With a Broad Brush towards a Police State.

Monday morning before the attack on Moscow's Domodedovo airport I had read an article on the jihadist movement and the marginalisation of al Qaeda as the driver being marginalised on the physical battlefield and being replaced by regional and grassroots groups.

The writers were trying to explain that the decline of al Qaeda as a unifying force meant that the war against global terrorism was being won. They meant this in the sense that jihadist movements no longer presented a strategic threat, but certainly maintained a tactical threat.

Indeed, they suggested that the regionalisation/grassroots aspect of the movement could result in an increase in attacks which would be harder to detect.

The attack on the airport yesterday afternoon was a perfect example of this. Disturbingly it has opened the door to ever stricter security measures which will inhibit our freedoms without really solving the problem.

In the past security operations at airports were concerned with keeping weapons/explosives off of planes. This attack was at the arrivals area which is a very soft target. The Russian response appears to be to put scanners at the entrance to the airports, as well as at train stations and other such buildings. This will presumably stop attacks inside the buildings, but will just move them to the queues outside. We have already seen this in Iraq where job applicants lined up to enter a compound are attacked.

In the German news there were muted questions as to the rapidity with which Mr Medvedev assigned responsibility to militants from the Caucasus. This is an area which has been devastated by Russia centered around Grozny.

Interestingly, it was also an area fiercely fought over in the Second World War for the oil reserves there. In any event, there will undoubtedly be a much higher security presence on the streets in Moscow and other major Russian cities.

Without legitimatising them I do think that we should look into the grievances of some of these groups. Although there have been attempts to color militancy in Chechnya and Dagastan in terms of Islamic extremism, this hides the traditional nationalistic tendency in the region.

There is a common predisposition for major powers to view the world within a framework which reflects their desires. In Viet-Nam the Americans consistently approached the problems in Indo-China within the construct of global communism overlooking the nationalist/independence aspect of the VC/North Vietnamese.

The Russians are happy to pigeonhole the problems in the Caucasus within the framework of the jihadist movement. It puts them on the "good" side of the war on terror and fits quite neatly into a state security structure intent on squashing any dissent under the "terror" umbrella.