AH Plausability Question: Osama Bin Laden and The U.S.S.R.

Ok, as we all know, in OTL The U.S.S.R. invaded Afganistan. Osama helped lead the Islamic Resistance against The Soviet Invasion. We also know that Osama later became the leader of Al-Qaeda and was the mastermind behind The 9-11-01 Attacks on The United States.

So here is my POD. The U.S.S.R. does not collaspe and survives to the modern day AND wins the War in Afganistan. So if this occurs, what are the chances that Osama/Al-Qaeda (If they even exist, considering the butterfly effect) dcide to attack The U.S.S.R. instead of The United States? And if so, what would the targets be?
 

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That could be bad. Considering the CIA funding that his jihadists had back in the anti-Soviet days, an organized attack on 9/11's scale against core Soviet interests could reasonably be seen as US-backed terrorism in Moscow - even if the ties between the groups had been severed for awhile.

I assume the Kremlin would be the best target. Then again, I suspect highjacking a Soviet airliner would be much more difficult - if only because there is likely to be less air traffic over Moscow than New York, and military oversight would probably be tighter.
 
That could be bad. Considering the CIA funding that his jihadists had back in the anti-Soviet days, an organized attack on 9/11's scale against core Soviet interests could reasonably be seen as US-backed terrorism in Moscow - even if the ties between the groups had been severed for awhile.

I assume the Kremlin would be the best target. Then again, I suspect highjacking a Soviet airliner would be much more difficult - if only because there is likely to be less air traffic over Moscow than New York, and military oversight would probably be tighter.
The CIA backed attacks on the Sovs in Afghanistan, sure, but that was Cold War tit-for-tat, see Korea and Vietnam and a dozen places besides. I can't see them actively backing an airplane smash into the Kremlin, especially not with the Sovs having so many nuclear weapons to contest the point with.
 
The Taliban would cease to exist very quickly as a very pissed off Soviet Union went on a no-holding-back campaign to eliminate them, likely killing alot of others in the process..
 
The Taliban would cease to exist very quickly as a very pissed off Soviet Union went on a no-holding-back campaign to eliminate them, likely killing alot of others in the process..
Indeed, muslim terrorists only attacked Soviettargets once, in Libanon
in 1985 they kidnapped 4 Soviet diplomats, the KGB did not take kindly
to this so they found out who the leader was and kidnapped one of his relatives and started to chop of bits of his body and sent it to the leader.
The leader understood that tangling with KGB was a bad idea and released
the hostages minus one which they had killed earlier. After that word
got around and it was a consensus among all the various terroristgroups
DO NOT MESS WITH THE KGB.
 

Tellus

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The CIA backed attacks on the Sovs in Afghanistan, sure, but that was Cold War tit-for-tat, see Korea and Vietnam and a dozen places besides. I can't see them actively backing an airplane smash into the Kremlin, especially not with the Sovs having so many nuclear weapons to contest the point with.

Oh sure. What I meant is that even if the Talibans are doing it on their own time, the Soviets might wrongly suspect that their old CIA buddies are behind it all. Intelligence isn't perfect; after all, some Americans thought that Saddam was behind 9/11, right? ;)

I'd be alot more touchy if the wrongly accused party was a nuclear superpower.
 
in 1985 they kidnapped 4 Soviet diplomats, the KGB did not take kindly
to this so they found out who the leader was and kidnapped one of his relatives and started to chop of bits of his body and sent it to the leader

Can you get me a source on that, i know about the kidnapings but i cant find anything about the chopping bodies up part.
 
Can you get me a source on that, i know about the kidnapings but i cant find anything about the chopping bodies up part.

I'm pretty sure Robert Fisk relates the story in Pity the Nation. He either reports it as hearsay, or say that the KGB threatened to decapitate one of the kidnappers uncles/cousins/something. It sounded like mythos or rumor, but then again, isn't starting whispers like this that the point of that kind of brutality? ;)

Anyways, Bin Laden, like a lot of the Arab fighters in Afghanistan, was a sort of rich-boy Jihad tourist. These guys would fly in from Saudi or elsewhere in the gulf, stage photos of themselves with RPGs and AKs, take part in a few raids or ambushes, and then quickly tire of the whole thing after a month or two. The Arab fighters were valued for their money and the organizational abilities they brought with them, not really for their military potential.

If the USSR begins to gain an upper hand, and the Afghan Communist regime is propped up to some sort of self-sustaining level, I think that the Afghan resistance would quickly become an ethnic-based (whoever isn't in the government) rural, militantly Islamicized, ISI-funded low-level insurgency somewhat similar to what the US is fighting now. The Arabs would leave and the CIA funding would slow, but not stop.

Where does this leave bin Laden? Well, I don't think the USSR would stay on the top of his list for very long. A US thwarted in Afghanistan and dealing with a persisting cold war would be more involved (if such a thing were possible) in the middle east than the OTL US in the 1990s. Ever since Sayyid Qutb planted the seed of Al-Qaeda ideology in the 60's, there was a strong anti-American sentiment among the general anti-western ideas. Anticommunism was par for the course, but that was a position that was assumed, and not a lot of time or intellectual effort was spent exploring it among Islamist theory. Fact of the matter is that radical Islamism is a reaction to western cultural, economic, and political penetration and influence in the Middle East.

The material culture, social mores, and political influence that so angered Osama bin Laden and his followers all came from the Cold War era west. After the temporary (but formative and essential for the movement) Afghan Jihad, he would probably turn his focus elsewhere- to the US and those who he sees to support it in the Arab world.
 
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Although in a continuing Cold War, the CIA could become the patron of radical Islam in Central Asia and the Caucasian region even if some AQ-type group begins launching attacks on American interests. The US would be more than willing to make a deal with the devil* if it would screw over the Soviets. The US would probably quickly develop a public rhetoric of who the "good" violent religious extremists were and who were the "bad" ones.




*Ollie North testifying that he was trying to "reason with Chechen moderates?"
 
I doubt the Soviets would worry much about 'collaterial damage' when they go after them. Imagine if the Reich still existed and were attack by the terrorists. In that case, the nation of Afganistan would soon cease to exist.
 
Can you get me a source on that, i know about the kidnapings but i cant find anything about the chopping bodies up part.

dude, i also believe Ollie North discussed this story in DEFIANT PATRIOT- indicating how he believed that the US should've undertaken a similar brutal approach to the terrorists as the KGB's No BS policy...
 
I assume the Kremlin would be the best target. Then again, I suspect highjacking a Soviet airliner would be much more difficult - if only because there is likely to be less air traffic over Moscow than New York, and military oversight would probably be tighter.

have you heard of the time when that mathias rust guy flew his plane into the u.s.s.r. and landed on red square?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mathias_Rust
 
have you heard of the time when that mathias rust guy flew his plane into the u.s.s.r. and landed on red square?

That was a small plane.

Plane style attacks probably wont work, as Moscow is filled with ABM systems and i would guess that in Russia the standard way to deal with hijackings is to let the plane go crazy and then ether land or get shot down.

The Russian Federation had a plane jacking once but the heroic pilot managed to stop them with the help of alfa.
 
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