The Caucasus Emirate, the largest group, denied any involvement in the bombing. Meanwhile, al Qaeda has often referenced Central Asia as an important theater for jihad. By most accounts, moreover, there were Chechens training in al Qaeda camps during the 1990s.

Helfstein, Scott.  “Intelligence Lessons from the Boston Attacks.”  Foreign Affairs, April 23, 2013.

In his article, Scott Helfstein will go on to boost greater intelligence cooperation on the part of state services addressing terrorism.

The Islamic Small Wars have provided ample stimulus for a corresponding global evolution in the political, religious, and social conceptualizing of “next societies” or the cultures to be inherited by the immediate next generations and their generations.  In fact, for most Muslims and everyone else, resurgent “Islamic Jihad” has been a powerful goad in fostering, at minimum, consideration of cooperation among the most unlikely bedfellows of politics.  That Mali, for example, has had to call on France to eject its Al Qaeda type brigands in its north tells precisely that story, as may also numerous and frequent assassinations, bombings, persecutions of minorities, and perversions of local and state laws and security arrangements  (see, for example, BBC Panorama: “Secrets of Britain’s Sharia Councils”, posted April 22, 2013) elsewhere in the world. 

An intrastate, internecine, and transnational collection of related conflicts — I call them the “Islamic Small Wars (ISW)”, noting, however, that there are other criminal (e.g., cartel, fraud, piracy, etc.), economic, and political conflicts running concomitantly, some separate, some tandem — naturally calls for a heightened level of cooperation on the part of the more entrenched and stable of states.

While most are aware of INTERPOL, which writ allows it to set its hooks into common international criminal matters, I’ve often wondered how the world’s generals and their partners in politics approach the competition for and related “divvying” of large cash, labor / employment-trade, and natural resource supply apart from longstanding commercial trade behavior.

How deeply goes the military-security aspect into political economics?

For example, I’ve been told that Putin’s sour relationship with nemesis Mikhail Khodorkovsky had to do with plans for shipping Russian oil to Chinese ports, which turns out to have been reported in The Washington Post:

Russian authorities arrested Khodorkovsky in 2003 just as his private oil company, Yukos, was completing plans for an oil pipeline across the frontier. He said the project had been endorsed by the Kremlin but may have contributed to his arrest.

Higgens, Andrew.  “Jailed Russian billionaire pioneered oil deals with China.”  December 28, 2011.

Here one may ask what behind the curtain nixed that deal?

Was it Putin’s legendary avarice and kleptocrat mania as described by Moscow journalist Masha Gessen?

Did the CIA or Diplomatic Mission of the United States with NATO support have a word with the Colonel President?

Setting aside that now famous region in thought denoted as “what we don’t know we don’t know” (reference: Landmark Education), we do know that those who appear amid others expressly to intimidate, maim, and murder — in the name of God with their own interests closely attached — have made themselves an international scourge and doubtless inspired consideration of greater intelligence service cooperation between allies and former enemies (quasi-enemies, “frenemies”) with the intent of quelling that deeply misguided and ever tumescent ambition.

As greater cooperation develops — if it does — will it have corresponding effects as regards broadened distributions of capital, freedom, productivity, trade and related improved qualities in living?

How good can the good make things for others?

How fast?

How inclusively?