Russia's policy in Caucasus = fail

[luvdovz.livejournal.com]

Good post by panookah about Iraq. Now I'll talk a little about Caucasus. I haven't been in Caucasus, the closest I've been to there is Sochi (which is just a few km away from Abkhazia anyway), but I've been following the events for quite some time.

It seems the frequency of the terrorist attacks there has increased a lot for the last year. I think this shows that the local and federal government's attempts to solve the problem by force are in vain.

The anti-terror operations of the Russian special forces have increased too in response to the increasing terror attacks across the northern Caucasus and further inside Russia. Before, the federal security service (FSS) used to avoid taking responsibility for these things and it left the fight with terrorism to the ministry of interior. But now the FSS activity in the region has increased. Unfortunately I think they're taking the wrong approach - trying to eliminate the insurgents themselves, instead of going deeper into the issue and focusing on its causes rather than its symptoms. And the cause is that Moscow has installed a corrupt local clan to rule the country as feudals, the Kadyrovs. With total disregard of the needs of the local people. This tends to put extra fuel to the fire of hatred that the locals have to Moscow in the first place. That's not the way you win hearts and minds, and no matter how many insurgents you manage to kill or capture, there'll be 5 new ones popping up in the place of each 1 that you've eliminated. It's beyond me how come Putin and Medvedev cannot see this very simple fact. Or maybe they just lack the resources (and I do mean reliable human resources) to implement a much more sensible and effective approach to the region.

Northern Caucasus owes this new 'terror surge' tendency to the multiple illegal groups that keep popping up everywhere and who now attack not just the police but also officers from the secret services. This shows that they've improved their intelligence and organization. What the Russian and the local governments are responding with is not a proactive position but rather a futile effort to chase ghosts.

Some data. According to the Russian ministry of interior, the first three quarters of 2010 saw 4-times more terror attacks than the entire previous year. Until November last year there were 609 registered terror attacks, 242 staff from the police and other government security services were killed, 620 were wounded and a total of 127 civilians were murdered. And that's just the official data.

The events of 2010 have effectively destroyed the old legend that the policies of Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov of fighting the armed insurgents anywhere he sees them, would give any results. Among all these attacks in Chechnya, the rebels also made two big attacks with a symbolic significance - in August they attacked the Tzentoroy villlage which was considered a bastion of the Kadyrov clan, and in autumn they even besieged the Chechen parliament. The official information claims 'just' 9 people of Kadyrov's family were killed, but the more important thing is that these attacks showed how vulnerable the power in Chechnya is.

There is also frequent news about civilian and cargo trains blown to smithereens, powerlines, power grids and mobile hubs and oil pipelines being disrupted in Northern Caucasus. The insurgence continues to mount, and it's focused on strategic facilities now. The propaganda effect of these attacks by far surpasses the economic damages.

One terror attack which had the biggest echo throughout 2010 was when two Dagestani women blew themselves up in the subway in Moscow in March, which was the first sign of the failure of Moscow's anti-terror policy. Everyone could see that, except maybe Kremlin's smart heads who were still in denial and preferred to throw all the blame on the secret services who had supposedly failed to avert the attack. But like I said, this is like chasing ghosts.

Today's concept of fighting terrorism shouldn't be formed around the premise that the number of casualties is the factor number one for the terrorists; it's the threat of a political destabilization that should be addressed first and foremost, because that's obviously what the insurgents are aiming for. That's why the secret services trying to avert rebel attacks on the power structures (police, security services, etc) like the one which happened in Ingushetia in 2004 should be 'The' top priority. The insurgents have shifted their focus away from the civilian population, although, granted, there are still a number of attacks in that area too, which are designed to maintain a relatively high tension and a sense of intimidation and instability among the populace. But their attention has now primarily moved on the pillars of Kremlin's power in Caucasus, and if Putin and Medvedev don't want another mega-crisis and another Chechen war to happen sometime within the next 2-3 years, they'd better think a bit harder on these things.

Comments

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

There are only two truly effective means to do away with terrorism: either brutality on a scale not seen since the era of Tamurlane (which no modern state could or should seriously advocate), or the most permanently effective means of redressing local poverty, establishing more stringent economic development and education, increasing the effectiveness of things like medicine and above all encouraging *locals* to do these things........any other means and eventually you get what happens here, a bloody mess that no amount of brute force can or will resolve.

This should be one of the examples brought up as to why at least for our time military power past a certain level is a white elephant because it cannot address the deeper issues that give rise to repeated violence of this sort. And as far as Chechnya is concerned it might also help if the Russians hadn't annexed as much of that and Ingushetia as possible in the 20 years from the 40s to the 60s when the Chechen "homeland" was in Kazakh SSR.

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

True, it's not the only solution. It is, however, a much more insidious means to defeat guerrillas than military means only. It's easy if cities are reduced to rubble to find people who'd want to fight the city-busters. It's not so easy if the counter-insurgency is visibly improving things to get that to happen.

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

To me it would seem it would be *most* effective in Afghanistan. The Soviets were within a hair's breadth of winning with blunt-axe tactics but they ultimately lost as it was. After 30 years of civil war supporting economic development could hardly be harmful to US interests, given that 30 years' wars do nothing good for a region and everything bad.

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

And that's also a fair point. The converse side is to avoid having it seem like overt imperialism by backing some factions at the expense of the others. We aren't the British Empire and all British rule in Egypt did was ensure the end of the Khedives for guys like Nasser and Mubarak. The infrastructure-building would have to serve local interests on some level at the expense of ours, which unfortunately is far too idealistic for the real world full of corrupt sonsobitches.

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

It's mainly about the problem where a colonial regime with local collaborators is seen by the locals as *collaborators* with a bunch of occupiers. Nobody likes an occupation. Even fewer people like those who collaborate with said occupation and there's always hell to pay when the occupying force leaves.

[luvdovz.livejournal.com]

The "raise the city to the ground" strategy reminds me of a Stalin saying: "If there's no people, there's no problem". :)

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

Well, it does work after a certain horrific fashion but there's no contest between that kind of "effectiveness" and the hearts and minds strategy. The one just creates seeds of future trouble and is short-term, the other is more expensive but is a long-term strategy. Unfortunately most governments, full-stop, only think in the short-term.

[gunslnger.livejournal.com]

BTW, it's raze, not raise.

[luvdovz.livejournal.com]

Thanks for this valuable correction. I tend to think my English is pretty decent, except in the cases when I type too fast and don't review the comment later.

On the other hand, it could sometimes be a bit confusing when you have 9 languages in your head, each of them pushing for space against the rest. ;)

[gunslnger.livejournal.com]

That word's a little more obscure, so it's a reasonable mistake to make. Just trying to help out.

[luvdovz.livejournal.com]

That's a good point about the surge of violence being an indication that the authorities are doing something right. "If they be hatin, U doin sumfin right" is the saying.

That would have probably been a viable way of interpreting the situation if the history of the region wasn't showing a clear pattern that violence tends to increase whenever the authorities are doing something wrong, though.

[udoswald.livejournal.com]

Unfortunately, this myopic flaw is a common trait of governments (at least ones with colonial aspirations). The US is no different. We're still reaping the bitter fruit we planted in Iran 30+ years ago. Ditto for Iraq where we supported the corrupt, violent regime of Saddam Hussein right up until the point he stopped being useful to us (then we hanged him). Unfortunately these expansionist governments will always choose leaders of puppet regimes that can be counted on to put the colonial power's interests above those of their own citizens, corrupt or not, over leaders who have their own peoples' interests at heart but might be less cooperative. If history is any indication Russia will keep beating a dead horse in Chechnya, and continue to prop up the corrupt regime, right up until the point they can't afford to do it anymore (Afghanistan anyone?) Then they'll pull out leaving the government to fall to the rebels setting up a situation that will end up biting them in the ass a few years or a few decades down the line.

[udoswald.livejournal.com]

Obviously it's more complex, books have been written on this sort of thing. Unfortunately I don't have that kind of time or space to be parsing the whole issue out into its complexities. My point was that expansionist/colonialist governments will support bad governments that meet their needs over better governments that don't regardless of the methods used by the puppet regimes or whether the people really support the guys we put in place.

I understand why we supported Saddam (his was a secular Sunni government allied with us against a Shiite Iran in a war that we did not want to see Iran win). It was still shortsighted of us to support him since we knew what he was doing to his people. The only thing we cared about was that the majority of Iraq was Shiite and would have probably allied with Iran given the chance and we didn't want to see that so we propped up a Sunni dictatorship and supplied it with arms to fight Iran.

The same is true of Russia and Chechnya, I'm sure Russia is desperate to stop an Islamic republic from popping up in Chechnya so they support their own puppet regime (including its brutal tactics) to keep that from happening. It's not going to keep it all from blowing up in their faces though (and in fact it's already quite literally been blowing up in their faces).

[udoswald.livejournal.com]

Well that's the thing. I don't think it was short sighted at all.

It set up our current difficulties with Iran (not entirely, we supported the Shah long before the Iraq-Iran War, but it certainly didn't help relations). It also set up the situation we are currently seeing where we're going to be involved in Iraq for the foreseeable future and may end up having to launch some sort of strike against Iran or see Israel do it for us and pull us into another long protracted war. I agree that at the time our interests aligned, and I'm sure it looked to our leaders that it was a slam dunk, but sometimes you have to look further into the future than the next 5 years.

when he did something that was not only belligerent, but borderline insane, by invading Kuwait, we had no problem with supporting our allied during the Gulf War.

Some say we goaded him into invading Kuwait. We certainly did know when to cut him loose (as I said, we did that the second he stopped being useful to us), that doesn't excuse us from the responsibility we have for creating the monster in the first place.

So in effect, we got the best of both worlds.

Except that Saddam didn't seal the deal and finish Iran so now we're dealing with them (and they do wield influence over the new Shiite government) and also Saddam was a crazy psychopath who started threatening our interests so we launched two wars against his regime and wasted hundreds of billions of dollars and thousands of precious lives. I guess if you call that the best of both worlds...

It's sort of like being a pimp.

And if you think your government should resemble a pimp...

When your ho pulls tricks like you want, you both make money. When the b*tch talks back, you gotta slap a ho down. Our pimp hand is strong...

Not strong enough evidently since that ho, even after we killed "her", is continuing to siphon money and lives from our government. And one of our other "hoes" is holed up in a cave in Afghanistan making even more trouble.

[udoswald.livejournal.com]

There are things that are short sighted and things that are impossible to predict.

If you can't predict that a mentally unstable lunatic and his psychopathic sons may cause problems for you in the future if you give them weapons and WMDs and set them loose on their neighbors you have no business running a superpower.

Saddam's behavior later on was impossible to predict. Crazy people usually are.

If you give a gun to the guy who yells at squirrels so he can shoot some other dude you should probably be ready for the time he turns that gun on you.

What WAS short sighted was invading Iraq with woefully inadequate numbers of troops, and ignoring a growing insurgency.

Or, you know, invading at all...

I think the reason for that is that there are some aspects of the history of this part of the world, and the cold war in general, which you don't yet understand.

Yes, that must be it, it must be that I don't understand your magnificent brilliance. If I'd just studied more I'd come around to your way of thinking. Give me a break. Did you ever think maybe it's you who doesn't understand certain things?

I can sort of see this discussion going nowhere though.

On that we can agree. Your arrogance and self-assured wankery precludes us from having a serious discussion of this topic.

[udoswald.livejournal.com]

I was fairly certain that it would be taken as an insult, or a derogatory comment.

And how was I supposed to take it? You suggested that our disagreement was due to my inability to understand your argument and my lack of education on the subject. Would you not take that as an insult?

[udoswald.livejournal.com]

Bottom line: I can understand your argument. Your argument is one of expediency (what is best at the time and what fixes the problems that exist in the moment). I understand that argument, it's not completely illogical. What you can't see, or refuse to see, about my argument is that I'm not contradicting you. You're right that this is the attitude that our government leaders had. All I'm saying is that it's a myopic view of the world and we can hardly look back and bitch about how much trouble Saddam is when we had a large part in putting him there in the first place and turning him into a problem. Ditto with Iran. You can spout expediency all you want, and you can argue common interests and strategic necessity, but it doesn't change the fact that we're reaping what we sowed all those years ago.

[udoswald.livejournal.com]

there is no evidence that anything we did with, or to, Saddam influenced what he did in the next few decades.

Without our support he may very well have not even made it to power, or he'd have been dethroned in short order. At the very least he'd have been steamrolled by Iran and would have been toothless by the late 80s.

Giving weapons and money to someone does not often make them react by welcoming war with us a few years later.

I don't think Saddam "welcomed war" with us. I think he honestly believed, for whatever reason, that we wouldn't react with military force to his invasion of Kuwait.

And even so, those weapons and that cash we gave him barely stopped our military forces.

But it did provide his military with the power to fight us, at least in the first few weeks, and provided the insurgency with some supplies to allow it to grow into the force it became. Perhaps it would have unfolded the same, perhaps not. Perhaps if we hadn't given him those weapons and that money and the ability to keep his enemies at bay we wouldn't have had to go into Iraq at all.

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

It was less that we supported Ba'ath Iraq and more that from 1980-8 its interests and ours had a brief moment of correlation. If Al-Majid had destroyed Khomeini then we and he alike would have benefited. Unfortunately that war went on to be the longest of the 20th Century and nobody won.

[udoswald.livejournal.com]

It was less that we supported Ba'ath Iraq and more that from 1980-8 its interests and ours had a brief moment of correlation.

Explain to me how those two things are different. It seems to me you're playing a pointless game of semantics.

We supported the Ba'ath Sunnis in Iraq because our interests and theirs had a "brief" (can 8 years be called brief?) moment of correlation. We may not have been all warm and fuzzy about their tactics but we didn't do anything to stop them (and in some cases we pushed them towards atrocities).

Their tactics were at the very least acceptable as long as they helped accomplish our goal which was to neuter Iran with a long a painful war (Iraq may not have won but they killed a shitload of the male population of fighting age and set back the Islamic Republic by a bit).

If Al-Majid had destroyed Khomeini then we and he alike would have benefited.

Why not just call him Saddam, or Hussein, or Saddam Hussein. I had to look up "Al-Majid", does it make you feel smart to use obscure parts of peoples' names? Sorry if I'm being a bit harsh but my brother does the same thing and it drives me up a wall.

[luvdovz.livejournal.com]

It's just Lankers. Don't judge him too hard. It's part of his aura. :)

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

Well, to illustrate I'll ask you if the WWII Allies were really "supporting" their three mutually incompatible situations or instead forced into a teeth-clenched alliance against a mutual enemy? Khomeini's rise threatened Saddam Al-Majid because his state, majority-Shia and run by a party-state clique from the Sunni part of the Arab population could have gone Iranian (or he feared it would and when the dictator fears something....) while both superpowers for their own reasons hated the rise of the Khomeini regime as much as if not more than what the Ba'ath did. In the Cold War Iraq predominantly tilted to the USSR after Saddam took over because in a lot of ways he was a Stalin fanboy.

And yes, you can call eight years brief given that for the next twenty we were against them due to wanting them to cough up a debt they couldn't repay and disguising that ultimate cause as a noble pretext. And Iraq not only did not win, it was that very debt which set the downfall of the Ba'ath regime itself in motion.

I do that because Al-Majid is what his "Western last name" would really be consistently but I'll use Hussein to avoid driving you up the wall.

[udoswald.livejournal.com]

Well, to illustrate I'll ask you if the WWII Allies were really "supporting" their three mutually incompatible situations or instead forced into a teeth-clenched alliance against a mutual enemy?

They were forced into an alliance against the existential threat posed by Hitler. Iran is not, nor was it at the time, an existential threat to anyone. Besides, we may not have loved Stalin but he was already quite powerful, nothing we did propped him up or created him as a threat. If we had allowed Hitler to destroy Stalin, thereby eliminating Soviet Russia as a threat, Hitler would have turned around and taken all of Western Europe. There is no way you can draw an analogy with Iraq or Iran in that regard.

Khomeini's rise threatened Saddam Al-Majid

Nobody calls him that, stop it.

because his state, majority-Shia and run by a party-state clique from the Sunni part of the Arab population could have gone Iranian (or he feared it would and when the dictator fears something....)

I already said that...

while both superpowers for their own reasons hated the rise of the Khomeini regime as much as if not more than what the Ba'ath did.

And yet we're the only ones bogged down in two wars in the area of Iran.

In the Cold War Iraq predominantly tilted to the USSR after Saddam took over because in a lot of ways he was a Stalin fanboy.

No doubt, which should have been all the more reason for us not to support him.

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

Actually it was....to the USSR. Soviet nationality policies were starting by that point to blow up into their faces and the last thing Soviet leaders wanted was an Islamist leader who could start propping up the nationalist movements in the Muslim parts of the USSR, that was feared as a potential civil war. The analogy was due to the fact that FDR did not like imperialism or communism, Churchill did not like US boorishness and democracy (like for instance women voting) and both did not like communism, where Stalin saw Churchill and Roosevelt as two different variations on the same imperialistic nightmare, but otherwise the same. Similarly, Iraq did not particularly like the USA but it disliked Iran more. Then the USA wanted that debt repaid......

In case you've forgotten the USSR disintegrated 3 years after the Iran-Iraq War, so when there's only one superpower......

But when you've got an enemy that both sides have their own reasons to loathe...

[udoswald.livejournal.com]

I guess that depends on what you mean by "you can't even make many lasting historical conclusions in 8 years time."

If you mean 8 years after an event you cannot make lasting historical conclusions, I would agree with you to a point. History requires distance.

If you're saying that an 8 year period isn't a sufficient amount of time, taken as a unit, to make historical conclusions about I would disagree. 8 years is a sufficiently long time. 8 years ago the kids dying in Afghanistan and Iraq were in elementary school. I'd say that's a long time.

[udoswald.livejournal.com]

If you say so...

Thank you

[udoswald.livejournal.com]

Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery...

[htpcl.livejournal.com]

OK OK, one macro is nice, two maybe. But let's not make this systematic, OK? A number of people tend to get annoyed by that.

[htpcl.livejournal.com]

You sound irritated on this thread, I wonder why is that? You lashed out at panookah, you lashed out at underlankers. Come on, dude.

[udoswald.livejournal.com]

What?!?

Whatever you say dude, I was just trying to have a discussion. Maybe I'm argumentative by nature but I am most definitely not "irritated" and I did not "lash out" at anyone.

[udoswald.livejournal.com]

Some people just can't stand any sort of discord. That being said, if this is what he thinks I look like "irritated" he ain't seen nothing.

[htpcl.livejournal.com]

Fair enough.

[htpcl.livejournal.com]

Whoa, hey. Fear of recrimination? O__o

[luvdovz.livejournal.com]

To be entirely fair, you can't say things like "this is less interesting now than it was before" after having spent just a couple of days around after a very long period of absence.

I think about it in different way.

[zebra24.livejournal.com]

It's not a "war against terror".

It's just about keeping criminal but controlled clans in power.

Nobody in Kremlin cares about terrorism itself. They only care about their power and keeping it forever.

So terrorism there is just a mix of clan wars and total corruption.
Just imagine, what happens if governor sells ministry post to three competitors, can you imagine good way to compete for them??
Shot opponents and take it, terrorism? No, just total corruption and degradation of state institution.