He Needed Killing, Part 2
Shamil Basayev has gone to hell to live with Zarkawi. Although my feelings about Basaev are not complicated, my feelings on the Chechen war are. My sympathies were entirely with the Chechens when Putin re-invaded Chechyna and overthrew its elected government, led by Aslan Maskhadov (also killed recently). But as the U.S. and EU placed politics above principle and kept silent about Russia’s destruction of a historically sovereign nation, the moderate and Western-oriented resistance was squeezed by a radical wing led by Basayev and his Jordanian jihadi associate, Khattab (also dead). Basayev’s death means that the Chechen rebels have lost their last high-profile leader, and suggests that the Russians are steadily wearing them down to lower levels of intensity.
Russis is fighting tooth and nail for Chechnya because it’s location is extremely valuable. It provides access to the Black Sea, the Caspian Sea, and oil from the Middle East. Chechny should have sovereignty, but Russian greed prevents that from happening.
The Bush Admin. is silently going along with the oppression, because its War on Terror is linked to Russia’s battle with Chechen rebels.
Didn’t Chechen muslim fighters invade Dagestan in 1999 and that lead to the second invasion by Russia?
The Dagestan point is correct. Russia also accuses Chechen terrorists of blowing up several Moscow apartment buildings. I don’t know enough to judge the veracity of the accusations. I don’t dispute that after the first Chechen War, against Yeltsin, there were Islamist terrorists with a strong presence in Chechnya. If I’m not mistaken, Basayev himself carried out the Dagestan attacks. Today, the radical faction is dominant and firmly tied into al-Qaeda.
The right initial response to this would have been for Russia to demand that the Chechen authorities reestablish law and order, and meaningfully help them to do so. Had the Chechen authorities failed to prevent terrorists from using their territory, Moscow would have had a right to attack the terrorists who were attacking its people. None of this, of course, justifies Putin’s tactics: mass detentions, arbitrary killing of civilians that is seldom investigated, the brutal torture of suspects, and the indiscriminate destruction of Grozny. The Russian Army surrounded the city and bombed and shelled everything for days before going in. It was full of civilians.
I suppose this is the essence of my problem with Putin’s conduct of the war. Counterinsurgency necessarily means that you have to find bad people hiding among innocents. The goal, which we have not always achieved ourselves, is to recruit as few terrorists as possible as you do it.