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The Guardian (UK)
9 November 2001
Vladimir's big adventure
In 1994 Russia entered what it thought would be a quick, anti-terrorist
operation in Chechnya.
It doesn't bode well for the US in Afghanistan
By David Hearst ( david.hearst@guardian.co.uk)
The September 11 attacks have seen a transformation in the relationship between Washington and Moscow, historic sparring partners on the world stage. Deftly overruling his own generals, and even as his defence minister was telling Tajikistan and Uzbekistan not to offer their territory to aid US forces, Vladimir Putin swung the door wide open to the former Soviet central Asian backyard.
Overflights in Russian airspace for "humanitarian and cargo flights", packed with Delta Force commandos? No problem. Shared intelligence on the Taliban? Here it is. Even in the first, heady pro-western days of Boris Yeltsin this would have been unthinkable in Tajikistan, packed with Russian troops and so sensitive to Moscow.
Putin got two valuable concessions in return. Washington agreed to postpone tests of its anti-missile defence system, so as not to violate the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, which although it is rubbished by Bush's advisers, Russia regards as the cornerstone of all arms control treaties. Washington went further. It changed the tone of its language on Chechnya, recognising for the first time some terrorist elements to the Chechen resistance.
The strange thing is that Putin did not go out on a domestic limb, as Russian leaders often do when making concessions to the west. According to the latest poll, 75% of Russians trust him, an astonishingly high rating.
And from a Russian foot soldier's point of view, September 11 was manna from heaven. Here at last was the US waking up to exactly what he had been battling with in Grozny for seven years. It is not true, of course. The Chechens have been fighting for an independent Muslim state for at least two centuries. But, unfortunately for any military planner now considering a ground offensive in the Afghan spring, the Chechen parallel may be all too accurate.
As Carlotta Gall and Thomas de Waal write in their definitive book about the start of the Russia's disastrous military involvement in Chechnya, Chechens were not very observant Muslims when the republic declared its independence in 1991. The leader of the national movement, Djokhar Dudayev, supposedly urged all devout Muslims to honour the Koran and pray three - not five - times a day. There was no sharia law. Russia's assault had the effect of increasing both the Islamic and the fundamentalist nature of the Chechen resistance. It was only as the battle spread that Chechen fighters started wearing green headbands with Arabic inscriptions and declaring that they were fighting a holy war.
Similarly, when the tanks first rolled in in 1994, the target was quite specific. It was a bunch of wild gunmen who had seized power and were baiting the Russian bear in Grozny. The surrounding towns of Gudermes, Argun, Urus Martan watched in amusement. By February 1995, with Grozny in ruins, the whole of Chechnya was up in arms. Every farmer, every householder, every son, every trader was stripping down their AK47s and filling water bottles with petrol.
Compare this with the US attacks on Afghanistan. Both wars started as anti-terrorist operations and then escalated. Russia too thought that the Chechens would give up and go home faced with overwhelming air superiority. The Chechen fighters had a motley collection of rusting tanks, anti-aircraft guns, a few rockets and what they could capture - or more often buy - off Russian troops.
But as fighters they could keep whole companies of lumbering Russians at bay. They had a mobility and ferocity to their defence that no Russian soldier could match. They had Allah on their side. Even compared to professional, seasoned Afghan vets fighting alongside the conscripts, the Chechen fighters were brimming with confidence. They knew what they were fighting for. They were picking up where their great-great-grandparents had left off. The Russians didn't and still don't know why they are there. And they instinctively know that one day, they will leave.
As the human targets multiplied the Russian military used heavier and heavier weapons. They levelled whole cities. They laid waste to vast tracts of land. They even used a fuel air bomb, similar to the now infamous American 15,000lb "daisy cutter" on a strategic square in Grozny. Death only reinforced the Chechen will to resist. Something very similar may be happening to the Taliban's morale.
Chechen resistance has never crumbled, although the fighters have been pushed back into the Georgian mountains and war fatigue has settled in. Individual field commanders have been killed, along with thousands of fighters, but Shamil Basayev and Khattab, the two warlords whose incursion in neighbouring Dagestan started the second Chechen war in 1999, are still at large, the former minus a foot. Russia may hold most of the crossroads of Chechnya by day, but by night Russian soldiers are sitting targets in their dugouts. Seven years after this started, Russia has not succeeded in installing a single civilian governor who has lived long enough to tell the tale.
Putin knows this. A KGB staffer with no political profile, anointed by Yeltsin as his son and heir, he shot to political prominence on the wave of public anger that greeted the bombings of apartment blocks in Moscow and Vologdonsk in 1999, for which five probably quite innocent Muslims from Karachaevo-Cherkessia are still currently on trial. As Russia went to war once again in the Caucasus, it was gripped by a wave of patriotic fervour, rather similar to the one sweeping through the US today. Only this time, the assault was to be even more brutal than in 1994. This was going to be the return match for the humiliated Russian army. It is still going on.
As the Pentagon ponders the resistance that the Taliban fighters are currently putting up, as it wonders whether it is doing enough to win the "hearts and minds and souls" of ordinary Afghans, they may do well to consider the precedent that Putin has set.
· Chechnya, by Carlotta Gall and Thomas de Waal (Picador, 1997).
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