Chechnya: Shutting the barn door after the horse bolted

By Gwynne Dyer

LONDON (JP): "Every day of the war is bringing more and more casualties," wrote the Moscow paper Kommersant recently. "The experience of the past Chechnya campaign shows that people quickly become tired of war, while its initiators turn from heroes into political zeros." Since the only 'hero' of the second Russian assault on Chechnya is interim President Vladimir Putin, that means his bid to win the March election and a five-year term as president is already in deep trouble.

On Jan. 7, after three months of almost unresisted advances by the Russian army and only one week of Chechen counter-attacks, Putin fired two of the three senior generals in charge of the Chechnya operation and suspended Russian attacks on the center of Grozny. "Don't ask me about casualties," snarled Lt. Gen. Gennadiy Troshev, one of the sacked officers, but reliable unofficial sources estimate an average of 10 Russian soldiers killed each day and another 20 wounded.

That's not much compared to the 20,000 dead a day that the Russians bore without complaint for four years during the World War II, but this is a different Russia, with a free press and a population that will not accept high casualties in a doubtful cause. Like the Americans who tolerated losses of 300 dead a day during the World War II, but rebelled at 30 dead a day in Vietnam and blenched at the idea of a single American casualty in Kosovo last year, the Russians have changed.

"(Russian) voters will hardly vote for a president who moves into the Kremlin over the corpses of his soldiers in Grozny," wrote the daily Segodnya, but Putin cannot avoid casualties by slowing the assault on the Chechen capital. In the past week, Chechen guerrillas have launched lightning raids on lowland towns that the Russians occupied weeks or months ago -- Argun, Shali, Gudermes -- while continuing to deny the Russian army any significant gains in the mountainous southern half of the country.

And it is going to get worse. In a classic case of shutting the barn door long after the horse has bolted, the Russians banned Chechen men between the ages of 10 and 60 from crossing the country's borders in either direction, in order to stop refugees from returning to fight and (more importantly) to stop Chechen raiding parties from penetrating into Russia proper. But the Chechen groups that are preparing to launch operations like Shamil Basayev's spectacular raid on the Russian city of Budyonnovsk in the last war in 1994-1996 surely crossed the borders long ago, for this is a planned counter-attack.

One hundred and fifty years of fighting the Russian empire have molded the Chechens into a culture of born guerrillas. Despite all their personal rivalries and political divisions, there was no debate among them about the appropriate tactics to meet this second Russian invasion.

Everybody in Chechnya instinctively knew that you must let the Russians advance, spread out, and occupy the towns. Then you nibble them to death in their hundreds of garrisons, command posts and check-points, while destroying their home-front morale by deep-penetration raids into Russia itself. So they waited three months to let the Russians get into that position, and now they have begun the counter-attack.

Those three months were the period in which Vladimir Putin went from zero to hero. When Boris Yeltsin plucked the former KGB operative from political obscurity to become his new prime minister late last summer, his aim was to hand the presidency over to a man he could trust to block any attempts to prosecute him or his 'family' for corruption after he left power. But since Putin was unknown, some means of building up his popularity quickly was needed -- and the second Chechen war was the means chosen.

The Chechens have recently produced a captured Russian military intelligence officer, Alexei Galtin, who has testified on videotape that it was the Russian intelligence services themselves, and not Chechens, who planted the apartment-building bombs that killed over 300 Russians in September and provided the pretext for the current attack on Chechnya. Since Galtin is a prisoner of the Chechens, this is not conclusive evidence -- but it is certainly true that Putin and Yeltsin needed and wanted the war.

Putin is intelligent enough to know that this war is ultimately unwinnable. It is essentially a gigantic publicity stunt, and if he made it safely into the presidency he would probably then wind it down again as fast as he could. But his problem is timing: the war is going sour for the Russians so fast that it could blight his chance of winning the presidential vote: from hero back to zero might be just as fast a trip.

Yeltsin's surprise New Year's Eve resignation was an attempt to cope with this threat, since it had the constitutional effect of moving the presidential election up from late June to late March. But that still leaves 10 weeks for things to go wrong, and the Chechens will not leave the Russian troops in peace even if they hunker down in purely defensive mode. They know perfectly well what Putin's game is, and it is in their interest to spoil it.

These next 10 weeks of winter weather will restrict the Russian use of air power and let them launch ceaseless attacks, with the aim of discrediting Putin and creating the space for a last-minute anti-war candidate to emerge and be swept into the presidency by disgusted voters. Like, for example, the gravel- voiced general who negotiated the end of the last war against Chechnya: Alexander Lebed.