Russia's incompetent war on terror backfires

Alexander Golts, Project Syndicate

In response to the recent wave of terrorist attacks, Vladimir Putin has demanded that even more power be vested in him. As leading Russian military expert Alexander Golts argues, the problem in Russia is not a lack of central power, but of power exercised incompetently and without individual initiative.

The slaughter by terrorists of hundreds of Russian children in Beslan was final proof -- if more was needed -- of the utter incompetence of Russia's military and security services. In Beslan, camouflaged men representing four ministries fussed uselessly, with no clear leader or goals, losing precious minutes when the violence erupted.

Meanwhile, Nikolai Patrushev, the director of the Federal Security Service (FSB, the former KGB) and Rashid Murgaliev, the head of the Ministry of Internal Affairs (MVD), both sent to Beslan by President Vladimir Putin, were invisible as the tragedy unfolded.

So once again Russians must face how ineffective their military is. Indeed, none of Russia's power structures, including the military, the FSB, and the MVD, are capable of performing effective anti-terrorist operations.

Most Russians reached this conclusion long before the Beslan attack. In 2002, after terrorists took 800 theatergoers hostage, Putin ordered that an anti-terrorist component be added to Russia's military strategic plan. Some military analysts saw this as the beginning, at long last, of serious reforms, as the army was capable only of executing military operations in Russia's traditional way, i.e., using overwhelming force, as in World War II.

Russia's traditional army cannot fight terrorists effectively because it disdains the ability of soldiers to work in small groups, and does not encourage individual initiative on the part of officers. All are simply expected to execute orders scrupulously.

But it is individual training and the ability to make split- second decisions in a fluid situation that are required in anti- terrorist operations. Incidentally, when one such anti-terrorist operation was suggested in the Pankisi Gorge in Georgia, Putin decided against it, understanding that instead of eliminating terrorists it would likely turn into a full blown traditional war.

From the outset, the Defense Ministry was skeptical of Putin's order to include anti-terrorism on the military agenda. It suggested, instead, that the army should play a secondary role in anti-terrorist operations.

The Army's hostility to reform is deeply ingrained. Today, Russia's army has no professional institution for training non- commissioned officers. The Defense Ministry simply names sergeants from senior conscripts, which means that sergeants are not very different from their subordinates in either age or training.

The internal conditions of the "power" ministries -- the FSB and the MVD, which bear the main responsibility for antiterrorist operations -- are equally grim. Now the Kremlin wants to merge the FSB and MVD into one Ministry of State Security, thereby creating a single anti-terrorist center. Putin has already decided to create an operational center of 13 groups in the Northern Caucasus region to coordinate the actions of the Defense and Emergencies Ministries.

But there is little reason to believe that this proposed bureaucratic monster will provide better security than the existing FSB and MVD forces. The only positive result that may emerge from such a structural change could be that the number of anti-terrorist formations will grow. Yet even that is uncertain: before Beslan, the response to terrorist attacks in Ingushetia and Chechnya consisted of efforts to form additional traditional military divisions.

It is now obvious that overwhelming numbers don't provide an advantage in fighting terrorism, because it is the terrorists who have the initiative -- they plan when and where to strike.

Confronting them effectively will require root-and-branch change in order to inspire Russian security officials to take the initiative. For example, Russian security structures have no information about the underground work of the terrorist organizations, which are spread across the entire Russian Federation. There is no credible intelligence penetration of these organizations. This must change if Russia is to prevent future Beslans.

But fighting terrorists requires an entirely different kind of spying from "uncovering" traditional "spies," or neutralizing unpopular oligarchs such as Mikhail Khodorkovsky. To meet today's threats, troops must be able to take individual responsibility and initiative, and need to be trained to react resourcefully and at a moment's notice.

These qualities simply don't exist in Russia's Sovietized military organizations, with their rigid hierarchies and culture of blind conformity. The entire military philosophy in Russia must be changed. But neither Russia's president nor its power ministries seem ready for this.

Instead of confronting today's new and very real enemy, they would rather confront the old, traditional one -- the West. After the Beslan tragedy, Putin offered an exotic explanation of terrorism: The terrorists, he claimed, are instruments in the hands of those who still fear Russia as a nuclear power.

This is nonsense on stilts, though it obviously sounds pleasing to generals in the power ministries, because the only war they know how to wage is with "world imperialism." They are useless at fighting today's new terrorist enemy. Without major reform of all security and military forces -- reforms that provide incentives for individual officers to show initiative and take responsibility -- Russia's war on terror will remain one- sided: the terrorists will be doing all the attacking.

The writer is a Russian military analyst and deputy editor of Ezhenedelny Zhurnal.