The Russian defense minister said that Russia had succeeded in its war in Chechnya, defeating separatists and what he called their "emissaries from 50 countries.""We have scored a success in Chechnya," the defense minister, Sergei Ivanov, said Sunday. "The problem has been solved."
All they had to do was kill a succession of Arab Masterminds™ and finally bump off Shamil. Even Maskhadov wasn't essential, though it's nice that he's dead.
Ivanov, speaking at the Munich Conference on Security Policy, underscored the Kremlin's confidence that the second war in Chechnya since the dissolution of the Soviet Union had largely ended, and that the separatists' ranks had been shrunk by military operations and offers of amnesty.
The second Chechen war began late in 1999. There has been a sharp turn in Russia's favor since late 2004, and the insurgents have not conducted a large-scale guerrilla operation since 2005 or a major terrorist attack since the seizure of a public school in the autumn of 2004. Attacks still occur in and near Chechnya, and an insurgency persists, mixing militant Islam, separatism and local vengeance codes. But the pace of fighting is much slower than it was two years ago and many of the insurgency's principal figures — including Shamil Basayev, the militant leader — have been killed since 2005. The turnaround has defied predictions from many analysts, who said that the army was hopelessly bogged down in Chechnya and that its rough and often indiscriminate tactics were creating more insurgents than were killed.
So much for that hackneyed argument. Let's try this as a model:
- Kill all the money men that show up - like Khattab, al-Walid, and the rest of them.
- Kill the links to the money men in Arabia, like Yandarbiyev.
- Kill as many of their leadership as you can track down, like Maskhadov and Sadulayev.
- Kill the organizational equivalent of Shamil.
- If necessary, make a desolation and call it peace.