PEN-L message, OK once more

The new conflict in the northeastern Caucasus illustrates one critical difference between Russia and the Western European colonial empires of the past: that they were maritime empires, while Russia's territorial expansion, like that of the United States until the 1890s, was on land. This obvious similarity has been missed by too many Western commentators who prate about Russia's need to "abandon its imperial heritage."

When they were faced with problems akin to that of Chechnya and Daghestan -- as were the British, for example, in Aden in the early 1960s -- the maritime powers in the end pulled out and sailed away home. The Russians cannot do so. The North Caucasian republics are not colonies but constituent parts of the Russian Federation itself. There is no natural barrier between the North Caucasus and the ethnically-Russian provinces of Stavropol and Krasnodar on the steppes to the north. Russia's relationship to the Caucasus is therefore far closer to that of the United States with Central America than it is to the French relationship with Francophone Africa, for example.

In Chechnya, Russia finds itself faced with a modern state's nightmare: a region on its immediate frontier which is simultaneously a chaotic failed state, a haven for banditry and organized crime, a threat to Russian control of adjacent regions, and a base for Islamic terrorist actions in Russia. It is as if Moscow had a mixture of Afghanistan and Sierra Leone for a neighbor. The British empire in India had Afghanistan as a neighbor for 100 years, and during that period tried a whole range of responses to the mixture of banditry, religious extremism, and geopolitical threat emanating from Afghanistan and the border region. These ranged from the bombing of recalcitrant villages to the seizure of hostile leaders by "snatch squads" of elite troops, punitive expeditions and, in the last resort, full-scale invasion. None of them worked for long. Russia's latest, mistaken, and brutal invasion of Chechnya is no more likely to provide a long-term "solution."

One aspect of areas like Chechnya is, however, new. Like the modern Afghans, the Chechens have not sunk into complete impoverishment as a result of their lack of a state and can still finance and supply large-scale military operations, due above all to their ability to operate successfully in the wider worlds of smuggling and organized crime. In this way, Chechnya also recalls the experience of some countries in Africa, which despite the complete collapse of modern institutions have gone on earning sufficient money to support parts of the population and, more important, to fund a number of warlords.

When added to the weakness and corruption of the Russian security forces, this has undermined repeated Russian attempts to bring about Chechen submission by means of economic isolation. Frustration at this failure helped lead Russia in September 1999 once again to make the disastrous decision to invade Chechnya.

The United States faces not wholly dissimilar threats from the growing anarchy of Colombia, though with the crucial differences that Colombia is much further away from U.S. territory and is not yet a base for terrorism against the United States itself, though the threat from criminality is of course all too real. Another difference is that, at least since the defeat of communist insurgency in Central America, the United States is in a considerably stronger position to influence events to its south than is impoverished, demoralized Russia with its neighbors. The Russian invasion therefore is not really a sign of strength. On the contrary, it indicates the bankruptcy of Russia's policy toward the region since the Chechen war of 1994-1996.