Arming The Tribes In Daghestan

Officials in the restive Russian oblast of Daghestan are contemplating the Anbar example:

The republic's first deputy prime minister, Rizvan Kurbanov, said in an interview with Kommersant at least two "ethnic" battalions would be sent to the mountains "to maintain order in the areas where the militants were highly active."

These ethnic battalions will be more effective, Kurbanov continued, because "they know all the roads in the mountains and can tell the difference between traditional Islam believers and the extremists even by their appearance."

Who knew counterterrorism was as simple as identifying people by their appearance? This kind of lazy stereotyping is one of many reasons why "arming the tribes," of which the Daghestani attempt is merely the latest example around the world, is so fraught with danger. It is true that local proxies are normally part of a counterinsurgent's arsenal—some people have made careers out of saying so—but that doesn't mean they are always a good idea.

In Daghestan, Minister Kurbanov seems to labor under the impression that the biggest challenge Russian security forces face is navigating the landscape and visually identifying militants. But that's usually the easiest part of a fight against an insurgency, except maybe the judging-by-their-appearances thing. After all, if militants were so easy to identify based on their clothes, hairstyle, and beard length, then they probably wouldn't have the freedom of movement they do—they could be rounded up.

But what insurgency adopts an easily-identified uniform appearance? Certainly not any successful one. This is where the real value of local counterinsurgent proxies come into play—they know how to identify the insurgents, who might look differently or might not. They do indeed know the landscape, though any military worth its salt (and Russia's Army is worth at least this much salt) understands their own geography. And perhaps most importantly, these proxies can lend at least the apperance of local, accepted legitimacy to counterinsurgency operations.

That doesn't mean arming the local tribes, communities, villages, or ethnic groups (or whatever the fixation of the moment happens to be) is a good idea. In the Caucasus in particular, fomenting ethnic militias strikes me as a terribly short-sighted idea. In both Afghanistan and Iraq, the deliberate arming of local militias to combat an insurgency has made the job of the central government incredibly difficult. And they've done so in different ways, which should indicate that the pitfalls of local militia groups are not an easily-theorized issue that can be planned for generically.

Nevertheless, it's rare that an insurgency is defeated merely through outside force. One recent example of this happening is Sri Lanka, which not only had some Tamils fighting for the Sinhalese (though not really as a local militia), but also involved the wanton brutalization of tens of thousands of innocent civilians. The Sri Lankan government hadn't built up militias prior to last year's successful drive to end the insurgency, but rather an intelligence network in Tamil territory of informants, snitches, and undercover agents. It allowed them to apply relentless, violent pressure on the insurgency, eventually neutering it in its present form.

The Sri Lankan method, too, has its pitfalls. Lots of the Tamils who experienced the crackdown remain bitterly angry, and there's a possibility the insurgency could be reborn thanks to the government's brutality (which was simultaneously brutal and not brutal enough, in that the people were not broken, but merely cowed). But that's just the nature of counterinsurgency, ultimately. It is risky war, perhaps one of the riskiest methods of warfare. Worse than the risk, there are no right answers—even doctrinally, concepts need to be emphasized or discarded in a chaotic, and sometimes contradictory way, to achieve success.

So in that sense, it's interesting to see how the trend in arming tribes—not developing intelligence networks, or economically or governmentally undermining the insurgency, but arming new groups—seems to have taken hold in Daghestan. It's possible this policy will result in a temporary, even short-term stabilization in the province (though at what human or material cost no one can really say). And in all likelihood, that's the point anyway: Russia needs to clean up the Caucasus before it hosts the Winter Olympics in Sochi in 2014.

It would just be nice if Russia also took the time to think about long term solutions to its several Caucasian insurgencies. In Chechnya, both times, but especially the second time around, it adopted a brutal, short method: bomb the living hell out of Groznyi, and kill whomever resembled a threat. The result was a petty thug—the flamboyant Ramzan Kadyrov—and a roiling rural insurgency that continues to set off bombs in Moscow's subway. The myopia of reaching out to poorly-conceived and poorly-controlled militias is difficult to overstate. It is grasping at straws, which, while understandable, cannot be considered prudent.

Comments

[Joshua Foust]

I think the double-car bombs that went off in Makhachkala today serve to emphasize how important this evolution in Russian doctrine might become.

http://en.rian.ru/crime/20100816/160214704.html

[clarisse]

Well, speaking of COIN militias and grenade attack in Caucasia:

Another timing … but it's in Colombia:

"The group was made up of numerous rural defense cooperatives formed more than 20 years ago to battle leftist rebels.

Many of the militias, however, degenerated into death squads and carried out massacres of peasants suspected of having rebel sympathies, along with slayings of journalists and union members accused of favoring the leftist insurgents."

http://www.laht.com/article.asp?ArticleId=363219&CategoryId=12393

(and for Sri Lanka: a much more complicated situation > possibly "Machiavellian strategies": see http://www.southasiaanalysis.org/%5Cnotes6%5Cnote594.html )