How to start an insurgency
Lessons from the North Caucasus’ recent past
Happy Friday!
Whenever terrorist attacks occur, people want to know what they mean. Often, when the North Caucasus is involved, they want to know whether a particular event heralds a return to full-blown insurgency or something else that threatens Russia’s control over the region.
Such questions are frustratingly hard to answer, even for someone who has spent as long studying the region as I have (see my earlier post about the folly of prediction https://newsletter.threatologist.com/posts/prediction-is-a-fool-s-game-try-scenario-planning-instead). But one thing we can do is look back on previous phases of conflict and see how they came about. Although history never repeats itself exactly, this can provide us with some useful points of reference.
With that in mind, I’m kicking off a mini-series that looks at how different insurgencies in the North Caucasus emerged and what parallels exist with contemporary developments. The first part of the series will focus on the degeneration of war to insurgency and the case of Chechnya. With that in mind, here’s what I’ll cover this week:
- How war transformed into insurgency
- The mistakes that Russia made
- The relevance of this history for what we see today
How war transformed into insurgency
In many ways, this is a story in two parts: How war broke out in the first place, and how that war gave way to more dispersed guerrilla activity. While I will focus here on the second part, it should be acknowledged that the two cannot be neatly disentangled: Insurgency was the second harvest of the seeds that Russia helped plant.
As far as the second part is concerned, at least three factors stand out:
Unity of purpose: Russia was weak, disorganised, and distracted in the First Chechen War (1994-1996). However, by the time the second war started in 1999, the Russian security services had become more cohesive and coherent. Aligned with this, Moscow had a clearer idea of what it wanted to achieve. Of course, everything is relative, but the Russian state was more competent in 1999 than it had been five years previously.
The primacy of the use of force: This unity of purpose allowed for much more effective military operations, which in turn allowed it to drive the separatist forces first from Groznyy, then from other major cities. Insurgency, therefore, was as much a consequence of Russian successes as failures — allowing Putin to declare an end to the military phase of operations in April 2002.
A switch in Chechen strategy: Having vowed that he could fight “army against army” in the first war, Chechen rebel leader Aslan Maskhadov authorised the switch to guerrilla tactics early in the second, seeking to pull Russian forces into the mountains. Of course, this constituted a recognition of a difficult operational environment, but it was also seen as a way of sustaining armed struggle — rather than risking decimation through direct confrontation.
The mistakes that Russia made
The catalogue of mistakes that Russia made in the run-up to the first war has filled more than one book. But the birth of a Chechen insurgency can, as I’ve just argued, be seen as a Russian success. In other words, the emergence of insurgency is not exclusively a negative development when viewed in a wider context.
But does this mean that no mistakes were made in the second phase of the conflict? Well, two obvious ones come screaming to mind.
First, Russia failed to lay positive, long-term foundations for stability in Chechnya. Its reliance on force was accompanied by massive human rights violations. Its policy relied less on persuading people that their future lay with Russia, and more on the belief that you can kill any ideology if you kill enough people who hold it. People were driven to exhaustion with war and all that it brought.
Second, there is a lack of a positive model of Russian governance in the republic. Victory was facilitated by turning the struggle from Russians versus Chechens to Chechens versus Chechens. This achieved some success, but it also created the Kadyrov regime that we see today. The Kadyrovs were granted impunity to do whatever they wanted, so long as Chechnya remained within the Russian Federation (ironically, many separatists would probably have settled for less autonomy than Russia granted the regime). This has left Russia stuck in a trap whereby, if it wanted to remove the Kadyrov regime, it would probably have to create something similar to replace it.
The relevance of this history for what we see today
At first glance, there might seem to be few lessons that can be drawn from the emergence of insurgency in Chechnya. The circumstances of state collapse and weakness that existed in the 1990s are very different from those existing today. And the region is not currently at war, so a transition from state-on-state to guerrilla warfare does not appear relevant.
That being said, there are some points of note. First, Russia continues to rely on force and still does not offer much by way of a positive model for the region. It offers, in other words, a distinctly negative vision. It has managed to stabilise the situation by applying continual downward pressure on any groups that resist it. But it has to keep doing so, because if it doesn’t, the lid could easily blow off again. It is not difficult to imagine a scenario where a divided and distracted Russia loses control over the region. What is harder to imagine is how Russia becomes sufficiently divided and distracted in the first place. Nevertheless, this provides an important pointer: The conditions for insurgency might be created somewhere other than where the insurgency breaks out.
The second less is that a failure to deal with root causes has long-term consequences that create the pre-conditions for insurgency. Despite defeating the insurgency at home — at least as a structured force — Russia has never stopped fighting it elsewhere. In Ukraine, Syria, and Ukraine again, Russia has fought the same groups and ideas. It has simply displaced the conflict itself. If the circumstances in the North Caucasus were to change, there would be plenty of groups willing to bring armed struggle home. By failing to deal with the root causes that fuelled insurgency in the first place, Russia might only have gained a short-term victory. Again, we are only talking about pre-conditions, not direct triggers. But they should still give rise to concerns.