THE RUSSIAN FRONT

Remember my speculation about cyberattacks on Georgia? Turns out it did in fact happen.

Mark Grimsley has a piece on his search for historical analogies to the war in Ossetia. I’ve been having trouble coming up with one, and I think one of the key facts about this conflict is the reason. The important point here, and the flaw with the Czechoslovakia and Afghanistan references, is that Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili started this war. Sure, there were constant skirmishes and sniping and banditry, but this is the Caucasus. Saakashvili escalated the conflict by a major military effort to exert control over South Ossetia, and he knew he was escalating it–witness the Georgian references (before everything went south) to “restoring constitutional order in South Ossetia.” There have been references in the press coverage to the Bush administration having to dissuade Saakashvili from war previously–something clearly went wrong this time.

And that’s the reason why I have trouble coming up with analogies here. Great Powers smack around their smaller neighbors all the time, sometimes successfully, sometimes not (Soviets in Afghanistan, China in Vietnam) But smaller neighbors very seldom yank the chains of their Great Power neighbors, for the obvious reason that it’s world-record-class stupidity. The closest I can come, and I admit it’s not perfect, is Kosovo: Milosevic clearly believed he could act with impunity in Kosovo, despite a clearly stated American position that he needed to reach a political settlement there, and found out he was wrong. As a British commentator put it, Saakashvili is no Milosevic. Still, that’s as close as I can get.

I’ve written a more formal version of my previous posting on South Ossetia for the History News Network, and I’ve copied it in below:

Roundup: Historians’ Take

David R. Stone: Blowback in South Ossetia

Source: Special to HNN (8-11-08)

[Dr. David R. Stone is a professor of history at Kansas State University.]

There is a great deal of blame to go around for the disastrous war over South Ossetia. Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili deserves the greatest share, for starting a war to reassert control over South Ossetia that Russia can now finish on its own terms. The Russian government, with former President and current Prime Minister Vladimir Putin in the lead, has cynically taken the conflict Saakashvili began as a golden opportunity to flex its muscles, make Georgia an object lesson for the rest of Russia’s neighbors, rally Russian voters, and tighten its grip on Georgia’s breakaway South Ossetia and Abkhazia.

But in a classic example of blowback, past American policy also bears some responsibility for the mess in the Caucasus. While American training and equipment, intended to make Georgia a partner in the war on terror and future member of NATO, made Saakashvili overconfident in his ability to seize South Ossetia quickly and easily, the problem goes back further than that. However good American motivations were in Kosovo, the breakaway region of the former Yugoslavia, its actions there handed Russia what it needed to take full advantage of the crisis Georgia created. Violating Yugoslavia’s sovereignty—its right to be left alone—and its territorial integrity—its right to keep itself intact—has come back to breed war in Georgia.

The Clinton administration took a fateful step in March 1999 when it led NATO into war with Slobodan Milosevic’s Yugoslavia to protect the Albanians of Kosovo. Milosevic’s treatment of his Albanian minority in Kosovo was brutal, but the world is filled with brutal regimes. The Clinton administration justified interference against this particular brutal regime on the grounds that Milosevic’s policies were so murderous, and the flood of Albanian refugees fleeing state terror so overwhelming, that they negated Yugoslavia’s right to be left alone.

After NATO’s bombing campaign won automony for Kosovo, the Kosovar Albanians ran their own government under NATO protection, and lacked only formal legal status as an independent state. They achieved that in February 2008, when Kosovo’s parliament formally declared its independence, and was quickly recognized by the Bush administration, the United Kingdom, Germany, and a host of other Western nations. Though the population of Serbia—what is left of the former Yugoslavia—was overwhelmingly opposed to Kosovo’s formal separation, the United States came down firmly in favor of an embittered ethnic minority’s right to break free.

Kosovo established two precedents. First, governments violating norms of civilized conduct can find themselves under military attack. Second, ethnic minorities can claim and win independence, even if ethnic majorities want to keep them under control. Both those principles sound right and just. Who could be against them?

But we now see the consequences of those principles. Russia has long been furious over the West’s backing of Kosovo’s Albanians against first Yugoslavia and now Serbia. Too weak to do anything about NATO’s war in 1999, a much stronger Russia is now delighted to turn these arguments around against an American ally. The leadership of South Ossetia has appealed specifically to the precedent of Kosovo. Sergei Shamba, Foreign Minister of Georgia’s other breakaway region of Abkhazia, uses Kosovo to justify his own government’s ongoing preparations for military action.

The Russian government has taken the precise arguments America used for defending Kosovo against the Serbs and is now employing them to justify defending South Ossetia against the Georgians. The Clinton administration held that Slobodan Milosevic’s policies of ethnic cleansing and the humanitarian crisis they created meant that war was necessary, including bombing of Milosevic’s military machine and infrastructure far outside Kosovo itself. Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov accuses Georgia of ethnic cleansing, while Vladimir Putin describes Georgia’s actions as genocide, and repeatedly referred to tens of thousands of Ossetian refugees fleeing into Russia.

Whether Russian accusations are accurate is impossible to tell, given how hard it is to get objective information from a war zone. But true or not, while the fighting rages the precedent America set in Kosovo gives Putin and the Russian government a wonderful tool to mobilize Russian public opinion behind this war. It allows Russia to accuse the United States of hypocrisy, especially effective when American credibility is already in question in much of the world.

The collapse of communism created dozens of Kosovos and Ossetias, where boundaries on the map don’t match ethnic identities. Trying to fix that by redrawing borders as the United States did in Kosovo, however well-intended, only opens to the door to a host of conflicts elsewhere. Russian-American relations are at a low not seen since the end of the Cold War. Changing that will require both sides to recognize that ethnic separatism is too dangerous a game for anyone to play.

Many precedents have been invoked over South Ossetia: I’ve noted the pernicious influence of Kosovo; others have raised Czechoslovakia and Afghanistan.

I’d like to look instead at the precedent for what Georgian President Saakashvili wanted to happen, not what he’s ended up with: Croatia’s August 1995 Operation Storm.

Using military forces trained and supplied by the West, the Croats attacked the Serbian Krajina, a non-recognized, ethnic-separatist pseudo-state on Croatia’s sovereign territory. In two days, the Croats ended all resistance and reincorporated the Krajina into Croatia. Along the way, a big chunk of the Serbs of the Krajina fled.

This is pretty clearly what the Georgian government intended, as witnessed by the proclaimed goal of restoring “constitutional order” in South Ossetia. The difference, of course, is that Croatia succeeded where Georgia, barring a radical change in circumstances on the ground, failed. We’ll have to wait to get a sense of why that failure took place on tactical and operational grounds, but the overarching reason is Russia. In 1995, Russia was in no position, politically, militarily, or even geographically, to bring pressure to bear to protect the Serbs. In 2008, everything is different–the price of oil and America’s overcommitment elsewhere, to name two.

The result for Saakashvili is utter disaster. It’s tough for me to imagine circumstances under which the Russian troops now in South Ossetia will ever leave, and certainly not under any terms that Saakashvili would find acceptable.

As for that operational and tactical question–why Georgia wasn’t able to take South Ossetia despite the much vaunted American effort to build up the Georgian military–I don’t think we have anywhere near enough information to get a definitive answer. In my last post, I mentioned how the Chechen wars revealed the vulnerability of armored vehicles in urban environments to even irregular forces with rocket-propelled grenades. That seems to have happened here. In Croatia, however, the Serbian Krajina was mostly rural, avoiding much of the problem, and the Russian Army in Chechnya went through much of the Chechen countryside without a problem until running into a buzzsaw in the city of Groznyi. It looks here like the Georgians went straight for Tskhinvali, and that may have been the problem. They didn’t much choice–the geography of South Ossetia, with Tskhinvali on its very southern border, doesn’t present a lot of other options.

First thoughts on South Ossetia

My overwhelming impression of events in South Ossetia is the enormous difficulty of sorting out what’s actually going on from conflicting accounts coming out of Georgia and Russia. Everything said below is highly preliminary and based on fragmentary information.

For example, Russian media are claiming 1) a failed Georgia effort to take Tskhinvali, the capital, and a number of burned-out Georgian armored vehicles in the streets of the town 2) Ossetian militia clearing the town of Georgian troops 3) Russian armored vehicles in Tskhinvali itself 4) the presence of large numbers of Russian “volunteers” on the Russian Federation-Georgian border, and Putin’s declaration that Russia may not be able to restrain them. Western media, however, report a proclamation by the mayor of Tbilisi Gigi Ugulava of a temporary cease-fire and a corridor to allow civilians to evacuate Tskhinvali, alongside occasional and unconfirmed claims that Georgian forces have taken the town

Several things strike me about this: first, why is the mayor of Tbilisi announcing the cease-fire and evacuation corridor for Tskhinvali? No question that Ugulava is personally close to Georgia President Saakashvili, but it seems quite odd that Ugulava would be taking this particular role, and suggests some disarray in governmental function. Second, on practical grounds allowing a corridor for refugees to get out would also allow a corridor for Russian troops to get in, and seem highly unwise. Pausing for any reason only allows more time for Russian aid to arrive and keep South Ossetia out of Georgian hands–as a result, this sounds a bit fishy to me. Third, the claim of burned-out Georgian armor is backed up by photographs, and would be in keeping with the experience of Russian army facing rocket-propelled grenades in Groznyi. The claim that Georgia informed Russia that it was acting to restore constitutional order in Tskhinvali suggests a major push, not merely retaliation for border incidents with South Ossetia.

On balance, then, based on highly incomplete evidence, this sounds to me like a Georgian attempt to take Tskhinvali (just inside South Ossetia, quite close to areas under Georgian control) that has failed in ways quite similar to the way that Russian efforts to take Groznyi failed, or at the very least took losses in ways similar to Groznyi.

Next, I wonder about timing. There was lots of speculation in the mass media about a Taiwanese declaration of independence during the Olympics, at least before Taiwanese politics shifted. Did Georgia plan on a coup de main while Putin was busy cheering on Russian athletes in Beijing? If that’s the case, and if the effort to take Tskhinvali has indeed failed, and if Russian armor is now arriving in force, this has backfired badly. I find it difficult to imagine circumstances that would get those Russian tanks out again.

Both sides have been claiming attacks on civilians. A couple things to note: the Georgians have particularly mentioned Russian bombing of the city of Gori. This is, of course, Stalin’s birthplace. At least when I was there in 1992, it had a still-standing Stalin statue and the hovel where Stalin was born surrounded and covered by a Greek temple. Gori is also, however, the gateway to South Ossetia, and the route by which Georgian troops would get there.

The Russians for their part have played this game exceedingly well. In addition to claiming to defend Russian citizens (and lots of South Ossetians have Russian passports), one of the first accusations out of Russian spokesmen was “ethnic cleansing,” and I am certain that was not accidental. In earlier posts here and here, I predicted baleful consequences from recognizing Kosovar independence, and I see those here. To pose rhetorical questions, what possible right could Russia have to send troops uninvited into the territory of a sovereign state and bomb populated areas? Well, the justification the Clinton administration used against Serbia over Kosovo was precisely “ethnic cleansing,” an accusation now leveled by Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov against Georgia. In the wake of Western recognition for Kosovo, the West will have a hard time making a consistent case against Moscow.

I note that Georgian government websites appear to be down or overloaded. It will be fascinating to see if Georgia has come under the same sort of electronic attack that Estonia suffered a couple of years ago.