Putin's honey trap

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See the Sol Sanders Archive By Sol Sanders SPECIAL TO WORLD TRIBUNE.COM

Washington’s decision to send Special Forces to Georgia could prove one of the messiest ploys in the worldwide antiterrorist war. The Bush Administration moved – apparently without notifying Congressional leadership – in the face of a rapidly deteriorating situation.

It‘s true the move came, as Georgian Pres. Shrevardnadze, the old KGB boss and former Soviet foreign minister, reminded, in line with a policy he had been pursuing for eight years. And, in fact, the U.S. has been training senior Georgian military and supplying significant weapons. Closer collaboration was laid out during Shrevrenadze’s Washington visit last fall. Georgia, along with Azerbaijan and possibly Armenia, play a crucial role in the U.S. strategy to open Central Asian oil to world markets with pipelines traversing the area. And Georgia is an important ally for neighboring Turkey, increasingly the vortex for U.S. Mideast.operations.

But what pushed Georgia’s priority was Chechnya, the breakaway former Soviet Republic next door where Moscow has been pursuing a bloody, seemingly endless, war. Georgia’s Pankisi Gorge, populated by ethnic Chechens, has some 7,000 Chechnya refugees. Moscow has insisted they are a sanctuary/base for the Chechen guerrillas. The Russians have pressed the Georgians, whom the Russians claim quite rightly cannot control the region, to let them sweep it. And they have just sent a mission to the Georgian capital to try to negotiate the refugees’ return, but who like hundreds of thousands of Chechens in neighboring areas, refuse. On February 11 U.S. charge d'affaires in Georgia Philip Remler said that a handful of Afghan mercenaries with links to Osama bin Laden have taken refuge in the Pankisi. Moscow media were even speculating Osama Ben Ladin himself might turn up there.

All this was taking place in a degenerating environment, where terrorists might build a new sanctuary. Moscow has just rejected the tenth attempt of its “moderate” Chechens to write a constitution, which would bring the area back peacefully into the Russian Federation. Only a weeks ago, the Russians lost a helicopter with a group of field grade officers, the second such. Another new mass grave has just been discovered in Chechnya; there are almost weekly protests by Chechens and European and American human rights activists against some Russian barbarism

In late February Russian Pres. Putin complained to his Security Council: "The channels of arms and money supplied to the illegal bandit formations have not been completely disrupted, the most dangerous leaders of the formations have not been neutralized, and the channels for trafficking of foreign mercenaries have not been closed.” [The FSB –successors to the KGB -- charges Boris Berezovsky, one of former Pres. Yeltsin’s closest “oligarchic “collaborators, now a fugitive, is in cahoots with the Chechens; Berezosky counters he has proof the FSB organized the Moscow apartment bombings, allegedly by Chechens, to justify the war.] In essence, Moscow is struggling with a hundred-year-old Russian-Chechen imbroglio, the second war in a decade to try to reconquer them. The issue is crucial since other heavily Moslem areas – Tartarstan, for example –are in a constant struggle for further autonomy from Moscow.

Putin has tried desperately to link the Chechen insurrection with the worldwide terrorist threat. And that there were significant numbers of Chechens in Osama’s networks, as far afield as Indonesia and the Southern Philippines, has lent verisimilitude. Still, the Bush Administration has tried to distance itself from the obvious political problem that Chechnya presents and on which the terrorists are feeding.

Washington insists this is a training mission, that it would not participate in any action in the Pankisi Gorge or elsewhere by Georgian forces. But bucking up the Georgian government is essential in view of its own growing internal difficulties. A scandal has just erupted over the reported suicide of its security chief. Although Putin offered to withdraw Russian “peacekeeping” troops from Georgia’s own breakaway province of Abkhazia, the Russian State Duma's International Relations Committee chairman threatened to formally recognize Abkhaz independence as a counter to the arrival of U.S. forces. The Russians play a role, too, in the other Georgian breakaway South Ossetia province.

` Although Defense Minister Ivanov originally denounced the possibility of an American military presence, Putin told a meeting of former Soviet republics in Kazakhstan, "Every country, in particular Georgia, has the right to act to protect its security. Russia recognizes this right." Obviously, Putin sees the U.S. recognition of the Pankisi problem and Georgia’s instability as an opportunity to get a Washington endorsement of the Russian goals in Chechnya, to turn off persistent American criticism, and, perhaps, even eventual collaboration to end the Chechen insurgency. That’s a route the Bush Administration would be loathed to take in the larger political arena severely damaging to the effort to convince the Moslem world terrorism not Islam is the enemy.