Review: The Insurgency in Chechnya and the North Caucasus: From Gazavat to Jihad

The Insurgency in Chechnya and the North Caucasus: From Gazavat to Jihad by Robert W. Schaefer
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

So I hear that this is one of the best books to read on the insurgency in Chechnya. Not having read anything else of this nature yet, I can attest that this is at least an incredibly informative primer on the subject, as well as an excellent case study of how NOT to handle an insurgency/conflict (for other examples of well known past and ongoing insurgency conflicts, see Afghanistan and Iraq/Syria).

Schaefer starts out by establishing and defining some of the key terms in the field of counterinsurgency- namely, insurgency and terrorism, which actually are not the same thing and draws attention to the unfortunately named “War on Terror” that the US espoused during the 2000’s. Insurgencies themselves are organized movements in rebellion against a constituted government or authority for fundamentally political or ideological reasons that rely on subversion and armed conflict to achieve their objectives. Schaefer goes on the define the four prerequisites needed for an insurgency conflict to happen: lack of government control, ideology, available leadership, and vulnerable population, likening them analogously to the components needed to make a campfire.

Conversely, when we talk of terrorism today, it’s important to note that while there are terrorist groups that exist for the sake of causing chaos/destruction, terrorism also exists as a means to an end for insurgencies. Insurgencies often use terrorist acts as a means for coercing a desired action out of their opposing government, by attacking the population that supports it, and otherwise demonstrating to their local population that the government is illegitimate, by creating the perception that it is unable to defend its own citizens.

Al Qaeda is better defined as an insurgency than a terrorist cell in this case, and Schaefer does a good job of explaining exactly why that is the case. And incidentally, insurgencies are much more difficult to deal with than regular nations/combatants in the conventional kinds of wars we’re familiar with, which is why they persist for so long: because defeating an insurgency requires both a long-term political solution as well as a military one. It is not sufficient to defeat an insurgency through military means; one needs to win the support of the local populace involved in the conflict through counter-ideological means, delegitimizing the insurgents themselves by eliminating the issues that would motivate the populace to support them in the first place. Otherwise, the insurgents can just go into hiding among the locals and continue to breed support from them and anger at the government until a later point when they have sufficient means to start attacking again.

The insurgency in Chechnya and the North Caucasus functions as a great case study for how to deal (and especially how not to deal) with such conflicts in general, as the conflict has effectively been ongoing for more than 300 years- morphing back and forth through different phases thanks to the generally ineffective methods that Russia has utilized and continues to rely on to this day. Schaefer spends much of the book outlining the history of the conflict, from the early days when the North Caucasus was besieged from all three directions (Ottomans + Persia + whoever controlled Russia) through the era of Yermolov and later the USSR, and finally the two Chechen Wars of the 90’s to the present shortly before the Sochi Winter Olympics. In the process he also provides much needed context on the Islamic nature of the conflict, noting that Islam has always been a factor since 300 years back, and clarifying the difference between the denominations/ideologies of Islam involved, Sufism and Salafism and Wahhabism and so on.

The most important content in the book is Schaefer’s detailed analysis of Russia’s counterinsurgency approach, and how counter it is in its priorities compared to established Western methodologies. I can only barely scratch the surface of the many issues that Schaefer addresses, but to put it one way, Russia’s problems are largely due to its lack of focus on the needs of the local Chechen populace, relying more on the support of the greater Russian population instead and otherwise ruling through coercion and fear. It has done very little to address the issues that have lead the local populations in the North Caucasus to see the insurgents as a legitimate cause in the first place, instead relying primarily on short-term solutions via the military/FSB and media censorship to control the public perception of the conflict. Because its standards are completely different from Western ones, Russia is able to judge its own methods as successful, even though the insurgents persist and still continue to carry out terrorist acts on the Russian population to this day, with no end in sight.

It is incredibly eye-opening to read about this conflict and see all of the ways it has gone wrong- and ironically, right in some cases. Russia’s methodology isn’t completely ineffective; it actually has made a number of gains in the past decade that Schaefer has also done a great job of presenting- but these gains are often only transient/short-term and not entirely sufficient for the kind of long-term recovery that the North Caucasus really needs given its lack of stability and poor infrastructure… not to mention the innumerable human rights abuses that have occurred in the area in the process. One can only hope that the situation may improve someday, but it’s hard to tell.

(Just to note: this book is rather expensive if you can't find it in a library. ~$50 on Amazon. Sigh.)