Vladimir Putin is exhorting his country to mobilize and fight the burgeoning threat of murderous terrorists, but he's had to acknowledge that Russia is behind the curve.
A shaken President Vladimir Putin made a rare and candid admission of Russian weakness Saturday in the face of an "all-out war" by terrorists after more than 340 people — nearly half of them children — were killed in a hostage-taking at a southern school.Putin went on national television to tell Russians that they must mobilize against terrorism and promised wide-ranging reforms to toughen security forces and purge corruption.
"We showed weakness, and weak people are beaten," he said.
Regional Emergency Situations Minister Boris Dzgoyev said 323 people, including 156 children, were killed. More than 542 people including 336 children were hospitalized, medical officials said.
Dzgoyev also said 35 attackers — heavily-armed and explosive-laden men and women who were reportedly demanding independence for Chechnya (news - web sites) — were killed in 10 hours of battles that shook the area around the school with gunfire and explosions after 1 p.m. Friday.
"What happened was a terrorist act that was inhuman and unprecedented in its cruelty," Putin said in his televised speech later. "It is a challenge not to the president, the parliament and the government but a challenge to all of Russia, to all of our people. It is an attack on our nation."
Putin took a defiant tone, acknowledging Russia's weaknesses, but blaming it on the fall of the Soviet Union, foreign foes seeking to tear apart Russia and on corrupt officials. He said Russians could no longer live "carefree" and must all confront terrorism.
He called for Russians to mobilize against what he said was the "common danger" of terrorism. Measures would be taken, Putin promised, to overhaul the law enforcement organs, which he acknowledged had been infected by corruption, and tighten borders.
"We are obliged to create a much more effective security system and to demand action from our law enforcement organs that would be adequate to the level and scale of the new threats," he said.
To see the ugly reality of what Putin is facing, merely click through a slideshow documenting the Beslan crisis.
Or consider this report from ITAR-TASS:
"The majority of patients have bullet wounds in the back,” the sources said."
However, Putin has a tough road ahead, in part because of the caliber of his military. It was striking that pictures of the "elite" special forces who were surrounding the Beslan school showed soldiers who looked pretty scruffy when compared to what we see of even ordinary American or British soldiers.
Indeed, a 2002 RAND study on the Russian military stated that the Russian military needed dramatic reform and modernization.
There is no question that comprehensive reform is needed for the Russian military to survive, much less succeed. But although the Russian military has shrunk from the force inherited from the USSR, reform itself has been elusive. What remains is instead a smaller, much deteriorated variation on the Soviet military. Plans for reform are plentiful. Vladimir Putin, for instance, has said that he plans to transition the armed forces to be “compact, mobile, and modern-ized.” But neither the plans nor the money for such an endeavor appears to be forthcoming.
The challenge is extremely serious and growing. Besides the brutal situation in Chechnya, experts now see an Islamofascist assault building across a broad arc in Central Asia. A recent article in The National Interest warned:
Radical Islam in Central Asia is in the midst of sweeping transformations. Despite the loss of their Afghan base, terror groups in the region are adapting and are mounting increasingly potent operations. The most recent bombings - targeting the US and Israeli embassies - confirm not only that the wave of terror that swept Uzbekistan back in March was not an isolated incident. It also points to the fact that Central Asia's terrorists have increasingly set their sights on the United States.This transformation has been in the making for some time. Over the past three years, Central Asia's terrorist groups have expanded their geographic reach and intensified their activities throughout much of the post-Soviet space.
New alliances have sprouted up as well. According to July testimony of the head of Tajikistan's National Security Service, Tokon Mamytov, the IMU, Tajik and Kyrgyz fundamentalists and Uighurs from Western China's Xinjiang Autonomous Region have joined forces to create a new clandestine umbrella organization, the Islamic Movement of Central Asia. Its purported goal: the establishment of an Islamic Caliphate in Central Asia.
One thing is surely clear: although he lacks the means, Vladimir Putin is more serious that John Kerry, who thinks the threat of terrorism is an "exaggeration". Islamic terrorists are coming for us, just as they have targeted Russia, Israel, Iraq, Spain, Bali, and countless others.
Posted by Alan at September 4, 2004 01:21 PM