There was a suicide bombing today in Quetta.

Five suspects, including three women and two children, were approaching a check post in the residential area of Kharotabad when security forces discovered they had explosive materials. The forces tried to arrest the group, at which point, one of the females blew herself up to avoid arrest, reported Arzoo Rehman for Express 24/7…

The Frontier Corps (FC) said all the attackers, including three women and two men, were foreigners of either Chechen or Uzbek origin. The women were reportedly equipped with hand grenades.

Here’s the thing: it could have maybe been the work of the Shahidka, the Chechen “black widows” whose husbands were killed during the Russian ethnic cleansing of Chechnya a decade ago. But here’s the other thing: those black widows, originally organized by now-deceased Chechen militant Shamil Basayev, tend to target Russia, which is responsible for their widowhood, and not random police checkpoints in southwestern Pakistan. Despite the phantom Chechen woman suicide bomber-nurses of Kunduz, Shahidki just don’t really operate outside of Chechnya and Russia.

The suicide bomber could have been Uzbek women. There’s not enough data to say for certain, though if true it would be a novel development in Uzbek militancy in the FATA. But what is absolutely certain is that you really couldn’t confuse Chechen and Uzbek women. They are completely different ethnicities: one Caucasian (by definition!), the other Asiatic.

A typical Chechen woman.	A typical Uzbek woman.

Do you really think the Frontier Corps can’t tell these women apart? That’s actually a possibility. Which leaves us with two possibilities: the FC can’t tell non-Pakistanis apart, or they have no idea who really blew themselves up. Either way, we shouldn’t leap to conclusions about the identities of those women.

The issue of mis-identifying all foreigners you can’t recognize as “Chechen” is a sadly common feature of studying Afghanistan and Pakistan. Locals in both countries—and the reporters who gullibly repeat whatever they’re told—routinely identify anyone with vaguely light skin speaking a weird language as “Chechen.” But really, we have no idea if there are any Chechens and what they might be up to. Just unreliable stories, bad memories, and obvious misidentifications. It’s one of many reasons I just assume all stories about Chechens in Afghanistan and Pakistan are wrong.

I wrote a summary of the issues Uighurs face in China, and how that affects the regional security setting, for PBS this week.

This latest bombing in Aksu is, in many ways, another symptom of China’s dysfunctional relationship with Xinjiang and the Uighurs who live there. According to Chinese sources, the attack targeted a man leading a group of public security officials into an inspection of a majority Uighur area of the city. It’s possible that this was a terrorist attack, in the sense of being violence against civilians meant to affect some political change. It bears a striking resemblance to a similar attack on Chinese policemen in 2008 in the city of Kashgar, near the border with Afghanistan, which could mean there is a a growing pattern of violence against Chinese police officers in Xinjiang. But it’s equally likely that this was, in effect, the killing of a “snitch” (or maybe a race traitor) in retaliation for cooperating with the Chinese authorities.

I’m not certain I got the nuance there right—fire away in the comments!

Secondly, Liz Fuller has a great report on Magomedali Vagabov, who Russian authorities killed in retaliation for the Moscow subway bombings earlier this year.

Vagabov’s name has never been mentioned before in connection with Umarov’s disavowal of his status as president of the Chechen Republic Ichkeria and simultaneous proclamation of the Caucasus Emirate. It is generally believed that radical Chechen ideologue Movladi Udugov pressured Umarov into making that decision.

It is only in late 2008 that Vagabov’s name began to figure regularly in reports in the Russian-language Daghestani weekly “Chernovik” of attacks on police and security officials by Vagabov’s Gubden jamaat. By then he had apparently made up for his previous lack of experience as a military commander. In July 2009, an unnamed Federal Security Service (FSB) source told “Chernovik” that “Vagabov himself doesn’t leave the forest even though he has a well-trained unit with professional weapons, including some mercenaries from abroad. He recruits young people, training them in the forest ideologically and in sabotage and subversion, then sends them into the city [Makhachkala]. When they’re destroyed, he recruits new fighters from among the relatives and friends of those killed.”

It’s a really interesting story, one that helps demonstrate that most of what I do is summarize the really impressive work of others.

I have a new piece up at PBS.

Dagestan hasn’t had it as rough as Chechnya. The Russian army did not stage two separate, brutal offensives into its cities. Makhachkala has never faced the same devastation as Grozny, the Chechen capital declared by the United Nations in 2003 as the most destroyed city on Earth (a distinction repeated by Andrew Meier, who, in his haunting 2005 portrait of Russia, “Black Earth,” says Grozny’s fall was worse than Kabul’s, since it had so much farther to fall). But Dagestan has been the center of an increasingly violent explosion of violence in recent years.

Part of that explosion is because of Chechnya. Russia cleverly installed Ramzan Kadyrov — a former militia leader in the Second Chechen War who switched sides to fight for Moscow in 1999 — as president of the region in 2007. Since then, incidents of violence within Chechnya itself have leveled off — only to migrate east to Dagestan and west to Ingushetia and North Ossetia. The violence was pushed out of one Russian republic, making its neighbors worse off.

I go on to wonder what this might mean, as Russia steps up some counterterror policies in Daghestan. Where will it push the violence to next?

Update: RFE/RL has an excellent piece on the deteriorating situation in Daghestan as well:

More effective police action alone, however, is not the answer. Nor is Moscow prepared to take sole responsibility for turning the situation in Daghestan around, as Medvedev made clear when he told Magomedov peremptorily “You’re president, it’s up to you to continue what you’ve started.” …

The litany of complaints aired in Sochi last week substantiate the widely held perception that the Kremlin has no comprehensive strategy for tackling the problems that plague the North Caucasus as a whole, or the individual republics. Other analysts argued at the time of Khloponin’s appointment six months ago that even if such a plan existed, the firmly entrenched regional elites would fight tooth and nail to thwart its implementation.

Two car bombs exploded today in Makhachkala, the capital of Daghestan. But what’s interesting here isn’t the tragedy of the bombs—that’s something that almost goes without saying, and is difficult to assess from the U.S.—but rather how Russia is responding to the various endemic insurgencies in the Caucasus. From the article:

The Kremlin has pledged to wage “a ruthless fight” against militant groups but also acknowledged a need to tackle unemployment, organized crime, clan rivalry and corruption as causes of the ongoing violence in the region.

One additional angle to this renewed COIN focus of theirs: tribal militias. Over at wish-it-was-my-day-job Current Intelligence, I have a short post about this:

Who knew counterterrorism was as simple as identifying people by their appearance? This kind of lazy stereotyping is one of many reasons why “arming the tribes,” of which the Daghestani attempt is merely the latest example around the world, is so fraught with danger. It is true that local proxies are normally part of a counterinsurgent’s arsenal—some people have made careers out of saying so—but that doesn’t mean they are always a good idea….

Counterinsurgency is risky war, perhaps one of the riskiest methods of warfare. Worse than the risk, there are no right answers—even doctrinally, concepts need to be emphasized or discarded in a chaotic, and sometimes contradictory way, to achieve success.

So in that sense, it’s interesting to see how the trend in arming tribes—not developing intelligence networks, or economically or governmentally undermining the insurgency, but arming new groups—seems to have taken hold in Daghestan. It’s possible this policy will result in a temporary, even short-term stabilization in the province (though at what human or material cost no one can really say).

I think Russia’s evolving COIN doctrine is a fascinating thing to watch. I wonder if other countries viewed the U.S. military’s evolving relationship to COIN with the same fascination? Given the obvious pitfalls in such warfare, I suspect it was less fascination than dread. Still, I’ll try to keep an eye on what Russia does going forward.

Many thanks to the good folks of Eternal Remont (“The floor of the Moscow Metro with a sweet candy coating.”) for bringing this to my attention: The director of the Nabucco Pipeline has given up on the uniting ideal behind the Nabucco Pipeline.

“Nabucco is not designed to substitute Russian gas…Nabucco is designed to offer complementary alternative gas quantities.”

No, that’s not what it was designed for. It was designed to give Europe an energy source independent of Russia. That’s why it’s called Nabucco.

This was all dead on arrival anyways when Turkmenistan signed on to give Iran 20bn m3 of gas annually. Or maybe it was dead on arrival when it turns out that Turkmenistan may not have enough gas to keep Russia and Iran (and, you know, itself) supplied after some reserve estimation went awry. And it definitely looked toast when Blue Stream became a reality.

All of the sudden, Europe is balancing between Nigeria, Russia, or Iran for its energy needs (other sources exist, of course, so if you want to convince me that Indonesia or something is the secret, just wiki and reply). It’s been effectively closed out from Central Asia unless it deals with one of the two latter.

I hate the sort of journalism that talks about the “door to Central Asia” and some such tropes, but unless Europe gets creative, it looks like it doesn’t have the key. And if some folks in the Caucasus start reading Global Guerillas? Then let’s hope that creativity comes all-the-more quickly.

…because he just decreed that the Azeri people’s debt to the state owned gas company is kaput.
Wait, did I say “decreed”? I guess this isn’t a vote thing after all. It’s just Caucasus economics.

Aliyev looks great to his people (and his parliament). He gets to be a father of the people just like his dad. And considering that all he really did was creatively title a tax break, its a pretty solid PR win. Eternal Remont says as much in less words.

It’s nice to see that Azerbaijan, for all of the freedom-of-press issues and single-track-economy issues at least ostensibly has Azeri folks’ interests in mind. Even though I enjoyed my time in Azerbaijan myself, every time I think of the country now I think of Carpetblogger, who is hardly an Aliyev mouthpiece. But as much as Azerbaijan has gotten ragged on pretty often in the past, it is an actual country with an actual economy. It is far more like the countries to the west of it than it is to the ones on the other side of the Caspian, I would wager. It even has a national book! Written by one of the more fascinating men I’ve read about (Lev Nussinbaum has a better reason to hate Communism than you do: Stalin slept with his mom).

So there is something definitively there to get punditized. Aliyev’s annulling of Azeri debt probably has investors in Azeri industry (read: BP) disgruntled, and it looks more like real governance than anything else going on between the Black and the Caspian. So there’s something that could be responsibly discussed, which beats things like “zOMG! Circassians are a threat to Russia and thus must be looked at like Chechens or maybe like Ossetians or was it more like Georgians!”

Partway through Decoding the New Taliban: Insights from the Afghan Field (which is fantastic and will be reviewed when I’m finished) I came across the following footnote to an article by Thomas Tuttig on Loya Paktia:

“‘Taliban release video of German who Targeted US Afghan Base’”[cited].…According to one source, it ‘appears the IJU is an umbrella term used to link a network of affiliated Jamoat groups from Central Asia, comprised of Kyrgyz, Uzbek, and Kazakh radicals, linked to, but not formally associated with, the IMU’. Another source describes it as an ‘offshoot’ of the IMU’ and as ‘dominated by Turkish Jihadists’, at least members of the German Turkish Community[cite1],[cite2, same article, but originally from a different, less They Live! website]…The former British Amabassador to Uzbekistan, however, believes that IJU is a creation of the Uzbek Secret Service.”[cite3]

OK, huh??? I obviously cut out the cites in favor of hyperlinks, but the footnote is referring to a bit on the relationship between the IJU as “the obscure Uzbek-Turkish Islami Cihad Ittehadi” Najmiddin Jalolov, and the Haqqani network. So there’s a whole dogs breakfast of ethnicities and nationalities being jumbled together, and this footnote doesn’t even mention the casual acceptance of Chechens swarming Afghanistan.

Ruttig is obviously a very sharp guy, and his CV is far more impressive than mine, and he cites Guido Steinberg, my favorite name in academia since P.L.O Guy, and I’m not knocking his research or writing at all…but that above paragraph displays a huge friction between the reality of terrorist groups and the study of them.

The first article is cited because of this note:

The plotters, who included two German converts to Islam and a Turkish Muslim, had allegedly been planning large bomb attacks on U.S. facilities in Germany. All have been linked to the Uzbek terrorist group Islamic Jihad Union. The videotape released in Peshawar also includes a message of Maulvi Jalaluddin Haqqani, one of the most wanted commanders in Afghanistan.

So far, we have 3 Germans, one of which is of indeterminate Turkish/swarthy origin, the other two apparently look like Beckenbauer. OK, maybe the linkage between them and IJU is confidential, that’s fine, let’s run with it.

The second link to Jamestown paints a very different picture of IJU. It discusses the same incident as above, but then goes into a quick history linking the IJU, IMU, IMT (Islamic Movement of Turkistan), East Turkistan Islamic Movement, Jamiati Tabligh, and assorted Kyrgyz and Kazakhs who got caught up in the movement. So what is this pan-ethnic, muti-tentacled, beast doing in Uzbekistan?

In effect, this culminated in the events in Andijan in which a peaceful demonstration against the arrest of 23 businessmen quickly escalated.

Oh. To be fair, this article was written in 2007 when I also still thought that terrorists had a big hand in Andijan, but, well, they didn’t. The IJU, IMU, IMT are still fighting mostly in Afghanistan/Pakistan, and the real heavy fighting hasn’t made Uzbekistan for a multitude of reasons.

The last article doesn’t cite any sources for its portion on “An Uzbek-Turkish al-Qaeda” because that doesn’t make any sense. To wit:

Whether the IJU can establish a new terrorist network dominated by Uzbeks and Turks and maintain it in the longer term remains to be seen. But the events of 2007 have given a clear warning. An Uzbek organization that operates transnationally and adopts an internationalist strategy like the IJU is ideally suited for recruiting Turks—either from Turkey itself or from the European diaspora—for al-Qaeda’s global Jihad.

That’s pure Eurabia-level scare tactics. We have located one Turk in this entire web, and he wasn’t actually Turkish, but German. In fact, we have twice as many Europeans as Turks so far, if we’re going to make that distinction. The concept of Turks having an al-Qaeda uprising RIGHT IN EUROPE’S BACKYARD needs a wee bit more fleshing out before Munich joins the Exotic Place of Danger Watch.

As for what Amb. Murray has to say, well, the Uzbek internet militia have already been at this site in full force, so I hesitate to comment. He’s probably the loudest, most famous, critic of Karimov’s regime, but that cuts both ways. I’m a sucker for conspiracy theories, but I’m still looking for more verifiable proof that the Uzbek Government funds IJU.

So all in all, we still don’t know what the IJU is about after looking into assertions on what the IJU is about. It’s certainly possible that they want to turn the entire Dar al-Islam into a caliphate capitaled at Samarkand. It’s also entirely possible that they only exist in the failed state between Afghanistan and Pakistan, and that any pan-Turanian branding is just that, branding. Just because an organization wants to have Kyrgyz, Kazakh, Turkish, Uyghur, Chechen (I wonder if there are any Buryat, Tatar, or Kabardin terrorists…especially Tatars, wouldn’t want to mess with them) fighters doesn’t mean they exist in amounts worth putting resources towards.

If you want to save Central Asian from amorphous, platonically ideal, bad guys, then look towards good governance, fighting corruption, instilling civic pride and smart urban planning, education reforms, and by all means make sure the resource wealth gets converted into something useful. A pan-Turanian Takfiri uprising may just get put down without it getting started that way.

Some time ago, I discussed an article Philip Smucker wrote about the presence of Al Qaeda along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border. I was mostly skeptical of this section in particular:

Interviews with US military commanders and American radio intercepts of Arab and Chechen fighters as well as confirmed captures or kills of foreign fighters inside Afghanistan bolster the findings…

An Afghan, working with Western forces in Afghanistan and who asked to remain anonymous, said he had monitored al-Qaeda radio traffic in a Paktika province district that is a stronghold of the Haqqani network, run by Sirajuddin Haqqani. “I set up a radio scanner two months ago and I picked up Chechens and Arabs talking regularly,” he said. “At one point, we heard an Arab talking to a Chechen say, ‘Hey, the money has come in, you can attack soon’.” The Afghan said that an Afghan al-Qaeda figure, Maulvi Twaha, who he said he had personally seen shoot dead five Afghan students in 2001, was operating openly in the province, assisting foreign agents and fighters to enter and leave the region.

An American, embedded as a trainer with the Afghan National Army, confirmed similar radio traffic. “It sounds from radio chatter like they have more recruits coming in, including Arabs, Uzbeks, Turkmen and Chechen fighters,” said US Army Major Cory Schultz, 37, from the San Francisco Bay Area.

At the time, I raised some doubts:

For years, since the start of the war, the existence of Chechens inside Afghanistan has been repeatedly asserted in the press but no one has ever presented proof of their existence. Indeed,that Smucker relies on an anonymous Afghan monitoring radio broadcasts to claim the presence of Chechens is telling: does that magical Afghan speak Chechen? Can he tell the difference between that and other Caucasian, slavic, or Central Asian languages?

I know and like Major Schultz, but again: how does he know? Does FOB Bermel just happen to have Turkic linguists and Chechen-fluent analysts to tell them what they’re listening to? For example, nearby Zabul province has a noticeable population of Uzbeks living near Qalat, the provincial capital: can their linguists tell the difference between Turkmen and Uzbek? I’ve never heard of Turkmen being in the southeast like that. That doesn’t mean it’s untrue—and I don’t think anyone is lying, let me emphasize that—but this kind of assertion is completely at odds with what we otherwise know of the area.

I was able to get in touch with Major Schulz (Smucker misspelled his name), and he had something startling to say. “I never said the quote that he used,” he told me via email. Major Schulz continued, “I stated that there have been reports that Chechens have been in the area but we have no way of verifying this information.”

That’s quite a different story than the one Smucker told, and Major Schulz offered several additional complaints about Smucker’s conduct and questioning while he was there. Major Schulz argues that Smucker, “chose to print contrary statements even though we told him the information he was getting was wrong.” Among the assertions Smucker made was that most of the violence in the area was driven by Al Qaeda; Major Schulz claims he and his team told Smucker they were actually tribal and local, not Al Qaeda.

“Multiple times,” Major Schulz said, he and his captain, “told him that his information was totally off and he chose to run with it anyway.” He attributes the slant of the reporting to a dispute Smucker had with the local PAO.

If the allegations are true, then they are serious, as they would imply that Philip Smucker knowingly printed false or misleading statements attributed to individuals who dispute them. That is a serious ethical violation. I have been unable to resolve how much the Asia Times fact-checked Smucker’s article—they have been caught out on this front before.

For Smucker himself, this is also a potentially damaging charge. While he garnered a lot of praise for his reporting from Tora Bora in 2001, in 2003 he was implicated when the Christian Science Monitor had to apologize and withdraw Smucker’s reporting regarding Saddam Hussein’s alleged payments to British Member of Parliament George Galloway.

When contacted for this post, Smucker insisted his version of the story was drawn directly from his notes, and that he presented an accurate account of the conversation. I lack the ability to mediate between the two—unless there is a recording somewhere, it’s kind of a he-said/she-said thing.

The Chechen thing worries me, though. From my conversations with Smucker, there seems to be an overriding sense in several U.S. and NATO units that there is a massive Chechen presence both within al Qaeda and in particular as a significant presence among the foreign fighters in Afghanistan. The evidence for this is… someone saying they heard it on a radio intercept and anonymous officials saying they exist. I’m afraid that’s not sufficient to overcome my original skepticism—when I was at FOB Salerno, a cultural adviser who grew up in the U.S. told me that many Afghans call fair-skinned foreign fighters “Chechen” in part because that’s what they think the Americans want to hear (which is a larger problem with interpreters not being fully qualified—a topic well beyond our scope here).

Then there’s the language issue. I’d be doubtful if even a fluent Russian-speaker could tell the difference between Chechen, Ingush, Agul, Avar, Azeri, or Nogai. Being able to recognize a Turkic language like Uzbek probably won’t help much, either. Given the other cases I know of where someone is identified as Chechen then found out to be of another Russian ethnicity, I find it difficult to just sort of accept that based on SIGINT in a language I know no one in the Yukon AO speaks, they know there are Chechens nearby.

It’s also important to note that Al Qaeda itself has a compelling interest in selling the presence of Chechens amongst its ranks in South Asia. It makes the jihad look more international (and thus, in theory, more attractive to new recruits), and it presents a pleasing boogeyman to distract attention from the Punjabs and Arabs in the group. Just as how petty criminals in Kapisa claim to be HiG because it makes them sound scary, so too is it entirely possible Al Qaeda claims Chechens to make itself seem something it is not.

None of this is to dismiss Chechnya or Chechen radicals as an issue. They are. There just isn’t much evidence beyond hearsay that there are many, if any, Chechens fighting the jihad outside of Chechnya. And it still doesn’t mean they don’t exist, merely that I don’t find Smucker’s published evidence convincing of much, and one of his interview subjects vigorously disputes what he wrote.

As I said above, Smucker says his quote came directly from his notebook. Major Schulz claims the quote comes from disassociated snippets of the discussion, and is not representative of their conversation or his intent in speaking. Major Schulz aso adds, “if [Smucker's] notes are that accurate then why is my name misspelled, my age incorrect and where I’m from wrong?” He adds he has seen “zero proof” beyond scattered rumors that there any Chechens anywhere in Afghanistan. I’m investigating further, and will post more when I can find out anything more.

Update: Smucker has contacted me, to say he feels I am treating his own reporting unfairly. Since everything is linked, I’ll allow readers to choose for themselves, but Smucker vigorously disputes how I’m framing things here—specifically that he never says al Qaeda drives most of the violence along the border, nor was he writing about Bermel. Again: choose for yourself whom to believe.

Steve LeVine has spent the last few weeks seeing what some ripple-effects of the Georgian war were in the rest of Central Asia. He has a nice essay up at Business Week:

Even before the Georgia mini-war, Russia was playing for keeps in the region. Starting in the 1990s, Russia often got its way by manipulating its oil and natural gas pipelines, which, despite the West’s efforts, still dominate Caspian output. Russian pipelines ship more than 85% of the 6.3 million barrels of oil exported daily from the former Soviet Union. In its struggles with the republics, Russia has turned its spigots off and on repeatedly. In 1993, for instance, Moscow shut off Turkmenistan’s gas exports to the West, forcing the Turkmen to sell at a lower price to Ukraine.

Kazakhstan has been the biggest prize of all. It didn’t look that way in the Soviet Union’s last days, when the flow of money from Moscow slowed considerably, and Kazakhstan had to take out a loan to feed its cattle. It had Tengiz, with at least 9 billion barrels of reserves, plus 13 billion-barrel Kashagan, the largest oil discovery anywhere in 40 years. Yet it was still hard to picture how a territory lacking a single private office building, in which the biggest business was importing Coke and whiskey, would become a petro-state.

It’s pretty interesting to read, in part because this is his old beat and he knows it very well, but mostly because the geopolitical implications are fascinating. Blog-friend Christian has already discussed some of the strategic implications of Russia squeezing a potential northern supply route for Afghanistan (we followed up with some more discussion here). But Afghanistan is not the West’s only strategic interest in the region.

I think Steve is right to be cautious in speculating about concessions the West would have to make the get a non-Russian route for Kashagan oil and Azeri gas. In short, the West has zero leverage, and now that they’ve shown they’ll use their military, the cards are down: Russia will go to war for its interests.

But perhaps pessimism is not the only possible emotion. At a meeting on September 9, Azerbaijani Industry and Energy Minister Natiq Aliyev reiterated his support for the Nabucco pipeline. The project does, however, still lack any definite buy-in on the part of Turkmenistan or Kazakhstan. And until that materializes, especially with Azerbaijan’s natural gas under threat by a thirsty Gazprom, it is too early to do more than discuss likelihoods.

This situation does, however, stress yet again the absolute strategic necessity of Central Asia to the West. Which is a pity it’s been so undermined at the American budget table.

Previously:
Outfoxing Russia… Sort of
Selling Out
Diversifying Caspian Gas
Debating Nordstream
Let’s Talk About Russia’s Pipes
Russia’s Move-Making
After the Wrecking Ships