Springtime for the Taliban: Afghanistan Needs a New Model

Perhaps the biggest disappointment to come out of eight years of American intervention in Afghanistan is the apparent inability of the Afghans themselves to decide what they want to be when they grow up.  Sure, that sounds like an average dose of lip service in this climate unless you consider the UN definition of “a failed state.” Afghanistan currently ranks seventh on the Failed State Index (FSI), a sort of Unfortunate 500 for dysfunctional nations. Somalia and its happy band of pirates is number one. For the purpose of perspective – out of a total of 177 UN recognized countries.

Previous US administrations somehow came upon the idea that the American model of a democratically elected government in a highly secular and tribal chunk of real estate was just the thing “to bring peace and stability to the region.”  Where have we heard this wistful speech before?  Probably somewhere between “winning the hearts and minds,” and if all else fails we’ll carpet bomb the daylights out of them until they come to their senses.  How does a country with a little more than 250 years of civility conclude that one system fits all, that it is the right system, or if it is even that useful of a system?  More importantly, is it exportable?

The US has spent more time in Afghanistan than was invested in all of World War II and Korea combined. To date, the Afghan government has made little progress toward establishing anything close to a stable government.  The country continues along the same path of sectional violence, the US led coalition now morphed into the role of neighborhood cop.  A great unifying tactic if it wasn’t for the body count.  The State Department meanwhile pushes the importance of elections and parliamentary process, which totally ignores the traditional power structures of Afghan society; those that encompass family ties, community obligation, and whichever interpretation of Islam that gets practiced in the neighborhood.   All eyes are told to look to the West.  Perhaps a better answer lies much closer to home:

Today the Turkish nation is called to defend its capacity for civilization, its right to life and independence – its entire future.

–Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, 1920.

Kemal (Ataturk was added later – something like ‘Father of the Turks’) had just made a pretty remarkable set of announcements.  They included:

• The end of the Ottoman Empire.  Well, it was almost dead before World War I anyway.
• The abolishment of the Caliphate.  (Political authority under Islam.)
• The formation of the secular Republic of Turkey.
• The unacceptable state surrounding British occupation.

And the need for the Armenians in the east and the Greeks in the west to relocate elsewhere. There was no place for Orthodox Christianity in the new Republic.

About the Man

Mustafa Kemal was born in Salonika (now part of Greece) in 1881.  Most of his early history has been revised so often that most versions lack credibility. Raised in the Muslim faith, a product of military schools, he later served with great distinction as a Lt. Colonel and division commander at the battle of Gallipoli, orchestrating one of the greater defeats the allied forces suffered in the First World War.  A great fan of the West and particularly The Enlightenment (having been assigned to Paris and the Balkans at varying points), he also fully embraced the potential power of the media, using newspapers (often his own creations) extensively in his nationalist pursuits.  Above all, he believed that the only way to save Turkey from complete partition by the allied powers was to establish a modern, secular republic.  In his words, “Islam and civilization are a contradiction in terms.”

The Background

Things were going badly on the western front for the British and French in World War I.  Russia was taken out by both the Nationalist and Bolshevik revolutions.  Britain’s attack at Gallipoli, (Australian and New Zealand forces, ANZAC) was aimed at knocking the Ottoman Empire out of the war.  Instead it turned into a rout.  Britain then tried to turn the Arabs (with T.E. Lawrence’s deft assistance) against the Turks, promising them an Arab state for their trouble.  Naturally that was a lie, the one apparent constant in British colonial policy.  The Allies won the war, the Ottoman Empire was partitioned by the Treaty of Sevres creating what today are known as Syria, Lebanon, Palestine, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Yemen and of course, Iraq.  The Sultan was left in Istanbul as a British puppet and Kemal fled to Ankara with plans to turn Anatolia into his new republic. He was able to deceive the British and the Arab world just long enough to consolidate his forces in Anatolia, a process pushed along by his creation of opposing media outlets.  The Arab world believed he was fighting to preserve the Sultan and the Caliphate, the British assumed that his services were already on the colonial payroll.  By the time the British realized his intentions, they were already outgunned, out-manned and out maneuvered. In 1923, they signed the Treaty of Lausanne ending hostilities.  The Republic of Turkey was born.

Much of the internal struggle dividing Islam and adding fuel to sectarian violence seems to surround the Caliphate, which is best described as both a person and a thing. One of the chief splits in Islam, the chasm separating Sunni and Shi’a communities is based on the interpretation of Muhammad’s successor as sole authority on Islamic law. Each side accuses the other of being usurpers in a centuries long dispute over who has the right to read the mind of a dead prophet.  Many political and social issues in Islam today fail to achieve any real clarity while the two camps continue to hold on to conflicting interpretations of religious doctrine.  This is further complicated (or exasperated) by the very notion of Islamic Law, a shadowy domain where the words of the prophet Mohammad somehow hold credence with something as innocuous as the local traffic code. By all accounts it is an archaic system, one reminiscent of The Inquisition, but accepted in many quarters of the Muslim world.  Judging its validity is not the point, accepting its existence is, for the idea of belief is not validated by the structural framework of a society, though it is that very framework that accelerates the rift.  Kemal argued that Islamic Law was part of the “nomadic Bedouin custom,” totally unsuitable in the development of a complex, modern society.  That is difficult to argue against given the global interaction of nations today.  Countries like Egypt and Israel have both found it necessary to operate parallel courts to accommodate issues of marriage and personal conduct, but not civil law.  Religious law as the fundamental tenet of a nation is little more than locking the door and keeping the key.  All social, educational, and political exchange stops. No common ground is allowed to exist on this dogmatic, unilateral dead-end street.  America was founded on the premise of religious persecution elsewhere, that in turn, sanctioned by the state.  The road to modernity through democratic ideals couldn’t traverse the murky ground of theological interpretation. Noted historians, Will and Ariel Durant once stated that “the Bible is a great book, a great tale, but if you had to live by it, you’d go crazy.” Then again, modernity may be our point, not the point.

Constantinople (Istanbul) had been the official seat of the Caliphate since about 1514.  The last recognized Caliph was Abd al Majid II who with his family was exiled to Paris following the establishment of the Republic of Turkey.  Kemal found this action necessary in order to create an Islamic republic based on civil law, not theology.  This was naturally viewed as an extreme form of heresy, particularly in the Sunni Arab world, complicated further by the establishment of language laws that reverted Arabic to second class status in both government and religious proceedings, though some laws were moderated later. In itself, this was an offshoot of his policies on nationalization, but it also played into his desire to create a literate, inclusive society.  Again, in opposition to fundamentalism which he saw as “a way of promoting intellectual stagnation” by authorizing religion to define social progress, including the very function of government itself.  Oddly, the Caliphate seemed to end there.  Saudi Arabia did not attempt to re-establish it at Mecca, undoubtedly since it would threaten their position as an absolute monarchy, and it was only briefly claimed by the Taliban following the Soviet departure from Afghanistan.

Kemal was brilliant in many ways, but he was no saint.  His orchestration of the Armenian exodus was as brutal as any forced deportation.  He stacked the military with believers in his own cause and seemed more than willing to arbitrate disputes at the gallows.  Within Turkey he was seen as both savior and despot; in the fundamentalist world, a Doenmeh (a closet Jew), an alcoholic, a homosexual, a womanizer and a heretic – personal attacks that continue long after his death.  The real truth is as clouded as the newspapers Kemal himself used to create.  Yet today, Turkey remains a somewhat stable republic in the middle of one of the most volatile regions on earth.  Not perfect, but functional.

Lessons for Afghanistan

The opportunity for a more progressive society in Afghanistan was probably lost shortly after the Soviet withdrawal in 1989. In the vacuum that followed, the same Mujahedeen we once funded became the Taliban we now hunt.  Instead of rebuilding schools and infrastructure, promoting education and a sense of inclusion, we simply walked away, leaving the task largely to under-funded NGO’s and a lot of wishful thinking. The Taliban, falsely claiming the right to the Caliphate sought to force an Islamic state on the people of Afghanistan as an alternative to both communist autocracy and western indifference – two models of what they saw as a similar dysfunction.  The United States supplied much of the fodder for the Taliban position by reinforcing beliefs that Islam alone would see to the needs of the Afghan people, faith having been the sole unifying factor over ten years of Soviet occupation.  Education should have been the tool of choice to defeat a return to fundamentalism, not merely the establishment of a western leaning central government, manufactured primarily as a base for US influence in the region. No one seemed interested in the greater investment in literacy, the real slayer of despotism, secular or political, and the one indispensable ingredient in democracy. Afghanistan claims a 28% literacy rate among men, women an even more dismal 12%; Turkey, 87% overall.  The Taliban know this and they fear a literate populous far more than anything our armories can ever produce.  But we can’t export a system if nobody can understand the instructions.

Turkey’s example may be a harsh one by American standards, but it allowed the time necessary to go from a shooting war to the process of nation building in a realistic time frame. That element of time is probably what has always hampered American foreign policy, the impatience inherent in the very system we seek to sell.  Any parent will tell you that it takes twenty years or so to educate and develop a child into an adult.  Americans tire of foreign intrigue as quickly as they tire of presidents.  This lack of continuity is not only a result of the fickle nature of American politics in general, but the bad decisions orchestrated by a system in constant flux.  We don’t even bother to apologize since the person that set the policy is never around to finish it anyway.  When Kemal died in 1938 from chronic liver disease, he left behind a far more literate society than he inherited.  Right or wrong in his methodology, he did bequeath them the tools necessary for choice, the one thing the fundamentalist camp can never accept.

The question for Americans is whether we can endure a long-haul assignment, one that begins with security and ends with an informed society, one that just might decide that our model isn’t their model.  That’s the risk of intervention.  If US policy is confined to simply destroying the Taliban, then we’ve already lost this one.  If something else is on the table, this would be a pretty good time for a new President and a revamped State Department to explain just what that might be.

The Georgian-Russian Conflict: NATO Goes Global

This is the second of a two-part series dealing with the core issues underlying the Georgian-Russian War of 2008, most notably that ethnic Russian populations abandoned beyond the borders of the old of the Soviet Union.

Part 1, entitled “More than Barbed Wire,” dealt with the history leading up to the collapse, the impact of lost borders, and the isolation of Russian enclaves outside Moscow’s control. This part, entitled “NATO Goes Global ,” deals with Russification under Stalin, the current status quo of the “frozen conflict zones,” and the role of NATO (under the Bush administration) in contributing to the Georgian-Russian conflict.

The Russians are Coming…no Staying

So where did these Russians come from? A great part of Stalin’s consolidation of the USSR was based on guaranteeing the internal security of a nation with far flung borders and a great many hostile guests, most notably in Eastern Europe. It was not simply a matter to be resolved by the military and intelligence agencies alone. Subversion could easily permeate all sectors of the infrastructure – communication, industry, transport, commodities – no part having immunity from an orchestrated assault from within. The solution was to remove the upper echelon of management in these areas and replace them with Russians. This included the intelligentsia, the sort of social network that commingled within that stratum of business, society, and educational elites. They were labeled ‘enemies of the people’ (“people” being the working class) and as such deemed guilty of “informal opposition to the government,” defined as participating in little more than critical conversation about the limitations of the communist system. Most were sentenced to internal exile in the far reaches of Siberia or to the oil fields of Kazakhstan as laborers. Others entered the Gulag never to be seen again. These purges or population transfers were conducted throughout the USSR and Eastern Europe, resulting in a nearly 60% death toll among the deportees. In other cases, like the Tatar population of the Crimean peninsula (this was probably their fourth or fifth eviction over history), the transfers were purely a matter of ethnic cleansing aimed at removing a recalcitrant population from a sensitive area—that being the headquarters of the Soviet Black Sea Fleet. Combined, these actions amounted to the further russification of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics – emphasis on “Union.”

So home is indeed where your hat is hanging, at least in the case of the Russian technocrats now in charge of the Soviet realm. What happened next is what always happens in forty years of living. Children are born, parents grow old, people are buried, and social networks ossify on the new land. In one sense, it mirrors the colonizing experience of other European ex-patriots, but with a different twist: The Soviet Union was not driven out of these territories, but also collapsed abruptly from the perimeter. In the chaos that followed, it quickly became apparent that these Russians not only didn’t want to go home (i.e., they were home), but under the circumstances weren’t really welcome in Russia anyway. The economic realities of the new Russia could ill afford the infusion of upwards of 20 million refugees.

Twenty years after the demise of the USSR, Eurasia is left with the four entities: South Ossetia, Abkhazia, Nagorno-Karadakh and Transnistria – termed “frozen conflict zones” in the vernacular of diplomatic exchange. Following the founding of the CIS in 1991, the group went on to establish the Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO) mirroring both the precepts of NATO combined with economic notions ingrained in the principles of the European Union (EU). Little coalescence has been achieved by this collective since its inception, and two of the chief antagonists in the current dilemma, Georgia and Ukraine, have either failed to ratify the CSTO Treaty or actively withdrawn from it. Russia has flip-flopped, calling it of little use in 2007 while seeking CSTO recognition for South Ossetia and Abkhazia in ’08, no doubt in an attempt to force a lopsided vote on the issue. And to the north, the Republic of Moldova refuses to recognize Transnistria, also known as the Pridnestrovian Moldavian Republic. Not much can be asserted by the current Moldovan government since the zone is still home to a Russian army, there on the pretext of guarding two warehouses of obsolete ammunition. Russia’s sharp rebuke to the Saakashvili government in Georgia is more than ample evidence to Moldova that Moscow will not tolerate aggressive actions against Russian nationals in any of these conflict zones.

NATO Goes Global

The North Atlantic Treaty Organization was a key element in the Cold War strategy of isolating and then encircling the Soviet Union. Its success has long been a subject of debate in the US and Europe. In some regards, it was a dangerous though necessary alliance because all assumptions pointed to a third confrontation on European soil, one with the potential to become global. By all accounts, the treaty was a mutual defense pact because an attack on West Germany constituted an attack on the United States. This was seen as a sensible response to the Soviet Union’s vast superiority in conventional forces stationed in Eastern Europe. No one cared to test the strength of this treaty in real time, for as the relationship between the US and USSR matured, and the evidence suggested that no winner would emerge from the contest.

NATO today is a relic of those forty years of distrust. It holds little value in defensive strategy outside of Western Europe, other than as a deflective tool in support of basically unilateral actions by the United States – as in Afghanistan or Iraq. Membership should seem somewhat ludicrous to the leadership of countries such as Georgia and Ukraine – except for one minor detail: The mere twenty years since the demise of the USSR. Former satellites of the Soviet Union have little trust in the “new” Russia, the once and still dominant power on the two continents. Russia however, has issues of its own and these issues demand both recognition and a degree of respect. Russia in its current geographic form has not existed in almost one hundred years. Considering its history and insular attitude, it should be noted as rather remarkable the degree of flexibility the nation has exhibited in that same twenty years. Too often the collapse of the Union is linked as a personal defeat of the Russian nation and its people. Hardly the case. The system changed, but not the sense of pride the people feel about their homeland. These former nations and SSRs simply cannot seek their own security at the expense of Russia’s. They need to broker a position based on what is real, not on the couched assurances heard at an embassy cocktail party.

NATO needs to back away and invest some of its energy on an introspective analysis on its purpose and objectives for the 21st century. It may discover that it has none. Selling its wares to Russia’s neighbors, whose own issues have little to do with European security, is both disrespectful and dishonest to all parties. The Georgian-Russian War of 2008 is a prime example of Russia’s restraint and perhaps more importantly its maturity. It mirrors the approach that it has taken on other issues concerning these “frozen conflict zones.” The Russian response was measured, to the point and designed to discourage any further provocation. Georgia is a little bent, but not broken. Perhaps it is also wiser for the experience. Membership in any strategic alliance demands common sense and discretion above all else. While the Bush administration saw fit to dangle the NATO carrot under Georgia’s receptive nose, it should have stopped for a moment and considered Russia’s reaction. Exporting democracy as an alternative to repressive regimes is one thing, but giving them the keys for a military option is quite another. Washington can assist in resolving the matter of these “unrecognized states,” but it will be Moscow’s signature on any substantive agreement. It may surprise some, but Vladimir Putin has read the Monroe Doctrine and the Roosevelt Corollary. Maybe we should read it again, with a renewed sense that regional issues need to be resolved by regional players.

The Georgian-Russian Conflict: More Than Barbed Wire

This is the first of a two-part series dealing with the core issues underlying the Georgian Russian War of 2008, most notably ethnic Russian populations abandoned beyond the borders of the old Soviet Union. This part, entitled “More Than Barbed Wire,” deals with the history leading up to the collapse, the impact of lost borders and the isolation of Russian enclaves outside Moscow’s control. Part 2, entitled “NATO Goes Global,” will deal with Russification under Stalin, the current status quo of these “frozen conflict zones,” and the role of NATO (under the Bush administration) in contributing to the Georgian-Russian conflict.

The Impact of Population Transfers in the Post-Soviet World

Perhaps the biggest question to come out of the great Georgian-Russian War of 2008 was the one nobody bothered to ask: What were all these Russians doing in Georgia to begin with?  The U.S. State Department (under President Bush) might have asked themselves the same question, if not blinded by the rather zealous recruiting campaign underway for potential NATO partners, most occupying real estate literally in Russia’s backyard.  Lost in this sort of retro-cold war pimping strategy (one that should have run out of gas during the Reagan administration) were three very important points, especially if you happen to be Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, a well-educated cold warrior with solid intelligence credentials.  He is also highly invested in the next chapter of Soviet/Russian history, one that will help decide the future course of The Great Game. They are:  1) borders; 2) displaced Russian nationals; and, of course, 3) America’s seemingly endless infatuation with the NATO franchise.

More Than Barbed Wire Here

Secure borders have been a flash point in Russian history all the way back to the Mongol invasions of the 11th century.  Feudalism was an ineffective force because the Mongol armies could easily manipulate the existing fears and suspicions of the various city-states, implementing a “divide and conquer” strategy as it moved across the continent.  Not until Russians united under a common cause were they finally able to drive the Mongols beyond the Ural Mountains.  This notion of a central authority (hence, security) has been thematic of Russian history (much like China’s) in generating policies driven by the need to consolidate an empire that experienced constant expansion until the end of the Tsarist period in 1917. Unlike the other great European powers–England and France, Russia practiced “internal” colonialism, confining most of its activities to the contiguous land mass of its birth – Eurasia.  External colonialism was abandoned in the 19^th century, culminated by the sale of Alaska and the withdrawal of its small colonies on the Oregon and California coasts. Russia managing Russia in a hostile world was a fulltime job.

Russia has continued to seek security by creating a confederacy of groups and tribes under one flag, a process of “russification” that has occupied the nation for most of its history, particularly in the modern age.  Russia’s borders are not only some of the longest in the world, but also the most complex in terms of the ethnic, religious and political diversification that make up a mélange of secular and ideological beliefs along what are largely geographic, not political divisions. Russia’s neighbors have always faced a double-edged relationship because Russia is both a perceived threat and concurrently a tenacious guardian of all that it shelters. What fuels this apparent paradox is Russia’s own fears about its ability to defend its territory from outside aggressors.  In the past two centuries, those threats have primarily come from the West, not only in the case of the French under Napoleon, but also from both the German/Austro-Hungarian alliance of World War I and later Hitler’s Third Reich.  The Axis defeat in World War II merely traded a vanquished threat for a potentially stronger one as a weary Western Europe quickly consolidated under the military umbrella of NATO (1949) and the economic might of the United States.  The first round of the Nuremberg trials coincided with the opening salvo of what became known as the Cold War.  Aside from stark differences in political philosophy between East and West, the perception of what constituted a national security policy also played out on polar grounds.  The United States had the technological edge, the economic advantage, and suffered no loss of infrastructure as a result of the war.  The Soviet Union had at least 22 million dead, split about equally between its military and civilian populations, including three million POWs that died in captivity.  Most of its European theatre was in ruins and another western army was sidling up to its doorstep.  Stalin was having none of it.  He would keep Eastern Europe and the scattered regions making up his southern flank.  The next war would be settled in Czechoslovakia or Poland – not at the gates of Moscow.

However, these new lands came with a lot of baggage, particularly in the case of countries and territories like Romania, Georgia, and particularly Ukraine.  The Bolshevik Revolution (which forced the Russians to withdraw from World War I) was hardly settled when Hitler turned his guns on Moscow.  Many captured soldiers quickly switched sides, as in the case of Ukraine forming its own Waffen SS Combat Division, later reformed as the Ukrainian 1st Division.  They actually preferred killing Russians to Germans, though they couldn’t be classified as allied with the German cause, for when sent to fight French or other Allied forces, they chose to flee or simply desert.  The German Waffen SS also deployed a Muslim division from the provinces of the Eurasian steppes.  And Romania, under Antonescu was of course fascist, the fourth peg in the Tripartite. The importance in this distinction is that many of these soon to be repatriated (re-seized) satellites of the post-World War II Soviet Union had far more serious issues with Moscow than Berlin.  Stalin’s sack of trophies from the German capitulation was offset by the demographic nightmare making up the contents. Having new lands was one thing, but holding on them was another topic entirely.

And so it went for the next forty years.  The nuclear card negated any potential for conventional warfare in Western Europe, as neither side could afford to win or lose under such surreal conditions.  An advantage by either belligerent could easily trigger an escalation to the nuclear option, one that promised to take the dispute global and for the most part, annihilate the human race.  Still, the Stalin mentality prevailed through the ensuing years and subsequent changes in leadership, holding Eastern Europe and a good portion of Eurasia as geopolitical hostages in a rivalry forced to play out on other fields–  Africa, the Middle East, Latin America and Southeast Asia. These were the proxied “hot” wars of the Cold War.  The paramount symbol of this struggle was the Berlin Wall, perhaps the most symbolic border of the 20th century and perhaps the most pernicious.  It was not just concrete and barbed wire – it marked the very thin line between an edgy status quo and the new acronym of the cynics:  MAD (Mutual Assured Destruction).

The Berlin Wall ultimately became a new symbol with the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1989.  The new (old) state of Russia emerged from the deconstruction of the old Union, though it was forced to do so without the luxury of borders.  The real borders were on the outskirts of the buffer states, Russia’s true perimeter a porous delineation on some cartographers chart.  The loss of central authority, the denationalization of all services and financial systems, command and control of the military, and control of commodities entering or leaving the country occurred virtually overnight.  As far away as Hungary or Czechoslovakia, Russian border guards simply walked off the job.  The second most powerful country in the world was left with little or no communication, all its doors unlocked and an internal struggle for not only control of the country, but also the nuclear arsenal as well.  The anxiety generated in this vacuum could only be compared to the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, the only time in the atomic age where the Nuclear Clock theoretically showed one second to midnight. [In reality, the crisis proceeded too rapidly to alter the clock.]

Fortunately, a degree of sanity did manage to prevail in most sectors, necessary in light of the greater stakes on the table, that being the risk to all humanity inherent by the instability of Russia’s nuclear arsenal, part of which was no longer in their direct control.  A preemptive strike by the United States was on the table – one option of many if Russia’s divided leadership could not contain the threat posed by the disruption in command and control of its nuclear assets.  Sound absurd?  By the fall of 1993 Boris Yeltsin, Russia’s beleaguered president, was literally engaged in a tank battle on the front lawn of Moscow’s White House (Parliament building) against the Vice President Aleksandr Rutskoi for control of the government and military.  Of the old Soviet Union’s 27,000 nuclear weapons, approximately a third were outside of Russia, including bomber-based weapons in the Ukraine that were not under Moscow’s central command.  The US concern was that Ukraine might launch on Moscow.

Violent nationalism erupted on many other fronts, but was tempered by the presence of Soviet Army groups stranded in the respective countries.  However, the grudging acknowledgment of new frontiers meant that millions of Soviet (Russian) nationals were, in effect, trapped behind indifferent or openly hostile lines.  General Alexander Lebed’s 14th  Soviet Army was trapped in Moldova, a de facto warlord in a dispute between the Russian enclave on the east bank of the Dniester River (Transnistria for these purposes) and Romanian nationalists pushing for the reunification of the Moldavian SSR with Romania proper.  Lebed had no authority to stay and no ability to go home.  His one obligation was to protect the Russian populace – though he had no clear license to even carry that order out.  The 14th Army sat as a wedge between the two antagonists in a somewhat neutral stance.  When violence broke out following Transnistria’s declaration of independence in 1990, the 14th Army intervened, opening fire on the nationalist forces.  That caused an abrupt end to hostilities as neither side cared to go toe to toe with a well-equipped Soviet army group. This same scenario was repeated throughout the old empire with a variety of results, both positive and negative.

Russia did attempt to resurrect a Union through what was termed the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS), though the effort was not particularly successful. The yoke had been lifted and most of the mules wanted to go their own way.  Repercussions continued for a number of years surrounding the formation of these independent states and former nations, and altercations provoked by the nature of the agenda:  The nationalist issue, the need for revenge platform, secular differences, various border disputes, the Balkan implosion, irreconcilable differences  (the Czech Republic & Slovakia), resources, nuclear arsenals, who owns what navy – endless stuff.  What wasn’t resolved was the fact that millions of Russian nationals were left behind in places like South Ossetia and Abkhazia (Georgia), Transnistria (Moldova), Nagorno-Karadakh (Armenia), and the Crimean peninsula in the Ukraine.  These composed the core of what is known as “the commonwealth of unrecognized states,” the unfinished agenda of the post-Cold War era.  Trouble is that Vladimir Putin has his own idea on how to close this chapter, and it doesn’t include the abandonment of what he considers a part of the “new Russia.”