These diverging trends, Daghestani analyst Igor Dobayev argues, reflect both limited success by Russian forces in Chechnya and a fundamental shift in the agenda and tactics of those launching these attacks, a change that he says presages an even greater threat to Russian control of the region (novopol.ru/material3685.html).

According to the Russian Interior Ministry, the number of "terrorist incidents" in Chechnya fell from 492 in 2003 to 214 in 2004 and has continued to decline this year, but the number of such incidents elsewhere in the republics of the northern Caucasus not only went up over the same period but also continues to rise.

In Daghestan, for example, the authorities registered 30 such incidents in 2004 (including 18 in the republic capital of Makachkala alone), Dobayev reports, but more than 100 have been recorded across that republic during the first nine months of this year. That trend is replicated "across the entire North Caucasus."

In trumpeting their relative success in Chechnya -- including the killing or capture of several major militant leaders -- the Russian authorities have failed to take these changes in the pattern, scale and nature of the terrorist threat into account, Dobayev continues, and thus have lost much of the initiative to their opponents.

The Daghestani expert argues that there are five changes in the nature of the conflicts in the northern Caucasus that help to explain not only their growth and spread but why the current Russian approach is failing to achieve the successes its Moscow authors regularly claim.

First, the goals of Moscow's opponents have changed. They are no longer primarily concerned with the independence of Chechnya or some other republic but rather with the establishment of an Islamic state across the entire North Caucasus. As a result, they now are taking the fight into regions where they have not been in before.

Second, the rise of Islam as a unifying force has made it easier for the various groups to recruit young people to their cause. The Russian authorities may succeed in decapitating some of these groups, but Dobayev points out, "world experience shows that radical Islamic structures have the ability to regenerate and draw in 'fresh blood.'"

Third, the new generation entering these groups is far more violent and even cruel than its predecessors. Having lived with violence for more than a decade and inspired by the ideas of "a holy war of the sword" against the infidel, younger people are more willing to engage in the kind of violence that older Chechen leaders had opposed.

Fourth, as the number of terrorist incidents across the region has increased, they have also become more regionally differentiated, a development that has obscured the broader trends and also complicated the lives of those who are trying to respond to the terrorist challenge.

In Daghestan, Dobayev notes, more than half of the terrorist acts have been carefully targeted at senior officials, another third at law enforcement personnel, and the rest against those serving in the military and their families rather than at the population at large.

But in Ingushetia and most other republics of the Northern Caucasus, he says, "the terrorists are ever more frequently using the methods of random [bezadressniy] terrorism, directing their destruction actions at places with a large concentration of people primarily from among the civilian population."

Any strategy that fails to take these differences into account almost certainly is guaranteed to fail, Dobayev says.

And fifth, despite the presence of perhaps 300 fighters from Saudi Arabia, Algeria, and Jordan in the ranks of Moscow's opponents in this region and the other assistance that they have received, "'North Caucasus terrorism'" ... is ever less dependent upon external support."

"In other words," Dobayev says, "'internal' terrorism [in that region] is capable not only of restoring itself but even of expanding its ranks" without any help from the outside. And thus those who think that blocking the support from abroad will solve the problem are sadly mistaken.

Instead, Dobayev continues, Russian officials must recognize the overwhelmingly home-grown nature of terrorist activity in their own country and understand that such activity is "slowly but steadily spreading across the entire territory of the North Caucasus and periodically is breaking out beyond the borders of that region."

And that recognition, Dobayev says, must lead to "a corrective in Russian policy" there. Force alone, will not be sufficient, not will depriving the terrorists of what many in Moscow see as their "social base" by reducing unemployment and improving public services.

All those steps have a role to play and should be part of a successful strategy, Dobayev says, but to them must be added improvements in law and law enforcement, in the work of the special services, and in agitation and propaganda work with the population.

But even if the Russian authorities do all that, Dobayev concludes, it won't be enough unless Moscow is able to "reduce the level of corruption [in the North Caucasus] to an internationally acceptable level, overcome [its own] systemic crisis, and make the reforms it is carrying out attractive to the majority of the population."

Paul Goble teaches at the EuroCollege of the University of Tartu in Estonia.

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