It descended into blood, panic, violence and tragedy. None of the children, parents and teachers killed and wounded in Beslan deserved this barbarism. The children who set off for the first day of school on Wednesday, wearing their new clothes and holding their balloons, could not have been a more innocent target, the anguish of their teachers and parents more undeserved.
Beslan is an extreme example of what is rightly seen as a depraved military tactic. But the equally unpalatable truth is that hostage taking is also a rational tactic in the desperate context of asymmetrical warfare. Despite the likelihood of a bloody end to most hostage situations, they are likely to grow more, rather than less, frequent.
At first sight the appeal of hostage taking is questionable: The hostage takers rarely achieve their stated objectives and often die in the attempt. There is nothing in Putin's record or in that of his security services to suggest that a peaceful solution in Beslan was likely -- or that respect for the lives of the hostages would predominate over the political need to end the crisis quickly.
Preserving lives takes time. Putin's interest, as it has been in Chechnya, is to create an impression of overwhelming force to pacify domestic anxiety. The hostage takers knew from the outset that they were likely to die.
Hostage taking has not always been so unrewarding. In November 1986, an American hostage was released by an Iranian group that had held him captive for more than 17 months. His release had been bought by the Reagan administration with the transfer of military spare parts for Iran. Despite official denials, governments from Washington and Bogota to Paris have sometimes found it convenient to negotiate the quiet release of prisoners. In doing so they created a double bind. Negotiating improved both the life chances of the hostages and the leader's image: A return in triumph was better than a tragic outcome. But rewarding hostage-taking also raised the incentives: As long as something could be gained, the practice was risky, but in some sense profitable.
Today's hostage-taking, though, from Iraq to Ossetia, is more savage, born of the spread of asymmetrical warfare that pits small, weak and irregular forces against powerful military machines. No insurgent lives long if he fights such overwhelming force directly.
His tactical success has always been in surprise and in picking his target. If insurgent bullets cannot penetrate military armour, it makes little sense to shoot in that direction. Soft targets -- the unprotected, the innocent, the uninvolved -- become targets because they are available. If the hostage-takers in Beslan knew they were likely to die, they also knew they would die with the world's attention upon them. Had they died in a regular firefight with Russian forces, we would neither have known nor cared.
In asymmetrical warfare everyone is involved and anyone is a potential victim. To promise that security in such conflicts will result from the deployment of large military machines is a sham. To fight asymmetrical war with tanks makes as much sense as trying to shoot mosquitoes with a machine gun. The result is counter-productive.
As the drama of Beslan was entering its final hours, US President George W. Bush was bidding for re-election on the promise of security to the American people It was the same promise that Putin gave to the Russians and Ariel Sharon to the people of Israel. All three have used violence freely in pursuit of electoral reward. None has produced the peace or security that was their justification.
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