Basayev’s response to Obama

Someone else can address McCain’s response. In an effort to channel the meanest, most ruthless, willful, and cunning opponent, Shamil Basayev may help us peer into the future as we wrestle with our enemies.

Basayev is dead but some of his trained cadre listened to the President’s speech tonight. What would Basayev do?

Shamil Basayev was a Chechen rebel leader, killed in 2006 and responsible for a series of guerilla battles and acts of savagery on the civilian populations most horrendous the Beslan school attack in 2004 where his operatives killed over 350 young students, children. While we seek to find bin Laden, we still in many ways chase Basayev’s ghost, even in the mountains of Afghanistan, along the coast of Somalia, and down Main Street. When I think of a formidable opponent, I think of him.

Like many before him (Begin, Ho, Fidel, Mao), he was willing to fight a giant. He would be thinking in the long-term. As a leader, he’d be fighting from the front, physically leading and more importantly personally training. Training is the key, he would say. Education, intellectual development of the cause, ultimately fuels victory. And victory lies in the heart of the youth.

Some of Basayev’s cadre, no doubt, draw parallels between the Pakistani Army’s offensive tactics and the Russian Army’s scorched earth methods in Chechnya. Effective, but a great recruiting poster. His cadre members may have no strategy white papers, but they possess the hardened will to tactically draw the giant into a strategic ambush. They remind the Taliban that they may have to displace for a time to a foreign land…Somalia, Yemen, Lebanon, Gaza, Mali, Nigeria, the United States.

So, while the President sketched a faint timetable, Basayev’s ghost seems to suggest we’re in the long haul on this one. We’re now facing his sons and well as his experienced brothers…the young grandsons are in madrassas. Some of our enemies own real estate here, attend university, and hold citizenship.

Shamil Basayev would probably say...nothing, and disappear into the mountains. It’s the things that Basayev would do that have me worried.

Tonight when I saw the President mix with the cadets after the speech, I pictured a Basayev-trained veteran sitting by a fire with his young recruits.