Peter has a nice "expert roundtable" on this subject on his website: http://www.untimely-thoughts.com/index.html?art=1474
I tand to agree with Patrick Armstrong:
Patrick Armstrong, defense analyst for the Canadian government
Despite being elected President in 1996, defeating extremists by a good margin, Aslan Maskhadov was never able to take charge. The crisis came in July 1998 when he banned Wahhabism and ordered the expulsion of Khattab, abu Walid and other Arab jihadists; five days later there was an assassination attempt on him. The late Akhmed Haji Kadyrov, then Mufti, believed that this had frightened Maskhadov into giving up; at any rate, next February, Maskhadov suspended parliament and ordered the imposition of Shariya law. Be that as it may - and experienced observers disagree on whether he supported the jihadist agenda - his significance rapidly dwindled. The jihadists found it expedient to pretend to be under his control but repeatedly showed that they were not. He would announce he was the sole commander and the jihadists would commit an atrocity soon afterwards that he would then have to denounce - for example the most recent cycle of assertion on 1 August 2004, the Beslan atrocity on 1 September, his condemnation on 5 September. After Beslan he stopped pretending. He was increasingly powerless through the present war and, at the end, commanded very little. His death will make little difference: Europeans will have to stop calling for Moscow to talk with him; his people will choose a new leader who will lead nothing; a few fighters will give themselves up. Those who say his death will "radicalize" the fighters haven't been paying attention: from early days the jihadist agenda has dominated. Maskhadov was only a symbol and not a very important one at that. It's a sad and miserable ending for a man I considered brave and honorable in the first war.
Nu, zayats, pogodi!
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