At a checkpoint in this rocky region, Russian troops can be seen digging trenches, piling sandbags and stringing fences -- the beginning of what could become a fortified frontier. Before August, Akhalgori was undisputed Georgian territory, populated entirely by ethnic Georgians. Now it is occupied by Russia and its puppet government in the neighboring self-declared republic of South Ossetia.
This means endless opportunities for trouble -- and an easy way for Vladimir Putin to test a new American president. The day I visited the checkpoint, several Georgian policemen were killed nearby by a roadside bomb. Last week, when the Georgian and Polish presidents arrived at the spot, shots were fired near their motorcade. Behind the Russian lines, the remaining Georgian civilians are coming under pressure from newly installed local authorities, who are demanding that they accept Russian passports.
Plenty of Western leaders, and no doubt some members of the incoming Obama administration, are desperately wishing this flash point away. French President Nicolas Sarkozy, broker of the cease-fire that ended the Russian-Georgian war, has publicly declared that the Russians digging those trenches do not, in fact, exist. All Russian forces are gone from the territory they occupied in August, he recently assured his fellow European Union leaders.
But there the trench-diggers are -- tangible proof that Russia's campaign against Georgia is far from over. And much as Barack Obama might wish to focus relations with Moscow on arms control or containing Iran, he will first have to decide what to do about this standoff -- and about the energetic, impulsive and ardently pro-Western leader on the other side of it.
That voluble man, Mikheil Saakashvili, remains firmly in place in Tbilisi despite Putin's vow (in a conversation with Sarkozy) to "hang him by his balls." But the model Saakashvili pioneered for wedding Georgia to the West looks shaky. His team of 30-something, English-speaking whiz kids liberated the country's economy, touching off an investment-driven boom and defeating a Russian economic boycott. But since the war and the global financial panic, investor cash has disappeared and the government now survives on handouts from the Bush administration and European Union.
Saakashvili promoted Georgia as a democratic model in a region of autocracies; after the war, he promised a new wave of liberal reforms. Yet the political situation in Tbilisi seems stagnant. Opposition parties are weak and divided, while the president's cronies control most of the mass media. Although parliamentary hearings are underway, Saakashvili has not been seriously challenged for his foolish decision to attack Russian forces in South Ossetia on the night of Aug. 7, an act that sprang the military and diplomatic trap Putin had methodically prepared.
Georgia's security model banked on eventual NATO membership. Rather than preparing its armed forces for territorial defense, Saakashvili used U.S. trainers to drill them for NATO missions in places such as Iraq. Now Russia has proved that territorial invasion as a real threat, while the war has prompted already-reluctant Europeans to dismiss further discussion of NATO. So should Georgia now buy anti-tank missiles and other defensive weapons? Seek a bilateral security guarantee from the United States? Trust that Western diplomacy will deter Russia from another intervention? No one in Tbilisi has yet formulated an answer.
That's largely because the Georgians are waiting to see how much Obama will be willing to do to save a small country on the Black Sea coast that for most of the past two centuries has been a Russian vassal. "We are in a weak and vulnerable situation right now, but we feel this can be changed by a new era of American leadership," Saakashvili told me. "The United States has never been in a better position to lead than it is now. The whole world is waiting for Obama."
But what can Obama do? The president-elect and his vice president, Joe Biden, are on the record as strong supporters of Georgia both before and after the war, notwithstanding Saakashvili's role in triggering the fight. But preserving postwar, post-panic Georgia will probably require an entirely new level of American commitment: not just some kind of security backstop as a substitute for NATO membership but arms to deter Russian tanks; not just advice on cutting taxes and tariffs but billions more in subsidies to keep the country afloat until investors return.
Such help will be taken as incitement by Putin, who may use it to provoke a quarrel between Obama and Europe, or as an excuse to withhold cooperation on Iran. And if the new administration flinches or dithers about whether Georgian independence is worth a confrontation with Moscow? Then the Russian troops along that new frontier will surely stop digging and take the road to Tbilisi, 20 miles south.
Jackson Diehl