The Russians looked to Desert Storm and the NATO campaign on Kosovo as prototypes for a "zero casualty" campaign on Chechnya. But there are stark differences in the strategy they adopted which help explain why the Russian juggernaut appears to be unraveling. PNS editor Franz Schurmann, professor emeritus of history and sociology at UC-Berkeley, has traveled extensively and reads widely in the Asian, Russian and Arab media. His weekly column "Predictions" can be found on PNS' website New California Media online at ncmonline.com.

A Russian juggernaut relentlessly advancing into Chechnya has been a prominent theme in the media in Russia -- and elsewhere --- over the last three months. It is clear that the Russians hoped to follow NATO's war strategy in Kosovo -- generally called "zero casualty" -- where the winner achieves victory with very few casualties.

Those hopes are now history and the world is asking, where did the Russian strategy go wrong?

The prototype "zero casualty" war was Desert Storm of January 1991. In that war, the U.S.-led "Coalition" suffered around 30 deaths (some caused by friendly fire) while the Iraqis suffered as many as 100,000. In Kosovo, NATO deaths were even fewer. It's still not clear how many casualties the Yugoslav Army suffered but thousands of Albanian and Serb civilians were killed and wounded.

The Russians' strategy included military, political and diplomatic elements. The comparison with NATO is instructive.

On the military front, the key NATO strategy was to empty Kosovo of people. Serbs and Gypsies, together some 10 percent of the population, fled northward. Over a million Albanians fled west to Albania and south to Macedonia. The Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) spread out over the hills leaving the Yugoslav army in abandoned towns. Finally, Slobodan Milosevic gave up and NATO ground forces moved in.

The Russians adopted the same strategy on Chechnya. The population of Chechnya reached at most two million. Many fled during the first Chechnya war in 1996. This time another million fled in all directions except the high mountains to the south of Djohar (as Groznyi was renamed by the Chechen government). That's where the Islamic fundamentalists were entrenched.

Here is a vital difference between Chechnya and Kosovo. NATO was allied with guerrillas in the hills, whereas Russians were battling mountain-based guerrillas. Even more important, the KLA had no ideology and soon degenerated into greed, but the Chechen Islamic fighters are part of a worldwide network of fundamentalists -- many within the Russian Federation where, in numbers, they constitute the second religion after Orthodox Christianity.

On the political front, NATO's strategy was to force Milosevic out of office but keep the Yugoslav Army intact. It did not oust Milosevic, but the army is still present and Serbia did not disintegrate.

The Russians, however, made bad mistakes in their political strategy. Plenty of people in Chechnya and neighboring Dagestan did not like the fundamentalists. One of them was Chechnya's president Aslan Maskhadov. But instead of treating them with respect, the Russians, especially Yeltsin, kept on breaking their promises. So even the pro-Russian militias which the Russians had organized failed them.

Russian diplomatic strategy also failed, in contrast to NATO forces which used diplomacy to great advantage. During the Kosovo War, the U.S. succeeded in completely isolating Serbia from its neighbors. By contrast the Russians angered Chechnya's neighbors -- Georgia to the south and oil-rich Azerbaijan. Only far-away China supported Russia. And even though just about all the Islamic countries are terrified by Islamic fundamentalism, they only shunned Russia. And large amounts of money flowed to the Chechen cause from the large Chechen and Circassian communities in many Arab countries.

Now the war has turned against the Russians. As in 1996, the body count is mounting -- it is no longer a zero casualty war. Politically all signs indicate that the Chechen "Wahhabis" have won. As Abdurrahman Ar-Raashid writes in the Arab-language As-Sharq Al-Ausat, "Putin knows very well that he can never win the war in Chechnya especially because the Chechen people, having suffered such destruction, harbor a hatred of the Russians deeper than it was before this war."