The war in Chechnya has often been compared to the United States' war in Vietnam. This comparison could perhaps become even more precise soon. During Vietnam, the American generals tried to convince the White House that they weren't able to defeat the Viet-Cong because they were hiding out in Laos and Cambodia. In the end, the generals got the go-ahead to take the war to Vietnam's neighbors.

Similarly, Russian generals have been trying to prove to President Vladimir Putin throughout the second Chechen war that rebel detachments have moved into neighboring Georgia, to the Pankisi Gorge, where Chechens live. The authorities in Tbilisi have always vigorously denied these allegations, accusing Moscow of trying to push an imperial policy. Washington has also reacted sharply to Moscow's accusations.

But this has changed in recent weeks. Georgian State Security Minister Valery Khaburdzania suddenly admitted that there are Chechen rebels in the Pankisi Gorge and that they even have training camps there. Meanwhile, Philip Remler, the acting U.S. ambassador in Georgia, said terrorists fleeing Afghanistan had entered the gorge, and that they are in contact with Jordanian rebel leader Khattab, who is active in Chechnya and has contacts with Osama bin Laden.

When Defense Minister Sergei Ivanov, speaking at an international security conference in Munich, called Georgia a weak country unable to control its own territory, this looked like just another attempt to place the Chechen war in the broader context of the global war against terrorism. But now it looks more like Ivanov was asking Russia for the go-ahead to launch a military operation in Georgia. And he got it.

A secret General Staff directive that became public provides another clue that events in Georgia could take an unexpected turn. The directive calls for the Russian trans-Caucasus military group to evacuate its Tbilisi headquarters as soon as possible. The only logic in this move is to avoid acts of provocation against the Russian officers by the local population. But these kinds of acts would be likely only if Moscow did something to provoke a sharp rise in anti-Russian feeling – a military intervention, for example.

In this case, it isn't the Defense Ministry, but one of the other Russian security ministries, that Putin is ordering to carry out an operation in the Pankisi Gorge. The president has ordered Emergency Situations Minister Sergei Shoigu to organize a homecoming for several thousand Chechen refugees currently in the Pankisi Gorge. Evidently, a humanitarian operation is the only thing Georgian President Eduard Shevardnadze could officially agree to, knowing that the opposition could take the chance to brandish anti-Russian slogans.

But what looks like a clever cover for a potential military operation is completely unrealistic in practice. The refugees don't want to return to Chechnya so long as the war continues, and only a madman could imagine that the rebels would let the Russian emergency situations workers deprive them of their human shield.

At best, this means that while preparing the ground for the military operation, Moscow has already taken care to find a justification for potential victims among the refugees and civilians, the idea being that everything was done to evacuate civilians, but the circumstances got in the way. At worst, the Russian emergency situations workers will play the part of Chechen terrorists' victims. This will then serve to convince the Russian public that a military operation in Georgia is the only solution.

But the main issue is just how successful a military operation in the Pankisi Gorge would be anyway. We already know how good the Russian military is at localizing military action and blocking adversaries in small settlements.

The most likely result of such an operation would be to spread the conflict to a large part of Georgia. History already knows similar cases. After blaming their failures in Vietnam on the fact that Viet-Cong was escaping into Laos and Cambodia, the U.S. generals finally got permission to fight in the territory of these countries. But rather than securing a U.S. victory, this sparked internal conflict in Vietnam's neighbors, plunging them into decades of bloody civil war.