Arms and influence

Hard to argue with him

Turkey's prime minister, Recep Tayyip, doesn't find it hard to justify military strikes against the PKK in Iraq:

"The ball is in our court now, and we will have to do what is necessary on our own if those who have the responsibility do not take action," Erdogan said in Bucharest, Romania's capital, during a joint news conference with Romanian Prime Minister Calin Popescu Tariceanu.

That's the diplomatic way of saying, "Watching the PKK slip over the Iraqi border after killing 17 of our soldiers was the last straw. If the US and Iraq won't deal with the PKK, we will."

Given the level of provocation--years of PKK terror attacks into Turkey--the Turkish military response is restrained. At a time when the Turks might be out for blood, the Turkish military has, so far, only used artillery and air strikes, and very limited ground forces, against suspected PKK positions. Turkey could have gone a lot farther in trying to deal with the PKK--and still might, if the US and Iraq fail to respond.

Go on, I dare you

Of course the PKK wants to goad the Turkish military into attacking across the border in Iraq. In their minds, the lives of 17 Turkish soldiers is certainly worth the effort. Cynically, they're also willing to sacrifice Kurdish lives, which are put at risk in any such attack.

Is Turkey serious?

Now that the Turkish legislature has approved attacks on PKK rebels in Iraq, how serious is the risk that the Turkish military will actually carry out these assaults? Very serious.

Turkish politicians no longer believe that the Iraqi government is capable of dealing with the PKK. In fact, it's hard to believe that the Iraqi military would make the PKK a high-priority target, given how occupied the Iraqi Security Forces (ISF) are with other problems. While Turkish troops crossing the border into Iraq might be embarrassing, Iraqi leaders know that it's hardly a nightmare scenario.

The political and diplomatic backlash from Turkish cross-border operations all depend on what form these attacks take. Options range from the plausible, such as occasional raids against suspected PKK concentrations, to the unbelievable, such as a de facto occupation of northern Iraq. While some Turks might like to see the PKK crushed once and for all, the general staff of the Turkish Armed Forces knows that the real objective is to drive the PKK away from the border, making it increasingly harder for PKK fighters to operate inside Turkish terrority. Turkish forces might easily accomplish this objective without a massive military intervention in Iraq.

This strategy might run aground if the PKK continues to elude the Turkish military. The strategy might really jump off the rails if Iraqi civilians are killed during these operations.

Fortunately, there are other interested parties that can lower the risk of these sorts of mishaps: other Iraqi Kurds. The PKK is hardly popular among other Kurds, who don't want their political fortunes to be hostage to the Kurdish version of the PFLP. Frictions between the PKK and rival groups, such as the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK) and the Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP), existed long before the 2003 invasion of Iraq. (For a recent example of how intansigent the PKK can be, click here.) While Kurdish leaders such as Iraqi president Jalal Talabani can't overtly cooperate with the Turks, they can moderate the political backlash from any Turkish incursions. While no one is likely to say it to a reporter, other Kurds might also provide information about the PKK to Iraqi, American, and even Turkish authorities.

For now, we'll have to wait and see what happens. However, the more Iraq creeps towards a Hobbesian state of nature, the fewer reasons the Turkish government has to respect the border with Iraq.

Rumblings in Kurdistan

AP is reporting some kind of troop movement or build-up on Turkey's border with the Kurdish region of Iraq. It's hard to say exactly what's happening here, and why. Is the Turkish military trying to take a swipe at Kurdish militants while civilian leaders are preoccupied with the constitutional crisis? Are we seeing the latest in a series of saber-rattling exercises between the Turks and Kurds? Is it exactly what the Turkish military claims it is, a hot pursuit of PKK fighters?

Whatever is going on, it's a prime illustration of how a small, militant faction can mess up the lives of fairly reasonable people. The Turkish government has a legitimate concern about the PKK, who has been raiding Turkish communities and slipping across the border into Iraq for several years. Kurdish leaders who don't belong to the PKK, and in many cases are their mortal political enemies, don't have the means to stop the PKK. The United States is too focused on the Iraqi insurgency to give the PKK any significant attention; the American military certainly lacks the manpower to patrol the Turkish-Iraqi border more thoroughly.

This conundrum existed before the 2003 invasion of Iraq, but that event made things worse. The Kurds had a functioning, albeit officially unrecognized, government in the NATO-patrolled section of Northern Iraq. They had been dealing with Abu Musab al-Zarqawi while he still headed Ansar al-Islam, a group that regularly tried to assassinate Kurdish leaders. The focus of the Kurdish mini-state was on protecting itself from the Ba'athist regime, not trying to protect its interests in the sprawling political melee that is Iraq today. The NATO presence was hardly sufficient to police the borders, but if the conflict between Kurds and Turks escalated, more troops might have been brought into the region.

Now, more Americans are in Iraq, but their attention is elsewhere. It's hard to imagine NATO countries sending more troops to northern Iraq to deal just with the Turkish-Kurdish issues, since they'll likely be sucked into the larger Iraqi conflict as a result.  The burden now falls almost completely on the negotiators, who have few cards to play with both sides. Godspeed to anyone trying to deal with this simmering conflict.

Turkey's constitutional crisis continues

The Turkish legislature has approved direct election of the president. Click here and here for insight into this political confrontation.

Ignoring at our peril: Turkey

Among other matters the US government and public are both largely ignoring, with Iraq on the brain, is Turkey. While American leaders wring their hands over the prospects of building democracy in Iraq, democracy in Turkey is navigating through treacherous waters. A political stand-off between the governing Justice and Development Party (the Turkish initials are AKP) and the opposition has turned into a constitutional crisis.

After the opposition succeeded, through a bit of legal legerdemain, in blocking the parliamentary election of Abdullah Gul, the AKP's candidate, to be the next president, many Turkish politicians are now demanding constitutional reform. Since the disgruntled AKP is an Islamic party, many Turks are worried about what sort of constitutional changes the AKP may have in mind. Not surprisingly, the Turkish army, the traditional guarantor of secular government, has started threatening that it might have to resolve the issue, er, forcefully. From the Le Monde article on this political crisis:

The constitutional court had seemed to be consulting the political weather vane as closely as its law books. The Friday before its decision, the military had taken the nation by surprise by posting on its website what amounted to an ultimatum to the government to abandon a presidential election which it said risked compromising the secular character of the republic. The Turkish chief of staff, General Yasar Buyukanit, had already hinted at what was to come in a rare press conference in Ankara on 13 April when he said that that he hoped the next president would not simply pay lip service to Turkey’s secular constitution but respect it to its core.

As the political temperature in Turkey rises, basic liberties, such as freedom of expression, begin to wilt. Intolerance is hardly the monopoly of any faction. Most visibly, nationalists lobbied for the prosecution of Orhan Pamuk and Elif Shafak for writing books that somehow insulted the nation of Turkey.  (Pamuk, by the way, won the 2006 Nobel Prize for literature.)

Meanwhile, Turkey faces other serious challenges. Turks want to be part of the European Union, but many Europeans remain skeptical. (The worse Turkey's internal problems get, the higher the skepticism goes.) Many Turks are themselves skeptical about joining Europe. Turkey sits on the northern border of Iraq, where it feels some of the backlash from that conflict, particularly around all things Kurdish. The Turkish economy is emerging from a troubled period of low GNP, a weak currency, and inflationary scares.

Turkey may not provide a repeatable model for every predominantly Islamic society, but the Turks did successfully build and maintain a secular, constitutional, and democratic government.  Turkey is also struggling in areas where the United States might directly help. For example, US officials can help round up more economic support in general, and political support within Europe. American civilian and military leaders can act as honest brokers between their Turkish counterparts and the Kurds, when either the Turks or Kurds feel nervous about each other's intentions. The US might take a stronger public position on the legal harassment of Turkish writers. Instead, Turkey is lost down the memory hole, where everything not directly related to Iraq or Iran have disappeared.