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Turkey
is the Next Failed State in the Middle East
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From
left to right: A Marxist terrorist holds hostage Turkish prosecutor
Mehmet Selim Kiraz (who died in the ensuing shootout) in March 2015;
crowds protesting the government's failure to stop ISIS terror attacks
are tear-gassed in October 2015; the June 8-14, 2013 cover of the Economist.
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We do not know just who detonated the two bombs that killed 95 Kurdish
and allied activists in Ankara Saturday, but the least likely conjecture
is that President Erdogan's government is guiltless in the matter. As
Turkish member of parliament Lutfu Turkkan tweeted after the bombing, the
attack "was either a failure by the intelligence service, or it was
done by the intelligence service."
Betrayed by both the United States and Russia, and faced with the
emergence of a Kurdish state on its borders and the rise of Kurdish
parties in the parliamentary opposition, Erdogan is cornered. At risk in
the short-term is the ability of his AKP party to govern after the
upcoming November elections. At risk in the medium term is the cohesion
of the Turkish state itself.
In public, Western leaders have hailed Turkey as "a
great Islamic democracy," as President Obama characterized it in
a 2010 interview. That was the view of the George W. Bush administration
before Obama, which invited Erdogan to the White House before his
selection as prime minister in 2003.
Erdogan's ability to govern, and
cohesion of the Turkish state itself, is at risk.
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A minority of military and intelligence analysts, though, has warned
that Turkey may not be viable within its present borders in the medium
term. The trouble is that its Kurdish minority, now at 20% of the overall
population, has twice as many children as ethnic Turks, so many that half
of Turkey's military-age population will speak Kurdish as a first
language in fewer than twenty years.
An existential crisis for Turkey has been in the making for years, as
I reported in my 2011 book, How
Civilizations Die (and Why Islam is Dying, Too). During the past
week, a perfect storm has overtaken Turkish policy, and threatens to
provoke deep political instability. Turkey may become the region's next
failed state.
Erdogan has suffered public
humiliation by both Washington and Moscow.
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There has to be a fall
guy in the Middle East's film noir, and that unenviable role
has fallen to Turkey. Prior to the bombings, the worst terrorist incident
in modern Turkish history, Erdogan suffered public humiliation by
Washington as well as Moscow. As Laura Rozen reported October 9 in Al-Monitor,
Washington announced a 180-degree turn in its Syrian intervention,
abandoning the Sunni opposition in favor of Syrian Kurds.
The United States will supply arms,
equipment and air support to Syrian Arab and Kurdish groups already
fighting the so-called Islamic State (IS) on the ground in Syria, the
White House and Pentagon announced Oct. 9.
The decision to refocus the
beleaguered, $500 million Pentagon program from training and equipping a
new force to fight IS in Syria to "equip and enable" rebel
groups already fighting on the ground came after an interagency review of
the train and equip program, US officials said.
"A key part of our strategy is to
try to work with capable, indigenous forces on the ground ... to provide
them with equipment to make them more effective, in combination with our
air strikes," Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Christine Wormuth
told journalists on a call on the new strategy Oct. 9.
Until last Friday, America and Turkey both supported the Sunni
opposition to the Assad government with a view to eliminating Assad and
installing a Sunni regime. That policy has been in shambles for months,
but it allowed the Turks leeway to provide covert support to ISIS, the
one Sunni force that shows effectiveness in the field. Russian
intervention exposed the fecklessness of America's attempts to find a
"moderate" Syrian opposition to back. As the veteran strategist
Edward
Luttwak wrote last week in Tablet magazine:
Putin must certainly be innocent of the
accusation that his air force has bombed the U.S.-trained
"pro-democracy" freedom fighters, because the trainers
themselves have admitted that the first lot on which one-tenth of the
budget has been spent, i.e., $50 million, are exactly five in number, the
rest having deserted after receiving their big family-support signing
bonus and first paycheck, or after they were first issued with weapons
(which they sold), or after first entering Syria in groups, when they
promptly joined the anti-American Jabhat an-Nuṣrah, whose Sunni
Islam they understand, unlike talk of democracy.
The Russians forced Washington to find something credible on the
ground to support, and Washington turned to the Kurds, the only effective
fighting force not linked to ISIS or al-Qaeda. That was precisely the
result Turkey had wanted to avoid; the Kurdish military zone in northern
Syria links up with Kurdish-controlled territory in northern Iraq, and
the two zones form the core of a prospective Kurdish state.
Russia humiliated Turkey, meanwhile, by challenging Turkish fighters
inside Turkish airspace, leaving NATO to protest loudly. Nonetheless the
US and Germany have deactivated Patriot missile batteries–the only weapon
system that represents a threat to Russian fighters–despite urgent
Turkish requests to leave them in place. Russian fighters over Syria
prevent the Turks from providing air cover for ISIS and other Islamist
groups in Syria, as I noted Oct. 6 in our Chatham
House Rules blog. M.K. Bhadrakumar observed in Asia
Times Oct. 9, "Turkey's scope for maneuvering vis-à-vis Russia
is actually very limited and it has no option but to reach an
understanding with Russia over Syria."
Less obvious but no less ominous is the deterioration of Sino-Turkish
relations due to Ankara's covert support for the East Turkestan
Independence Movement, a terrorist organization active among the Uyghurs
of Western China. Despite official assurances, Turkey continues to
provide safe passage to Turkey to thousands of Chinese Uyghurs via
Southeast Asia, some of whom are fighting with ISIS in Syria. Thailand
claims that Uyghur militants carried out the Aug. 17 bombing at Bangkok's
Erawan shrine after Thailand sent 109 Chinese Uyghurs back to China.
Erdogan has suffered not merely a collapse of his foreign policy, but
a public humiliation by countries that backed his regime in the interests
of regional stability–and this just before November's parliamentary elections.
After the Kurdish-backed HDP party took 13% of the national vote in last
June's elections and removed Erdogan's majority in parliament, Erdogan
called new elections rather than accept a coalition government. Erdogan
also revived military operations against Turkish Kurds in order to elicit
support from Turkish nationalists, a transparent maneuver widely reported
in the major
media.
As the New York Times reported August 5,
Having already delayed
the formation of a coalition government, analysts say, Mr. Erdogan is
now buttressing his party's chances of winning new elections by appealing
to Turkish nationalists opposed to self-determination for the Kurdish
minority. Parallel to the military operations against the Kurds has been
an effort to undermine the political side of the Kurdish movement by
associating it with the violence of the P.K.K., which has also seemed
eager to return to fighting.
Instead of responding to Erdogan's provocation, the Kurds have shelved
military operations in order to concentrate on winning votes in the
November elections. After the Saturday bomb attacks, Thomas
Seibert noted in the Daily Beast:
Observers agreed that the Ankara blast
was probably linked to a decision by the PKK rebels to suspend
hostilities with Ankara. The PKK had hinted in recent days that it would
declare a new ceasefire in order to boost the HDP's election chances. The
people behind the attack wanted to "prevent the ceasefire" from
coming into effect, respected journalist Kadri Gursel tweeted. The PKK's
ceasefire announcement became public shortly after the attack, but the
decision by the rebels had probably been taken before.
In short, Erdogan now contemplates American heavy weapons in the hands
of Syrian Kurds; the end of Turkey's ability to provide air support for
Sunni rebels in Syria; a Russian campaign to roll up the Sunni
opposition, including Turkey's assets in the field; and a collapse of his
parliamentary majority due to an expanding Kurdish vote at home.
Whether the AKP government itself ordered the Ankara bombing, or
simply looked the other way while ISIS conducted the bombing, both Turkey
and global opinion will assume that the ghastly events in Ankara on
Saturday reflect the desperation of the Erdogan regime. Regimes that
resort to this sort of atrocity do not last very long.
The best thing that Turkey could do under the circumstances would be
to ask the United Nations to supervise a plebiscite to allow
Kurdish-majority areas to secede if they so chose. The mountains of
southeastern Turkey with the highest concentration of Kurds are a drain
on the national budget and of no strategic importance. Neither Erdogan
nor his nationalist opposition, though, will consider such action; that
would undermine both Erdogan's neo-Ottomanism as well as the old secular
nationalism. The pressures under the tectonic plates will only get worse.
Saturday's bombing may have demarcated the end of the Turkish state that
arose out of the First World War.
David P. Goldman is a Senior
Fellow at the London Center for Policy Research and the Wax Family Fellow
at the Middle East Forum.
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