The AKP, Turkey, and Kobanê: The Enemy of my Enemy is also my Enemy

US B1 bomber conducting airstrikes over Syria

   by  DVIDSHUB 

Anyone such as myself who follows developments from the Middle East is rarely, if ever, bored.  But the recent months have been both gripping and horrifying at the same time, thanks to a new calamity.  No, I’m not talking about the Ebola outbreak that seems poised to spread beyond Africa, but rather an unnatural pestilence that now plagues Iraq and Syria, and seems hell-bent on spreading further.  I’m speaking of course of the pseudo-religious savages of the so-called Islamic State (IS), formerly known as ISIS or ISIL.  IS has been at the forefront of many peoples’ minds, particularly in recent weeks as a result of the heavy fighting in the largely Kurdish Syrian border town of Kobanê (also known as Ayn al-Arab).

The fighting between the local Kurdish militia and IS has also had a dangerous destabilizing effect on neighbouring Turkey and even that country’s formerly close relationship with its NATO allies.  Since Turkey’s reluctance to get militarily and directly involved in the conflict right across the border became more widely publicized, the online vitriol being spewed against the country and its leaders has reached near-hysterical levels, egged on of course by Kurdish activists who have their own decades-old bone to pick with Turkey.  As of October 29, 2014 however, Turkey has begun officially allowing Iraqi Kurdish Peshmerga (whose KRG government is friendly with Ankara) and moderate (one would hope) and anti-Assad Free Syrian Army troops to cross into Kobanê, in an apparent attempt to assuage its critics without getting dragged into the quagmire.  Though a seemingly simple act, the background to it is incredibly complicated, and indeed touches on some very raw but also very old regional nerves, particularly in Turkey itself.

   by  quapan 

The fact that the war being waged by the IS is as much an online social media war as a conflict with guns and tanks means that there is an extreme amount of information AND mis-information to be found on the Internet.  Nor has this fact been lost on the Kurdish factions involved, who have managed to seemingly garner remarkable support against their old antagonist Turkey.  Worse yet, the negative image of Turkey being spread, often (but not always) unjustly, has been exacerbated by Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoğlu, and the ruling AKP’s policies.

(Right to Left) Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev, Ahmet Davutoğlu

There is also a significant lack of understanding of why Turks in general aren’t jumping on the same pro-Kurdish bandwagon as many Europeans and North Americans.  This has prompted some of the most ridiculous suggestions I’ve seen in recent years (and not just from your run of the mill Internet trolls), from expelling Turkey from NATO (an organization whose southern border it has guarded since the 1950s), to Turkey’s NATO allies arming the Kurdish factions fighting IS, regardless of whether this would see the PKK (a Kurdish terrorist organization that Turkey has been fighting since 1984, with some 40,000 deaths, including four more military deaths in the past week) receiving those same weapons and turning them on Turkey.

   by  Gwydion M. Williams 

So why are the Turkish public unwilling and government seemingly unwilling to wade into the conflict in Syria and Iraq?  In the former case, the answer is generally quite simple: they don’t see it as Turkey’s war and are unwilling to sacrifice their soldiers to clean up a foreign mess. Indeed, most Turks would place the blame for all this squarely on the US, since that country’s invasion of Iraq in 2003 is largely seen as the first domino that was knocked down in the series that has led to today’s chaos.

   by  FreedomHouse 

Moreover, Turkish society is dealing with severe trauma as a result of 30 years of fighting with the PKK, and so sending Turkish soldiers to fight alongside the YPG (the Kurdish military wing of the PYD in Syria) in Kobanê is offensive to say the least, not least because the YPG is effectively the Syrian branch of the aforementioned PKK AND because it is at best neutral to the regime of Bashar al-Assad, if not allied to it.  Basically, the Turkish public sees the fight in Kobanê as one between two vicious and dangerous terrorist organizations, and is simply hoping that they wipe each other out without troubling Turkey.  This is of course short-sighted, but also understandable given the experience with Kurdish guerrillas over the past couple decades.

In the case of the AKP, particularly President Erdoğan and his neo-Ottomanist remote control Prime Minister Davutoğlu, the situation is quite a bit more complicated, though ironically no less short-sighted, and possibly more disastrous for Turkey as a whole.  If we get right down to it though, there are two intertwined issues that are at the root of this disaster in the making: the AKP’s very nature and its failure in foreign policy.

The crux of the matter is the fact that the AKP is the worst kind of populist party.  Its primary focus at all times is keeping power through this populism, regardless of the situation.  Indeed, as we can see over the course of the past 12 years, every action or reaction of the AKP is dictated by this unhealthy near-addiction to power, particularly on the part of its chieftain: Recep Tayyip Erdoğan.  More to the point, however, Erdoğan, having conflated himself with the AKP as a political party (which would explain the tendency towards one-man rule), is a lens for its actions.  Indeed, every action taken by the AKP must be evaluated in terms of votes, which appear to be the measure used by Erdoğan and his followers for this popularity contest, instead of their real purpose as a means of involving the average person in the policy-making process of a country.

…every action taken by the AKP must be evaluated in terms of votes…

In one of my previous articles, I mentioned how the AKP was the first party in Turkish history to transform foreign policy into a tool for domestic political purposes.  It’s natural to be conscious of the effect of foreign policy on domestic politics, but it often spells disaster when the former is COMPLETELY suborned to the latter.  IS is the monster created by the need of the AKP to be popular (apparent irregular financial benefits aside), resulting from a foreign policy that is not designed to protect and further the interests of Turkey as a country, but rather one whose primary purpose is to create campaigning material for elections for a single political party.  And it would appear that I’m not alone in this opinion, with whispers of this apparently coming from within the AKP itself: http://www.hurriyetdailynews.com/senior-akp-deputy-slams-erdogan-his-party-over-kurdish-policies-bbc.aspx?pageID=238&nID=73158&NewsCatID=338.

The IS is an unintended or undesired result of the AKP’s unsound and populist foreign policy.

Let me be clear: IS is an unintended or undesired result of the AKP’s unsound and populist foreign policy.  Within Turkey, since the beginning of the civil war in Syria, Erdoğan had been playing the Sunni Muslim religious card against the Shiite (yet largely secular) regime of Bashar al-Assad.  This is in line with Erdoğan’s thought process of supporting Hamas in Gaza (but notably not Hezbollah in Lebanon because it is a Shiite organization) or the Muslim Brotherhood of now-convicted Mohamed Morsi in Egypt.  The main focus of this policy, however, is to appeal to the Sunni conservative voter base within Turkey, so as to ensure the continued rule of Erdoğan himself and the AKP, as the former needs the latter to survive politically.

   by  FreedomHouse 

Erdoğan and his foreign policy ‘brain’ Davutoğlu didn’t count on one thing when pushing so hard to oust al-Assad: the West was distracted by the conflict between Ukraine and Russia.  Given that this conflict directly affected the EU’s economic prosperity due to the dimension of Russia being Europe’s primary energy supplier, it naturally took precedence over an uninteresting and already-boiling conflict in Syria.  Moreover, the crisis in Ukraine also put the EU and US at odds with Russia, who happened (and still happens) to be the main supporter of al-Assad, both militarily and diplomatically, who has in turn allowed Russia its only permanent base in the Mediterranean at the Syrian port of Tarsus.  The result of this multi-layered political environment was that Erdoğan and the AKP found themselves supporting a foundering and initially moderate Free Syrian Army, as the West was unwilling to intervene against al-Assad.

Bombed out buildings and destroyed tanks in Azaz, Syria

As time has shown, the lack of direct Western intervention against the al-Assad has resulted in a drawn-out civil war situation rather than a revolution in Syria – an environment in which radicalized anti-Assad forces like al-Nusra and IS have thrived.  Ironically, the growth of the IS from a radical faction in the Syrian civil war is very similar to the emergence of the Taliban in Afghanistan out of the US-supported Mujahideen that fought against the Soviet invasion of that country in 1979.  One might even argue that the US outsourced its covert intervention in the Syrian conflict to Erdoğan’s government, though the latter were obviously willing participants.  But now that the IS has taken centre-stage in Syria and has brutally spilled the conflict into neighbouring Iraq, a country still reeling from the sectarian conflict produced by the US invasion and occupation of that country, Erdoğan and the AKP have been left holding the bag.

One of the millions of Syrian refugees in Turkey

   by  FreedomHouse 

Worse yet, the AKP government has been trapped on the domestic front by its own extremely poor foreign policy decisions, which, in a vicious circle, is resulting in an even more authoritarian response to legitimate criticism in Turkey.  For instance, the AKP is trapped by the ideological contradiction of supporting Shiite al-Assad against the Sunni IS, which has deterred Erdoğan and his followers from directly confronting the IS.

Barrel bomb aftermath Aleppo, Syria, February 2014

But the more current factor in the AKP’s unwillingness to get directly involved in the Syrian mess is the domestic factor surrounding the fight in Kobanê is the PKK dimension.  As I mentioned earlier, while Turkish society certainly recognizes the threat posed by the IS, that threat is still largely theoretical, as there has only been one radical Islamist attack in Turkey, at Reyhanlı in 2013, which resulted in 140 deaths.  Erdoğan and the AKP, however, in spite of the IS precursor ISIL/ISIS claiming to be responsible for the attack, blamed Bashar al-Assad, in an attempt to secure foreign and domestic support for an intervention against the Syrian dictator.  The conflict between Turkey and the PKK, on the other hand, is a long and very bloody one that clearly resonates in the psyche of the Turkish public.  The Syrian Kurdish YPG that is defending Kobanê is essentially the Syrian branch of the PKK, an organization that is directly responsible for tens of thousands of deaths in Turkey, and which is still attacking Turkish civilian and military targets today.  The Turkish military’s airstrikes on the PKK in Dağlıca (in the province of Hakkari, on the Iraqi border, hundreds of kilometers from Kobanê, for the record), were said to be in response to PKK harassing fire on the local Turkish army outpost, for instance.

With the prevalent perception in Turkey that the IS and the PKK are two terrorist organizations cut from the same cloth, but with the PKK also being perceived as the greater threat, Erdoğan and the AKP are trapped in a lose-lose situation.  This is largely thanks to the AKP’s well-intentioned but inept handling of the peace talks with the PKK, which many in Turkey opposed from the very beginning.  Indeed, the primary motivator for the AKP in these talks was to swing the Kurdish vote away from the Kurdish-issue HDP for the March 2014 local elections and the August 2014 presidential elections.  Though successful in these efforts so far, Erdoğan and the AKP are now facing a final, more difficult test: the 2015 parliamentary elections, which are supposed to be held in June 2015, but seem likely to be moved up to April in an effort to stem the dropping popularity of the AKP post-Erdoğan.

   by  FreedomHouse 

The AKP’s poor foreign policy decisions regarding the Syrian civil war has created a situation in which Turkey is being forced to choose which enemy it wishes to support against another owing to foreign pressure.  Worse yet, choosing to directly or indirectly support any of the three ‘enemies’ Turkey currently faces, namely the PKK/YPG, the IS, and al-Assad’s Syrian regime, will provoke the others into hostilities with the country.  For all intents and purposes, Erdoğan and the AKP have painted themselves into a proverbial foreign policy corner.  The AKP is likely to lose either the religious conservative vote or the Kurdish vote if it forces Turkey into the Kobanê quagmire. Moreover, the party is already bleeding the Turkish nationalist votes it had managed to steal from the far-right MHP during the presidential elections because of the pro-PKK/YPG Kurdish riots that erupted across the country and resulted in some 40+ deaths.  And to add fuel to the fire, the most recent assassinations of four off-duty Turkish military personnel in cities like Diyarbakır, allegedly by members of the PKK, are likely to backfire on both the Kurdish-issue HDP and the AKP.

   by  FreedomHouse 

Erdoğan and the AKP are desperately trying to maintain their popularity in the wake of the dramatic escalation of the Syrian civil war and the pressure being heaped on Turkey to intervene directly.  But given the nature of the conflict, and the parties involved, the most sensible thing for Turkey to do is not get involved.  ANY intervention, regardless of which side it is in favour of, will result in Turkey being embroiled in a lengthy war that it cannot afford given its structural economic problems (AKP cronyism being first and foremost).

Iraqi Kurdish Peshmerga on a T-55-Tank outside Kirkuk

Allowing the Iraqi Kurdish Peshmerga and Free Syrian Army to transit through Turkey to aid Kobanê’s YPG fighters is the limit of what Turkey should realistically be expected to do, unless directly and dramatically attacked by the IS.  And even this action is likely to cost the AKP a few nationalist votes because it strengthens the YPG at a time when its sister organization the PKK is actively attacking and killing Turkish soldiers within Turkey.

President Barack Obama meeting with President of Turkey Recep Tayyip Erdoğan at September 2014 NATO Summit in Wales, UK

But perhaps most important of all, nobody in Turkey, aside from Erdoğan and his yes-men, wants to wade into the bloodbath that is now Syria and Iraq.  Even the most amateur armchair general will tell you it is best to fight one enemy at a time.  That Erdoğan and co are seemingly hell-bent on fighting THREE foes at once, including one that theoretically has a massive fifth column within Turkey itself (i.e., the PKK), is mind-boggling.  Military adventurism is one thing, be it for votes or ego (usually both), but lunacy on an international scale is where I draw the line.

To those who are heaping scorn on Turkey for refusing to get involved, I ask you this simple question: would you want to volunteer and possibly lose your life for a cause that is not your own?  This is the question that citizens of Turkey and Turkish expats face.  Wars are not strategy games and shaky YouTube clips.  They are personal pain, suffering and fear multiplied for every individual present, and magnified ten-fold for each family member.  And I, for one, neither wish to experience this, nor wish for anyone I know to do so either.  Certainly not to assuage the fears of keyboard warriors or those with delusions of grandeur.

And to my fellow Canadians: in recent weeks we needlessly lost two brave members of our armed forces to fanatics.  My heart goes out to the families of Cpl. Nathan Cirillo and Warrant Officer Patrice Vincent.  I say this: while you’re watching the funerals of the two members of the Canadian armed forces who were killed senselessly by fanatics in recent weeks, remember that families in Turkey fear seeing the same scenes multiplied a thousand-fold in their country which doesn’t have two oceans to insulate it.  Turks have the same worries, fears, and enemies as Canadians.  They’re just literally on the front lines of the conflicts we Canadians mostly have the luxury of watching from the other side of the world.  Keep that in mind before making any criticisms, well-founded though they might be.