Turkey's Terror Problem Is Ours

It's been nearly two months since the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) sparked an international crisis with a major attack inside Turkey, and more than six weeks since President Bush promised Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan that Washington would aid Turkey's fight against terrorism. Heady talk of intelligence sharing and cooperation followed and, indeed, may have been a factor in this weekend's Turkish air strikes on PKK targets in Iraqi Kurdistan.

Yet at the same time the Bush administration -- more precisely its increasingly assertive State Department -- has embraced an ill-advised diplomatic strategy toward the PKK that will likely backfire on our long-standing NATO ally, and could serve to undermine what is left of President Bush's "global war on terrorism."

With 100,000 Turkish troops amassed alongside the Iraqi frontier, it is understandable that U.S. diplomats want to avert a military crisis. But, rather than take a zero-tolerance policy toward terrorism, the State Department is counseling Turkey to offer political concessions. On Dec. 13, for example, State Department Coordinator for Counterterrorism Dell Dailey said, "We have not looked at a military solution as the solution to the PKK. Our preference is a political solution," both inside Iraqi Kurdistan and inside Turkey.

The desired political solution seems to be Iraqi Kurdish action to close down the safe haven on Iraqi soil in exchange for a general amnesty law in Turkey to forgive most PKK members and perhaps other Kurdish-language broadcasting and constitutional reforms as well.

Such a deal at this time would be cockeyed. Turkey has a legitimate grievance against both the PKK and Iraqi Kurdish leader Massoud Barzani. During its Oct. 21 attack on Turkish troops, PKK tactics mirrored those taught by U.S. Special Forces to Mr. Barzani's peshmerga fighters, suggesting its complicity in training terrorists. A diplomatic solution should not reward such behavior.

This needn't mean solely a military solution either. Rather, U.S. officials should threaten isolation and a cessation of all financial assistance until Mr. Barzani ceases his safe haven. Confronted with such demands since 2003, Mr. Barzani has always begged for more time, only to let his promises lag when the diplomatic spotlight passed.

It is trendy to seek "root causes" of terror and to discount terrorist ideology. For State Department officials who believe the PKK is just an outgrowth of inequality and discrimination in Turkey, a deal may seem logical. The group's ideology should negate such a compromise. The PKK has its roots in the revolutionary turmoil of the 1970s. Its leader, a university drop-out named Abdullah Öcalan, immersed himself in the Marxism and Maoism fashionable among intellectuals of the day and became a committed revolutionary. Cloaking himself in Kurdish nationalism, Öcalan's first target was not the Turkish military, but rather nonviolent Kurdish civil rights groups.

In August 1984, the PKK launched an insurgency in southeastern Turkey. Like Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge, it targeted the educated and modern. PKK terrorists executed school teachers for being public servants. PKK gangs burned medical clinics and murdered their staff. Health care collapsed. As al Qaeda would do two decades later in Iraq, the PKK destroyed critical infrastructure to drive a wedge between the state and the local population. Before ending in 1997, the PKK campaign claimed 30,000 lives, the majority ethnic Kurds killed by the PKK itself.

The terror campaign ended not with political concession, but coercion: Turkey threatened to expand its military campaign to Syria, which sheltered the PKK. As the Turkish military mobilized along Syria's frontier, Syrian President Hafez al-Assad blinked and order the PKK out. Öcalan sought Greek protection. Rather than try to negotiate compromise with a terrorist, U.S. forces took a no-nonsense approach. U.S. (and Israeli) intelligence tipped Ankara off to Öcalan's whereabouts. On Feb. 16, 1999, Turkish Special Forces captured the PKK leader outside the Greek Embassy in Nairobi. Today, Öcalan serves his life sentence time on the prison island of Imrali, but controls his organization through trusted lieutenants.

Every time the PKK finds a safe haven, it renews violence. Iran briefly sheltered PKK fighters after their expulsion from Syria. No sooner had the PKK established camps than it restarted its terrorism. Turkey responded by bombing both PKK targets and Iranian Revolutionary Guards posts around the Iranian town of Piranshahr. While Tehran seldom takes diplomatic demarches or deals seriously, faced with a military red-line, the ayatollahs, too, backed down. No U.S. official, obviously, counseled that Turkey should compromise.

And yet, in the name of diplomacy, the Bush administration now does. The White House validates Mr. Barzani's decision to play the terror card. For the State Department to accept Mr. Barzani's excuse -- that Kurdish solidarity prohibits a crackdown upon the PKK -- is naïve. Kurdish solidarity is an oxymoron. Throughout the 1990s, Mr. Barzani fought the group he now protects. His change of heart came after the Turkish parliament's 2003 decision not to participate in Operation Iraqi Freedom. Overestimating the chill in U.S.-Turkish relations, he took a hard line against Ankara. As Turkey at the time offered amnesty to those rank-and-file PKK members without blood on their hands, Mr. Barzani welcomed the PKK leaders he once fought. Turkish authorities say they have photographs of senior PKK commanders receiving medical treatment in Erbil hospitals and meeting with Barzani associates in nearby restaurants. Last spring, Mr. Barzani threatened in an al-Arabiya television interview to unleash insurgency inside Turkey.

So as Mr. Barzani denies complicity in terrorism, he nevertheless seeks to leverage it into diplomatic gain. To link demands for Mr. Barzani to crack down with any Turkish political concession suggests that President Bush has learned nothing from his predecessors' failures. The Bush administration's strategy today mirrors the Clinton administration's approach to late Palestinian chairman Yasser Arafat, in which the State Department matched every empty Arafat promise with demands for good-faith concessions from Israel, the democracy he victimized. While Kurdish officials tell credulous diplomats that the PKK threat would disappear if only Ankara offered greater concessions, the opposite is true: Concessions fuel terror.

Any Turkish compromise prior to a complete disarmament and expulsion of PKK terrorists from northern Iraq could encourage Syria and its Lebanese proxies to demand concessions in exchange for insincere promises to cease terror support. Pakistan, too, may once again leverage its support and safe haven for the Taliban and al-Qaeda leadership into demands upon both Washington and Kabul.

Turkey has been a poor ally in recent years, but fighting terror requires alliances to trump politics. Every country has the right to defend its citizens from terrorism. Mr. Barzani may give silk carpets to diplomats, provide lavish spreads during their visits, and have his praises sung by high-powered Beltway lobbyists, but so long as he provides the PKK a safe haven, he is a terror enabler. Forcing Turkey to negotiate with the PKK or its intermediaries would only justify its terrorism, and would be no wiser than counseling compromise with Hezbollah, Hamas, or al Qaeda.

The sooner the sordid corrupt Muslim parastate of Turkey breaks up the better for everyone.

Like Iraq, N. Korea Cuba and its mentor the Stalinist Soviet Union it is a relic of personality cult despotism.

Aside from Israel, Turkey is the most free state you will find in the Middle East. Its government is headed in a secular direction, as opposed to a strictly Islamic, Shariah-esque government, everyone dresses like Westerneres—women aren’t required to wear burkas or headscarves (I saw pictures of them on an old thread about some Turkish protest and they looked like they came straight of the West), and a good portion of the populace is anti-Islamist, and millions of them turned out to protest against a pro-Islamist party, carrying pictures of Ataturk who dissolved the Ottoman empire and is a national hero over there.

Of course, there are die-hard Islamic jihadist Turks, but Turkey is no Saudi Arabia. Since it is so close to Europe, Western thought has rubbed off on the country and the people seem to like it.

Turkey a free state? Only if you are Muslim Turk! If you dare question the official propaganda line you will find yourself speared by a dagger or shot like a yiaour. And just try to preach Christianity...some freedom...it’s laughable to have to repeat this.

Your naivete is astounding. You have swallowed whole the lies about the Turks. Turks have been supporting jihadis in Russia and the Balkans for quite a while and continue to exploit the media and academic machinery to promote lies and distortions of the truth.

I didn't say it was a free state, I said it was freer than most countries in the Middle East. By that I meant the strict laws regarding dress and segregation of men and women, for example, aren't imposed the way they are elsewhere. And the government is not an Ahmadinejad or Assad-type regime; it is heading in a more secular direction, the only ME govt to do so (aside from Israel). That doesn't mean it's purely secular and uninfluenced by religion, but it is not dominated by Islamicism.

I'm not making this stuff up.... http://209.157.64.200/focus/f-news/1832978/posts

Oh yeah, and about the “supporting jihadis in Russia, etc”....I’m aware of this. I said there were Islamist Turks in the country, in fact it is split between more European-oriented people and more Arab-oriented people (this is from the mouth of a guy from Turkey whom I spoke with). However, Turkey has also helped us in the WOT too...70% of supplies to our troops in Iraq go through Incirlik in Turkey. They’re fighting the terrorist Marxist PKK.

The constitution of Turkey recognized freedom of religion and there is no official state religion. I am not saying Turkey is a great place to live and a nation to be trusted blindly (it’s not), but compared to the rest of the Middle East it’s a step in the right direction.

Turkey is quietly desending into just another Islamic hell hole.

What it was is not what it is becoming.

Mike Huckabee criticized President Bush’s failure to pressure the Iraqi government to deal with the PKK. Huck said if he’s elected he’ll provide Turkey with intelligence to go after the PKK with air strikes and commando raids.

bmflr

According to Intrade, the winner of the December 12th GOP debate was... Duncan Hunter.
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1938773/posts

What it was is not what it is becoming.

What it was is as evil as what it is and will be...unless dismantled.

I’ll just note if a group was attacking Minnesota from Canada, we’d bomb the hell out of em if the Canadians didn’t address it immediately, and leave it at that.

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