Tag Archives: Turkey

Not Your Father’s Suicide Terrorism…

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… if your father’s name is Robert Pape.

Friday, February 1, witnessed two notable suicide terrorist attacks in quick succession. Both were bad news for Robert Pape’s theory of suicide terrorism, which argues that suicide terrorism is almost always the result of foreign occupation, whether real or imagined. Pape finds that suicide terrorism is employed by ethno-national or religious groups that perceive themselves as being occupied by an outside group, particularly if other types of violence have failed and if the occupying force is a democratic state (see here, here, and here). This answer fits in nicely—perhaps too nicely—with realist skepticism of George W. Bush’s interventionism. Why shouldn’t you invade places? Reason #207: People will blow themselves up. As Pape and James Feldman argue in a 2008 book, “To stop and reverse the recent explosion of suicide terrorism, it is important to reduce the reliance on foreign occupation as a principal strategy for ensuring national interests.”

But why was Friday bad for this theory? While it is still too early to know why the suicide bomber detonated himself at the U.S. Embassy in Ankara, the Marxist group that claimed responsibility apparently condemned Turkish support of anti-Assad forces in Syria. That sentence reads like a bad geopolitical “Mad Libs,” but it doesn’t sound like Pape’s theory. Also occurring on Friday (and in my opinion, more problematic for Pape) was yet another suicide bombing in Pakistan where Sunni extremists attacked Shi’as. This has happened repeatedly over the last few years, and whatever the poor Shi’a in Pakistan are, they are not foreign occupiers. (The same case could be made for the Barelvis and Sufis who are periodically targeted by members of the more orthodox Deobandi Sunni movement).

Pakistan was already a problematic case for Pape given its non-occupied nature and its sky-rocketing rate of suicide terrorism from 2001 to 2010. (The chart below is drawn from Pape’s Chicago Project on Suicide Terrorism.) Pape’s counterargument has been that because Pakistanis feel that their government is merely a puppet of the United States, the suicide bombing campaign can be interpreted as one against the “indirect occupation” of the United States. While this line of reasoning may certainly explain attacks against the Pakistani state, police, or military, it cannot explain the soaring anti-Shi’a violence. It is basically impossible to construct a narrative where Sunni extremists perceive themselves as occupied by the Shi’a minority.

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I think Pape has made the mistake of treating suicide terrorism as a static phenomenon when, in fact, it is evolving. Suicide terrorism has grown much, much more common over the last twenty years, while the level of foreign occupation has remained fairly constant. While not a perfect indicator, one that I have on hand is the percentage of terrorist groups that engage in suicide attacks over time. I have modified data from Michael Horowitz to construct this suicide terrorist “market share” variable, which is just the number of groups employing suicide tactics divided by the total number of terrorist groups in Horowitz’s data.

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If suicide terrorism is becoming more ubiquitous, there is no reason to expect that old predictors will remain valid. Imagine if you had a perfect model of who purchased computers in the 1960s and used it to predict consumers today. You would go out of business. The cauldron of the 1981-1983 Lebanon civil war produced modern suicide terrorism. There is no reason to assume that a phenomenon that is only thirty years old will remain the same, nor its causes stay constant over time. Friday’s gruesome attacks are a reminder of that.

A Tale of Two Wars in Turkey

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Editor’s note: the following is a piece by The Smoke-Filled Room contributor Lionel Beehner that originally appeared on The World Policy Blog.

GAZIANTEP, Turkey — Gaziantep is surprisingly quiet, despite the ruckus of metal workers plying their trade in the town’s souk. Not thirty miles south of this Anatolian city sits the Syrian border, beyond which massacres and military air strikes have become an almost daily routine. The violence has pushed over 100,000 Syrians to seek refuge along Turkey’s border in camps and cities like Gaziantep (I’m told vendors at the local mall and souk have been brushing up on their Arabic). Cross-border shelling by the Syrian military in recent weeks has killed five Turkish civilians. Syrian defenses also shot down a Turkish fighter jet. Yet none of these violations of Turkish sovereignty has provoked a mass retaliation or convinced most Turks of the need for escalating the war with Syria.

Turkey has responded in a restrained fashion, with limited tit-for-tat artillery strikes against Syrian targets across the border. Ankara grounded a Russian commercial plane bound for Damascus on suspicions of spiriting radar equipment to the Assad regime, while its parliament green-lighted a motion for military intervention. But Turkey has mostly put pressure on the Assad regime through indirect means: By providing safe haven to Syrian opposition parties and rebel groups like the Free Syrian Army and allowing the free flow of arms and other aid across its 500-mile border.

All of the above might be cause for alarm among Gaziantep residents, whose backyard could become the next flashpoint of Mideast violence. But Turks, whether in “Antep” or Ankara, do not believe that war with Syria is imminent. Moreover, most of the population remains at odds with the government over the Syria issue. Despite repeated provocations, large majorities do not favor military retaliation or escalation, according to recent polls, for fear of being sucked into what some here call “Turkey’s Vietnam.” But it would be incorrect to chalk this gun-shyness up to pacifism among the Turkish public. After all, in response to a surge of cross-border attacks by the separatist Kurdistan Workers’ Party, or PKK, holed up in the hills of Iraqi Kurdistan, polls indicate that two-thirds of the population favor responding with greater military force. Even while conceding more social and cultural rights to its 14 million Kurds, Turkey has preferred using sticks over carrots against the PKK. So what explains this yin and yang stance among Turks toward war?

The Syria question bedevils Turkish policy-makers, namely because their government has led the charge in favor of Syrian regime change, even at the costly imposition of some kind of no-fly zone in the north to tip the balance of power in the rebels’ favor. While this approach has won it admiration among humanitarian interventionists abroad (myself included), it goes against the wishes of Turkey’s public and vocal business community. The government got too far ahead of itself in its belligerent rhetoric, their thinking goes, perhaps assuming Assad would have fallen by now or that NATO would have rallied behind it, and now finds itself in the awkward position of calling for regime change but lacking sufficient leverage to do anything about it.

The AKP leadership has been motivated by mixed impulses. On one hand, it found itself on the wrong side of history by not supporting NATO’s intervention into Libya more forcefully. On the other, the government is motivated by genuine humanitarian concerns as well as the presence of a bloodbath on its doorstep, to say nothing of the refugee crisis such a one-sided war would cause. Yet without NATO’s backing, Turkey will not unilaterally intervene in Syria. It will continue to respond in kind to any cross-border attacks, but it cannot impose a meaningful no-fly zone, much less depose the Assad regime. That is partly because of Turkey’s divisive domestic politics – the country has enough on its hands trying to rewrite a new constitution – but also because Turkish forces are mostly defensive in nature, not offensive, according to a recent report published by IHS Jane’s. Hence, Ankara must rely on its soft power to cajole allies and assist the Syrian opposition.

Yet, what we sometimes fail to appreciate in the West is that the main war on most Turks’ minds is the ongoing conflict against the PKK, not the one next door in Syria. The PKK issue receives scant attention abroad, but it continues to galvanize the Turkish public after three decades of violence. The conflict for many Turks presents an existential crisis that threatens the nation’s social and cultural fabric, whereas the Syrian issue is viewed as a passing threat, serious in scope but something to be managed like countless others in the region.

Of course the two wars are intertwined. The escalation of PKK violence in recent months has coincided with spikes in attacks from Syria. Ankara accuses the Assad regime of providing Syrian Kurds safe haven and material support in hopes that they take their fight across the border into Turkey. Damascus’s logic is “the enemy of my enemy is my friend,” and ostensibly Assad wants to punish Turkey for assisting Syrian rebel organizations and drive a wedge between its Kurdish communities and the Free Syrian Army. There could be blowback to this strategy of course if Kurds throughout the region become more organized and raise greater demands for an independent state, which could end up carving up parts of northern Syria and Iraq as well as Iran.

In response, Turkey’s routine raids against PKK strongholds in Northern Iraq could extend into Syria on a more regular basis. These violations of sovereignty raise thorny issues for international legal scholars, but not among Turks. Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan warned Syria that his government would “not stand idle” in the face of cross-border incursions, and “is capable of exercising its right to pursue Kurdish rebels inside Syria, if necessary.” That script sounds vaguely similar to what a retired Turkish general told the BBC back in 2007, regarding incursions into northern Iraq: “I believe operations will continue on this scale–pin-point operations, hot-pursuit raids and carefully controlled air strikes.” Turkey has also lashed out at foreign forces – even its nominal allies – for abetting the Kurdish insurgents. Ankara even went so far earlier this year as to accuse Israel of using its surveillance drones to assist the PKK.

The surge in PKK violence has killed some 700 people over the past 15 months, according to the International Crisis Group, including a car bomb that killed nine in Gaziantep last August blamed on Kurdish rebels. Turkey finds itself in the awkward spot of aiding rebels whose ranks include untold numbers of Syrian Kurds that could take up arms against Ankara after the Assad regime falls (Syria’s Kurds have struck deals with the Free Syrian Army and the Syrian government as a way to both hedge its bets and remain autonomous). In this way, the buffer zone Ankara is calling for along the Syrian border, not unlike the one imposed on Northern Iraq in 1991 to halt flows of Iraqi Kurdish refugees, might actually provide Kurdish militants with greater cover to carry out cross-border attacks in Turkey.

That may explain why the public mood in places like Gaziantep, which is 30 percent Kurdish, remains reflexively antiwar when it comes to Syria. Despite impressive growth in recent years, businessmen here are also worried about their bottom line, which has suffered as relations with Russia and Iran, two of Turkey’s most important energy partners that are both aligned with the Syrian regime, spiral downward. Turks also suspect the opposition in Syria is too Salafist and fear that an Islamist government unfavorable to Turkish interests will succeed Assad. Better the secular devil you know than the Islamist devil you don’t know, this theory goes. A final oft-heard view holds that Turkey, as a rising regional power striving to fill the perceived security void left by the United States as it redeploys forces out of Iraq and “pivots” toward Asia, should be deploying its “soft power” abroad and in the region, not its hard power. The phrase gets invoked so much among experts here, I half-expected to see a statue of Joseph Nye next to Ataturk. These analysts see Turkey’s role in the region as an honest broker of disputes arising out of the Arab Spring and a middleman between the Muslim world and Western powers.

But a state’s ability to project soft power is incumbent on the strength of its own values and perception abroad. On the PKK issue, soft power has taken a backseat to hard power. This heavy-handed approach is partly rooted in public opinion – after peace talks with the PKK stalled two years ago, many Turks lost hope that political dialogue could resolve the crisis and turned increasingly hawkish — but it is also partly rooted in Turkey’s Kemalist past, which has traditionally favored blunt force to quash domestic uprisings of any kind. As a retired army colonel told me, “Turkey has a long history of exaggerating internal threats.” Under Ankara’s draconian anti-terror laws, thousands of pro-Kurdish activists, lawyers, and journalists have been imprisoned by the AKP government. According to the Committee to Protect Journalists, Turkey jails more journalists than any other country, including even Iran and China. Over the past six months, its military has staged around 1,000 counterinsurgency sorties against PKK targets.

Standing in the gleaming conference room of one of 90 new universities Ankara has erected over the past decade, a Turkish political science professor gazed out the window eastward. A vast panorama of construction projects punctuated an otherwise barren landscape of twisted olive groves.  “If you look out that window,” he said, “the only democracies you see are Japan and India.” He was correct, but his point was to situate Turkey’s important place not just in the region but in the whole Eurasian landmass. Westerners fret that Turkey is reorienting itself eastward and away from Europe. At the same time, given the creeping authoritarianism of the current government in power, the professor claimed that Turkish exceptionalism was weakening. Moreover, Ankara’s foreign policy of “zero problems” on its borders appears to be in tatters. Its relationship with Iraq was imperiled after Ankara gave shelter to Tariq al-Hashimi, the Sunni vice president accused by the al-Maliki regime of being involved in death squads. Turkey’s relations with Israel, though reportedly on the mend, remain strained after the infamous 2010 Marmara flotilla raid.

After making great strides to open up its border with Syria to ease cross-border trade, Turkey now finds itself on the precipice of not one but two wars. So far its military has acted with surprising restraint in response to Syrian attacks. Yet on the PKK front, Turkey has gone on the offensive and doubled-down on the military option. The trouble is that it is next to impossible to favor a peaceful and diplomatic solution to Turkey’s interstate conflict with one hand while applying hard power to its intrastate crisis with the other. Expect Turkish soft power to suffer as a result.

Will Syria’s Refugee Crisis Prompt A Military Intervention?

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This post originally appeared in the World Policy Journal’s blog here.

Two hundred thousand Syrian refugees have poured into neighboring countries in recent months as their country descends ever deeper into civil war. In August alone, over 100,000 refugees fled Syria, according to the UN High Commissioner for Refugees. The flood of refugees has pushed Turkey to amplify its calls for a no-fly zone near Idlib along its border, not unlike the no-fly zone imposed on northern Iraq to protect Kurds from becoming refugees in the aftermath of the 1991 Gulf War. All of which invites the question: Is there a magic threshold before outside powers intervene to stem the tide of asylum seekers?

The relationship between refugee crises and humanitarian interventions remains unclear. On one hand, the use of brute and indiscriminate force appears to be a deliberate tactic by the Assad regime to displace locals and create refugee flows, thereby raising the costs for outside powers like Turkey to either provide humanitarian assistance or intervene militarily. But this tactic could also backfire, prompting calls for greater military involvement by the West.

A look back at recent interventions is instructive on how the size and scope of refugee flows has swayed policymakers and the public to intervene militarily. One of the major motivations behind the northern Iraq no-fly zone, established in 1991 was to relieve the burden of an estimated million-plus Kurds seeking shelter in Turkey by creating a secure zone for them within Iraq. Ankara was particularly worried about the influx of refugees exacerbating tensions among its own Kurds in the southeast, creating a kind of “Kurdish Gaza Strip” that could become a lawless zone of instability. In Bosnia and Kosovo, similar spillovers of refugees and the threat they posed to regional stability provided the catalyst for greater involvement and eventual military intervention. As then U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright put it, “Spreading conflict … could flood the region with refugees and create a haven for international terrorists, drug traffickers, and criminals.”

That being said, obviously not all refugee crises lead to international interventions. In fact, most don’t. The Great Lakes refugee crisis of 1994—when over 2 million Rwandans, most of them Hutus, fled during the aftermath of the genocide into neighboring countries—resulted in little humanitarian relief or interventions from outside parties like the U.S., just a few Dutch medics and nurses and a French field hospital. The biggest refugee crisis in recent memory—Iraq between 2003 and 2007—was the consequence of U.S. intervention, not the cause.

But refugees can create humanitarian crises and export instability, which in turn can ratchet up domestic pressure for military interventions. In Haiti, for example, the 1991 coup by General Raoul Cedras and an attack against pro-Aristide shanty towns two years later by forces loyal to him set off a chain of events that left some 500 Aristide supporters dead, over 300,000 Haitians internally displaced, and roughly 100,000 refugees, mostly forced to flee on ramshackle rafts heading for the U.S. coast. The coup and subsequent refugee crisis ratcheted up pressure on Washington to respond with military force. The intervention was preceded by an arms and fuel embargo against the Cedras regime by the UN Security Council, the deployment of international monitors to document human rights abuses, and the freezing of all government funds. The only real threat posed to the U.S. homeland was the boatloads of Haitians seeking refuge, but it hardly posed a vital national security interest. Still, the Black Caucus and pro-Aristide camp pushed President Bill Clinton to issue calls for a multilateral intervention in 1994. Peacekeeping responsibilities, however, were not handed over to the UN until March 1995, well after the 20,000-strong force, almost all of them American, landed in Haiti for Operation Uphold Democracy.

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Biting Off More Than You Can Chew: Turkey, Syria and the PKK

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As the conflict in Syria worsens, an increasing number of Syrians have been heading to Turkey. The UN Refugee Agency warned on Tuesday that the number of refugees in Turkey could increase up to 200,000. Currently, around 80,000 Syrians are already registered in Turkey across nine refugee camps, with Turkey building facilities for six more camps in order to increase their capacity to accommodate refugees. This burgeoning refugee crisis is stoking tensions in Turkey, both on a local as well as a national level.

At the local level, observers have noted increased tensions in the Hatay district of Turkey, where about a million Alawis reside (Alawis are ethnically Arab and are related to the Alawi-dominated Syrian state). While some have cautioned that this in no way means that the Alawis in Turkey are directly supporting the Assad regime in Syria, the conflict has nonetheless turned their presence into a sensitive subject. As evidence, some Turkish media outlets have commented that Syrians in Turkey are being given priority over Turks in public hospitals in the district and are putting a strain on various other public services as well.

At the national level, the refugee crisis has highlighted the increasing inability of the government to deal with the Kurdish “issue.” Aliza Marcus argues in The National Interest that “the real fear isn’t that Syria will be divided. It’s that Kurds are uniting.” About a third of the PKK members are drawn from Kurds residing in Syria and organizational links are said to exist between the PKK in Turkey and the Democratic Union Party (PYD), an offshoot of the  PKK in Syria. These ties date back to the early 1980s, from when Abdullah Öcalan, the founding member of the PKK, built up the organization from Damascus once he was forced to flee Turkey.

Intensifying PKK attacks started this July when the PKK took over a large amount of territory in the town of Şemdinli, a district in southeastern Turkey bordering Northern Iraq. Şemdinli then witnessed a two-week showdown between Turkish military and the PKK, with the Turkish government claiming that it killed 150 PKK terrorists in the two weeks. On August 13th, the PKK kidnapped Hüseyin Aygün, a deputy for Turkey’s main opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP). Its most recent public attack (allegedly) was in Gaziantep, a city 30 miles from the Syrian border, where a car bomb killed 9 civilians while injuring 70 others.

The Turkish government’s problems extend beyond the worsening situation in Syria and the refugee problem, however.  Last year, it had tried to strike an agreement with the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) in Northern Iraq to import a large amount of oil and natural gas, in exchange for exporting refined petroleum products to the region . While on the face of it, the deal increases the country’s energy and economic security, it was also seen as fulfilling certain strategic goals. Gonul Tol writing in The National Interest argues:

From the Turkish perspective, closer ties to the KRG serve Turkey’s strategic interests in Syria. Turkey would like to use the clout of Barzani (the current President of Iraqi Kurdistan) with the Syrian Kurds to sideline the Democratic Union Party (PYD), the PKK offshoot in Syria, and to gain some influence with the Syrian Kurds in a post-Assad scenario.

However, in April of this year, the Iraqi government declared that the export of oil to Turkey was illegitimate and that the oil and natural gas reserves were the property of all Iraqis and should therefore be federally managed, instead of by the KRG alone. In May, Iraq awarded Pakistan Petroleum the right to explore for gas, officially snubbing Turkey, who is also harboring Iraq’s fugitive former Vice-President.

So what do all these events mean for Ankara? In terms of posing a threat to Turkey, the number of Kurds in Syria are too dispersed and fragmented as compared to their kin in Iraq and Turkey. The issue is most salient nationally as it highlights the inability of the ruling AKP to deal with the issue. Writing in the Hurriyet Daily News, analyst Semih Idiz laments:

What makes it sadder is that the situation in terms of Kurdish cultural rights is much better than it was a decade ago, and the government has the strongest mandate from the electorate any government has had over the past four to five decades. Given this situation, the government was in a position to take bold steps aimed at solving the Kurdish problem.

Instead of moving in that direction, however, it has moved in the traditional direction of considering the Kurdish problem as one that is not political in nature but a simple question of security and terrorism……The prospects for solving the Kurdish problem soon, therefore, do not appear good, which unfortunately points to more bloodshed and increased ethnic estrangement.

Is There An Emerging Norm Against Restraint in Dealing With Non-State Actors?

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Last week I argued that restraint among states is becoming a new norm in international affairs, as military retaliation is increasingly seen as a global taboo. What’s puzzling is that just the opposite is the case with conflicts between a foreign state and a violent non-state actor. States in recent years have shown little restraint when attacked by non-state actors and retaliation, which often includes disproportionate force, appears to be the new norm (the Mumbai attacks, carried out by Lashkar-e-Taiba, are the one obvious exception). Examples include Israel’s response in 2006 to a cross-border incursion by Hezbollah forces, Turkey’s repeated cross-border attacks against Kurdish militants in northern Iraq, and Colombia’s incursion into Ecuador to take out FARC rebels in February 2008. So why are states under-reaching when it comes to conflicts with other states, but overreaching when it comes to conflicts with non-state actors?

Two thoughts come to mind: first, all states concerned about the sanctity of their sovereign borders have a collective interest in undermining the power of non-state actors, even ones they nominally tolerate. That is why the Kurdish or Iraqi governments do not send troops after Turkish forces that cross the border in search of PKK rebels. States like Pakistan do their best Captain Renault impression to feign shock at the audacity of their neighbors’ violation of their borders as well as equal shock that there is anything rebel-related going on in their midst. What’s interesting is both that a) states barely give the use of force a second thought when it comes to non-state actors and b) that this use of force appears to be accepted by the state whose sovereignty was violated (even when they claim to be outraged).

In 2008, for example, Hugo Chavez howled and sent troops to the border after Colombia’s military took out a FARC rebel camp in Ecuador. But only a few years later, the Venezuelan strongman was seen backslapping Colombia’s new president at a summit in Santa Marta. In South Asia, repeated cross-border attacks by U.S. forces into Pakistan have ruffled relations. But there is a reluctant acceptance – a wink-wink-nod-nod of sorts – of these acts among some in the Pakistani military and government, so long as Pakistani forces are not targeted (and if they are, as long as there’s a forthcoming apology). As restraint increasingly defines relations between states, retaliation defines relations between states and non-state actors.

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Is There An Emerging ‘Taboo’ Against Retaliation?

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The biggest international news in the quiet months before 9/11 was the collision of a U.S. Navy spy aircraft and a PLA fighter jet in China, during which 24 American crew members were detained. Even though the incident was lampooned on SNL, there was real concern that the incident would blow up, damaging already-tense relations between the two countries. But it quickly faded and both sides reached an agreement. Quiet diplomacy prevailed.

Flash-forward a decade later and we have a similar border incident of a spy plane being shot down between Turkey and Syria. Cue the familiar drumbeats for war on both sides. To save face, each side has ratcheted up its hostile rhetoric (even though Syria’s president did offer something of an admission of guilt). But, as in the spring of 2001, I wouldn’t get too worried. One of the least noted global norms to emerge in recent decades has been the persistence of state restraint in international relations. Retaliation has almost become an unstated taboo. Of course, interstate war is obviously not a relic of previous centuries, but nor is it as commonplace anymore, despite persistent flare-ups that have the potential to escalate to full-blown war.

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In Syria, NATO Faces its Toughest Test

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The debate on whether or not NATO should intervene in what is quickly becoming the Syrian Civil War continues as the violence across the country escalates. In Washington and London, it appears as if legislative and public opposition has convinced executives to limit their support for President Assad’s opponents to statements of support and condemnations of government massacres of civilians. But the question as to whether or not NATO, as an alliance, will take action depends on one’s definition of NATO. Indeed, more so than in Libya or even Afghanistan, the course NATO decides to take in Syria may very well determine the future of the alliance.

In more ways than one, NATO has already intervened in Syria. From an early stage, Turkey has been giving refuge and aid to Syrian civilians fleeing the fighting and Ankara also hosts the opposition Syrian National Council. More recently, Turkey has deployed tanks and anti-aircraft weapons on the border after Syria shot down a Turkish F-4 Phantom on patrol, representing a dangerous escalation between the two countries. While NATO central command has condemned the attack, Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen has stated that he does not expect the situation to escalate despite the incident qualifying as grounds for Turkey to invoke Article 5 of the NATO charter, which reads:

The Parties agree that an armed attack against one or more of them in Europe or North America shall be considered an attack against them all and consequently they agree that, if such an armed attack occurs, each of them, in exercise of the right of individual or collective self-defence recognised by Article 51 of the Charter of the United Nations, will assist the Party or Parties so attacked by taking forthwith, individually and in concert with the other Parties, such action as it deems necessary, including the use of armed force, to restore and maintain the security of the North Atlantic area.

While this type of incident was certainly not what the authors of the North Atlantic Treaty had in mind when NATO was established, neither were the attacks of September 11th, which provided the grounds on which the US invoked Article 5 to call its allies into action in Afghanistan despite their deep-seated reluctance. If Turkey follows suit and invokes Article 5, will the United States keep to its alliance commitment or will it leave Turkey hanging?

It may help to take a step back and consider what, exactly, NATO is as an organization. Consider the UN Security Council: its 5 permanent representatives are the victors of World War II: the US, the UK, France, Russia, and China. Other important world powers, notably Germany and Japan, have been left off of this list. But the Cold War necessitated a new collective security arrangement among the Western allies. NATO was the result, with the US, England, and France incorporating their clients, including notable non-North Atlantic states such as Greece and Turkey, in their fight against communism.

The Cold War may be over, but NATO remains. So what, then, is NATO? This is a question that has weighed on the alliance since the fall of the Berlin Wall. Some might argue that it is an institution to cement US military dominance over Europe while others might claim that it is a way to allow European states disinterested in investing in their own defense to free-ride off of US military power. On one hand, however, intervention in Libya, spearheaded by European states including Italy and France, challenges the first notion. On the other hand, intervention in Afghanistan — where, according to numerous accounts, the US pressured European states to participate in combat operations much to the chagrin of their parliaments and publics — challenges the second. But they have something in common: both very much presuppose a Western-dominated club focused on the global interests of its principal members. While Turkey and Greece were key buffer states between the Mediterranean and the Soviet Union, and thus integral America’s Cold War strategy of containment, their place in the future of the alliance is unclear.

Moreover, it is likely that the abandonment of these allies would result in the rest to express serious concerns about their own membership and perhaps even lead to their departure from NATO. They would see such an act of abandonment as the US presupposing, and often demanding, a commitment to its own interests while failing to consider those of its allies. Will the US and Britain come to Turkey’s defense if open hostilities break out between Turkey and Syria, or even more provocatively, Turkey and Syria’s regional backer, Iran? This is certainly a pressing question, but it reflects an alliance cleavage that is quite familiar to us.

Israel’s involvement complicates matters further. While Jerusalem has kept quiet, Israeli media sources have called for aid and arms for Syrian rebels. But it remains unclear just how far Israeli support for Assad’s opponents runs. In January, a high ranking Syrian defector, General Hussam Awak, reported that Iran dispatched an armored brigade of Revolutionary Guardsmen to fight alongside pro-government Syrian forces. Other reports suggest Hizbullah fighters are doing the same. While both are implacable enemies of Israel, this alliance has not led to increased strategic cooperation between Israel and Turkey. Quite the opposite, relations between Israel and Turkey are at the lowest point in their diplomatic history, souring after an incident in which Israeli troops stormed a Turkish vessel attempting to break the Israeli blockage of Gaza. This incident resulted in the deaths of 9 Turkish citizens, with each side blaming the other for its aggression. With Turkish rhetoric against Israel at an all-time high, on must wonder whether Netanyahu’s hawkish government will decide to go to war, an outcome for which it has been calling for quite some time, on Turkey’s behalf. If the answer is no, then a Turkish invocation of Article 5 would be met by intense diplomatic efforts to prevent the US from going to Turkey’s assistance, an outcome that would almost certainly result in attacks against Israeli civilian targets. Arguments regarding the nature of the pro-Israel lobby aside, with presidential elections six months away, there would be intense pressure on the Obama administration to consider Israel’s security concerns over those of Turkey.

The problem is that Israel is not a member of NATO, merely a close ally. And if a non-NATO member can successfully lobby the US or any other European state to ignore its alliance commitments, what does this mean for the future of the alliance? This is an exceedingly difficult question to answer. Not only is it far too early to tell whether Syria and Turkey will be able to escape the classic “spiral model” of military escalation, Israel’s attitude towards escalation with Syria remains unknown. The US has often pressured Turkey to uphold its alliance commitments, especially regarding US actions in Iraq and Afghanistan. Will the United States find a pretext dismiss its own and what will that mean for the future of the alliance? While this discussion has raised many more questions than answers, it is clear that the Syria conflict is much more politically complicated than anything NATO has faced in the post-Cold War period.

When Abortion Leads to the Decline of Nations

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Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan.

Across the Atlantic from the abortion debates in Arizona, Virginia, Philadelphia, and most recently, Michigan, a very similar discussion can be found in Turkey. A few weeks ago, Turkey’s Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan said that he considered abortion to be murder. The statement was strongly endorsed by the head of the Parliament’s Human Rights Commission and the Family and Social Policies Minister – both women.

However, unlike their fellow conservatives stateside, this debate is ostensibly not just based on pro-life or religious reasons. According to Erdoğan, keeping abortion legal is “a sly plan to wipe this nation off the global stage.” Such statements are not all that surprising, given that last year Erdoğan expressed concern about a declining Turkish population. He went on to urge Turkish families to have at least three kids, claiming that those who did would receive a ‘prize’.

Though a majority of Turkish citizens are in opposition to a draft bill which would make abortion illegal (abortion is currently legal in Turkey during the first 10 weeks of the pregnancy), the nature of the debate highlights two rather disturbing trends. First, it points to the over-extension of the state into highly private matters. The ruling AKP (Justice and Development Party) has tried to adopt similar extensions into people’s private lives in the past – in 2004, they tried to criminalize adultery, but the proposal was dropped in the face of criticism both from within Turkey and from Europe.

Secondly, and more alarmingly, it showcases a nationalistic fear – of being wiped off the map and of diluting ‘Turkish-ness’. Such an understanding also naturally lends itself to giving no room for the assimilation of minorities or immigrants. In fact, some analysts have argued this decision may have political rather than religious motives behind it as it aims to counter the high birth rates among the Kurdish population of the country. According to the Turkish Statistical Institute, in Southeast Anatolia and Central Anatolia, where a majority of the Kurdish population in Turkey resides, the birth rate is 27.3 per 1000 people and 22.9 per 1000 people respectively. This is much higher than the rest of the regions where most of the population is ethnically Turkish, and birth rates are below 19 per 1,000 people, with as low as 11 per 1,000 in some parts of the country (numbers reflect data from August 2011).

A counter-argument might be that the higher birthrates among the Kurds are just caused by a lack of basic services – such as education, provision of health service and birth control, and should therefore, not be linked to some sort of conspiracy by the Kurds to outnumber the Turks. Some have even claimed that the debate over abortion was started by the Prime Minister just to divert the public’s attention from the Uludere incident – where 34 civilians near the Iraqi border were killed in a strike by the Turkish military. However, some analysts have commented that organizations can use ‘ethnic reproduction’ as political tools to reach their goals. Indeed, after looking at Erdoğan’s past statements and his concern about a declining Turkish population, one cannot say with so much certainty that the debate on abortion was initiated just to divert the public’s attention.

While controversial policies geared toward ethnic minorities are nothing new for Turkey, using social policy in this manner is. Moreover, Turkish women’s groups now have to focus on getting the state to offer better alternatives to rape victims, and those women, who out of fear of giving birth to another female child in a highly patriarchal society, will take recourse to illegal and more dangerous options to terminate their girl child. In the longer term however, one must cautiously watch the nature of AKP’s policies, and how they might have troubling consequences for the mindset of Turkish society.