opinion

 

US policies antagonize Turkey, interrupt NATO expansion south

by Nicola Nasser

Discretely but progressively and confidently the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) is expanding south and southeast almost uncontested outside the mandate designated by its statute into the Arab Middle East as well as into the Caspian Sea regions, but the regional US-created chaos is antagonizing Turkey’s national strategic interests and alerting it into the defensive, not against enemies, but against its own NATO allies.

NATO has already secured its presence on the middle tier between the two regions, in Turkey (a member), Afghanistan (where it has a 25,000-strong force) and to a lesser extent in Iraq where the Atlantic alliance is training the “new Iraqi army.”

Turkey is a major NATO ally since 1952; she contributes troops to NATO's operation in Afghanistan and provides access to Incirlik air base for heavy US military logistical support and supply to its forces in Iraq. However, more importantly Turkey sits astride the cross roads of the huge oil reserves in the Caspian and Gulf regions.

The Caspian Sea region is gradually emerging as one of the most explosive parts of the world and the US and NATO involvement is linking it inextricably to the already war-torn Middle East region. This NATO-US involvement is alerting the five Caspian states --- Azerbaijan, Iran, Kazakhstan, Russia, and Turkmenistan --- to be on guard; in the past decade, the number of warships on the Caspian has almost doubled, while coastal infrastructure is also being rapidly reinforced, Vasilina Vasilyeva reported in the Moscow News on November 8.

On a wider scale the NATO-US heavy and aggressive involvement in both regions is strategically invoking defensive responses by China and Russia, which geopolitically consider both regions, but the Caspian in particular, their backyards; hence their evolving bilateral strategic coordination as well as their growing closer ties with Iran, the regional major player targeted by the NATO-US involvement.

“The North Atlantic Treaty Organization is considering the possibility of providing security for the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan oil pipeline,” Vasilyeva quoted Robert Simmons, the NATO secretary general's special representative for the Caucasus and Central Asia, as saying. “The Baku-Ceyhan oil pipeline runs to Turkey, a NATO country, and passes through the territory of Azerbaijan, a NATO partner. The protection of energy infrastructure includes the security of this oil pipeline in addition to other energy infrastructure facilities.” NATO has also finalized a long term program to provide military support for all pipelines along the Caspian-Turkey-Balkans route. Vasilyeva added that terrorism is the biggest threat to the pipeline.

Counterproductive US policies are antagonizing Turkey, which is indigenously deeply involved in both regions with vast strategic, economic and political interests, and consequently threatening to disrupt a successful NATO expansion south, invoking cracks within the NATO membership, and creating a pragmatic possibility for potential Turkish strategic shifts.

Under the headline, “Turkey Rediscovers the Middle East,” an article in the July/August edition of the magazine Foreign Affairs explained that “a significant shift in the country’s foreign policy has gone largely unnoticed: after decades of passivity, Turkey is now emerging as an important diplomatic actor in the Middle East.” Within this context Turkey’s pragmatic evolving ties with Iran and Syria, both condemned by US President George W. Bush as two pillars of a world’s “axis of evil,” is an indication.

Similar pragmatic evolution of ties and coordination with the two major obstacles to NATO’s expansion south and southeast, namely Russia and China, could not be ruled out should the United States, the backbone of the alliance, persist with “Just as the White House claims it has finally turned the corner in what it defines as the ‘central front’ in the 'war on terror' --- Iraq --- it has found itself desperately trying to contain new crises on the war's periphery stretching east to Pakistan, west to Turkey and south to the Horn of Africa,” Jim Lobe wrote in Asia Times on November 10.

To prove his point, Lobe cited Pakistani President General Pervez Musharraf's latest “coup,” the continuing threat of a Turkish invasion of Iraqi Kurdistan, the looming probability of war between US-backed Ethiopia and Eritrea, “amid a lack of concrete progress on the Israel-Palestinian peace process, the ongoing political impasse in Lebanon, and still-mounting tensions between Iran and the US” and amid an anti-Americanism that now pervades the entire region.

This is for sure an unwelcoming environment for NATO, but at the same time an environment that the United States, the leading NATO player, will use as the raison d’etre for dragging the North Atlantic Alliance into even more expanded role in the region. Turkey could make or break the difference either way.

“The situation along the border between Turkey and Iraqi Kurdistan most directly threatens the administration's efforts to stabilize Iraq,” said Lobe, but this is exactly where the NATO’s gradual, confident and successful expansion south could be curtailed, hindered and face problems because the US double-standard policies vis-à-vis what Washington herself list as “terrorist organizations” as well as her regional hegemonic plans pit the alliance against its Turkish founding member or at least create an environment conducive to a collision course between the two allies.

In October, Turkey's parliament overwhelmingly voted 507 to 19 in favor of ordering the army to launch an offensive across Turkey's south-eastern border in search of PKK Turkish-Kurd rebels hiding in Iraqi Kurdistan. The Turks made no less than 24 attacks into Iraqi Kurdistan since 1984, but without effect. The PKK guerrillas could easily disappear in the rugged mountain terrain of the Qandil Mountains.

Now the Turks are after their “terrorist-harboring” Iraqi-Kurdish hosts as well, who were securing a safe haven for Kurdish rebels, demanding their extradition, a demand that the US-allied Kurdish Iraqi President, Jalal Talibani, and the President of the Kurdistan Regional Government, Masoud Barzani, had categorically rejected.

The prospect of a Turkish - Kurdish war that could embroil the Iraqi Kurds, the only trusted Iraqi ally supporting the US occupation, and destabilize the only stable Iraqi region of Kurdistan is a nightmare for the US Washington can ill-afford to lose the support of either the Iraqi Kurds or that of the Turkish government across the border; both play a vital role in supporting the US war effort in Iraq.

US double standards

Meanwhile Washington has turned her eyes away from the fact that Iraqi Kurdistan has become a safe haven for organizations outlawed by the US as “terrorist” groups. The US-backed Iraqi Kurds were honest to their rhetoric of Pan-Kurdish nationalism and turned their US-protected region into a base for Kurdish rebels from and against neighboring countries. The US-outlawed Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) took on Turkey; but a US-sponsored Iranian Kurdish group known as PEJAK took on Iran.

Washington also turned a blind eye to the fact that PKK since two years has become the mother organization of four splinter groups each of them working separately but in coordination in Turkey, Iran, Syria and Iraq.

On October 28, the turkishweekly.net quoted the author of the forthcoming book “The Iran Agenda: the Real Story of US Policy and the Middle East Crisis,” Reese Erlich, as saying that, “Kurdish and American sources say the United States has been supporting guerilla raids against Iran, channeling the money through organizations in Iraqi Kurdistan.” Writing in the latest issue of Mother Jones, Erlich reported that the PKK, which is listed on the United States State Department List of Terrorist Organizations, “about two years ago split into four parties in each of the countries where the Kurds live” in Syria, Iraq, Turkey and Iran. “So the PJAK is the Iranian affiliate. Basically they're still part of the same organization.” He added that the United States accommodates the presence of the PKK in Iraq, but opposes its actions in Turkey, while on the other hand it supports attacks by PKK's splinter group on Iran.

Osman Ocalan, brother of the imprisoned PKK leader Abdullah Ocalan, told AP that some fighters had moved toward Iran, and that there were now more PKK fighters there than in northern Iraq. “PKK forces are split into three parts situated in Turkey, Iraq and Iran,” Ocalan said. “If there is Turkish pressure on our forces in Iraq, the fighters will head toward Iran.” How could this free movement on Iraqi soil be possible without accommodation by the US occupying power and their Iraqi Kurdish arms?

Iraqi Kurds’ Pan-Kurdish “solidarity” with their Turkish, Iranian and Syrian compatriots is undercutting US efforts to contain further deterioration in its ties with Turkey. Two weeks ago, Iraq’s Kurdish President, Jalal Talabani, said that Iraq could not solve Turkey’s problems. “The handing over of PKK leaders to Turkey is a dream that will never be realized,” he said.

Washington seems caught between Iraq and a hard Turkish place. A recent German Marshall Fund poll found that only 11 percent of Turks have positive views of the United States.  One of the main factors in the extraordinary growth of anti-US sentiment among the Turks was the US unwillingness to pressure its ally Barzani to stop the PKK from crossing into Turkey.

President George W. Bush spelled out US opposition to a Turkish invasion of northern Iraq. Turkey’s Prime Minister Recep Tayyep Erdogan was infuriated to declare that the future of bilateral ties with the US will be determined by Washington’s active involvement against the PKK, without “double-standards.” Erdogan returned disappointed from his November 5 summit with Bush in Washington; the crisis lingers on as Bush could not assure the Turkish leader enough for Ankara to rule out the military option.

“This crisis was predictable and predicted. US officials have long known that a Turkish incursion was just one terrorist event away. As tensions mounted, the administration had numerous opportunities to engage in preventive diplomacy. A combination of lack of imagination, incompetence and sheer lack of knowledge at the State Department has caused this impasse,” Henri J. Barkey wrote in the Washington Post on October 27.

The New York Times on October 22 reported that “American officials acknowledged that neither the United States nor Iraq had done much recently to constrain” the PKK Current and former Bush administration officials said a special envoy appointed by the Bush administration in 2006, Gen. Joseph W. Ralston, “had recently stepped down in frustration over Iraqi and American inaction.”

Ahead of their summit Bush sent his Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice to Ankara and to the meeting of Iraq neighbors in Istanbul with a “diplomatic” proposal to diffuse the crisis based on hitting at the heart of the Pan-Kurdish declared loyalties of the Iraqi Kurds’ leaders, Talbani and Barzani, by splitting the Kurds into a terrorist camp, which Rice declared in Ankara as the “common enemy” of her country, Turkey and Iraq and a non-terrorist camp which both men represent.

During their summit on November 5, Bush promised Erdogan that Turkey would be furnished with US intelligence on the camps and movements of the PKK. The Turkish press reported this as a “green light for military strikes.” For the US, the main issue now is that “Turkish military action is limited and strictly controlled,” commented Spiegel on-line. “Where possible,” the publication added, “military action should be coordinated with the (Iraqi) Kurdish regional government so as to avoid clashes between the Turkish army and the northern Iraqi Kurdish militias.”

NATO had earlier expressed its solidarity with Turkey. On October 24, NATO defense ministers meeting in The Netherlands said the 26 allies expressed solidarity with Turkey in the face of the attacks. PKK rebels have killed more than 40 Turks in hit-and-run attacks over the past month. “I think the Turkish government is showing restraint, remarkable restraint under current conditions,” NATO chief Hoop Scheffer told a news conference.

But for how long could Turkey practice restraint before her NATO allies translate their so far verbal solidarity into deeds?

Scot Sullivan, writing in The Conservative Voice on November 9, had a different interpretation of the results of the Bush-Erdogan summit: “The US is appeasing Iran and Iran’s PKK allies while preparing to confront Turkey. Such is the inescapable conclusion following Erdogan-Bush Summit. A careful assessment of the Erdogan-Bush summit indicates that Bush remains hostile to Turkey and sympathetic to the PKK-Iran Axis that seeks to partition Iraq. Bush made only two modest assistance offers to Turkey. Each offer raised more questions than answers.”

First, Bush’s offer to share intelligence with Turkey implies that the United States has been withholding such intelligence from Turkey until now, despite US obligations within NATO and despite bilateral counterterrorism agreements. Second, the establishment of coordinating mechanism between the United States and Turkey for conducting joint operations against the PKK is in reality “no more than a hotline, or more accurately a US phone number.”

To add insult to injury, the “US brush-off of Turkey became evident, according to Sullivan, when “General Petraeus was named as the US point of contact. For the Turkish military, General Petraeus is pro-Kurdish. He approved without question the PKK military buildup in northern Iraq. He also approved granting the Kurdish peshmerga the status of an independent military force that is answerable only to Kurdish president Barzani.”

 

Nicola Nasser is a veteran Arab journalist who has worked in Kuwait, the UAE, Jordan and Palestine; he is based in Bir Zeit, West Bank of the Israeli-occupied territories