Turkey and the Threat of Kurdish Nationalism

Turkey and the United States share a strategic vision of an Iraq that is one nation with a strong and functioning central government. For the United States, that would mean an Arab-dominated regime able to deal with internal security problems like al Qaeda between the Two Rivers before they become international threats and also strong and self-confident enough to serve as a bulwark against Iranian expansion. For Turkey, it would mean a Baghdad government capable of eliminating the Marxist terrorist group the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK), which has bases and safe havens in the north of the country. A strong central government would also ipso facto render irrelevant any Kurdish aspirations for independent statehood.

Unfortunately, a unified Iraqi nation that would serve as a source of regional stability and security has failed to emerge after four years and is increasingly unlikely. As a result, the United States and Turkey find themselves looking at quite different short-term solutions to the volatility of the region and are increasingly at loggerheads over policy vis-à-vis Kurd-dominated northern Iraq.

Both the United States and Turkey regard the PKK as an international terrorist group and agree that it should be eradicated. But the United States, viewing the Kurdish region as the only stable part of Iraq, is unwilling or possibly unable to apply the kinds of pressure that would eliminate the PKK bases, which is the only nonnegotiable, short-term demand being made by Turkey. Turkey is politically divided over the issue of what precisely it should do given the American failure to act decisively, even as it is united in its desire to have the PKK threat removed. The result is a steady worsening in relations between two long-time allies who should be acting in unanimity.

Appointed in mid-May 2007, Turkey's new special ambassador for countering the PKK, Rafet Akgunkay, had to wait "more than two weeks" for a phone call from his counterpart, General John Ralston, the American special envoy for countering the PKK. Turks think they know where the blame for the failure to resolve the Kurdish problem rests, and that is firmly with Washington. They note the hypocrisy whereby the United States violates the sovereignty of countries like Yemen to kill terrorists who only marginally threaten the United States yet tolerates the continued existence of terror bases in a country that the American military occupies. Those bases are being used by terrorists to kill the citizens of a fellow North Atlantic Treaty Organization member. The Turkish media, which blames many of Turkey's problems on the Iraq war, is generally critical of the United States and its policies, reflecting popular sentiment coming from all parts of the political spectrum. The specific US failure to respond to Turkish demands to attack the PKK has meant that only 12 percent of Turks now have a favorable impression of the United States, and most blame the United States for the establishment of the PKK in Iraq as well as the resumption of terrorism inside Turkey itself.

Much of the Kurdish problem is deeply rooted in Turkish domestic politics, which make Ankara's Iraq policy a surrogate battleground. Ottoman Turkey was the heart of a polyglot and multicultural empire. Modern Turkey was intended to be the Turkish heartland with many of the imperial provinces shorn away, but it incorporates three distinct cultures that have been somehow cobbled together into a less than completely harmonious whole. There is Mustafa Kemal Ataturk's Turkey, consisting of a traditionally Western-looking, educated elite that is both fiercely secular and increasingly xenophobic and nationalistic. This elite, which includes the senior ranks of the army, is concentrated in Istanbul and Ankara, with pockets elsewhere. It is hostile to overt signs of religion, because Ataturk believed that Turkey had become backward through its identification with the caliphate and with political Islam, and it sees itself as the defender of the secular constitution instituted by Ataturk in 1924.

A second Turkey is the predominantly rural Anatolian heartland, the Turkey of villages and simple values. Frequently poorly educated and still...