You have the fantastic French experts on why Sept. 11 did not in fact happen, the American evangelicals with the wildest plans for the Armageddon, the Turks who believe the world system is always against them and so on. Yet I insisted that Arab societies have become masters of conspiracy theories, and this is ruining their intellects. He looked at me and smiled. “Yes,” he said, “there are many conspiracy theories, because there are so many conspiracies.”Looking at what has been happening over the last four weeks in Turkey, one can’t help but wonder if some people are really insane enough to pull Turkey into a war with northern Iraq just five weeks before the elections. They have created such a psychological atmosphere that a cross-border operation has become the only way to fight Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) terrorism. As if the armed forces had not carried out such operations before, invading northern Iraq in pursuit of PKK terrorists is now presented as a magical formula. Cross the border and the PKK terrorism will suddenly stop. Our Kurdish problem will be solved. Our border security will be perfected. The Justice and Development Party (AK Party) will lose the elections. The ultra-nationalists will make it to Parliament. Everyone is happy. End of story.
The recent events should be a wake-up call for everyone. Terrorism is a global phenomenon and no one can fight it alone. The Americans made that mistake and they are paying for it dearly. America’s cause for fighting terrorism is over for many nations. They no longer believe that the US administration is justified by any means to do what it is doing in Iraq, Afghanistan or elsewhere. Why? Because the Bush administration has squandered the one golden opportunity they had right after Sept. 11. They used and misused it to advance their apocalyptic vision of the future, and they failed miserably.
Do some people want Turkey to make the same mistake? Having lost all of its legitimacy and credibility, can Turkey fight a successful war against terrorism?
Turkey needs to develop a new national security strategy. As we all know too well, security can no longer be provided by weapons alone. It requires an artful coordination of political, military, diplomatic, economic and cultural factors. A strong army is absolutely needed, but never necessary. Muscle must be combined with intelligence, planning, credibility and an ability to convince others to be on our side. Invading northern Iraq is certainly not one of these steps.
PKK terrorism is one among many potential threats to our national security. As we fought this war for many years and lost close to 40,000 people, we should know better now. Many people still think that fighting terrorism is equal to killing terrorists. Killing a terrorist is only another way of producing more of them. Fighting terrorism takes more than killing one, 10 or 5,000 terrorists. It involves many other measures and can only be a subset of a larger security strategy.
National security seeks to secure our national borders, but begins beyond them. We can not protect our borders if we create an extremely insecure and fragile political environment around us. We failed in the ‘80s and ‘90s to protect our borders with Iran and Syria, because we failed to develop good political relations with those countries. When we began to secure our borders with these neighboring countries after the late ‘90s and early 2000, it was not because we had improved our military presence along the border, but because we adopted a new strategy for border security and involved our neighbors as equal partners.
Keeping in mind the subtle difference between killing terrorists and fighting terrorism, we have to fight PKK terrorism with the utmost resolve. But this can not be used as a tool to weaken the AK Party government and make political gains over the fallen bodies. This seems to be what the anti-government political actors, and their spokespeople in the media, want to see happen. This is a far greater threat to Turkey’s national security than PKK terrorism.
