The Erdogan Puzzle: Solving the Insolvable: New Age Islam's Selection, 22 December 2016
New Age Islam Edit Bureau
22 December 2016
• The Erdogan Puzzle: Solving the Insolvable
By Rajesh Singh
• A Brief History of the Aleppo Battle
By Stanly Johny
• Turkey Is the Canary in the Coal Mine, Forecasting Whether the West-Led Liberal Order Has a Future
By Abhijnan Rej
• A Year of Living Dangerously
By Happymon Jacob
Compiled By New Age Islam Edit Bureau
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The Erdogan Puzzle: Solving the Insolvable
By Rajesh Singh
22 December 2016
Turkey’s President has betrayed the hopes and aspirations of liberals in his country. Ironically, he is not too liked by the radicals as well, who view him with suspicion. That leaves him with a Janus-like legacy
On Monday, soon after he shot the Russian Ambassador to Turkey and before he was neutralised by security personnel, the killer shouted in Turkish: “Don’t forget Aleppo; don’t forget Syria.” He also said, “We are the ones who pledged allegiance to Mohammad, to wage jihad… Allahu Akbar.” The Government was quick to point fingers at President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s rivals within and outside the country for the tragedy. Official sources suspect the role of US-based Islamic cleric Fethullah Gulen or the ‘Gulenists’ who are up in arms against President Erdogan. Gulen had also been accused of a recent failed coup attempt against the President.
It’s politically fine for Erdogan’s camp to blame Gulen or the President’s other opponents for all that has gone wrong in Turkey today. These people may or may not be guilty, and it’s important to know for sure. But equally important to understand is President Erdogan’s failure to live up to the promise he showed when he assumed power, first as Prime Minister (early-2003-mid-2014) and President thereafter. He was supposed to take Turkey to the path of a secular nation which the founder of modern Turkey, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, had envisaged and worked for. Instead, Erdogan has created a Turkey that is increasingly turning radical. The political and economic liberalisation he had promised has not happened. Nor has his much-touted reconciliation with the restive Kurdish minority, worked.
Why has Erdogan failed? The answer is simple: He never wanted to succeed. His attempts at being secular and a reformist were a sham. He began his career in city politics in the late 1980s, famously refusing to shave off his moustache on religious grounds. But when he contested the mayoral elections, he encouraged women to join the Welfare Party, the Islamist group of which he was a member. He did not insist on their wearing headscarves. Those were early indications that Erdogan was to develop an identity crisis.
After he was elected Mayor of Istanbul in 1994, Erdogan began to toe the conventional Islamist line. He expressed support for Sharia’h, cracked down on the sale of alcohol on civic body-controlled outlets (not on social but religious grounds) and fell in love with a poem that drew an analogy between religion and the military — “mosques are our barracks, domes are our helmets…” The effort landed him in jail for four months on the charge of incitement of religious hatred.
Once released, Erdogan again underwent an image-makeover. He joined hands with a bunch of conservative reformers who favoured greater interaction with the West and tempering down of the Islamist rhetoric. Suddenly he discovered merit in discarding the Sharia’h notion, saying he did not take those people seriously who spoke of a state that must be founded on Islamic law.
By 1999, he had effectively changed colours — though it would not be the last time he would do so — when he announced that Turkey would get nowhere “with radicalism”. Armed with a reformist pledge and the badge of a ‘conservative democrat’, Erdogan, along with a few others, founded the Justice and Development Party (AKP) and won the national election. By now, the liberals in the country had begun to believe they finally had a leader who would help Turkey be a modern secular nation — a project left unfinished by Ataturk.
The liberals believed that the baggage of history would not trouble Erdogan. They were ready to keep aside the reality that Erdogan, for all his show of reform, had led his party to victory on the strength of support from a deeply conservative and religious middle class which had embraced economic prosperity but kept secular-minded thoughts and projects at an arm’s length. The liberals were mesmerised by Erdogan’s promise of economic reforms that would make Turkey “easier for the world to enter”, of creating conditions for a liberal Press and an independent judiciary; in short, shape his nation into a vibrant democracy.
But it would have been so un-Erdogan like to have kept those assurances. From batting for a free judiciary, Erdogan soon began to complain about its existence. One day he cribbed, “You find yourselves confronted by judges in places where you least expect.” Thereafter, he began to undermine the judiciary’s independence. Over a period of time, he assumed the power to name a majority of the constitutional court judges. Two years ago, he summarily dismissed as many as 3,000 judges. Since the failed coup, he has had more than 2,700 judges removed. Last year, a presidential appointee heading the National Intelligence Organisation, was given powers to collect ‘all information, documents or data from any entity in Turkey’ without having to seek any judicial sanction. Needless to add, such an action was kept immune from the purview of judicial test.
The news has been bad on the secular front too. President Erdogan’s Government recently took control of six churches in the war-torn city of Diyarbakir. These include Catholic, Protestant and Orthodox churches. Although the official reason given is that the move has been taken to facilitate rebuilding and restoring the historical city, nobody is fooled. It was a step to appease the hard-line Islamist sections of society, some of which are powerful enough to dictate terms to the regime. These properties now belong to the state, and the fact that this should happen in a country having 98 per cent of Muslim population, is not lost on anyone.
True to his reputation for double-talk, President Erdogan has been spreading the propaganda that all his efforts — controlling the judiciary, cracking down on the media, intimidating and jailing political opponents, micro-managing the freedom of speech of the state’s citizens — are aimed at combating the threat of Islamist terrorism. In a bid to foster this impression, he has been vocal in demanding that the US extradite the Islamic cleric, Gulen. He has also tightened the country’s anti-terrorism laws, which is a cloaked attempt to fix his opponents. The principal and obvious target is the pro-Kurdish Peoples’ Democratic Party (with whom he has failed to arrive at a conciliation), though other rivals too could be in trouble because of the new provisions. Ironically, while Erdogan continues to use religion to play both ways, he dubs the European Union (EU) as a “Christian Club”. His rant should be seen in the context of the, until now, failed attempt by his Government to lead Turkey into the EU in the immediate future.
President Erdogan has betrayed the hopes and aspirations of the liberals in Turkey. Ironically, he is not too liked by the radicals as well, who view him with suspicion. That leaves him with a Janus-like legacy.
Source: dailypioneer.com/columnists/edit/the-erdogan-puzzle-solving-the-insolvable.html
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A Brief History of the Aleppo Battle
By Stanly Johny
December 22, 2016
The battle for the city has brought Syria to a critical crossroads: how the world deals with Bashar al-Assad may well define the country’s future.
Bashar al-Assad has just clinched his greatest victory in the almost six-year-old Syrian civil war. Aleppo, which was the country’s largest city before the civil war broke out, was one of his early and biggest losses. But having recapturing the rebel-held parts of the city, his regime now controls all major population centres in Syria, stretching from the Druze city of Suwayda to the Sunni-majority Aleppo.
The victory will certainly boost the morale of the regime forces, while the opposition militants, left to some enclaves, will find it difficult to sustain the fight in the long run, unless there’s a foreign intervention in favour of them. From the Syrian perspective, the regime has defeated armed gangs in Aleppo which they had been illegally occupying. But that’s not how the battle for Aleppo was received. The regime faces serious allegations of human rights violations. The U.S. accuses Damascus of war crimes, while France claims Mr. Assad’s “destructive drive” is harming the “defenceless civilian population” in Aleppo. Besides, the dominant narrative in the international media about Aleppo in particular and Syria in general is that a rogue regime is massacring civilians while fighting a political opposition, aka “moderate rebels”, who strive for the “Syrian revolution”.
The Larger Context
It is important to understand the broader context of these claims. The regime lost the eastern half of Aleppo to militants in 2012. At any point of the conflict, it sheltered a large majority of Aleppo’s more than two million residents. The militants’ initial plan was to capture the whole of the city. But they were stopped halfway by regime forces, and from 2012 there was a stalemate, though both occasionally attacked each other, killing fighters as well as civilians. The balance of the conflict changed only after Russia intervened in favour of the regime in September 2015. Government forces launched a massive operation early this year, assisted by the Russian air force, fighters from Hezbollah and Iran-trained militias.
Secondly, who are these “moderate rebels” the Syrian government is fighting in Aleppo? In the initial days of the conflict, it was the Free Syrian Army (FSA), largely composed of rebel soldiers and helped by Turkey, which fought the regime forces in Aleppo. But as the civil war turned uglier and spawned jihadist groups, and FSA lost its influence, its fighters either withdrew to Turkey or merged with local militant factions. One of the most dominant jihadist groups was Jabhat al-Nusra, the al-Qaeda branch in Syria founded by Abu Mohammad al-Jolani, a former lieutenant of Abu bakr al-Baghdadi, now the ‘Caliph’ of the Islamic State. When he was leader of al-Qaeda of Iraq, Baghdadi sent Jolani across the border to join anti-government forces in the civil war. The ideologically-charged, ferocious al-Nusra soon emerged as a powerful militant group in the Syrian opposition. Baghdadi later split with Jolani to found the Islamic State, but since then, the IS and al-Nusra acted as two competing movements of the jihadist project in Syria.
Opposition Coalitions
Eastern Aleppo soon became a key base for al-Nusra. In early 2016, when the Syrian regime launched an operation to retake the eastern city, militants were divided into three blocs — Aleppo Conquest, Ansar al-Sharia and Euphrates Volcano. Of this, the Euphrates Volcano largely comprised Kurdish militants not directly fighting the regime but the IS. The other two, the real anti-government forces on the ground, are dominated by al-Nusra Front, aka al-Qaeda. The major militant groups in the Aleppo Conquest are Jama’at (a sub-unit of al-Nusra), Fajr al-Khilafa Brigades and Ahrar al-Sham (both are allied with Nusra). Ahrar al-Sham, which wants to overthrow the Assad regime and build an Islamic state in Syria based on Sharia, is financed by Saudi Arabia and Turkey. The Aleppo Conquest has been accused of war crimes.
The other coalition, Ansar al-Sharia, was formed by al-Nusra in July 2015. As of October 2015, the coalition had 11 militant groups as its members, including the Qaeda branch. Their common goal was to seize all of Aleppo and impose Sharia. Though Nusra rechristened itself as Fateh al-Sham and announced it had severed ties with al-Qaeda in August this year, it was basically a stunt to repackage themselves as the “moderate rebels”. Neither its world view nor its operational strategy has changed, and the leadership remains intact. In the last days of the conflict, the remaining fighters in Aleppo are members of this coalition. There were reports that the rebels prevented civilians from fleeing the city even after the government opened humanitarian corridors. On December 14, the UN Commission for Inquiry for Syria referred to allegations that “opposition groups are preventing civilians from leaving as well as opposition fighters embedding themselves within the civilian population”. By political ideology or actions, these groups are not substantially different from the IS. While the IS wants to establish a caliphate across the borders, al-Nusra and Ahrar al-Sham want to turn Syria into a theocratic state. They share common views on non-Sunni sects, women and the future of the Syrian society. What they differ on is who should hold power in Damascus.
To be sure, Mr. Assad is no saint. But the situation in Syria is too complicated to make a simple moral choice among the two warring sides. However ruthless Mr. Assad may be, there is no military alternative in today’s Syria. If his regime, which still offers protection to a majority of the people, is militarily destroyed, the country will only plunge deeper into the civil war between jihadist militia groups, similar to what happened in Afghanistan after the communists fell or what’s happening in Libya now after NATO “liberated” the country in 2011. But there could be political alternatives to Mr. Assad — a diplomatic solution that seeks to rebuild the country instead of further weakening its state. For that, two things have to happen. One, the government should be ready for a dialogue on Syria’s future with the non-jihadist opposition groups. Two, the outside powers that are involved in Syria’s civil war through proxies need to rethink their approach. The political rebellion they started financing has long been hijacked by extremists who are now on the run. To keep bankrolling them will only further destabilise the region.
Source: thehindu.com/opinion/op-ed/A-brief-history-of-the-Aleppo-battle/article16919595.ece
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Turkey Is the Canary in the Coal Mine, Forecasting Whether the West-Led Liberal Order Has A Future
By Abhijnan Rej
December 22, 2016
The assassination of the Russian ambassador to Turkey, Andrei Karlov, in Ankara on Monday caps an already-troublesome year for Turkey that saw an unsuccessful coup and a spate of high-intensity terrorist attacks. The geopolitical ramifications of Karlov’s assassination – and the degree to which Russia would seek concessions from Turkey as compensation – is not yet clear.
What is evident is that the ebb and flow of Turkey’s trajectory in the recent years closely parallel the three of the greatest risks to the post-war liberal international order. These risks are the growing fissure between Islamism and the West – in Europe and its periphery, the rise of authoritarian leaders within ostensibly democratic frameworks, and the visible fragility of American alliances and the security architectures that sustain them.
Modern Turkey, as envisioned by Mustafa Kemal Ataturk after the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, was to be a staunchly secular state. The Turkish military saw to it that Ataturk’s conception of the state remained intact. Turkey would become a frontline Western state in the American anti-Soviet containment policy, as a member of NATO and other collective security mechanisms.
But Europe never fully opened up to Turkey as one of its own. Despite Bush Jr’s exhortations that Turkey be admitted to the European Union – and therefore serve as a model for other Muslim-majority states to emulate – European powers never warmed to this idea. This was a cause of resentment among many Turks.
With Recep Tayyip Erdogan at helm, Turkey’s flirtation with Islamism began to acquire an institutional character. Erdogan imagined Turkey’s role as a buffer state between Europe and West Asia as leverage to obtain significant concessions from the EU while, at the same time, playing the Sunni-Shia conflict for its own geopolitical advantage. This in turn, and much like Pakistan, exposed Turkey to Islamist violence on its own soil. Instead of consolidating its image as a secular republic, Turkey today embodies a schizophrenic relationship – between Turkey as a nominal ally of the West, and as a country with a significant Islamist base.
When pundits talk about the rise of illiberal democracies led by authoritarian leaders, Turkey is at the top of the list of examples. What started out as a fringe movement on the edge of Europe – in Hungary and Poland – now appears to be mainstream. First PM, and then president, Erdogan has cracked down on the press and aligns his policy priorities as a conservative Muslim. Much like other authoritarian leaders of our era, he also enjoys significant support from the Turkish people. The extent of this became clear during the failed coup this summer when people took to the streets to foil it.
Erdogan has also publicly challenged Turkey’s long-term commitment to Western-led alliances. A couple of months ago, he hinted at Turkey seeking membership in the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) – a Sino-Russian central Asian security framework. In fact, Turkey seems to have internalised, for the moment that Russia as a temporary ally serves its long-term calculations better than America as a permanent friend.
This is why despite a serious conflagration last November – when Turkey shot down a Russian fighter jet – Erdogan has been more than keen to make nice with Putin. This is also why Turkey will, in all certainty, heavily crack down on groups that it suspects to be behind Ambassador Karlov’s assassination while publicly blaming US-based dissident Fethullah Gulen as the culprit. It goes without saying that given the diametrically opposite stances of Turkey and Russia over Syria, this is a tightrope act.
Though Erdogan seems to be using the possibility of a Russia-Turkey entente as a bargaining chip to strike a deal with the West – shades of another populist, Donald Trump, here – this has the potential to unnerve the US. To wit, this would be the first time, should Turkey indeed join the SCO, that a Nato member is also part of a pact that has Nato’s greatest worry, Vladimir Putin, as a leader. Should countries like Turkey exhibit wavering commitment to the US-led security architecture, this does not bode well for the future of the architecture itself.
The canary in the coal mine is Turkey. Its trajectory will serve as the best indicator of the future of the liberal world order in the years to come.
Source: blogs.timesofindia.indiatimes.com/toi-edit-page/turkey-is-the-canary-in-the-coal-mine-forecasting-whether-the-west-led-liberal-order-has-a-future/
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A Year of Living Dangerously
By Happymon Jacob
December 22, 2016 00:04 IST
Loc Tensions
Along with a disturbing rise in attacks on Army camps across Jammu and Kashmir, the Line of Control and the International Boundary in the State are also alarmingly tense today.
Pakistan’s decision not to respond to India’s surgical strikes after the terrorist attack on the Army base in Uri may have seemed at the time like a major political victory for the Narendra Modi government in New Delhi. But it is increasingly becoming evident that not only was the political victory short-lived, the country is paying a heavy price for the cross-LoC strike on September 29. While the Pakistan Army refused to admit that the surgical strikes ever took place, it has since been retaliating: unstated, surreptitiously and through proxies. Consider this: with Saturday’s attack on an Indian army convoy in Kashmir’s Pampore, the armed forces in Kashmir have lost over 60 men this year alone.
Along with this disturbing rise in the attacks on Army camps across Jammu and Kashmir, the LoC and International Boundary (IB) in the State are also alarmingly tense today. Ceasefire violation-related military casualties on the Indian side itself are 12 so far, highest since the ceasefire agreement — which has all but collapsed now — was arrived at in 2003.
Strategic Implications of the Strikes
From a military point of view, the cross-LoC operation was limited and carefully calibrated: there was no targeting of Pakistani military installations as the operation was claimed to be against terror camps and not against the Pakistan Army, and the Director General of Military Operations (DGMO) telephoned his Pakistani counterpart after the operations ended and conveyed the counter-terrorist intent behind the strike. The DGMO further clarified that the “Indian Army conducted surgical strikes at several of these launch pads ‘along’ Line of Control.”
Moreover, the operation was hardly a surprise to Rawalpindi given the high level of political and military signalling from the Indian side between the Uri attack and the surgical strikes. The Pakistan Army is also said to have monitored a great deal of ‘operation-related chatter’ from the Indian side. Indeed, New Delhi’s post-strike triumphalism did have negative reputational impact on the all-powerful General Headquarters in Rawalpindi and for the Nawaz Sharif government in Islamabad. If so, why did the Pakistan Army not resist, or hit back after New Delhi hailed the military action as a blockbuster victory (even though we now know that such operations were conducted in the past as well)?
Does this mean that Rawalpindi displayed a certain amount of tolerance for the Indian military action given that it was carried out after 19 Indian soldiers were killed, and national anger was mounting in India? I recently asked a senior (retired) Pakistani General about the ‘level of tolerance’ for potential surgical strike-like action in future by India. I was told rather bluntly that it would depend on the Pakistan Army’s complicity in the attack: the more the complicity, the less the retaliation. Or differently put, no complicity would mean definite retaliation.
While this might appear to provide an operational window for future Indian military action across the LoC below the Pakistani redline, a proactive military strategy based on the assumption of Pakistani indulgence is rife with multiple challenges. First of all, it would be rather difficult to fix the degree of state complicity in an attack within a severely limited time frame for any retaliatory operation. The Pakistan Army’s tolerance, if it indeed exists, and international community’s acceptance would be time-sensitive. Second, local commanders along the LoC on the Pakistani side could misread the ‘accepted threshold’ assumption and act differently than expected when attacked.
Third, the Indian side would, as it did post-surgical strikes, radically exaggerate the success of its retaliatory strike in order to show that the Pakistani tolerance level for Indian retaliation is high. The Pakistani side would, on the other hand, as it did post-surgical strikes, deny the operation altogether or lower its level and success (i.e. that operation was limited to the LoC only) to reduce the perceived level of Pakistani tolerance by India. Finding a via media between these two extreme positions for operational purposes is easier said than done, and trying to exploit that fine balance may be setting out on a dangerous course of action.
Finally, that there was no vertical escalation after the surgical strikes even though this was an openly declared attack on Pakistan’s territory assumes a great deal of significance. While this might, at one level, go to show that the Indian and Pakistani sides are able to control the escalation dynamics under extreme stress, it would be wrong to assume that India’s cross-LoC operation has gone not responded to by Pakistan. Indeed, the response is currently playing out. Consider the following.
The Low-Cost Response
Responding to the surgical strikes with matching force would not have been a smart strategy for Pakistan given that it would have been hard for Rawalpindi to pull it off. This, in my reckoning, perhaps explains the Pakistani inaction and the refusal to acknowledge the Indian attack. When you don’t acknowledge an action, you don’t have to react to it.
However, the story doesn’t end there. Pakistan is currently responding to the Indian strikes in a way it is materially able to and ‘at a time and place of its choosing’: by firing on the border and organising coordinated attacks on Indian Army bases/convoys through its proxies such as the Jaish-e-Mohammed and Lashkar-e-Taiba. These two cheap strategies seem to essentially make up Rawalpindi’s response to New Delhi’s surgical strikes.
India was highly emboldened by the Pakistan military’s non-retaliation after the September strikes but it is today recognising that while it may have pulled off the military action and the subsequent political management of it, the costs are mounting day after day. The LoC and the IB have become the new battlefield, and we should expect a lot more action along these borderlands in the days ahead. Both India and Pakistan seem to be using these contested borders as an arena for settling scores which they do not want to settle in a conventional pitched battle. In short, lower-level instability seems to be the order of the day in the near future.
While border firing might seem less escalatory than cross-border raids, ceasefire violations are a slow killer: as ceasefire violation-related casualties continue to rise, they could lead to political and diplomatic escalation, and sustained violations together with covert cross-border raids (as it has happened more than once in the past) could potentially lead to vertical military escalation.
The other cheap strategy in response to India’s surgical strikes seems to be well-planned low-intensity attacks on Indian forces in J&K. While border firing hurts both parties, low-intensity strikes (for example, Nagrota and Pampore) hurt only India since it loses soldiers in such raids, whereas Pakistan only loses expendable proxies. The argument here is not that such attacks against Army camps did not take place before September this year, but that they are likely to increase with more precision and determination in the days ahead.
Moreover, thanks to the stand-off, Islamabad and Rawalpindi will continue to fan the Kashmir uprising with even more vigour. Notwithstanding the fact that the recent Kashmir uprising was essentially indigenous in nature, Pakistani grandstanding and renewed domestic political mobilisation within Pakistan over Kashmir, and the military strategising for a sustained Kashmir campaign will keep Kashmir on the boil.
Pakistan’s adoption of such low-cost strategies to respond to India’s surgical strikes also lands the Modi government in a rather awkward commitment trap. Though the post-Uri strikes and the political posturing by the Bharatiya Janata Party were supposed to convey to Rawalpindi and the domestic audience in India that attacks on Indian forces won’t go unpunished anymore, the reality is that both the Nagrota and Pampore attacks have gone unpunished. This leaves the Modi government in a strategic quandary: it has neither been able to live up to its commitment nor has its threats been able to dissuade the Pakistan Army. If anything, the Pakistan Army seems to have called the Modi government’s bluff.
National Security Implications
The current stand-off with Pakistan has drastically deteriorated our overall national security environment. Our soldiers in the north-western frontier are far more in danger today than they had been in recent years. The precious lives of soldiers would have been saved had New Delhi avoided an unnecessarily aggressive policy in J&K and towards Pakistan. There is also growing disquiet within the Indian armed forces about the needless loss of lives because politicians are unwilling to reach a modus Vivendi on political issues both within Kashmir and vis-à-vis Pakistan.
Besides the military casualties, there is yet another form of collateral damage: the lives and livelihoods of people living along the border. Despite the recurrent hardship that they have to go through, villagers don’t speak out in public thanks to the extreme levels of right-wing political mobilisation in Jammu. Suffering and death are couched in the language of Deshbhakti (patriotism). In private, however, they recount the untold miseries due to ceasefire violations. The year-long violations in 2014, for instance, had displaced them for several months. This is a collateral damage that goes unsung and unacknowledged.
Happymon Jacob is Associate Professor of Diplomacy and Disarmament Studies at Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi.
Source: thehindu.com/opinion/lead/A-year-of-living-dangerously/article16919538.ece