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EURASIA INSIGHT

TURKISH PRESIDENT’S VISIT TO WASHINGTON HERALDS UPTURN IN BILATERAL TIES
Nicholas Birch 1/08/08

Less than three months ago, the United States and Turkey seemed poised for a political falling out. Since then, bilateral ties have made a stunning comeback, and Turkish President Abdullah Gul, who arrived in Washington on January 7, is expected to stress "the new found warmth" during a meeting with US President George W. Bush.

Closer strategic cooperation opened the way for the rapid US-Turkish rapprochement. Gul’s visit is coming two months after Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan secured a US pledge to provide real-time intelligence support for Turkish raids against Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) bases in northern Iraq. [For background see the Eurasia Insight archive]. With US backing, the Turkish military opened an aerial bombardment campaign of PKK camps on December 16. Two days later, Washington turned a blind eye to a small army incursion into Iraq.

Turks saw the US intelligence support as the first serious sign that Washington was taking their struggle against the PKK seriously. Accordingly, anti-American sentiment in Turkey began experiencing a decline. "The latest developments have been a turning point" in US-Turkish relations, Gul told Turkish journalists accompanying him to Washington. He added that Turkish "aid to northern Iraq and Iraq as a whole would increase tenfold � once the PKK is out."

"Our relations with the United States have an importance that goes beyond our relations with any other country. The United States is not [just] any ally for us, it is the most important ally," added Gul, as reported in Today’s Zaman. "It is a fact that there has been some turmoil in the relations in past years. But today this has been overcome, and a climate of confidence has emerged."

Speaking on CNN-Turk television recently, the government’s chief foreign policy advisor, Ahmet Davutoglu, characterized relations between Ankara and Washington as "the best they have been since the end of the Cold War."

The long-standing US-Turkish alliance seemed on the brink of collapse as recently as last October, when the US Congress appeared poised to adopt a resolution to recognize the World War I-era slaughter of Armenians in Ottoman Turkey as genocide. [For background see the Eurasia Insight archive]. In addition, Ankara felt that Washington was not doing enough to contain PKK militants. [For background see the Eurasia Insight archive].

Now, to keep diplomatic momentum moving forward, some experts believe Turkey should help advance Washington’s global diplomatic agenda. Along with the Iraqi government and the European Union, the Bush administration is keen to see Turkey rapidly follow up military action against the PKK with political and economic policies aimed at diminishing Kurdish support for militancy. But following a PKK bomb attack that killed six people in southeastern Turkey on January 3, it is now unclear whether Turkish government talk of a PKK pardon can receive needed support from either the military or the hawkish mainstream media.

Meanwhile, Middle Eastern geopolitics remains a potential stumbling block in US-Turkish relations. With Bush set to depart after his meeting with Gul on the longest Middle Eastern tour of his presidency, few analysts think Washington and Ankara will ever see eye to eye on Iran and Syria, Turkey’s neighbors and � more or less � friends.

Some analysts believe that Pakistan, a country in turmoil since the December 27 assassination of presidential hopeful Benazir Bhutto, is one area where Turkey can play an important supporting role for the United States. "Turkey has a lot of credit in both Pakistan and Afghanistan," says Hikmet Cetin, a former NATO senior representative in Afghanistan. "It has more space for maneuver than the United States in both countries, and it should do more."

With 1,500 troops in Afghanistan, Turkey is the only Muslim state contributing to peacekeeping efforts there.

But Turkey’s close interest in the region extends further than that. Pakistan’s founders modeled their state on that developed by Turkish founder Kemal Ataturk. Many Turkish 30-somethings can still sing bits of the Pakistani national anthem that they were made to learn when Pakistani dictator Mohammad Zia ul-Haq visited Turkey in the 1980s.

More recently, and more seriously, Turkey played an important behind-the-scenes role in the historic 2005 meeting between the Pakistani and Israeli foreign ministers. Last April, Pakistan’s president, Pervez Musharraf, was in Ankara to broker an agreement with Afghan leader Hamid Karzai to increase cooperation over anti-terrorism. [For background see the Eurasia Insight archive].

Gul repaid the compliment to his Turkish-educated, fluent Turkish-speaking counterpart when he traveled to Pakistan on December 3 for talks with Musharraf. He also met with Bhutto and Nawaf Sharif, another Pakistani presidential contender. "Turkey has very close political and military relations with Pakistan," said Zeyno Baran, a Turkish expert at the Hudson Institute in Washington.

Baran suggested that Ankara wouldn’t need to offer much to win US gratitude. "As a Muslim country, Turkey has a natural insight that westerners sometimes lack," she said. "Simply translating what is happening on the ground [in Pakistan] to a western perspective would be a great help."

A Pakistan expert at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, George Perkovich, agrees that members of the Bush administration would appreciate Turkish input on the formulation of a stabilization strategy for Islamabad. Since Bhutto’s assassination, he says, senior members of the Bush administration have "absolved themselves of Pakistan. They don’t know what they want to do. If somebody from Turkey came along and said �we’ve got an idea of how to push things forward’, I think the President would say, �Jeeze, tell me.’"

The issue of Pakistan was on the agenda for the Gul-Bush meeting. Turkish diplomats specializing in the region accompanied the Turkish president to Washington. Responding to a question about Pakistan on January 7, Gul himself said that Turkey was "the country that knows and understand this region the best."

Yet, beyond agreement with Washington that Pakistan and Afghanistan represent a combined, and growing, security threat, there is little evidence that the Turkish delegation is coming with creative ideas, either large or small. Most analysts put that lack of creativity down to Turkey’s preoccupation with other issues. One senior Turkish official who knows Pakistan well thinks it has more to do with the source of Pakistan’s turmoil. He believes Pakistan’s problem will not be solved until something is done to control the "hundreds of extremist madrasa [religious colleges]" in the country’s tribal northwest. "I don’t know how ready Turkey is to take a strong stance in the fight against religious fundamentalism over there," he said.

Editor�s Note: Nicolas Birch specializes in Turkey, Iran and the Middle East.

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