Turkey
opinionjournal.com
America's ally is poised to lead the Muslim world.
BY MELIK KAYLAN
Thursday, October 25, 2001 12:01 a.m. EDT
As American eyes scan eastward across a troubled Islamic horizon of equivocal friends and outright enemies, they should rest their gaze on Turkey, an unfaltering ally, and take heart. Turkey's decades-long fortitude in the service of Western interests and a Pax Americana has garnered meager applause from its allies--and a ton of trouble from its regional rivals. Yet it remains our most dependable resource in the Islamic world, and, as the world's most successful secular Muslim democracy, is set to play perhaps the most critical role of all our allies. We should dance a jig of gratitude for what Turkey has endured for our side up to now, because it points the way to what it could do for us henceforward.
The Turks have outfaced and outlasted all of the last century's devouring political upheavals. Consider how their neighbors--from the Balkans, the Soviet bloc, and in the Middle East--succumbed to the various temptations of fascism, communism, nonalignment, and Islamic fundamentalism, when Turkey did not. The country has not always presented a pretty face during its self-protective exertions, especially in the area of human rights. Encircled by the likes of Russia, Iran, Iraq and Syria, Turkey has perforce maintained a kind of "Bunker Democracy."
How else, one might ask, could Turkey have stayed the course while permitting the North Atlantic Treaty Organization to station anti-Soviet ICBMs within its borders, making it a prime nuclear first-strike target, and letting the U.S. use its airbases against Iraq, once a valuable trading partner? The same grim self-discipline kept the Turks from recent foreign adventures in defense of their ethnic cousins who were enduring slaughter in Bosnia, Azerbaijan and Chechnya.
But now it's time for the Turks, with Western support and encouragement, to come out of their bunker and exert themselves in shaping history outside their borders. That they were among the first allies to volunteer unconditional support for the U.S., offering everything from bases to soldiers, shows that they are willing. Their record shows that they are able. What remains is for the West to help Turkey mobilize its potential.
Turkey offers pivotal strategic and cultural salients in the fight against Islamic terrorism. For the immediate purposes of a possible ground war in Afghanistan, the battle-readiness of Turkish troops among allied forces will prove invaluable. Turkey has NATO's largest standing army in Europe, and has just fought a fierce internal war against Kurdish Marxists in terrain and conditions not unlike Afghanistan. Politically, the troops' very presence in their midst furnishes the allies with an early propaganda victory. This is not a West-vs.-Islam crusade, because nonfundamentalist Muslims such as Turks will fight for the Western side.
Moreover, the Turks already have a regional interest in Afghan affairs: Their Turkic cousins, the Uzbeks, have a sizable minority living in Afghanistan that supports the Northern Alliance. Leaders of the Afghan-Uzbek militia such as Gen. Rashid Dostum have, over the years, spent time in Turkey. And like the Turks, both the Uzbeks in Uzbekistan and their fellow ethnic Uzbeks who live in Afghanistan have adhered to a secular form of Islam for almost a century.
In the post-Soviet era, Afghanistan's Uzbek militias have received their war materiel from Russia, which has meant that many other Afghan Muslims and nationalists have viewed them with suspicion. This has set back the cause of secular Muslims in Afghanistan. But it has suited Russian strategy perfectly well. Russia has used the threat of Islamic fundamentalism to retain a post-Soviet colonial hold on its former Central Asian client states, the "stans," such as Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan and Tajikistan, several of which abut the Afghan border. Several are also hugely rich in natural resources, enough to shift the world's dependence on Mid-east oil.
Although most of these states are ethnically Turkic, Turkey has stayed out of the fray. But important shifts have begun to unfold in the region's alignments. Uzbekistan has allowed the U.S. to use its military bases in early contravention of Russian directives. Indeed, American and British special forces are already said to be operating from those Uzbek bases.
Now is the time for Turkey, as a Western proxy, to replace Russia's influence in the area. This will have several salutary strategic effects. It will deprive the region's militant Islamists of an important legitimizing anticolonial role. It will invalidate the invocation of "jihad" among those who wish to export fundamentalism against the Turkic states, since a war fought against other Muslims--aligned with Turkey, not Russia--is no jihad. It will create a secular Turkic continuum, or bloc of states, to counteract both the Iranian and Pakistan-Afghan fundamentalism abroad in the region. Ultimately, it will also help free up strategic reserves of oil and gas, currently under Russian veto, possessed by ex-Soviet republics. Alleviating the region's poverty is perhaps the most obvious counter to the appeal of Islamic fundamentalism.
And yet, the infusion of wealth has not exactly countered it in Saudi Arabia. Which is where Turkey's cultural role in the region also becomes paramount. For centuries, the Ottoman Empire presided over Muslim doctrine and much of Islam's geography. Its subjects lived under a precise and codified system of multiethnic religious tolerance. One might say, with hindsight, that the Ottomans conferred a sanity on the Middle East that has not existed since their departure. These days, Turkey endures as the most prominent secular Muslim society in the world; indeed as one of Islam's few functioning democracies, Turkey and its Kemalist system can furnish other Muslim countries with an alternative model to the fundamentalism of Saudi-built mosques and maddrassas.
The U.S., and the British before them, championed the Gulf states and Saudi Arabia for decades. The result is evident for all to see: Saudi cultural influence has grown out of all proportion, allowing them to export their primitive home-grown form of jihadist Wahhabism throughout the world. The time is long overdue for the West to help effect an equivalent but countervailing dissemination of the Turkish model through the Islamic geosphere.
There is no reason why Indonesia or Malaysia, so far from the Mideast, should opt for an Arabian approach to religion except that it was the only one on offer. Several non-Arab Muslim countries have elected women prime ministers. For these cultures, the Kemalist system with its liberation of women to dress, work, travel and study in relative freedom, is surely more sympathetic than the Saudi variety. Turkey can be to Islam what Hong Kong was to China, an example that ultimately prevails because it advertises a manifestly better life gained through a freer pursuit of happiness.
However, the West must foster and abet Turkey's elevation into the role of paradigm, as it did successfully with Hong Kong and so disastrously with the Saudis. The throw-weight of the Turkish message depends on the success of Turkey's economy, the expansion and export of its secular education system, the optimism of its pro-Western youth culture.
Turks have already done much of the work for us. Istanbul today is one of the most entrancing and dynamic cities on earth, certainly in the Islamic world. Like Hong Kong was to China, Istanbul too stands in colorful contrast to the dour circumspection that prevails in most Islamic capitals.
Many a hypocritical fundamentalist repairs there to savor its douceur de vivre along with a good many refugees from the Muslim world's myriad self-strangling economies.
However unwittingly, the Turks have already crafted a cultural product much in demand.
For our own sakes, it's time the West helped package it and export it to the Muslim world.
Message 16617550 |
