BY MEHMET ALI KISLALI
RADIKAL- Although low-intensity conflict is now called asymmetrical war, it's not actually like a guerilla war. It's a very different combat, with its own unique rules and needs. Britain's T.E. Lawrence - "Lawrence of Arabia" - described it as being like 'eating soup with a knife.' In his new book 'The Sling and The Stone,' US Col. Thomas Hammes describes it as the war of the 21st century and argues that to win this war, first its true nature must be understood, and that from now on wars won't be waged by armies confronting each other. Neither man is wrong, because countries with large armies have recently been unable to win such wars.
But things in Turkey are different. Turkey is working against a small part of a separatist ethnic group on its own territory, whereas most members of the group are outside Turkey's borders. Nearly 80,000 village guards fight against them, and this fight has been going on for 24 years. Turkey has been unable to take control of the resistance in a short period of time, unlike in the early years of the republic. This obviously comes from how the modern world no longer allows the state to use unlimited force. Countries with similar problems, such as Britain and Spain, brought their struggles to an acceptable level without facing as many casualties as we did when neighboring countries cut their support for the IRA and ETA. But Turkey hasn't reduced its own low-intensity conflict to an acceptable level. It has apparently been unable to internalize, explain or implement the rules governing such struggles.
So has the Turkish Armed Forces (TSK) been helpless in the face of the terrorist PKK, which takes inspiration from Mao? We can answer this by examining the past and present of both the TSK and PKK. It was bad luck for the TSK that the fight against the PKK began in 1984, in the wake of the 1980 coup. The ruling party at that time declared a state of emergency, taking Britain's colonial years as an example, without fully understanding the situation, and so got off to a bad start. When the terrorist PKK was about to declare a part of southeastern Anatolia a so-called 'rebel zone' in the early 1990s, the TSK started to take proper steps and so prevented this.
When terrorist PKK head Abdullah Ocalan was captured in 1999, the entire country mistakenly thought that the problem was solved. It was unfortunate for Turkey that none of its ruling parties took any steps to counter this complex and difficult problem. The ruling parties tried to meet military requests without understanding the vital importance of the issue. Was this issue dealt with by postgraduates sent to the West, or within the TSK or the military academies? How did the TSK command see their goals in this? How much has it tried to develop its ability to win an asymmetrical war, and what results has it seen? In light of all this, what has it requested from the ruling parties? And how many of these requests were fulfilled? Who can say that these questions have been sufficiently answered, and what necessary steps have been taken in this critical period since the establishment of the republic?