BY ERDAL SAFAK
SABAH- History couldn't have prepared a worse joke for US President Barack Obama, who was elected by Americans to fix the eight years of damage caused by his predecessors George W. Bush and Dick Cheney. After he received the Nobel Peace Prize in Oslo, he announced the decision to expand the war in Afghanistan. This way the Afghan war which was started by the Bush administration became Obama's war. He has actually made this choice as soon as he was elected president of withdrawing from Iraq and focusing on Afghanistan. When he was elected, nearly 35,000 American soldiers were fighting in Afghanistan. Obama boosted this number to 71,000. Now he'll go above 100,000 with an additional 30,000 troops.
Furthermore, he called on US allies to provide additional support of 5,000-10,000 soldiers, including Ankara. Besides US troops, there are still slightly more than 71,000 soldiers from 43 countries working in Afghanistan. As of last month, 720 of them were Turkish troops, but as Defense Minister Vecdi Gonul said that we've since sent 958 more soldiers, as of now Turkish soldiers in Afghanistan number nearly 1,700.
It's not clear if the request made by US Ambassador to Ankara James Jeffrey that Turkey send more soldiers immediately after Obama announced his new Afghanistan strategy this week covers the 958 soldiers sent last month or something more. But we know from Jeffrey's statement that the US has a more important expectation than additional soldiers: making the missions of soldiers in Afghanistan more flexible. To see what this means, we have to look at the status of the powers in Afghanistan. There are still two separate forces in Afghanistan: Operation Enduring Freedom, and the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF). Enduring Freedom is conducted by forces called the 'US coalition.' This force overthrew the Taliban regime back in late 2001. It mainly fights against the remaining Taliban and al-Qaeda, while the ISAF is called the 'NATO coalition.' This is what Turkey is involved in.
Although certain units in the ISAF (such as the British, Italians and Canadians) support the war against the Taliban and al-Qaeda, the NATO forces' priority is to train Afghan army and security units, provide the nation with training and health services, and help to build infrastructure. The Turkish soldiers have always conducted their missions as part of this; that is, they have built schools, hospitals, and police stations, trained the police and soldiers, conducted health tests, organized vaccination campaigns, and given courses. Now the US wants to change things by bringing Turkish soldiers alongside Western forces fighting the Taliban. In other words, it wants Turkish soldiers to fight.
This request is nothing but a call to disaster, because it would mean Muslims killing Muslims. From the very beginning, both the government and the General Staff have always rejected such US expectations. We're sure that this time they will press harder, and actually they did. What's more, except for the Korean War at the beginning of the 1950s, Turkey has never fought in the operations it's taken part in under the UN and NATO umbrellas. It has always played the peace-making and peace- and stability-providing role. It will and should continue to do the same in Afghanistan.