Communicating Arts - Main Web SiteOne may wish the PKK membership list, whatever its authenticity or age, did not exist in that it pushes the rank-and-file within the guerrilla band away from desertion and into a less equivocal stand-or-surrender position.
Given the nature of other Islamic small wars, surrender will be a late option, if that, for those known through the list by Turkish authorities.
While one might say, "good, I hope they get them all," the price disinterested parties--the non-members, if you will, in the PKK sphere of influence--will pay for having through chance geographic proximity to the organization may or may not galvanize Kurdish resistence to or resentment of the incursion.
This is tough political calculus for the United States as well as military and political scientists worldwide. In essence, focusing on the PKK leadership and scattering the rest, a half-measure of uncertain adequacy, has been taken off the table in favor of a more thorough piece of work but one more dangerous.
As was thought during the U.S. invasion of Iraq, the sooner the war ends the better; as with some plans elsewhere, even with extraordinary control over the "battlespace" as at Nahr al-Bared this year, guerrilla fighting has a way of creeping along into tomorrow and the next day and so many after that.
There's a challenge to creating retreat or alternative course for one's enemies, and it would seem often insurmountable for them to find that for themselves. I've used the word "inexorable" once today and here wish to use it again: there seems in this way of "working problems" that suffering through the full extent of misery becomes as inevitable as it may be remarkable.
Somalia today can barely sustain a humanitarian aid mission or two for the inability of its troops, bandits, rebels, and warlords to refrain from making the same targets for mayhem and plundering; ditto, Darfur.
Cold weather will come to Iraqi Kurdistan, and both the Turkish Army and PKK rebels will suffer as it does, but the rebels, approximately 3,000, will either escape through relatives and sympathizers elsewhere, or, if sufficiently cordoned about now, they simply won't as the numbers of the force against them would seem by every measure overwhelming.
With the regional government and most of its constituents benefiting from "peace and prosperity" in general and the Kurds dependent, healthily so, on Turkish services and trade, the Peshmerga may be in the same position as the Lebanese Army during the Israeli incursion against Hezbollah and its rocket attacks: it hasn't a way of defending its uncommitted citizens without also tangling itself in political barbed wire.
For the sake of realpolitic and the lives of so many uninvolved or far less involved Kurds, one may hope the incursion goes fast, produces much in the way of what the Turks want, and ends with a fugitive PKK contingent that may then be demoted to an INTERPOL-type security interest
1. "Turkish air force on the move." Reuters, October 26, 2007.
Correspondence: James S. Oppenheim
Comments