Micheal Doran: By allying with the PKK, we set ourselves on a collision course with Turkey
Part of Michael Doran’s speech transcript of the October 15th, 2019 Hudson event titled After the Syrian Pullback: What Next for U.S. Middle East Policy? :
Michael Doran:
I think it’s important that we focus on where we would like all this to end, how we want to bring this to a solution. And I think it’s important to recognize that we were postured for catastrophic failure in northeastern Syria because we entered into an alliance with the PKK. And we – the YPG, the Kurdish force that we worked with on the ground, is the PKK.
This is a terrorist organization on the State Department’s terrorism list that seeks to partition Turkey between Kurds and Turks. By aligning with the PKK – or actually, allying with the PKK, we set ourselves on a collision course with Turkey. That was unwise from a humanitarian point of view, and it was extremely unwise from a strategic point of view. The strategic prize in this situation is the orientation – the international orientation of Turkey. The Turks have been telling us for years now that they don’t like the fact that we are providing a power umbrella under which the PKK can build an autonomous Kurdish statelet in northeastern Syria. And we have, effectively, time and time again told them to sit down and shut up. And we rebranded the PKK as the SDF. We brought in Arabs and Yazidis and others, as Mary Beth is saying, but the power center of that organization always was the PKK.
And we should recognize that we lied to ourselves. The Obama administration packaged this as something other than PKK. It successfully propagandized the American people in that regard, but it didn’t successfully propagandize the Turks. They’re enraged by it. They have been telling us time and time again that this is destroying relations with them, and we chose to ignore it.
This is not a question of Erdogan, by the way. The vast majority of Turks support this operation. And that – we have to – if we look at the mess that we have there now, we have to recognize that we played a major role in creating that mess. Getting out of it means we need to reestablish good ties with Ankara, productive ties for stabilizing that part of the world.
If we don’t have productive ties with the Turks, which means largely working on their terms, not on ours, because we had 1,000 troops there, and they’re – we are leaving. Everyone knows we’re leaving sooner or later. Turkey is going to be there forever, and the Turks know this as well. So we have to work through them, largely on their terms. We can have our humanitarian concerns, and we can push them aggressively.
We can have differences of opinions, but it has to be within a Turkish framework rather than with some framework that we have made up as a result of where all the different little positions that we ended up with as a result of a lot of temporary tactical decisions that we made without any larger strategic understanding. We’ve started to talk about the Middle East without – our policy in the Middle East without reference to states.
We have to go back to a traditional understanding of how the world works. States are the main actors, and we need to position ourselves accordingly. The strategic prize is Turkey. And the strategic goal, when all of this settles, is that we can contain Iran.
If we drive – we are in a position, which makes no strategic sense whatsoever, of ditching a major ally, a NATO ally that sits athwart Europe and Asia in which we – where we have bases, intelligence platforms and ability to stop the Russians through the Bosporus, a Black Sea strategic posture, an ally that worked with us in Bosnia, in Afghanistan, not to mention the Korean War and others.
We’re going to ditch that state for a splinter group, extremist terrorist organization that doesn’t even represent the Kurds. The PKK is not the Kurds. This makes no sense. We now have a bipartisan consensus in Congress to put massive sanctions on Turkey in order to save our relationship with the PKK. How did we get to this position? It makes no sense.
