Wall Street Journal
GLOBAL VIEW

By BRET STEPHENS

A Kurdish Lesson

October 23, 2007; Page A18

A debate among U.S. military brass over whether to declare victory
over al Qaeda in Iraq coincides with threats by Turkey to strike
terrorist camps in northern Iraq belonging to the Kurdistan Workers’
Party, or PKK. Note the irony: The PKK, which in recent days has
killed scores of Turkish soldiers, was itself declared dead as a
terrorist group in 1999.

There are excellent reasons to avoid pronouncements concerning AQI’s
defeat. One is to deny the group the chance to offer testaments in
blood to its own resilience. A second is to avoid another political
embarrassment of the "Mission Accomplished" kind. But the main reason
is that the experience of terrorist organizations world-wide shows
that even in defeat they are rarely truly finished. Like Douglas
MacArthur’s old soldiers, terrorist groups never die. At best they
just fade away.

Some examples: In its heyday in the 1980s, Peru’s Maoist Shining Path
was every bit as brutal as al Qaeda. The 1992 capture of its
charismatic leader, former philosophy professor Abimael Guzmán, was
supposed to have dealt a fatal blow to the group’s capacity to
operate, as was the capture seven years later of his successor, Óscar
Ramírez. Yet as recently as last year, the Peruvian government was
forced to declare a state of emergency in the Huánuco region to deal
with terrorist activities by the group.

Or take the Taliban. In April 2005, American Gen. David Barno told
reporters he believed that, with the exception of a few bitter-enders,
the Taliban would be a memory within two years. The opposite happened.
In 2006, the rate of terrorist attacks in Afghanistan soared, and the
Bush administration was forced to deploy 6,000 additional troops to
recover territory lost to the Taliban and turn back their anticipated
spring offensive.
[Abdullah Ocalan]

What about the PKK? Late in 1998 Turkey massed troops on its border
with Syria, with the declared intention of expelling the PKK and its
leader Abdullah Öcalan from Damascus if the Syrians didn’t do so
themselves. (A banner headline in the Turkish paper Hurriyet declared
"We’re going to say ‘shalom’ to the Israelis on the Golan Heights.")
The late Syrian strongman Hafez Assad got the message, and sent Öcalan
packing. He was eventually captured by Turkish intelligence in
Nairobi, and sentenced to death by a Turkish court (commuted to a life
sentence when Turkey abolished the death penalty in 2002). Öcalan has
since apologized to the Turkish people for the 37,000 deaths he caused
in the 1980s and ’90s and called for a peaceful solution to the
Kurdish issue. The PKK itself declared a ceasefire.

That should have been the end of it. As Turkish analyst Soner Cagaptay
of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy observes, Öcalan was
a cult-of-personality figure in an organization that, unlike the
cellular structure of al Qaeda, was run along strictly hierarchical
lines.

For the next few years the Turkish government made real, if limited,
strides in accommodating peaceful ethnic Kurdish cultural demands in
education and broadcasting. What remained of the PKK — 5,000 or so
fighters — mainly retreated to northern Iraq, where their bases were
attacked by Turkish forces no fewer than 24 times.

So might things have remained had the U.S. invasion of Iraq not
rearranged the strategic chessboard. The Turks did not help themselves
by failing to support the war, which caused strains with Washington
and prevented them from carrying out further cross-border raids. That,
in turn, created an opening for Iran, which until then had been the
PKK’s sole remaining state sponsor. Concerned about its isolation in
the region, and sensing an opportunity to make common cause with the
moderately Islamist government of Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Tehran
abruptly switched sides, going so far as to shell PKK positions in
northern Iraq. Not surprisingly, the Turks began to take a more
favorable view of Iran.

The U.S. role is scarcely more creditable. The Ankara government has
been pressing the Bush administration to hit PKK bases for at least
four years. The administration has responded with a combination of
empty promises of future action and excuses that U.S. forces are
already overstretched in Iraq. For the Turks, who contribute more than
1,000 troops to NATO’s mission in Afghanistan, U.S. nonfeasance is a
mystery, if not an outright conspiracy. "How is it that Turkey fights
America’s terrorists, but America does not fight Turkey’s terrorists?"
is how Mr. Cagaptay sums up the prevailing mood.

Yet the real mystery isn’t U.S. behavior, which was mainly dictated by
a desire not to rock the boat in what was (at least until this month),
the only relatively stable region of Iraq. It is the forbearance shown
to the PKK by Massoud Barzani, Kurdistan’s president, who has
otherwise sought to cultivate better relations with Ankara and Kurdish
moderates in Turkey, and who would have much to lose if an invading
Turkish army turned his province into a free-fire zone. One theory is
that Mr. Barzani wants to use the PKK as a diplomatic card, to be
exchanged for Turkish concessions in some future negotiation. But all
that depends on his ability to rein in the PKK at the last minute and
avert a Turkish invasion. Yesterday’s kidnapping (or killing) of
another eight Turkish troops puts that in doubt.

Meanwhile, the PKK has fully reconstituted itself as an effective
fighting force under the leadership of Murat Karayilan, who was canny
enough to see Congress’s Armenian genocide resolution as an
opportunity to take scissors to the already frayed U.S.-Turkish
relationship. The resolution was turned back at the 11th hour, but it
remains to be seen whether it has already done its damage.

All the more reason, then, for the U.S. to pre-empt the Turks by
taking the decisive action against the PKK it has promised for too
long. But the story of the PKK’s resurgence should also remind us of
the dangers of premature declarations of victory against terrorist
groups, especially when such declarations foster the illusion that you
can finally come home. Against this kind of enemy, there are no final
victories, and no true homecomings, and no real alternatives other
than to keep on fighting.

Write to bstephens@wsj.com1.

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