Category: News

Now for the Hard Part: From Iraq to Afghanistan

July 15, 2008
By George Friedman

The Bush administration let it be known last week that it is prepared to start reducing the number of troops in Iraq, indicating that three brigades out of 15 might be withdrawn before Inauguration Day in 2009. There are many dimensions to the announcements, some political and some strategic. But perhaps the single most important aspect of the development was the fairly casual way the report was greeted. It was neither praised nor derided. Instead, it was noted and ignored as the public focused on more immediate issues.

In the public mind, Iraq is clearly no longer an immediate issue. The troops remain there, still fighting and taking casualties, and there is deep division over the wisdom of the invasion in the first place. But the urgency of the issue has passed. This doesn’t mean the issue isn’t urgent. It simply means the American public — and indeed most of the world — have moved on to other obsessions, as is their eccentric wont. The shift nevertheless warrants careful consideration.

Obviously, there is a significant political dimension to the announcement. It occurred shortly after Sen. Barack Obama began to shift his position on Iraq from what appeared to be a demand for a rapid withdrawal to a more cautious, nuanced position. As we have pointed out on several occasions, while Obama’s public posture was for withdrawal with all due haste, his actual position as represented in his position papers was always more complex and ambiguous. He was for a withdrawal by the summer of 2010 unless circumstances dictated otherwise. Rhetorically, Obama aligned himself with the left wing of the Democratic Party, but his position on the record was actually much closer to Sen. John McCain’s than he would admit prior to his nomination. Therefore, his recent statements were not inconsistent with items written on his behalf before the nomination — they merely appeared s o.

The Bush administration was undoubtedly delighted to take advantage of Obama’s apparent shift by flanking him. Consideration of the troop withdrawal has been under way for some time, but the timing of the leak to The New York Times detailing it must have been driven by Obama’s shift. As Obama became more cautious, the administration became more optimistic and less intransigent. The intent was clearly to cause disruption in Obama’s base. If so, it failed precisely because the public took the administration’s announcement so casually. To the extent that the announcement was political, it failed because even the Democratic left is now less concerned about the war in Iraq. Politically speaking, the move was a maneuver into a vacuum.

But the announcement was still significant in other, more important ways. Politics aside, the administration is planning withdrawals because the time has come. First, the politico-military situation on the ground in Iraq has stabilized dramatically. The reason for this is the troop surge — although not in the way it is normally thought of. It was not the military consequences of an additional 30,000 troops that made the difference, although the addition and changes in tactics undoubtedly made an impact.

What was important about the surge is that it happened at all. In the fall of 2006, when the Democrats won both houses of Congress, it appeared a unilateral U.S. withdrawal from Iraq was inevitable. If Bush wouldn’t order it, Congress would force it. All of the factions in Iraq, as well as in neighboring states, calculated that the U.S. presence in Iraq would shortly start to decline and in due course disappear. Bush’s order to increase U.S. forces stunned all the regional players and forced a fundamental recalculation. The assumption had been that Bush’s hands were tied and that the United States was no longer a factor. What Bush did — and this was more important than numbers or tactics — was demonstrate that his hands were not tied and that the United States could not be discounted.

The realization that the Americans were not going anywhere caused the Sunnis, for example, to reconsider their position. Trapped between foreign jihadists and the Shia, the Americans suddenly appeared to be a stable and long-term ally. The Sunni leadership turned on the jihadists and aligned with the United States, breaking the jihadists’ backs. Suddenly facing a U.S.-Sunni-Kurdish alliance, the Shia lashed out, hoping to break the alliance. But they also split between their own factions, with some afraid of being trapped as Iranian satellites and others viewing the Iranians as the solution to their problem. The result was a civil war not between the Sunnis and Shia, but among the Shia themselves.

Tehran performed the most important recalculation. The Iranians’ expectation had been that the United States would withdraw from Iraq unilaterally, and that when it did, Iran would fill the vacuum it left. This would lead to the creation of an Iranian-dominated Iraqi Shiite government that would suppress the Sunnis and Kurds, allowing Iran to become the dominant power in the Persian Gulf region. It was a heady vision, and not an unreasonable one — if the United States had begun to withdraw in the winter of 2006-2007.

When the surge made it clear that the Americans weren’t leaving, the Iranians also recalculated. They understood that they were no longer going to be able to create a puppet government in Iraq, and the danger now was that the United States would somehow create a viable puppet government of its own. The Iranians understood that continued resistance, if it failed, might lead to this outcome. They lowered their sights from dominating Iraq to creating a neutral buffer state in which they had influence. As a result, Tehran acted to restrain the Shiite militias, focusing instead on maximizing its influence with the Shia participating in the Iraqi government, including Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki.

A space was created between the Americans and Iranians, and al-Maliki filled it. He is not simply a pawn of Iran — and he uses the Americans to prevent himself from being reduced to that — but neither is he a pawn of the Americans. Recent negotiations between the United States and the al-Maliki government on the status of U.S. forces have demonstrated this. In some sense, the United States has created what it said it wanted: a strong Iraqi government. But it has not achieved what it really wanted, which was a strong, pro-American Iraqi government. Like Iran, the United States has been forced to settle for less than it originally aimed for, but more than most expected it could achieve in 2006.

This still leaves the question of what exactly the invasion of Iraq achieved. When the Americans invaded, they occupied what was clearly the most strategic country in the Middle East, bordering Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Syria, Turkey and Iran. Without resistance, the occupation would have provided the United States with a geopolitical platform from which to pressure and influence the region. The fact that there was resistance absorbed the United States, therefore negating the advantage. The United States was so busy hanging on in Iraq that it had no opportunity to take advantage of the terrain.

That is why the critical question for the United States is how many troops it can retain in Iraq, for how long and in what locations. This is a complex issue. From the Sunni standpoint, a continued U.S. presence is essential to protect Sunnis from the Shia. From the Shiite standpoint, the U.S. presence is needed to prevent Iran from overwhelming the Shia. From the standpoint of the Kurds, a U.S. presence guarantees Kurdish safety from everyone else. It is an oddity of history that no major faction in Iraq now wants a precipitous U.S. withdrawal — and some don’t want a withdrawal at all.

For the United States, the historical moment for its geopolitical coup seems to have passed. Had there been no resistance after the fall of Baghdad in 2003, the U.S. occupation of Iraq would have made Washington a colossus astride the region. But after five years of fighting, the United States is exhausted and has little appetite for power projection in the region. For all its bravado against Iran, no one has ever suggested an invasion, only airstrikes. Therefore, the continued occupation of Iraq simply doesn’t have the same effect as it did in 2003.

But the United States can’t simply leave. The Iraqi government is not all that stable, and other regional powers, particularly the Saudis, don’t want to see a U.S. withdrawal. The reason is simple: If the United States withdraws before the Baghdad government is cohesive enough, strong enough and inclined enough to balance Iranian power, Iran could still fill the partial vacuum of Iraq, thereby posing a threat to Saudi Arabia. With oil at more than $140 a barrel, this is not something the Saudis want to see, nor something the United States wants to see.

Internal Iraqi factions want the Americans to stay, and regional powers want the Americans to stay. The Iranians and pro-Iranian Iraqis are resigned to an ongoing presence, but they ultimately want the Americans to leave, sooner rather than later. Thus, the Americans won’t leave. The question now under negotiation is simply how many U.S. troops will remain, how long they will stay, where they will be based and what their mission will be. Given where the United States was in 2006, this is a remarkable evolution. The Americans have pulled something from the jaws of defeat, but what that something is and what they plan to do with it is not altogether clear.

The United States obviously does not want to leave a massive force in Iraq. First, its more ambitious mission has evaporated; that moment is gone. Second, the U.S. Army and Marines are exhausted from five years of multidivisional warfare with a force not substantially increased from peacetime status. The Bush administration’s decision not to dramatically increase the Army was rooted in a fundamental error: namely, the administration did not think the insurgency would be so sustained and effective. They kept believing the United States would turn a corner. The result is that Washington simply can’t maintain the current force in Iraq under any circumstances, and to do so would be strategically dangerous. The United States has no strategic ground reserve at present, opening itself to dangers outside of Iraq. Therefore, if the United States is not going to get to play colossus of the Middle East, it needs to reduce its forces dramatically to recreate a strategic reserv e. Its interests, the interests of the al-Maliki government — and interestingly, Iran’s interests — are not wildly out of sync. Washington wants to rapidly trim down to a residual force of a few brigades, and the other two players want that as well.

The United States has another pressing reason to do this: It has another major war under way in Afghanistan, and it is not winning there. It remains unclear if the United States can win that war, with the Taliban operating widely in Afghanistan and controlling a great deal of the countryside. The Taliban are increasingly aggressive against a NATO force substantially smaller than the conceivable minimum needed to pacify Afghanistan. We know the Soviets couldn’t do it with nearly 120,000 troops. And we know the United States and NATO don’t have as many troops to deploy in Afghanistan as the Soviets did. It is also clear that, at the moment, there is no exit strategy. Forces in Iraq must be transferred to Afghanistan to stabilize the U.S. position while the new head of U.S. Central Command, Gen. David Petraeus — the architect of the political and military strategy in Iraq — f igures out what, if anything, is going to change.

Interestingly, the Iranians want the Americans in Afghanistan. They supported the invasion in 2001 for the simple reason that they do not want to see an Afghanistan united under the Taliban. The Iranians almost went to war with Afghanistan in 1998 and were delighted to see the United States force the Taliban from the cities. The specter of a Taliban victory in Afghanistan unnerves the Iranians. Rhetoric aside, a drawdown of U.S. forces in Iraq and a transfer to Afghanistan is what the Iranians would like to see.

To complicate matters, the Taliban situation is not simply an Afghan issue — it is also a Pakistani issue. The Taliban draw supplies, recruits and support from Pakistan, where Taliban support stretches into the army and the intelligence service, which helped create the group in the 1990s while working with the Americans. There is no conceivable solution to the Taliban problem without a willing and effective government in Pakistan participating in the war, and that sort of government simply is not there. Indeed, the economic and security situation in Pakistan continues to deteriorate.

Therefore, the Bush administration’s desire to withdraw troops from Iraq makes sense on every level. It is a necessary and logical step. But it does not address what should now become the burning issue: What exactly is the U.S. strategy in Afghanistan? As in Iraq before the surge, the current strategy appears to be to hang on and hope for the best. Petraeus’ job is to craft a new strategy. But in Iraq, for better or worse, the United States faced an apparently implacable enemy — Iran — which in fact pursued a shrewd, rational and manageable policy. In Afghanistan, the United States is facing a state that appears friendly — Pakistan — but is actually confused, divided and unmanageable by itself or others.

Petraeus’ success in Iraq had a great deal to do with Tehran’s calculations of its self-interest. In Pakistan, by contrast, it is unclear at the moment whether anyone is in a position to even define the national self-interest, let alone pursue it. And this means that every additional U.S. soldier sent to Afghanistan raises the stakes in Pakistan. It will be interesting to see how Afghanistan and Pakistan play out in the U.S. presidential election. This is not a theater of operations that lends itself to political soundbites.

www.stratfor.com

July 16, 2008
Turkey’s East; Still One Big Mess

Submitted by Michael van der Galiën

Eastern Turkey is the country’s poorest region. A lot of Kurds live in that area, and a lot of poor Turkish people as well. These individuals have had little to no education, and still live in accordance with the beliefs, prejudices and ways of their ancestors.

Although Turkey’s culture is great in many ways, it’s not so great in many other. The people in the East are often very conservative, and not very modern or enlightened. When we hear about Turkish immigrants in the West, who misbehave so tremendously, and who kill their daughters because they refuse to wear headscarfs, or have a Western (and Christian) boyfriend, we often forget that Turks from Western and Central Turkey aren’t like that at all; it are mostly Eastern Turks we hear about.

The main reason for the above is simple: the area has not been given the attention it deserves. It has stayed behind, or at least not made a lot of progress in decades. Some things have changed, but the culture has not. Where women in the West, and especially in the big cities, have emancipated, they are still humble and oppressed in the East, especially in the villages. The citizens there are not educated, or if they are, their education was of such a terrible quality that they may just as well not have gone to school at all.

Education is not encouraged in those areas, this in contrast with the West and Central regions. There, people believe that education is of the utmost importance. In the East, however, people all too often believe that education is not truly important; it’s all about God, customs, and farm work.

This while education has changed so much in the West (of Turkey). So much even, that Easterners and Westerners often appear to be coming from completely different countries altogether. All too often when gets the impression, when talking to Turks from the West or Heartland, that they look down upon their fellow countrymen in the East; they truly cannot get along well, the differences in culture and views are gigantic. When one, at the same time, talks to people from the East, one quickly comes to the conclusion that they believe that their fellow countrymen from the West are living ‘Godless.’

Of course, the lack of education in the East has not merely resulted in a lack of cultural progress; there are also a whole lot of economic problems. The East is poor, and undeveloped. The people there lack just about everything.

As said, one of the main reasons for this is a lack of education. How difficult can it be, one may wonder, to educate the citizens in the East? Well, quite difficult. Turkey is not a rich country, although it is becoming richer every year. Some regions are also hard to reform education-wise, simply because people there still live according to ancient norms and values. And then there is the little fact that teachers who teach in the East, often leave immediately after their term has expired; they are sent by the government to teach in the East for a short amount of time, but after this time, they quickly go back to the Central or Western parts of their country. The East is poor and undeveloped, what modern person wants to live and work there?

Well, not many, and as a result, children in the East have often experienced eight to ten different teachers at the time they are elementary grade students. This constant change of teacher is incredibly problematic; they never develop a bond with their teacher, and, just at the moment the student may find school fun, or interesting, the teacher leaves and is replaced by another one. Every time, the students have to get used to the new teacher. When they are used to him / her, (s)he leaves again.

And so, Eastern Turkish schools perform worst in nationwide tests.

But Turkey’s educational systems are not confined to this region:

Some regions in Turkey’s eastern region might struggle with financial and social abandonment, but students from every part of society are also beset with a deficient education system that many hope will improve with a new curriculum. Tens of thousands of elementary school graduates were dismayed by the results of the OKS, another slap in the face of authorities in the Turkish education system. More than 30,000 students scored points “not worth calculating,” according to Çelik.

Associate professor Ömer Kutlu of Ankara University’s education faculty said poor results stem from a lack of capacity to understand what is heard or read on the part of many students. “Turkey scores very low in international studies on literary effectiveness,” he said and added that the system pushes students toward greater competition in test taking skills. An Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development 2006 report revealed that 40 percent of Turkish 15-year-old students scored one on a scale of six on tests that measure text comprehension skills.

”The problem lies with the teachers, who sometimes lack enough skills,” Kutlu said and added that the whole system is oriented toward making children able to solve tests, not preparing them for life.

When it comes to education, a lot remains to be done in Turkey. Education is one of the corner stones of Kemalist ideology, and of modern countries in general terms. Without education, without a significant improvement in education, Turkey will never fullfil its potential.

July 16, 2008
Talking Turkey

Talking Turkey

Published: July 14 2008 18:39 | Last updated: July 14 2008 18:39

The indictment of 86 people, including businessmen, journalists and retired army officers, on coup-plotting charges is clear evidence of the scale of the political crisis now gripping Turkey.

The defendants are accused of planning an ultra-nationalist insurrection against the government of the ruling Justice and Development party, the Islamic AKP. Prosecutors are preparing cases against several others, including two ex-generals arrested this month. The investigators suspect the plotters of planning violent outrages to create conditions for army intervention.

The probes coincide with constitutional court action by the prosecutor to ban the AKP for allegedly undermining Turkey’s secular constitution. The party’s Islamic agenda – including allowing women to wear headscarves at public universities – has provoked great disquiet in the traditional secularist establishment, not least the army.

The legal actions must now run their course, free of political interference. But, more fundamentally, the secularists must reconsider their ill-advised efforts to bring down the popular AKP, which governs with a big parliamentary majority. The party should not have put headscarves so high on its agenda but overall it deserves praise for developing Islamic politics with a modern face. Its economic record, including boosting the incomes of the rural poor, speaks for itself. The secularists must accept that if democracy delivers Islamic governments, they must accept the voters’ verdict – as long as those governments do not themselves threaten democratic rights, which the AKP has not.

As the country develops, Turkey’s Islamic and secularist leaders must find compromises – or risk harming the modern nation both sides want. A sensible deal over headscarves would be a good start.

The crisis is also an indictment of the European Union for its lamentable failure to handle Ankara’s membership bid positively. If the union had given Turkey a clear set of conditions and timetable, both the generals and the AKP could have concentrated their energies on accession, not headscarves.

The talk of coups, bombs and a cache of hand-grenades should remind the EU that, inside or outside the union, Turkey will not go away. Dealing with a violently unstable big neighbour would demand much more attention – and possibly more money – than managing the considerable difficulties involved in Turkey’s EU accession. The union must revive its faltering efforts to engage with Ankara before it is too late.

July 15, 2008
Albright had it right

Albright had it right

Of headscarves and hegemony

Tulin Daloglu
Tuesday, July 15, 2008

OP-ED:

In principle, U.S. foreign policy toward Turkey is consistent whether Republicans or Democrats are in office. The particulars of Turkey’s democracy, however, sometimes tests the relationship. The role of the Turkish military, as guardian of secularism, also defines the country’s unique understanding of democracy. In recent memory, Turkish armed forces have attempted to intervene in politics twice – on Feb. 28, 1997, and April 27, 2007. Both times, they came close to the brink of a coup because Islamic fundamentalism posed a threat to secular democracy. Both times, the headscarf issue spawned the intervention.

The United States made it clear to Turkey that it does not approve of military challenges to civilian authority. Yet the different ways Secretaries of State Madeleine Albright and Condoleezza Rice have approached the subject is defining. In 1997, Mrs. Albright said that changes in Turkey “have to be in the democratic context with no extraconstitutional approach” – meaning no coup. It was essential, she said, that Turkey “continue in a secular and democratic way.” She also made clear that she was concerned about the government’s Islamic tendencies – including its relationship with Iran. Her approach kept the balance of Turkey’s domestic affairs intact. The Islamist-rooted prime minister, Necmettin Erbakan, resigned soon afterwards.

Unlike Miss Rice, Mrs. Albright never spoke directly either for or against the government, or any political party in Turkey. She made clear at all times that the relationship is one between two sovereign countries.

Miss Rice, however, has strongly supported the government of the Justice and Development Party (AKP), not even acknowledging the thousands of people protesting in the streets to express their concerns about Islamist influences over the government – though she could. “Even though it is led by the AKP [Justice and Development Party], which has Islamic roots, it has been trying to integrate into Europe,” Miss Rice said at a May 2007 Senate Appropriations Committee hearing. She took her support one step further after meeting Turkish Foreign Minister Ali Babacan at the State Department in June 2008. “[W]e’re going to continue to work with this government … with which we share common values,” she said.

The AKP government is certainly pleased with such praise from Americans. Yet a case before Turkey’s constitutional court which alleges that the government is acting extraconstitutionally in its attempting to turn the regime away from secular democracy puts matters to a test. While Miss Rice goes out of her way to express U.S. support for the AKP – even saying that the Islamist-rooted AKP government’s embrace of democracy fits with American values – she has declared that if the court rules against the party and decides to shut it down or ban some of its members from politics, the United States will question it.

Separately, Miss Rice distances herself from Turkey’s other notable court case, in which a state prosecutor aims to expose an ultra-nationalist group that is trying to bring down the government. The prosecutor legally labeled the group a “terrorist” organization, and arrested a number of Turkish military personnel and two prominent high-level retired officers.

The fact is, both cases belong to the realm of Turkey’s domestic affairs. There should exist full trust that the country’s courts can bring about justice.

Although the United States has never responded to challenges by quashing political parties or banning politicians, not all democracies are the same. There is no democracy on Earth like that of the United States. Taking sides based on this country’s democratic norms and perceptions creates confusion and disarray.

The United States has effectively chosen to side with the AKP rather than Turkey, dismissing the fact that, in democracies, political parties come to power through elections, and their rule lasts from election to election. The state and its institutions have a longer life span.

Turkey’s desire to become a member of the European Union did not start with the AKP government, nor will it come to reality under its reign. When Abdullah Gul arrived to Washington in 1997 as a state minister defending the Erbakan government, he was trying to ease the concerns of Mrs. Albright regarding secularism in Turkey. That government had done almost nothing compared to the AKP government regarding the headscarf issue and more.

Furthermore, if Turkey were a democracy by American standards, Turkish President Abdullah Gul would not be talking to Gen. Hilmi Ozkok, the former chief of staff, about issues under investigation by the state prosecutor. Gen. Ozkok would be surrendering what he knows to the state prosecutor instead of the president. Last week’s meeting between Mr. Gul and Gen. Ozkok is the very picture of a state’s highest authority interfering in the judicial system. If Miss Rice thinks the Bush administration shares common values with the AKP government, those values can only be that neither is perfect or immune from making major mistakes.

To be sure, democracy is chaotic, but it is vital to distinguish the chaos of democratization from the dissolution of social integrity and unity. That dissolution does not promise a more democratized state, but rather one that is doomed to deeper trouble. And the rule of the AKP government has brought Turkey to the brink of such polarization and dissolution.

Tulin Daloglu is a free-lance writer.

July 15, 2008

“New Action Plan for Southeastern Turkey” from SETA

“New Action Plan for Southeastern Turkey” from SETA

New from SETA Foundation for Political, Economic and Social Research:
Policy Brief No.18, July 2008

“New Action Plan for Southeastern Turkey ”

by Taha OZHAN,
Coordinator, Economic Research, SETA

. org/document/ Policy_Brief_ No_18_Taha_ Ozhan.pdf

Currently, GAP is a regional development project that covers nine southeastern provinces extending over the wide plains in the basins of the lower Euphrates and Tigris rivers. Political and economical instability in Turkey in the 1980s diverted attention from the GAP Project and led to consecutive failures in meeting official targets for its progress within the initial time framework. Within the last five years, Turkey has undergone a significant social and economic transformation whereby fiscal discipline, effective inflation control and an average of greater than 7% growth have been achieved ahead of many expectations. Turkish government launched its long-awaited plan for the GAP Project, now scheduled for completion by 2012 at an expected cost of around 27 billion YTL ($20 billion). The government described its action plan to boost social and economic development in the country’s southeast as “a turning point for Turkey .” The GAP Project was designed not only as a rural development plan but also as an economic initiative intended to have positive social and political consequences for Turkey ’s Kurdish issue. However, although it is certain that the Kurdish issue has an important socioeconomic dimension; it would be a mistake to reduce the issue to the economic backwardness of the region alone.

Please find attached a copy of SETA Policy Brief No. 18, “New Action Plan for Southeastern Turkey “.

Please click on the following link to download the document:

. org/document/ Policy_Brief_ No_18_Taha_ Ozhan.pdf

SETA FOUNDATION FOR POLITICAL, ECONOMIC AND SOCIAL RESEARCH
Resit Galip Caddesi Hereke Sokak No: 10 GOP, Cankaya 06700 Ankara , Turkey
Tel: +90 312 405 61 51 Fax: +90 312 405 69 03
www.setav.org [email protected]

ABDULLATIF SENER: A DIVISIVE FACTOR OR THE NEW POLITICAL LEADER OF TURKEY?

ABDULLATIF SENER: A DIVISIVE FACTOR OR THE NEW POLITICAL LEADER OF TURKEY?

By Emrullah Uslu

Monday, July 14, 2008

As the decision of the Constitutional Court on whether the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) should be shut down gets closer, new political figures have started forming alternatives. The expectation that the constitutional court will shut down the AKP has led various politicians to fill the gap that will be left behind. In addition to the continuing political discussions that have taken place with the participation of well-known former politicians and ministers under the name of Patalya Hotel Meetings (Sabah, July 12-13), former Minister of Labor and Social Security Yasar Okuyan has also formed the New Party. (Hurriyet, June 28)

Perhaps the most interesting formation among those newly formed parties, however, is Yeni Olusum Hareketi (YOH), which was founded by a former deputy prime minister from the AKP government, Abdullatif Sener, one of the four founders of the AKP in 2002. Sener recently resigned from the AKP to found the new party (www.yeniolusumhareketi.org).

Unlike other parties, the YOH successfully attracted the attention of the Turkish media. Several factors explain this. First is Abdullatif Sener’s firm stance against corruption. Sener had protested against his own party on this issue and withdrew his nomination to be a member of the parliament in the general election of July 2007. Second, when he was deputy prime minister he successfully reached out to secular segments of the society, which made him an alternative political leader who could fill the gap in case the Constitutional Court bans Prime Minster Recep Tayyip Erdogan from participating in politics. Opinion polls indicate that after Erdogan and President Abdullah Gul, both of whom may be banned by the court, Sener is one of the most widely supported political leaders on the center-right of the political spectrum (Vatan, July 13).

There are conflicting opinions about whether Sener could successfully turn his positive image into political capital and carry his party to parliament. On the one hand, Sener has so far successfully organized several public gatherings: one in his hometown of Sivas (Hurriyet, April 19) and another more recently in Konya, the heart of the Islamist National Outlook Movement that gave birth to the AKP in 2002. More than three thousand people welcomed him, chanting “Prime Minister Sener” (Vatan, July 13). On the other hand, despite his positive image and some media support from Dogan Media Group, the most powerful media cartel, political observers are not so optimistic about Sener’s success in an election (Perihan Magden, Radikal, July 13, Ahmet Hakan, Hurriyet, July 9, Ahmet Kekec, Star, July 8). One of the major reasons why Sener may not be able to convert his prestige into electoral success is because most of the moderate Islamist groups consider that he betrayed them by associating himself with the “social engineering projects” of those who want to harm the ruling AKP (Zaman, July 13).

Regardless of his success in the short term, in the long run even his presence could significantly damage the ruling AKP’s positive image among ordinary people. In his first rally in Konya, Sener harshly criticized the AKP government (Anadolu Agency, July 13). If the Constitutional Court decides to shut down the AKP or ban Prime Minister Erdogan from party politics, which is highly likely, then Sener’s position in politics in the forthcoming weeks will be very important, because it is no secret that 60 former AKP MPs and many current MPs would join Sener’s party (Bugun, July 13). Right after the Supreme Court prosecutor opened the lawsuit demanding the AKP’s closure, Sener used his connections within the AKP to organize private meetings with AKP MPs to form the new political party (Vatan, April 28).

It seems that Sener’s role in short-term politics will be to divide the ruling party, but it is not clear how deep a political wound he might leave on the face of the AKP, since there is absolutely no sign as to what Erdogan’s plan will be if the court shuts his party down. Sener is in a critical position and must play the right cards at just the right time. Sener could become Erdogan’s Brutus or, with the help of the political climate and a bit of luck, he could be the next leader of Turkey.

July 14, 2008