Turkish invasion of Afrin

The Western powers cannot ignore Turkey's effective declaration of war today on the Syrian Kurds. Turkey may be an ally, but it is in the wrong.

The reputations of the USA and UK in the Middle East could scarcely be poorer. If we care to have any role in the region, and we clearly do, then we cannot keep treating regional allies as fair-weather friends. Our promises to them cannot be ignored whenever it is expedient, unless we learned nothing from the case of Palestine. The YPG, although not a unified entity, is broadly speaking a key Western ally which has done the bulk of the heavy lifting against the self-styled Islamic State, and on this basis deserves to be treated with the same respect as any other ally. Yet with its threats against both Afrin and Manbij, Turkey has made it clear that it does not significantly distinguish between NATO- and Russian-allied YPG factions. They're all Kurds, right?

Turkey is in the wrong about the Kurds. Ankara has been condemned repeatedly for human rights abuses against them in the European Court of Human Rights. To equate Kurds with terrorists may be popular in Turkey, but it is blatantly racist. It is difficult not to conclude this has nothing to do with national security and everything to do with limiting the chances of the emergence of any form of Kurdish autonomy among Turkey's neighbours, particularly given its history of maltreatment of its own Kurdish minority.

But Turkey has very little right to interfere with the Kurds in Syria, and the indiscriminate manner of the present attempt undermines their excuse. Any alleged ties to armed insurgencies within Turkey should be dealt with by diplomatic means, rather than military force. Otherwise, the Western powers may reasonably assume that Ankara is pursuing a war against Kurdish groups in neighbouring countries for more cynical ends.

Erdogan has presumably made a calculation that Turkey's NATO "allies" will protest a great deal in the UN, but ultimately do nothing - much like what has been going on with his brutal, paranoid crackdown against his political opponents. Perhaps he believes he has his allies' hands tied, thanks to the importance of Turkey's strategic location to the USA and UK, and the pending threat of re-opening the refugee flood-gates if the EU annoys him too much. Doubtless he is also taking into account the personality and numerous distractions facing the US president, and estimating the likelihood that Trump will overly care as quite low. He presumably also calculates, no doubt correctly, that the US will not stick with its Kurdish allies in Manbij over Turkey.

But it should.

If Turkey attacks the ally of several of its fellow NATO members, the burden is on Ankara to prove beyond reasonable doubt that the group in question really was meaningfully threatening it. But more pragmatic geopolitical considerations than what is right or true are likely to have much more sway over the American, British and French responses to his move. Kicking Turkey out of NATO will probably not seem like a viable response - although, given Russian (and pro-Assad Syrian) condemnation of Turkey's attack on Afrin, it might not be the worst time to do it; and Erdogan does make a horrific mockery of whatever values NATO might otherwise generally be supposed to stand for.

But for Erdogan, this would merely be evidence he could use that the US is not Turkey's friend: he would then find it even easier to justify attacking Kurdish groups which are incidentally also US allies, and the US is pretty unlikely to be drawn into another Middle-Eastern war, let alone with Turkey. Turkey could probably expect to be hit by sanctions, but not much else - although it might be hard put to find other allies in its region.

Ankara may have outmanoeuvred his Western "allies" into forcing them to give up any meaningful support for Kurdish groups in Iraq and Syria, now that those groups have more or less served their purpose - I suspect that is the real end-game, as Turkey has been livid about it for years. Of course, the grown-up response would be to start treating their own Kurdish community properly, but Erdogan has long made it abundantly clear he does not care about either his own integrity or the human cost of his own putrid politics.