■"At the Gates of Brussels: If Recep Tayyip Erdogan gets his way, Turkey will be more Islamic and Europe will be more Turkish. Both would be good news," by Robert D. Kaplan, Atlantic Monthly, December 2004, p. 44.
■"As Growth Returns To Pakistan, Hopes Rise on Terror Front: Exports, Malls Enjoy Boom, As West Ramps Up Aid; But Will Militants Notice? 'Economics Isn't Everything,'" by Jay Solomon, Zahid Hussain and Saeed Azhar, Wall Street Journal, 9 November 2004, p. A1.
In the first piece, Robert Kaplan does a quick tour of Turkish history and explains why the current prime minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan's moderate Islamic bent, coupled with his Western-style management degree, promises Europe exactly the type of non-radical Islamization it must inevitably undergo:
This December a hesitant European Union will decide whether to open negotiations for Turkey to join. Its hesitancy has legitimate and illegitimate reasons. The legitimate ones center on the difficulty of digesting a country of 70 million people—one that is far poorer and more populous than many of the Central and Eastern European nations recently admitted to the EU. The illegitimate ones center on the fact that—well, Turkey is Muslim. Does Europe want that many Muslims within its community?
The answer should be that Europe has no choice. It is becoming Muslim anyway, in a demographic equivalent of the Islamic conquest of the early Middle Ages, when the Ottoman Empire reached the gates of Vienna. More to the point, Turkey is not only contiguous to Europe but also is already economically intertwined with it. The only issue that remains is whether Europe will encourage Islamic moderation through economic development in Turkey. Though American troops are fighting and dying in Iraq, ultimately the Europeans, because of geography and their own demographic patterns, have more at stake in the stabilization of the region. And the surest way to advance that stabilization is to make Turkey part of Europe.
Never before has the West been so lucky in Turkey as now. The re-Islamization of Turkey through the rejuvenation of the country's Ottoman roots was going to happen anyway: Ataturk's republican-minded secularization had simply gone too far. The only question was whether this retrenchment from Kemalism would take a radical or a moderate path. Erdogan's political leaning suggest the latter. Europe should seize the opportunity.
If I were Bush, I would twist some Europeans arms until they fell off on this issue. But I would make clear to Turkey the quid pro quo: we need them to accept some serious ownership for the Kurdish portion of Iraq. Turkey needs to be the protector and mentor for that territory and its people. The Kurds have a long and very successful economic history within the Ottoman Empire and Turkey, and there is an historic responsibility for Turkey that goes with all that, as well as a real opportunity for Turkey to be recognized as not just part of Europe, but a security stalwart in the Middle East.
Iraq has been and always was a pretend country built by the British, much like Yugoslavia. Forcing the Kurds (20% of the population) and the Shiites (60%) to continue their abusive marriage to old Saddam's Sunnis (20%) isn't going to work—unless the U.S. encourages some serious local ownership of this issue by Turkey to the north and Iran to the South. Entrance into the EU is Turkey's legitimate price tag on this issue. It must be paid.
Over in Pakistan, all that special attention paid by the U.S. (bilateral free trade agreement, tons of military aid and cooperation, rescheduling of debt, quick flows of substantial economic aid) is paying off, as the economy there is booming at more than double the growth rate prior to 9/11. Its exports have doubled over the past six years and its reserves are up four-fold from before 9/11. With U.S. blessing, Pakistan is getting access to international credit in exchange for cracking down hard on the terrorist funding networks and the black markets they leached off of prior to 9/11. All this seems very good:
To U.S. officials, Pakistan is emerging as a laboratory for how Western economic orthodoxy can contribute to stability in countries fighting Islamic extremism. They hope that economic development and structural reforms will sap the appeal of militant groups in the Islamic world's third most-populous country.
The downside is typical of most globalizing situations: cities are booming but the countryside seems to be left behind, political reforms aren't keeping pace (but they're not backsliding either) and there is a vocal and determined minority of radicals that wants to tank all this budding connectivity with the outside world cause it's "evil." But the telecom industry is taking off like a rocket, attracting foreign direct investment in droves, and there's a rising consumer culture that's attracting a lot of global business attention.
But in the end, what threatens the hard-core Islamic population in Pakistan is neither connectivity nor economic development, but the content flows from the outside world that come with all those transactions. It's the social values, stupid! The sophisticated urban elite don't have any trouble with this, but the traditional countryside does. To them, no amount of rapid economic development is going to do the trick if it's seen as challenging their lifestyles too dramatically too fast. And yet we know that not globalizing its economy certainly won't get Pakistan anywhere it wants to go either, so it's all a question of pace.
Pakistan has been given a golden opportunity with 9/11, oddly enough because it has so many terrorists obviously living within its borders. If not for the strong military-to-military ties between Pakistan and the U.S., built over many years, there would have been an overwhelming argument to invade that country more than Iraq. After all, Pakistan is a major exporter of WMD, narcotics and terrorists, effectively checking all the major boxes of a rogue regime. But if the U.S. can continue to do it, we'd rather outsource the military intervention role to the Pakistani military itself, because it's easier and cheaper right now.
But mark my words: America suffers a WMD attack in the U.S. and we hear bin Laden crowing about it from some lair in NW Pakistan, and we'll be in there militarily big-time in seconds flat. So we need lots of good news from Pakistan—lots.
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