Turkey’s New Base in Qatar
Olivier Decottignies and Soner Cagaptay/Washington Institute/January 11/16
Having a permanent military foothold in the Gulf will put Turkey in an elite group of powers, but more presence also means more exposure, whether to Saudi-Iranian tensions or other local crises.
In December, Ankara announced that it will establish a new military base in Qatar, putting Turkey in a small group of nations willing and able to project power in the Persian Gulf. As with France’s previous creation of a military base in the United Arab Emirates, the Turkish effort signals the willingness of Washington’s NATO allies to engage in the Gulf on their own. It also highlights the pairing of small but wealthy Gulf states with militarily powerful NATO countries in a series of nonexclusive partnerships, largely in anticipation of a resurgent Iran, among other perceived regional threats.
TURKEY AND QATAR: A SPECIAL BOND
To a certain extent, Qatar owes its existence to the special relationship it established with the Ottoman Empire in the late nineteenth century, when Anglo-Ottoman rivalry dominated Gulf politics. At the time, Qatar was a district under the Ottoman governorship of Najd, which itself fell under the Ottoman province of Basra. Elsewhere in the Gulf, Britain had established special relationships with the rulers of Kuwait and other emirates, drawing them into its sphere of influence and eventually opening the path to British control. A series of events in 1893 set Qatar on a different course, however.
That year, the Ottomans sent troops to Qatar to suppress local ruler Jassim bin Mohammed al-Thani’s opposition to Istanbul’s proposed administrative reforms. After the Ottoman forces were defeated, Qatar became an autonomous district in the empire, but also agreed to host Ottoman troops. Accordingly, the Ottoman military stayed in Qatar until the empire’s collapse in World War I — longer than in any other Gulf principality. Qatar’s autonomous status under the Ottomans also prevented its absorption into the expanding Saudi state between 1899 and 1926, despite their shared Wahhabi creed.
More recently, a shared political vision regarding the Middle East has helped bring the Turks and Qataris even closer. Since the rise of Turkey’s Justice and Development Party (AKP) government in 2002, Doha and Ankara have thrown support behind various Islamist parties in the region, often forming de facto alliances in places such as Egypt and Syria (sometimes against the wishes of Riyadh, another key regional partner for Turkey). In Syria, rebel brigades backed by Turkey and Qatar made significant gains beginning in spring 2015, only to be stopped by Russian airstrikes later in the year. And in the Palestinian theatre, both countries have supported Hamas, undermining the Palestinian Authority.
United by history and recent political developments, Ankara and Doha are currently in talks to sign a Status of Forces Agreement, laying the groundwork for a long-term Turkish military presence. The agreement will likely include a “casus foederis” clause stipulating that if one country is attacked, the other will come to its assistance. This would put Qatar in a special league in Ankara’s eyes. Apart from its NATO casus foederis obligation, Turkey has such arrangements with only two other partners: Northern Cyprus (which Ankara recognizes as a state) and Azerbaijan.
TURKEY WILL JOIN AN ELITE CLUB IN THE GULF
While the United States remains by far the largest provider of security in the Gulf, major NATO allies have been stepping up their presence. The French established a multipurpose air, sea, and ground base in the UAE in 2009, while British foreign secretary Philip Hammond took part in a groundbreaking ceremony for a similar project in Bahrain last November.
Key non-Western nations are also closing in on the region. Russia has deployed forces to Syria and established itself at bases in Latakia and Tartus, while China controls commercial operations at the Pakistani port of Gwadar, not far from the mouth of the Persian Gulf.
For its part, the Obama administration has pledged to refocus U.S. efforts toward the Far East and the Pacific Rim. This pivot and the nuclear deal with Tehran have caused anxiety among Arab Gulf countries contemplating the prospect of a resurgent Iran and still wary of Tehran’s nuclear ambitions.
Therefore, Turkey’s move in Qatar will make Ankara all the more valuable to its Arab partners, and to an American ally seemingly inclined to share the burden of Gulf security. The new base will also reinforce Qatar’s autonomy vis-a-vis Saudi Arabia. In addition, it could contribute to the security effort for the 2022 FIFA World Cup, a major and persistently controversial endeavor for Qatar.
In military terms, the base will give Ankara a variety of options in the region. Although the distribution of future Turkish facilities and the timeline for their completion remain undisclosed, the French experience in Abu Dhabi shows some of the benefits Turkey could derive. The French base is currently used as a launchpad for strikes against Islamic State positions in Iraq and Syria. It is also home to the French Naval Command for the Indian Ocean (ALINDIEN), and a key support point for naval operations in the Persian Gulf and Indian Ocean — including counterpiracy efforts along the Horn of Africa and elsewhere, to which Turkey contributes as well. In addition, the base has served as the backbone for expanding military cooperation with the UAE, a logistical platform for France’s disengagement from Afghanistan, a training ground for desert and urban warfare, and a showcase for French military hardware and technology.
Along similar lines, the Turkish base in Qatar will reportedly include army, navy, air force, and special forces components as well as trainers for the Qatari military, allowing Ankara to show off its military hardware and perhaps boost sales of its Altay tanks, Firtina self-propelled howitzers, and other arms. It will also give the Turkish military the desert training medium it currently lacks, allow Turkish naval forces to conduct counterpiracy and other operations in the Persian Gulf, Indian Ocean, and Arabian Sea, and perhaps serve as a hub for future Turkish operations overseas. More symbolically, the base will signal the Turkish navy’s return to the Indian Ocean for the first time since the 1550s, when the Ottomans unsuccessfully fought the Portuguese Empire for dominance there.
RISKS AND POTENTIAL BURDENS
Yet more presence in the Gulf also means more exposure, especially in light of escalating Saudi-Iranian tensions in which Turkey is assuming a position closer to Riyadh. For example, forces stationed at the new base in Qatar would be within easy reach of Iran’s extensive missile capabilities. Thus far, Ankara and Tehran have maintained their economic ties and managed their political disagreements despite being rivals in Iraq and waging a proxy war in Syria. But the Gulf is a more volatile environment than Turkey’s land border with Iran.
Indeed, while Turks and Persians have not engaged in military conflict since the early seventeenth century, Tehran is sure to regard the new base as a hostile move, and a sign of Turkish alignment with the Gulf’s Sunni monarchies. Parallel indications that Ankara is normalizing relations with Israel are unlikely to improve the climate.
Finally, while a mutual defense agreement of the sort Ankara and Doha are contemplating is normally reciprocal, Turkey is much more likely to come to Qatar’s help than the other way round. The mere fact of maintaining a permanent military presence on such a tiny territory as Qatar means that Ankara will durably underwrite the emirate’s security. Even so, the Turks may still need an underwriter of their own. In a 2013 study on British military forces in the Gulf, Gareth Stansfield and Saul Kelly noted, “There is a danger that the deployment would be large enough ‘to get us into trouble’ but too small to get us out of trouble when it starts.” The same applies to the 3,000-strong Turkish deployment envisaged in Qatar. Although the North Atlantic Treaty does not extend collective defense to allied forces deployed in the Gulf, the United States has its own military headquarters in Qatar, as well as its largest air base in the Middle East, al-Udeid. Washington is thus in the same boat as Ankara and could become the Turkish base’s de facto guarantor.
Olivier Decottignies is a French diplomat-in-residence at The Washington Institute. Soner Cagaptay is the Institute’s Beyer Family Fellow and director of its Turkish Research Program.
How Obama Created a Mideast Vacuum
Dennis Ross/Washington Institute/Politico/January 11/16
By taking an overcautious approach in Syria, the president has highlighted America’s failure to have an open discussion about the real strategic lessons of the Iraq war.
Few issues have confronted President Barack Obama with tougher dilemmas than Syria. Over the course of the nearly five years of the war within Syria, Obama has faced choices on how the United States should respond and he consistently decided to do the minimum. From the outset, when Bashar Assad’s response to calls for reform was draconian and turned peaceful demonstrations into an uprising, the president’s first instinct was avoidance. He looked at Syria and he saw entanglement in another ongoing Middle East conflict where our involvement would be costly, lead to nothing, and potentially make things worse. In nearly every meeting on Syria when presented with possible options to affect the Syrian civil war, the president would ask “tell me where this ends.”
He was surely right to ask this question. But he failed to ask the corollary question: Tell me what happens if we don’t act? Had he known that not acting would produce a vacuum in which a humanitarian catastrophe, a terrible refugee crisis, a deepening proxy war and the rise of ISIL in Iraq and Syria would occur, his responses might have been different. However, it was hard for him to ask that question because when he looked at Syria, he saw Iraq.
Given the painful legacy of the Iraq War, it was not surprising that he did so. In his eyes, Iraq was a colossal mistake. He had run against it. He had been elected to get us out of Middle East wars not into them. But was Syria really Iraq? As someone who believed (wrongly) that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, I made the mistake of supporting the Iraq War. Surely, other proponents of the war should be willing to acknowledge now that it was wrong to seek regime change and not understand the vacuum that we would create in doing so; it was wrong to go to war without a serious, well-thought out plan for what it would take to create a credible transition, including the forces on the ground — military and police — needed to ensure security and the means to establish governance; it was wrong for us to become the administrator of Iraq, becoming the symbol of occupation, instead of having a United Nations interim administration; it was wrong to go to war without thinking through the consequences of unleashing a Shia-Sunni conflict that might not be limited to Iraq.
But Syria has always been a different issue. This was not an American invasion of a country but an internal uprising against an authoritarian leader. Assad consciously made it a sectarian conflict, believing he could survive only if the Alawites, and other minorities, saw their survival depending on his. Soon, thereafter, it was transformed into a proxy war largely pitting Saudi Arabia and Turkey against Iran. A vacuum was created not by our replacing the Assad regime but by our hesitancy to do more than offer pronouncements — by overlearning the lessons of Iraq, in effect. And, that vacuum was filled by others: Iran, Hezbollah and Iran’s other Shia militia proxies; Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Qatar; Russia; and ISIL. Unless the U.S. does more now to fill this vacuum, the situation will spin further out of control.
In many ways, the vacuum in Syria has been compounded by the sense that the U.S. is retrenching in the region, creating a larger void that has helped to produce the increasing competition between Iran and Saudi Arabia. The Iranians saw they ran little risk with the United States as they ramped up their regional activism and made the Qods force — the action arm of the Revolutionary Guard outside of Iran — more prominent in both the Syrian and Iraqi conflicts. Indeed, Qassem Suleiman, the head of the Qods forces, who was previously a shadowy figure, has become a very public presence appearing at times on the ground during the battles over Tikrit in Iraq, al Qusayr in Syria, and other places in both countries. For the Saudis, the nuclear deal and the greater Iranian regional involvement fed their perception that the Obama administration was not prepared to set any real limits on Iran — or act on its red lines. As a result, it has decided to draw its own lines. It has done so in Yemen and will probably find it difficult to extract itself. Its execution of Shia cleric Nimr al-Nimr may have been done as much for domestic reasons, particularly given the number of Sunni Al Qaeda operatives that were being executed at the same time, but the Saudis knew the Iranians would react. They had, after all, threatened the Saudis with retribution if they put him to death.
The Saudi-Iranian competition probably won’t escalate into direct conflict but will make them see the existing proxy wars in strictly zero-sum terms. It will surely make it harder for either to be willing to back down in Syria, and is bound to complicate the administration’s hopes to use the Vienna diplomatic process to, in its words, “bring peace and security to Syria.” Even without the deepening Saudi-Iranian divide, the prospects for Vienna were not great and, in any case, depend far more on Vladimir Putin: he has the ability to force the Assad regime to respect a ceasefire, stop the barrel bombs, and permit the creation of humanitarian corridors for the delivery of food and medicine to the areas that the non-ISIL opposition controls. Only in such circumstances will there be any possibility of getting the Saudis, Turks and others who are supporting the opposition to persuade rebel forces to implement a ceasefire — the key to the Vienna process going anywhere and an essential element of the Obama strategy for defeating ISIL. Indeed, so long as there is no meaningful ceasefire between the Assad regime and the non-ISIL opposition in Syria, the Sunni states and tribes will not truly join the fight against ISIL. (If nothing else, they need to be able to show that the onslaught against Sunnis in Syria has stopped and they have succeeded in protecting them.)
While President Obama sees Syria as a quagmire, Putin, for now, does not. He continues to believe that achieving his ends in the war is more important than ensuring that the Vienna process works at this stage. Moreover, whereas the president believes Putin will not want to repeat the mistakes of Afghanistan and will see the need to extricate Russia from Syria at some point, Putin shows little sign of being inhibited by his reading of Russian involvement in Afghanistan — perhaps, knowing that he does not intend a similarly large ground presence and perhaps also believing that we will simply not raise the costs to him. Putin may well be driven by history, but it is his need to make up for the period of Russian weakness and U.S. primacy; he wants to demonstrate that Russia is a superpower and arbiter of events. He sees U.S. retrenchment, and the vacuum it has created, as an opportunity to reassert Russia’s prerogatives in the Middle East. For President Obama, the Iraq experience continues to loom heavy in his calculus. Like presidents before him, he is being guided by his reading of an analogy. There is nothing wrong with that — provided the analogy is apt.
Presidents and their advisers use analogies to shape judgments, particularly when facing hard choices that involve interventions. For Lyndon Johnson, “Munich” was the analogy that disastrously guided him on Vietnam: if we did not stop the communists there — if we “appeased” them there — we would face a much greater and more dangerous threat later on. In the bipolar world of the Cold War, the Munich analogy was powerful and blinded Johnson and those around him to the realities that communism was not monolithic, that the Soviets and Chinese were rivals, and that the war in Vietnam was nationalistic. George H. W. Bush was also guided by this historical reference point when responding to Saddam Hussein in 1990. Indeed, in Oval Office meetings, I heard him use the Munich analogy as we mobilized the world against the Iraqi leader after he seized Kuwait; for Bush 41, we could not let this aggression stand lest the law of the jungle replace his hopes for a new world order in the aftermath of the Cold War. President Bush may have used the analogy, but he also clearly defined a limited objective which was to reverse the aggression in Kuwait and not produce regime change in Iraq. The means employed matched the stated objective.
Analogies are going to be used, but they need to reflect real lessons. We have never had a serious discussion in this country about the lessons of the Iraq War. The critics of the war never acknowledged there was anything to discuss; indeed, they saw those who supported the war as fundamentally misguided. For their part, the proponents of the war have been so put on the defensive that they have been reluctant to acknowledge what they got wrong and how things might have been done differently.
We should be tempered by the Iraqi debacle, but we should not overlearn the lessons of the war and misapply them. Not every conflict in the Middle East is a replay of Iraq — and our choices for responding to them should not be reduced to doing nothing or putting massive numbers of troops on the ground.
It may not be easy to find the Goldilocks solution where we don’t do too much as in Iraq or too little as in Syria, but until we have a serious debate about Iraq (and for that matter Syria) and consider what needs to be learned from these conflicts, we will thrash around using false analogies and making bad judgments. Having some guidelines for what we might be prepared to do militarily would help — e.g., being prepared to put some troops on the ground, including deploying spotters for directing air attacks, embedding forces with local partners perhaps to the battalion level, and using special operations elements for hit-and-run raids might allow us to manage our involvement while avoiding the slippery slope that the president has feared.
For sure, even these guidelines should be informed by our first asking hard questions in each case about our stakes and whether we should or need to act, and, if so, in what ways. It is obviously not just better but also necessary for local partners to assume a major responsibility in Middle East conflicts. President Obama is right about that. But we also need to know what will produce them — who might actually fight and where, what will motivate them, what they would need from us, whether they believe we will stand by them, and whether we or others have leverage on them. In each case, we should assess the range of military options we have. We should be mindful of what the Pentagon calls mission creep. We are more likely to avoid that if, like George H. W. Bush, we define our objectives clearly from the start and make sure the means we are prepared to apply match them.
At a time when there is a general consensus on the need to fight ISIL but no consensus on how to do it, the Iraqi legacy and its lessons are the elephant in the room. Confronting it and having an open discussion about it — especially in an election year — may be a necessary part of producing a strategy that can work. It may also be essential for signaling those in the region and outside it that we will no longer be inhibited by its legacy.
**Dennis Ross, a former senior advisor to President Obama, is the counselor and William Davidson Distinguished Fellow at The Washington Institute.