What is a war now anyways?

Sometimes you can learn more about a government from how it handles failure than from how it deals with success.  For this reason, I’m going to be interested to see how the Turkish government deals with the accidental killing of 35 civilians in misguided bombing raid yesterday.  The raid was supposedly targeting Kurdish extremists (aka "terrorists"); instead, the victims were civilians (probably engaged in smuggling), a good many of them reportedly in their late teens.

Despite certain misgivings, I’ve been impressed by Turkey’s progress in recent years, and by the political sophistication of its leadership.   Turkey’s economic growth has exceeded 5 percent over the past decade, and it staged a sharp recovery from the 2007-2008 financial crisis (growing roughly 11 percent in 2010).  The AKP has emphasized education, enacted significant constitutional reforms, and won nearly 50% of the vote in the 2011 parliamentary elections.  On the negative side, there are growing concerns about press independence in Turkey and the government’s protracted, wide-ranging, and still-unresolved investigation of an alleged military coup plot (the so-called Ergenekon trials) has raised serious questions about the politicization of the investigation and prosecution.

In foreign policy, the AKP government has won plaudits for its energetic (some might say, hyperactive) regional diplomacy, and despite some recent setbacks, by an ability to chart a principled but flexible course consistent with its own long-term interests.  In addition to strongly backing global efforts to press the Assad government in Syria (a formerly close ally), Turkey was especially critical of Operation Cast Lead, the 2008-2009 Israeli assault on Gaza.  It also lowered its diplomatic relations with Israel this past year when the Netanyahu government refused to apologize for the killing of several Turkish citizens during the IDF raid on the Gaza relief vessel Mavi Marmara.   Not surprisingly, these responses helped make Prime Minister Erdogan the most admired figure in the Arab world, according to some recent surveys.

Which puts the Turkish government in the hot seat now.  If you’re going to be critical of other countries’ over-reliance on military force (correctly, in my view), and if you’re going to demand apologies and/or policy changes when these actions lead to the loss of innocent life, then you’d better be willing to live up to similar standards when the shoe is on the other foot.  To their credit, Prime Minister Erdogan has already expressed regret for the incident and President Abdullah Gul has offered his own condolences, though neither has yet offered a full-fledged apology.  An official investigation is reportedly underway, but it remains to be seen whether those responsible will be held to account.   But if Turkey doesn’t respond to this event in a convincing manner,  it will lose some of the moral authority that its recent stances have earned.

More generally, this incident reminds us that air-power remains a crude policy instrument, and one that almost inevitably leads to embarrassing and/tragic results.   As we’ve seen repeatedly in recent years, even highly sophisticated military organizations can make big mistakes when they try to impose their will solely through bombing campaigns.  Sometimes you hit a foreign embassy by mistake.  At other times you bomb your putative allies, or even your own troops.   And as we’ve seen repeatedly in the Af/Pak theater, even strict rules of engagement and the most sophisticated sensors and precision weapons cannot prevent civilians from being struck by accident or becoming unavoidable "collateral damage."

It also makes me wonder we aren’t seeing a further blurring of the lines between war and peace.  This isn’t the first time Turkey has bombed suspected Kurdish rebels across the border in Iraq, but you wouldn’t say that Turkey was actually at war with Baghdad.  Similarly, the United States is waging an expansive drone war against suspected terrorists and other suspected bad guys in several different countries–none of whom we are officially "at war" with–and ordinary Americans don’t even know the full extent of what we are doing.  Why?  As Glenn Greenwald notes, it’s because the Obama Administration refuses to tell us. In short, we don’t "declare war" anymore: we wage it in the shadows and most of us don’t really know what’s going on.

As I’ve noted before, if more and more countries are killing people through actions that are not-quite-war-but-certainly-not peace, then we are likely to under-estimate the overall level of conflict in the world and we will fail to appreciate the underlying reasons why some groups are angry at us or our allies.  And one wonders what it might take to get different governments-including the leaders in Washington and Ankara–to ask whether the instruments they are relying on aren’t the right ones.