AL-Monitor
By Amberin Zaman
Jan. 21, 2021
With the inauguration of Joe Biden as US president, Turkey’s
designated nemesis, Brett McGurk, has formally taken over his new
position as the National Security Council coordinator for the Middle
East and North Africa. “The McGurk thorn in Turkish-American
relations,” fumed English-language government mouthpiece Daily Sabah
in a Jan. 18 op-ed. The headline summed up the mood in Ankara, where
McGurk is widely expected to use his power to undermine Turkey at
every opportunity.
“McGurk was the chief architect of the United States’ relationship
with the Syrian offshoot of the [Kurdistan Workers Party] PKK
terrorist organization, the [People’s Protection Units] YPG. The
appointment has dealt a heavy blow and could impact the mending of
ties between Ankara and Washington. McGurk’s appointment has sullied
the picture,” complained the op-ed’s author, Batu Coskun. Will it
really?
The narrative being pushed by circles close to Turkish President Recep
Tayyip Erdogan stems from McGurk’s role as counter-Islamic State envoy
under two presidents, Barack Obama and Donald Trump. McGurk, together
with the US Central Command, oversaw the highly successful partnership
with the Syrian Kurdish YPG to defeat IS.
Turkey remains incensed by the alliance because of the YPG’s close
links with the PKK, which has been waging an armed insurgency against
Turkey since 1984. The reality is, though, that Ankara treats any
arrangement empowering the Kurds, be they in Iraq, Iran, Syria or
Turkey, as an existential threat. By May 2017, Turkish Foreign
Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu was openly campaigning for McGurk to be
dismissed. “It would be beneficial if this person is changed,” he told
the private broadcaster NTV.
While it’s easy to see why having its NATO ally arm, train and
decorate members of a group that was established as the PKK’s Syrian
wing would drive Turkey mad, the reason the partnership grew is not
McGurk. It’s Turkey’s failure to come up with an alternative force and
its laissez faire attitude toward the thousands of foreign fighters
who poured into Syria through the Turkish border to expand the
“caliphate” that gave rise to Turkey’s image as a patron of the
jihadis.
In truth, McGurk worked closely with the Turks for many years
traveling to Ankara, meeting with Erdogan and striking up an amicable
relationship with his intelligence chief Hakan Fidan, among others, to
work on a range of knotty issues including Iraq and its oil trade
through the Kurdistan Region.
Yet the anti-McGurk growls from Ankara suggest that Turkey continues
to pin US policies that it doesn’t like on individuals and claim those
individuals have gone rogue.
“McGurk is not a rogue actor. He’s someone who’s deeply committed to
advancing the missions assigned to him by his commander-in-chief and
he’s done it for three presidents,” said a Western source with close
knowledge of McGurk. “He’s never believed in carving up Syria, just
like he’s never believed in carving up Iraq. He’s trying to cultivate
strong local partners to advance US interests. He’s driven by matching
means with ends and he’s often given few resources to accomplish
significant tasks,” the source added. One of his notable successes was
negotiating the 2016 prisoner swap with Iran that saw four Americans
of Iranian descent including Washington Post reporter Jason Rezaian
freed in exchange for seven Iranians who were held on charges of
violating sanctions.
A defining characteristic of McGurk is the ease and single-mindedness
with which he shapes the missions that he’s assigned. He’s a master at
navigating power — a strategist, not an ideologue. As such, if Ankara
were to turn a new page, as it keeps claiming it wants to do, it may
well find a constructive partner in McGurk, be it in Syria, Iraq, Iran
or Libya, over which he now holds sway.
And the Syrian Kurds may discover as their Iraqi brothers did that
McGurk does not always pick their side. He was among the fiercest
critics of the Iraqi Kurds’ 2017 referendum on independence.
In the first year of the war against IS in 2014, McGurk spent more
time in Turkey than any other country in the region. He negotiated the
deal to get Turkey to let the coalition carry out airstrikes against
IS. It took almost a year. It was again McGurk who secured Turkish
agreement to let Iraqi Kurdish peshmerga warriors transit through
Turkey to help the YPG end the IS siege of Kobani, the Syrian town on
the Turkish border where the US partnership with the Syrian Kurds was
first forged.
Yet even after Kobani, Washington’s plan A was to use the
Turkish-backed Syrian opposition against IS. Massive US air support
helped those forces cross the so-called Marea line and move east to
Manbij. The mixed Arab-Turkish town where IS had planned the Paris
attacks would soon become the locus of Turkish-US tensions in Syria.
However, when Turkish-backed forces failed to capture Manbij, where IS
had planned the deadly Paris and Brussels attacks, the Pentagon gave
the YPG-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) the green light on Manbij,
allowing them to seize territory west of the Euphrates River for the
first time, something Turkey was viscerally opposed to.
The same pattern was repeated in Raqqa. Turkey was given over a year
to come up with a rebel force to seize the jihadis’ capital. Ankara
instead demanded that the Pentagon provide more US forces — some
10,000 of them — than it was willing to deploy of its own. Once again
the SDF stepped in. Raqqa fell in 2017.
The emerging consensus was that Turkey was more motivated to attack
the Syrian Kurds than to clear IS from its border.
“Ankara did seek to build with the United States an alternative force
through the Train and Equip program. The program failed,” said Aaron
Stein, research director for the Foreign Policy Research Institute, a
think tank based in Philadelphia. He was referring to a now defunct
CIA program to arm and train Syrian opposition rebels inside Turkey.
The US plan then became to defeat IS and “given the reality of
geography and the need to work through a proxy, the YPG was the only
option. Whereas it was a secondary priority for Ankara, as they
focused first on the clandestine program to push [out Syrian President
Bashar al-] Assad and then to frustrate the YPG’s efforts,” Stein
added.
Domestic politics also played a big part in deepening the US-Turkish
divide. The Kurds’ dizzying gains in Syria spooked Turkey into pulling
the plug on peace talks with the PKK. Up to this day, Erdogan remains
convinced that the United States had a finger in the failed attempt to
bloodily unseat him in July 2016. It is frequently cited as one of the
reasons the Turkish leader decided to acquire Russian S-400 missiles
that are designed to shoot down US-made F-16s, which the coup plotters
used to bomb the Turkish Parliament.
The move has pushed Turkish-US relations to the brink. Caving to
congressional pressure in December, the Trump administration slapped
sanctions on Turkey’s state defense procurer under the Countering
America’s Adversaries Act.
Turkey has already been kicked out of the F-35 consortium and will not
receive any of the fifth generation fighter jets until it's removed
the S-400s, or as Stein puts it, “verifies nondeployment” and “nonuse”
through a credible monitoring mechanism. Antony Blinken, the Biden
administration’s pick for secretary of state, made clear that there
will be no shift during his confirmation hearing on Jan. 19. “The idea
that a strategic — so-called strategic — partner of ours would
actually be in line with one of our biggest strategic competitors in
Russia is not acceptable,” he said, hinting that further sanctions
might follow.
Erdogan remains adamant, however, that Turkey will take delivery of a
second shipment of S-400 batteries. Might he believe that the Biden
administration will seek his ouster? His legendary paranoia will have
been fed by Biden's refusal to indulge his request for a telephone
conversation, as initially reported by the Middle East Eye.
Turkey’s assault against the YPG in October 2019 offered a glimpse of
what might follow, with Biden lashing out at Trump for greenlighting
the invasion. Biden said he would have never allowed it and called
Erdogan an "autocrat."
In December 2019, McGurk quit the administration in protest at Trump’s
announcement that he was pulling all US troops out of
Kurdish-controlled northeast Syria. (Faced with a congressional
outcry, Trump didn't follow through.) Freed of his bureaucratic
straitjacket, the 47-year-old former lawyer began publicly taking aim
at Turkey over its lax attitude toward IS. How else did Abu Bakr
al-Baghdadi find sanctuary so near the Turkish border, McGurk mused in
a series of tweets.
In sum, Turkey’s real and self-inflicted problem is with a bipartisan
consensus in Congress and with the new president that it's Ankara, not
McGurk, that is going rogue. The priority, certainly as far as Syria
is concerned, will be to undo the damage Trump appointees wrought by
silently condoning Turkish aggression against the Kurds and turning a
blind eye to the horrific abuses by its rebel proxies. As of Jan. 20
the message from Washington will likely be, “No more free rides."