PREVENTING CONFLICT OVER KURDISTAN
http://carnegieendowment.org/files/preventing_conflict_kurdistan.pdf
By Henri J. Barkey
Reviewed by Amb. Michael Cotter, Publisher, American Diplomacy

Over the past six months a deluge of articles with policy recommendations for the Obama administration, authored by scholars, pundits, and former and/or prospective government officials, have kept the foreign affairs journal industry in business.  American Diplomacy has done its part, including bringing to our readers’ attention via our links to such articles found in sister publications. Given the number and complexity of the issues the administration faces, perhaps the greatest benefit of such articles is the in-depth analysis they provide of the issue(s) for which the authors propose policy solutions; the kind of analysis generally not found in the media.

That is certainly the case with this article, published by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in February. The author, Henri Barkey, is a nonresident senior associate in  Carnegie’s Middle East Program and a professor of international relations at Lehigh University. He served on the State Department’s Policy Planning Staff, working primarily on issues related to the Middle East, the Eastern Mediterranean, and intelligence from 1998 to 2000; has taught at Princeton, Columbia, the State University of New York, and the University of Pennsylvania; and has authored, co-authored, and edited five books.

Here Barkey has taken on the enormously difficult issue of Iraq’s Kurds. To his credit, and unlike many of the other authors who have tackled this issue (e.g., former U.S. ambassador to Croatia Peter Galbraith), he has produced a commendably even-handed discussion of both the background and the current state of play. He begins with an excellent, albeit all too short, background on the history of the Kurdish people and their frustrated efforts to achieve recognition and independence leading to their current minority status in four key Middle Eastern countries – Turkey, Iran, Iraq, and Syria.  Although his main focus, as it should be, is on how to solve the immediate problem of the status of Kurds in a unified Iraq, he goes to great pains to underline how any solution of that problem is tied to the status of Kurds in the other three countries, especially Turkey.

Barkey’s essential argument is that finding a way to accommodate Iraqi Kurds’ demands for a large degree of autonomy within a unified Iraq is a critical issue if the United States is to withdraw successfully from its presence in that country. He further argues that the United States is the only player with the influence over the three principal protagonists (the Iraqi government, Turkey, and the Kurds themselves) to achieve that goal.  And thus he arrives at the heart of his article: his recommendations for policy steps the United States should take to achieve it. He identifies U.S. objectives as:
1) Establishment of a legitimate Kurdish entity in the north of a federal Iraqi state;
2) Resolution of the issue of who controls the key northern city of Kirkuk;
3) Establishing a working relationship between the Turkish government and the Iraqi Kurdish political entity;
4) Resolution of Turkey’s own Kurdish problem; and
5) Developing approaches to Iran and Syria regarding their Kurdish populations.

Perceptively, he argues that while the most urgent problem is solving control of Kirkuk, the most difficult will be Turkey’s need to satisfy the demands of its Kurdish population.

Having identified the key problems and the priority in which they must be addressed, Barkey then turns to listing recommendations for steps U.S. policy makers must take to resolve them. Here Barkey’s analysis begins to suffer from the same problem that afflicts so many such articles – it is relatively easy to list policy steps, but much more difficult to implement them. Regarding Kirkuk, Barkey understands the difficulty it poses, but he argues cogently that as time passes U.S. influence will wane, so the need for action is urgent.

On the dual issues of Turkey’s relations with the Iraqi government and Iraq’s Kurds, Barkey’s policy recommendations may overstate the influence the U.S. government still wields over both the Turks and the Iraqis. His recommendations regarding Iran and Syria are simple and reasonable – signal to both that the United States has no intention of encouraging their Kurdish populations to cause problems. Essentially what he asks is – if and when the atmosphere for better U.S. relations with those countries arrives – that Kurdish questions need to be on the agenda.

Turning in his conclusion to recommendations for implementing his policy prescriptions, Barkey proposes creation of a high-level coordinator position in the U.S. government capable of making all of the bureaucratic players (the State and Defense Departments, the military Central and European Commands, the intelligence community, and the National Security Council) work together. He envisions a coordinator with adequate access to the president and sufficient staff to see the process through.

In sum, Barkey has come up with an outstanding analysis of the issues involved, the U.S. goals, and measures that need to be taken to achieve those goals. Those measures reflect the difficulty of the issues, and one can only hope that the United States has the focus to address the issues and the influence and resources to achieve the goals he has set for it.