Is there a coup a-brew in Turkey?

Over the past 18 months I've read half a dozen books about Turkey and scores of articles.  I did this for a long-term project in which Turkey's position in the international network of rivalries is very interesting.  That project is looking at Turkey as a case for whether an unknown social position that is determined by the cumulative social choices of all states about which states pose a threat (rivalry) can affect state behavior.  There is also a question about whether factors within a state may cause it to become central in such a network.

I am far from an expert on Turkish politics, but my foray into the academic international relations and historical literature about that state has made me curious.  The events within Turkey over the past six months have made the country even more interesting from the standpoint of someone who is interested in civil-military relations.

The reporting on the abortive coup and its aftermath has been interesting and scattered.  On the one hand, it seems as if the coup itself was largely theoretical and ineffective.  The prolonged and continued effort to blame the coup on Gulen and his followers has seemed like a naked political maneuver to minimize any influence that Erdogan's former ally has within the polity.  However, Michael Rubin from the American Enterprise Institute has been writing about other issues with Turkey, and specifically about the chance for a real coup to take place sometime in the coming year.
(article)

Much of the reporting about Turkey in the West focuses on either President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s efforts to draft a new constitution or the aftermath of the abortive July 15 coup. But, behind-the-scenes, there is a story with ramifications as great: the competition for control of the military between followers of Erdogan on one hand and those of ultra-nationalist and former Maoist political leader and businessman Dogu Perincek on the other. Perincek’s followers have long occupied top role in the Turkish military which was fine when Erdogan and Perincek sought to take on common enemies: Kurds, liberals, followers of Fethullah Gülen etc. I had previously written about the Erdogan-Perincek struggle within the Turkish military here, but now it seems that the conflict may be accelerating. 

In recent days, Perincek has appeared on television and insisted Erdogan give up on his dreams of changing the constitution. He has cited a letter from a member of his political party calling for a popular rebellion and has now openly called for a change in government. Perincek has also suggested that Turkey could be aflame by March. One prominent Perincek supporter, prominent retired air force officer Ahmet Zeki Ucok has openly said there will be a new coup, but with full buy-in from all levels of the Turkish military.

 The continued unrest within Turkey, including the murder of Russia's ambassador, attacks carried out by ISIS, and Kurdish restiveness provide the military with plenty of arguments for the need to change the leadership of the state in order to right the security situation. While the idea that there may be a coup in Turkey is still speculative, the growing instability in the country's security situation heightens the risk that such a change could occur.

I am teaching a course this semester on civil-military relations, and we will be doing a lot of Turkey watching.

Doctored Intelligence and ISIS, is this a Crisis?

Why don’t political scientists study intelligence as part of other issues? That is a longer post for a different day and the subject of a paper that I currently have under review at a journal. For today, though, I am interested in the potential for politicization of intelligence processes.

This is in the news again.  A few months ago a news story caught my eye about the fact that intelligence analysts at CENTCOM were being asked to change their assessments about ISIS (A good recap of the controversy is here).  The story is in the news again after the Paris attacks and the new conflagration that is occurring in Syria presently.

Analysts assert that they were asked to tone down assessments that the Islamic State was growing in strength despite the coalition actions against them.

Among the complaints is that after the U.S. air campaign started in August 2014, the metrics to measure progress changed. They were modified to use measures such as the number of sorties and body counts -- a metric not used since the Vietnam War -- to paint a more positive picture. 

Critics say this "activity-based approach" to tracking the effectiveness of strikes does not paint a comprehensive picture of whether ISIS is being degraded and contained.

President Obama has responded to the allegations and said that he doesn't think that the White House has been kept in the dark about the nature of ISIS, and that the administration didn't want intelligence "shaded by politics."

Whether or not President Obama was directly involved in ordering intelligence to be "softened politically" is not the question.  The question is how any president can expect to get unvarnished intelligence when the incentives are built into the system to give information to the boss that things are going well.

In a recent book, Garthoff (2015)[1] explores the relationship between Soviet Leaders and Intelligence.  One of the key points of his book is that Soviet leaders relied on their own conceptions of the main adversary (the US) in evaluating intelligence.  Even if a system exists to funnel "pure intelligence" to a leader, his or her particular lens on the world will always affect the interpretation, and subsequent decisions based on that intelligence.  One of the fundamental questions about foreign policy is whether or not states behave as rational actors.  This depends on whether or not individuals act rationally. Theories of satisficing, of using heuristics to make decisions rather than carefully exploring all options helps us to understand behavior quite well.  If we truly want to understand how intelligence works, we need to understand not only the processes by which it is produced, but the processes by which it is consumed.

In the case of the CENTCOM reports, if the President was given access to the raw intelligence, it is unlikely that the doctored reports made that much difference in national-level decision making.  However, having reports that show success may change the calculus at the operational level, leading to poor strategic outcomes.

One of the other lessons from Garthoff was that Soviet leaders could not rely on intelligence assessment from the KGB and GRU precisely because those organizations were expressly ideological and their assessments were not objective enough to provide clear guidance for decision-making. If the US Intelligence Community (IC) becomes similarly politicized it will lead to marginalization of that government function.

From a bureaucratic survival perspective, then, it is is probably in the best interest of the IC to be (or at least appear to be) politically neutral and ideology free.  The short-term gains in political favor will lead to long-term decline in the political power of the institution.

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[1] Garthoff, Raymond. 2015. Soviet Leaders and Intelligence: Assessing the American Adversary during the Cold War. Georgetown University Press.