TASAM | Complex Security Threats: New Apprecations For International...

Türkiye and Africa Relations:

Türkiye is exercising its vocation as an emerging power and is trying to build relationships with Africa. Internationally this was noticeable particularly with Somalia. Turkish Airlines’ scheduled links with Somalia symbolized this connection and was taken as both daring and a sign of commitment even to a troubled African state.
Türkiye, however, cannot intervene in Africa simply as an Islamic country – a frequent Western misunderstanding and reductionism - due to cultural differences, religious pluralism within Islam, and external factors imposed by other ‘Islamic’ states. Instead, Turkiye should engage with sympathy, understanding, and awareness of complex factors. A diplomacy of assiduous sensitivity is required.

Africa’s Diplomatic Position:

Africa lacks diplomatic engagement and support from the EU, unlike the case of Ukraine.
Ukraine has seven embassies in Africa but no significant influence, as Africa is often seen as a continent of over-great political diversity and with little political punching weight. Turkiye knows this is untrue and has many more embassies, but they too must ‘up their game’..

Africa’s Potential and Challenges:

Africa comprises 54 countries, each with unique problems. However, African people could achieve anything if they are given agency and opportunities. Turkiye’s foreign policy should emphasize exactly those opportunities but always in a non-condescending manner. It is natural for an independent state to do things its own way, even with assistance.
What Africa needs most is sympathy and understanding, not more non-African goods, values, impositions and foreign needs entering the continent.

Military and Strategic Dynamics:

Military cooperation in Africa should with basic premises:
Eritrea’s military won against Stalinist Ethiopia by applying Clausewitz’s doctrine of concentrating forces on the weakest point of the enemy. So Generalship of rebel forces can be of a very high level.
Kaddafi’s use of Toyota pickups helped the Taliban capture Kabul for the first time and allowed him to resist NATO in Libya for six months. Donations of military equipment should resist tanks and aircraft and emphasize light and fast, maneuverable vehicles, drones and all those things that lend themselves to speed and reduction of front-line casualties.
Tanks are ‘nice to have’ to demonstrate a ‘real’ army but, in combat, are too often used only as movable artillery, slow movable artillery. Rebel forces win by speed.

Terrorism and Violence in Africa:

Violence in Africa seems mostly Islamic in nature, but there is almost always a complex cocktail of reasons for rebellion and uprising.
More than one Nigerian state leader in the areas contested by Boko Haram has stated that moving too fast towards ‘Western’ values of e.g. gender equality would lead to losing to Boko Haram, so this gives rise to the problematique of slow but sometimes frustratingly ‘steady’ progress.
Trade-offs exist between countering terrorists like Boko Haram and ISIS, but not as analyzed by Washington think tanks along Connecticut Avenue. The trade-offs must go beyond those of a material nature but, very problematically, negotiate areas of the extent of faith.

External Interventions and Local Responses:

ISIS’s attack on Mali showed the inability of local forces to resist without Western equipment, such as the light and fast equipment provided by France.
Africa’s historical resilience is evident in places like Timbuktu, which once housed one of the world’s greatest libraries and what we should today call a university. A center of great learning. Preserving that culture is the key goal for an Africa under contestation. Turkiye is better prepared than any Western state to help, but it too must resist convincing itself it knows it all before it even starts.