First, observers should be deeply skeptical of any claims that the Turkish armed forces are or have been committed to the principles of liberal democracy. Although supporters of the officers are quick to remind that the TAF returned the government to civilians after each of the four coups d’etat between 1960 and 1997, each episode coincided with the officers’ successful efforts—through some shrewd institutional engineering—to narrow Turkey’s political arena.

Second, the portrayal of the officers as deeply opposed to Islam is, as Reynolds suggests, erroneous. Turkey’s commanders have used Islam for what they perceived to be political advantage. For example, in order to gain support from religiously conservative notables in the Anatolian interior during the nationalist struggle, Mustafa Kemal himself used Islam as a mechanism of political mobilization for his project. After the 1980 coup, the officers went on a mosque- and imam-hatip school-construction binge in a misguided endeavor to depoliticize Turkish society after a decade of left vs. right violence.

Finally, to the larger point that Mufti and Reynolds have made about the stresses on Turkey’s secular system: Dare I suggest that these strains are the result of the failure of Kemalism to achieve ideological hegemony? Turkey has become too complex and differentiated for the drab conformity that Kemalism demands. In the end, AKP and DTP may be shut down, but these efforts reveal that the principles of Kemalism can only be enforced through coercion, which is the least efficient means of political control. The avatars of Turkish secularism like Yaşar Büyükanıt and Abdurrahman Yalçınkaya are, despite themselves, presiding over Kemalism’s deathwatch.

Steven A. Cook is Douglas Dillon Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations.

But they do know they don’t like what they see. Turkey’s chief prosecutor, Abdurrahman Yalçınkaya, is now asking the Constitutional Court to ban the ruling Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi (Justice and Development Party) on charges of undermining secularism. As Malik noted, when the military warned the AKP-led parliament not to elect Abdullah Gül president of the republic, the AKP called early elections and won in a landslide. Now the chief prosecutor is upping the ante and trying to have the party shut down and 71 of its members banished from politics for five years. Last November Yalçınkaya asked the court to shut down Turkey’s “Kurdish” party, the Democratic Society Party (Demokratik Toplum Partisi). No decision has yet been made.

Another point I would like to make is that the reason why the TAF distrust any politics that smacks of Islam is not so much because they see Islam as an illiberal force inimical to democracy or corrosive of Turkey’s putative pro-Western orientation but for a simpler reason: they see doctrinal Islam as a source of crippling weakness. Foreign commentators typically portray the TAF as a bastion of pro-Western sentiment and values in Turkey. Although not entirely incorrect, this depiction is oversimplified. The Turkish Republic was not borne out of an experiment to realize the ideals of liberal democracy but instead out of a desperate effort to salvage for Ottoman Muslims a chunk of territory—Anatolia—from a crumbling empire under long-term assault by the Great Powers. That attempt was successful, and the forerunners to today’s TAF played the key role in it. It was also exceptional. It is worth remembering that only two major countries in the Middle East have escaped European occupation: Turkey and Saudi Arabia.

In their search for an explanation for their once invincible empire’s inability to beat back the European powers, the Young Turks at the turn of the century identified Islam as a reactionary force that had impeded their society’s ability to match European advances in technological, economic, and military might. Many Ottoman military officers, including but by no means limited to Mustafa Kemal, subscribed to this general view, which drew heavily upon the materialist and positivist philosophies then considered cutting-edge in Europe. Thus when they established the Turkish Republic, they were determined to subordinate Islam to the state and contain its influence over society.

An ancillary reason why the TAF are deeply suspicious of Islam in politics is that it might suggest a loyalty to something beyond the Turkish state and in particular an affinity to Turkey’s Middle Eastern neighbors, and Arab neighbors especially. The Turkish Republic’s officer corps has, by and large, traditionally been allergic to closer ties to the Arab world, seeing it as at best a geopolitical quagmire to be avoided and at worst a source of cultural contamination that would undermine the republic should it be embraced too closely.

To return to Malik’s point, the TAF and Turkey’s secularist establishment as a whole will continue to find itself under stress. The current environment is a confusing one for the TAF as an institution. The TAF rests on a world view that is not only obsolescing but that is today arguably counterproductive to its two main goals, the perpetuation of a modern and unified society. Sharp minds within the TAF recognize this, although the war in Iraq renewed the Turkish military’s nightmare of separatism (in this case Kurdish) backed by neo-imperial powers (read the United States and the EU) and jolted the TAF to revert to its instincts and templates of threat assessment it inherited from the late Ottoman period.

But even when confused and under stress, the TAF remains a remarkable and powerful institution, and one which should not be discounted or underestimated.

Michael Reynolds is a member of MESH.