The growing reports of increased U.S. support for the armed opposition in Syria with the training of Free Syrian Army (FSA) militias in Jordan and the facilitating of arms shipments into the country through Turkey mark an increase in overall U.S. assistance over two years into the conflict. While such actions are tempting in efforts to bring an end to Syria's deepening civil war, a military solution for either side has not been achievable these past two years. What is needed, instead, is to combine military assistance with a coordinated strategy of capacity building within the opposition, which can then have measurable results and reinforce international efforts to find a political solution to the crisis.

A better-trained, organized opposition that is able to make political and military gains could change not only the situation on the ground, but also the perception of the crisis in Russia and Syrian President Bashar al-Assad's inner circle. Based on our conversations with former senior members of the Assad regime and individuals in contact with the regime presently, Assad is still confident that he can manage to suppress the uprisings and bring the opposition to the table to negotiate on his terms. 

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After nearly three decades of bloody struggle with the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK), Turkey might finally be entering a post-conflict era. On Wednesday, the PKK's jailed leader Abdullah Ocalan, who has been serving a life sentence on Imrali Island since 1999, called for an immediate cease-fire and for thousands of his fighters to withdraw from Turkish territory. The call followed a round of talks that began in October 2012 between Turkey's National Intelligence Organization (MIT) and Ocalan to convince the PKK fighters to lay down their arms and withdraw from Turkish soil. On Ocalan's counsel and in a gesture of good will, the PKK released eight Turkish soldiers and civil servants last week that had been abducted almost two years ago.

Ocalan's call could mark the first step in ending one of the world's longest running insurgencies. If it were to succeed, it would also favorably impact Turkey's democratization process, as well as possibly change the course of the Syrian uprising. 

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The resumption of talks between the Turkish government and imprisoned Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) leader Abdullah Ocalan has raised hopes for a solution to the Kurdish issue. An advisor to Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan announced a Dec. 31 interview that disarmament negotiations were occurring in Imrali prison, where Ocalan is serving a life sentence. They are the first confirmed state-PKK talks since mid-2011. Nothing is known for certain about their specific content, which only the government has commented on to date. But the fact that Erdogan confirmed and took clear responsibility for the meetings has created hope for a breakthrough. A Jan. 3 visit by Kurdish parliamentarians to Imrali -- the first of its kind in the talks -- was also hailed as a historic.

The Imrali meetings are an important step, but Ankara's repeated failure to follow through on expectations for progress on the conflict counsels against premature optimism. If they are to result in anything more than another wave of disappointment, the AKP must drop its goal of defeating the Kurdish political movement in favor of a genuine, negotiated agreement acceptable to all parties, including the PKK. 

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The last time Erkan Yildirim visited his imprisoned wife, Pervin, she told him about her recent meeting with their colleague, Fatma. "Pervin said Fatma was very sluggish, that her eyes were slowly darkening, that two or three people had to bring her to and from the bathroom," says Yildirim, nearly choking on the words. At that time, Fatma had been on a hunger strike for more than a month.

What his wife said next, however, was even more troubling. Pervin informed Yildirim that she was about to begin her own indefinite hunger strike.

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As international attention remains focused on the fighting in Syria, Turkey's military has been fighting lethal battles on its southern border with the Kurdistan's Workers' Party (PKK), which has waged a bloody war against Turkey for almost three decades. Just last week, nine people were killed when a car packed with explosives blew up close to a police station in Gaziantep, a city around 30 miles from the Syrian border. In response, the National Security Council (MGK) convened yesterday to discuss the recent PKK attacks and issued a statement vowing to avert the risks to its national security emanating from the violence in Syria. While the government has come under increased criticism for its Kurdish policy, Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan is placing the blame on Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. Ankara suspects the PKK is exploiting the chaos in Syria, and that Assad is supplying it with arms in retaliation for Turkey's support for the Syrian opposition.

The spike in the PKK's terrorist activity in Turkey comes amid mounting concerns in Ankara that the PKK and its affiliates are gaining ground in Turkey's southern neighbor. Particularly alarming was the capture of several towns along the Turkish border by the PKK's Syrian offshoot, the Party of Unity and Democracy (PYD). Turkey watched nervously as Kurdish groups took control of the towns after the withdrawal of Assad forces and hoisted the Kurdish flag over Syrian government buildings, along with posters of the PKK's imprisoned leader, Abdullah Ocalan.

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Talks between Iran and the five permanent members of the U.N. Security Council plus Germany resume again this weekend, with Tehran giving hints that it may take a more constructive attitude to negotiations than it did during the previous round in 2011. Iranian nuclear officials have suggested that Iran might curtail its 20 percent uranium enrichment program, which would meet almost halfway the expected demands of the United States and its so-called P5+1 negotiating partners.

The United States and its allies reportedly plan to demand the immediate cessation of uranium enrichment to 20 percent, and a closure of the hardened Fordow enrichment plant, possibly in exchange for promises of no further sanctions. If the United States and its international partners are able to achieve these objectives, they will significantly slow Iran's progress toward having the capacity to produce a nuclear weapon, score a victory for the two-track policy of diplomacy and economic pressure, and provide a template for more fully resolving outstanding issues surrounding Iran's nuclear program in future talks.

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The "Arab Spring" is now over one year old. In much of the popular analysis over the past year the term "Arab Spring" has become the defining characteristic of the "new" Middle East emerging from decades of authoritarian and repressive rule. However, one should be cautious about inflating the importance of the democratic uprisings in several Arab countries in shaping the future contours of the Middle East. This caution applies especially to exaggerating both the prospects of democracy -- particularly the unhindered linear transition to representative rule -- in the Arab world and the role of major Arab powers in determining political outcomes in the Middle East in the short and medium-term future.

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On the top floor of a towering apartment block in Cairo, half a dozen Syrian activists are hunched over their laptops. Each man organized demonstrations in his home town before escaping the Assad regime's intelligence agents in the last few months. Now, armed with a list of trusted contacts that stretches across the borders from southwest Syria to Lebanon and Jordan, they have become a key link in the supply chain of an opposition movement that is struggling to outmaneuver a brutal crackdown. Donations collected from Syrians and well-wishers in Cairo are used to purchase cell phones, satellite communications equipment, medicine, and money, which is smuggled to friends and family members on the inside. In turn, protesters send out video evidence of attacks, which the men in Cairo catalogue, upload to YouTube, and forward to media outlets.

The men work with close contacts in their own villages and neighborhoods, independently of organizing committees or opposition bodies. Abdel Youssef fled from Ad Dumayr, a city northeast of Damascus. Syrian authorities went door to door there searching for military defectors on Wednesday night and he spent the day following their movements through eyewitness accounts. As he tells the story of how he fled, a Skype window flashes up on his screen. A woman he knows tells him that security forces attempting to arrest a man have captured his daughter instead. "Now I'm looking out the window," the message reads. "She is being beaten up by the security forces because she is saying ‘Allahu Akhbar'." Abdel Youssef passes on information like this to a contact in the Free Syrian Army, who he says use this information to block roads and set up ambushes in an attempt to protect demonstrations.

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In the midst of all the changes the Arab Spring has brought in Egypt, Tunisia, and Libya, among others, the intelligent lay, media, and policy worlds have remained largely deaf to the Kurdish question. This is an unfortunate situation because much has occurred concerning Kurdish nationalism, particularly in the aftermath of the Arab Spring. However, the Kurdish version of the Arab Spring did not just begin in 2011, but has been going on for decades: In Turkey (at least since the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) formally began its insurgency in August 1984), as well as in Iraq since the days of Mulla Mustafa Barzani beginning in the early 1960s, but especially since the end of the two U.S. wars against Saddam Hussein in 1991 and even more in 2003. These two wars led to the creation of the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) in northern Iraq, the most successful attempt at Kurdish statehood in modern times.

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Turkey's air strikes in recent weeks in search of Partiye Karkaren Kurdistane (PKK) insurgents along the Iraqi Kurdish border have fueled a growing crisis. They have caused civilian deaths and displacements, raising criticisms by human rights organizations, local populations, the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) and even the Baghdad Parliament. This predicament has not only undermined possibilities for negotiating Turkey's Kurdish problem, but has also heightened tensions among Kurdish groups in Iraq and the region.

Still, complaints against Turkish incursions will continue to be checked by concomitant demands to control the PKK, assure regional security, and guarantee shared economic interests. The military interventions may therefore have less effect than expected on the alliance between Turkey and Iraqi Kurds, but may further fragment cross-border Kurdish groups and encourage regional unrest.

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Although it is still early to evaluate the ultimate impact that Turkey's June 12 parliamentary elections -- which resulted in a landslide victory for the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) -- will have on the direction of its foreign policy, there are several likely outcomes. The electoral victory of the AKP under the leadership of Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan demonstrates again that the Turkish electorate is satisfied with the assertive foreign policy that has been a concomitant feature of the party. In fact, part of the explanation for the victory of the AKP was the rise of Turkey's stature in its region and in world politics over the last nine years. The support for Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu's electoral campaign by the candidates of opposition parties in his district -- and the tendency of opposition parties not to bring Turkish foreign policy to the election agenda -- was a further sign of public support for the government's outlook. From Erdogan's victory speech on election night, moreover, it's possible to tease out a number of possible changes (as well as continuities), in the tone, means, and goals of Turkish foreign policy.

In the AKP's next government term, Turkey will continue to extend and deepen its ties with different political actors and the people of the Middle East, which was indicative in Erdogan's salutation in his victory speech to the people of Damascus, Cairo, Beirut, the West Bank, Ramallah, Gaza, and Jerusalem. As such, and in the aftermath of the Arab Spring, an Erdogan government will likely aspire to a more integrated Middle East where Turkey occupies a central role more attuned to the political developments of the region. The prime minister realizes that only having a good posture, being a favorite leader in the region, or maintaining good ties with the people in the upper echelons of governments is no longer sufficient. To solve this problem, it would not be surprising to see a Turkish diplomatic outreach going forward focused on a "civilian surge" that aims to be more active on the civil-society level in the Middle East in order to build the groundwork for deeper ties with the region.

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Leading Western publications, such as the Economist and the New York Times, have been recently editorializing in a sensational vein that the return to power of the Justice and Development Party (AKP) with an enhanced majority could be the beginning of the end of the Turkish democratic experiment. The Economist has gone to the extent of endorsing the CHP, Turkey's main opposition party and the standard-bearer of Kemalism with its mix of authoritarianism and militant secularism, as if it were endorsing a candidate in the mayoral elections in London. The New York Times has editorialized that it would be better for Turkey if the voters did not give the AKP what it calls a "supermajority" as it would erode the basis of Turkish democracy.

These apprehensions regarding an AKP victory in the June 12 Turkish elections have their roots in two sources. On the one hand, they are the products of overblown concerns about the future of democracy in a country undergoing democratic consolidation, which is hardly ever a unilinear and smooth process. A second cause for such apprehensions, which undergirds the first, is related to the Islamist pedigree of the AKP -- though the party has moved quite a distance away from its roots and repackaged itself as a conservative democratic formation akin in spirit to the Christian Democrats of Europe. Nonetheless, the fact that many of its leaders belonged to the Islamist Refah (Welfare) Party at one time and that it continues to draw support from some of the same elements that supported Refah conjures up images of a staunchly Muslim Turkey under the AKP that will be reflexively anti-Western.

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President Obama's Middle East speech last week laid out a policy of support for the growth of democracy and peace in the area. He challenged all the players in the region to support self-determination, equal opportunity, democracy, political and civil rights and religious tolerance. He stated that democracy requires a free press and right to assembly. He called for a Palestinian state based on 1967 borders. The President has a clear vision of U.S. policy in the Middle East.

It is not obvious that the Turkish government could make the same declarations.

Under the Justice and Development Party (AKP) Turkey is having a tough time adjusting its much heralded foreign policy of "zero problems with neighbors" to the new realities of the Middle East. Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu says Turkey wants good relations with the people and regimes of the region. However the people of the Middle East are challenging their own dictators today. Tomorrow they will remember the states that supported the brutality of these regimes. Turkey must therefore realize the soft power they extol in their active diplomacy as a regional leader is not just about trade and diplomacy. It also calls for active support for democracy, human rights, and the rule of law.

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Political demonstrations in Tunisia and Egypt have sparked a century old discussion: Is Turkey a model for the Middle East? Two contemporary examples of the "Turkey-as-a-model" debate show how this issue can play out: Turkey was presented as a moderate Islamic, democratic model for the Middle East as part of George W. Bush's "freedom agenda," and more recently as part of Barack Obama's democracy promotion efforts in the Middle East. It is ironic that in 2010 the debate revolved around concepts such as a "shift of axis," "torn country," and "drifting away," but now Turkey has transformed from a "lost" ally to a "model" country.

Interestingly enough, Islamist actors such as Rachid Ghannouchi of Tunisia and the Muslim Brotherhood of Egypt declared their intention to emulate the Turkish experience in order to differentiate themselves from the examples of Iran and Taliban. How is it that Turkey is presented as a model country by political actors as varied as high-level U.S. officials and Islamist groups? To make sense of this irony, one needs to consider the questions: whose model and which Turkey?

In fact, there are three main political groups with competing narratives on what the Turkish model means.

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