No doubt, Turks have strong leanings towards fatalistic behavior regardless of how religiously observant they are. Recently, the father of a little girl who died with her 16 friends and one teacher after an explosion at an illegal Koran course commented on the incident: “God's will!”

God punishes who?

In a parallel, but more extravagant mindset, Islamists had two explanations for the devastating earthquake of 1999 in Istanbul and Marmara: (a) God punished a city that was increasingly becoming immoral, and (b) God punished the infidel military as part of the earthquake had hit a naval base.

But this kind of fatalism is not exclusive to religious thinking. Ironically, the military, traditionally the antidote for Islamism in Turkey, often exhibits behavior which can be catalogued under the same heading of fatalism although the motive there is probably more related to "Turkishness" and less to religion. The best proof for "fatalism in uniform" can be found in the way soldiers keep on dying.

After almost a quarter of a century fighting with the PKK, one would have expected the military HQ to better cope with the terrorist's changing tactics of warfare. It is not a secret that the heaviest losses in the last few years have been caused by the PKK's switch to improvised explosive devices, or IEDs, as their main attack strategy. Although this is a difficult warfare for regular armies, it is not impossible to better cope with the IED threat.

The trouble is with the genetics of the country. When nationalism is reduced to big speeches, fancy words, fiction material like extremely imaginative films featuring Turkish heroes, shooting in the air and killing a neighbor's child after football victories and hunting all around Anatolia, then trouble about reality is inevitable.

Turkey's military priorities

Turkey has NATO's second biggest army. It has dozens of state-sponsored defense companies whose Web sites would boast incredible capabilities. After a quick virtual surf anyone would believe that Turkish companies made unknown miracles and are on the edge of manufacturing weapons systems to make American, Israeli and Russian arms producers blush with envy.

Recently, Turkey's government and military leaders ordered six submarines from a German shipyard with the minor price tag of $4 billion. More recently, the same men gave a $500 million go-ahead for the ‘local' production of battle tank prototypes. When eventually completed, Turkey's first national tank, the Altay, will probably cost the Turkish taxpayer anywhere between $5 and $20 billion.

How wise it is to spend billions of dollars for armaments designed against more virtual than real enemies is a controversy in which probably no idea can convincingly beat the other. Say this is the dark side of the moon. But there is the darker side of the moon, too.

Turkey does not have abundant resources to spend for its security. So it has to “prioritize.” Since the imminent security threat is the PKK's asymmetrical warfare, the limited resources should have been prioritized and spent to fight this war, not a war scenario. And that should have dictated more, and smarter, spending for war toys designed to fight asymmetrical, not conventional, wars.

Several years after the PKK's switch to IEDs became an established fact, the Turkish military still cannot protect its convoys, although it boasts of a rapid mobility. It should have boasted of a safe and rapid mobility.

It is still an unknown, for instance, how Turkey's armored vehicle makers, which regularly supply tactical vehicles to the Turkish and many other militaries, cannot propose a solution such as mine-proof armored vehicles. Or, if this is beyond their technological capabilities, why have the procurement authorities not purchased such vehicles off the shelf of a foreign supplier? Were they wishing to avoid "offending" Turkish companies?

A bigger mystery:

There is a bigger mystery. One short cut to protect convoys is to have a jamming system escort them, like, for example, the jamming vehicle that always escorts the prime minister's convoy. The jamming system blocks unwanted signals and frequencies that might be used to detonate roadside bombs. In theory, if the prime minister's convoy can be protected by a jamming system, so should have the Lt. Colonel and eight soldiers who died in a PKK attack this week.

But why are most military convoys deprived of jamming equipment? At this point, we must turn our gaze to Aselsan, a military-owned defense electronic company that boasts about its high-tech products and being the country's biggest defense company. A few years ago, Aselsan set out to work on locally developing and producing protection jamming equipment and is probably still working on the ‘classified' project. So far, so good. We can naively ignore the major delays and politely refrain from questioning how many lives this delay may have cost.

But a more realistic question could be why did Ankara not opt for a stop-gap solution and bought jamming systems from a foreign supplier until Aselsan made its deliveries? Could it be that the decision-makers have preferred not to "offend" Aselsan?

The answers to these questions will probably not be given. But we can always go for fatalism and call it "bad luck," if we despise religion, and "God's will," if we revere it. In the meantime we can always shout “martyrs don't die!”