The intelligence of the "state that keeps people alive"

"When one says operation, what comes to mind is not only what is done with weapons, bombing from the air with planes. There is also an operation carried out through diplomacy, through talks, aiming to achieve results."

These words of President Erdoğan also describe the New Turkey's new understanding of operation. Indeed, Turkey has recently been showing the whole world that it is getting better results with this understanding of operation, including its own solution process. It gets results by talking, by trying to understand, through diplomacy or politics.

What is the targeted result?

Of course that too points to the new state's new understanding: "keeping the human being alive."

While Turkey mobilizes all the state's resources so that very young people do not die and mothers and fathers do not weep, it prefers solution, politics, diplomacy and talking over fighting.

Turkey does not care only for Turkey's own people. It plays the role of a shelter for saving people's lives from every point around us that has turned into a scene of fire.

For 101 days, with this understanding, it safely rescued the 49 consulate staff held hostage by ISIS, which it declared the bloodiest terrorist organization in the world and against which it was preparing to mobilize. The rescue operation was not carried out by using weapons, by fighting, by using force. On the contrary, this happy outcome was achieved through fine diplomacy and intelligence work carried on with great sensitivity for 101 days.

At a time when a harsh campaign against ISIS was getting under way all over the world, Turkey, instead of joining this campaign in a more bombastic and officious style, gave priority to the safe rescue of its citizens in ISIS's hands. A wrong word or move could have endangered the lives of our citizens in the hands of the ISIS members, who have a mentality and character very different from what we have been accustomed to until now.

This sensitivity Turkey has shown in protecting the lives of its citizens is a typical manifestation of what the AK Parti government has recently called the New Turkey understanding. The New Turkey also grounds the solution process at this level of principle.

According to this principled understanding, what makes a state a state is not only its monopoly over the force it uses, but how successful it is in using that force to protect the lives and security of its own citizens. A state that cannot protect its people, and that has even become a threat to the lives of its own citizens, has no legitimacy.

Unfortunately, the Middle East is full of states that have lost their legitimacy in exactly this sense, that is, that pose a threat to the lives of their own citizens.

When we consider this manifestation together with the generosity or indifference many surrounding countries show toward the lives of their own citizens, we better appreciate the difference it makes.

By showing this sensitive attitude it displays toward the lives of its own citizens also to those who have been forced to flee from all of the region's countries, each of which has been turned into a hell for its own citizens, Turkey gives its humanitarian approach a universal framework.

Turkey's difference is reflected in the approach of its intelligence organizations in the same way. While the mukhabarat of the surrounding countries choose their own peoples as enemies and try to set up an insidious mukhabarat order against their own peoples, Turkish Intelligence under Hakan Fidan has devoted all its intelligence and performance to keeping the human being alive. While trying to rescue safely the hostages held by the most complex organization the region's history has seen, it is also busy delivering life-sustaining aid other than death to peoples who, under the mukhabarat of these countries, are forced to choose among deaths.

This is the perspective from which one should view the old Turkey, accustomed to Mukhabarat styles that see their own peoples as a threat to themselves, and its regional collaborators, trying to portray MİT's aid as aid to terror.

They are evidently very unfamiliar with an intelligence service focused on keeping alive and saving human lives. They will get used to it too.