On "Ataturk"

What a beautiful article published on Mustafa Kamal Pasha Ataturk in Dawn

"... He believed in minimising casualties for units under his command, and took Istanbul by bluff. His motto was ‘Don’t fight a battle you cannot win’. Military victories didn’t go to his head, as for instance his refusal to advance further into the Balkans after he had driven the Greeks out of Anatolia and Asia Minor and secured eastern Thrace and the Straits Zone. He refused when his elated colleagues pressed him to advance toward Macedonia, Kosovo and Bosnia. He asked them to build on what they had achieved, warning that a further push into the Balkans would unite Europe on the half-a-millennium-old war cry, ‘The Turks are coming!’ He was a Macedonian, he said, but he didn’t believe in reckless adventures..... He predicted that war would break out in the spring of 1940, and though he went wrong by about six months, he had made up his mind to keep Turkey out of it.....Atatürk was Napoleon’s admirer as a general but, as quoted by Lord Kinross in his biography, Atatürk, he said “Napoleon started with his country and ended with himself.” Though an excellent general, he thought, Napoleon was “without a sound political idea, more concerned with his ambition for world conquest than with the national interest of France”. According to Kinross, Atatürk liked to compare Napoleon’s invasion of Russia with the Ottoman push on Vienna “at the expense of the country’s internal welfare”. He was aware of Napoleon’s remarks, “I just go ahead and my progress is the result of my movement.” Atatürk commented: “Those who ‘just go ahead’ finally knock their head against the rock of St. Helena.”

You can read the whole article here:

https://www.dawn.com/news/1447737/atatuerk-u-turn