REUTERS Aiming at what?

"Kandil Mountains Taken," read a headline in Turkey's largest newspaper on Tuesday, showing a couple of soldiers packed in cold-weather outfits marching along a snowy road. More specifically,reported that the Turkish army had won control of the roads leading in and out of the Kandil Mountains.

So is it just a matter of time before special forces in helicopters take Kurdish militant leaders from their headquarters in the notorious Kandil Mountains, and drag them before a Turkish court?

Well, no.

Six days after the start of Turkey's operation in northern Iraq against a stronghold of the Kurdistan Workers Party (or PKK), the insertion of special forces may have good political resonance at home, since Turkish public debate about the PKK, a homegrown terrorist organization, tends to focus on the Kandil Mountains as the seat of evil. But not much will come of the invasion. Neither Murat Karayilan -- the PKK's military commander -- nor the group's co-founder Cemil Bayik have been waiting around for the Rambos of the Turkish army to arrest them.

Still, Turkish officials were deflecting calls for a "timetable" from both Washington and Baghdad on Wednesday afternoon. US and Iraqi leaders are tolerating the incursion but want to know when it will end. "Our objective is clear, our mission is clear and there is no timetable until those terrorist bases are eliminated," said senior Turkish envoy Ahmet Davutoglu in Baghdad, after a crisis meeting on Wednesday with Iraqi Foreign Minister Hoshiyar Zebari.

"This is a very dangerous, precarious situation," said acting Iraqi Prime Minister Barham Saleh, adding that the invasion had "not been conducive to Iraq-Turkey relations."

Not Winning Hearts and Minds

The Kandil Mountains lie a good hundred kilometers (62 miles) from the Turkish border, and the PKK has operated there long enough to know how to disappear in the rugged terrain. Karayilan may have been there as late as last Thursday, when the Turkish offensive began, but by now he could just as easily be in one of northern Iraq's larger cities -- like Süleymania or Erbil -- in a café, talking to his lieutenants by mobile phone.

Karayilan and Bayik are both on a list of wanted terrorists which the Turkish government has shown to the Americans as well as the Iraq government. So far no one has caught them. And what goes for PKK leaders also goes for average foot soldiers -- they can simply take off their uniforms, lay down their weapons, and disappear among the other Kurds in northern Iraq.

Local sympathy for the PKK is one reason to doubt figures quoted by Turkey on the number of militants killed so far. On Wednesday, Turkey's General Staff said 77 more Kurds had been killed in fighting since Tuesday night, bringing the death toll since last week to 230. Measured against the 17 soldiers Turkey admits to having lost, it sounds like a rout.

But the Kurdish guerrillas know the Kandil Mountains. Turkish soldiers don't. Even with help from the Turkish air force and American satellite intelligence, the lopsided casualty figures are unlikely. The Kurds' report of 80 Turkish soldiers killed is just as unreliable. What's more probable than any of these figures is that most of the PKK fighters have attempted to melt away to the south.

The Turkish army is reported to have surrounded a strategically important PKK camp on Monday night and engaged the militants in heavy fighting. Even if that's true, and Turkey manages to kill or drive hundreds of guerrillas out of their strongholds along the border, what will keep them from taking up position again after the soldiers go home? If General Staff estimates are correct, there are 4,000 to 5,000 fighters in northern Iraq and their recruiting potential in Europe and Turkey will not be easy to overcome.

Progress in the fight against the PKK will only succeed if the Turkish government succeeds in undermining support among Turkish Kurds for both the group and its terrorist methods -- and when it can stir the Kurds in northern Iraq to shove the PKK out.

But the political steps for winning "hearts and minds" are lacking. Leyla Zana, an icon of the Kurdish rights movement in Turkey, reminded a party congress of the pro-Kurdish DTP on Monday that Kurds were still second-class citizens in Turkey: She demanded equal-rights recognition for her people in the Turkish constitution. And the Islamic ruling party, the AKP, hopes to seize the imagination of the country's largely conservative Kurdish population with religious slogans. With piles of money and a snappy motto -- "We're all Muslims" -- the leaders in Ankara are trying to defeat the secular and largely leftist radicals of the PKK.

Meanwhile the army drives into the Kandil Mountains, and US Defense Secretary Robert Gates sounds impatient. "It's very important that the Turks make this operation as short as possible and then leave, and to be mindful of Iraqi sovereignty," he told reporters on Wednesday, before embarking on a trip to Ankara to discuss the military incursion. "I measure quick in terms of days -- a week or two, something like that. Not months."