Should be interesting to see how that gets mangled by the DU interface. /kəˈtɑːr/
k + schwa + ta:r.
Now, a lot of people have two schwas, one front and one back. I'm one of them. "guitar" has a front schwa in it for me when I'm speaking quickly. It's a reduced mid-high front unrounded vowel. Back it a bit and wham, you're in schwa-space.
A lot of people don't. For them, there's just one schwa. Thing is, when they run into two-schwa speakers they just hear one schwa, and when two-schwa speakers talk to them we sometime just hear one aberrant schwa or hear them switching back and forth. So we two-schwa-ers make some assumptions about what we're hearing.
In other words, there's a pronunciation of "Qatar" that isn't too horribly different from "guitar". It's just how strong the aspiration on the /k/ is that's at issue.
What's worse is that for many, Qatar's pronunciation was very much like "gutter" at one point. Instead of making that /q/ into an English /k/, it was taken into Englsh as a /g/ because it's a variant actually used in some varieties of Arabic plus s avoids the aspiration on English initial /k/. One of those trendy "I'm better than you because I can pronounce a foreign country's name in a less Anglicized way than you do." Rather like those who insist on the backed a in "Pakistan." And screw up the phonemic length which is actually more important.
Find clear things to complain about. This is like complaining about Bush's "nukyulah" while thinking Carter's pretty much identical pronunciation is refined. It communicates nothing but affect, which is already a given.
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