Yes    The short answer is that you can self-train yourself using a simulator. 

An instructor or experienced flyer always is a good idea in terms of safety instructions, etiquette at the field etc.  And their help is invaluable when it comes to the peripheral activities like building kits, programming the radios, setting up the equipment for peak performance (especially nitro engines, if you are total newbie), safely charging LiPo batteries etc.

The first thing I did when I ventured into RC flying, was to get a good simulator (RealFlight G3, in my case).  I wanted to learn flying helis (everyone tells me that it is much harder than flying airplanes), and spent tons of hours on the sim.  When I was fairly confident of my skills on the sim, I went and got myself a real small heli.

I did crash my heli many times (and sometimes I still do), but it is not because I did not train with an instructor.  It was because either I am trying some new 3D stuff for the first time, or because of equipment failure.

It was after flying helis for a while that I got myself my first airplane.  It was a piece of cake   

In general terms, it all depends on your budget !  It is best you do some research online.

Your choices kinda go like this :

1) Expensive, great graphics:  RealFlight G3/G4, Phoenix, Reflex, FS One (US$160 to US$200).  Some of the them come with their own transmitter with a USB connector to the PC. Most of them are protected, so that you have to use some kind of hardware that you get with the sim itself, so they may or may not work directly with your existing radio (downloading the software from some place is not enough!).

2) Cheap, pretty good, average graphics and physics: Clearview (US$30).  Should work with any transmitter that can already connect to a PC (via serial or USB ports).  More information at http://rcflightsim.com. Another one in this category is the E-Sky Flight simulator (US$20), which comes with a simple radio : http://www.raidentech.com/e4chflsitrki.html

3) Free, bare minimum: Flying Model Simulator (FMS).  This forum discusses the hardware you will need to get it to work with various radios : http://n.ethz.ch/student/mmoeller/fms/index_e.html.  Getting/building the connection hardware to get your radio working with this is too much trouble, so this is not a good option for beginners.

4) You can find some all-in-one deals at local hobby shops where you can get a cheap plane/heli, controller, cables to connect the controller to the PC and low-end sim software for like US$125.

I would recommend one thing though.  "IF" you are planning to be in the hobby for the long run, getting a good sim certainly helps.  Practising new moves on the sim greatly improves your flying skills.  Most importantly, it prevents costly crashes, and the money you are saving by not crashing pays for the sim many times over.

After having used RealFlight extensively, and played around with Reflex, I have come to the conclusion that Phoenix is the best sim for helicopters    I am not really into flying airplanes, so I would rather not make such "bold" statements about Phoenix, when it comes to airplanes.

In addition to having a lot of the commonly used model helis built-in with very realistic performance, Phoenix seems to use less resources, and the auto-rotation behaviour is very close to the real thing.  On my laptop that is more than couple of years old, RealFlight would not display shadows of the aircraft, while Phoenix seems to have no such problems. 

I haven't seen it being available locally in Qatar though.