On Terrorism

How to Talk to Terrorists
By Jonathan Powell on 7/10/14, The Guardian

Extracts:

“(…) As is so often the case, the terrorists had a better memory for what had gone before than the government. (I use the word “terrorist” here for the sake of simplicity, but it isn’t a particularly useful term to define a group – terror is a tactic employed by governments, groups, and individuals. I mean it to refer to non-state armed groups that use terror and enjoy significant political support.)

When it comes to terrorism, governments seem to suffer from a collective amnesia. All of our historical experience tells us that there can be no purely military solution to a political problem, and yet every time we confront a new terrorist group, we begin by insisting we will never talk to them. As Dick Cheney put it, “we don’t negotiate with evil; we defeat it”. In fact, history suggests we don’t usually defeat them and we nearly always end up talking to them. Hugh Gaitskell, the former Labour leader, captured it best when he said: “All terrorists, at the invitation of the government, end up with drinks in the Dorchester.”

Certainly that was true throughout the history of the British empire. Menachem Begin’s Irgun was responsible for blowing up the King David Hotel in Jerusalem in 1946, killing 91 and injuring 46. The British authorities called him a terrorist and tried to hunt him down. But when he became prime minister of Israel and made peace with Egypt, we lauded him as a statesman. We accused Jomo Kenyatta of being a terrorist and locked him up, but later negotiated Kenyan independence with him. We exiled Archbishop Makarios to the Seychelles for supporting terrorism but made peace with him and he became the first leader of an independent Cyprus.

It is hard not to respond emotionally to a terrorist act in the heat of the moment. When we see videos of western journalists being beheaded or TV footage of small children being blown up by IRA bombs it seems obvious that the only answer is force. It is easy to regard any suggestion that we should ever talk to people capable of such savagery as immoral. George W Bush, in a speech to the Knesset in 2008, even suggested that talking to terrorists in this way amounted to appeasement. That is, however, to misunderstand appeasement. Chamberlain’s mistake in 1938 was not talking to Hitler – it was entirely sensible to take every possible step to avert another catastrophic world war – but to think Hitler could be bought off with a slice of Czechoslovakia. Talking to terrorists and agreeing with them are not the same thing. The British government negotiated with Sinn Féin, but we did not concede to their demand of a united Ireland at the barrel of a gun.

I have not always been convinced of the need to talk to terrorists. The first time I met a terrorist, I did so reluctantly. My father had been hit by an IRA bullet in an ambush in 1940, and my eldest brother was on an IRA death list for eight years while he worked for Margaret Thatcher. When I first met Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness, in Belfast in October 1997, I declined to shake their hands – a petty gesture I now regret, but one that recurs again and again at encounters between governments and terrorists. (…) Terrorists are nearly always keen to talk. (…)

I am an unlikely peacenik. I grew up in a military family, and I was involved in the decisions on all of Tony Blair’s wars. I do not think that war is always wrong: sometimes it is necessary to stop a dictator, prevent massive human-rights abuses, or expel an invader. (…)

We usually delay talking to armed groups too long, and as a result, a large number of people die unnecessarily. General David Petraeus admitted that, in Iraq, the US left it far too late to talk to those “with American blood on their hands”. We delay because it is argued that talking is too risky – but experience suggests the real risk lies in not talking. (…)

It has been argued, by some revisionist historians, that talks delayed, rather than hastened, the end of the conflicts in Northern Ireland and the Basque country. Had politicians allowed the army and police to go after the terrorists without “their hands tied behind their backs” by worries about human rights, the argument goes, they would have finished off the terrorists without any need for talking. As someone intimately involved in both negotiations, I can categorically declare this to be false. Although the IRA had been penetrated – and was suffering from the advances made by security forces, which frustrated an increasing number of their attacks – they were not about to be defeated.

(…) When every other option has been eliminated, and governments are prepared to contemplate talking to terrorists, they face a series of bad arguments against doing so.

First, that talking will give the terrorists legitimacy. It is true that armed groups crave legitimacy, and will go to great lengths to secure it. But it is equally true that such legitimacy is usually temporary, and disappears if they end the talks and return to violence. The Farc in Colombia attained some respectability in the Caguan negotiations in 1998-2002 but lost it as soon as they went back to war, being dismissed as narco-terrorists who had rejected a reasonable offer from the government.

Second, it is argued that agreeing to a ceasefire so that talks can begin allows insurgents to rest, regroup, and re-arm. In fact, experience suggests that it is the armed groups that suffer most from ceasefires, and find it harder to motivate their forces to return to killing if the ceasefire ends.

Third, critics suggest that talking can undermine moderate politicians by favouring the extremists. The Blair government was accused of having sidelined the moderate SDLP to talk to Sinn Féin, but this was another false charge: in fact, we tried at the beginning to build an agreement from the centre outward, but the SDLP made it clear they would not move forward without Sinn Féin.

These specious arguments only cause governments to leave opening up conversations with the terrorists far too late. We forget how such discussions were conducted on previous occasions, and try to reinvent the wheel each time. Opening a channel with a covert group is difficult and dangerous; building trust and turning the channel into a negotiation takes much more time than people think.

Terrorists are much better at learning the lessons of history, partly because leaders of armed groups tend to stay in place much longer than democratically elected prime ministers and presidents. Gerry Adams has seen eight British prime ministers come and go while he has been the leader of Irish Republicans. The terrorists deliberately study what has happened in the past. The Fenians looked at the Russian nihilists, and the original IRA were fascinated by the Boers. Menachem Begin studied both the campaigns of the IRA in 1919-21 and the Russian anarchists. His own memoir was in turn found in an al-Qaida training camp in Afghanistan.

To say that we need to learn the lessons from the past is not simply to suggest that we can adopt a model from Northern Ireland – or anywhere else – that can be plugged into any conflict and used as a template to solve it. Every conflict is different; its causes are different and its solution will be different. But I have now studied most of the negotiations between armed groups and governments in the last 30 years – including those that have succeeded in Mozambique, South Africa, El Salvador, the Philippines and Indonesia, as well as those that have failed in Sri Lanka, Colombia and the Middle East – and there is clearly a pattern to what works and what does not. Above all, what these experiences demonstrate is that there isn’t really an alternative to talking to the terrorists if you want the conflict to end. (…)

It is true that an autocratic regime can, by using unrestrained force and blacking out all publicity, finish off a terrorist movement in Chechnya or anywhere else. But as we found out after the Soviet Union collapsed, all this does is to put the problems in the deep freeze; sooner or later they will reappear. Hafez al-Assad thought he had resolved the problem of Sunni rebellion in 1982, when his forces killed tens of thousands of civilians in the city of Hama. But as his son Bashar found out 30 years later, he had not really resolved the problem at all. (…)

In February 2008, after I had left government, I argued in the Guardian that we should also talk to Hamas, to the Taliban and even to al-Qaida. My former colleagues in the British government predictably rubbished me. They insisted that while it was acceptable to talk to the IRA and the PLO it was out of the question with these new terrorists.

But are the so-called “fourth wave” terrorists (following on from the anarchists, the nationalists and the Marxists) really so different that there is nothing to be learned from the way we dealt with their predecessors? Or are the issues in the end political – however gruesome the methods they use – and therefore resolvable only by political means? It is true that the ambition of their violence is on a greater scale. Rather than the handful of people the IRA or ETA would kill in a car bombing or an assassination, they want to kill thousands of people. But the 19th-century anarchists had the same ambitions – and in any case, the number of people killed doesn’t make any difference to the moral nature of terrorism. It is just as wrong to kill one innocent person as it is to kill a thousand, and it can often be more shocking. It is true that the new terrorists use suicide bombers to maximise the terror they inflict, but so did the Russian nihilists – and the art of suicide bombing, including the use of female suicide bombers, was perfected by the Tamil Tigers in the 1980s.

It is argued that their violence is based on religion, and so it is impossible to negotiate with them – in the words of one former Israeli cabinet member: “When you get God into discussions, God never compromises.” But there is no evidence that religious armed groups are harder to engage than secular ones: peace has been made with Islamic armed groups, including the Free Aceh Movement in Indonesia and the Moro Islamic Liberation Front in the Philippines. It is also said that because the aims of these groups are apocalyptic and their demands unnegotiable, it is impossible to treat with them.

While it is true that it is unlikely that any government is going to agree to the creation of a global caliphate, the terrorist groups we encountered in the past also put forward demands that would never be acceptable. No British government was ever going to concede a united Ireland against the wishes of a majority of the people in Northern Ireland. Once discussions were begun with the Irish Republicans, we discovered that they were prepared to settle for something else.

Government officials may have criticised me six years ago, but in the intervening period they seem to have overcome the sense that it is absolutely impossible to talk to these groups. The Israeli and US governments have now both negotiated with Hamas on the release of Gilad Shalit, the kidnapped Israeli Defence Force corporal, and over the recent ceasefire in Gaza, albeit indirectly. In Afghanistan, after a long mating ritual, the US government finally negotiated with the Taliban for the release of Sergeant Bowe Bergdahl a few months ago in return for freeing five prisoners held in Guantánamo Bay. (…) So it turns out that we are ready to talk to these fourth generation groups despite the assertion only a few years ago that we could never deal with them.

(…) We need to work out a longer term strategy for dealing with whatever threat they pose, rather than opting once again for a kneejerk response to satisfy opinion polls. That strategy will certainly include security measures – if the terrorists feel they have the prospect of winning, they will just carry on fighting. (…) We need to bear in mind that such negotiations do not usually succeed at first; they have to go through many iterations, and an agreement is usually reached only when a mutually hurting stalemate exists, in which both sides realise that they cannot prevail militarily.

Nor should we expect that we are going to defeat terrorism for good even if we succeed in dealing with al-Qaida and Isis; there will be new groups and terrorism will always be with us. It is the ugly twin of democracy and has grown up with it. If minorities cannot get their way by the ballot box they will sometimes resort to extreme violence to attract attention and find satisfaction for their demands.

Yet we continue to approach terrorism as if it is something that can be solved or cured. Some experts look for a solution in technology. Drones, jungle-penetrating radar and electronic counter-measures can help combat terrorists for a while but the terrorists soon work out a way round the counter-measures and technology helps them develop more deadly means of attack. The use of mobile phones and social media can make it easier to track terrorists but it also makes it easier for them to organise without being detected. There is not going to be a miracle cure for terrorism and we should stop hoping one will turn up. The solution lies in the tools we already have in our hands – fighting and talking. Success depends on combining military force with offering a political way out.

The one thing I have learned, above all else, from the last 17 years is that there is no such thing as an insoluble conflict with an armed group – however bloody, difficult or ancient. Even the Middle East peace process, which has stuttered on for decades, will in the end result in a lasting agreement. The fact that it has failed so many times before does not mean that it will always fail, and an eventual settlement will be built on the past failures and the lessons learned from these failures, as was the peace in Northern Ireland.

It is remarkable how quickly a conflict can shift from being regarded as “insoluble” to one whose solution was “inevitable” as soon as an agreement is signed. Beforehand, and even up to a very late stage in the process, conventional wisdom states that the conflict can never be resolved; but before the ink is dry on the agreement, people are ready to conclude that it was inevitable. They put it down to outside events like the end of the cold war, to the effect of 9/11 or to changing economic circumstances. But this conventional wisdom is wrong.

Just as no conflict is insoluble, nor is it inevitable that it will be resolved at any particular moment in history. Believing that a solution is inevitable is nearly as dangerous as believing a conflict cannot be solved. If people sit around waiting for a conflict to be “ripe” for talks to start, or for the forces of history to solve it for them, then it will never be resolved. If the negotiations are handled badly, they will fail, which is why it is worth trying to learn from the experience of others. Dealing effectively with a terrorist threat requires political leadership, patience and a refusal to take no for an answer. What we need are more political leaders who are capable of remembering what happened last time – and prepared to take the necessary risks.”