Talking to Terrorists
I agree with David Aaronovitch who argued recently in The Times that there's little to be gained in talking to terrorists unless they possess a credible political agenda complete with demands that the civilised world can address.
But this is not the case with the Taliban or groups like the Islamic State who believe they are doing God's work by making some of their victims slaves and murdering others, often fellow Muslims, for holding a different religious or political outlook on the world.
Some people on the left of politics regard these groups as 'freedom fighters' who are resisting their oppressors and foreign invaders which is tantamount to saying that the southern states in the American Civil War were perfectly entitled to defend their way of life even though it was based on the slavery and misery of other human beings.
The Taliban won’t talk until they’re cornered
By David Aaronovitch - The Times
Negotiations with these groups have not worked in the past – and they’ll continue to fail without military success first
Whatever Malala says, the six men who murdered the children and staff of the Army Public School in Peshawar yesterday were not, in any conventional sense, cowards. As they set about the task of shooting all those boys and girls, they will have expected that this was their last act in this life and will somehow have known too that the blood bursting from the young bodies and the screams were sanctioned by the ultimate authority. It was what God wanted.
The organisation that sent them, the Pakistani Taliban, or TTP, is only one (albeit among the largest) of the various jihadi and armed extremist groups that operate in Pakistan and over the Afghan border. Its leader, Mullah Fazlullah, is said to have been a former ski-lift operator in what was once the tourist destination of Swat, in northwest Pakistan. The TTP claimed yesterday that the attack was a reprisal for army activity in the federally administered tribal areas. The army was killing the TTP’s women and children in Waziristan, so now it was payback time. The implication was that if you stop doing stuff to us we’ll stop doing stuff to you. No counter-terrorist offensive, no school massacres.
And that is what they or their compatriots in other groups always say. They said it when, 15 months ago, two suicide bombers blew up a Christian church, also in Peshawar, killing 127 people. That act by a group called Jundullah, which co-operates apparently with the TTP, was ostensibly in revenge for US drone attacks, but punishing Christians for being enemies of Islam also came into it. No drones, maybe no atrocities.
The Pakistani Taliban is not the Afghan Taliban, which condemned the Peshawar attack, but which is content to kill civilians and aid workers in smaller groups in Afghanistan. Nor is it exactly the same as the armed groups who have murdered so many members of the Hazara community (mostly Shia) in bombings and shootings from Quetta to Karachi in the past 20 years. Or the ones who organise the murders of politicians and journalists who criticise the country’s blasphemy laws. They are slightly different, with different emphases and interests, but they hold out the same tempting possibility, which many in Pakistan and a few in the west seem keen to grasp at. If we could talk to the Taliban!
Soon the feeling of complete outrage over the Peshawar school will die down. The government has suspended the suspension of the death penalty and may soon be suspending from a rope the terrorists it has in prison, most of whom seem to want to die anyway. There will be pointless executions and then the problem will remain and the question be raised again. If we could talk to the Taliban!
It’s fair to say there is a significant section of opinion here and in Pakistan that buys the argument that groups such as the TTP are, in essence, a response to western military activity. Without our drones and our Camp Bastions and our Guantanamos we might instead have engaged diplomatically with these enemies, instead of which we have “wasted” the lives of our young service people and made things worse. We could have talked to the Taliban!
It is true that never talking to anyone who is armed and powerful leaves only one option: you have to annihilate them. Outside existential and total war we are not in the annihilation business, so we will always have to talk at some point. In that sense there is rarely a pure military solution.
I was struck by the recent book by Tony Blair’s chief of staff, Jonathan Powell, Talking to Terrorists: How to End Armed Conflictsin which he generalised from his experience in helping to broker the Good Friday agreement in Northern Ireland. If Martin McGuinness, of the Derry Brigade of the Provos, could end up being a minister at Stormont, Powell implied, then who knows what your jihadi leader might become given time, patience and intelligence. In Afghanistan, he said, we should have started earlier to talk to the Taliban.
Possibly. As I said, no two situations are exactly the same — you have to be flexible. So, in 2009, after two years of war against the Taliban in Swat, the Pakistani government decided to try concessions instead. In January of that year the provincial minister met a Taliban delegation in a room full of velvet armchairs and signed an agreement allowing them to operate their version of Shariah in the Swat area. The minister described the day as “historic” and added “an old demand of the people has been met”. The Taliban agreed to lay down their weapons.
Soon the girls (including Malala) were forced out of school and the dangling headless bodies of those who had been dealt with, supposedly under the new laws, began turning up at dawn hanging in the squares. Convinced by the virtue of their cause, the Taliban naturally looked to expand outside Swat and began to attack other areas with the weapons that they had somehow taken up again. So the army launched an even bigger and bloodier offensive and drove them and their leader — the same Fazlullah — out.
Even after this in Pakistan there has been a terrible ambivalence by some of the main political parties towards the Taliban and other murderous groups. They have appeased, courted, evaded and lied, always attempting to blame America and the west for their own egregious failures. They have marched against drones but kept quiet about the killers in their midst.
Here in the UK the parties were united. The Provisional IRA took more than 20 years to accept that the “Brits” were not going to leave unless a majority of the population of Northern Ireland wanted us to. To accept that they could not win their core demands and would have to settle for something far, far less. But by the mid-1990s they were old, exhausted and bruised. Even so it took extraordinary courage on the part of Adams, McGuinness and the Unionists to make a peace. In the meantime British soldiers lost their lives to deny a terrorist victory.
This is what I draw from it. If we could talk to the Taliban, grunt and squeak and squawk with the Taliban, and they could talk to us, it would make no difference unless they were convinced that they could not win. Then they may — just may — make partners for peace. So while there may rarely be a military solution to terrorism, there is certainly no solution without a military component.
Negotiations with these groups have not worked in the past – and they’ll continue to fail without military success first
Whatever Malala says, the six men who murdered the children and staff of the Army Public School in Peshawar yesterday were not, in any conventional sense, cowards. As they set about the task of shooting all those boys and girls, they will have expected that this was their last act in this life and will somehow have known too that the blood bursting from the young bodies and the screams were sanctioned by the ultimate authority. It was what God wanted.
The organisation that sent them, the Pakistani Taliban, or TTP, is only one (albeit among the largest) of the various jihadi and armed extremist groups that operate in Pakistan and over the Afghan border. Its leader, Mullah Fazlullah, is said to have been a former ski-lift operator in what was once the tourist destination of Swat, in northwest Pakistan. The TTP claimed yesterday that the attack was a reprisal for army activity in the federally administered tribal areas. The army was killing the TTP’s women and children in Waziristan, so now it was payback time. The implication was that if you stop doing stuff to us we’ll stop doing stuff to you. No counter-terrorist offensive, no school massacres.
And that is what they or their compatriots in other groups always say. They said it when, 15 months ago, two suicide bombers blew up a Christian church, also in Peshawar, killing 127 people. That act by a group called Jundullah, which co-operates apparently with the TTP, was ostensibly in revenge for US drone attacks, but punishing Christians for being enemies of Islam also came into it. No drones, maybe no atrocities.
The Pakistani Taliban is not the Afghan Taliban, which condemned the Peshawar attack, but which is content to kill civilians and aid workers in smaller groups in Afghanistan. Nor is it exactly the same as the armed groups who have murdered so many members of the Hazara community (mostly Shia) in bombings and shootings from Quetta to Karachi in the past 20 years. Or the ones who organise the murders of politicians and journalists who criticise the country’s blasphemy laws. They are slightly different, with different emphases and interests, but they hold out the same tempting possibility, which many in Pakistan and a few in the west seem keen to grasp at. If we could talk to the Taliban!
Soon the feeling of complete outrage over the Peshawar school will die down. The government has suspended the suspension of the death penalty and may soon be suspending from a rope the terrorists it has in prison, most of whom seem to want to die anyway. There will be pointless executions and then the problem will remain and the question be raised again. If we could talk to the Taliban!
It’s fair to say there is a significant section of opinion here and in Pakistan that buys the argument that groups such as the TTP are, in essence, a response to western military activity. Without our drones and our Camp Bastions and our Guantanamos we might instead have engaged diplomatically with these enemies, instead of which we have “wasted” the lives of our young service people and made things worse. We could have talked to the Taliban!
It is true that never talking to anyone who is armed and powerful leaves only one option: you have to annihilate them. Outside existential and total war we are not in the annihilation business, so we will always have to talk at some point. In that sense there is rarely a pure military solution.
I was struck by the recent book by Tony Blair’s chief of staff, Jonathan Powell, Talking to Terrorists: How to End Armed Conflictsin which he generalised from his experience in helping to broker the Good Friday agreement in Northern Ireland. If Martin McGuinness, of the Derry Brigade of the Provos, could end up being a minister at Stormont, Powell implied, then who knows what your jihadi leader might become given time, patience and intelligence. In Afghanistan, he said, we should have started earlier to talk to the Taliban.
Possibly. As I said, no two situations are exactly the same — you have to be flexible. So, in 2009, after two years of war against the Taliban in Swat, the Pakistani government decided to try concessions instead. In January of that year the provincial minister met a Taliban delegation in a room full of velvet armchairs and signed an agreement allowing them to operate their version of Shariah in the Swat area. The minister described the day as “historic” and added “an old demand of the people has been met”. The Taliban agreed to lay down their weapons.
Soon the girls (including Malala) were forced out of school and the dangling headless bodies of those who had been dealt with, supposedly under the new laws, began turning up at dawn hanging in the squares. Convinced by the virtue of their cause, the Taliban naturally looked to expand outside Swat and began to attack other areas with the weapons that they had somehow taken up again. So the army launched an even bigger and bloodier offensive and drove them and their leader — the same Fazlullah — out.
Even after this in Pakistan there has been a terrible ambivalence by some of the main political parties towards the Taliban and other murderous groups. They have appeased, courted, evaded and lied, always attempting to blame America and the west for their own egregious failures. They have marched against drones but kept quiet about the killers in their midst.
Here in the UK the parties were united. The Provisional IRA took more than 20 years to accept that the “Brits” were not going to leave unless a majority of the population of Northern Ireland wanted us to. To accept that they could not win their core demands and would have to settle for something far, far less. But by the mid-1990s they were old, exhausted and bruised. Even so it took extraordinary courage on the part of Adams, McGuinness and the Unionists to make a peace. In the meantime British soldiers lost their lives to deny a terrorist victory.
This is what I draw from it. If we could talk to the Taliban, grunt and squeak and squawk with the Taliban, and they could talk to us, it would make no difference unless they were convinced that they could not win. Then they may — just may — make partners for peace. So while there may rarely be a military solution to terrorism, there is certainly no solution without a military component.
