NON FICTION ESSAY

Write an essay of about 900-1200 words on the article How to talk to terrorists. Your essay must
comment on the structure of the article as well as the argumentation used and how the author
reaches his conclusion. For reference you might want to consult On Purpose pages 21-26 and 4546. If you are interested in reading the whole article, I have put it in lectio written work.

How to talk to terrorists

A Taliban commander in Salar district between his two lieutenants.

Jonathan Powell
Tuesday 7 October 2014 05.59 BST
In 1919, the British government had its first major encounter with terrorism, when the
Irish Republican Army was established to drive the British out of Ireland. The government
responded to the IRAs acts of terror which included the assassination of civilians as well
as soldiers with indiscriminate reprisals; these were met in turn by further escalation
from the IRA. The prime minister, David Lloyd George, declared that the British
government would never talk to the murder gang, as he described the IRA. But by 1920,
it became clear to both sides that a military victory was impossible. Lloyd George secretly
began to initiate contact with Michael Collins and other IRA leaders, using a relatively
junior former customs official, Alfred Cope who managed to open up a channel to the

rebels and negotiate a ceasefire. This led to full-blown talks in Downing Street in 1921, and
eventually to an agreement, albeit a flawed one that later unravelled.
Seventy-six years later, in December 1997, Tony Blair and I sat down in the same cabinet
room in Downing Street with Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness; the negotiating
teams, from Sinn Fin and the British government, even sat on the same sides of the table
as they had in 1921. On both occasions, the meeting was a big event. There were more TV
cameras outside Downing Street than there had been on election day seven months earlier,
and we were all nervous. Alastair Campbell had ordered the Christmas tree be removed
from in front of the door of Number 10, so that there could be no pictures of terrorists in
front of festive decorations.

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 dont negotiate with evil; we defeat it.
In fact, history suggests we dont 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.

The IRA in Derry, 1972. Photograph: Keystone-France/Keystone-France/100% Keystone

Certainly that was true throughout the history of the British empire. Menachem
Begins 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. Chamberlains 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 Fin, 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. Gerry Adams could not persuade David Trimble
or his Ulster Unionist party to talk to him even when they entered negotiations; they
insisted on directing all of their comments to the chair, US Senator George Mitchell, rather
than to Sinn Fin. Adams resorted to desperate tactics: he would loiter in the corridor until
one of the unionists entered the gents, and then follow them in, stand at the next urinal,
and try to engage them in conversation. They still refused 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 Blairs 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.
But I have also seen that in the modern world, civil wars are the greatest threat to
humanitarian security. If you want to fight starvation, the spread of disease, and mass rape
or to help suffering children, whether child soldiers or the victims of war then the most
important thing you can do is to help end armed conflicts, which is why I have decided to
dedicate the rest of my life to that goal.

***

A Hezbi-i-Islami insurgent east of Kabul. Photograph: Ghaith Abdul-Ahad

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 19982002 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 Fin, 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 Fin.

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.

Now we face the group that calls itself the Islamic State(Isis), the latest terrorists to
confront us. And yet again we have met them with an emotional response based on the
horror deliberately generated by their acts. We agree to bomb them and insist we will
never speak to them because they are quite unlike any terrorist group we have ever met
before.
Of course there are differences. Their violence is more grisly than al-Qaida, and unlike
many previous terrorist groups they, and Boko Haram in Nigeria, are taking and holding
territory. This time, however, we should stop and consider what we have done in similar
circumstances before. 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.

But we will also need to address the grievances of the Sunni community in Iraq and to
separate out the ex-Baathists and former members of Saddams army, who give the
movement its real power, from the jihadis. And while Isis may not want to talk to us at the
moment, we need to start building a channel to them, as we did with the IRA in 1972, so we
can communicate. At some stage, we will need to negotiate with violent Islamic extremism,
whether in this form or another one, if their ideas continue to have political support and
we want to find a lasting solution to conflict in the region. They are unlikely to simply fade
away. 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.

Jonathan Powell is CEO of the charity Inter-Mediate which works on armed conflicts; his
new book Talking to Terrorists, How to End Armed Conflicts is published by Bodley Head