The following is an edited extract from Jonathan Powell's new book Talking to Terrorists, published by Bodley Head (£20)
Book tickets to see Jonathan in conversation with Prospect's Editor Bronwen Maddox, where he will discuss how to end armed conflicts, and how governments should negotiate with terrorists.
“All terrorists, at the invitation of the government, end up with drinks in the Dorchester,” said Hugh Gaitskell, the former leader of the Labour Party. What he meant was that governments of all political colours and in all countries repeatedly say they will never talk to terrorist groups and yet they nearly always do so eventually, and in the end usually treat their leaders as statesmen.
From 1997 to 2007 I was the chief British negotiator on Northern Ireland. On the basis of that experience, when I left Downing Street in 2007 I proposed publicly that we should talk to the Taliban, to Hamas, and even to al-Qaeda. A Foreign Office spokesman said: “It is inconceivable that Her Majesty’s Government would ever seek to reach a mutually acceptable accommodation with a terrorist organisation like al-Qaeda.” Only a few years later, NATO countries are now talking to the Taliban, and the US and Israel have talked to Hamas, at least indirectly.
I don’t mind the hypocrisy of governments on the subject—that is part and parcel of politics—but I do mind the fact that they never seem to learn from past experiences, often with devastating consequences. Each time we meet a new terrorist group we start again from scratch, partly because governments change so regularly while the leaders of the terrorist groups tend to stay in place far longer.
As a result, when governments do engage with terrorists they almost always leave it far too late. General David Petraeus admits that in Iraq the US government delayed too long before talking to those “with American blood on their hands.” In the case of the Taliban, despite a long mating ritual, a sustained peace process with the US has still not begun, even though NATO forces will leave Afghanistan in the course of 2014. The process of engaging with these groups and winning their trust takes a lot longer than people realise. They need time to adjust to the outside world and grasp what might be a realistic demand and what is not. When we do eventually engage, we forget the techniques and skills we learned last time.
By happenstance I have spent the last seventeen years of my life talking to terrorists of different sorts. I was not always in favour of such dialogue. My experiences have, however, changed my mind and convinced me that talking is the right thing to do.
My experience in Northern Ireland convinced me that no conflict—however bloody, ancient or difficult—is insoluble. With attention, patience and above all political leadership, they can be solved, even if previous attempts at making peace have failed repeatedly. I am not suggesting that there is a Northern Ireland “model” that can be deployed elsewhere unaltered—that would be ludicrous: each conflict has different causes and will have different solutions—but it would equally be nonsense to suggest that none of the lessons we learned in the negotiations in Northern Ireland, from our successes and our failures, could be applied elsewhere. If people are going to make mistakes negotiating with terrorists, they should at least make their own, new, mistakes rather than repeating those already made by others.
Book tickets to see Jonathan in conversation with Prospect's Editor Bronwen Maddox, where he will discuss how to end armed conflicts, and how governments should negotiate with terrorists.
“All terrorists, at the invitation of the government, end up with drinks in the Dorchester,” said Hugh Gaitskell, the former leader of the Labour Party. What he meant was that governments of all political colours and in all countries repeatedly say they will never talk to terrorist groups and yet they nearly always do so eventually, and in the end usually treat their leaders as statesmen.
From 1997 to 2007 I was the chief British negotiator on Northern Ireland. On the basis of that experience, when I left Downing Street in 2007 I proposed publicly that we should talk to the Taliban, to Hamas, and even to al-Qaeda. A Foreign Office spokesman said: “It is inconceivable that Her Majesty’s Government would ever seek to reach a mutually acceptable accommodation with a terrorist organisation like al-Qaeda.” Only a few years later, NATO countries are now talking to the Taliban, and the US and Israel have talked to Hamas, at least indirectly.
I don’t mind the hypocrisy of governments on the subject—that is part and parcel of politics—but I do mind the fact that they never seem to learn from past experiences, often with devastating consequences. Each time we meet a new terrorist group we start again from scratch, partly because governments change so regularly while the leaders of the terrorist groups tend to stay in place far longer.
As a result, when governments do engage with terrorists they almost always leave it far too late. General David Petraeus admits that in Iraq the US government delayed too long before talking to those “with American blood on their hands.” In the case of the Taliban, despite a long mating ritual, a sustained peace process with the US has still not begun, even though NATO forces will leave Afghanistan in the course of 2014. The process of engaging with these groups and winning their trust takes a lot longer than people realise. They need time to adjust to the outside world and grasp what might be a realistic demand and what is not. When we do eventually engage, we forget the techniques and skills we learned last time.
By happenstance I have spent the last seventeen years of my life talking to terrorists of different sorts. I was not always in favour of such dialogue. My experiences have, however, changed my mind and convinced me that talking is the right thing to do.
My experience in Northern Ireland convinced me that no conflict—however bloody, ancient or difficult—is insoluble. With attention, patience and above all political leadership, they can be solved, even if previous attempts at making peace have failed repeatedly. I am not suggesting that there is a Northern Ireland “model” that can be deployed elsewhere unaltered—that would be ludicrous: each conflict has different causes and will have different solutions—but it would equally be nonsense to suggest that none of the lessons we learned in the negotiations in Northern Ireland, from our successes and our failures, could be applied elsewhere. If people are going to make mistakes negotiating with terrorists, they should at least make their own, new, mistakes rather than repeating those already made by others.
