Negotiating with Evil: When to Talk to Terrorists

You can test that proposition by actually meeting with them. There's a third group that falls somewhere in between the irreconcilable and the reconcilable. These are the tough calls. It may be that on a Tuesday they're signaling that they want to talk to you but on a Thursday they're going to set off a bomb that is going to blow up a security official.

It could be that some members of the group are interested in negotiating but that other factions inside the organization are absolutely opposed to it. How do you tell? These are tough calls. A couple of examples where this proposition was tested and it proved that you could move this group into the reconcilable category were the British and the IRA, and the U. These were very hard calls. A second lesson is that, with apologies to Clausewitz , engagement is war by other means. You cannot win at the negotiating table what you can't defend on the battlefield. What this means really is that you need leverage.

Terrorist groups have no incentive to come to the negotiating table if they don't think that our side is winning, that they are losing, or if you remove all hope from their ultimate victory by demonstrating that you have the stamina, you have the determination to slog it out for as long as it takes. This, of course, is a very hard political message to be able to convey. It's probably even harder if the terrorist group is religiously motivated, because they're taking their orders from God, and God doesn't compromise. We know in some cases that it is possible to demonstrate this type of resolve.

But it's not easy.

How to talk to terrorists

One of the examples in the book is that it took the British over ten to 15 years to be able to demonstrate to the IRA that it was not going to leave Northern Ireland. The IRA believed that "one more big push" was all that it would take to raise the political cost to the British to leave the North—not that they could ever defeat the British military on the streets of Belfast or Derry, but simply that it would be too politically painful for the British to stay.

There is a wonderful quote in the book from Gerry Adams , when I interviewed him in , in which he said, "We were looking at war for another 30 or 40 years, and I didn't want to do that. Another lesson is that it still may be worth talking with the terrorist groups even if there is no hope of a deal.

This may seem counterintuitive, but in fact it's a different animal altogether. You're not talking about a negotiation here; you're talking about a counterintelligence operation. The ability to sit down with these men—and they're almost always men—to take their measure, to see if there's any fractures within the organization, to understand better the personal relationships, and to be able to recruit and turn them to your side, is invaluable. You can do both simultaneously; they're not necessarily mutually exclusive. The British were quite good at this. By the early s, many of the IRA's operations were stillborn because the British intelligence services had infiltrated the IRA so massively.

The British were very successful, but it took them almost two decades to get to that point. One of my favorite examples has to do with Spain and ETA. Again, it took a while to get this negotiation set up, but in the mid-to-late s the Spanish and the Basque terrorist group ETA met in Algiers in Algeria. The Spanish had no real interest in negotiating. They didn't think a negotiation was possible because they didn't think ETA would compromise.

But they had a different plan altogether. It was a very sophisticated counterintelligence operation. What they had done is that they had gotten the Algerians to agree before the talks that if the talks failed, the Algerians would expel the ETA members to certain countries in Latin America. Sure enough, after a year or so, the talks did fail.

The Algerians expelled them to certain Latin American countries. The Spanish had already prearranged with these Latin American countries that the ETA leadership would be under house arrest and that all of their residences had the phones and fax machines tapped, and had listening devices throughout the entire house. What happened is that they could then start to roll up ETA's organization inside Spain and over the border in France by tapping into this network of leadership outside the country. There's a quote in the book by the security official who was in charge of this, who said, "These leaders were much more valuable to me sitting in the Dominican Republic than they would have been sitting in Spanish jails.

Another lesson seems almost obvious. You have to have first-rate intelligence, and the integrity of the intelligence collection process and analysis must be preserved. If there was one great surprise to me in the book, it was how often the intelligence process had gotten corrupted as it went up the chain of command.

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It's also true that a lack of good intelligence will kill you. It's very painful to talk about some of these cases here. Perhaps the most well-known one has to do with Iraq after the invasion in We had 1, intelligence officers in Iraq at that time. All of these 1, were tasked to finding weapons of mass destruction. Very few were actually tasked with reaching out to the growing Sunni insurgency at the time.

There's an argument that we missed an opportunity to talk to some of these people and perhaps walk them back in late and early , certainly before the event that took place in Fallujah. In addition, there is a story that has gained some currency—unfortunately, because it's not true—that the United States missed an opportunity to engage with what I call the "fake sheiks" in Amman, Jordan. There were a number of Sunni leaders that decamped from Anbar over the border into Amman.

They were telling us that they could turn the insurgency off like a faucet if only we gave them lots of money and lots of weapons. Some academics and some reporters, have actually reported—there's a Vanity Fair article on this point—that this was a golden opportunity that we missed. In fact, we did spend a little bit of time running down that particular rabbit hole, unfortunately, because none of these individuals had any influence that we could ever tell. Perhaps the most upsetting case has to do with Abu Ghraib. There's an argument there that our frustration, our inability to understand what was happening in Iraq, led us to adopt extreme measures that led directly to some of the abuses that we saw so vividly with Abu Ghraib.

This all goes under the heading of an intelligence failure. There are also examples in the book about the poor handling of intelligence and how it compromised the British, Spanish, and Sri Lankan governments in their negotiations. We're all familiar with the events of the last week or so where there was an imposter who presented himself as the number-two leader of the Taliban and apparently was successful in separating us from a rather large sum of money before he was exposed.

This highlights the absolute centrality of having good intel. You cannot do anything without that. Another lesson has to do with my experience in Northern Ireland. I debated for a long time whether I really wanted to call the book something different. There is a phrase that's trotted out in all of these conflicts, that we're looking for a partner for peace.

Everybody needs a partner for peace, whether it's in the Middle East, whether it's in Kashmir, or what have you. That really is just a euphemism. We're not just looking for a partner for peace; we're looking for a very specific individual with certain skill sets that are exceedingly rare. The person must have a lot of credibility with his comrades inside the organization. He must also have the political imagination to envision a different way forward for this particular terrorist group.

And he must also have the physical courage to be able to take risks, including risking his life. He must be able to meet with the government repeatedly—for months, perhaps even for years—when many people inside his organization may be strongly and violently opposed. That skill set is very unusual. The Northern Ireland peace process was very fortunate in having one of those individuals in Gerry Adams. There was a possibility that our interlocutor in Anbar Province in Iraq also had those qualities.

Abdul Sattar Abu Risha was a member of one of the minor tribes in Anbar Province, but he was willing to stand up, to talk points against al Qaeda in Iraq at that time, and align himself publicly with the U. This gradually, over time, led to what was called the Sunni Awakening. Less than a year after the Sunni Awakening was announced in his house, he was assassinated by al Qaeda.

It's possible that he had these qualities, but it also highlights how rare it is for these individuals to bubble up and then the difficulty of keeping them alive long enough so that they can make a difference. Just a few more to share with you before questions. Patience is not just a virtue, but in these cases it's a strategic advantage.

All of these engagements take time, and they take far longer than any government expects them to. The process starts usually with lower-level officials, intelligence officers, sometimes military officials, cutouts, third parties—track-two negotiations—who meet, they probe, they talk, they meet again, they talk some more. Months and even years can go by before the decision is made to take these talks out of the shadows and bring them into the public light, and to set up what is hoped to be a sustainable diplomatic effort. The problem here is that they take time because terrorist groups aren't terribly sophisticated.

They don't get out a lot. They are also very anxious about engagement.

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For some of the reasons that I mentioned before, it's not clear that these terrorist groups are monoliths. In fact, we know that they are not. There are factions within them. People have different motives for joining these groups. It could be that factions are violently opposed to these types of engagements. This leads to some rookie mistakes.

One of my favorites was at one of the first engagements that the IRA had with the British government. The IRA brought a lawyer along with them to examine the credentials of the British intelligence officers, to make sure that they were really who they said they were. As I was talking about "you did this wrong, you did that wrong," he interrupted me and said plaintively, "I was only 22 at the time.

None of them had any experience. This in fact is par for the course. It's not that they're not smart, because many of them are extraordinarily smart; they don't tend to be sophisticated, at least not in the terms of the rules of a formal negotiation. It's also possible that many of these groups have a very shallow talent pool. As I mentioned, there's only one Gerry Adams.

It's unclear who that figure might be for the Taliban, if that person exists at all. What this means is not only is it hard to identify these individuals, but it's almost impossible to do what some of my academic colleagues love to do, which is to group all of the grievances together, call it a grand bargain, and say, "Let's just put it on the table, get it all out there, and have them agree. It's convenient for us to propose it, but in practice it is quite difficult. To show how difficult it is, in Northern Ireland it took the British almost 25 years to get the IRA into a sustainable diplomatic framework, and it took the Spanish almost as long to do that with ETA.

The one with ETA fell apart in a year and a half. You have to have patience and persistence. The final lesson—and perhaps it's appropriate that it be the final lesson here at the Carnegie Council—has to do with the ethics of talking to these individuals, the morality. The last question that I asked every single person that I interviewed across the globe was: What do you think about sitting down with people who have so much blood on their hands? The answers really ranged across the spectrum, from some people saying, "You should never do it; the only thing I want to do to terrorists is kill them," to other people who actually were quite conflicted but also quite reflective about the ethical price that you have to pay in order to do this.

The last part of the book talks about the ethics of doing this, with some of the sentiments along the following lines: All I can do is stop the next person from being killed, if I'm lucky. If you're not conflicted, if you don't have a heavy heart, when you meet with some of these individuals, then you're really misunderstanding what the nature of your charge is, because there is an ethical price that you pay. The only question is: At the end of the day, if you do it right, if you're fortunate, if you set it up and structure it correctly, then that price is worth it, because you may have a shot at ending a terrorist conflict, and that would make it worthwhile.

Thank you very much. I'm happy to take questions. Thank you very much for a very cogent and well-organized, well-reasoned presentation. I noticed a theme through your talk that seemed to put greater hope in diplomacy and what I would call a crime-fighting approach to terrorism, rather than the military approach.

You touched on the war on terrorism notion very early but then moved quite firmly away from it. I wonder if you would address the utility or danger of rhetoric invoking the military and whether, putting aside the actual use of the military for intelligence and so forth, the rhetoric of military approaches to terrorism.

I don't think I have much trouble with a military approach to certain terrorist groups. Some groups are irreconcilable and we're deluding ourselves if we think we can sit down and talk to them. In those cases it's capturing or killing them. You're actually talking about a slightly different issue, and it's one that I have thought quite a bit about, which is how do political leaders explain these issues to their people. One of the examples that I spent quite a bit of time with was Margaret Thatcher. I talked to all of her senior officials about her relationship with the IRA.

When this topic came up, one of the sitting officials now in the security forces said that it's dangerous for politicians to overload the political space by demonizing the group if you think that you may have to make a U-turn and actually talk to them. He thought that Thatcher was guilty of that, which made it more difficult to engage with the IRA.

In fact, there was a decade, during the s, corresponding to her time in office, when the IRA had given up hope of negotiations and was returning to solely using violence to get its point across. So there are some problems. On the other hand, nobody is going to defend what terrorists do.

It's a fine line between how far do you demonize this group in order to explain to the American people and to others what's at stake. If I can try to capture another aspect of your question, my sense today is that we have not fulfilled our obligation properly to come up with the system where we can prosecute these individuals under what I think should be a hybrid. It's not solely a military campaign.

It's certainly not solely a criminal act. It's some combination of the two. There's a fellow at the Brookings Institution, Benjamin Wittes , who has written what I think is the best book on this. He calls for a special set of courts with new legislation that will actually marry up the two in a way that will defend our constitutional liberties but also make us more effective in this fight.

Politicians are always going to be tempted to use rhetoric. It's a little bit less understandable that our legislators haven't come up with a new framework for dealing with it. David Ignatius wrote a column in The Washington Post the other day in which he raised this point: It's easier for us now to send predators to kill these guys than it is to capture, interrogate, and actually acquire some information from them that's valuable. He is making the same point I am trying to make here, which is that we need to rethink the legislative framework.

Negotiating with Evil: When to Talk to Terrorists

Perhaps that will lead to a more measured assessment by our political leadership at the same time. You said that in order to negotiate with someone you've got to be reasonably sure that they have the ability to make a decision and follow through with it. Would you suggest that Abu Mazen has that ability in Israel? The problem is that he has the ability to deliver some but not all of the Palestinian national movement. Can you cut a deal with him? It gets you something, but it doesn't get you everything that you might wish for.

The Palestinians have a civil war. It's on the low boil right now, but they have a civil war that's going on. That makes it very difficult for the Israeli government, for us, and for the quartet members, to be able to move forward. It doesn't make it impossible, but it certainly makes it more of a challenge. I'm interested in your comment on the designation of groups as terrorists. Many years later Mandela won a Nobel Prize. This was pointed out in my class at Columbia yesterday.

A totally different example is that the United States for many years would not negotiate with the PLO because it was a terrorist organization. The United States, of course, covertly did. But the real negotiation was through the Norwegians. The United States did not really negotiate what became the Oslo Peace Agreement and the opening to the negotiations later on that happened in the s. I'm wondering if you could comment on whether the designation of a terrorist is sometimes very politicized.

In some cases such as al Qaeda, I don't think there's a big argument. Let's revisit some of that history. A few years later, the Clinton Administration was sitting down in Amman, Jordan, with Hamas in trying to get them to join the peace process. I don't have a problem designating these individuals as terrorists. In most cases they have earned it. There is some value in having a little bit of moral clarity here. But that doesn't necessarily preclude you from talking to them if you determine it's in our national interest to do so.

A recent case that pains me to mention has to do with removing North Korea from the terrorism list. We did this a few years ago in the latter stages of the Bush Administration. It wasn't clear that North Korea deserved to be removed from this list. It was politicized, and I don't think it was helpful. You're going to have politicization of it.

But I don't think that it's as debilitating and paralyzing, as perhaps your question suggests. You can call these guys all sorts of names and you can still sit down and talk to them. However, some of our parents or grandparents were involved in what you might call terrorism insofar as some of our countries were invaded and some of our peoples were in what we call the Resistance Movement.

Now, those would have been called in today's words terrorists. They were defending their land. What would you say about the root causes of terrorism in those particular cases? We could spend all day debating this issue. What I tried to do in the book was to sidestep that question.

Jonathan Powell: How to talk to terrorists | World news | The Guardian

There are over definitions in the academic literature as to what terrorism is or isn't these days. I didn't want to make it in my book. What I thought I'd do was to actually invoke the governments involved. The governments involved have called these groups terrorists. I thought that that sort of got me out of a jam, on the one hand, but it also indicated how difficult it was for the governments then to make the reverse course.

It gets back to the first point, that the rhetoric was politically charged and yet the governments still were able to overcome that and talk to these groups. I don't think we want to debate the heroic resistance in World War II or the heroic resistance to British colonialism at the start of our own country. I'm the president of a college that was started and endowed by our Founding Father, George Washington. He was a British officer at one point. George III issued a proclamation saying that we were all a bunch of rebels.

Once you go down that path, you've got some difficulty there. We always believe our side is right, the other side is wrong. For this case, though, we're talking from the perspective of the governments. The governments are designating these groups as terrorists. They're finding some way to overcome that political hurdle to actually sit and talk to them. What the book tries to do is to show when they have done it well and when they have done it poorly and what lessons we can take going forward. You mentioned early in your talk that most of these terrorist characters were men.

I sense a great opportunity here to defeat any force that will expire of its own limitations. All you have to do is put some pressure on them. We know so much in the West about women and the science of equality. How can you mine that with the Taliban, who supposedly don't like to educate women, who blow up schools, and I've read that they throw acid in people's faces—how can you mine that to embarrass them, to make them appear to be more limited? How can you mine that fact that they abuse women, or appear to abuse women, and what we know about equality and the abilities and things like that?

How can we mine that in these primitive societies?

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The best way to tackle that is really through the prism of development rather than counterterrorism. The UN Development Agency a few years ago did an analysis. There was a direct correlation to economic development and the literacy and education rates of the female population. The more literate, the more education the females had in society, the greater their economic growth.

No surprise for all the women in the audience here. Can we do more along those lines? We are trying to do that in Afghanistan, in terms of building schools and trying to educate a generation of young women who are going to be returned to the 13th century if we are no longer there. But that's really hard. It takes a long time. That is a long play, if you will, in this ongoing war. The bad guys are the ones with guns, and it's easy for them to undo at a stroke what you have been striving to do at great cost and great effort. So it's a problem. The real challenge is to try to change the culture to value women and women's education more highly.

You're really swimming upstream in some of these societies. This is very difficult to do. I'm not that optimistic that we have the ability and knowledge to be able to reengineer these societies. I sat down a few months ago with a senior American general who was telling me about all the wonderful things that were taking place in Afghanistan and how we were going to leave it in a much better state than we found it. When he finished, I said, "General, I sincerely hope you're right.

That would be a very good thing if that's true. Powell describes himself as a practitioner, and has decided to dedicate the rest of his life to the work of stopping armed conflict. Its message is clear: I should declare an interest, having myself been a practitioner, though not to compete with Powell.

Diplomats have other things to do as well, but my own involvements in peace-making were the high points of my career. The first time I saw my name on the front page of a national newspaper was as the man who shook the hands stained with British blood in Aden in , and I am equally proud that my last piece of action as a diplomat was to help stifle a row in the Aegean between Greece and Turkey in , which could have ended in shooting.

From my own experience I agree with Powell about the necessity of talking. But the sooner the spitting stops and the talking starts the better. The preparatory phase can, as Powell explains, take a long time — so start now. Powell avoids getting bogged down in the notoriously difficult issue of defining terrorism.

It requires careful preparation, a well-thought out message backed if necessary by force, and of course readiness to say no: A large part of the book considers the various stages of a successful mediation: A disadvantage of this method is that questions arise again and again that are briefly discussed in the context of each negotiation but not fully analysed. Later chapters are more analytical, but here there is perhaps an opposite disadvantage, that important questions such as the uses of ambiguity, or the pros and cons of final compared with interim solutions, can get boring for the general reader.

To follow a particular story, say Eta or El Salvador , one would have to piece together fragments from several chapters.