Negotiating with terrorists

A comment by Dick Gephardt (somehow nobody calls him Richard) in tonight’s Democratic candidates’ debate: “I don’t think you can negotiate with terrorists. [He thinks] the administration has failed with getting at the root causes of terrorism.”

As I’ve said before, terrorism isn’t that simple. And despite talk of the “War on Terror”, it’s not a military issue. If the Indonesian/Vietnam war, and subsequently the Algerian and Afghan (Soviet era) wars have taught us anything, it’s that militaries designed to fight a massive state vs state war (e.g. World War II or the projected World War III between the US and USSR blocs) are not capable of adapting to a guerilla war. I do not believe - please correct me if I’m wrong - that any major power has won a war against insurgents with guerilla tactics.

No, terrorism is primarily a police issue, unless the cause has enough popular support that it becomes a political issue.

And that’s where the issue of negotiating with terrorists comes into play. What’s their support? That’s the major issue. People like Action Directe, like the Red Brigades, were extremist groups without a major political, regional or sectarian backing, so there wasn’t much resistance to the police hunting them down. Other European terrorist organisations are trickier to deal with.

ETA, the Basque separatists, have a hard time because not many of the French Basques particularly support them. After all, they live just next door to the rabidly pro-European Catalans. Roughly speaking, anyone from Bayonne to San Sebastián is Basque, and they vaguely want to be independent, whereas anyone from Toulouse to Barcelona is Catalan, and they’re very happy to be making money through trade thanks to the EU. That tends to put a damper on your nationalistic spirits, knowing that people who live in a very similarly trans-border linguistic community have found a peaceful and apparently very prosperous way of being together and ignoring national boundaries. (Did I mention that Airbus has its assembly base in Toulouse?)

The Corsican nationalists (of a variety of different flavours), and the IRA / UVF (+ dissident factions) are yet another case in point. Here you have paramilitary groups fighting each other on 100% political grounds; sure, there’s criminal activity going on (there’s strong suggestions of Mafia-like involvement in Corsica, and the local version of omertá is as good as the Sicilian equivalent; the IRA is known for its involvement in cigarette and untaxed “red diesel” trafficking, and the UVF is no better). But both types of terrorist groups are predicated around independence, and that’s a 100% political goal.

When you’re in that situation, you have to negotiate with terrorists. There’s no alternative. You have to encourage a political settlement, because there cannot be a military victory for either side, short of wiping out the political consituency of one of the terrorist groups. If you arrest all of the current IRA, new members will arise within 10 years, just because there will still be angry Catholics in Northern Ireland.

I do wish that the lessons of Northern Ireland could be learned and applied to the Middle East. Northern Ireland is messy, and far from solved, but it’s better than it’s ever been since I started paying attention (i.e. roughly 15 years). A lot of that is to do with Senator George Mitchell and President Bill Clinton, and I deeply admire Howard Dean’s proposal to send Clinton to the Middle East as a special emissory, because what Israel and Palestine need is a respected, non-partisan mediator.

Look: the only time when you wouldn’t talk to terrorists is if a) you can’t find them, or b) you know it won’t do any good. And you’d have to be really damn sure of yourself to confidently assert the truth of point b.