Terror and appeasement

Monday, 2nd June 2008

The head of the Police Service of Northern Ireland, Sir Hugh Orde (who most certainly should know better) said a few days ago that Britain could only stop al Qaeda by negotiation. A little while back there was a clamour for talking to the Taleban. This is all part of a huge establishment push for talking to terrorists (on both sides of the Atlantic – indeed, this is already becoming a major issue in the US presidential election) including Hamas, Hezbollah and Iran. The argument is a perfect distillation of the hubristic ignorance and solipsism of the west which views everything through the prism of its own cultural assumption that the entire world operates according to the rules of rational self-interest and that all conflict can be solved by dialogue. Indeed, the dominant belief is that conflict can only be ended through dialogue, and there can be no military solution to terrorism.

In Britain, much of this thinking is driven by the experience of Northern Ireland where the ‘peace process’ is commonly held to have ended the conflict between Republicans and Loyalists. I have written previously about the reasons why this analogy is hopelessly and dangerously flawed -- not least because the ‘peace process’ only happened because the British Army actually beat the IRA into at the very least a permanent stalemate. In other words, the military victory was crucial. If they had not been beaten, the IRA would not have decided they had no alternative but to use democratic politics instead of the Armalite to achieve their goals.

That’s why it’s so disappointing that Sir Hugh Orde, of all people, should have said

he could not think of a single terrorism campaign in history that ended without negotiation.

In fact, there has not been a single terrorism campaign in which terrorists have been talked to where the terrorism hasn’t worsened as a direct result – as indeed happened in Northern Ireland, where the back-channel secret talks with the IRA long before the ‘peace process’ emboldened them to perpetrate yet greater atrocities. The same thing has happened over the years with Hamas, Hezbollah and Fatah. As Hussein Massawi, a former leader of Hezbollah, so helpfully put it:

We are not fighting so that you will offer us something. We are fighting to eliminate you.

It is safe to assume that al Qaeda would not dissent from that proposition.

Within a few hours of Sir Hugh’s published remarks, there was some practical evidence of the wrongness of his position and that of all the other appeasers who say that terrorism can never be ended through military means. The CIA has declared that

al Qaeda is virtually defeated in Iraq and that the country is seeing its lowest level of violence for four years... The relative calm produced by the Shia ceasefire has coincided with what the CIA is now calling the ‘near strategic defeat’ of al Qaeda in Iraq, and a growing rejection of the group's murderous ideology across the Middle East.

While the commander of the British forces in Afghanistan has said that the Taleban are on the brink of defeat:

The new ‘precise, surgical’ tactics have killed scores of insurgent leaders and made it extremely difficult for Pakistan-based Taliban leaders to prosecute the campaign, according to Brig Mark Carleton-Smith. In the past two years an estimated 7,000 Taliban have been killed, the majority in southern and eastern Afghanistan. But it is the ‘very effective targeted decapitation operations’ that have removed ‘several echelons of commanders’.

Clearly, these wars are far from over; only a fool would assume that the Taleban and al Qaeda are now finished -- far from it, I fear. But it seems equally clear that they have been seriously weakened as the result of these military campaigns which have recently turned a corner and achieved startling success. It is in fact only military or policing campaigns that can defeat terrorism; since the strategic purpose of terrorism is to force a general acceptance of its political aims, talking to terrorists invariably tells them that they are winning and inspires them to step up their campaign. It is indeed because the world has talked to Middle East terrorists over the years that we are now facing what we are facing.