In a week when security was stepped up across Europe in response to perceived threats from al-Qaeda and dissident republicans in Northern Ireland, the reflections of former US special envoy Mitchell Reiss on negotiating with terrorists could not be more timely, writes ED MOLONEY
IN HIS REMARKABLY sparse account of the Northern Ireland peace process in his recent autobiography, the former British premier Tony Blair refers to a key move-on moment in that epic saga. It was a speech he gave in Belfast in 2002 in which he called for “acts of completion” from the IRA to copper-fasten the Belfast Agreement, meaning specifically the decommissioning of its weaponry and recognition of the new police service.
What Blair neglects to explain is that it took another five weary years, almost as long as the second World War, for those acts to materialise. That they did so at all is, in the view of not a few observers, less to the credit of the British prime minister than to the White House envoy in the final years of the process, Mitchell Reiss, a figure whose name is glaringly absent from the glittering cast named and thanked by Blair in his book for their part in achieving peace in Ireland.
To say there was a clash of approaches to the peace process between Blair and Reiss, a former senior official in George W Bush’s state department, would be something of an understatement. Blair, assisted by his chief of staff, Jonathan Powell, had an unshakeable conviction that Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness needed a constant diet of concessions to fend off hardliners in the IRA and avoid a split, but Reiss – armed, ironically, with intelligence provided by Blair’s security service, MI5 – took the sharply contrary view that the Provo leaders were pulling the wool over the eyes of Downing Street.
When Robert McCartney was murdered by drunken IRA members in Belfast in 2005 (just weeks after the IRA stole £26 million from the Northern Bank), Reiss got Adams’s invitation to the White House for St Patrick’s Day withdrawn, and McCartney’s sisters were feted, mobilising an angry Irish America, led by Ted Kennedy and John McCain, against the Provo leadership. Within weeks a chastened Adams had persuaded the IRA to end its war and to complete decommissioning.
Later, when the Provos faltered in giving support to the Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI), Reiss barred the Sinn Féin leader from raising funds in the US. The ban wasn’t lifted until the Provos accepted the new police force, not long afterwards. Without such toughness, some might argue, Adams and McGuinness would still be traipsing to Downing Street with their begging bowls outstretched.
So when Reiss researches and writes a book asking and answering the question of when governments should talk to terrorists, the chances are that he has some things of interest to say. He examines five terrorist-type groups that at one time or another have talked to governments. Aside from the IRA these are Basque separatist group Eta, the Tamil Tigers in Sri Lanka, Hamas in Gaza and the so-called Anbar Awakening in Iraq, former Sunni insurgents who turned against al-Qaeda to side with the Americans, in a development that has enabled the US to “officially” end combat duties there.
There were two inspirations for the book. One was Northern Ireland. One of the funders for the project, the US Institute for Peace, wanted to know whether the peace process was a model for the rest of the world, as Blair and Bertie Ahern would have us believe.
“The short answer is absolutely not,” says Reiss. “In one abstract way you’re right because it shows at a conceptual level that warring factions can move from violence into the corridors of power. But when you get beyond that 30,000ft view the factors that created that settlement – Blair, Adams, the diaspora, the thriving economy – are not present in any other conflict that I can think of anywhere in the world . . . And that’s why I’m so sceptical of this cottage industry that seems to have grown up around the myth-making.”
The other catalyst was 9/11 and the knowledge that talking to terrorists was something that the US was going to have to face up to at some point. In the immediate aftermath of the attack, that wasn't the case. Reiss's book gets its title, Negotiating With Evil,from a speech made by Vice-President Dick Cheney just after the al-Qaeda attacks. Americans never negotiate with evil, Cheney declared: "We defeat it."
Historically, that was a wildly inaccurate claim. American governments have been talking to terrorists almost from the outset. In the 1780s, just before George Washington assumed the presidency, the infant US government struck a deal with the Barbary pirates, paying them a “tribute” for leaving American ships alone. Teddy Roosevelt negotiated with a Moroccan pirate to secure the release of an American hostage in 1904. Jimmy Carter talked to the Palestine Liberation Organisation in 1978. Bill Clinton talked to Hamas in 1993 and to the Taliban. Most famously, Ronald Reagan got himself mired in the Iran-Contra scandal in the 1980s.
"After 9/11 it was clear that terrorism was going to increase in both geographic scope and lethality," Reiss told The Irish Timeslast week. "Terrorists had been pursuing WMDs. They had been successful in a couple of instances, but without huge fatalities, and the threat was metastasising. And it was unlikely that we would be able to kill or capture every one. So the policy implications then were: would it be possible to identify those groups who had more limited or local grievances, and would it then be possible to engage them in a way that you could reach a negotiated solution that didn't compromise your national security?"
When Reiss took the Northern Ireland job he discovered that there was no playbook in the state department dealing with the subject. This book is arguably the first attempt to write one, and Reiss’s conclusions, while hardly surprising, will strike some as controversial.
“There are three types of terrorist groups,” he says. “Reconcilables who can be persuaded to compromise; irreconcilables who can only be satisfied by outright victory; and those in between.” Hamas and al-Qaeda, along with Eta, fall into his irreconcilable category, the IRA and the Sunni insurgents are mostly reconcilable, while the Tamil Tigers fall into the third category – one fraught with danger for governments, he believes, because their intentions are so hard to read.
Even so, he says, it is sometimes worthwhile to consider talking to every and any group involved in terrorism. “Even if you’re dealing with irreconcilables, it is worthwhile to negotiate. When it doesn’t become an exercise to find a pathway to peace, it’s a counter- intelligence exercise. You’re trying to discover information about the structure and leadership of the organisation, you’re trying to sow mistrust among the different members and, perhaps most of all, you’re trying to recruit members, to turn them over to your side in the way the Brits did so effectively with the Irish. So the big question is: do you negotiate with Osama bin Laden? The answer is yes, but it’s not what people conceive of as a traditional negotiation; it’s a counter-intelligence exercise.”
It is unlikely that the Obama administration will find itself talking to al-Qaeda, but the prospect of talking to the Taliban in Afghanistan is real and may be the only route out of that quagmire for the Americans. But this, for Reiss, is where it begins to get tricky.
The British were able to talk to the Provos because the IRA had been deeply penetrated and were effectively defeated. The Israelis, however, don’t need to talk to Hamas, notwithstanding the UN’s Goldstone report or Hamas’s legitimacy as an elected government, because the Israelis have neutralised the military threat from Hamas since the brutal invasion of Gaza in the winter of 2008-9.
But for the Obama White House, the picture in Afghanistan looks very different. “Again the question is: are the conditions such that engagement would be worthwhile, that it would support US national-security interests?” says Reiss. “It’s very clear that if you take the lessons I lay out in my conclusion and overlay them on Afghanistan that we will not be successful in negotiating with the Taliban. We do not have the things needed in place.
“We saw this in Northern Ireland also. Unless you’re winning or unless you remove the hope that the other side has of winning, it won’t work. You also need to have real good intelligence. We don’t have that. The Taliban are not monolithic, and the challenge from an intelligence perspective is astronomical. You almost have to go valley by valley, and we can’t do it.
“The other thing is: is there a leader who can play the role that Gerry Adams played? Unclear. Maybe that means you’re going to have to find a dozen Gerry Adamses. Good luck. Finding one is hard enough.”
Negotiating With Evil: When to Talk to Terrorists, by Mitchell B Reiss, is available as an e-book from Open Road; see openroadmedia.com/author_reiss
