I mean they may be a smelly bunch of murdering scumbags, but if neither side talk to eachother, then how can anything be resolved?
The UK gov told us in the 80 and 90’s that they would never negotiate with the IRA. Turns out they had been on and off for about 10 - 15 years. Currently ( any time soon, although the Good Friday agrrement is a bit stuck ) we have IRA members involved in a power sharing govenment. This could not have happened if Major had not been willing to open the lines of communication. He did, terrorism by the IRA reduced dramatically. Is this the only real way to win the war on terror?
Anyway the point is if you dont have at least one round of talks the how does either side know what the other wants. If you dont know that, then how can you formulate a plan?
I suppose you could call it a “Pre-emptive” (or “Preventitive”…yawn ) discussion.
There is an important difference between rewarding terrorists and recognising their grievance.
If their cause is simply absurd or evil in itself, as in the case of eg. Al Qaeda, McVeigh,
Aum Shinrikyo etc. then negotiation is futile, since addressing the grievance would be even worse than suffering the terror.
However, the waters are muddied when there is clearly a legitimate cause for which they carry out illegitimate acts of atrocity, especially when it is so deep seated and popular a grievance that said acts will simply not cease even were all the terrorist operatives to be captured or killed, since others would take their place (for generations if necessary).
In these cases, negotiation is an essential step towards peace.
And it also encouraged future radical proponents of change to consider the same tactics. Some groups use terror tactically (like the IRA), others use it strategically (like AQ). In the case of the former, if we’d always kept a strict policy of non-negotiation then the tactic would be abandoned. The problem is, we never have kept that policy strict.
In the case of AQ, there is no hope to negotiate because they aren’t trying to engineer a policy change; they just want to destroy infidels. Having said that, there probably are a great many supporters of AQ who might back off if the Israeli/Palestinian issue were resolved.
There is no evidence of it working because it hasn’t been implemented. No one has yet to put the theory (which many subscribe to) into practice. If you negotiate only one time, you’ve blown your credibility completely. If you never give in, you will certainly suffer some short term losses, but eventually render the tactic ineffective and therefore obsolete. Over the long haul, I believe more lives would be saved by never negotiating then allowing the tactic to remain viable. Again, this only applies to groups that use terrorism to achieve a policy change or quid pro quo.
Terrorists are not necessarily the legitimate representitives of their group. Can Hamas or the IRA legitimately speak for Palestine or Ireland? They aren’t elected officials. They are groups that declared themselves and then went around blowing stuff up.
Terrorists are not bound by treaties, legality, or public opinion. What gurantee would there be that they would abide by any agreements?
As already pointed out, terrorists often have demands that are unreasonible - like the destruction of Israel or stop logging or driving SUVs.
Terrorists are criminals. Blowing up a traing full of commuters should not be rewarded. Any negotiations would have to include appropriate punishment. Is their cause worth going to jail for the rest of their lives or were they hoping for a lot of ‘not getting caught’?
Well, I think that there was a point in time where we could have and should have talked not only to the likes of Al Qaeda, but to the Islamic people in general. That time was, oh, 15-20 years ago. 9/11 kinda sealed the deal, and unfortunately, we’ll now have generations of both Americans and Muslims growing up to loathe each other.
As we all know, simply bombing terrorists and refusing to talk has worked superbly for Israel and Russia, and we CERTAINLY cleaned up that situation in Yugoslavia without a hitch. :rolleyes:
But there is some debate as to the motives of our good friends AQ. Some people are absolutely convinced that they are out to destroy all Western life. Some people think that they just want us out of the middle east. I certainly don’t know which is really true. Terrorists say all kinds of fed up shite, and if you believe every word they say you’re a nitwit. But to a certain degree, they want us to be jumping scared every time they or someone else makes some vague threat (coughHamascough*). All we’re doing now is pissing off more people.
Where does this leave those people who want the same things the terrorists want, but don’t engage in terrorism? Eg Republicans in Northern Ireland. Are you saying their views should immediately be ignored, because some of them engage in terrorism?
In the case of IRA their objectives(and some of their tactics) where supported by large sections of the nationalist community in the north and citizens of the Republic for a large amount of time during the troubles. Sinn Fein which is the political wing of the IRA is now the biggest nationalist party in the North and a small but influential party in the Republic.
While the IRA where murdering people the nationalist people had a lot of legitimate grips with the people who were ruling them. These problems had been ignore in the past which led to the re-emergence of the IRA in the first place.
I thank a nonexistent god that the likes of Thatcher are gone and the recent leaders of the UK have shown a lot more control and intellect about the problem of terrorism then a lot of people I read on this board.
You can’t win a “War on Terrorism” with violence. Yes sometimes violent acts are required, I’m no pacifist, but the zero % tolerance approach is going get you nowhere except deeper in the shit.
Now saying all that I also agree that some terror organisations like AQ should be dealt with violence as nothing else will work on those type of fanatics but while fighting this fight you have to be very careful not to further radicalise the public that surrounds them. This is were the west and Israel are failing IMO. They are giving AQ and Hamas etc. victories every time they dismiss the rights of civilians.
Fighting terrorists isn’t easy and it isn’t clean but it also isn’t a cowboy movie or a video game.
Finally lets not give the UK too many blowjobs. In Ireland (NI) they have in the past carried out executions, feed info to Loyalist terror groups so they could kill lawyers etc. , released soldiers that had been convicted of murder, employed a shoot to kill policy and on and on. The have also had to suffer many heinous and disgusting attacks on their people
Does this comment strike anyone besides me as being astonishingly naive? Short of genocide, can anyone name an example where the use of sheer military force alone has stopped terrorism?
Using violence breeds more violence. The only way it stops is when a truce is negotiated, or when one side utterly annihilates the other. In the case of terrorism, it well never be possible to use violence to quell it completely: some of the flies (if you’ll pardon the metaphor) will always escape to breed elsewhere. One solution is to remove the flies’ breeding areas. In the case of terrorists, annihilating one group of people to remove all of its potential terrorists will only anger the allies of that group of people and foster more terrorists somewhere else. Another solution is to remove the conditions that nourish the flies. To accomplish that requires understanding what it is that the flies feed on. Mindless, retaliatory warfare will not stop terrorists: they are far less afraid of sacrificing their lives than your average American soldier. Removing or at least ameliorating the conditions that provoke terrorism would be far more efficacious in the long run.
But that would require an administration for whom diplomacy was rather more nuanced than “demonize anyone who disagrees.”
N.B. I am not a pacifist; I am not arguing that military force should not be used. I’m trying to suggest that a successful effort against terrorism probably requires more than using violence to try to stop violence.
The point is to never negotiate with a group that actively supports/engages in terrorism. It applies most specifically to hostage-taking and hijacking where the perpetrators have a specific end in mind (money, release of prisoners, troop withdrawl, etc.). The importance is to not give the appearance that the acts of terror are actually effecting change. For instance, we could work harder to resolve the Israeli/Palestinian population without seeming to be “negotiating” with terrorists. We pulled our troops out of Saudi Arabia under the auspices that we no longer needed to defend SA from Saddam and it just happened to be an issue that many jihadists had been championing.
If the interviews I’ve seen with Bin Ladin are any indication, his major beef with the United States is our occupations of various lands – he wants us out of the middle east, Afghanistan, etc.
I don’t think the terrorist attacks would continue forever until everyone was of the same fundamentalist Islamic faith he is, though I could be wrong. I’d imagine if we just left the middle east alone he’d stop the jihad.
Thats not to say I advocate this position or anything, but thats what I got out of his interviews.
Terrorists don’t represent each other. They have no authority to accept concessions, or make binding promises. In fact, the reasons you can’t negotiate with terrorists are pretty much the same reasons you can’t just shoot them. A terrorist is just an anonymous criminal with a fan club. If you know who they are, then they aren’t terrorists. They’re just criminals. If you don’t know who they are, then you can’t talk to them.
Now, if your country is being targeted by a whole lot of terrorists from a particular part of the world, then, over a few decades of intense effort, you might be able to change the way the people in that part of the world feel about your country. But that is not the same thing as talking with, or negotiating with terrorists. That is just a way of making your impact on the world less menacing. I doubt that military invasions, bombs, and missiles, however “precise” they are, will do much to encourage those people that we love them.
“All your private property, is target for your enemy.”
Or, put another way, those who have the least to loose can risk the most.
