Deal with the devil

POST: Northern Ireland's Top Cop: Negotiate with Al Qaeda, By Kris Alexander, Danger Room, June 04, 2008

An interesting perspective. Revolutionary movements lose their revolution when they make pacts with the enemy--"devil" or no.

This is much temptation to make all foreign policy, all national security, and all grand strategy terror-centric (Bobbitt being the most eloquent).

I myself see no reason to reward their asymmetry with symmetry. To me, that is the essence of going wobbly: recasting this grand horizontal scenario called globalization (i.e., nation states integrating via economics, then security, then politics) to foreclose the enemy's capacity for hit-and-miss vertical scenarios.

Their friction merely reflects our far more powerful force.

So avoid going wobbly, avoid giving into fear, don't play down, and maintain faith in what got us here and gets us there: meeting the demands of a growing middle class. For decades that was an intra-national affair. Now it's an international or global middle class whose emergence drives change and adaptation far beyond the puny terrorists, who remain a useful bogeyman for a networked age but control nothing but our fears and attention spans--when we let them.

Comments

[stuart abrams]

Really bad analogy. The IRA might be analogous to Hamas - a "terrorist" organization with defined nationalistic goals as to which negotiation might serve a purpose - but the comparison has nothing to do with al Qaeda. Al Qaeda is a criminal organization, not a "revolutionary" organization. Negotiating with al Qaeda makes about as much sense as negotiating with the Mafia.

[Ted O'Connor]

Actually we have negotiated with the Mafia. We did it in WWII in New York to make sure the longshoremen kept working. The FBI under Hoover worked with the Mafia to keep Communists from taking over unions. The result was the loss of union leadership to organized crime. The CIA played games with the guys that used to run vice in Cuba and wanted back.

In Chicago, the Pollice Department sent word to the "Outfit" to stop dumping bodies inside the City limits. "Keep it up" they were told and "We will shut down every book joint, card game, and girlie joint in the city." It worked quite well except for the rare instance when somebody had to get whacked ASAP before they got to the Grand Jury.

It seems to me that the guys who were never in a fight are the ones who always want to start one. It never hurts to talk. You can always fight later.

[Wiredman]

Gosh I though the CIA just said we were winning against Al Qaeda? Why negotiate at all? Silly. We keep up pressure and use time against them.

[Tom Barnett]

Agreed. AQ the HQ, for example, is no IRA (there's no there, there--so to speak).

Again, don't reward asymmetry with symmetry.

But remember this: much of AQ-the-brand, just like with the Sov bloc's fellow travelers, will be allies of ideological convenience with real "olive tree" desires and those people, like Petraeus proves in Iraq, can be flipped.

To that end, I say, consider the Pashtun--a people united by a dividing border.