By IRNA,
London : The West will eventually talk with the Taliban and maybe even al-Qaeda, according to former British prime minister Tony Blair’s chief of staff, Jonathan Powell.
Powell, who has experience from being involved in bringing Sinn Fein into the Northern Ireland peace process, said that “in the end there always has to be a political solution” to such conflicts as the nine-year war in Afghanistan.
“There seems to be a pattern to the west’s behaviour when we face terrorist campaigns. First we fight them militarily, then we talk to them, and eventually we treat them as statesmen,” he said.
“That is what Britain did with Menachem Begin and the Irgun in Israel, with Jomo Kenyatta and the Mau Mau in Kenya and with Archbishop Makarios in Cyprus.”
Powell is commonly described as Blair’s “closest political aide” having served as his chief of staff from the time he became prime minister in 1997 until his resignation in 2007.
In an article published on the Guardian’s Comment is Free website Monday, he suggested that from the experience in Northern Ireland, “both sides have to have reached the conclusion that they cannot win militarily before meaningful talks are possible.”
“The first stage in such a process is usually listening to insurgents’ grievances and winning their trust. The negotiator needs to understand the currents within the terrorist movement and the pressures the leadership face,” the former chief of staff said.
The Taliban, he said, “will need to move beyond the single demand that foreign forces must leave first, and consider what they really want to achieve.”
“What changes do they want in the Afghan constitution? What sort of power sharing should there be between the Pushtuns, Tajiks, Uzbeks and other minorities? How would they demonstrate that they had separated themselves from al-Qaida?”
Powell also suggested that from experience such conversations cannot be conducted in public. “Neither side will be prepared to reveal the concessions they can make in public but will only begin to explore them behind closed doors.”
“It is only when you get to the stage of a negotiation proper that the process should become public, when there is a ceasefire in place and the killing on both sides has stopped,” he said, adding that in the case of the Taliban, it was for the Afghan government, not Nato, to conduct the negotiations.
“Tough military pressure to convince insurgents that they cannot win, coupled with offering them a political way out, seems to be the only way to resolve such conflict,” Powell argued.
“If history is any guide we will in the next few years be repeating the pattern we went through with Begin, Kenyatta and Makarios, and will be speaking to Mullah Omar, and even perhaps to Osama bin Laden,” he said.