I’m beginning to wonder where I can go this summer to get away from Jonathan Powell. Suddenly Tony Blair’s curly-haired former chief of staff is everywhere, bursting out of newspapers and Radio 4 programmes, relentlessly repeating the message that it’s good to talk to terrorists. Or, to be more specific, that it was jolly good to talk to Messrs Adams and McGuinness of the IRA — which he and Tony did during the heady days of the Northern Ireland ‘peace process’ — and that now he thinks it would also be good to talk to the Taleban one day, and even perhaps Osama bin Laden himself. One is tempted to think that if Beelzebub were to make an impromptu appearance on earth, the first thing he would see would be Jonathan Powell walking purposefully towards him, clearing his throat for a chat.
Mr Powell recently observed, in the Guardian, that ‘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, then we treat them as statesmen.’ Nothing in his subsequent reasoning leads one to believe that this is ever a traject-ory of which he might conceivably disapprove. When he first met McGuinness, he admits, his scruples were such that he refused to shake his hand: ‘a gesture which I now regret’. With time, scruples were shed: after bantering sessions with Martin and Gerry, and glimpses of them playing with the Blair children in the Downing Street rose garden, he invited them to his post-wedding party as ‘personal friends’. Oh dear. As Adams and McGuinness no doubt twigged early on, there are certain susceptible English public schoolboys for whom the whiff of cordite is a very potent attractant.
The gist of Powell’s talking cure, which he now sees as transferable to trouble spots all over the world, is based on the notion that the settlement reached in Northern Ireland was an unalloyed triumph. Having grown up in Northern Ireland during the worst of the Troubles, I would not recognise it as such. It is now considered indelicate to remind the elevated circles in which Powell moves that during the Provisional IRA’s long campaign in Northern Ireland it committed deeds so atrocious that it can still make one physically queasy to recall them. IRA bombs murdered children, pregnant women, elderly men and women and worshippers at Remembrance Day commemorations. Suspected informers were tortured, taped stuttering out their ‘confession’, and then shot in the back of the head. Along with their psychopathic counterparts in the Loyalist para-militaries, the IRA pursued a squalid sectarian war that spread nothing but misery. IRA activities were directed and defended by Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness.
In their efforts to bring a settlement to Northern Ireland, Blair and Powell did everything within their power to appease the terrorist leaders. They overturned the law; they ruthlessly sacrificed the political moderates of the nationalist SDLP and the Ulster Unionist party; and they presided over a system that handed the top government jobs to Ian Paisley’s DUP and Sinn Fein, the two political groups that had done the most to inflame the vicious conflict in the first place. The peace came at a very steep price.
Given that Northern Ireland is now a mini-state with former gunmen in government and current gunmen — in the shape of the Continuity and Real IRA — attempting to reintroduce murder to its unsettled streets, I can just about bear the arguments of the honest English cynic who says, ‘Yes, of course what we settled for in Northern Ireland was pretty disgusting, but I’m afraid it was necessary to buy off the Provisional IRA and prevent any more bombs in the City of London.’
What I cannot bear are the pronouncements of the self-congratulatory English romantics, a group of which Mr Powell is undoubtedly a member. For Powell, in his 2008 memoir and subsequent media appearances, perpetually invites his audience to thrill to the piquant moments in his late-blooming chumminess with Gerry and Martin, such as the hilarious time when he and Tony were in hot water over cash for honours, and Gerry, quick as a wink, rang up to advise them to seek political status and go ‘on the blanket’. It is, of course, Adams’s dark history alone that lends this leaden joshing its frisson for the narrator. If this sort of dinner party anecdotage instinctively strikes you as creepy, then congratulations — it is.
But fanaticism arrives in many flavours, and even Powell would agree that the peculiar pathology of the IRA is not the same as that of the Taleban. Powell, once such a cheerleader for war-war in Afghanistan and Iraq, is now the most vigorous proselytiser for jaw-jaw there too. The Taleban will need to consider what they really want to achieve, he has written, adding: ‘What changes do they want in the Afghan constitution?’ I can think of a few, but they’re unlikely to bring a smile to Hillary Clinton’s face. ‘What attitude would they take to women’s rights and girls’ education?’ he asked. ‘They probably haven’t thought these questions through themselves.’
On the contrary, the Taleban has thought these questions through, very thoroughly, and it has plumped for a religiously fundamentalist agenda in which women are subjugated, veiled, uneducated and murdered for disobedience. Up in Pakistan’s flooded, desperate Swat Valley, it is presently howling for the Islamabad government to refuse all aid from ‘foreign infidels’. The local policeman in Mingora still remembers the time when, before being routed by government forces, the Taleban slit throats and strung up bodies in ‘Slaughter Square’ and killed a famous local dancer, Shabana.
The IRA’s aim of a united Ireland was a legitimate political aspiration: the problem was the violent and fanatical style in which that aspiration was pursued, against the wishes of the majority in Northern Ireland.
The Taleban’s political aspiration is not based on geography, but on religious ideology. It wishes to see a fundamentalist Islamist state, in which women are forcefully deprived of numerous basic rights. How does one negotiate with that? Beckon it into a power-sharing government on the basis that a satisfactory level of oppression can be granted in 20 years’ time?
Of course intelligence sources should be alert to power shifts within the Taleban, and the possibility of luring away disillusioned supporters. But to pretend that hard-core Taleban leaders can shift to a position acceptable to Western democracy, and remain there in our absence, is frighteningly disingenuous. If there ever are such negotiations, it will be to carve out a deal which permits the coalition to back eagerly away while proclaiming a work- able arrangement, and God help thereafter any Afghan woman or man who has made their affection for freedom too visible in the meantime. Powell proposes that the Afghan government should do the talking to the Taleban, but I am inclined to think that it should really be Powell himself, dispatched as our special envoy on the slow train to Kandahar.
Jenny McCartney is a columnist and film critic for the Sunday Telegraph.