DERMOT MURNAGHAN: Thirteen years ago when the war in Afghanistan began the idea of talking to the Taliban was unthinkable for many but now it’s a reality so should we always be prepared to talk to terrorists in some way, shape or form?  Well Jonathan Powell is a former British Diplomat and was of course Tony Blair’s Chief of Staff for the entire time that he was Prime Minister and his new book is called Talking to Terrorists is out now so he is a very appropriate man to have along.  So talking with General Sir Mike Jackson about the future of Afghanistan, it’s got to be political progress now.  We know the talks, the contacts are already there with the Taliban but how does that deepen, how does that get really engaged and get the Taliban I suppose to buy into the new Afghanistan?

JONATHAN POWELL: Well we’ve left it awfully late to start talking to them.  When I left government in 2008 I argued that we should be talking to the Taliban and I was rubbished by the British government of the time who said while we can talk to the IRA and the PLO, we certainly shouldn’t be talking to the Taliban.  It took us a long time, the West a long time to start engaging with them.  They then had a base in Qatar and then the Americans negotiated the release of Sergeant Bowe Bergdahl with them so we left them awfully late but now a real negotiation needs to start involving the Afghan government, involving the other parties in Afghanistan and the Taliban.   

DM: But has one of the levers, one of the big sticks been removed with the withdrawal of military forces there?  The Taliban know that in certain areas they have got the upper hand.  

JONATHAN POWELL: Well yes, of course one of the mistakes we make quite often in these cases is we think  that if we just give them a really bad bash – and that was the surge in Afghanistan, the idea was if we have a surge then they will suddenly be on the back foot and be prepared to negotiate – well the trouble is that terrorists like that may not see it that way, they may feel that they can actually outlast the enemy especially if the enemy announces that it is leaving quite soon so you’re right, some of the pressure has been taken off militarily and as Western forces withdraw we already see the Taliban making advances.  In Kunduz in the north they are beginning to advance in a place they haven’t been for a very long period of time, so there is a real danger as you hinted in your question, that Afghanistan may go the way of Iraq.  

DM: Just tell me what forms the contacts are taking and what forms they should take.  There is always this phrase isn’t there, back channels, that they should have been established a long time ago so you actually tell the British public and you see British service personnel dying in the military campaign and at the same time, the very politicians who ordered them in there are talking to representatives who are talking to representatives or something like that.

JONANTHAN POWELL: Well you have to be ready to fight and to talk at the same time.  We opened, the British government opened a channel to the IRA in 1972, they only opened real negotiations in ’91 to ’93 under John Major but if we hadn’t had that channel there we wouldn’t have got to the ceasefire, we wouldn’t have got to the end of the war with the IRA so you have to have these channels and you need to start secretly.

DM: Let’s broaden this out, talking about talking to the IRA, they are all very different aren’t they, these terrorists or whatever you want to call them, could we talk to ISIS, could we talk to Islamic State?  They call themselves a State but as we know they take on a very different hue depending on where they are.

JONATHAN POWELL: Yes of course. I have written this book looking back over the history of the last century actually and we always say we will never talk to terrorists, as Dick Cheney put it, we will never negotiate with evil and yet we always end up talking to them, we do it the whole way through our colonial history and as Hugh Gaitskell put it, all terrorists end up with drinks at the Dorchester courtesy of Her Majesty’s Government.  Now each group of different, of course it is, but each time we meet a new terrorist group we rediscover the whole thing all over again and we reinvent the wheel and all I am asking for is that people remember what happened last time and if the group has political support, we will end up talking to them.

DM: Okay, political support, with Islamic State does it have political support or does it just have military dominance over some of the areas in the cities that it controls?  Isn’t it more difficult to negotiate, to talk to terrorists who don’t seem to have any very clear political demands beyond the setting up of a caliphate which you can’t deal with?

JONATHAN POWELL: Absolutely but ISIS does control territory and it controls territory because it has political support and one of the things you could talk to them about and you would have to start a long way back and it would be a long lead up to any negotiations, you couldn’t possibly negotiate with them now, this is a long way down the track but like the IRA you need to open up a channel.  What we would talk to them about is this, it’s the position of the Sunni in Syria and Iraq who have been marginalised.  When we left Iraq in a bit of a hurry we left Iraq in the hands of Maliki and a Shi’ite government that was very sectarian and did not allow the Sunni rights, for example the former generals in the Republican Guard under Saddam Hussein were not allowed to stay in the army because Maliki wouldn’t allow them in so they had real grievances and they want to know if they have a future in Iraq.  Those are the things we talked about, not about an Islamic caliphate, just as with the IRA.

DM: But isn’t that for the Iraqi government to talk to them about that and isn’t it the same question I asked you about Afghanistan, we’re kind of out of the game militarily.

JONATHAN POWELL: The Iraqi government hasn’t been talking to them about it and one of the mistakes we made in leaving was not having that conversation.  When we were in government back in 2005, we started such conversations in Jordan with the Sunnis and the ex-Ba’athists from Iraq, that conversation should have carried on.  We could not leave it to the Iraqi government because the Iraqi government was Shi’ite and did not want to have a relationship with the Sunnis.  We had a duty to do that as we will continue to do in Afghanistan.

DM: Is that the reason, Jonathan Powell, that you think there are so many messes going on, the aftermath, people point to the aftermath of the so-called Arab Spring and a country I know you have got a lot of expertise with and a lot of dealings with at the moment, Libya.  You can’t even call it a country anymore, it seems to be disintegrating before our eyes and if there were to be talking, who would you talk to there?

JONATHAN POWELL: There are I’m glad to say talks happening thanks to the UN. There is a problem in Libya that we intervened by air but we didn’t then go in afterwards and help them try and recreate a state, that was the problem.  They say to me when I go to Libya, where on earth did you go after the campaign?  It is something that President Obama says he sees as perhaps his biggest mistake in foreign policy.  But it is possible to get the two sides to talk, we started talks in the Sahara three weeks ago between the two sides, the legitimate parliament in Tobruk and those MPs who are refusing to go to it from Misrata and other parts of the country so there, the two parts of the country, although they are still fighting they are talking so there is always a hope in these cases.

DM: But talking to terrorists, of course it happened there already with Gaddafi, he was funding and arming the IRA and there was a lot of talking to him, he was brought in from the cold by Mr Blair and he did an awful lot of work there.  Wouldn’t it have been better talking to him and keeping him there in some shape or form?

JONATHAN POWELL: No, I think it would be crazy to say we should keep dictators in place because it gives us stability, I notice people saying that about Iraq and all sorts of things, that is not the answer to our problem.  I am old enough to remember when we used to say in the Foreign Office, good old Brezhnev, let’s keep Brezhnev in place, that’s not what we want.  We want these countries to move forward, we want them to move towards democracy but to do that we have to be able to talk to them as well as to fight them.  There is no military answer, if anyone thinks the answer to ISIS is bombing, they are sadly mistaken.  It is part of the answer, it is not the answer.

DM: Jonathan Powell, thank you very much indeed, very good to see you.