Todays Telegraph carries an article by Peter Taylor, with the title "If we talked to the IRA, why not al-Qaeda?" The article accompanies Taylor's series starting tonight on BBC2 called Al-Qaeda: Time to Talk? In my view there is no need for a tv series to find the answer to this question. It's obvious, no.
For Taylor though, it seems that talking might be the way forward. However, the error he makes is to equate Osama bin Laden to Al-Qaeda in the sense that if you address bin Laden's issues you will resolve the problem of Islamism. Sadly Al-Qaeda is not an organisation though, it's a catch-all term that expresses a much wider ideology. Talking with bin Laden is not to talk to Al-Qaeda.
Taylor goes on to point out that when one looks at bin Laden's statements he rarely says he wants a "caliphate" but does want an end to "American support for "apostate" rulers in Muslim countries, notably, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Jordan and Pakistan." Surely that implies the desire for a pan-Islamic Caliphate though? Without American support those nations would very likely fall to Islamist revolution and a Caliphate would be born from Egypt to Pakistan.
Islamic terrorists are not people that we will ever be able to negotitate with. Their worldview is such that we will always be in the wrong no matter what we do. Osama bin Laden is merely one man in a global interconnected network of religo-political fascists. The meer suggestion of talking to them is risible, do that and you instantly legitimise the use of violence over the ballot box.
3 comments:
Taylor has made a fundamental error in confusing a conflict of interest with a conflict of value. The former lends itself to negotation, the other does not. As a case in point, imagine I have a tin of beans I wish to sell for thirty pence, and have a buyer who wishes to pay twenty pence - the desire to trade already exists and there may well be scope for compromise. However, if the 'buyer' considers that the tin is rightfully his without payment, that particular circle cannnot be squared.
Returning to the immediate issue at hand, here is the Defense (sic) Department's thumbnail sketch of A-Q's raisons d'etre: "Al Qaeda is a radical Sunni Muslim umbrella organization established to recruit young Muslims into the Afghani Mujahideen and is aimed to establish Islamist states throughout the world, overthrow ‘un-Islamic regimes’ expel US soldiers and Western influence from the Gulf, and capture Jerusalem as a Muslim city." . A negotiation that gives that is not worthy of the name - it is at best a paying of a danegeld, and at worst a surrender that reduces Western civilization to dhimmitude.
I thought our military recently commented that our boys were experiencing the heaviest fighting 'since the Korean War' in Afghanistan.
The idea of this fighting is surely to kill the terrorists so that the Afghans can build their country back up to something resembling a peaceful democracy.
I can't see any use in talking to Taliban commanders, surely we want to make Afghan mercinaries believe that fighting for the Taliban is suicide, by killing them until the troops abandon the ringleaders and flee for their lives.
There are lots of Lefties that should be sent to 'talk' to Bin Liner and his chums.
I would like to send thousands, and I would also like Bin Liner & Co to seize them, bind them, film them begging and screeching for mercy, and then cut their stupid treasonous heads off.
Is that too much to ask, Lord?
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