Teun van Dongen: Why Negotiating with the Taliban Is a Really Bad Idea

Washington has finally admitted the obvious: the United States and its allies are negotiating with the Taliban. Seems like a no brainer: an agreement committing the Taliban to cease violence and distance itself from al-Qaeda would make it possible for U.S. troops to leave the country with the impression that ten years of campaigning in “the graveyard of empires” has not been in vain. But negotiating a way out of Afghanistan is far more complex. Even in the best of cases—say, the successful demobilization of the IRA in 1998—terrorist groups don’t merely magically disarm and deradicalize overnight. And the Taliban is a particularly prickly nemesis.

 

After the Belfast Agreement was signed in 1998, the pacification of the IRA became something of a model for dealing with insurgent groups. Those involved in brokering the deal seemed to believe that it was possible to copy their success in quite different settings. For instance, Hugh Orde, the Police Chief of Northern Ireland, urged the British government in 2008 to start negotiations with al-Qaeda, positive that there was a serious possibility that the two sides would straighten things out. This same hopefulness carried Sinn Fein leader Gerry Adams to the Basque Country, where he played the preposterous role of peacemaking expert, lecturing the Basques on the importance of including all parties—even the extremist ones—in the peace process.

 

However, scholarly analyses, providing a healthy counterweight to the undue optimism of the Northern Ireland model, have shown that the success of the negotiations in Northern Ireland was highly contingent on the specific context on the conflict. That said, there is one important lesson for Afghanistan that policy makers should take away from the pacification of the IRA, although not the one promulgated by the negotiation enthusiasts: the end to the conflict in Northern Ireland shows that the pacification of an insurgent group requires a serious post-conflict effort to bring the fighters to lay down their arms. It took the specially appointed Independent International Commission on Decommissioning several years before it was convinced the IRA had definitively demobilized. And even so, a few years after the Belfast Agreement, the UK and Ireland agreed on the founding of the Independent Monitoring Commission, which kept an eye on paramilitary activities that still took place...