Negotiating Hostage Crises with the New Terrorists

"I actually met Adam Dolnik at a conference in Turkey and he asked me to review his book and write a foreword for it, which I ended up doing. And I think it is a very interesting book because they examine primarily terrorist hostage sieges that occurred in Russia. For example, they looked at the Beslan school and Moscow theatre situations. Their premise is that the authorities are under-prepared to deal with the new terrorist, who is a bit more sophisticated in understanding how to manipulate law enforcement’s response. I think it is a very good book on articulating many of the problems that authorities have, and by authorities I mean not just police but governments, in dealing with organised radical terrorists who are willing to die. And I think it is probably the best book out there on that topic. I think its only weakness is that it draws conclusions based only on Chechnyan terrorists and we may see other terrorists act in different ways around the world. The authors think that the terrorists are pretty adept at stopping negotiation approaches and I think in the case of Beslan and the Moscow theatre there is some truth in that, but I am not sure that is applicable across the world with other terrorist groups. For example, in the famous Mumbai incident the behaviour of the terrorists was also very frightening and demonstrated a lot of forethought which was put into the planning in how to deal with negotiations, but I think in many respects it was also different from the Chechnyan terrorists. So I think we have to be careful about drawing absolute conclusions about how terrorists are likely to behave and we have to be more flexible. Well, it is very challenging. It is like the suicidal individuals that the police deal with all the time. If someone really is convinced that they are going to kill themselves and they are determined to do that then you are going to be unsuccessful in stopping them. But we try to find a level of ambivalence and that gives us an opportunity to insert our efforts to try to stop them from doing that. And I think the same is true for terrorists. As we look at today’s world, with a very committed fundamentalist terrorist, the prognosis for getting them to comply is extremely difficult but not impossible. There are always some people who, when put on the spot, will choose life over death. And I think we have to make that effort time and again if for no other reason than to buy time and slow down the process, so we have better resources available if we have to use tactical intervention."