Taliban

"9/11 was a big shock. When the first plane hit I thought it was an accident. When I was told of a second plane, I assumed it was a loop on the film. Once I knew the truth, I spent the rest of the day dealing with the consequences and trying to make sure the UK wasn’t under attack. The next morning I went to Waterstone’s bookshop on Trafalgar Square and bought all the books I could find on the Taliban. There were only four. Three were academic books and virtually incomprehensible. Rashid’s book was easily the best. I sat at my desk reading it for the rest of the day. I remember Tony and Alastair Campbell trying to steal my copy. Now that we’re poised to start talking with the Taliban, it’s imperative we understand them. I try to see it from an historical perspective. We called the Stern Gang and the Irgun terrorists. They killed many British soldiers and we tried to kill them. But we also talked to the [Irgun] leader, Menachem Begin. The Mau Mau fighters did terrible things to women and children and yet Kenyatta became a statesman. There are many examples of terrorists we’ve dealt with who have behaved atrociously. Are some terrorists beyond the pale? You’re not going to defeat an insurgent group by fighting it. The Taliban have been indicating that their education policies and approach to women is misunderstood. Many of them are extremely conservative, uneducated peasants from the countryside. They did not really know what they were doing in government and they engaged in these terrible practices. If there’s going to be some kind of power-sharing arrangement, one of the key things to negotiate is indeed their treatment of women and their education policy. They have indicated they may change their position on those issues. It will be hard. There need to be guarantees and monitoring mechanisms. What no one will be doing is giving them back full power. You have to talk to them unless you believe you can kill every single person who has that belief. It’s possible, by security means, to get to what we called in Northern Ireland an ‘acceptable level of violence’. That could be a couple of hundred people dying a year. If that’s ‘acceptable’, and people have got the stomach for it, you can keep that situation going forever. But you need to find a political solution eventually. I wasn’t happy talking to the IRA. They shot at my father and put a hole through his ear. And my brother was on a death list for eight years while he worked for Mrs Thatcher. But in the end, you have to talk to the people who are doing the killing if you want peace. Talking to them does not mean agreeing with them."