NEGOTIATE WITH TERRORISTS?
By Leonard Weinberg
Special Report for the National Security Forum
The recently concluded negotiations between the Taliban and the US government to free Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl in exchange for five of the group’s leaders raises a number of questions about when or if it ever makes sense to negotiate with terrorists. The logic of never negotiating or making concessions to terrorists when they engage in kidnapping or hostage-taking is clear cut.
If a government, the American or any other, offers to negotiate it may have the unintended effect of legitimizing the group in the eyes of the public. And if the same government exchanges the group’s members held in prison, or provides ransom for the liberation of those it holds captive, then the terrorist group, or any other similarly motivated one, will have an incentive to repeat the action. In the long-run making concessions in a hostage-taking or kidnapping situation simply encourages terrorists to take more captives. Seizing American citizens has an added bonus; if you take Americans captive you draw the attention of the mass media throughout the world. Therefore, the policy of no negotiations and no concessions makes good sense for the US and any other country similarly targeted.
The origins of this policy date back to 1972 (the year of the Munich Olympics massacre) and decisions made by President Nixon and Henry Kissinger, his Secretary of State. It was a time when the Rand Corporation analyst Brian Jenkins (a special forces’ veteran of the Vietnam War), asserted that “terrorists wanted a lot of people watching, not a lot of people dead”. Unlike today’s terrorist organizations which specialize in suicide bombings and other techniques for mass murder, those of the 1970s skyjacked commercial jetliners, seized hostages and set-off bombs (some of them, the IRA for example, issued warnings to the police ahead of time) as a means of winning publicity rather than inflicting mass fatalities.
Did this policy of no negotiations/ no concessions work? Did it have a deterrent effect? Terrorism analysts interested in the application of the policy by Latin American governments sought to calculate its impact. During the 1970s the continent was plagued by a number of armed insurgent organizations, in Colombia, Uruguay, Argentina and Brazil especially, that took hostages for ransom or prisoner swaps on a regular basis. (The Tupamaros in Uruguay for example kidnapped Sir Richard Jackson, Britain’s ambassador, and Dan Mittrione, an American police adviser to the Montevideo government. Jackson survived the ordeal while Mittrione did not.)
According to the terrorism analysts’ findings, the no negotiations/no concessions policy had no effect on the rate of kidnappings and hostage takings. The frequency with which Latin America’s armed insurgents carried out these attacks did not vary significantly with whether or not the governments affected refused concessions or were willing to make them. What did seem to matter was who was taken captive. Prominent and wealthy individuals e.g. bankers, businessmen, politicians, were more likely to cause governments to make concessions than ordinary members of the public.
Also during the 1970s two American terrorism analysts used “game theory” as a means of calculating when or if negotiating with terrorists is rational. If a terrorist makes say 10 demands on a government, how many if any should the authorities concede? Their answer is that it depends on the group’s pain threshold. If a terrorist group has a low threshold and is willing to compromise, then the government should make concessions since the group will likely settle for a few of the its demands. On the other hand, if the group has a high pain threshold, if it is composed of fanatics willing to die for the cause, than the government’s best option is force; since it cannot be bought off with much less than conceding all the demands.
Another observation worth introducing into our discussion is that if a decision is made to negotiate, the best way to proceed is to use a low ranking official to do the negotiating. Presidents, prime ministers and foreign ministers should stay out of it. If high-ranking figures become involved it generates publicity, exactly what the terrorists hope to achieve.
Over the last few decades terrorism has undergone some serious changes. Among other things, the perpetrators have become more religiously-inspired. Suicide bombings have become the exemplary type of attack. And these days terrorists want a lot of people dead, not simply watching.
Despite these changes the problem of negotiating has persisted. At this point it makes sense to distinguish between negotiating a broad agreement with a terrorist organization and negotiating for the release of hostages. In the case of a broad agreement there have been some successes. The 1998 “Good Friday” agreement between the IRA and British and Irish governments seems to be the leading example.
If we limit ourselves to hostage seizure cases though, a number of episodes seem relevant. In Sub-Saharan Africa both Boko Haram in Nigeria and Uganda’s Lords’ Resistance Army have engaged in kidnappings on a massive scale. The Ugandan group has not expressed a willingness to negotiate (so far as I’m aware), while the Nigerian government has declined to negotiate over the freedom of the hundreds of school girls Boko took hostage.
The situation in Israel presents a mixed picture. On the one hand, Hezbollah’s 2006 attempted kidnapping of a few Israeli soldiers on the Lebanese border sparked a month-long war between the Jewish state and its “Party of God” enemies. On the other, a few years later the Israeli government was willing to free some hundreds of Palestinian prisoners in exchange for a single army sergeant held by Hamas.
Another major case: In Russia during 2002, Chechen rebels, wearing suicide vests, took control of Moscow’s Dubrovka theatre during a performance and demanded national independence in exchange for the hundreds of play-goers they took hostage. The Russian authorities responded by pumping gas into the theatre, which had the effect of killing the terrorists along with most of their hostages. This “no negotiations” tactic though did not deter the Chechen fighters from killing some hundreds of school children at Beslan a few years later.
Is there is a lesson to be learned from all these hostage-taking experiences? The lesson is that the policy of no negotiations/no concessions has not been successful in all cases, perhaps not in most of them. Whether or not to negotiate and concede should be based on a careful cost/benefit calculation.
–Dr. Leonard Weinberg is Foundation Professor of Political Science Emeritus at UNR and has served as a senior fellow at institutes in Israel, Italy, and England. Among his many books are The End of Terrorism (2011) and Democratic Responses to Terrorism. You can reach Dr. Weinberg at [email protected].