Jonathan Powell (Shall we talk?, 7 October) has little to say except repeated rewordings of the near slogan: there is no military solution [to terrorism], you have to talk. His favourite example is Northern Ireland, but this is actually a very poor example. He writes: “No British government was ever going to concede a united Ireland against the wishes of a majority of the people in Northern Ireland [but] once discussions were begun with the Irish Republicans, we discovered that they were prepared to settle for something else.”
Not for 25 years they weren’t, so Britain had to face down the insurgency, which Britain did. Eventually an older, perhaps mellower, IRA leadership accepted that they weren’t winning, and settled for an agreement that they could certainly have got with the Heath government in the 1970s.
And the IRA had a comprehensible political agenda (a united Ireland). Does Islamic State (Isis) have a correspondingly comprehensible agenda? The nearest is a pure Islamic state purged bloodily of all dissenters, somewhere in Syria and Iraq. But this is envisaged to be permanently at war with the rest of the world, fighting to oppose all real and imagined grievances of Muslims everywhere.
Maybe Isis will eventually develop a meaningful agenda, and maybe will one day even be willing to compromise about it. But at present we are at 1970, not 1996, in Northern Ireland terms.
Roger Schafir
London
• Jonathan Powell is right; talking to terrorists is the only way to establish some sort of peace. He is also right that building trust takes time - “I spent a good part of the next 10 years [from 1997] flying back and forth across the Irish Sea to meet Adams and McGuinness”.
NGOs engaged in similar work also need time. And resources. But there is little funding from governments or the EU, because peacebuilding is regarded as too difficult, too risky, with no guaranteed outcomes.
Rev Donald Reeves
Director, The Soul of Europe
