 We're here today to have what I am sure is going to be a very interesting discussion on a topic that, for any number of reasons, is quite timely if you read the daily news. As the invitation said, the topic is going to be framed around a recent USIP special report entitled, When Should We Talk to Terrorists? by Audrey Kurt Cronin. The very first line of that report states that this is a topic that generates a lot of passion, but scarce light. And it's for these reasons that, or for this reason that USIP is really proud and it's very important to us to support evidence-based research of the kind that Dr. Cronin conducts. And we'll hear a little bit more about the results of that research in a moment. We have a very esteemed panel today, and we've provided their bios out on the table. If some of you came in this way, there's also quite a few materials related to this topic out on the table. I'm not going to do lengthy introductions, but let me just highlight a few things about each of our panelists. Audrey Kurt Cronin, our guest of honor, or first among equals, is coming to the end of her USIP grant that's supported not only the special report, but what we think is a really interesting and groundbreaking book entitled How Terrorism Ends. And there's information on that book out on the table as well. William Zartman, familiar to many in the room, he's had four USIP grants, Audrey, you have some catching up to do, has come at this topic from a range of perspectives. Just recently, he's co-edited a book entitled Engaging with Extremists, States and Terrorists Negotiating Ends and Means. Anthony Juaniz, in addition to his position at American University, is an instructor here in the USIP Academy and teaches a course on negotiation, and we'll be looking at this issue from a negotiation perspective. Peter Bergen is a current USIP grantee, doing really interesting work on the grievance structure of various groups in Afghanistan and Pakistan, clearly related to this issue as well. Finally, we have Paul Pilar here, who is the Director of Graduate Studies at the Center for Peace and Security Studies at Georgetown University, and as you'll see from his bio, has a wealth of policy experience that relates to this topic. He's wrestled with these issues, and we're very fortunate to have him to moderate the discussion we'll have after the presentations. So what we're going to do is have 10-minute presentation by each of our panelists. After that, we'll have, I think, a good amount of time for discussion. Today's event is being webcast, and there is also media in the room, so we ask questioners to please come to one of the microphones we have set up. And with that, I'll ask Dr. Cronin to come to the microphone. Thank you, Andrew. It's a pleasure to be here. I'm glad to be back at the Institute of Peace, a place that's very dear to my heart. Before I get started, though, since I am an employee at the National Defense University, I should point out that everything I'm about to say is strictly my own opinion, my own academic research. It does not in any way represent anyone but myself, and that includes the Department of Defense and any of the other agencies involved. So with that as a caveat, I'm going to talk about the report that you have access to a copy of, and I only have about 10 minutes to give you an overview of some of the general conclusions. So it's going to be a fairly broad presentation, where I won't be able to get into a lot of the details of how I came to these conclusions, but I hope you'll have the time to possibly read the report and even potentially have a look at the book, because all of the statistical data is described in the book and also on a website that's accessible through, that is referred to in the book. So for those of you that are statistically oriented or who want a lot more detail about any of the case studies, you're not going to be satisfied with what I say today in 10 minutes, but you might at least achieve a little bit more of an idea of what I did by looking at the other things. Well this question of negotiating with people that target civilians for a symbolic purpose is understandably repulsive to many people. The natural impulse of governments is to crush terrorist groups that attack their citizens. The natural, that's very natural and understandable, particularly in the aftermath of a tragic event. The priority is to shore up the safety of the population, to stabilize the state, to avoid legitimizing the group that attacked, to punish those responsible, and to show, quote unquote, that terrorism doesn't pay. This is one reason why if you look through the broad history of terrorism, you can see that strong states typically respond with very strong measures, particularly military and police repression. It's very logical. It's an instinctive part of how states are structured. Nobody wants to appease, quote unquote, terrorist groups. It's hardly surprising that strong states respond the way they do. But sometimes classic state counterterrorist measures like military repression, policing, infiltration of groups, targeted killings, arrests, reform movements, or even marginalization of a group, sometimes those things are insufficient on their own to end a campaign. There may be no viable alternative to entering into talks. So the purpose of my research, particularly that which is focused on this report, was to answer the questions that are faced by policymakers when they are thinking about the prospects of negotiating with groups that use what is a repulsive tactic. Those questions include when and why do governments and groups negotiate? Under what conditions are those negotiations promising or unpromising? And how can we assess whether a particular terrorist campaign is more or less likely to end through talks? And again, as we've mentioned, the focus on negotiations was part of a broader project that addressed the question of how exactly terrorist campaigns end. I focus on the question of collective talks with groups that use terrorism, not individual measures like amnesties. And the book employed three approaches to try to answer that question. First, a detailed history of terrorist campaigns over approximately the last couple of centuries. Secondly, a series of controlled comparative case studies of the decline and ending of specific campaigns. And then finally, a database of campaigns which included hundreds, almost 500, and studied exactly how they had declined and ended. So I'll give a brief overview, as I said, of some of the conclusions. First, negotiation can indeed lead to the achievement of some of the aims of a group and a short-term decline in terrorism. There are many examples that are included in my study. Some of the familiar ones include the provisional IRA, the Israeli-Palestinian peace process in the 1990s, the Tamil Tigers in the early part of this century, and so on. But as these examples that I've just mentioned painfully demonstrate, the picture is a lot more complicated than simply the pursuit of a negotiated agreement and then the ending of violence. With talks, the long-term goal, which is a viable political outcome, a stable political outcome oftentimes, and the short-term goal, which is a reduction in violence itself, may be at odds. The good news is that from the state's perspective, overall, only about 5% of terrorist campaigns, including those who negotiate but also those who end in other ways, only about 5% of them succeed in achieving their aims, as they describe them. And again, the most common scenario is for groups that use this tactic to die young. Second, only a small percentage of groups, about 18% by my calculation, these numbers are never precisely exact, but somewhere in that range, about 18% negotiate at all. These tend to be long-lived groups. The average lifespan of groups that negotiate is between 20 and 25 years. If you look at the average lifespan of groups overall, at least the groups that were in my database, it's only about eight years. So they're longer-lived groups. That seems to make sense because they're hanging around longer to talk with. So of that 18%, 1 in 10 of the talks fail outright. On the other hand, very few groups can be said again to have fully achieved their aims. The predominant pattern in negotiations with groups that use terrorism is for talks to drag on with some lower level of violence without resolution or outright failure. Essentially, the negotiations become a diversion of the violence to another channel, while another dynamic typically enters the picture to help lead to the group's demise. So it's a little bit artificial to talk about negotiations completely independently of other aspects of the particular context. Negotiations rarely throughout history and groups completely on their own. So those who claim that talks alone and terrorism are just as wrong as those who insist that governments must never negotiate with terrorists. Under certain circumstances, talks are a necessary but not sufficient condition for reaching the end. Negotiations, therefore, are best approached as a long term managed process requiring patience and a broad range of policy tools. Now with that as the broad overview, there are seven promising and unpromising conditions for negotiations that are drawn from all of the case studies and the database and the historical study. The promising conditions that I've concluded that I come up with include, first, the existence of a political stalemate on both sides. The emphasis here in my work is on the political element because groups are more likely to negotiate when they sense that their popular support is waning. On the other hand, if the domestic constituency of the state is shifting in directions that serve a group's interests or respond favorably, at least from a group's perspective to violence, then it will wait to negotiate. So in short, the broader audiences are a key element in determining whether or not the moment is right for negotiations. Essentially, I think you need to see, particularly as we move into the 21st century, negotiations as not just a dichotomous relationship between any given group and any status quo power, but something that has a third side to the triangle that is becoming increasingly more important relative to the other two. And that is the role of the audiences or the popular support or the mobilized groups that are or are not supporting those talks or the violence. So that's the first key thing to keep in mind, I think. Secondly, a promising condition is strong leadership on both sides. This is obvious from the government side, but what is interesting is the need for leadership on the group side in many cases. A strong charismatic leader on the terrorist side who pursues talks and can at least pretend to distance him or herself from the violence, frankly it's almost always himself, but in any case, pretends to distance that person from the violence can be equally crucial if the goal is a negotiated outcome. Talks may become more difficult after a leadership change because the group may become more diffuse. So this debate that's going on right now about the question of whether or not targeted killings work or decapitation or drone killings and so on work is extremely complicated. And when it comes specifically to talks, the question of whether or not you have a leader with whom to negotiate is very important. Third, under the promising conditions, is third party sponsors or mediators. These are crucial, especially in terrorist campaigns because these groups are typically clandestine and unwilling to meet with government representatives directly. And also because the domestic political cost to a government that reaches out to a group directly is very high in many cases. Third party sponsors can act as well as outside guarantors, so their role becomes very important. And a fourth promising element for entering talks is the broader historical setting, particularly the relationship between terrorist groups who share sources of inspiration internationally. Looking at campaigns that have actually ended in a negotiated agreement, they have all included, especially in recent history, groups whose cause had peaked on the international stage. In the 20th century, I would argue that included groups that were part of the wave of decolonization. Talks with groups whose global cause is perceived to be rising in terms of broad based political support and connections with other comparable groups inspired by the same kinds of ideas tend to be unpromising. Now three unpromising conditions, in addition to those four promising conditions that I discussed. First is suicide attacks. This is an unpromising factor for successful negotiations because they reduce the ability and the willingness of populations to live side by side. Second, splintering. It's a very common outcome of opening talks. There are many examples that you'll think of immediately. The provisional IRA's splintering into its many individual elements and splinter groups, the real IRA, continuity IRA, and so on. The PLO, all of those splinter groups. Dividing groups can be a purpose of the negotiations and it potentially strangles the most radical factions. But splintering can also occur on the status quo side. Usually the pro-government side in this case. In South Africa, with the Africana White Powers Group Farmers Force in Northern Ireland, there was splintering on the pro-status quo side with the Ulster Volunteer Force. The most extreme case of splintering of status quo factions I would argue is Columbia, where the signing of the peace accords between the Colombian government and the popular liberation army in 1984 resulted in the formation of right wing paramilitary groups. Before long leftist groups, paramilitary units, the Colombian army all stepped up their attacks increasing the violence. Again, in the short term, talks do not necessarily decrease the violence. A third and final, unpromising condition would be spoilers, the existence of spoilers. And there's been considerable research done on this within the academic community. But as is the case in talks with those that are involved in civil wars, spoilers may decrease the likelihood of successful talks. But the cause and effect in terrorist attacks is complex. In the presence of a foundation of popular support for the talks, strong outside guarantors and identification of the negotiators with the talks themselves, spoiler attacks can actually strengthen the process if there's the ability of those who are involved in the talks to condemn and delegitimize the violence itself. The key variable is whether or not they have a plan to do so. So just to sum up, this has been a sort of a huge broad overview and I realize it's a little frustrating not to be able to get into the details. But again, the report is there. Negotiations are best thought of as a way to move a conflict toward the ending of a campaign in conjunction with other classic means of ending terrorism. Again, the violence rarely ends with the opening of talks. If talks are entered, a key consideration for policymakers is to consider these seven promising and unpromising aspects that I've gone through to approach the talks as a process that will trundle along and in most cases take considerable time. And to build a strategic plan for communications in advance if the virtually inevitable violence occurs. Thank you, Audrey. And let me add my two, what Andrew said earlier, my greeting to all of you and your thanks for coming out. We did not agree on an order of March here, but I would propose that for the rest of the panelists we go in the order on your printed program, which I think happens to be alphabetical once we get past Audrey. So that would be Peter Bergen and then Anthony and then Bill. So Peter, if we could have your observations, please. Thank you very much, Paul. And thank you very much to USIP for this invitation and thank you, Audrey, for her brilliant work. I just wanted to sort of re-associate about the four promising and three unpromising conditions as they relate to the Taliban that Audrey laid out. So promising conditions, is there a political stalemate and is the Taliban losing group support? I would say yes and no because, I mean, polling data on the Taliban indicates that their favorable ratings never go above 10% right now, about 7%. So they certainly don't enjoy a great deal of popular support, but unscientific polling in Helmand and Kandahar indicates that their support may be about 27%, according to a relatively recent poll. Strong leadership on both sides. Well, Ahmed Karzai, Mullah Omar, Zadari, these don't seem like very strong leaders on a lot of levels. I mean, Qiyani, I think, is clearly somebody who I think wants to bring some form of resolution to this, but perhaps the question of the Akhani network is still very much on the table. Third party sponsors to facilitate a deal. The Saudi government, obviously, is going to play, is playing, potentially, a large role. If Mullah Omar retires, he's not going to retire to Kabul. He'll probably retire to Mecca. And that's true also of Gubernain Hegmatra and a number of these guys are not going to be here. But Gubernain Hegmatra is sort of a war criminal by any standard. It would be very hard to imagine him coming back to Afghanistan. And just as Zadari went to Saudi Arabia during his, pardon me, when Nawaz Sharif went to Saudi Arabia, you know, Idi Amin, there's a sort of long tradition of Saudi being a place of exile that a number of people will agree to. Another third party sponsor, of course, is the United States, which, the sort of a kiss of death problem I would suspect for much of the Taliban, but obviously our ability to engage with the Pakistanis is a fairly large one. Is the context promising? In a way, yes, I'd say there are some very contextual things that are quite promising. The biggest strategic shift since 9-11 is the views of the Pakistani public military and government about the Taliban. The Taliban enjoyed a sort of religious Robin Hood image for many years and that is essentially evaporated. Support for suicide bombing in Pakistan has dropped from 33% to 5% the last several years. Support for bin Laden has dropped from 65% to 18% in the most recent poll. Support for the Taliban is tanking dramatically basically because of all the things that they've done domestically. And so that's a change. The Afghan population also is overwhelmingly in favor of talk, so that's another sort of favorable. Then on the unpromising side, suicide attacks, of course, have gone off the charts. In Afghanistan, 2005, there were 17 of them. In 2006, there were 123 and the numbers are usually around about 150 a year at the moment. Splintering. The Taliban is very splintered. Kamal Omar even delivered most of the quite assurers and interesting questions. He, can he deliver Haqqani's? Could he deliver Gulbadi and Haqmacha? And I think the short answer in all that is no. So you're dealing with at least four factions, the TTP, the quite assurer, Haqqani and Haqmacha, who you'd have to do deals with. And finally, the question of spoilers, almost all of these guys are potentially spoilers of one sort or another. So having this, and then I just wanted to draw your attention to 10 kind of unpromising things in general about this whole, about doing deals with the Taliban. First of all, obviously a very weak Afghan government. And what can they concede? Is it territory or principle? Does the Taliban get the Ministry of Justice? And how would that go over with the international community? Mullah Omar has had 10 years now to say al-Qaeda, bin Laden, 9-11 was a bad idea and he has never said anything of the sort. Every time there's been a meeting in the Maldives or Mecca between Afghan government and representatives of the Taliban, the quite assurers very quickly said that this doesn't represent anything to do with us. And that, by the way, our main demand is the withdrawal of international forces. And of course that would mean that they would take Kabul because the weak Afghan government and army cannot defend Afghanistan by itself at this point. We've also done a controlled experiment on this issue, which was the pre-9-11 period in which we basically said to Mullah Omar essentially kind of what we're planning to say to him now, which is give up al-Qaeda, bin Laden and we won't attack you. And he obviously decided to do what we all know he did, suggesting that he's not Henry Kissinger and he's unlikely to be Henry Kissinger in the future. And then the question of who do you deal with? We have so many different factions. Also the fact that the Taliban think they're not losing or perhaps even winning, either of those means that you're winning in an insurgency. We've also conducted a number of controlled experiments on the same issue in Pakistan. Every time there's been a peace deal with the Taliban, they have taken advantage in 04 and 05 in southern Waziristan and 09 in Swat to extend territory and use it to regroup. And then who are the moderate Taliban? Are they the Taliban who send their girls to schools once a week or once a month? It's sort of an oxymoron anyway. And the moderate Taliban who are going to moderate have already come over. The Mujahid kills the others that we know of. And then finally, al-Qaeda's influence on the Taliban is fairly pronounced and has, I think, increased over time. Baitullah Masoots and suicide bombers to Barcelona in Spain a couple of years ago, which was really canary in the mine. Faisal Shazad, it just appeared in a video post-humans obviously after the fact in which he's standing next to Haqimullah Masoud, suggesting that the Taliban have become more ideological and not less so over time. Thank you, Peter. Anthony. Good afternoon. Anthony Wenice from American University. I'd like to talk about the negotiation aspects specifically. Negotiation and terrorism are two very, very packed terms. Negotiation, I will say, and I'm sure my friend and colleague Bill will say more, can be done very well. It can also be done very poorly. And it doesn't have to be simply as it is often portrayed in military terrorism context as simply a series of concessions by the state to the opposition. It can be done well. It can be done poorly, strategically, tactically. It can result in implementation or failures of implementation. So we need to be careful as we think about what those terms mean. Terrorism too, despite all the different definitional lives, I think we can all probably agree, even if we don't agree on the definitions, that a great deal of military violence finds its way to the civilians, especially in the last several decades. Regardless of who is doing the fighting, civilians end up paying the price. I'd like to talk about essentially four things negotiation related with regard to Dr. Audrey's wonderful work. The first is to ask, who are we talking to when we talk about negotiation with a terrorist group? Are we thinking about speaking to their top level strategic foundational leaders? Are we thinking about talking to their field level military people who have an operational role but who do not make the strategic direction of that movement but who do direct its activities on a daily basis? Are we talking about the rank and file type people who may not be connected strongly to the ideological currents of their movement and may be occasionally looking for a way out? Even when we are talking about discussing having negotiations with top leadership, how solid is that top leadership? Are they going to withstand the rigors of shaking and movement within their own group? Will they be able to deliver their group? Do they have a sort of expiration date on their leadership role? As noted by several of our other panelists, these movements can and often do face a great deal of fragmentation. Insurgencies and terrorist groups in general, I think that the closer they get to the negotiation table, the more the momentum for fragmentation probably increases as those who want to be seen as faithful to the original cause begin to engage in tactics that are more on the extreme side. So who are talking to matters? What kind of talking also matters? To those who might say, we shouldn't talk to people who engage in these sorts of behaviors, well, there are some forms of negotiation that might be even useful with your worst adversary. Some of the purposes of negotiation might not be, as I stated earlier, simply a series of concession making in the hope of luring the movement away from its behaviors. It could be for the purpose of gathering intelligence about what their tendencies, interests, leadership are. So some sort of engagement with them brings a lot of information directly into the hands of those who engage with them. Negotiation can also be for the purpose of what I might call meta-negotiation or pre-negotiation. You're not talking about the substance of the conflict. You're talking about the terms of possible engagement. You're talking about what it would take to actually sit down at the table together. Those are very useful kinds of talks. They often happen in the shadows. And we shouldn't underestimate their importance. They often precede the open sort of talks that make the news that we all hear about. The third purpose, I think, and one that doesn't get much play, is that negotiation can be used, of course, as a process of trying to get the, if you're on the state side, get the group, the terrorist group, to see their political goals as attainable by other means. In contrast to the image of simply making concessions to them, getting them to feel that they can be brought into a process that might attain legitimate goals if the means are also legitimate. Audrey's work, as some of my other colleagues, and certainly my work, has shown that a lot of important negotiations don't happen in the open. And when negotiations are taking place in front of cameras, there are often quiet negotiations taking place elsewhere, where the real substance is discussed. And that helps to manage some of the political risk, I think, that leaders take on when they are trying to face movements engaged in terrorism. With regard to the Afghanistan example, it occurs to me that there are so many different levels of opposition as Peter alluded to. Just as in many different conflicts that we've seen around the world, a government responds as if the uprising or movement were a monolith. And there are often many different actors and movements sort of coalescing together. It occurs to me that you have to do an analysis on their ability and willingness to talk separately on each one. People going out into the street and throwing stones who might be civilian supporters of an opposition movement are probably different from the hardcore recruits who would put on a suicide vest. And those themselves are going to be different from strategic leaders. Engaging with all of them, I think, requires different tactics, different strategies, different approaches. It certainly seems to me that our armed forces, the folks serving in ISAF, will face people at a mid-field level rank of command in Afghanistan who are probably willing to come over from the Taliban and bring fighters with them. Our military is increasingly looking at ways to equip our commanders with the ability to do those negotiations. Those are not strategic level. We are making a reconciliation with the Taliban. They happen rather in the moment without any prior preparation or planning. And they increasingly are part of what I think are the landscape in that conflict. Let me end my comments there and pass the mic to Bill Zahman. Thank you very much. Bill. I think I'll take the podium just to equalize the forces. And I promise you, I resist the temptation to talk about ripeness. So you're safe. I noticed that Audrey mentioned right as well as right. So that's a broad concept. First of all, I would say, just to stake out positions that I think we should talk with extremists as much as possible. We should negotiate only when the terms of trade appear possible. Those are two overlapping terms and there's a broad gray area in between that should be more probably a subject of intelligence and operation and strategy than hair splitting on the nature of the terms. I think it's important to recognize that the government has to say that it will not negotiate with terrorists. So we shouldn't be lambasting the government for saying that. Think of the opposite. The government says, we will negotiate with terrorists. Just be a terrorist and come along. This debate has gone on over and over again. And I think it was Nixon who is quoted as saying that we will not negotiate for terrorists and his memory remains with us forever. There was a debate soon after that about what the new shape of the policy would be. Excuse me. And sometime around that time it was stated that the new policy was do everything to affect the safe release of hostages without making any concessions. That's from the New York Times in 1976 which shows you that academics are pack rats. The government has to say, therefore, that it's not going to negotiate with terrorists. The question is, what is it going to do and when? Talking is not surrendering. Talking is a means of attaining a goal when the opponent cannot be eliminated by force or even when the opponent, when the opponent can be checked but not eliminated by force. I think those two conditions are important. If you can't get rid of the guy on the other side and you don't have a millennial kind of belief that you're going to be able to do so in an acceptable amount of time, then the only thing left is to talk. If you can't take it, you have to buy it in other terms. Yuri Sevier said, who do you expect me to talk to if I can't talk to the enemy? He had a good reputation in practice of negotiation and talking. But at the same time, one has to expect to negotiate from strength. And that's an established position as well. That is that they, as Audrey's paper has pointed out, that the negotiation takes place when the parties are stalemated. And then she points out very nicely, politically stalemated, as strong as militarily, important as militarily stalemated. But remember, too, that that applies to both sides. So a stalemate only takes place when both sides are unable to achieve their goal, and the other side is going to try to negotiate from strength, too. And hence the challenging dynamics of the situation. So talking and repression, as another line, are not mutually exclusive. It is rare the cases where there are talks only under the condition that everybody will lay down their arms. And in fact, those talks must have been preceded by a lot of negotiations before that. So one would expect military action to take place on both sides while talking and even negotiation goes on. Those are a couple principles. There's one point that I would like to emphasize. And Anthony has mentioned it particularly specifically. Some of the points I'm making have been, it will be bouncing off of points that people made before. But I'll do it just so that you can get it the second time if you missed it the first. We make an enormous mistake in talking about the opponent as a group, as a solid, splittable, united group. So we talk about the Taliban, already a plural, as if it was one united force without any splits in it. Now, it is correct in saying that splits can be unhelpful as well as helpful. But it's important to try to look at talks as a means of splitting the group and getting to people who are talkable. And isolate those who are not talkable. This too is a very difficult calculation. One has to make sure that the talkables end up in the majority and that the untalkables are people who are outside who can either be controlled or unable to derail the deal when the deal is finally made. But splitting is important and therefore thinking of splitting is important. After all, just as one of many examples, the LTTE in Sri Lanka were defeated because one faction defected. And then when they broke off their truce, the Sri Lankan government was able to arm better and not talk, but in fact win, defeat the LTTE. So I think we have to ask ourselves another question and that is why should we talk with the other side? A few of these have been mentioned, but a number of them bear some repetition and some other new emphasis. First of all, simply to gain information. We want to know what they're thinking. We want to help them, curiously perhaps, to think a little bit more broadly and creatively very often when one talks to groups like this, they repeat things. They repeat things in their own minds. And talking can, with great difficulty, help them get behind that repetition into reasons, why into lower things, lower levels of thought, into, as Roger Fisher would say, into interests rather than positions. Second of all, we want to sow doubts. We want to have them ask themselves whether what they're doing is the proper path to what they would like to achieve and whether they can hang on that long and whether the means that they use are worth the action that they take and worth eventually the loss of popular support as well. Third, we talk with terrorists and extremists because it's necessary sometimes. Sometimes it's the only way to get to at least a part of what we want and we find ourselves in the, we, I assume, we think of ourselves as the state, find ourselves in the position where talking is the sole path. Remember that whenever we talk about reasons why or problems facing, we're talking not only about the state, we always kind of identify with the state, but also with the terrorists who have the same kind of problems to face and the same kind of decision to make when, why, how should I talk? We talk, another reason to talk is possibly to end violence, don't change the ends, but rather to demote the struggle from a violent struggle or a terrorist struggle to a political struggle, even though one can't talk them out of their goals. In other words, a conflict management type of aim rather than a conflict resolution. We want to talk too, it may sound a little wimpy and silly, but it's important because willingness to talk gives us a moral high ground. They live on the moral high ground, particularly if they're religiously inspired people. I mean, they're right next to God. In fact, Joseph Coney is God. He said, you don't have to pray. Why pray? Because I'm here. So willingness to talk, a declared willingness to talk occupies the moral high ground and that plays into some of the positive conditions, the context, the political stalemate that this audience paper talks about. It undercuts the extremists who are trying to keep their hold on the moral high ground. Another reason to talk is because we want to bring in, to buy in the mediator. We want to improve our relations with a mediator. And it has been pointed out, talks are most unlikely to take place without the presence of a third party, at least to get the other parties in touch with each other. And finally, we want to talk because we want to split the terrorists. If we can't sow doubts everywhere, maybe we can sow doubts among part of them. So we, not to negotiate is, negotiate is not to encourage a terrorism or extremism were to betray it, but rather to overcome it, a path among others. In rational terms, the bargaining dynamics are simple and straightforward. The state wants the extremists to give up their terrorist means in exchange for what? In sum, for a better chance to get less of what they want by using other lesser means. These terms of trade are scarcely appealing unless a new condition has introduced the impossibility of getting all of what they want by terrorist tactics. This means that the possibility for the extremists of achieving current goals must be convincingly blocked. And also that the possibility of achieving at least something of those goals by alternative means must be convincingly open. Any other terms are of no appeal to the parties. Engagement and negotiation are both about means and ends and about impossibilities and possibilities. Thanks very much to all of our panelists for their comments. I'd like to open the next stage of this by posing a question to each of our panelists and some of these are gonna overlap and I'm just gonna lay these out to all four of them, give them a chance to comment and then we'll go to your questions from the floor. First of all, Audrey Cronin. Audrey, one thing that you addressed in your paper that you didn't have time to get to in your oral comments had to do with how terrorist groups differ or don't differ from other practitioners of political violence such as guerrilla warfare movements. In fact, you cite at one point a formulation that Bill Zartman came up with about articulation, motivation and so on and make the point that terrorist groups tend to be stuck in one stage. And I'd like to ask you to comment a little bit more about to what extent the things you've covered elsewhere in your talk are unique to terrorist groups as opposed to more generally applicable and to challenge you just a bit on your formulation in the paper. I mean, how do you categorize a group like the FLN during the Algerian War for Independence where they resorted to just terrorism after they lost a basically a guerrilla warfare campaign against the French Army. Or perhaps look at the PKK as one that has sort of drifted back and forth between these different forms of political violence. My questions to the other three panelists all overlap a bit because they all have to do with Afghanistan, top a gay at the moment. Peter Bergen, you had quite a long list of unpropitious circumstances starting with Audrey's criteria and then adding some of your own. Am I to conclude from this, although you didn't state it as a conclusion explicitly that basically negotiation is a lost cause in Afghanistan. Or if not, please give us the encouraging side of your observations. If so, then what do you see as the end game there if it's not going to be negotiation? Anthony Juaniz, you sounded a little bit less negative on this than Peter was, am I correct in that? But what I'd like you to comment on is if there is a role for negotiations in the Afghan conflict, what about the structure of them? Are we talking about getting a whole bunch of parties around one big round table? Or are we talking about separate negotiations involving some of these various players? And finally, Bill Zartman, you did not want to talk about rightness, but I'll raise that. And we want to take advantage of your presence on this panel as one of the truly leading experts on international negotiations whose work through the years has developed concepts like rightness that have become common currency among those who have followed in your footsteps. And I'd like you to apply that concept again to Afghanistan and or if we were to apply it, what would be the sorts of things you would look for in particular in evaluating that as a ripe or unripe situation? Audrey? Okay, Paul, you've touched upon one of the most difficult elements of the field as you well know because you're extremely expert in it and have done it for many, many years. So it doesn't surprise me that you found the sort of Achilles heel of what we study. But I think that it's possible to make a kind of a rational distinction between these types of violence, insurgency, guerrilla and terrorism because I see them as being on a kind of a continuum. Terrorism is a type of violence that primarily targets civilians and is usually engaged in by smaller groups but that doesn't mean that insurgencies and guerrilla groups don't engage in terrorism. Guerrilla groups or insurgencies tend to be larger, tend to hold territory at least temporarily, tend to operate as a military unit, tend to have broader support and most importantly are strong enough to attack military targets. So of that continuum of violence, I see terrorism as being the least legitimate and insurgent groups are more legitimate because they tend to have a broader support and territorial control and some sort of broader mobilized popular involvement. Terrorism is a tactic that it doesn't surprise me, it fits very well with my way of looking at it that the FLN after they had lost resorted to engaging in terrorism because they're trying, a lot of times what a terrorist group is trying to do is to mobilize that third part of the trying which would try to gain attention to use symbolic violence when they haven't mobilized in the more traditional ways. So they do overlap but I do think that probably the key most important distinction between them is the type of targeting that they engage in and secondly I would say also extremely important is the degree to which there is legitimacy of the type of violence that it is. If you're a broad based insurgent group, there's more of a popular foundation to what you're doing and whether or not you support the insurgent group or the state, this is a different kind of war than that which a terrorist group engages in. This is one of the reasons why I've argued for many years and obviously have lost the argument that the United States should not be calling al-Qaeda a global insurgency because that type of terminology, well for one thing it implies a kind of a mobilization and also a connection between many of the individual elements that I would dispute in many cases but secondly it's a much more legitimate form of violence. It would be much better to talk about the use of terrorism which is by virtually anyone's definition the act that is not the cause for which it is undertaken but the act itself of targeting individual civilians as a form of symbolic violence is virtually always considered to be highly illegitimate. Thank you. Peter. Thank you, Paul. Of course as negotiations are of course desirable and I'm just posing I guess a little bit of skepticism. We've already had several years of negotiations and back channel between the Afghan government and elements of the Taliban and it's yielded precisely nothing and I think part of the problem is that you're looking at three levels of conflict and already can perhaps how this is a fairly unusual set of conflicts. One is an intra-pastune conflict between essentially rural pastunes and urban pastunes which you can cartoon as the gills eyes versus the Duranis but basically the Karzais are on one side of this and the Taliban on the other. That's the first level of the conflict. The second level of the conflict is you've had various kinds of civil war based on ethnic lines in Afghanistan going back for decades and that is in terms of the spoilers that I left off of this the Northern Alliance again a sort of shorthand would be a very large spoiler for any deal going forward. And finally you've got a regional conflict which has also been going on for years with all sorts of actors, Pakistan, India, Iran, Russia which makes it all the more complicated. So to do a deal in that kind of situation is going to be complex. What kind of deal just to partially answer your question in post-Atlantic? I mean I think Iraq is a very uncertain, the analogy, there are a lot of differences but one of the reasons that we didn't lose in Iraq is that we did multiple hundreds of ceasefires, hundreds of local ceasefires with lots of different groups and that probably is the most promising way forward picking up on something that Anthony said I think rather than a top level deal with Mullah Omar and others. Thank you, Anthony. Let me point out that the Pakistanis have made deals with the Taliban at a field level, at a local level and they've done so with a lack of success. The folks that they negotiated with went back to fighting. In some cases the order that they would establish in the communities they went back to were ones that people found objectionable or otherwise problematic and controversial. They were trying to get Taliban-like order without the fight. So how you do this does matter. At the same time I would say that part of the problem was that they were doing this in the absence of a national level, regional level, strategic, perhaps grand bargain or grand plan. So I would say that there would be not one table but probably several different kinds of tables that would have to happen in some sort of loose simultaneity. At the local level, I think our marines, our army military, ISEF folks will be engaged on a sort of battalion but by battalion sell by sell effort to get people off the field of combat. And those negotiations are important. They don't change the entire conflict landscape. They don't change the political order. They reduce the conflictivity. They reduce the lethality of the conflict. They make it safer for ISEF to operate. They make it safer for Afghan civilians to live and not become enmeshed in the crossfire. There is probably a different sort of negotiation that has to happen with Afghan tribal and civil society. And I'm using those terms sort of synonymously. It seems to me that the tribal level of existence, of life in Afghanistan has become in some ways the sole bearer of legitimate institutions in that country. And to some extent have been co-opted and overrun by people with weapons, by the warlords, by the Taliban, by others. Part of the deal then has to be then getting them to back away entirely from Taliban support, make them an empowered part of the reintegration of people back into some sort of honorable and economically feasible civilian life. All of that has to happen under the umbrella of some sort of a grand bargain. And that grand bargain can look like many things, but I think ideally it would look like the end of the political role of the armed groups who have run Afghanistan for the last few decades, whichever side they come from. So it would probably mean something that's connected to Pakistan's involvement, something connected to the United States, some exit for some top level people, some exile or otherwise for them, but it would mean a new regional order that combines real reconciliation and reintegration with a real different sort of political order in that country, supported by their neighbors. Thank you. Bill? Yeah, I would agree with the continuum, first of all, between various types of conflict and at the extreme terrorism. I don't think we should be squeamish about the definition of terrorism or the use of the term, although apparently we don't have terrorism anymore in this administration when you have extremism and we don't negotiate, we only engage. That's why I called the book Engaging Extremists. I have to be up with the times, I mean, after all. Terrorism is the use of violence against civilian targets for the purpose of influencing official decisions. And that last part means that there is a separate subject for state terrorism, unless somebody wanna bring that up, which is the subject in itself. We were talking about extremist groups using that, those tactics against the state. It is a weapon of desperation. You don't win battles by terrorism, you win minds and will by terrorism. So it's a definable object and all kinds of groups, whether they be freedom fighters or bad guys, have used something that one can dispassionately call terrorism. Since it is a weapon of desperation, if one renounces terrorism, one means that at least one is thrown back into normal violent combat, but since it was a weapon of desperation, that must mean that the people who are so doing had lost their faith in normal violent combat. So it's a bit of a bet to know what happens when one changes the means and what does this mean in the mind of the person or the party that agrees with it. Afghanistan, I don't know anything about Afghanistan. I think that it's important, as Anthony said, to think of separate types of negotiation. If we say there's no negotiation or talking, if we say there's no approach, no engagement, short of the Mullah Omar, then we're getting nowhere by definition, by his definition, and in practices as well. But I think one wants to talk with whatever groups that one can get to engage with. The discussion frequently runs about getting the troops to defect. But I think we also have to think about vertical divisions that is getting people in charge of various geographic sectors to come over to a cooperation of some kind with the government. Question remains too, how co-operable, how co-optable are some of these groups? Is Hekmatyar, whom we've never loved very much over the past couple of decades, co-optable on anything but his own terms, which have never been very acceptable? The question further then would be, are there people under him? Are there lieutenants, not just levels, but subgroups that one can talk with and deal with? It would be dangerous for them, he's not a friendly character, it would be dangerous for them to try to do so, but that may be the path to breaking up that single group notion that I had talked about. What I think, the point that Anthony raises as well is very important, and that is we need, if one gets a deal, some kind one needs to consolidate, one needs to follow through, one needs to not just simply hand off a piece of territory to the other person, but rather to bring them in as well. In other words, the end of negotiation is not the deal, but the follow through, the consolidation. One thing I would disagree with Anthony is at the end of the political role of armed groups that have run Afghanistan in the last couple decades, the dates are wrong. They've run Afghanistan since the 1830s, as the British, and probably before when we weren't as well informed about Afghanistan. It's a tough area to try to look for a deal in. I thought you didn't know anything about Afghanistan. Right, I didn't know anything about Afghanistan. I'm sorry, I didn't answer your question. About rightness. Yes, very quickly we can take it apart if you want to. I think one would look for a stalemate on the ground. That is, there's some parts that the plural they have that we can't get, and there are larger parts, a respectable part that the other side, the government and the military support has. And again, Audrey's point, which is very important, a political stalemate as well. That is the feeling that they are losing ground that is harder for them to hold on to their territory that admittedly they have, even though it's impossible for us to take it. But nonetheless, the wave of sympathy, if you will, is not running in their favor. I thought there might be a glimpse of hope for a hurting stalemate in one of the quotes attributed to General McChrystal in the infamous Rolling Stone article, in which he said, as I recall, the Taliban doesn't have the initiative, but neither do we. But you need something like that from the Taliban side. Correct. So maybe McChrystal is wrong. That's the beginning. Okay, we have about, well, close to a half hour of questions. I see we have two microphones. I'm not clear what the current view of the administration is towards negotiation in Afghanistan. We are getting mixed signals from Neil Holbrook, Clinton, and others. I just wonder if you could maybe clarify this. Peter mentioned back channels are been open for several years. I just wonder if he could elaborate what he thinks is happening just now. Well, before Peter comments, I would just note, your question seems to be of a piece with reporting in the paper this morning about how Ambassador Holbrook was getting treated rather roughly before, I think, it was the Senate Foreign Relations Committee whose members were saying you don't have a strategy, you don't have an approach. But Peter, do you have observation about current administration with respect to the government? I don't really on the current administration because, I mean, but on the question of what kind of negotiations are happening, obviously the negotiation at the end of the day has to be with the Afghan government, and the people that have attended these negotiations in Mecca have basically been people that have gone through Guantanamo who have otherwise become part of the Afghan political process. They are widely regarded as people who can't deliver the Taliban and the Taliban keep saying that. So of course you wanna be talking and talking is not surrendering. But the people who are doing the talking right now are not really empowered to make any deals. I think just one further comment about the current administration posture, and obviously I don't speak for them, but I think the, if we had an administration spokesman, that person would find a way of saying we are flexible and we are, as you know, looking ahead toward another policy review toward the end of this year, at which point probably there'll be more presidential decisions about what happens in 2011 with regard not only to the military side, but the diplomatic side. So I think your question reflects probably decisions not yet made. First person over here, please. Good afternoon. I'm Mr. Lloyd from the University of Maryland. We are talking today about terrorists and discovery issues about insurgency and terrorism. Our speakers tried to delineate what is insurgency and what is terrorism. But in my mind, I think there's really no big difference between the two of this. We have, let me say, samples of countries which insurgency and terrorism go hand in hand. After World War II, the Communist Party of the Philippines already existed. And to this day, it is one of the longest insurgent movement in Asia, and still there is no, seems to be solution in sight. And at the same time, we have the Muslim Rebellion Movement in the South, like Islamic Liberation Front and the National Muslim, Moral National Liberation Front, all of this. And it seems that all solutions trying to dissuade and to convince rebels to get into the mainstream government system is not working. And the Philippines is really different from the case of Afghanistan or Iraq or Iran, whatever it may be. The Philippines is a former US colony. The Philippines has all the institutions of the United States, democracy-wise, civil service, military, everything. Now, as experts in terrorism and insurgency, do you still think there's a solution to solve all of this, given these long years of insurgency and all the talks never really work at all, even incorporating them into the constitution, giving them autonomous region in the South? And to this day, it's still getting stronger and stronger with all the aid and assistance given by the government. It still is not working. So I'm asking as experts, do you think there's a solution to this? Thank you. Okay, I don't think any of us up here have a claim to expertise on conflict within the Philippines specifically, but I invite anyone on the panel to apply some of your general framework and Audrey, certainly, you got into this somewhat in your response to my question that might be applicable to Philippine Anthony. Oh, I would just say at the outset that insurgency and terrorism are not the same thing by any definitional, I would say that insurgents can use terrorism. Terrorists may occasionally become insurgents. Both can become sort of conventional forces and target only other belligerents. So there is a big mix and it's always a mistake to try to lump everything together that needs to be synthetically taken apart, I think. Analytically taken apart. And I might add, just pretending for a moment to be an expert on the Southern Philippines. You were lumping things together, but you mentioned a couple of the groups. You got the MILF, the MNLF, and then the Abu Sayyaf group, which is the one, I think, of most direct concern to terrorism experts, and I'm sure you would agree that those are very different fish, even though they're swimming in the same kettle. Over here. The U.S. has a policy of not negotiating with the... Could you identify yourself, please? Oh, my name is Amir. I'm from American University, the same program that Professor Winnie teaches. I just finished this summer, so. Finished yet? No, we'll talk, we'll talk. I think he has to answer the question. I'm not finished yet, okay, I'm not finished. So the U.S. has a policy of not negotiating with terrorists, but they supplied, they supported the militias in Somalia to overthrow the Islamic government, Islamic courts in 2006. The same case in Afghanistan. Taliban has killed American soldiers. They have targeted American interests. They're not popular with their community. And yet the U.S. has had some shift of granting them amnesties if they're willing to renounce violence and recognize certain things. In the case of Hamas, they're not targeting U.S. soldiers. They're not targeting U.S. interests. They're very popular with their community. They were voted by the majority in 2005, and they're willing to renounce violence and recognize the state of Israel if they recognize them and give them a just state. So I see more pluses than minuses in comparison to the U.S. policies. My question is, how does the U.S. define what a terrorist group is? And after they define it, how do they define their exceptions to negotiate with them? Okay, I'm glad you raised one of the Middle Eastern issues. I was gonna steer the discussion to that if no one else did. I'll give you my short take on this and then invite my co-panelists on this. On something like U.S. posture toward Hamas or related issues with regard to the territories, I think it would be futile to try to understand or explain U.S. policy in terms of abstract definitions about who's a terrorist or who isn't. We're talking about much different political pressures and considerations that are involved here, which we could go into if you wanna go in that direction. But with that preface, does any of my fellow panelists wanna comment on that? I would draw your attention to Paul Piller's book on the evolution of U.S. policy with respect to terrorism came out in what, 1999? 2001. 2001, but before September 11th. It's an excellent book. It talks all about the many different definitions of terrorism that exists within our government. There's not one unified, agreed upon definition. Elements are agreed upon, but there are slightly differences between different elements of the American government. And I would simply strongly urge you to read Paul's book. Yeah, I wouldn't quite agree with that last formulation. You mean the plug for my book. How shall I put it now to get out of that? Go ahead. The plug for the book is good. Definitions come in square boxes. Events don't come in square boxes. So we try to base our policy on concepts and definitions and the number of different elements that go into policy making in each case. Each case is not exactly sui generis. I think you can make analytically distinctions. There are concepts and so on that one has to recognize that there's a gap between the intellectual label and what happens on the ground. Cases are individual and have to be judged on the basis of the ingredients that go in. That said, I don't know why we are not talking to Hamas at some level, and I certainly hope would expect that we are, although at an unavailable level. And I would just add I concur with that and it's gonna have to be avowed at some point in my judgment. Next question over here. My name is Robert DeBohem, a security advisor. Thank you all for coming. I really appreciate the discussion today. I think as a caveat, one reason we avoid the definition of terrorism so closely is because we keep approaching it ourselves. I'm a retired service member and I know that American policy keeps dancing around the edges of doing violence. I mean Hiroshima is a terrific example of violence against civilians. We can't afford to embrace that definition because it qualifies us as terrorists. The question is for Peter. I loved your comment about we haven't lost an Iraq or we didn't lose an Iraq because of the hundreds of ceasefires, small ceasefires. It's a better approach than trying to deal with the Mullah Omar or somebody like Azarkawi. Do you think that we have a huge option here? And I'm biased. I think we have a huge option here from bottom up approaching to dealing with the whole thing. I don't think that our administration or our approach is reaching enough folks. We can touch a lot more people across the board, NGOs all over the region and we can deal with more than just principle to principle in the policy making it. Do you think we have an untapped opportunity? The short answer is yes. I mean that's what's in the process of happening and that's what makes sense. I mean most Taliban fighters are fighting a few miles from where they grew up. It's a very localized phenomenon. So even more than Iraq, I think that's probably the promising way forward. Let's move on over here. Yeah, good afternoon. My craft counterterrorism writer and former official in the State Department counterterrorism office in view of some of the questions I'm gonna have to change mine a little bit. Just for the record, the State Department does have a clear definition in defining terrorism. It's primarily, as I recall, written into law violence by non-state actors perpetuated against civilians, primarily for a political purposes. And Hamas and others were put on the terrorism list after a long detailed administrative record that had to be written to stand up in courts. I know I was involved in drafting original law and fighting with the Justice Department in terms of writing what amounted to legal briefs. But this raises the question and Audrey, maybe you got into this in your book, which I haven't read yet. But in differentiating negotiations between groups that are mainly territorial, such as maybe the Basques and the PKK and others, and the more recent ideological groups like Al Qaeda and even Hamas and Hisbola, who in many ways have a broad ideological agenda, and I think the question comes up, how can you really satisfy their hands of an involved instruction of entire state or in the case of Al Qaeda, restoring the mythical Khalif? And at this point, I disagree respectfully with Professor Dartmouth. I don't think terrorism is a weapon of desperation for people whose main goal seems to be the revenge or restoring your honor or killing the other. I mean, it may be true of the territorial groups like the PKK, but I don't think so much of the ideological groups and you also ignore the psychological factor. But anyway, Audrey mentioned a key element, the triangle, the outside audience. So how would a government negotiate with a group such as Hamas without giving them more standing incentive because it seems to me that if, and I think you're right, the group is more likely to negotiate if they think their position is weakening, but when people do things like Fotillas or Iran supplying missiles and rockets to Hisbola, these groups will think they're under ascendancy, so these so-called peace movements may be counterproductive to trying to get negotiations going. And finally, the thing you didn't mention is the very difficult issue of negotiations when there's hostages involved. It's true, the State Department government has said they don't negotiate, and it's been modified, and I can give you a list of the changes I put together for a book. It sort of evolved to, we'll talk, but without giving terrorists tangible gains from it. So it's a very tricky area. Thank you. Well, okay. I think we know each other, actually. When I was working at CRS, I used to call you all the time, so nice to actually see you. And I have great respect for your questions and your expertise. Let me just say that I'm not implying that there's no definition, and I didn't mean to imply that in the answer to the question about US policy, only that there are slight differences of emphasis between different agencies. That doesn't mean that the State Department definition is incorrect. I just think it's fascinating because there is a certain degree of shades of difference. And then on the question of negotiable terms, that is much more discussed and sort of carefully analyzed in the book. I didn't really go into that here, but obviously the group that is engaged in negotiations has to have some sort of tangible negotiable terms. And if you look back through over all the many case studies logically enough, those groups that have had some connection to territory or some interest in controlling territory have had more success in terms of achieving some sort of negotiable outcome as have the states with which they're engaged. So when you're talking about these broader ideological questions, one of the key points that you have to determine right away is whether the terms that the group is trying to pursue are in any way realistic in the real world. I mean, it's almost like a tautology. You can't resolve a difference of opinion unless there is some point on which you can resolve it. And so it is true that highly ideological groups that are oriented toward broad, vague ideas that would overturn the entire international system have virtually never been successfully negotiated with. Let's go back here. Thank you. I'm Kay Gnane with the Charity and Security Network. In late June, the Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of applying the prohibitions on material support of terrorism to US civil society groups that wanted to do training, provide advice and assistance towards conflict negotiation or mediation services. So whether you agree or disagree with the court's finding that they're holding that that could be the policy but not that it must be the policy. So my question is, what is, in your opinion, the smart policy to have for US civil society organizations to be able to act as those third parties or to be able to engage in training and advice and assistance to violent actors to try to bring them to the negotiation table? Anybody want to address that? I don't have the, I haven't read the, except the news reports about this. So I don't have all of the reasoning and exactly what the judgment covered. But as I read about it in the newspaper, it's mindless. It's terribly important to be able to talk with people on the part of NGOs. And sometimes it's even necessary to train a extremist groups about how to negotiate. In Mozambique, Renamo didn't know what its aims were, didn't know how to talk to people and needed some kind of training even by those who were friendly with the state, the state's position to get the Renamo to know how to state its position and negotiate. And we finally got an agreement out of it. And there are a number of other experiences like that. So I hope that NGOs at least can continue their activities. There's no question that for organizations like yours that court decision puts you in an awful bind. I mean, I think the ultimate fix is there will need to be legislation to amend the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penal Act of 1996, which is what laid out the material support provisions and reword it in an amendment to make it clear it is not to be construed as criminalizing the sort of dialogue with a group that is aimed at trying to persuade that group into peaceful channels as opposed to violent ones. It clearly is an unfortunate counterproductive effect of the law, whether from a strictly legal point of view and I'm not a lawyer, the court decision made legal sense. I think we need new legislation to fix that. Thank you. Chick Donbach with the Alliance for Peace Building. Kay asked the question that I originally came up to ask but we agreed that she would ask that one and I'll ask the follow-up. Obviously involved with civil society, the NGO community, you've already indicated some of the value of being able to talk with terrorist organizations. Just appreciate if you comment just a little bit more on the difference between official government talking with terrorist organizations and the special role that civil society NGOs can play because there's a very different framework and a different dynamic to that and I would appreciate your comments on that. Anyone? I would say that on one hand, talking as intelligence agents might do, making contact for gaining information and so on, even by US government officials. It's still something that's important to learn more about what the other side is after but that said, for the most part, many of the things, some of the advantages that I mentioned, opening up their way of thinking, getting information, that kind of thing are best done and probably first done by NGOs. There is this fine line and we don't like to think of spooks but thank goodness in many cases for there being there, fine line where the government gets itself in, would get itself engaged more than it wants to if it undertook those activities and as we know now, a track tour or whatever you wanna call it has a very important role to play. Anyone else on that? I'd only add that we're speaking on a kind of a shorthand that's not really completely reflective of what negotiations entail. I mean, there are always different types of levels of negotiation or talks or contact and all of those have their uses and I think are potentially very helpful. I might add just a little thing to that, that civil society and NGO work with belligerence is extremely important. Traditionally, I think on the track two side, it's been with supporters of the other group, perhaps or civilian sectors on the other side but increasingly it's become that the NGOs set the table, they act as intermediaries, they play a number of roles that they have not traditionally been given responsibility for and it's important to, I think, make space for all of those different things especially when they are filling a vacuum that the parties themselves cannot do on their own. Okay, let's get a question on this side. Hi, Aaron Schein, UMass Amherst. Just with respect to Professor Cronin's caveat that a diffuse group is harder to negotiate with, I was wondering if I could field the opinions on the drone campaign in Pakistan which is a decapitation technique for terrorists and I guess has also a very high civilian death toll. I think the conservative estimate is 50 to one. The latter issue I think goes beyond the scope of this discussion, especially since we've only got about five minutes left but my observation as it pertains to the question of do you have somebody to negotiate with is I think most of the targets we're talking about there are part of especially hardcore al-Qaeda central with which the prospects for negotiating for the reasons that Audre lays out in her paper are virtually nil or there's nothing to be gained. There is nothing, there is not a negotiable objective there so I don't really think it spoils anything as far as negotiating opportunities are concerned. I don't know if anyone would disagree with that. This may be our last question over here. Hi, I'm Benedict Teegard and I'm with the Stimson Center here in Washington. We talked a lot today about the way in which the politics between the two parties are important and also about how military fighting keeps going but I was wondering if briefly even though we could probably stay here all day and talk about it, how economics might affect these negotiations both in terms of terrorist or insurgent organizations which use terrorist tactics can be part of war economies and also just about their funding in general and the way in which these groups support themselves either through illicit means or through any sort of funding they can gather, how that affects the negotiations and what a state can do where international actors can do on the economic side which would also be part of setting the table. Thanks. Audre, thank you. That's a really broad question. I mean I could talk about that for another hour you were right. Economics, they're extremely important everything from the question of terrorist financing which has been very heavily emphasized ever since September 11th and cutting off resources to an individual group for using violence to broader situations where states have increased the local sort of viability of local communities for example as happened in Northern Ireland with a tremendous influx of funding and financial support from the UK government. Economics can play lots of different roles when it comes to priming groups for negotiations or more importantly I think providing an incentive for the popular support that may or may not be in favor of the talks to be interested in getting beyond the violence. So those are just a few points that occur to me. It's an extremely broad and important issue. Join me in thanking our panel and thank you all for coming out.