Top Blair aide: we must talk to al-Qaida

Tony Blair's most influential aide and adviser has said that Britain and the US must talk to al Qaeda if they are to have any chance of ending the war on terror.

Jonathan Powell, who served as Blair's chief of staff from 1995 to 2007 and is widely regarded as having been instrumental in negotiating a settlement in Northern Ireland, said his experience in the province convinced him that it was essential to keep a line of communication open even with one's most bitter enemies. Powell said: "There's nothing to say to al-Qaida and they've got nothing to say to us at the moment, but at some stage you're going to have to come to a political solution as well as a security solution. And that means you need the ability to talk."

I can hear the outrage of the "war of civilisations" crowd already. The people who have convinced themselves that al Qaeda want to establish Sharia law over the entire planet. They see this as nothing other than a fight to the death for our very survival.

In truth, however, al Qaeda are a political group and have political aims. All of which Bush and others have been at pains to obscure.

Bin Laden has so far made two demands. That the US should remove it's troops from Saudi Arabia - which has already happened - and that a Palestinian state should be formed, which Bush has called for, but which I seriously doubt he has the will or resolve to see through to it's completion. We'll have to wait for the next US president to have any hope of seeing that materialise.

But it's interesting that someone so well placed in the Blair government should even be making this call, as al Qaeda have, until now, been portrayed as beyond the pale, beyond civilised discourse, certainly beyond negotiating with.

And now Jonathan Powell - of all bloody people - is telling us that this "epic clash of civilisations" can be sorted by political means.

He also states, which I have long called for, that the US and UK should be talking to Hamas.

"It's very difficult for democratic governments to do - talk to a terrorist movement that's killing your people," he said. "[But] if I was in government now I would want to have been talking to Hamas, I would be wanting to communicate with the Taliban; and I would want to find a channel to al-Qaida."

Powell's remarks will be highly controversial, as all western governments have insisted any contact with al-Qaida would be immoral and pointless. A spokesman for the Foreign Office said last night: "It is inconceivable that HMG would ever seek to reach a mutually acceptable accommodation with a terrorist organisation like al-Qaida."

I fully understand the position of HMG, however, unless this is a fight to the absolute death; and - as they recruit faster than we appear able to kill them - we have to accept that such a fight would, by it's very nature, be never ending; one would have to concede that perhaps Powell has a point.

Powell, whose book, Great Hatred, Little Room, will be serialised exclusively in the Guardian from Monday, conceded that the idea of talking to al-Qaida and the Taliban was fraught with practical problems: "Who do you talk to? And what do you actually have to talk about?"

But he's a brave man to even acknowledge that there is room for talks.

One of the things I always admired about John Major's government was that he was brave enough to open a secret back channel to the IRA at a time when, had this back channel become public, it would have destroyed the credibility of his entire government.

Blair, rightly, takes much of the praise for achieving peace in Northern Ireland, but Major was the man who had the vision and the courage to take the first step towards ending decades of brutal madness.

And I am sure there will be many who will seek to dismiss Powell's call as immoral and cowardly, but I think there is a certain courage in what he is doing, even if the solutions he is calling for are years from any form of practicality.

He is introducing the notion that there is another way around this madness. For that alone his courage deserves to be recognised.

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Tags: Jonathan Powell, al Qaeda, war on terror, Bush, Blair, clash of civilisations, Hamas