Sooner or later we may need to ‘think the unthinkable’ and talk to Al Qaida, according to senior UK police officer Sir Hugh Orde, who cites the IRA precedent.

Meanwhile Al Qaida is said to be in retreat, according to the head of the CIA:

But now, Mr Hayden said, al-Qaeda was losing the battle for hearts and minds in the Islamic world. He said there was a growing public resentment toward jihadism, and described the insurgency in Iraq as "more and more a war of al-Qaeda against Iraqis".

I don’t like the analogy between talking to the IRA and talking to Al Qaida. The IRA had a motley assortment of essentially rationalist lumpen-Marxist nationalistic aims which in outcome terms (ie a new union of some sort between Northern Ireland and Eire) were not in themselves philosphically objectionable, even if terrorist killings were used to pursue those aims.

The aims of Al Qaida are – by our standards – utterly philosophically objectionable.

The mass forced subjugation of women. Widepread Islamic rule via a ‘caliphate’. A new ‘final solution’ for Israel. And above all no vision whatsoever for a modern society that actually works:

… the conception of world order promoted by Bin Laden and other Islamic fundamentalists suffers from a fatal flaw that no thinker has been able to overcome. Islamic fundamentalists have been very good at highlighting and analyzing the weakness, backwardness, and problems afflicting current Islamic societies. They have also been good at proposing their own solutions–but very bad at the details. They have no Islamic model to hold up as appropriate for this day and age.

The Islamic Republic of Iran cannot be a model, because it is a Shia state, whose trajectory has been very different from those of its Arab neighbors. Moreover, the Ayatollah Khomeini’s central political idea, the rule of the religious jurisprudent, constituted an innovation even in Shia thought, and it has been under constant challenge since his death in 1989.

Sudan is not a model either. It is a poor country, whose Islamic political system has not been able to withstand the tensions between the army, under President Omar al Bashir, and the Islamists, under the suave, Sorbonne-educated Hasan al-Turabi.

Usama Bin Laden and his followers, and many other Islamic fundamentalists as well, can cause disorder and conflict with and among the West and its allies in the Islamic world; indeed, they can widen the chasm between the two sides. But it is not likely that they will be able to implement an alternative order that can constitute a successful challenge.

So, question.

What might we actually talk to Al Qaida about?

A haggle over how to split the difference between the world of C21 and the world of C14? Do a deal on which corrupt Arab regimes to topple so as to spread purer and even less competent Islamic rule?

Negotiate whose ships will transport all Israelis somewhere else? Al Qaida’s plans for dealing with the money supply and carbon offset? New techniques for executing homsexuals?

In the Irish context Sir Hugh opines about extremist republicans:

"A cornered animal lashes out, and these people are cornered. They are not wanted by their community, they’ve got nowhere to go."

Why not work together to corner Al Qaida? And hope the Americans come to blow up that corner?

If those in the corner then squeal quickly that they surrender, maybe then comes the time to talk to them – about that unconditional surrender, and that alone?

Update: If someone hits you really hard, do you negotiate or ‘talk’? Or hit him back, even harder, to catch his attention?  Going quite well so far?