Does Jonathan Powell really want to negotiate with the Islamic State?

I think I’ve finally worked out the time-honoured Jonathan Powell formula for promoting a new book: take which-ever group constitutes the most bloodthirsty terrorist organisation of the day — in this case IS, the warped Islamist force currently enslaving and beheading its way across Iraq and Syria — and create a media fizz by boldly declaring that sooner or later we’re going to have to negotiate with them.

Powell’s predicted circumstances in which the ‘talking’ to IS should actually happen, however, are hedged with unrealised conditions. At other moments he will daringly hint that talking is best without any preconditions at all. During the Northern Ireland peace process, one of the approaches beloved by the British government was that of ‘creative ambiguity’, in which mutually contradictory positions could be held simultaneously. In Mr Powell it appears to have become a habit.

Following his argument is a bit like riding a rodeo bull: you can only hang in there for so long. In a recent Guardian article, headlined ‘How to talk to terrorists’, he noted that: ‘We usually delay talking to armed groups too long, and as a result a large number of people die unnecessarily.’ (So talk sooner?) Yet at the same time, on IS, ‘We need to work out a longer-term strategy for dealing with whatever threat they pose, rather than opting once again for a kneejerk response to satisfy opinion polls. That strategy will certainly include security measures: if the terrorists feel they have a chance of winning, they will just carry on fighting.’ (So hit hard, talk later?) But then again: ‘If people sit around waiting for a conflict to be ripe for talks to start, or for the forces of history to solve it for them, then it will never be resolved.’ (So talk any time — and fetch me a couple of paracetamol, will you?)

The one solid thing we can reliably do, it seems, is to ‘learn from the experience of others’ and call in the expertise in this field of Jonathan Powell, who is now chief executive of the charity Inter Mediate, which works on armed conflicts.