Old Friends?
| 12:20 UK time, Tuesday, 5 September 2006
While I was away (in a valley on the border of England and Wales with absolutely NO mobile phone coverage, fancy that!) I was reading a book I picked up in a remainder sale that has proved to be well worth the couple of pounds I paid for it.
It's called 'Secret Soldiers' by Peter Harclerode. He's a former soldier, now military historian, and so there is a lot of detail about exactly which kind of Heckler & Koch handgun various countries' special forces are using.
But Peter also applies his eye for detail to the chronology of extremist violence in the run up to September 11th 2001.
He catalogues all the reported links between the different groups and their militant attacks.
He gives exhaustive descriptions of terrorism outrages and the groups who claimed responsibility for them, from the UK to Japan through Europe and the Middle East. And he shows the way the groups worked together, sharing expertise, equipment and even personnel.
Alleged links between the Provisional IRA and Palestinian militants are part of the pattern he describes - in that case, according to police and intelligence reports at the time, often through Libya and Col. Gadaffi.
If those links, operational or just symbolic, are now to be used to support a peace process in the Middle East, as Sinn Fein's Gerry Adams suggests, that would add another, more uplifting chapter to the history of irregular warfare.
But Peter Harclerode's book also shows what has happened in the past to militant groups that move away from violence towards conventional politics.
History shows that generally there is another even more militant group which attempts to derail the peace talks.
Will another group emerge to attack Hamas, if it pursues negotiations, just as in the 1990s Hamas attacked PLO politicians and launched suicide bombings inside Israel in opposition to the deals made in Oslo and Cairo?
We can hope the answer is no.
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