So Much Process, So Little Peace: Lessons for the opponents of terrorists.

Since 9/11, the West has waged a robust war on terrorism. One failed state that sheltered international terrorists, Afghanistan, was invaded and is currently being pacified. One rogue state that assisted terrorism (most notoriously by subsidizing Palestinian suicide bombers), Iraq, has been liberated and is now being reconstructed. And within the United States the government has adopted a firm stress on national security that has even included detaining people suspected of involvement in terrorism for immigration violations that might otherwise have been ignored or lightly punished.

While authorities rightly caution that the terrorists may still succeed in striking the occasional dramatic blow, perhaps killing or maiming thousands of innocent people, al-Qaeda looks weakened and in retreat -- and this has led to a significant change in official Western attitudes to terrorism. Until now, the assumptions guiding Western policy in terrorist conflicts from Israel to Northern Ireland have been the liberal ones that terrorism is ineradicable, there is no military solution to it, negotiations with terrorist groups are therefore necessary, and ultimately political concessions to them will prove unavoidable. These assumptions led in turn to the popularity of the so- called "peace process" as an alternative to what were assumed to be endless anti-terrorist military campaigns. The Oslo accords, the Good Friday Agreement, and now the Mideast "road map" are all examples of the peace process. They are rooted in the assumption -- not in itself unreasonable -- that complex and intractable problems such as the Mideast conflict cannot be solved in a single bound: Each disputed item has to be separately negotiated, with the most difficult one left for last. This gives negotiators an incentive not to discard all their previous agreements when they finally reach the crucial issue.

Another incentive is that while negotiations are being held, and later while any step-by-step deal is being implemented, both sides will call a cease-fire. Terrorism then stops, and a temporary nervous peace ensues. Peace is therefore the process of negotiations as much as the final settlement. Or so the theory goes. And a great deal of political capital has been invested in this theory by Britain's Tony Blair, by the Israeli Labor party, by Israeli prime minister Ariel Sharon and President George Bush more recently, and by many others. Even though the other option -- the military solution -- seems to be getting rid of global terrorism, the "peace process" remains the favored remedy for the Ulster and Palestinian problems.

But just how successful have these various peace processes been? Have they actually culminated in peace? Or have they merely increased the standing and respectability of the terrorists? Or -- a third possibility -- have they made some important gains while failing overall? Given that the Mideast road map is still in its earliest stages, the best answers to these questions are to be found in Oslo and the Good Friday Agreement. In both cases the results have fallen well short of success.

The deal Oslo held out to Israel was that Yasser Arafat would halt or repress terrorism and end the first intifada in return for Israel's acceptance of a Palestinian Authority. For seven years, though, Israel delivered on its side of the bargain -- and terrorism steadily intensified. Arafat sometimes claimed to be unable to halt the terrorism and occasionally imprisoned Hamas terrorists. But the Hamas imprisonments were a revolving door; Arafat's own groups were plainly involved in terrorism under the second intifada; and the PA encouraged insane hatred of Israel through its controlled mass media. Neither the Israeli government nor the U.S. penalized Arafat for these breaches. Oslo collapsed only in 2000, when Arafat rejected the largest concessions ever offered by an Israeli government and was welcomed home by Palestinian crowds. This confirmed all the criticisms of Oslo advanced by Israeli right-wingers; whereupon the Israeli electorate voted in Likud's Ariel Sharon in a landslide.

In Northern Ireland, Sinn Fein-IRA agreed to end violence in return for the establishment of all-Ireland institutions, entry into a devolved power-sharing Northern Ireland government, and various other reforms including the release of convicted terrorists. All of the promised reforms have been delivered by the British and Unionist side. Sinn Fein meanwhile has maintained a cease-fire against the British Army and the Protestant community, but has conducted a brutal campaign of repressive violence, including murder and maiming, against dissident Catholics and petty criminals. Above all, the IRA has steadfastly refused to disarm completely or to declare that its war for a united Ireland is over. Alone among the political parties in Northern Ireland, it maintains an armory of weapons.

Two months ago President Bush ran up against this reality when he arrived in Northern Ireland to celebrate the peace process as a possible model for the Middle East. He had been lured to the province by a half-promise from the London and Dublin governments that the IRA was going to disarm and to announce that its war for a united Ireland had been abandoned. Then something happened -- namely, nothing. The IRA still could not bring itself to disarm and pledge peace. This confirmed the criticisms of Unionist opponents of the Good Friday Agreement; whereupon the British government canceled the Northern Ireland elections, in order to prevent these opponents from winning an Israeli- type landslide.

Disappointing though these two case studies may be, they offer some practical lessons:

One. No agreement should be made with opponents who are ambiguous on the key point of whether they can and will halt terrorism. Arafat claims that he cannot control terrorist groups; Sinn Fein promised only to try to persuade the IRA to halt violence. These were legalistic fictions. Any future peace process must establish with absolute clarity that the insurgent side will both halt its own terrorism and assist the lawful repression of terrorism mounted by others. Or the deal is off.

Two. Elites must not become so committed to safeguarding the peace process that they ignore violations of it. Otherwise, the violations will mount until the voters conclude that the process is essentially a deception and reject it altogether.

Three. Concessions that have been made in return for an end to violence should be withdrawn if the violence continues. Otherwise, as the Israelis found, terrorism will actually increase in step with the government's concessions -- because terrorists will interpret such concessions not as one element in a reciprocal deal but as a sign of moral and psychological weakness. Nor will they be wrong.

Four. Governments that embark on a peace process must have -- and tell people they have -- a Plan B in case the process fails. The constant recital by British ministers of the line "there is no Plan B" merely let Sinn Fein-IRA know that they could ratchet up their demands indefinitely with no fear that the Blair government might walk away from the table. How could it do so? It had no Plan B. Israel's doves were similarly handicapped.

Five. That Plan B must almost certainly include administrative detention without due process of law. If armed terrorist gangs murder people for political objectives -- and if the peace process fails to persuade them to stop doing so -- then the government has to protect citizens. Experience suggests that it cannot do so within the legal and constitutional rules of liberal democracy. Britain sought to defeat a ruthless terrorist insurgency within these rules for many years, but that attempt failed. Worse than that, as an official report recently revealed, the frustrations of fighting an unwinnable war against a ruthless terrorist enemy tempted some British soldiers into fighting a "dirty war" of their own in which people also got murdered. Those who were thus killed were a handful compared to the hecatombs killed by the IRA -- but a single official murder is one too many. Israel's targeted assassinations of PA figures it suspects of terrorist involvement are a very similar phenomenon, and similarly hard to defend.

These lessons can be distilled into one -- the rejection of the sad slogan, "The peace process must continue, no matter how many people get killed."