A War on Terror Over

Terrorism ending not with a bang, but a whimper:

The Irish Republican Army has begun reducing its membership and shut down key units responsible for weapons-making, arms smuggling and training, an expert panel reported Wednesday in findings designed to spur a revival of Catholic-Protestant cooperation in Northern Ireland.

The British and Irish governments warmly welcomed the 60-page assessment of the Independent Monitoring Commission, a four-man panel that includes former directors of the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency and the anti-terrorist unit of Scotland Yard.

The assessment reported that the IRA — which last year declared a formal end to its campaign to overthrow Northern Ireland by force and handed its weapons stockpiles to disarmament chiefs — had recently shut down three command units and "run down its terrorist capability.''
The report said the IRA has disbanded military structures, including the departments responsible for weapons procurement, engineering and training, and it had cut back rank-and-file members and stopped payments to them, the report said.

"We do not believe that PIRA is now engaged in terrorism," it added, using the group's full formal name of Provisional IRA. "We do not believe that PIRA is undertaking terrorist-type training. We do not believe that PIRA has been recruiting. ... The leadership is seeking to reduce the size of the organization. We have no evidence of targeting, procurement or engineering activity.''

The commission said the leadership of the IRA does not consider a return to terrorism as in any way a viable option and it continues to direct its members not to engage in criminal activity.

The Provisional IRA, (PIRA or "Provos") first emerged in 1969 to end Northern Ireland's status within the United Kingdom and force a united socialist Irish state through terrorist attacks. "The Troubles" lasted from the late 1960s until the late 1990s.

After 30 years of war, and an occasionally broken cease-fire measured in years, the Provos turned in their weaponry—thousands of small arms, grenades, some heavy machine guns and even surface-to-air missiles—in 2005. A year later, comand and control elements are slowly dismantling and recruitment has stopped.

The Provos called it the "Long War," and convincing arguments can be made that this was a sectarian conflict, or even a civil war.

The PIRA and other nationalist groups were only willing to negotiate a political settlement once they determined after decades of low-intensity warfare that loyalists and the British Army were not leaving. They finally accepted the inevitable, that they could not beat an indigenous government supported by its own military and police forces and strong external interests acting on the government's behalf.

Somehow, this all seems vaguely reassuring.