PARIS, September 28, 2005 (IslamOnline.net & News Agencies) – The talk with Al-Qaeda and extremists is no longer a taboo subject in the United States with academics setting the change in tone, experts said on Wednesday, September 28.

“The evolution is doubtless the result of a worsening of the situation in Iraq and Afghanistan. The lessons of the attacks in London have also been learnt: the threat (of terrorism) can resist the formidable security deployment,” Francois Burgat, a leading expert on the Arab world at France's national research institute (CNRS), told Agence France-Presse (AFP).

He said the change in tone was “the start of a critical reassessment of the logic of the whole security policy.”

Burgat was commenting on a controversial Boston Globe article by Harvard University professor and prominent expert on Al-Qaeda Mohammad-Mahmoud Ould Mohamedou under the title “Time to Talk to Al Qaeda?”

“With the conflict viewed largely as an open-and-shut matter of good versus evil, nonmilitary engagement with Al Qaeda is depicted as improper and unnecessary,” wrote Mohamedou in the September 14 article.

“Yet developing a strategy for the next phase of the global response to Al Qaeda requires understanding the enemy -- something Western analysts have systematically failed to do.”

Allen Zerkin, an expert in responses to disasters at New York University, said that governments would have to seek a truce with Al-Qaeda sooner or later, seeing eye to eye with Mohamedou that neither side can win the war.

“To be sure, the terrorists can't win this war, but neither can we,” he told AFP.

Derided by critics as an apologist for Al-Qaeda, Mohamedou said neither side can defeat the other.

“The United States will not be able to overpower a diffuse, ever-mutating, organized international militancy movement, whose struggle enjoys the rear-guard sympathy of large numbers of Muslims. Likewise, Al-Qaeda can score tactical victories on the United States and its allies, but it cannot rout the world's sole superpower,” he wrote.

“No longer able to enjoy a centralized sanctuary in Afghanistan after 2002, Al- Qaeda's leadership opted for an elastic defense strategy relying on mobile forces, scaled-up international operations, and expanded global tactical relationships. It encouraged the proliferation of mini Al-Qaedas, able to act on their own within a regional context.”

A research by Robert Pape at Chicago University has also challenged the commonly held belief that the motivations for terrorism are religious fanaticism, AFP said.

Pape said he was “surprised” to discover from the study of 463 suicide bombings that “what over 95 percent of all suicide attacks around the world since 1980 until today have in common is not religion, but a clear, strategic objective: to compel a modern democracy to withdraw military forces from the territory that the terrorists view as their homeland.”

In his article, Mohamedou also cited the analysis of the former head of the “Bin Laden unit” at the CIA, Michael Scheuer, who is now a fierce critic of the Bush administration and its “War on Terror” policy.

During a recent speech at the US Army War College, Scheuer said that both militant and non-militant Muslims hated the United States “for what we do in the Islamic world, not for our democratic beliefs and civil liberties.”

One of the four would-be London bombers told investigators they were motivated by the Iraq war and not by religious fervor, denying any link to Al-Qaeda network.

In an obvious retreat from his earlier stance, British Prime Minister Tony Blair recently acknowledged that the Iraq war was being used to recruit terrorists.

The London-based Royal Institute of International Affairs, known as Chatham House, further said the Iraq war has given a momentum to Al-Qaeda's recruitment and fundraising and made Britain more vulnerable to terrorist attacks.