No one in this country wanted Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl of Hailey, Idaho, to suffer another day as a prisoner in Afghanistan, another place where we decided to fight somebody else’s civil war so George W. Bush could look tough in the shadow of Sept. 11.
And no reasonable person thinks that the intention to free Bergdahl from captivity, no matter how he was captured originally, was anything less than an honorable one, from the President or his defense secretary. Always ask yourself what you would think if it were your child.
Bergdahl was held five years by the Taliban. Now he has been handed over by them to our Special Forces so he can finally come home from Afghanistan before most of our troops do. So at least in Afghanistan, President Obama did what he said he was going to do with foreign policy.
Or actually seemed to have done.
But as honorable as the President’s intentions are in this matter, as humane as they are, there is no question that he changes the rules of engagement on dealing with groups such as the Taliban, which means the idea that our country no longer negotiates with terrorists has been folded up into a paper airplane with this trade for Bergdahl, who wandered away from his base in Paktika province five years ago and doesn’t come back until now.
Department of Defense Mullah Norullah Noori
Department of Defense Mohammed Nabi
Department of Defense Abdul Haq Wasiq
Department of Defense Khairullah Khairkhwa
Department of Defense Mohammad Fazl
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To get one of our guys back, five very bad guys are released from Guantanamo. All of them are senior Taliban. All are labeled highly dangerous. One of them is a murderous thug named Mohammad Fazl, who was an associate of Mullah Mohammed Omar, the supreme Taliban commander. Fazl was wanted as a potential war criminal by the United Nations, mostly because of the murder of thousands of Shiites.
This is from his Guantanamo case file:
“Detainee is ... likely to pose a threat to the U.S., its interests, and allies. If released, detainee would likely rejoin the Taliban and establish ties with ... elements participating in hostilities against U.S. and coalition forces .... ”
Five of them for one of ours. This is the kind of deal that gets you fired if you make one like it in sports.
Still: This is how we bring Sgt. Bergdahl home from a country that has sent too many young Americans like him back in body bags, in the name of defending a place that will soon be left with 10,000 American troops as its occupying army, and in the name of what? Propping up a tinhorn despot like Hamid Karzai?
But if we make a deal like this to bring Bergdahl home, how many bad guys get their ticket out of Guantanamo punched the next time the Taliban grabs one of ours? If this is all about saving the life of an American soldier, then bring everybody home from Afghanistan today.
Of course, Obama is better than his predecessor, who started wars that ended up killing and wounding thousands of young Americans. Obama isn’t the one who sent American kids to get blown up in Iraq because of phantom weapons of mass destruction; did not send them into Afghanistan with the pinheaded notion that he could defeat the Taliban. But this President not only negotiates with terrorists now, he sets a dangerous precedent, one that he has not come close to properly explaining to the American people.
Momammed Nabi, another one released in this deal, worked with both the Taliban and Al Qaeda. So did Abdul Haq Wasiq. Khairullah Khairkhwa, according to a detainee file obtained by WikiLeaks, was a direct associate of Osama Bin Laden; Khairkhwa also pulls a get-out-of-jail-free card. They are not just bad guys, they are worst guys, which is why this isn’t quite the feel-good story that Obama and Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel want it to be.
Once, Congress would have had to sign off on a prisoner exchange like this, just no longer. Those rights were signed away because of a change in what is known as the National Defense Authorization Act, passed last December. Now the defense secretary is only required to notify Congress when Guantanamo prisoners are released.
So Fazl and Nabi and Khairkhwa and Wasiq and Mullah Norullah Noori, another associate of Mullah Mohammed Omar, all get to walk, with assurances from the government in Qatar that they will be able to “secure” the detainees there. Sure they will. People are always confusing Qatar with Sing Sing.
President Obama brings a live soldier back this time from across the world instead of another dead one. And if it were one of my sons held this way, for this long, I would have wanted our President to bring him home at any cost.
The cost here, though, happens to be extraordinary. This is what Mullah Omar says about this trade: “I extend my heartfelt congratulations to the entire Afghan Muslim nation.”
At least we know this bedbug can keep score.
Source: Top Stories - Google News - http://ift.tt/1pznz0W
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