It was a rubric, the only alternative to simply releasing them with new clothes and airline tickets or staging a fake breakout a la Mission Impossible. But why?
In the so-called "exchange," the Taliban got what Arizona Republican Senator and former POW John McCain has
called, "The hardest of the hard core," the "highest high-risk people." Their
rap sheets read like a Who's Who of Evil, Pol Pot devotees, and all are important strategists and leaders.
One is wanted by the U.N. for war crimes in the killing of thousands of civilians, to which he has cheerfully admitted. So the Administration has also thumbed its nose at the U.N. As well as Canada, and all the other allies who sent their young men and women to that hellhole to fight and die in the War on Terror.
In return, the U.S. gets Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl, who
apparently deserted his Afghanistan post after sending out emails ripping the US and the Afghanistan war effort. Now add that his dad, all spiffy in his Taliban-like beard, has apparently
sent out tweets calling for all Guantanamo prisoners to be released.
His fellow soldiers, who claim attempts to locate him before capture cost them six men,
are outraged. So am I. I'm an airborne vet who went to Afghanistan as a photo-journalist and was permanently injured.
But I'm not so blinded by anger to not realize Bergdahl and dad were just a sideshow.
The administration is lying through its teeth on every level: about Bergdahl's health not permitting the legally-required 30-day notification of Congress; by making a big fuss over the (alleged) one-year ban on the bad guys not going back to the battlefield as if that would impede their operations; by claiming they didn't negotiate with terrorists (no, they used intermediaries that did so) and so on.
And if it's always been U.S. "policy" to obtain release for all American prisoners no matter what the cost, why didn't the U.S. offer 50,000 North Vietnamese prisoners in exchange for McCain and the other captives in the infamous "Hanoi Hilton prison?"
I've long said that Afghan President Hamid Karzai has at the least been too conciliatory with the Taliban, but even he
claims to be "furious" that the deal was made behind his back. Is there anybody the Obama administration
hasn't incensed?
CRAZY LIKE A FOX, OR JUST CRAZY?
The Administration must have foreseen this backlash, but it gambled the release was worth making.
The ONLY possible explanation seems that Obama appears to think it can lead to some sort of a negotiated settlement. Indeed, practically lost in all the noise, though it appeared on a highly-watched national TV program, was U.S. Defense Secretary
Chuck Hagel's assertion that "Maybe this will be a new opening that can produce an agreement." If that isn't a smoking gun, what is?
Granted, it seems like a truly desperate effort but consider this: The Afghan Foreign Ministry, rather than raise hue and cry,
criticized the agreement's "tough" restrictions that keep the freed Taliban prisoners from leaving Qatar for a year. "The Afghan government wants unconditional freedom of its citizens and demands from U.S. and Qatari governments to treat them like free individuals," the ministry said in an e-mailed statement.
The inevitable conclusion is that the Taliban now control the Foreign Ministry and presumably other parts of the government and the Obama Administration believes the only way to salvage anything out of the war is to try to influence those Taliban, to try to gain some influence in the new order. But was releasing these five monsters the way to go about it?
The way such strategies are supposed to work is you eliminate the very worst, in the hopes-- if only that-- that more moderate bad guys will take over. But it's hard to imagine anybody worse than these Five Horsemen of the Apocalpyse, whom in any case had been removed from circulation. They are all psychopaths, Elliot Rodgers without the BMW but with a lot more firepower and influence. Psychopaths don't stick to agreements.
The Obama Administration seems to think it's acting crazy like a fox, but more likely it's just plain crazy. Or stupid, or whatever.
I'm not privy to inside U.S. intelligence information. So maybe despite past support for al Qaeda and other international terrorists, these monsters have since decided-- really decided, as opposed to telling interrogators what they want to hear-- it's in their best interest to keep AQ and the like out of Afghanistan and to behave better than before. Gosh, maybe they each have an unremovable chip embedded in their bodies that allows a drone to home in on them. Doubtful.
More likely Obama and his aides have just been fooled, as President Franklin Delano Roosevelt was by his dear "Uncle Joe" Stalin-- despite British Prime Minister Winston Churchill's desperate efforts to make him judge Stalin by his record, not his promises.
Alas, more likely the U.S has taken five of the biggest, baddest wolves in post 9-11 history and released them back into the fold, thereby perhaps converting a possible defeat for the Afghan people and the world into a sure thing.
Michael Fumento is a former paratrooper who embedded thrice in Iraq and once in Zabul Province in Afghanistan. He currently lives in Colombia, South America, and can be reached at fumento[at]gmail.com.
