Trading With the Taliban Other Americans will Pay the Price for the Terrorist Hostage Swap.
http://online.wsj.com/articles/trading-with-the-taliban-1401662373
The return of Sergeant Bowe Bergdahl from the clutches of the Taliban is cause for relief for his family and all Americans. But there’s no denying that the price of his recovery is high. The Obama Administration swapped five of the hardest cases at Guantanamo in a fashion that will encourage terrorists to kidnap more Americans to win the release of more prisoners.
This does not mean we agree with Republicans who say President Obama broke the law by failing to inform Congress 30 days in advance of the prisoner release from Gitmo. Presidential power is never stronger than in the role of Commander in Chief. Congress did not attempt to use its comparably strong power of the purse. Instead Congress’s Gitmo language sought bluntly to constrain Mr. Obama’s wartime decision-making.
This is unconstitutional, as the President averred in a statement at the time he signed the bill. That Mr. Obama—and his liberal friends—denounced George W. Bush for similar signing statements is one more antiterror irony of this Presidency. Readers should watch to see if the same politicians and newspapers that assailed Mr. Bush are more forgiving when a Democratic President is using the same war powers.
The real problem with this prisoner swap is the message it conveys about American weakness, especially in the context of Mr. Obama’s retreat from Afghanistan and elsewhere. The world’s bad actors have long perceived that the U.S. doesn’t negotiate over hostages, in contrast to, say, France or Italy. This has made American soldiers and civilians less promising targets.
The Taliban swap will change that perception and increase the likelihood that more Americans will be grabbed, not least in Kabul. Don’t be surprised if 9/11 plotter Khalid Sheikh Mohammed shows up on a list of future prisoner-swap demands.
It’s true that Israel has also traded Palestinian prisoners, sometimes hundreds at a time, for its captive soldiers. One difference is that Israel conducts those swaps in the context of an otherwise tough antiterror policy. This includes unilateral targeting of Hamas and periodic military operations against terrorist havens. No one doubts Israeli resolve.
The same isn’t true of the Obama Administration, and the Taliban swap will only underscore the perception that the U.S. is tiring of its antiterror fight. Mr. Obama announced last week that the U.S. will withdraw all of its military forces from Afghanistan by the end of 2016, no matter the facts on the ground. The U.S. hasn’t used drones to hit a terror target in Pakistan since December. The prisoner swap sends a similar message of retreat.
All the more so because the five freed Taliban killers are likely to return to the battlefield. Though they will supposedly have to stay in Qatar for a year, that means little to men who have been in Gitmo for a decade. They’ll probably spend their year boning up on Taliban and al Qaeda war plans.
The reason these five weren’t previously released is because they were deemed “high” security risks by the Joint Task Force Guantanamo. They are the most senior Taliban commanders remaining in U.S. custody, and even the Obama Administration approved them for indefinite detention.
Two of them— Mohammed Fazi and Mullah Norullah Nori—were present at the fortress in northern Afghanistan in November 2001 when Taliban prisoners revolted against their captors in the anti-Taliban Northern Alliance. CIA operative Johnny Michael Spann died in the melee, the first American casualty of the Afghan war. The duo are also suspected of war crimes for the mass murder of Shiites in Afghanistan before September 11.
Fazi was a close adviser to Mullah Omar, the Taliban leader who has escaped U.S. capture and is believed to be living near Quetta in Pakistan. Soon they will be back in business plotting new attacks.
The release of these Taliban killers also undercuts U.S. complaints against the Afghan government’s release of its dangerous Taliban captives. U.S. officials rightly objected to President Hamid Karzai’s February release of 65 prisoners after the U.S. military turned them over to Afghan control. The Afghan military and police who will have to fight these five Taliban also have reason to be upset.
Mr. Obama said in a statement on Saturday that he hopes the prisoner swap will lead to a resumption of peace talks with the Taliban, but this reverses the usual order. In Vietnam and most other wars, the prisoner releases were part of a peace deal. In this case the Taliban can continue the war with their ranks enhanced.
If the Taliban now negotiate, it won’t be because Mr. Obama’s Guantanamo release has changed their intentions. It will be because they sense they can gain more by talking than by fighting. More likely, the success of their hostage-taking and Mr. Obama’s 2016 withdrawal pledge will convince them that they can keep fighting while they talk and still win.
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