High cost of freedom

THE prisoner swap signals a dangerous policy change for the US.

FILE - This undated file image provided by the U.S. Army shows Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl. A Pentagon investigation concluded in 2010 that Bergdahl walked away from his unit, and after an initial flurry of searching, the military decided not to exert extraordinary efforts to rescue him, according to a former senior defense official who was involved in the matter. Instead, the U.S. government pursued negotiations to get him back over the following five years of his captivity — a track that led to his release over the weekend. (AP Photo/U.S. Army, File)

TO critics it is a deal that sets a “terrible precedent” — it’s a “catastrophe”, they say, that shatters Washington’s longstanding commitment never to negotiate with terrorists, and certainly never to give in to their demands.

US President Barack Obama’s decision to swap five top Taliban commanders held at Guantanamo Bay for US Army Sergeant Bowe Bergdahl, 28, who was captured in Afghanistan five years ago, will, they contend, prove a boon to hostage-takers from Kabul to Khartoum, adding to the threats faced by US servicemen as well as those of nations allied to the US.

And the apprehensions of such critics have been stoked by the response from no less than Mullah Mohammed Omar, the Taliban’s reclusive, one-eyed leader who hasn’t made a public statement in years. So triumphant is he over the release of the Guantanamo five, he has declared it a “big victory”, one that brings the Taliban “closer to the harbour of victory”.

Amid such claims, and given the fierce controversy about just how Bergdahl ended up in the Taliban’s hands, it is hardly surprising that organisers have hastily cancelled a celebration they were planning to welcome him home to the small town of Hailey (pop. 8000) in Idaho.

What Obama sought to present as a major achievement for his administration, when he announced the deal to bring home an American hero captured on the battlefield in Afghanistan, has turned desperately sour.

There are charges from former comrades that Bergdahl is in fact a deserter who deliberately left his post and, in so doing, put at risk the lives of many servicemen and women who, over the years, have sought to free him from his ­captors.

Far from being hailed a hero, they say, Bergdahl should be court-martialled.

Witnesses in the village of Yusef Khel, in Paktika province, close to the US base where Bergdahl was stationed in 2009, speak of local Afghans seeing him walking deliberately into the hands of the Taliban.

“We think he probably was high after smoking hashish,” Ibrahim Manikhel, the district’s intelligence chief, told The Washington Post. “Why would an American want to find the Taliban?”

Manikhel said villagers had tried to tell the soldier not to go towards where Taliban fighters were located, but he refused to listen.

The villagers’ account supports the recollections of some of Bergdahl’s former comrades.

“I was pissed off then and I am even more so now with everything going on,” former sergeant Matt Vierkant, a member of Bergdahl’s platoon when he went missing, told CNN.

“Bowe Bergdahl deserted during a time of war and his fellow Americans lost their lives searching for him.”

Another former colleague, Jose Baggett, said two of his friends died because of Bergdahl’s actions. “He walked off,” Baggett told CNN. “He left his guard post. Nobody knows if he defected or he’s a traitor or he was kidnapped.”

At least half a dozen US soldiers are believed to have been killed in operations launched to find Bergdahl, who was promoted twice during his captivity.

Born in Sun Valley, Idaho, the son of a commercial truck driver, Bergdahl was home-schooled and brought up a Presbyterian, though his pastor says he struggled with his faith. He is said to have practised fencing and martial arts before switching to ballet classes and spent time at a Buddhist monastery.

He graduated from infantry school at Fort Benning, in Georgia, and was assigned to the 1st Battalion, 501st Infantry Regiment.

When his unit was deployed to Afghanistan he is said to have quickly learned to speak Pashto, the local language, and to have been a loner who spent “more time with the Afghans than with his platoon”.

On June 9, 2009, his unit suffered its first casualty in a roadside bomb blast, and Bergdahl’s father has said he believes the death of a comrade who was a close friend darkened his son’s mood. He went missing a few days later, on the night of June 30.

Accounts of his capture diverge. He claimed in subsequent videos released by the Taliban that he fell behind during a patrol. Taliban officials have been quoted as saying he was ambushed after becoming drunk and wandering away from his base.

Then there are the charges that he deliberately walked off the base and sought contact with the Taliban, and it is these claims that are now causing such acute embarrassment to Obama.

What is not in doubt is that to secure Bergdahl’s release, the US has paid a very high price — one that effectively dismantles its commitment never to negotiate with terrorists — and that this policy change has the potential to have a major impact.

Washington, the Obama administration has always averred, is different; it is not like France or Italy, which have been prepared to do deals with hostage takers. Only last February it was seriously at loggerheads with the Hamid Karzai regime in Kabul over its release of 65 Taliban prisoners after they were turned over to the Afghan authorities by the Americans.

A few weeks ago the administration was remonstrating with the government of Nigeria, warning it not to negotiate with the Boko Haram jihadists over the schoolgirls they have abducted, saying that to do so would set a dangerous precedent.

Now Washington has done precisely what it has told others not to do, and done it in a way that has infuriated many American lawmakers.

Among the five Taliban commanders released from Guantanamo are some of the jihadist movement’s fiercest fighters, men whose past is so vicious that even the Obama administration, though it has been eagerly seeking to release as many as possible of the detainees remaining at Guantanamo, had decided they should not be freed.

Joint Task Force Guantanamo had deemed them all to be “high” security risks and the administration had approved them for indefinite detention.

Two — Mohammed Fazi and Mullah Noori — were among the most ferocious of Taliban commanders before September 11, 2001, when al-Qa’ida operated at will in Afghanistan. In 1999 Fazi led a force of fighters that swept through the villages around Sheykhan, north of Kabul, and carried out a ruthless scorched-earth assault that is estimated to have sent 300,000 men, women and children fleeing for their lives.

Many were killed as Fazi ordered the demolition of entire villages, the blowing up of houses, the burning of crops and the seeding of land with lethal mines.

Fazi and Noori are suspected of involvement in the mass murder of Shi’ites in Afghanistan before 9/11 and to have been present at the fortress in northern Afghanistan when Taliban prisoners revolted against their captors from the Northern Alliance.

Fazi is particularly close to Mullah Omar, and though the five, in terms of the deal done through Qatar, are supposed to remain in the Gulf state for the next 12 months, few doubt that they will soon be back in business with the insurgents.

That is not the only price Washington has paid for Bergdahl’s freedom: from the moment he went missing, the US spared no effort to find him. Those efforts, according to US officials, were hampered by deliberate misinformation that led them into dangerous traps, as his captors from the notorious Haqqani group took him into neighbouring Pakistan, where it was easier to secrete him in the country’s ungoverned tribal areas.

In the first few weeks after his disappearance, searching army units were led to houses rigged with explosives, cars wired with bombs, and to suicide bomb vests set to detonate. Overshadowing the search, however, were misgivings among many soldiers about risking their lives for a man they believed was a deserter.

Obama remains unrepentant about the deal, despite the furious response it has provoked.

“Our terrorist adversaries now have a strong incentive to capture Americans,” warned Howard McKeon, chairman of the House of Representatives Armed Services Committee. “That incentive will put our forces in Afghanistan and around the world at even greater risk.”

Ted Cruz, a prospective Republican presidential candidate, asked tellingly: “How many soldiers lost their lives to capture those five Taliban soldiers we’ve just released? Once you start doing it, every other terrorist has an incentive to capture more soldiers.”

The White House, however, is standing firm. Susan Rice, the National Security Adviser who is close to the President, said: “Sergeant Bergdahl wasn’t simply a hostage; he was an American prisoner of war, captured on the battlefield. We have a sacred obligation ... to do our utmost to bring back our men and women who were taken in battle.”

Few would argue with that. The Israelis do it all the time, sometimes trading hundreds of Palestinians at a time to recover their captive soldiers. The trouble is, while no one can doubt Israel’s resolve to fight terrorism in whatever guise it appears, Obama’s deal comes at a time when he is perceived to be increasingly weak in confronting terrorism. Only last week he announced that the US will withdraw all its forces from Afghanistan, leaving not a soldier there after the end of 2016, something that will doubtless boost the Taliban’s chances of a comeback.

Clearly, the President had to do what he could to free Bergdahl from his Taliban captors, whatever the circumstances of his disappearance. But what remains to be seen is whether he has paid too high a price.

More broadly, in being prepared to do the deal, Obama has dismantled a cardinal principle of the anti-terrorist strategy of the US and its allies — that of never negotiating with hostage takers.

The consequences are likely to be far-reaching. As one US commentator pointed out, we shouldn’t be surprised if 9/11 mastermind Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, currently held at Guantanamo, shows up on a list of future prisoner-swap demands.

That is a measure of the importance to the US and its allies of the precedent established by the deal done to free Bergdahl.