Some people are already questioning whether our government should have traded 5 Taliban guys for an American POW. The more indelicate versions of this question put it this way: Should President Obama have traded 5 terrorists for a deserter?
That’s not an easy question to answer. (I’m referring to the first version of the question; I’ll deal with the alternative version below.) As in all negotiations, price matters. At the end of the Vietnam War, North Vietnam held several hundred American POWs, and offered to trade them for South Vietnam and billions of dollars in reparations. The two sides split the difference; they got South Vietnam and we got our POWs back. At the time, handing over our erstwhile South Vietnamese allies to the enemy, many of whom subsequently spent years in re-education camps, didn’t seem too stiff a price to pay, at least not to us, it didn’t.
But that was a war of nations between opposing armies, in which both sides recognized captives were entitled to POW status, although in practice they often executed ours, and we usually turned theirs over to South Vietnamese who treated them as terrorists. But those are technicalities; policing the treatment of POWs is always like trying to maintain order in a kindergarten lunch room, that’s just the nature of the human condition.
Trying to quantify what Sgt. Bergdahl’s freedom is worth is problematical, because the exercise is by its nature purely subjective. Some Americans would have gladly traded George W. Bush for him and thrown in a case of beer as a signing bonus. It appears that others, especially among those who get paid to be outraged at President Obama, seem to think Sgt. Bergdahl’s life isn’t worth five Taliban killers. Before the President adopted that as policy, though, he should require them to say that to his mother.
Before we go any further, I think we need to deal with a terminology issue, namely, are these Taliban guys POWs or terrorists? Now, the U.S. Army is fighting a war against the Taliban in Afghanistan so our soldiers there, if they get captured, are clearly POWs. Conversely, the Taliban are fighting a war against a foreign army that invaded their country, and they have organization and command structure and military training, but they’re not operating under the government we officially recognize so we don’t recognize them as a legitimate army, which means their guys are terrorists and we get to beat them up, waterboard them, throw them in dank dungeons, and anything else we want to do to them.
This is a case of being careful what you wish for, because it’s a lot harder to swap terrorists for POWs than to simply exchange POWs. Obama didn’t invent the idea of prisoner swaps; that’s been going on since war was invented, and everybody does it. So why should it a problem if Obama does it? What do the critics think he should have done, turned his back on Sgt. Bergdahl and left him in Taliban hands? Let’s pick this apart, detail by detail.
First, if you don’t have something to trade, there’s nothing to negotiate. But this is academic, because you always have something to trade. The whole purpose of taking prisoners is to acquire trade goods. Prisoners are trade goods, period. They’re not good for anything else. They’re also a colossal bother: They have to be fed, guarded, and kept alive, etc.; they’re not useful if they die or escape. The only reason anyone would go to all that trouble is to get something they want. So, logically, if you have nothing they want, they won’t bother to take prisoners.
But, as I said, you always have something they want. First and foremost, they want you to pack up and leave their country. That’s usually not an obstacle to negotiations if your mission has failed and you’re leaving anyway, which has been the usual outcome of our military adventures since 1945. (To the best of my recollection, Japan was the last country that surrendered to us.) Sometimes they want money, too, although almost nearly everyone will take guns instead of cash, as the Iranians did from President Reagan for our diplomats. But the most common trade is their prisoners for your prisoners. In fact, if you have some of their guys, they’ll often make great exertions to capture yours,* so they have trading stock. (*When negotiating with Americans, one captive is usually enough, because everyone knows Americans will pay exorbitantly to get back even 1 American. We’re more squeamish about writing off any of ours than most other people are.)
The Bergdahl case, as far as the exchange goes, was straightforward. It was the standard prisoner-for-prisoner swap. They got 5 hardened fighters in exchange for 1 soldier accused of being a wimp who ran away from his post in the middle of the night, which as I’ve already pointed out is not an unusual ratio in a swap involving American prisoner(s). So, there’s really no grounds for criticizing President Obama either for approving a prisoner exchange or the price he agreed to pay.
The President’s critics seem to have two principal complaints about this prisoner exchange. First, they claim the President released terrorists to get Sgt. Bergdahl back, which isn’t the same thing (to them, at least) as trading POWs. It could be argued these Taliban were POWs, but I don’t want to spend time on that here. Let’s keep discussion this moving along before everyone falls asleep. Second, they seem to imply that Sgt. Bergdahl wasn’t worth trading for. This is problematical.
It springs from an ideological antipathy of some people toward rule of law and due process. They prefer to make up their own minds about whether someone is guilty or innocent, and do it right now, based on nothing more than what they heard on talk radio or read in a political blog. That’s okay for personal consumption, I guess, but they shouldn’t expect the rest of us to accept that as a basis for making governmental decisions.
Let’s approach this problem logically, and in proper sequence. When one of your guys is a POW in enemy hands, the first thing you have to do is get him back, then nurse him back to health. and only then can you deal with any beef our military authorities may have with him. And it is the military, not an online lynch mob, who should decide whether there’s a beef. If there is, you charge him under the UCMJ* (* for you civilian types, that means Uniform Code of Military Justice); appoint a military judge, military prosecutor, and defense counsel; and give him a court-martial trial on the charges. If he’s found guilty by the court-martial tribunal, only then is he “guilty.”
It’s hard to see how this process could be followed if he was left in enemy hands. And it’s hard to see how you can justify leaving him in enemy hands based on assumed guilt when the UCMJ entitles him to a presumption of innocence. It follows that if you have an opportunity to secure his release, either by rescue or prisoner exchange, you do that.
And that’s why the people criticizing President Obama are wrong. If you disagree with the price paid, fine, but what you’re saying then is price is everything and if the other side wants too much we’ll walk away and leave our POWs in their tender care. I don’t think I’d want to run for office on that platform, even in Texas or South Carolina, where I understand the civilian police routinely shoot people instead of taking prisoners. If your beef with the President is that he traded perfectly good terrorists for a worthless deserter or traitor, then you’ve fallen into the trap of presuming guilt. As an ordinary citizen with no decision-making authority, you have a right to do that, and spew about it on the internet if you like. But Presidents, who do have the responsibility of making hard decisions, can’t operate on that kind of quicksand. If you’re a President, you have to get your POW freed if you can; and then, if circumstances warrant it, you let the military deal with any issues about the POW’s conduct after he returns home. If you argue otherwise, you’re just blowing hot air from the luxury of an armchair
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