Haven’t posted here for a while, and noticed that nobody has commented on the recent release of Idaho infantryman Bowe Bergdahl, who had been a prisoner of the Taliban in Afghanistan since 2009.
The more I read about this, the stinkier it gets, even beyond the surface controversy (which appears predictably to fall along partisan lines) of whether it is proper to negotiate with terrorists to facilitate the release of a POW. More on that later.
I have never met Sgt. Bergdahl, so I can’t speak definitively for his motivations, but in reading some of his communications with his parents before his capture, as well as the accounts by his fellow soldiers, I come away with the impression that Bergdahl may have been more than a little bit complicit in his own capture, and may have cooperated with the Taliban to a greater extent than is generally approved of by the Armed Forces Code of Conduct.
Here is an article that appeared in Rolling Stone two years ago, which gives a good background of the man: Bowe Bergdahl: America’s Last Prisoner of War by Michael Hastings – Rolling Stone
According to the article, Bergdahl was a loner, preferring to spend his free time at Ft Benning poring over maps of Afghanistan, or doing curls with his SAW. He talked about desertion before he even left the US: “If this deployment is lame,” he said on base in Alaska, “I’ll just walk off into the mountains in Pakistan.”
The deployment, one surmises, turned out to be lame.
On June 25th, 2009, Bergdahl sent an email to his parents, in which he had some unflattering things to say about the United States Army:
“The system is wrong. I am ashamed to be an american. And the title of US soldier is just the lie of fools. The US army is the biggest joke the world has to laugh at. It is the army of liars, backstabbers, fools, and bullies. The few good SGTs are getting out as soon as they can, and they are telling us privates to do the same.”
Five days later, after mailing his uniform and some books to his parents, and taking a knife, a camera and his diary, he walked off base and into the mountains, where he was promptly captured.
Here is a Taliban propaganda video from 2009 in which Bergdahl was interviewed by his captors. He gave quite a bit more information than name, rank, and serial number.
Fast forward five years. Bowe Bergdahl is released from captivity in anticipation of the US’ imminent withdrawal from Afghanistan. In exchange for five men who were being held in Guantanamo Bay: the so-called “Taliban Five”.
These five were some pretty bad dudes, according to John McCain, who ought to know something about the POW business: “they are the hardest of the hard-core, possibly responsible for the deaths of thousands.”
So here’s where it gets a bit confusing to me. The only POW in the entirety of the longest war in American history seems to have been a deserter, who was treated exceptionally well by his captors. Did he collaborate with them in order to receive such preferential treatment (as opposed to being beheaded on video)? Did he give up any military secrets (such as an Airborne PFC may have been privy to), or perhaps, as has been claimed by the Taliban, train his captors in devising improvised explosive devices?
And what of the Taliban Five? It seems that in exchange for Bergdahl, the Taliban have made out, well, like bandits. They now have five high-ranking members back in the fold.
But wait: according to the Israel News, they were released a year ago, almost four years to the day of Bergdahl’s capture.
And in an earlier story in the Asia Times (from January of 2012) three of the Five were supposedly already released from custody in a secret deal for Bergdahl.
Admittedly, I am not convinced as to the reliability of these sources. Still, they do demonstrate that the idea of this particular prisoner exchange had been discussed for years.
So what to make of all of this?
Was the US a chump for trading five high-value prisoners for a low-value deserter?
Was Bergdahl just a deserter, or something worse?
It seems like he was more comfortable as a prisoner in Khandahar than he was in the Army, or even as a house guest in America: should we have just told the Taliban that they could keep him?
