Playing Chicken With The Taliban – South Korean Hostages
You’re the president. Terrorists hold 23 of your citizens hostage. A deadline has passed and you find the bullet ridden body of one of your citizens. Terrorists hold 22 citizens hostages now. “Their demands are considerably fluid and not unified. The armed insurgents are divided into different groups and the hostages are being kept in different places,” you are told. Next deadline: tomorrow, noon. What do you do? What are your choices?
If you trade jailed terrorists for hostages, you strengthen the enemy and create a profitable strategy they will use from now on. If you trade anything for the lives of your citizens, every foreigner in-country must flee – aid workers, interpreters, journalists, they all instantly become potential economic/political tokens. In fact – that’s why you’re in this position – Italy traded for a hostage and one of the men they were told to release happens to be a terrorist leader of the Taliban. His freedom has created a wave of kidnappings across Afghanistan. “I am shocked to be free.†he said. “I tell all my men to kidnap any foreigner.†They’ve got 22.
But the families of the hostages beg you to strike a deal. For them the president holds the life of their loved one in his hand – he has the power to bring them home safely. The left in your country and across the world beg that you obey the demands of the kidnappers. The way they see it, if your presence in a country is causing them to kidnap you, then its your fault for being there, not their fault for succumbing to expressions of violence and alienation. The world watches. Each day that passes without compromise can cost you one of your citizens. You tell them “No. We don’t deal with terrorists.â€
You’re strong now. Will you be after 10 of the 23 are executed?
The next twenty three days could be horrific for South Korea and its President Roh Moo-Hyun. If the Taliban in Afghanistan are as bad they say they are, they’ll kill one a day until their demands are met. That would prove a stark vision for the world about who we are fighting against. If they choose to draw it out – the optimistic among us will increase the pressure on governments to capitulate. Peace starts with the West paying a price for our guilt in the colonialism that created all this. We’re it not for us, there would be no Islamic extremism, they add. Were it not for the West, the deserts of Africa and beyond would be “pristine,†without its resources plundered to feed a monster that has now endangered the very planet we live on through global warming. Our scheming, enslaving, strip mining orgy of greed and racism makes us responsible for the depraved state of Middle East and the final judgement of mankind.
It’s no wonder the left never cares to hear about the millions murdered, jailed and re-educated in Vietnam and Cambodia after we fled that country in shame. They think we deserved it.
Our leaders must be ready to make this decision, while realizing there is no such thing as evening the historical scales. Do any of those we’ve seen on stage running for president here in America seem like they would be able to deal with this situation?
More: From Time Magazine – “With the fate of 22 South Korean hostages in Afghanistan still uncertain, the hostage crisis is finally forcing South Korea’s Christians, the world’s second largest group of proselytizers after Americans, to re-think their evangelical ambitions.” – see, I told you so!
More: Execution #2 – and a new deadline… Wednesday at noon.
More: “We will sincerely plead with the United States to take more substantial and meaningful measures to resolve this crisis,” Rep. Cheon Young-se of the liberal Democratic Labor Party said before the delegation set off.
More: President Bush and Afghan President Karzai say no deal for hostages
More: Educated into ignorance – Tom Plate argues for rewarding the Taliban
More: Taliban dangles freedom for two hostages – then changes mind.
Pictures of hostages (hat tip to eugenecho.wordpress.com who is following this story with his heart on his sleeve)
Pray for them…
More: Taliban frees two hostages, wants credit for being nice
More: Day 35 – “Although we want this crisis to be solved through negotiations, it seems the U.S. authorities are creating problems,†the Taliban spokesman complained.
More: South Korean negotiators in Afghanistan have reached a deal with Taliban militants holding 19 South Korean Christian aid workers for over a month, a presidential spokesman in Seoul said Tuesday.
Under the terms of the agreement, South Korea agreed to stick by its previous decision to withdraw its 200 non-combat troops from Afghanistan, which work mostly in an engineering and medical capacity.
In addition, Seoul will halt all Christian missionary work in Afghanistan.
More: From the AFP: Afghan Foreign Minister Rangeen Dadfar Spanta said in an interview with Germany’s RBB-Inforadio Thursday it sent “a very dangerous message to the world” when governments were seen as giving into “blackmail.”
The saga could be seen as a victory for the Taliban, he said.
“It was a blow to the government and a positive point for the Taliban,” an official said in Kabul on condition of anonymity.
In Ottawa, Canadian Foreign Minister Maxime Bernier was also critical of negotiations with “terrorists.”
“Such negotiations, even if unsuccessful, only lead to further acts of terrorism,” the minister said in a statement.
Kabul came in for heavy criticism in March when it freed five Taliban in exchange for an Italian hostage, whose two Afghan colleagues were beheaded.
It vowed then not to repeat such a deal amid criticism that negotiating with militants could encourage them.
More: From The Christian Science Monitor: Broadly speaking, the Koreans in Afghanistan operated on a 19th-century missionary model that has evolved considerably in the US, says David Heim, editor of The Christian Century, a magazine in Chicago. “American churches going out to the world and converting people has been critiqued for a century, and most have learned from the criticism,” notes Mr. Heim. “The South Korean churches seem to be in that older independent evangelical model of going off alone. Today relatively few mainline American churches do this. Most send small teams that partner with indigenous churches and local believers. It’s more collaborative.”
In the past decade, the number of NGOs has risen sharply, as have incidents of violence against them, say Larchu of Médecins du Monde and Martin of Mercy Corps. “More than 80 humanitarian workers were killed in 2006 – that’s more than UN soldiers,” says Larchu.
The number of religious groups is also rising and work closely with secular groups. “Worldvision, the Aga Khan Foundation, Catholic Relief Services – which makes no attempt to hide its name – they channel their faith into humanitarian efforts,” says Martin. “When they come into a dangerous place, they either sit at the table with us, or work at cooperation. If, like the South Koreans, we don’t know them, and they don’t know us, that makes it more difficult for everyone.”
Philip Leveque, director of CARE France, says the basics of humanitarian interventionism today are: sending an ethnically diverse team, employing locals, building over time, and becoming familiar with rules and procedures.
“The old days when 8 of 10 aid workers were white guys is over,” Mr. Leveque says. “Maybe the main thing is to know when to leave.” Every CARE mission now has a security chief who can overrule the head office and circumvent the local head of mission in most cases.
McClure says a public misconception abroad is that Christians want to “foist” their beliefs on others. “On the contrary, most Christians today suffer not from a tendency to foist our faith on anyone, but from a tendency to be excessively private about our faith,” she argues. “I have never met a follower of a non-Christian religion who would respect someone who could not and would not express his or her beliefs.”
More: From Reuters: A spokesman for South Korea’s president, Chon Ho-seon, was evasive in responding to questions at a news briefing in Seoul on Wednesday on whether a ransom was part of the deal, saying only South Korea had done what was needed.
Some Afghan officials say South Korea agreed to pay a ransom during negotiations with the Taliban, which one foreign diplomat said started out as a demand for $20 million.
More: The seven remaining South Korean hostages taken captive last July by the Taliban have been released, and insurgents have vowed they will abduct more foreigners.
“We will do the same thing with the other allies in Afghanistan, because we found this way to be successful,” Taliban spokesman Qari Yousef Ahmadi told The Associated Press by phone on Thursday.
More: South Korea welcomes home hostages with widespread anger: Critics said the group’s actions forced their government into negotiations with the Islamic militants that damaged the nation’s international reputation.
Scathing comments, written with the cloak of anonymity, flooded Internet message boards. Newspapers published critical editorials.
Most noticeable was the feeling the hostages themselves and the church that sent them to Afghanistan were to blame because they did not heed repeated government warnings to stay away from the volatile Central Asian country. One advisory cited an intelligence report that insurgents were targeting Koreans.
“They were told not to go,” said Kim Young-soo, 42, a travel agency employee in Seoul. “They shouldn’t have gone there in the first place.”
The apparent ignoring of the warning levied a high price on the government, critics argued, forcing it to deal directly with the Taliban in violation of the international principle of not negotiating with terrorists. Seoul is also alleged to have made a secret ransom payment to the insurgent group, although the government denied it.
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3 Responses to “Playing Chicken With The Taliban – South Korean Hostages”
August 12th, 2007 at 5:39 pm
Pray for them…
August 12th, 2007 at 5:50 pm
[...] dialogue Playing Chicken With… on prayer for hostages in afghani…Michelle Malkin So… on prayer for hostages in afghani…Helen [...]
August 28th, 2007 at 3:36 pm
[...] We here at Political Vindication have been following This story from the beginning – you can read every sordid step of this game of chicken here. [...]
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