On Saturday, the 31st day of May, 2014, the American government agreed to, and actually swapped one of their soldiers captured in Afghanistan five years ago for five Taliban prisoners held at the Guantanamo Detention facility. This surprising event has taken place under the canopy of a regular policy which forbids the US government from negotiating with terrorists, hostage takers or kidnappers. The assumption is that negotiating with purveyors of terror creates a precedence hinged on blackmail and an incentive for underhand dealings. Instead of a negotiation, they would rather attempt a rescue and flunk rather than give in to demands from their traducers. And to their credit, this policy used to be one that many governments have copied and tried to inculcate.
But why did the Americans agree to this unusual swap of prisoners, even in the face of their very harsh criticism of the way we have handled the kidnapping of 230 girls in Chibok by the Boko Haram? This was why I think they did it. In November, 1979 certain students stormed the American embassy in Iran and took everyone there, about 60 people, hostage. The hostage takers said that they were protesting America’s support for a certain Iranian leader who was said to have used too many western methods to build the Iranian economy. When the leader eventually travelled to the US for medical attention for treatment of cancer, the hostage takers asked the American government to give him up to them in exchange for the 52 hostages they took at the American embassy.
The US government under Jimmy Carter stood its ground at first. In fact, it was to the president’s credit that he seemed to have anticipated all of the coming trouble because at first he refused to allow the former Iranian president in to have his treatment in the US. But then many people, including his wife began to pressure him to give in to the kidnappers and give up the formerly Iranian president. ‘What if I give him up and the hostages are not released what would I do after that?’ he asked his wife. After about 100 days, and after all entreaties and diplomacy failed to get the hostages released, Carter decided on a rescue mission which failed woefully and sounded the death knell to his second term as president: two helicopters crashed, and eight American soldiers died in the rescue attempt. The failure of that rescue attempt was what decided the elections the following year because it was only after Jimmy Carter’s failure in getting re-elected, together with the death of the former Iranian president and just minutes after Ronald Reagan was sworn in as president were the hostages released. This was after 444 agonizing days.
Now, the Reagan Administration, instead of sticking to the US policy of not dealing with hostage takers and terrorists, worked with them to undermine administrations and governments considered unfriendly to the interests of the United States. The scandal aka the Ira Contra Scandal eventually blew open when a congressional hearing found out the Reagan administration was using a certain soldier, Oliver North as go-between of the US government, to sell arms to trouble makers in Iran, bent on destabilizing administrations unfriendly to the US.
What all this amounted to is that in front of the world, the US government and indeed most governments huff and pussyfoot and grandstand about terror-related matters but they still do business with the people they say they will not discuss and negotiate with, especially when it is a matter that concerns the life of one of theirs. What this means in essence is that the policy of not negotiating with terrorists and combatants engaged in asymmetrical warfare has not really worked apart from the grandstanding involved. Therefore, considering developments in our contemporary social anaemia, and considering the fact that the abduction of the 230 school girls in Chibok is engineered to weaken Mr. President’s administration and paint it in effete colours, and considering that a rescue attempt might flounder, I sincerely call for a review of the decision not to negotiate and swap Boko Haram members in detention with the abducted girls. Mr. President should realize that the current impasse is equivalent to a Catch 22, and the only way to beat these people at their own game would be to play along and get the girls back alive. Recall that sometime in 2012, even the British government working in close collaboration with the security people in Nigeria attempted to rescue a Briton and an Italian – Chris McManus and Franco Lamolinara – they were both killed and the attempt failed. What should be of primary concern to us all is the safe return of our girls, and if we negotiate and get them back safely, I believe that it would be a plus rather than a weakness. If Mr. President does not negotiate and anything happens to those girls, I doubt if he would survive politically.
