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Brother of Dead Hostage: Obama’s Taliban Swap Led to ISIS Demands
Posted By Daniel Greenfield On February 23, 2015 @ 10:48 am In The Point | 5 Comments
When you negotiate with terrorists, it encourages the other terrorists. Even if you’ve randomly decided that the terrorists you negotiated with aren’t terrorists (because you negotiated with them) while the other terrorists are terrorists and can’t be negotiated with. The other terrorists, caring very little about your terrorist categories, start getting very greedy.
Little do they realize that you were only negotiating with the Taliban because you wanted to get out of Afghanistan and free all the killers in Gitmo. Nor do they care. And people end up dead.
The brother of an American woman who was killed after spending months as a hostage of Islamic State militants says Kayla Mueller’s situation worsened after the government traded five Taliban commanders for a captive U.S. soldier.
The militants increased their demands after the May swap for Army Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl, Eric Mueller told NBC’s “Today” in an interview that aired Monday.
“That made the whole situation worse because that’s when the demands got greater,” he said. “They got larger. They realized that they had something.”
The young woman’s father, Carl Mueller, said that the United States’ willingness to swap for Bergdahl but not pay ransom or allow ransom to be paid for his daughter “was pretty hard to take.”
“I actually asked the president that question when we were in the White House,” Carl Mueller said without elaborating.
Obviously you can’t under any circumstances give things to terrorists, particularly not money, in exchange for hostages.
Obama broke that rule over Bergdahl which created an opening for the Mueller family to complain about the hypocrisy. And they have a point.
Obama decided that the Taliban are a legitimate group to negotiate with. He decided that ISIS isn’t. Those decisions are random and hard to defend. There’s a reason we have a rule about not negotiating with terrorists. Obama broke that rule and it encouraged them.
ISIS, accurately, saw Obama as weak. They believed they could roll him. They didn’t understand the larger political considerations which had allowed him to deal with the Taliban, but wouldn’t currently allow him to deal with them. Obama had not been particularly interested in Bergdahl. He was bent on freeing Gitmoites. He had been since his first days in office. Mueller ended up as collateral damage for his efforts.
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