Communicating Arts - Main Web SiteTime is the ocean that swallows events, and it will absorb this one that grows more dim and tragic each passing day.
Whether their people agree or not, the governments involved with hostage scenarios--Afghanistan, Germany, South Korea, and the United States--know concessions have only two outcomes: enemy prisoners released in exchange for hostages will return to war to take countless more lives; barter itself only invites more of the same and worse.
While the innocent, misguided, sentimental, and selfish would have their own back at any price, those with experience--military, political, social, psychological--know better.
The calculus on the Taliban side may be even more difficult.
Perceptions about family honor, simple justice, power, and pride call for submission, restoration, and tribute--how dare the Afghani government and people refuse each in turn. Abandonment of this particular kidnapping may be perceived as essentially abandoning both people and intended social place.
While a different military temperament might give up one project to undertake another, the Taliban has not demonstrated so nimble a turn.
If, in addition, there has been a change of heart as regards the taking of another 21 innocent lives, that too may also break the heart as such political action becomes a crime even to the captors, which in turn amounts to the change in will that undermines hostility and foreshadows the end of the tribal part of the struggle against time.
Reuters reports South Korea and the United States promising not to take military action against the Taliban to free the hostages [1] (or, one may note, end the ordeal): of course, that may leave Afghanistan free to determine the course of the event. In fact, pledges by other than Afghani officials, essentially, would seem irrelevant--no other country holds the prisoners of interest to the Taliban.
1. "S.Korea, U.S. agree no force to free Afghan hostages." Reuters, August 2, 2007, 4:25 a.m. EDT
Correspondence and Permissions: James S. Oppenheim
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