Bergdahl Affair: No good deed goes unpunished

The Bergdahl Affair: No good deed goes unpunished

President Obama has to be coming to the conclusion that no good deed goes unpunished. He is standing by his policy of never leaving a uniformed troop of ours behind on the battle field.   Howls of protests erupted, some silly; some unfactual,  some substantive .  Senators (including Sen John McCain) in February who had criticized  the President for not extricating Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl  with such an exchange,   reversed themselves. Most  passed themselves off as jurors and hangmen before a court martial judged whether he was a deserter. Others virtually changed the terms of eligibility for retrieval, implying  it only applies to those we do not suspect as being deserters.

  When the POW/MIA movement began ,there were suspicions raised that maybe there were some left in Viet Nam  who did not want to return. Regardless,  the black and white flag became symbols of leaving no one behind, dead or alive. That policy institutionalized  also meant that even a lowly PFC  POW had high value as a bargaining chip to be kept  alive  so long as a bargain was possible.

 A legal definition: a deserter is one who goes AWOL for more than 30 days with the intent of not returning. Sgt Bergdahl was quickly grabbed by the Taliban  . A court process, not politicians, is appropriate to judge intent or ability to return.

Assume for argument’s sake,   Bergdahl was a mixed up kid who did desert his unit and  he was not sick at all. Was his deteriorating  health  just a pretext for Obama to claim  he had  to  ignore the  30 day notice to Congress?   Some  by just looking at videos  have provided their own mental health diagnoses  (“looks drugged to me”) or his physical shape (“he’s walking, isn’t he”) as silly  proof he was really not sick.

The deal had been in the works for  nearly two years and Congress knew about it. Most had opposed it, but with end of war looming , the window for action was closing.  Clearly,  Bergdahl’s life was in jeopardy now. If the deal had collapsed, his value to the captors became a negative as US ops continued the hunt, and he would be killed. The captors had recently threatened it. Imagine the political fallout and charges of ineptness against Obama if that would have happened.

   Obama was also clobbered with charges the deal was  bad , that  Bergdahl was not worth five dangerous  Taliban leaders, even though there were no plans to put them on trial.  That  position   is subject to   speculation. Are the aging Taliban too old to fight effectively? Could the Qataris really keep the released detainees from the battlefield for a year?  Was this a token  olive branch to give the newly elected Afghan government a chance to bury the hatchet with the Taliban,  a move which the US  had urged outgoing Pres. Hamid Karzai to make  for years and he had refused?

We have a policy of never negotiating with terrorists, claimed critic Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX), inaccurately . We have done it  since Pres. Jimmy Carter’s days. Besides, the Afghan Taliban, with whom we negotiated via Qatar,  is not formally on a terrorist list, though some offshoots are.

This affair highlights an  unsettled  issue.   Usually at a war’s end there is a prisoner exchange. What about the detainees in Guantanamo then?

A version of this appeared in the Sky Hi News print edition 6/13/2014

Footnotes and fact sources:

http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2014/06/quick-facts-army-deserters-bergdahl,

 http://www.factcheck.org/2014/06/sorting-murky-issues-on-the-pow-swap/,

  http://www.wtsp.com/story/news/politics/2014/06/02/punditfact-check-statement-on-negotiating-with-terrorists/9873527/
http://theweek.com/article/index/262832/speedreads-fox-news-juan-williams-obliterates-gopers-for-craven-flip-flop-on-bergdahl#axzz344dPVrKu