South Korean Hostages in Afghanistan

Thoughts about the U.S. government policy on Afghanistan

Currently there is one German engineer and 21 South Korean Christian church people being held in Afghanistan by Taliban captors. The fate of these people is far from certain. There are no announced negotiations to free them. In response to these events there are political forces and organizations, especially in South Korea, trying to understand the situation and what can be done to help to resolve it in favour of the peaceful release of the prisoners.

In South Korea some of those concerned, including members of the Democratic Labor Party and various anti-war groups, are holding candlelight demonstrations calling for the withdrawal of the 200 person Korean force supporting the U.S. led coalition in Afghanistan. Others in South Korea are urging that there be no actions that may alienate the U.S. government, in the hopes that the U.S. will thus help to win the release of the church group. Underlying these different views of how to approach the situation is a debate around the current view of the world and the role of government.

The U.S. government claims that the major threat in the world is terrorism and that governments have to be warriors against terrorism. In the U.S. this view is supported by the set of neoconservative ideas and practices that have been developed as the basis for U.S. government policy. It is helpful to look at the background of the current U.S. Ambassador to the UN as he has helped to formulate and implement U.S. policy, particularly with respect to Afghanistan.

Zalmay Khalilzad, who replaced John Bolton as the U.S. Ambassador to the UN, offers a more congenial mode of representing U.S. policy in contrast to Bolton's more confrontation approach.

Khalilzad is originally from Afghanistan. Like Afghanistan's President Hamid Karzai, Khalilzad is of Pashtun origin. His background includes a PhD from the University of Chicago where he studied with Albert Wohlstetter, one of the architects of neoconservative ideas. Khalilzad then became an Assistant Professor at Columbia University working closely with Zbigniew Brzezinski, and developed the policy of supporting the Mujahadeen to resist the Soviet Union's occupation of Afghanistan. Subsequently Khalilzad helped to formulate the neoconservative doctrines and practice. Also, he has served alternately in Afghanistan as Bush's envoy and later as U.S. Ambassador to Iraq.

The U.S. government policy on Afghanistan is based on a neoconservative ideology which focuses on the notion of U.S. supremacy in a unipolar world. This requires that the U.S. maintain military superiority and use it when needed.

Among the neoconservative ideas of Wohlstetter is the concept replacing the cold war policy of "mutual assured destruction" (MAD) where both sides build up their stockpile of weapons and essentially neutralize each other, with the idea of "gradual deterrance." As opposed to MAD where the weapons are never used, "gradual deterrence" sees the necessity of using weapons as in initially limited wars, or even "possibly using tactical nuclear arms, together with 'smart' precision-guided weapons capable of hitting the enemy's military apparatus."

Another cornerstone of the neoconservative policy pursued by the Bush administration are the ideas that formed the basis for the Project for the New American Century (PNAC). A letter sent by the supporters of PNAC to President Bill Clinton on January 26, 1998, called for an invasion of Iraq without the approval of the United Nations. Khalilzad was one of the signatories of the letter.

The neoconservative policy of the U.S. government is characterized by a hard line in the battle for control over Afghanistan. The invasion and occupation of Afghanistan by the U.S. military and its allies has in general been criticized as being marked by a lack of concern for civilian casualities. The continual loss of civilian lives in Afghanistan has grown so great as a result of NATO and U.S. led operations in Afghanistan that even Afghan President Karzai has warned that the situation could not continue. There have been similar warnings from other Afghan officials about the potential for serious repercussions if the large number of civilian casualties continues. Some argue that the nature of what is called the Taliban has changed. The Taliban is a term being used to describe those forces opposing the occupation of Afghanistan.

The U.S. government has said that it will not give in to the demand to free Taliban prisoners. This position is echoed by the Australian Prime Minister John Howard, for example, who argues that once prisoners are exchanged for hostages, hostage taking will encouraged. The argument is that the fight against terrorism must be kept as primary and that moving from this fixed position can only be a compromise of the primary objective.

Asked for his views on how to solve the South Korean crisis, Khalilzad responded that it was necessary to work "with Pakistan as well on the issue of the Taliban as well as with various Afghan parties. And of course the coalition also has an important role to play," he proposed. He added that it was an issue of "identifying also where they (presumably the South Korean church members-ed) are." The problem, he said, requires "a multiplicity of angles to be worked on to deal with it."

In contrast, the family members of the Koreans being held by the Taliban are in favour of negotiations with the Taliban and of finding a way to win the safe release of their loved ones.

The Italians were able to win the safe release of an Italian journalist held in Afghanistan in return for the release of five Afghan prisoners. The principle of the Italian government in working for the release of the journalist from the Italian newspaper La Repubblica, was, "We think that the life of a person is very precious. So if there is a chance to save a life we must do all we can do."

Reinforcing this view, Giuliana Sgrena, a journalist who had been held in Baghdad in 2005, explained that the occupation of Afghanistan and the war was the problem, not the resistance to the occupation. "If there is no war there will be no hostages," she told reporters.

The U.S. government's neoconservative policy in Afghanistan is not likely one which will provide for a prisoner exchange as the Taleban are demanding. The Italian people were able to influence their government to pursue a less hard line policy which resulted in the safe release of the Italian journalist. It is critical that an accurate understanding of the U.S. policy in Afghanistan become a part of the debate.