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Of course, Americans look at the Bergdahl trade from our point of view. Nathan Hodges in the WSJ puts us in the shoes of Afghan villagers.
SHEYKHAN, Afghanistan—Taliban forces led by Mohammed Fazl swept through this village on the Shomali plain north of Kabul in 1999 in a scorched-earth offensive that prompted some 300,000 people to flee for their lives.
Fifteen years later, local residents here are responding with fear and dismay to the U.S. release of the notorious commander, along with four other Taliban leaders in exchange for Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl, the only American prisoner of war who was held by the Taliban. The group released a video on Wednesday showing the hurried handover a few days earlier of the American captive, looking gaunt and dazed.
The villages of Shomali were once the orchard of central Afghanistan, and the plain’s carefully tended vineyards were famous for their grapes.
When the Taliban seized control of this area from their Northern Alliance rivals in 1999, they systematically demolished entire villages, blowing up houses, burning fields and seeding the land with mines, according to two comprehensive studies of war crimes and atrocities during wars in Afghanistan and human rights reports. Mr. Fazl played a major role in the destruction.
“There was not a single undamaged house or garden,” said Masjidi Fatehzada, a shopkeeper in Mir Bacha Kot, the district center. “My entire shop was burned to the ground. There was nothing left.”
Khwaja Mohammad, a farmer in the village of Sheykhan, remembered how Mr. Fazl’s men took away his son, a civilian, and sent him to Kabul’s Pul-e Charkhi prison.
“They jailed him for nearly three years,” Mr. Mohammad said. “They took him when he was on his way from the bazaar to buy oil and flour.” …
Texas congressman Steve Stockman with the best tweet of last week.
The Bergdahl swap crystallizes all that is Obama:
A man who won’t let obeying the law stop him from making a bad decision.
Charles Krauthammer says; “Free him, then try him.”
… What to do? Free him, then try him. Make the swap and then, if the evidence is as strong as it now seems, court-martial him for desertion.
The swap itself remains, nonetheless, a very close call. I would fully respect a president who rejected the deal as simply too unbalanced. What is impossible to respect is a president who makes this heart-wrenching deal and then does a victory lap in the Rose Garden and has his senior officials declare it a cause for celebration. The ever dutiful, ever clueless Susan Rice hailed it as “an extraordinary day for America.”
Good God. This is no victory. This is a defeat, a concession to a miserable reality, a dirty deal, perhaps necessary as a matter of principle but to be carried out with regret, resignation, even revulsion.
The Rose Garden stunt wasn’t a messaging failure. It’s a category error. The president seems oblivious to the gravity, indeed the very nature, of what he has just done. Which is why a stunned and troubled people are asking themselves what kind of man they have twice chosen to lead them.
Jennifer Rubin posts on the terrible “Taliban terrorist trade.”
The Taliban terrorist trade is beginning to crowd out other scandals. As with the Veterans Affairs fiasco, the outrage is not partisan. Democrats are irate that Congress was not alerted about the prisoner swap while Republicans are beside themselves over the idea of negotiating with and releasing terrorists. Both sides have huge doubts that the trade was in our favor and deep concerns that the deal doesn’t restrict the terrorists’ ability to return to the battlefield. For President Obama, there are fewer excuses because the president can’t claim that he was kept out of the loop. No, this is his doing. Indeed he imagined this would be heralded as a great strategic victory.
Why has it degenerated into a fiasco? (When Chris Matthews and the Wall Street editorial board both slam a decision, you know it really is a fiasco.) Here are four main concerns that threaten to engulf Obama:
1. The White House feels compelled to embellish if not outright deceive the public and media when it gets in hot water. Now the press is beginning to call him on it. National security adviser Susan Rice says Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl served with distinction. The White House says failing to alert Congress was all an oversight. Neither story holds up. …
Max Boot posts on how the Taliban has been rescued from the ashheap of George W. Bush’s history.
A lot has changed in warfare since the days of hand-to-hand combat with swords and spears in ancient Mesopotamia 5,000 years. One thing hasn’t changed, however: War remains a test of wills. If you break the enemy’s will, you win. If he breaks your will, you lose. If neither of your wills is broken, and assuming you have sufficient material resources to continue fighting, the war becomes a stalemate. This is a fundamental truth and yet one that President Obama seems to miss time after time.
In Afghanistan, U.S. forces and their Afghan allies have dealt defeat after defeat to the Taliban. Yet the president keeps showing that his will is wavering by attaching deadlines to U.S. troop deployments, the most recent being a promise that, while 9,800 U.S. troops will remain in Afghanistan in 2015, all of them will depart by the end of 2016. The latest sign of wavering American will, at least from the Taliban’s standpoint, is the prisoner exchange for Bowe Bergdahl.
The Taliban are going to town with a video of the exchange that has become an Internet sensation. The message of the video is obvious: the Taliban are a force to be reckoned with. The U.S. has tried to portray the Taliban as mere terrorists who are on the wrong side of history, but the fact of this exchange bolsters the Taliban’s narrative that they are actually a legitimate governmental entity that will one day rule Afghanistan again. …
Scott Johnson posts on the mullahs read of our country.
In another harsh editorial — “Hapless Obama” — the New York Daily News reports on the mullahs’ reading of Obama:
“Iran’s supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei has bluntly taken the measure of President Obama as a paper tiger — and the United States commander has only himself to blame.
Delivering an address on a stage hung with a banner that read “America cannot do a damn thing,” Khamenei Wednesday sneeringly declared that Obama has abandoned military force as a tool of foreign policy. …”
Now for important stuff. Free Beacon reports the GOP might pick up a Senate seat in Iowa.
The U.S. Senate race in Iowa is now in a dead heat after Republican candidate Joni Ernst secured a primary win on Tuesday, according to a recent poll by Rasmussen Reports.
Ernst—a state senator and Iraq War veteran who still serves as a lieutenant colonel in the Iowa Army National Guard—received 45 percent support in the poll, while Rep. Bruce Braley (D., Iowa) garnered 44 percent. The survey of 750 likely Iowa voters had a margin of error of plus or minus 4 percent.
The poll indicates a bump in support for Ernst, who trailed Braley by about 7 percentage points in early April, according to a survey at the time by SuffolkUniversity. …
Father’s day is coming soon. The NY Times reviews a book; “Do Father’s Matter?”
When our young daughters first decided to play on top of our Honda minivan, parked in our driveway, my wife was worried. But to me, it seemed no less safe than chasing a ball that frequently ended up in the street. And they loved the height, the novelty, the danger. So I let them stay. They never fell. And with the summer weather here, playing on the car is once again keeping them occupied for hours.
Now that I have read Paul Raeburn’s “Do Fathers Matter?,” I know that my comfort with more dangerous play — my willingness to let my daughters stand on top of a minivan — is a typically paternal trait. Dads roughhouse with children more, too. They also gain weight when their wives are pregnant and have an outsize effect on their children’s vocabulary. The presence of dads can delay daughters’ puberty. But older dads have more children with dwarfism and with Marfan syndrome.
In Mr. Raeburn’s book, there is plenty of good news for dads, and plenty of bad. A zippy tour through the latest research on fathers’ distinctive, or predominant, contributions to their children’s lives, “Do Fathers Matter?” is filled with provocative studies of human dads — not to mention a lot of curious animal experiments. (You’ll learn about blackbirds’ vasectomies.) But above all, Mr. Raeburn shows how little we know about the role of fathers, and how preliminary his book is. Its end is really a beginning, a prospectus for further research. …