Pod Save the World - Trump's hostage policy

Episode Date: May 23, 2018

Tommy talks with NewYorker.com executive editor David Rohde about the way Trump is handling - and showcasing - hostage negotiations as President. Rohde was held hostage by the Taliban for over seven months until he escaped in 2009.

We are in one world trade center. I've never been in this building, in this iteration. It is, you kind of feel the enormity of it all. You're very safe. Yeah, well, I'm in the New Yorker office. I'm here with David Rode, who's the executive editor, The New Yorker.com. He's also the offer of several books,

including one called A Rope and a Prayer, the story of a kidnapping. And he has won the Pulitzer Prize a couple times, I believe. Once alone and once a part of an amazing team of New York Times. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You got a couple of them, and around this place. Thank you for doing the interview. I reached out after reading a piece you did recently about President Trump's event welcoming home three men from North Korea who had been

held hostage. And that question of how to manage a hostage situation when you're president of the United States is a very complicated policy debate that I think is worth exploring, but it's particularly worth exploring with you because of your personal experience. You were kidnapped by Taliban forces while reporting in Afghanistan. And the full story, that harrowing story is detailed in your book, a rope and a prayer of the story of a kidnapping. But the book in articles you've written about it, I think brings forward a lot of the complexity of the entire region and the policy debate in the area. So I was hoping to start there. Sure. So you went to Afghanistan to do reporting for a book about, you know, mistakes and missed opportunities in the region

of which you could probably write many books. And you decided admirably, in my opinion, then you need to talk to someone in the Taliban to get their perspective. Just for people listening, How risky and how common is it for reporters to talk to someone in the Taliban or, you know, al-Shabaab or a militant force when there's that risk involved? So this was, you know, several years ago at this point, it was 2008. But at that time, dozens of people had done safe interviews with the Taliban. And I had been careful and not interviewed them. I'd been covering Afghanistan for about seven years. But I felt like for this book, you know, I felt like a wimp that all these other journalists had done it.

And why hadn't I done it? Bad-ass journalists. Well, yes. Carlotta Gall. Correct. Yes. You know, and actually Carlotta, those two had not done interviews with the Taliban, but other people had who I won't name. Right. But I was like, you know, I can do this. I'd had an earlier incident when I covered the war in Bosnia where the Serbs had held me captive for 10 days. And so I hadn't done anything like that for like a decade. So I agreed to go to this one interview. This person's going to be a character for my book. he had done interviews with a French journalist, twice, had done a TV interview with a French journalist, and then a Greek journalist didn't kidnap them. I met the French journalist before I went to my interview,

and she said, I've met this commander twice. I think he's using you to get, you know, their viewpoint across. You know, you are in more dangerous as an American, but, you know, you should be fine. And he grabbed us the next day when we showed him for the interview, took us into the mountains of Pakistan and held us there for seven months. So it sounds like you got sort of basically set up by this guy. I mean, you were with an Afghan journalist named Tahir, isn't that right? Yeah, Tahir Ludin. And a driver named Assad. You drove to meet this guy.

Instead, you were met by these armed gunmen. They drive you for hours into the desert. They stash you in a mud brick home. In those first hours, are you able to listen to the rational side of your brain that thinks back to that conversation about them, they're getting their message out? Or is it just, you know, panic mode? It was panic mode with a little bit of rational thinking. One critical moment was they stop our car, they jump in with guns, Assad, the driver, and Tahir. The journalists get in the back seat with us, and then they take us out in the desert, as you mentioned.

And Tahir is turning to me. The Taliban are screaming at us, who are you, who are you? And at one point Tahir says we should attack them, grab them, try to like, you know, strangle them and fight and somehow regain control of the car. And I remember telling him like, no, you know, I'd been through this before in Bosnia, and then they asked me what my nationality was. And I was debating what to say, and I actually said I was American. I thought it was better to tell the truth because, you know, you can be Googled. Everyone can figure out who you are.

But this was just after, and for listeners, this was just after Barack Obama was elected president. This is late November 2008. And when I told the driver I was American, I remember him grinning broadly. And, you know, and shouting to the other Taliban on the car, you know, he's an American. And then he raised his fist and said, we will send a blood message to Obama. That is just terrifying. It is remarkable. I mean, you talk about this later in the book and in the articles you've written about it.

These guys did Google you. They knew what your brother did for a living. They knew about your family. I mean, it's just kind of amazing to think of a Taliban warlord sitting in Waziristan, like Googling who's with him. But they do. And all these groups are very sophisticated, and this is long before the Islamic State. but, you know, they did the same thing with James Foley and Stephen Sautloff, who were murdered, and the whole dynamic has just gotten worse.

Yeah. So in the vein of turning lemons into lemonade, you learned a lot about your captors. You learned about how the Taliban had changed, the symbiotic relationship between the Pakistani military and the Taliban. Your treatment seemed to very guard by guard, but it did seem like they were all totally indoctrinated with Taliban ideology. What did you take away from how that organization had changed over time and what it told you about the U.S. or the Western NATO's ability to influence their thinking or behavior? So it's virtually impossible to get like hardcore militants to change their views. They were convinced that 9-11 was staged. Here we are sitting in the new World Trade Center.

And that it was simply done by the CIA and the Mossad to create a pretext for the U.S. to occupy Muslim countries. they believe that Afghans were being forcibly converted to Christianity by U.S. soldiers. They believed Afghan women were being forced to work as prostitutes on U.S. military bases. One young guy I met who was training to be a suicide bomber, he was convinced that a Western necktie was a secret symbol of Christianity, that it was sort of a cross. And any Afghan government official that was wearing it had secretly converted to Christianity. So they saw themselves as, like, defending their faith and their,

families from this, you know, international conspiracy to obliterate Islam from the face of the earth. So that was pretty stark. Yeah. Sounds pretty stark. Meanwhile, they give you your blanket options were Hannah Montana, Spider-Man, and Barbie. Yeah, so this is what's so strange and about, you know, even in this corner of, you know, Waziristan, this remote pocket of Pakistan, there's all this Western culture. There were BBC broadcast in English they let me listen to. There was English language news papers that they would let me read. They brought me bottled nestly water that was manufactured in Pakistan and they were somehow able to get it up into these remote areas. So, and there were younger

guards that as the months went by, I mean, the commander said, oh, this guy's a CIA agent and made up all these stories about me. The younger guards sort of saw through that. And there was one guard who heard his mother was sick and he like begged them to go and see his mother. And they said, no, you have to, you know, guard David and the two Afghans. And then his mother passed. away. And he left in a fury saying like, you know, these commanders are frauds. They're criminals. I'm here to fight American soldiers not to waste my time guarding an unarmed American journalist. You know, you're not a spy. So there was, you know, there is, I think, among younger people, a chance you can get them to move, but there also is a hardcore group, to be frank, that you

sort of have to use lethal force against. Yeah. Well, so you mentioned this earlier. I mean, you were taken pretty quickly from Afghanistan to the tribal. regions between Afghanistan and Pakistan, which are semi-autonomous regions that are a hotbed of extremism, drones are omnipresent there. And one night, a drone strike occurred just a few hundred yards from the home you were where you're being held. Can you tell us that story? And did that on the ground perspective change the way you thought about, you know, the efficacy of drone strikes and lethal force? It was they, I mean, my experience of the drone strikes was that they were largely accurate, but they weren't decisive.

So a commander would be killed. The Badriden Haqani, the leader, one of the leaders of the Hakani network, which is a group that held us there. He was killed after I was in captivity in a drone strike, but that my actual kidnapper is still free in operating. So it's a complicated thing, but I do feel like the drone strikes are generally accurate. There are civilians killed, but the broader point is they're not a silver bullet. You know, if you aren't going to send ground troops into this part of Pakistan to somehow push out these people, you're not going to defeat them. It was eerie. They sound sort of like a piper cub, like a small propeller-driven aircraft circling overhead.

When three or four of them would gather, the Taliban guards would sort of freak out because they thought that was a sign that was going to be a strike. And then the one strike you mentioned was extraordinary, just the power of the missile. It hit a car that was driving by the compound we were held in. all of this shrapnel and dirt fell in our compound. It turned out there were four militants in the car. I think they were from Uzbekistan, or maybe they were Arabs. And our guards were furious. And I'm alive today because of Tahir Luddin, who you mentioned.

He kind of, they were talking about killing us that night in revenge, or sorry, it was that day, for this drone strike. And he, Tahir somehow sort of talked them out of it. So it creates this fury also. They see it as cowardly. The Taliban will say, like, why don't the Americans come fight us? on the ground, toe to toe. So it's a long way of saying, again, they are effective, but they're very limited. They don't turn the tide of a war.

Yeah. It's a complicated discussion, but it's also one in Washington that I think it rarely has the full context. Because I think there's a fundamental question of do you think lethal action should be used against individuals in that area? And if that's the case, your options are ground forces, F-16s, drone. And if you're thinking of it that way, a drone that can linger on a tariff, for a long period of time and use a missile with a payload that is small can be more precise.

Now, what people defending drones generally don't talk about is that, sure, there's a high value target. If you have Osama bin Laden in your sites, you can watch that compound for months and then hit it when he's alone. But then there's something called signature strikes, which is if you see 15, 18-year-old guys in a truck heading towards where U.S. troops are and you hit them, you don't know their names. You don't know what they were doing. And that could kill a lot of people who were just caught up with the wrong folks.

And there are civilian deaths. And so I remember Tahrin Assad were taken out by the guards. One strange thing with the paranoia of the drones. So my guards were convinced that the United States was actually trying to kill me in a drone strike. What? They thought that the drones were hunting for me, which they may have been to maybe carry out a rescue raid, but they also believe that the drones wanted to kill me. But the Taliban themselves would take Tahrin Assad.

to these graveyards and point to all the graves and say these are all civilians who have been killed. I think civilians are killed. I think the numbers are more than what the U.S. government says, but less than what the Taliban claims. But again, it's like a propaganda tool they use to recruit young men to join these militant groups saying, look, they're cowards, and then these drones kill civilians. For some reason, the people holding you just lie to you the whole time. It's insane to me.

One lied about his identity. They lied to you that you were going to get released and they take that back. They forced you to lie about your own treatment and videos. It felt like you were negotiating in some ways your own release when you were with them until you just realized like these guys can't be trusted. So you finally decided to escape. Like why did you make that final decision? And can you talk about how you guys ultimately got the hell out of there? Yeah, they lied to us over and over again.

They had these crazy ideas. I mean, they wanted $25 million in cash ransom and I think 10 prisoners released from Guantanamo. And I was like, are you kidding me? I'm like some reporter that came to the Taliban for an interview. We can talk about this later, but, you know, people will be really angry. Like, you're a fool, David Rode. You went to this interview.

Why should the government help you? But they were sort of delusional about what they could get. They lied to me over and over that we were going to be released. And we had kind of thought about escaping, and I'd gotten up in the night at one point and to see if the guards would wake up and they didn't. And then they moved us to this one house that was very close to a local Pakistani military base.

And the simple thing was we'd moved to that house. It was very nice house. It had like a computer and they would sit and play computer like role playing like combat games. It was very strange. Call of Duty type of thing. Yes, it was like a Call of Duty version where they would pretend to be American soldiers.

Really? Yes. And that's again like how it's all mixed together. Yeah. But anyway, I found a rope up on a shelf. There was a bunch of car parts, and it was a car tow rope. And Tahrir and I had a plan to get up when the guards were asleep. Because Tahir had been going outside and sort of walking around the town with the guards, he would, as an Afghan, he didn't stand out like I would have. So the guards went to sleep. We got up, went up on the roof and used this car tow rope to kind of lower ourselves down the roof. He had been out in the town enough that he kind of thought he knew how to get to the Pakistani military base. We sort of found our way there, and we kind of stumbled onto the base. And I remember hearing the sound of a Kalashnikov being loaded, a round being chambered in the rifle, and people screaming at us, and Tahrir screamed, like, to me, don't move. And I thought it was a Taliban, and he actually said, this is the base.

And he had managed to guide us through the night to a little outpost to the base, and we stood there for 20 minutes. We had to take our shirts off. They thought we were suicide bombers. I had this long beard. and luckily a Pakistani Army captain, a moderate, believe this crazy story from this guard post that there was these two people standing there claiming they were an American journalist and an Afghan journalist. He led us on the base and saved our lives.

Thank God. I mean, what's amazing to me about the broader story is that wasn't the first time you guys had seen the Pakistani military, right? I mean, there were times when a convoy would drive by you and you guys would be forced to stay in the car and the leader from the Haqqani group, which is almost more of a, they're an extremist group like the Taliban, right, but they're more mob-like. More mob-like, yeah. It's like a combination of, they have a veneer of they're doing this for, you know, religious reasons or, you know, Afghan nationalism, but they're actually a organized crime syndicate. So they still operate in this part of Pakistan, and you're bringing up this broader lesson. You know, we've, we have failed the United States and Afghanistan for many reasons. And, you know, we tried to maybe change the country too much. Well, we were first distracted by Iraq. You know, second, it was probably too much to think we're going to create a democracy there.

But, you know, a third and vital reason is that Pakistan has given the Taliban a safe haven all of these years. And so no one can win in Afghanistan if their enemy has a safe haven in Pakistan. We use that to defeat the Soviets in the 80s. Situation was reversed. We were, you know, the people in the tribal areas of Pakistan arming these young fighters. and Soviet soldiers were fighting and dying in Afghanistan. So it's a really complex place. I care a lot about Afghanistan.

I have many Afghan friends. But until we can get Pakistan to cooperate and Pakistan to crackdown on the Taliban, you know, we'll never succeed there. Ronan Farrow, a cub reporter, I believe, works here now. He is extraordinary, and I'm lucky and proud to be his editor. He wrote about the challenge of the safe haven in Afghanistan and Pakistan in his book.

That was really well done, but I think you could also say that Syria's got the same problem. So there's Iraq, so of all these places. Anyway, so that brings us back to Joint Base Andrews at 3 a.m. on May 10th, and your article that started with. So we have Trump, we have Pence, we have their wives, they went to the airport in the middle of the night to welcome home, three Americans who had been in North Korea. Is it fair to say that this type of event was unusual? So what was unusual was a president going at 3 a.m.,

and the whole thing is broadcast live on cable. TV. And I was very torn in writing this story. I am incredibly grateful to Donald Trump for the fact that these three prisoners are home. One of them had been held longer than any other American sentenced to like 10 years, hard labor, and it somehow survived for two years. So the fact that these three are home is extraordinary. And I praise the Trump administration for bringing them home. But it was odd, and I talked to other former captives about the publicity around it. And I, you know, it's important to praise the president when he does something right. Definitely. Yeah, I know I'm totally with you.

Like, I have the same struggle. I mean, the broader context is that every president deals with hostage situations. In 1979, 52 Americans are taken hostage in Iran. In 2009, Obama dispatched Bill Clinton to North Korea to bring home to journalists,

Laura Ling and Unilee, who'd been held in captivity in 2012, a journalist named Austin Tice was taken captive in Syria. He still has not been released. People still pray for him and think about him all the time. Part of the reason that these governments or groups like the Taliban take hostages is to gain leverage, right? And to extract something in exchange for their release, which they never should have been taken in the first place. Again, it's obvious to me, too, that Trump cares about getting these people home.

He wouldn't do it if he didn't. But the cynic in me wonders if that's largely because it creates a good news story event. The risk is that he could be incentivizing this kind of activity by making it a focus and making it high-profile. Like, how do you manage that if you're the Trump White House or NSC? It's, look, it's an excruciatingly difficult problem from Jimmy Carter to Barack Obama to Donald Trump. And then I will say this clearly as a former hostage. The foreign policy of the United States cannot be driven by the needs of a person who's been taken prisoner. Like, I sat there in captivity, and it's easy for me to say because I've survived, but I was like,

let the drone strikes continue. Like, it might get me killed, but there's sort of broader goals that a country has to. to achieve. And so can you somehow bring a captive home, you know, without contradicting your broader foreign policy goals? And the danger then about the publicity that surrounds this is that so many people, there's been a pattern, the North Korean government, the Iranian government, arresting American citizens and using them as bargaining chips. You know, I was a bargaining chip the Taliban had. You know, I talked about Jim Foley and Stephen Sautloff earlier, where it's gotten so bad that the Islamic State will just kidnap an American so they can, you know, film their beheading

and use it for propaganda purposes. So the danger of what Trump did is he's sort of signaling to governments and groups. This president really likes to bring hostages home, and you can incentivize it. And it's hard. I mean, I'm good friends with Diane Foley and John Foley, Jim's parents, and they are still haunted by the death of their son. I blame the Islamic State. I think, you know, they did everything they could.

But it's, do you want to give foreign country? and militants, that kind of leverage. Yeah. I mean, we should be clear. These people are taken indiscriminately. It doesn't matter if you're a U.S. Service member or a journalist, someone there trying to end the war. People have been taken and used as propaganda tools over and over again.

I think the question is, how should a government respond? I mean, when you got back, did you go to the White House? Did you go to the Oval Office? How did that feel for you? So I did not meet Barack Obama. I didn't. That's fine. And I felt terrible.

I mean, it was a dumb thing to go interview that Taliban commander. I felt very guilty about what I put my family through, the New York Times, and my editors and friends there were incredible. Through those seven months, they did a huge amount to help me. So I didn't, you know, feel like I deserve to meet the president. And the broad thing, too, is that the United States has a very clear policy, Republicans and Democrats alike. The United States will not pay ransom to a terrorist organization,

and it will not make, like, major concessions to a foreign government. European governments are believed to pay very large ransoms, and that's why European journalists who were held with Jim and Steve survived. They were ransomed. So the Syria cases were very painful example of standing by that policy. So I don't know how you bring them home. I mean, this was a moment with North Korea where the summit was approaching. It was clearly in Kim Jong-un's interest to release these three Americans. It was an easy precondition for the summit for Trump and Pompeo to ask for that to happen. So that's a big success. When Donald Trump pulled the U.S. out of the Iran deal, that essentially doomed. There are seven American citizens and green card holders currently being held in Iran. They'll be held now for months, if not years. Yeah. And you also wrote about how when President Sisi from Egypt came to Washington, he released someone, I believe, before. Yeah, it was, again, it's a deal.

Trump brings Sisi, who has a terrible humanitarian record to the Oval Office. President Obama did not bring C.S. to the White House for that reason. And after the meeting, after Cece gets this nice audience with Trump in the Oval Office, Cici then releases this amazing American aid worker who'd been helping street children in Cairo. She and her husband were accused of child trafficking, of exploiting these kids and sexually abusing them. It was totally trumped-up case. They spent three years in Egyptian jail, never went on trial. She never should have been detained, nor should her husband. but it's a fig leave.

C.C. releases her to Trump after he gets his Oval Office visit. The way the administration, the White House approached managing these cases was far from perfect. People felt like they were sort of threatened out of negotiating with militant groups or paying ransoms to the point where Obama instituted a whole bunch of policy changes that Trump, you write, has, to his credit, kept. Do you think that's something they really thought? about and focused on, or is it just sort of defaulting to the status quo is easier? Well, there's an interesting, you know, problem with the Obama administration face.

So, you know, Beau Bergdell, you know, we escape and several weeks later the Taliban capture Bo Bergdell. And then he is held by the same faction that had me, some of the same kidnappers for five years. And this just briefly, that is Pakistan's fault. There is no way that an American soldiers should have been able to be held on Pakistan's territory for five years. They should have been able to find him. Imagine if an American soldier was held by Iran for five years, but that's back to the blind eye towards Pakistan. Obama famously, you know, did not release prisoners from Guantano, but transferred several Taliban commanders to Qatar, where they are still held in detention there and they have not rejoined the fight in Afghanistan. So when a Democratic president does a deal like

that, he is weak. He's negotiating with terrorists. He's giving concessions. You know, when Trump is making deals. It's sort of praise. So it's a catch-22 that was very difficult, I think, for Obama to deal with. A positive thing, they set up this new hostage recovery fusion cell. It's a joint effort by the FBI and intelligence agencies

and the State Department to try to bring Americans home. Trump, you know, has maintained that office. It does help families. But the issue of like, how do you get Austin Tice out of Syria is just as complicated. There is no sort of easy way to get a regime to release

and innocent American. I mean, I want to talk about Bo Bergdahl a little. So he came home in 2014. As you said earlier, the U.S. sent five Taliban detainees to Qatar, where they're held under house arrests. These are guys who had been in Gitmo for years and years and years. In some cases, were decrepit old men. Obama also held sort of a controversial press event at the time, which some might say,

added to the problems. But I have to say, like, I've never been more wrong about how something would be perceived by the press and the public. Because I worked on that issue for a long time because what would happen is it was part of a broader set of reconciliation talks with the U.S., the Taliban, the Afghans. So of course it leaked, leaked immediately. And getting Bo back was seen as sort of a confidence-building measure to begin a larger set of peace talks, which we need to have happen still to this day. But I always assumed, regardless of why Bo was taken captured, whether he deserted his post or whether he was fell back in a march and was just taken.

I thought that the American people and that politicians would just say, thank God he's home. And I want to caveat that by saying that like if you were a service member who worked with Boe or had to search for him or felt like you lost someone who was patrolling for him, they should say whatever the hell they want. They can hate his fucking guts. I don't care. So right. But Donald Trump would go to campaign rallies and joke about how Bo Bergdahl should be executed.

I mean, an American soldier. So it's, I mean, there's a warning here for, you know, President Trump that you can use, you know, if you try to use bringing a hostage home for sort of political gain, it can backfire on you. I don't think that's what President Obama meant to do or you were involved with this decision of, and it was basically Bo Bergdell's parents came to the, you know, and stood in the Rose Garden with him and said if you, words, and it was turned into a massive political weapon. And it was used very effectively by Trump and Republicans, you know, that Bo was a traitor, Beau should be executed, the Obama administration's weak on terrorism. You know, people still think that these five Taliban commanders are now roaming around Afghanistan. They're not. You know, they're under house arrest. I was surprised as well. I understand the anger of soldiers. You know, he did leave his base voluntarily.

He made a mistake. He then suffered through five years of horrific. Hell. Captivity. But it's how complicated these cases are and I couldn't I didn't write about Bo in the story because he's a soldier and it's different but it's so you know again just as present you know there's some seems to be a pattern of him showing off these captives when he brings them home and it's that can backfire on you and that's sort of what happened in the Burdlchdel case but we've changed as a country I never thought like you that a soldier would be so vilified as he was and and you know he's afraid of living in the United States I have never talked to Bo I talked to his parents for many years years when he was in captivity. I tried to give him advice about how to get him out. But I know from

them, you know, they still get death threats. And, you know, Bo Burtle doesn't feel he can live safely in this country. And it's what's sad is that's how, you know, vicious and polarized our politics have become. Yeah. Blaming the victim in these cases is, I mean, I hear it in your own voice. Well, he made a mistake. I made a mistake. I'm a dumb ass who went off to an interview. It's not your fault. He left his base. He thought he was going to go. He had concerns about what was happening his unit. And he was going to march through the night. He thought he grew up in Idaho. He can get through the mountains and go to a bigger military base and warn more senior commanders about what was going wrong with his unit. And it was a silly decision. He was captured

very quickly. And I made a mistake. He made a mistake. Was five years in captivity enough for him to pay? He still got a court martial proceeding going on against him. But he did become a political football. It's just, I mean, clearly he made a choice to walk off and that ended horribly for him. But you don't hear the same voices criticizing BB Netanyahu for trading, what, I think, a thousand prisoners. A thousand prisoners for Gillette Chalit, who was an Israeli soldier who was taken captive. And he was taken captive in sort of routine duty. So I guess they don't victim shame him the way they do with Bo Bergdahl. But the foreign policy implications of a thousand guys for a soldier and talk about incentivizing their capture.

You know, talk about letting, you know, terrorists into the wild versus five guys who are sitting in a house in Qatar that's probably wired to the gills by every intelligence agent on the planet. So maybe it's a story about the fragility and stupidity of our politics. Part of Trump's success is standing by what he does and exaggerating, you know, what he's achieving or what he's done or how he's, you know, getting the rest of the world to respect us. you know, this just blew up on the Obama administration. I don't know. I don't think there's a better line somehow that the administration could have taken, but I don't, I mean, I'm like all of us, it's a, it's a very strange era and a very polarized era.

And I have relatives that sort of enraged by the whole Bo Bergdahls story, and there's basic facts. Again, they think the five Taliban commanders are back in Afghanistan and they're not. So, again, I just, you can be a hero for helping a hostage, or as a president. or you can be a villain and be, you know, weak. You look at Jimmy Carter if you focus too much on hostages. So it's a very delicate dance that President Trump is involved in now. Or you could be a hackish Republican who criticizes all of the above. One of the, there's this sort of very specific implications in terms of the policy for how you deal with kidnapping for ransom.

But it also worries me that the specter of Bobberg-Dahl and trading the five Taliban guys, seems to have maybe soured Trump on any chance of negotiating a peaceful solution in Afghanistan. Yes. Yeah, and so that's the thing. I mean, it's like my diplomacy is Trump's diplomacy with North Korea is better than anyone else's diplomacy. I mean, it's, and this is where we're so divided politically that it's kind of, when Obama negotiates with the Taliban, it's weakness if a Republican administration does, then it's somehow, you know, negotiating from strength. So it has. I mean, everyone saw the way that deal was used as a political sledgehammer. So it does discourage that.

A broader and more simple question is, you know, should the United States pay ransoms for people taken by militants or criminals? And European nations are definitely paying them. And, you know, Peter Kasig and Caleb Mueller were two other Americans held by the Islamic State. They were, you know, murdered as well. those four families are just heartbroken. They tried to raise money, couldn't raise enough money. People think the American government secretly pays ransoms. They don't.

In every single case I've been known about, and it's a very difficult situation. So Diane Foley is sort of doing research trying to look at, does this U.S. policy of not paying ransoms actually save American lives? Does it lead? You know, you're assuming that the Taliban or Islamic State are rational. They're like, well, I won't take that American because the American. because the American government won't pay me a ransom. Yes. They actually think the American government does pay ransom.

I was in captivity when there was the Navy SEAL raid off of Somalia, and the ship captain was rescued. It became the movie. Captain Phillips. And my kidnapper was like, there was no Navy SEAL raid. The Americans paid $25 million for that captain. And I'm like, you're wrong. But they live in this sort of alternate reality.

So, again, I'm not sort of saying we must pay ransoms and all this stuff. It's just that I've seen, again, how complicated these cases are and how they can blow up in the face of a politician. And it's just, I guess, and what makes me the angriest is these incredibly cynical governments and incredibly, you know, cynical criminals and militants who take innocent people. There are two Americans. Paul Overby is a journalist who the Haqanis have. And Kevin King is a – he was a professor. at American University in Kabul.

He was kidnapped from the streets of Kabul, the capital of Afghanistan, taken, I mean, I left Kabul and went outside the city to meet my Taliban commander. He did nothing wrong. He was on the streets of the country's capital. He was taken by the Haqanis. Both of them have been held now for at least two years.

They're in terrible health. They're in captivity, and I just feel for them and their families. Yeah. I think there's a danger in turning these hostages when they return home into wins was a term that was used that the Trump administration sees bringing a captive home as a win. Because that's where you're using short-term domestic political gain in a dangerous way. You don't want to use that sort of quick boost to the

American public that creates a larger international dynamic that will come back and haunt you. So some might say, oh, it's unseemly that the president went out and, you know, live cable TV coverage. I don't care that it's unseemly. I am concerned that it does raise the value of an American captive and that, you know, whether it's North Korea or Iran or Syria, around the world governments are like, hmm, I'm going to grab an American aid worker, an American professor and jail them, or there are militants who will just grab and kill Americans just because they think it's a way to get at President Trump. You raised a broader sort of policy trap, I think we follow in constantly when dealing with Afghanistan or Pakistan or these militant groups,

which is we think we can apply logic to these policies we're putting in place, which is to say, oh, well, if they know we won't pay a ransom, then it will not be as big of a problem. But, like, how do you get yourself in the mind of a Haqani Network commander who went to a madrasa until he was 11 and only learned propaganda-based training? Right? I mean, it feels fundamentally flawed. You can't.

And then, I mean, look, the only answer to kind of, ending kidnappings in terms of like militant groups is this broader problem of like these giant lawless safe havens that now exist all around the world. I mean, kidnappings in Somalia have slowed down. The African Union mission there backed by the Obama administration has, you know, limited the strength of al-Shabaab and there's less kidnappings in Somalia. The peace deal in Colombia with FARC ended a horrific, horrific pattern of dozens and dozens of kidnappings in Colombia. So this gets back to good old-fashioned diplomacy, good old-fashioned development, law and order, like, you know, local people in these countries, Pakistanis, Colombians, Somalis having a normal life where they're

in a local functioning government, not us, not a long-term, you know, U.S. troop occupation, but slowly working at these problems, you know, solves many things, and they can help reduce the number of kidnappings. And people mock it and we're just going to bomb them and we're going to scare the Haqqani militant into giving up, they want to die. They want to be martyrs. What scares them is slowly working with moderate Pakistanis and Afghans to regain control of these areas, helping them run their own country better. You know, everyone laughs at it. Everybody sneers, but that's the answers. There are moderates in these countries. I'm alive today because an Afghan moderate helped me escape from the Taliban. So it's the long slog. It's the long investment in these countries.

believing in local people, believing that there are moderate Muslims that succeeds, not the kind of quick hit win of, I brought one, you know, captive home. Right. I killed an al-Qaeda number three. Correct, because it's, as I talked about with the drones, it's whack-a-mole. It's just a, you're not winning, you're not losing. It's just this grind status quo. I will very much admit that we, at times, fell into the trap of sort of celebrating the kinetic wins on the battlefield without any broader long-term success.

So my final question for you, You talk about these horrible groups like the Haqqani's and the Taliban that still exist. You talk about the structural problems of the Pakistani military and government and the ISI, their intelligence service being complicit in what they are doing and having ties to these groups. When you look at Afghanistan and Pakistan, a region you've been covering since 2001, do you think there's any sense that things on the ground now are better than they were previously, that might lead us to getting the hell out of there or at least leaving the country better

than when we found it. No, it's worse. And the death toll is, I think last year, something like 15, maybe 20 American soldiers died in Afghanistan. It's because we have a very small troop presence now. And during the same period,

I believe 8,000 Afghan soldiers and police died fighting the Taliban. And there was at least several thousand civilians, Afghan civilians dying. So the approach now, which is a very small American force, maybe 10,000. It's not enough to win the war, but there's enough Americans to kind of not lose the war. And so there is this pointless policy now

of just hanging on in Afghanistan. We should either pull out or, you know, send in more troops or negotiate, and we're not doing either. It's just the status quo. And I will, you know, the one soapbox I'll get on is I just think, you know, look, the Arab Spring, it's incredibly complicated

in the Middle East. The majority of young people in these countries want to live, you know, be very proud of being Muslims, but they want to be modern as well. And there is a way to engage with this region slowly and patiently to help them deal with

the civil war that is going on in the Islamic world between, you know, horrific extremism in the Islamic State and the many, many people that oppose that. The Trump administration has decided to back generals and, you know, Saudi autocrats and sell them a lot of weapons and that's going to do it. I don't think it's going to work. The Obama administration, I think, tried to sort of engage less in the region militarily.

I've said for years there's some middle ground. I don't know where it is, but I think that I just, it's frustrating to me when it's portrayed as they all hate us. Yeah. They don't. Or it's portrayed as we're just going to leave and the problem's going to go away. Right. So we need to stay at this and kind of listen to local people more and be more patient and make them. help them deal with these challenges. And again, I'm biased. My Afghan moderate friends save my life, but they're out there. Yeah, yeah.

David, thank you for talking to me. If folks want to hear the rest of this story, you should buy a rope and a prayer, the story of a kidnapping, or just go to the New Yorker.com. Maybe subscribe, pay for journalism. That's a good way to do it, too. Pay for journalism.

I'm a full supporter of that. We need your help. We make many mistakes, but we're trying the best we can. You're doing a great job. Thank you again. Thank you. Thank you.