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The Illusion of a Hostage Policy

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"Hostages taken today may nominally be victims of a single group, but they are caught up more fundamentally in a dysfunctional region-wide configuration. To end the broader problem will require brokering among leaders from Lebanon to Pakistan about the future of the region, both politically and physically," writes Robin Wright.

Earlier today, the Islamic State posted a twenty-two-minute video online that shows a young Jordanian pilot, Moaz al-Kasasbeh, being burned alive in a cage. Kasasbeh’s F-16 went down over northern Syria on December 24th, and he was the first member of the U.S.-led coalition to be captured by ISIS. Over the past week, Jordan attempted to obtain his release by offering to exchange a woman on death row whose suicide vest had failed to explode at a wedding in 2005. (Her husband’s bomb did detonate, and thirty-eight members of the bridal party were killed.)

Negotiations stalled when ISIS failed to provide proof that the pilot was alive. Today, Jordanian television reported that Kasasbeh was probably killed a month ago.

President Obama, who is reviewing U.S. hostage policy, said that Kasasbeh’s death proved the “barbarity of this organization,” and added, “I think it will redouble the vigilance and determination on the part of the global coalition to make sure that they are degraded and ultimately defeated.”

Obama faces his own conundrum in what is probably the opening stage of a long war against not only ISIS but also Al Qaeda’s many franchises on three continents. American pilots have carried out the majority of the bombing runs—now more than two thousand—over Syria and Iraq. ISIS claims that it brought Kasasbeh’s plane down with a heat-seeking missile, and there are believed to be many more of them.

Hundreds of Americans are also deeply engaged in aid and humanitarian missions for Syria and Iraq or are covering the war as journalists. Since August, ISIS has beheaded two American journalists—James Foley and Steven Sotloff—and the aid worker Abdul-Rahman Peter Kassig. It still holds a young female American aid worker.

There are other American hostages, too, largely in the Middle East and South Central Asia. The exact number, their locations, and their captors are classified for the security of the hostages, the State Department told me Tuesday. Not all have been publicly identified.

The United States has arguably never had a viable hostage policy. In the Republic’s earliest days, after Barbary pirates seized American sailors off merchant ships Congress willingly paid for their release. In the late eighteenth century, the American government gave the Dey of Algiers almost a million dollars—roughly a sixth of the annual U.S. budget at the time—and a thirty-six-gun frigate to win the freedom of more than a hundred sailors seized off a dozen American ships. Some had been held for years.

But the demands didn’t stop. The military ruler of Tripoli seized more than three hundred American sailors, and demanded a ship and two hundred thousand dollars in cash. President Jefferson ultimately opted for war. (The phrase “to the shores of Tripoli,” in the “Marines’ Hymn,” refers to the First Barbary War, in 1805.) But hostage-taking by the Barbary corsairs didn’t end for another decade.

Officially, U.S. policy is not to pay ransom. The 1949 Geneva Convention made it a war crime to seize hostages. The 1979 International Convention Against the Taking of Hostages, prompted by Iran’s seizure of the U.S. Embassy and fifty-two Americans, mandates punishment of hostage-takers. But the Islamic State and Al Qaeda are not states. Rules that might cover prisoners of war, such as the Jordanian pilot, do not apply.

In reality, several countries, including allies of the United States, quietly pay in cash or kind to get their citizens released. ISIS has released Italian, Danish, French, German, Spanish, Belgian, Swiss, and Peruvian hostages for ransoms, the Times reported this week. Turkey has acknowledged dealings to free forty-nine diplomats and their families taken by ISIS last June.

The United States has often strayed from its own policy as well. The Carter Administration brokered a financial arrangement with Tehran—allowing international adjudication of Iranian assets frozen by Washington—in exchange for release of Americans. In the mid-nineteen-eighties, the Reagan Administration gave more than fifteen hundred missiles to Iran in exchange for the release of three Americans held by Hezbollah in Lebanon. Hezbollah subsequently went out and picked up three more Americans in Beirut.

The United States has also allowed other nations to broker hostage releases. In 2009, three young Americans working in Iraqi Kurdistan were detained by an Iranian border patrol as they hiked along the border. One of them, Sarah Shourd, was held for fourteen months before she was released, on medical grounds, after the government of Oman reportedly assumed her half-million-dollar “bail.” The other two, Shane Bauer and Joshua Fattal, were tried for espionage and sentenced to eight years. They were held in the notorious Evin Prison for seven hundred and eighty-one days, until the Sultanate of Oman paid almost a million dollars in “bail” money to get them out of Iran.

Washington sometimes cedes in clout if not in cash. In 2009, Kim Jong Il won the international attention he sought when former President Bill Clinton flew to Pyongyang to win the release of two American journalists, Laura Ling and Euna Lee, who had been captured as they filmed a documentary along the border with China; they were sentenced to twelve years’ hard labor. The Obama Administration insisted that Clinton was on a “private humanitarian mission.”

Just a month earlier, Hillary Clinton, as Secretary of State, had chastised North Korea for having “no friends” and for being “unruly.” She told ABC News, “What we’ve seen is this constant demand for attention. Don’t give it to them, they don’t deserve it, they are acting out.” After Bill Clinton left North Korea, its news agency said that he had “expressed words of sincere apology to Kim Jong Il for the hostile acts committed by the two American journalists. Clinton courteously conveyed to Kim Jong Il an earnest request of the U.S. government to leniently pardon them.”

Since ancient times, the dilemma for any government has been whether to pay ransom or cede policy in some form. The former Associated Press correspondent Terry Anderson, who was held hostage by Hezbollah in Beirut for seven years, often chained to a radiator, is firmly opposed to paying off the captors. “All you’re doing is creating a market for hostages,” he told me on Monday. “On the other hand, the U.S. has refused to talk with anybody—not even negotiate—since Reagan got his fingers burned,” Anderson said, referring to the Iran-Contra scandal of the nineteen-eighties. “That’s not a valid policy either. That’s just sticking your head in the sand and hoping the problem goes away. That’s very hard on the families. We’ve got to understand that not paying ransom does not mean not trying to find other ways to do it.”

The Obama Administration’s new policy, an initiative led by the National Counterterrorism Center, is expected to be finalized sometime this spring, according to a National Security Council spokesman, Alistair Baskey. The center has solicited feedback from more than eighty former hostages and their family members.

Giandomenico Picco, the former U.N. hostage negotiator who won freedom for Anderson and dozens of other Westerners held in Beirut, says that the policy challenge today is more complicated than simply dealing with extremists or rogue governments. “The tactics I used in the nineteen-eighties and early nineties don’t apply now,” he told me. Hostages taken today may nominally be victims of a single group, but they are caught up more fundamentally in a dysfunctional region-wide configuration. To end the broader problem will require brokering among leaders from Lebanon to Pakistan about the future of the region, both politically and physically.

“It’s a little bit naïve to have one policy on hostages from Colombia to Syria,” Picco said. “There’s no one formula that fits all. It’s an illusion.”

The opinions expressed here are solely those of the author.

This article was originally published in The New Yorker.

About the Author

Robin Wright image

Robin Wright

USIP-Wilson Center Distinguished Fellow;
Author and columnist for The New Yorker
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Middle East Program

The Wilson Center’s Middle East Program serves as a crucial resource for the policymaking community and beyond, providing analyses and research that helps inform U.S. foreign policymaking, stimulates public debate, and expands knowledge about issues in the wider Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region.  Read more