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Kurt Wallace: This is Kurt Wallace and our guest today on Rare is terrorism analyst Max Abrahms. He’s a professor at Northeastern University and a member of the Council on Foriegn Relations and Max, thanks for being with us today on Rare.
Max Abrahms: Happy to be with you.
Kurt Wallace: Max there’s so many different angles to what’s happening with this swap that happened over the weekend. Five Guantanamo Bay detainees swapped for U.S. Army Sgt. Bergdahl with Taliban. His family has been asking the U.S. to do what they can to bring the soldier home and they did. His father said in a press conference with President Obama that this is a complicated nature of a recovery which will never really be comprehended. What does he mean by that?
Max Abrahms: Well, I think that there are a lot of outstanding questions. The situation at this point is still a little fluid and murky. For example, we do not know how Bergdahl ended up from being an active U.S. soldier in Afghanistan to falling into the hands of the Taliban al-Qaeda network. So, basically in exchange for him Obama suggested releasing five Taliban fighters but they will not be returned directly to the Taliban, rather they’ll go through an intermediary country. They’ll go through Qatar and Qatar has promised basically to keep an eye on these five militants to limit their travel, to make sure they don’t leave the country for at least a year. But honestly, what exactly happens to these militants in that country is very hard to say. So, those are just two examples of the murkiness of this situation.
Kurt Wallace: Now one side says we’re trading five high risk detainees for one US soldier who has as you were kind of alluding to, there’s some questions around what happened to him? There are reports that he allegedly abandoned his post after being disillusioned by the war. What are your thoughts on this?
Max Abrahms: Well, the evidence I’ve seen so far is that he really wasn’t the most loyal U.S. soldier. Whether or not he intentionally gave himself up. There is a paper trail suggesting that yes you’re quite right that he was disillusioned with the counter-insurgency in Afghanistan. He made some borderline or not even borderline unpatriotic comments about the United States. And so, he’s not exactly the kind of person you’d expect the president to really get behind. And so I think there are a lot of misgivings about the price that we’re paying to get this guy back given his history and the fact that we’re exchanging five high level militants. On that there is really no dispute. Yet there are questions over Bergdahl’s loyalty and the circumstances that he left the U.S. military. But there really is no doubt that because we have the names of these people, of these Taliban detainees, that are being released. It’s unquestionable that they were very high level, that they are very violent, that they are anti-U.S. and that they’re exactly the kinds of people that we would expect to have at Gitmo.
Kurt Wallace: Now Congress has been requiring that any kind of trade like this, that they would be notified and this is a law but Obama basically said that, in an abuse of power, that on his part, he can do what he wants. He set a precedent with an executive order?
Max Abrahms: Yeah, you know the entire relationship between the U.S. and Congress over foreign policy as you know and your listeners know is also really quite murky. The framers of the Constitution understood that there should be some kind of a balance of power between the executive and the legislative branches and that’s why of course the executive is the commander and chief and Congress has the power of the purse in terms of declaring war and sending in troops for any length of time. And yet that relationship has sort of changed over time where power seems to have been usurped by the executive branch.
So, what Obama did in sort of excluding Congress maybe be inconsistent with the spirit of what the framers intended in close cooperation with Congress, but it’s actually the norm in terms of the current direction of foreign policy. So, a good example of that would be like the drone campaign, which largely came out of the executive with little congressional approval. And so, more and more we’re seeing see this isn’t specific to Obama in his defense this is the direction of foreign policy over the last 50 years or so.
Kurt Wallace: Now, Bush had set a precedent that we don’t negotiate with terrorists after 9/11. Are they really five high risk detainees that are being released? And is this the right thing to do for Obama?
Max Abrahms: Well the rhetorical position of pretty much every government in the world is that they will not negotiate with terrorists and the fear, of course, is that if you negotiate with terrorists governments will provide utility to terrorism, which will incentivize exactly the kind of behavior which we’re trying to avoid. In practice though, it’s a little bit more complicated though. Most governments do at least consider negotiating with terrorists.
Now terrorists have all different kinds of demands. Sometimes they have very large strategic demands. For example Boko Haram and other Islamic groups they call for governments to accept Sharia law. These are large expansive strategic demands which governments almost never actually accommodate. Terrorists groups though have other kinds of demands. Sometimes called redemptive demands to build up the capacity of the terrorist organization, and so examples of redemptive demands would be exactly the kind that we’re seeing here with Bergdahl, that the group wants the release from the government of militants so that they’re able to return to the militant group. Or the militant group might ask for other kinds of small demands like financial compensation.
Naturally the smaller the demand, the more likely it is for government to accommodate that. So when the Taliban asks for prisoner releases the U.S. is much more likely to go along, than say, for the U.S. to adopt Sharia law or other large kinds of concessions. In practice, many governments do negotiate over these smaller kinds of demands like prisoner releases or money rather than making large political concessions though to the militant group.
Kurt Wallace: Now Obama had promised before he was elected in 2008 that he was going to close Gitmo and I see it kind of ironic that he never did and now he’s using these detainees as sort of like baseball cards to trade. Is this how he’s planning to close Gitmo now?
Max Abrahms: Well, you’re quite right. I think that Obama campaign on closing Gitmo and then when he came to office it became clear that closing Gitmo really wasn’t as easy as he made it sound. And I think that over time since 9/11 and the creation of Gitmo we now have hundreds and hundreds of former detainees who have been released back to the public or with restrictions on them.
And I think that as the counter-insurgency campaign in Afghanistan comes to an end the position of Gitmo will be called increasingly into doubt and I do expect the Obama administration to try to sort of wash its hands of this kind of legal ambiguity and this normative criticism called Gitmo. Finding ways to release these detainees. So I do expect to see more of this.
I am not very confident about the security implications of releasing these detainees. Now, it is true that some of them are you know maybe shouldn’t be there. They’re not actually violent offenders and they may not have a propensity to turn against the US upon release but the recidivism rate although disputed are alarming. So, the Pentagon has released numbers suggesting that about 30 percent of all Gitmo detainees released back to the public have returned to terrorism or what they call terrorist activity. So, that’s about one out of three which seems rather high to me. And certainly when you look at the background of these particular militants, they are clearly on the more dangerous end of the spectrum. All five of them were classified as a high security risk to the United States.
Kurt Wallace: Max Abrahms professor at Northeastern University, thanks for being with us today on Rare.
Max Abrahms: My pleasure. Any time.