This is the fifth in a series of posts about Serial 2, a podcast focused on the war in Afghanistan. It centered around Bowe Bergdahl, and I wrote responses to the podcast for my first semester International Relations major-required course, Introduction to World Politics. We learned about the international state system, and challenges to international politics today.
In Serial 2’s fifth episode, narrator Sarah Koenig tries to make sense the entangled and frustrating process to try to bring Bowe back to the U.S., but the finished product seems to obscure more than it enlightens. The episode seems to show how impossible the situation was: Pakistan is friendly, the Haqqanis and Taliban are terrorists, Bowe is an enlisted solider.
When Bowe goes missing, Kim Harrison, Bowe’s emergency contact, files a missing persons report of Bowe in Portland, Oregon, hoping to trigger police and Interpol attention to Bowe’s case, but the Department of Defense (DoD) denies permission. A DoD official states that the FBI, CIA and DoD are already working on the investigation. CENTCOM’s (U.S. Central Command) personnel recovery office had no plan for recovering missing persons in Afghanistan, or ground team there to help the remote Tampa, Florida office. Then again, from all accounts Bowe was the first case like this in Afghanistan. Why were the protocols followed in Iraq not set up in Afghanistan?
On the US side, I feel that the CENTCOM office and Kim were the main actors trying to get Bowe back. The office kept trying, even when the agencies let leads fall, and Kim had the successful Taliban contact, with accurate information about Bowe’s whereabouts. While the three letter agencies all have personnel recovery aspects, the CIA in particular headed U.S. actions in Pakistan, but they do not figure very heavily in Koenig’s reporting. Despite what should be a clear demarcation of who does what, given the difficulties of U.S. activity in Pakistan around 2011 and the inability to decide on a course of action by any involved party, the listener begins feel like the U.S.’ has endless bureaucracy clouding Bowe’s case without someone really in charge of it all.
One of the major obstacles is the fact that the Taliban contact had eight family members to bring to the U.S., and would need to taken care of indefinitely. Nobody wanted the responsibility, not the the FBI or the CIA or the DoD. The DoD apparently spent two years asking the CIA for drones to find Bowe, and was denied. And according to the analyst Koenig interviewed, “CENTCOM deferring to SOCOM [the United States’ Special Operations Command], SOCOM deferring to the State Department, and the State Department really just deferring to DoD.” Was there a line drawn about how far the U.S. would go to recover Bowe? At what point was diplomacy the only option, and why was Kim’s lead not considered more heavily?
Other people, including Bowe’s family were encouraged unofficially to put pressure on the U.S. government to get Bowe home. Bowe’s father made a video, directed at the government of Pakistan and the national army, where he thanks the Taliban and Haqqanis for “sheltering your American prisoner.” He pleads in a monotone voice, appealing to Pakistan on the basis of the unique situation of his family and his son. I think that families of captives should be kept up in the process of negotiations, and can help bring about a return, but that negotiations should ultimately be up to states to determine the logistics of returning them. In the video, Bowe’s father appeals to God and the suffering of both Pakistan and Bowe. On the topic of families participating in paying ransom, I do not think that the family of the victim should pay ransom because it is the government’s responsibility to protect its citizens. I feel that even if a family does so, it should not be a crime, and there should be no penalty.
During the episode, I continued to reflect on how people who enlist in the military do not exactly know what they are signing up for, and that Bowe’s family had few options but to make the video to help him return. Mainly, I came away with the sense that there was inscrutable disorganization clouding Bowe’s case, especially because of how Bowe was labelled a ‘traitor’ by the U.S. organizations tasked with him, all lacking the motivation to actively lead a return.
