Hostages Held to Dumb Ideology

LOS ANGELES _ It is the useful, results-oriented, down-to-earth philosophy known as pragmatism that tends to reveal America at its best.

A protester participates in a recent anti-war rally in Seoul demanding the safe return of South Koreans kidnapped in Afghanistan and the withdrawal of South Korean troops stationed there. / AP-Yonhap

By Tom Plate
Professor at University of California, LA
Director of Asia Pacific Media Network

LOS ANGELES _ It is the useful, results-oriented, down-to-earth philosophy known as pragmatism that tends to reveal America at its best.

Rather than hiding behind the skirt of airy ideology for fear of facing reality, pragmatism takes the world as we find it and proposes to work with it in a useful way.

William James, the great American philosopher, was perhaps our most famous modern proponent of pragmatism. His ideas were a gift to the world, as well. From him we are inspired to understand that little gets done unless you actually try to do it. Obviously.

Instead of standing on ideological ceremony _ of whatever political, religious or ethnic justification _ we are almost always better off trying to work things out, not just with those with whom we agree but far more importantly with those with whom we do not.

A great contemporary example of abstract principle getting in the way of real-world needs is the hostage crisis in Afghanistan. The fact is that the world _ and the Bush administration especially _ is not trying to do enough about those Korean hostages who at this writing are still in Taliban hands in Afghanistan.

Sure, anguish and hand-ringing there is plenty of; there is also far too much ideological posturing. We will never negotiate with terrorists, say Washington and Kabul. How principled!

But is that always the right policy? The British government repeatedly negotiated with representatives of the Irish Republican Army in order to achieve peace. They were not exactly patsies on Irish terrorism.

And consider how the West eventually negotiated with one of the greatest evils of them all _ Pol Pot and his Khmer Rouge state-terrorists _ to end the carnage in Cambodia.

And if we never negotiate with terrorists of any kind, then why did the United Nations negotiate with the craven central government in Khartoum so it could dispatch U.N. troops to Sudan to save lives?

Sometimes standing on your principles leads to the worst consequences. The theory of not negotiating with terrorists is based on the sappy assumption that by negotiating you only encourage them. The truth is that terrorists don’t need encouragement from us. They manage to get all fired up all on their own.

The government of South Korea and many of the people of that country are angry with the United States right now. Having contributed a small troop force a few years ago to Iraq, they hoped Washington would do more than reiterate the no-talk-to-terrorists mantra and get more involved, pull more strings _ and try to save those Korean lives before it is too late.

Earlier this week, the brutish Taliban kidnappers proposed swapping them for female Taliban prisoners held by the Afghans and the Americans.

That sounds like a fair trade to me _ and time may be of the essence. Two male workers, of the 23 Korean captives, have already been executed.

If nothing is done and the hostages die, Koreans may well come to feel that the U.S. considers South Korea less a true equal partner and more as a geopolitical subsidiary.

Why? It’s becoming an old story. Consider the recent agreement of North Korea to accept the need for nuclear disarmament in return for desperately needed aid. It took six years to get this deal done, not only because of North Korean posturing but because of U.S. posturing as well.

As part of President Bush’s ``axis of evil,” North Korea was deemed unworthy of a U.S. negotiating effort. But without face-to-face U.S.-North Korean negotiation, nothing was going to happen.

This is precisely what the Chinese, what the Russians, what the South Koreans and what, of course, the North Koreans had been saying _ for years. Even the Japanese, for all their hard-line mentality about the North, had seen their prime minister travel to Pyongyang to negotiate the mystery of disappeared Japanese nationals _ twice, in fact.

But the more the U.S. refused to face the North Koreans directly, the more the talks stalled. Similarly, those Korean hostages come closer to death each day that Kabul and Washington live by the misguided mantra of refusing to negotiate.

``People talk about the conscience, but it seems to me one must just bring it up to a certain point and leave it there,” said William James. Another way to put this is to suggest that if you do not on occasion rise above your principles, you can wind up falling on your face _ and taking others down with you.

The Bush administration should do the prisoner exchange, and get those well-meaning but naive South Korean missionaries out of there before it is too late. The deal won’t encourage the bad guys, and it will save some good guys.

Negotiating with them is the right thing to do, the humanitarian thing to do, and the pragmatic thing to do. Once again, the world is asking the United States to stop horsing around by getting off its high moral horse.

platecolumn@hotmail.com

UCLA adjunct professor Tom Plate, a veteran journalist, is a syndicated columnist. His column appears in a number of world cities, from Providence Rhode Island, to Seoul, South Korea. His new book is ``Confessions of an American Media Man.”