One of the perils of working in or even travelling to the Middle East and Central Asia is that there is a high risk of being taken hostage by autocratic states or terrorist groups. Peter Reynolds, 79, and Barbie, his 75-year-old wife, are the latest Brits to find this out the hard way. The couple, who have been running projects in Afghanistan for 18 years, were detained by the Taliban in Afghanistan on 1 February. Their children have heard nothing from them for a fortnight.
The grim reality is that they might be left languishing as hostages for some time. A former colleague of mine at the New Lines Institute, Elizabeth Tsurkov, has been a hostage of either the Iranian regime or a proxy force of that regime for over 700 days. Elizabeth is a tremendous professional and one of the world’s great scholars. It is an outrage that the Iranian regime kidnapped her and continues to hold her hostage. Stories like Elizabeth’s, and the Reynolds’, are depressingly common.
The British state ought to let it be widely known that this practice will now end
The Reynolds, who have lived in Afghanistan for some time, are not holidaymakers. And it seems clear that they have done some good for the country’s people. My heart bleeds for them. It really does. But the British government should spend not a single pound, not a single official’s time, on rescuing Brits like this abroad. Those who elected to stay on after the fall of the legitimate, internationally-recognised Afghan government, despite knowing that the two powers left in the country were the Taliban and Isis, surely knew the risks of staying put. It’s not the state’s job to save them from the clutches of the Taliban.
I’m an analyst of some fairly dangerous countries, mostly in the Middle East. When friends of mine announce their intention to travel for fun to hostage-taking counties, or places where there is a lot of kidnapping for ransom (North Korea, Russia, China, Iran, Iraq, Libya and so on), they sometimes ask me for my thoughts: I tell them not to go. And I say also that if they are taken hostage while out there – something that is not unlikely – I will personally go on TV or radio, speaking as a friend of theirs, and tell the public that the government should not help them.
I will say, if called upon, that they knew what they were doing and went in defiance of good and sensible advice. These people tend to go anyway, however. They don’t ask for advice so much as glory in their bad choices. They do this because they are deluded about the risks (the world is filled with Westerners who truly believe the world is their playground and that everyone will be glad to see them wherever they go and that ‘nothing like that could ever happen to me’). They go also because they believe deep down that the British state will bail them out – to the tune of hundreds of millions if necessary – if they are taken hostage.
Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe was held by Iran quite explicitly because it demanded hundreds of millions of dollars from the British state. This was an overdue refund on some tanks ordered by the Shah before 1979, Iran said. Iran is so lawless and corrupt that it believes this is how you do business. Britain is so spineless that its leaders keep proving this to be true – and eventually, although the state officially denies this, it paid out.
This practice of hostage taking in exchange for money is evil and pernicious. But the problem with the British state paying up is that, as those who coughed up the Danegeld found out, it doesn’t make the problem go away: it means that they keep coming back for more. It incentivises hostage-taking and guarantees that more people will be kidnapped.
The British state ought to let it be widely known that this practice will now end. That it will leave people in those places if they defy Foreign Office advice and risk their safety in such an obvious way.
Terrorist groups like the Islamic State and the Taliban routinely take hostages. Armed groups that are not technically international terrorists do it, too. To put yourself in a position to be taken hostage by these people is to fund their war efforts, to hand them chips in the poker game of power.
It’s an open secret that Isis was funded significantly in its early days by taking hostages. Hostage-taking was a common tactic in the Syrian civil war. European governments actively rewarded and justified the practice by paying out enormous sums of money. The Iranian state secures sanctions relief and pallets of cash because it takes hostages as often as it does. This is what the Taliban now likely wants to do at the expense of Peter and Barbie Reynolds. Britain must make it known that it will no longer be extorted in this way.
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