Ever since the botched withdrawal from Afghanistan last August and the complete takeover of the country by the Taliban, the terror group has been working toward a number of goals to cement its legitimacy as the recognized government of the country. The group would also like to see all of the assets of the former, legitimate government unfrozen for their use. Those desires have largely gone unfulfilled, with the UN and many countries saying they will wait and judge the Taliban by their actions and not their words. (Two of the notable exceptions are China and Russia, of course, who are looking to leverage their positions in the country.) But is the White House getting ready to blink and roll out the red carpet for the Taliban? We may have gotten a hint about that yesterday when Joe Biden announced that the Taliban does have something we want, and perhaps there might be some room for bargaining. Biden wants Mark Frerichs, a government contractor and Navy veteran who was taken hostage in 2020 to be released. But what are we willing to offer in return? (Associated Press)

President Joe Biden on Sunday called for the release of U.S. Navy veteran Mark Frerichs, who was taken hostage in Afghanistan nearly two years ago.

Frerichs, a civil engineer and contractor from Lombard, Illinois, was kidnapped in January 2020 from the capital of Kabul. He is believed to be in the custody of the Taliban-linked Haqqani network.

“Threatening the safety of Americans or any innocent civilians is always unacceptable, and hostage-taking is an act of particular cruelty and cowardice,” President Joe Biden said in a statement to mark the second anniversary of the kidnapping on Monday. “The Taliban must immediately release Mark before it can expect any consideration of its aspirations for legitimacy. This is not negotiable.”

This isn’t a case where a concrete “deal” was being offered in public, but it wasn’t far off. I’m going to grant Joe Biden the benefit of the doubt here and assume that this was a prepared written statement and not some off-the-cuff gaffe. The President didn’t simply demand the release of a hostage. He’s the one who agreed to toss in a mention of the Taliban’s “aspirations for legitimacy” when demanding Frerichs’ release.

Surely this topic must have come up during the seven months of secret negotiations between the United States and the Taliban, right? The problem is that the public has no idea about the situation. I know I’ve brought this up here in the past, but I’ll keep beating this dead horse for as long as it’s required. Biden has had American negotiators talking to the Taliban’s “political arm” in Dubai, Kabul, and other places since at least last June, and we are never told what takes place in those meetings. The entire thing is being handled in secret by “the most transparent administration ever.”

Could we really be on the verge of giving the Taliban the international recognition they crave and huge piles of money? And would we do it just because they agreed to release a single hostage that they shouldn’t have been holding to begin with? Sure, the Taliban can try to claim that Frerich is actually being held by the Haqqani network, but that’s a preposterous smoke screen. Sirajuddin Haqqani (who is still on the FBI’s list of the top ten most wanted terrorists) is currently the Interior Minister of Afghanistan. If the Taliban wanted the hostage to be released it could be done in a matter of hours.

Unfortunately, we don’t have a lot of room to be issuing demands about the unacceptable nature of countries taking hostages these days. Turkey has held a number of Americans as hostages over the past several years and they’re still a member of NATO. And we’ve tolerated a lot of bad behavior from some of our other supposed allies as well.

I would very much like to see Mark Frerichs returned to his family. Of course, I would like to see all of the people who were left behind in Afghanistan safely removed from the country. And I’d love to see the Taliban start behaving like rational human beings. We can’t always get what we wish for. I just hope that Team Biden isn’t on the verge of handing yet another huge gift to the Taliban (on top of all the weapons and everything else we left for them) without getting anything close to a proportional concession from them in return.