Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl, imprisoned by Taliban in Afghanistan since 2009, is freed

[anvi]

Now right-wing media guys are going after the parents, too?  Bergdahl's parents are Presbyterian, and the father probably learned Pashto so he could understand and communicate with the people who captured his son.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/for-father-of-released-pow-growing-a-beard-and-studying-captors-defined-the-years/2014/06/02/d8de9fcc-ea93-11e3-93d2-edd4be1f5d9e_story.html

As was asked above, if the soldiers in Bergdahl's unit thought he was showing signs of wanting to leave, as they have said in interviews, why didn't they inform commanding officers about it at the time?  It's terrible that men lost their lives looking for him, but that's part of a soldier's duties, they were under orders.

Anyway, even if Bergdahl did bail on his unit, he was probably f-ed up by his experience of the war, a war which, by that time was eight years old and having rapidly diminishing returns and now is thirteen years old.  Does that mean he doesn't deserve to live?  The war is rapidly ending for us, the prisoners who were released in exchange for him, who were Taliban government officials and not al Qaeda members, probably have next to no intelligence value to us anymore; they were captured the first week of the Afghan war and have been out of the field since.  Unless you're going to eliminate every living Taliban fighter, which we haven't done in 13 years and couldn't do in another 13, some bad guys are still going to be running around and causing the Afghan government and us trouble.  It's a dangerous world, tough.  If we're getting out of there anyway, and it's about damned time, maybe we should save a few lives while we're at it.

[anvi]

Well, in my opinion, we should be at the "cutting our losses and salvaging what we can" stage of the Afghanistan war.  That includes prisoner swaps.  If we want to dig in and eliminate the Taliban, then we can be upset about this--and on top of it, we should at least triple our 2009 force-strength in Afghanistan. If we're done, we should be done, and should be doing the things that people and nations do when they decamp--settle up, no matter how messy it is, and move on.

Of course I'm not an expert on any of this stuff.  Few on Atlas would be interested in reading what I am an expert on, unless there is some huge, silent horde of you here who are fascinated by Sanskrit verb conjugations.  Anyway, I'm just writing what I think.  This is a political discussion forum, so I had the vague impression that voicing opinions was the protocol.

Anyway, you see, there are plenty of targets to shoot at, the Obama administration for failing to consult, military representatives for failing to disclose the nature of missions to soldiers' families (happens with some frequency, actually) and a military investigation of a possible case of desertion.  And of course there is the eternal question of whether or not Obama should be psychoanalyzed and then fried by true patriots for telling foreign audiences that he thinks America has made mistakes, but continuing to drop drone bombs on them.  So many things to sit in front of television and computer to be outraged about, so many snarky lines of denunciation to quote, for years on end.  Hey, if we're giving up in Afghanistan and Iraq, at least we have one another to fight with over politics and law, forever.  Isn't it grand?

But, again in my non-expert opinion, going after Bergdah's dad for doing everything he could to try and save his son's life is both low and stupid.