Taliban Kidnap 18 South Koreans in Afghanistan

They were members of a church group, and readers may recall other church groups  from South Korea have also ventured into some very dangerous places.

Taliban gunmen abducted at least 18 members of a South Korean church group in southern Afghanistan, and a purported spokesman for the Islamic militia said Friday it will question them about their activities in Afghanistan before deciding their fate.

The Koreans were seized Thursday in Ghazni province as they were traveling by bus from Kabul to the southern city of Kandahar, said Ali Shah Ahmadzai, the provincial police chief.

“We are investigating, who are they, what are they doing in Afghanistan,” Qari Yousuf Ahmadi, a purported Taliban spokesman, told The Associated Press by satellite telephone. “After our investigation, the Taliban higher authorities will make a decision about their fate. Right now they are safe and sound.”

The South Koreans’ bus driver, released late Thursday, said there were 18 women and five men on the bus, Ahmadzai said. The Taliban spokesman said 15 women and three men were seized. The discrepancy could not be immediately clarified.  [AP, Amir Shah]

Let’s all hope these people get home safely, so we can ask them what the hell they were doing there.

See also:  

*   Would the Muslim world be so tense if this fatwa had gained wider acceptance?

Many Muslims believe that unmarried men and women should not work alone together–a stricture that can pose problems in today’s global economy. So one Islamic scholar came up with a novel solution: If a woman were to breast-feed her male colleague five times, the two could safely be alone together. “A woman at work can take off the veil or reveal her hair in front of someone whom she breast-fed,” he wrote in an opinion issued in May 2007.  [Foreign Policy]

I don’t really know if I want to touch that one, beyond imagining the lawsuits if anyone suggested that here.

*    I hate them even more  than Illinois Nazis, but you can’t deny that  they’re the terminus of a logical progression that has considerable cross-DMZ appealOthers have noticed, too.  Leaving aside the superficial question of fashion, these guys  have an  uncomfortable proximity to the mainstream of their society.

*   Rumors of Kim Jong Il’s failing health continue to spread  among North Koreans.  In a society where news is so controlled, the mere propogation of  rumor has a significance detached from their veracity.  That said, I hope the rumors are true that we’ll be rid of Kim Jong Il sooner rather than later.  As unpopular as  I suspect Kim Jong Il to be in most segments of  North Korean society, his  death would be an irrecoverable loss to the regime’s ideological cohesion.

*   Michael Yon has a moving post about former enemies turning their guns on  al  Qaeda  and  experimenting with self-government.  They’re not laying down their arms; better, they’re agreeing to point them at the right people, put on uniforms, and become a part of their country’s still-rickety security structure.  The experiment is clearly fragile, and Iraq’s current leadership may not be up to the task.  A new round of elections may even be in order.  Still, this kind of Sunni participation in Iraqi self-government and its attendant restoration of security is an absolute prerequisite to any non-genocidal resolution of Shiite-Sunni differences. 

Update:

Those South Koreans who ventured into Taliban territory have inadvertently hastened the apocalypse by creating rare agreement between me and Joseph Steinberg, though his  use of  the word “traitor” is  a predictable  excess.   My sympathy for these folks just declined by at least half.  It’s one thing to push against  the boundaries of medieval intolerance, but it’s another thing entirely to throw yourself at its mercy and then  expect to be ransomed out or exchanged for Taliban thugs who would go free to murder again.   If the actions of these people were as courageous as I was willing to assume, then they assumed that risk.  Not surprisingly for Roh Moo Hyun, he speaks  and acts as though he’d gladly pay ransom or meet the terrorists’ demands if could.  Roh thus helps to assure that there will be more hostages and beheadings in the future. 

Still,  I can’t understand why some people seem so gleeful about this.   Over at the  Marmot’s Hole, the venom of some of the comments is just hard to understand without engaging in amateur psychology.  The hostages have quickly become surrogates for  some pretty powerful anti-Christian sentiment.  What’s striking about the discussion is that the Taliban’s murder, kidnapping, intolerance, and ignorance never even became a subject.  It  was lost among the venom directed at the victims.  I grant that these Koreans  don’t seem to be  adherents  of an especially open-minded or intellectual  strain of Christianity, and Christianity in Korea can seem  annoyingly messianic  to a non-believer (worst example:  an obnoxious attempt to convert my wife at her mother’s funeral).  In the comments below, I’ve conceded the possibility that the missionaries’  motives were more psychological than altruistic, depending on what they were actually doing there. 

But let’s  keep some perspective here.  At worst, the missionaries practiced a far more benign form of fanaticism than their captors.  So why are the Taliban getting off without a scratch in this discussion?  One commenter actually compares them to bad weather.  What a neat trick the Taliban have managed here:  they are scoring propaganda points against the South Korean and Afghan governments without even being judged responsible  for their terrorist actions.  Are these evil human beings, or  were these missionaries kidnapped by wild  bears that  were hanging around their garbage cans?  And if the distinction doesn’t matter, then can we start  euthanizing the ones we capture without a lot of fuss from the Human Rights Industry? 

11 Responses

  1. Agreed, this is pretty shocking news and I hope it can only get better. We’ll all hope for their safe return.

    On a lighter note, great site and a good cause 🙂

  2. well if they’re from a church group
    then maybe they were doing some missions…. right?

    hopefully they do return safely though

  3. Hanlove, I’d like to see the day when Afghanistan is a tolerant enough place for all religions to compete in its marketplace of ideas. But what I think about the activities of these Koreans depends largely on what, specifically, they were doing. If these folks are doing humanitarian work and spreading the word by example (as opposed to actively proselytizing people who aren’t ready to hear their message) I’d be a lot more sympathetic. As a non-Christian myself, my advice for those who want to propogate Christianity is that I’ve never been swayed by anyone approaching me with religious doctrine I’m not prepared to accept. Frankly, if there’s one Christian demomination that’s made a great impression on me, it’s Mormonism, despite the fact that there’s so much in the Mormon religious doctrine that I couldn’t possibly believe. The reason for my impression is that I’ve just seen too many Mormons whose religion seemed to have helped make superlative human beings of them.

    So I guess here’s what I’m saying:

    1. The area in which an extremist insurgency operates calls for a very nuanced approach to challenging that insurgency’s ideology.

    2. A nuanced approach would be opening clinics and schools that don’t openly proselytize, but which simply exemplify the values of Christianity in practice.

    If these folks were applying a similarly nuanced approach, then I have complete sympathy for them. In such a case, their choice of a venue signifies nothing but courage. But if they were simply looking for an inhospitable place to take their message and confront people with it, then there’s something about that mission that’s more about the missionary’s own emotional needs than it is helping others, spiritually or otherwise. Furthermore, actions like that only serve to validate Taliban propaganda that interaction with the outside world is a direct threat to their values.

    Either way, obviously, I hope they make it out of there safely.

  4. ” What’s striking about the discussion is that the Taliban’s murder, kidnapping, intolerance, and ignorance never even became a subject. It was lost among the venom directed at the victims. “

    The reason is that condemnation of the the violently extreme Islamist Taliban is a given; hence, there is nothing to discuss or debate. The focus is on the victims because there is a wide scope to debate the appropriateness and intentions of a project that has put them in harm’s way. This isn’t about blame. It’s about making wise choices.

  5. I don’t know, Sonagi. If you reread those comments, it is about blame, and it goes way beyond that to openly hoping that something bad happens to these people. The common thread is that some of the commenters don’t much care for their beliefs, which I view as pretty unsophisticated and ultimately self-destructive. They may even be founded on masochism. But there’s more to this than the classic sadist-meets-masochist story. Too many people seem to have a crush on the sadists here.

    If we’re looking for narrow-minded, intolerant fanatics to condemn, the Taliban ought to be our starting point. These missionaries might annoy you at the train station, but after all, they aren’t beheading anyone. And I have no qualms about wishing every one of the hostage-takers a gruesome and painful end, and a swift journey to Hell.

    Our world today can be a damned good illustration of just how thankless it is to defend a bunch of masochists from the sadists they secretly adore.

  6. “If you reread those comments, it is about blame, and it goes way beyond that to openly hoping that something bad happens to these people. The common thread is that some of the commenters don’t much care for their beliefs, which I view as pretty unsophisticated and ultimately self-destructive.”

    Different commenters have different viewpoints. That includes those critical of the missionaries. I am scrolling through that 160+ message thread, and I see only one comment, #20 by Careb, that actually wishes for something bad to happen. A few others, most prolifically IHBB, have complained about evangelical Christians or belittled religious beliefs. IHBB likened overseas Christian missionary work to 9/11, but I didn’t read even faint praise for “the sadists” you think those unsympathetic to the missionaries have a crush on. One can be critical of the missionaries’ work without loving or admiring their scary captors or wishing a dark fate upon them. They are good people, and I hope dearly for their safe return. I am bothered, however, by the prospect of freeing dangerous Taliban captives, who will kill more civilians and soldiers, or the possibility of ransom money, which will buy more weapons and bomb-making equipment.

  7. I think that the taliban was hired by the n koreans to kiddnap the s koreans. this will put a damper on any unifacation talks, as well as the bombing of raingoun since it killed 427 member’s of the s korean cabinit.just an other reason to put capitalism in and kim jong il out!

  8. Aint the ROK being too pro-Nazis? Why not tell America about that?

    Why are South Koreans going there in the first place? I lost hope in believing that there is common sense.