The Shooting Starts Before the Whimpering Ends

I hope this will be the last post I do on the Korean-Afghan hostage story, at least until we start to see the proceeds of its  resolution in bombs, mangled bodies,  and the next round of kidnappings  it will  inspire.  Koreans are still furious,  but mostly at  the victims rather than the terrorists.  I admit to having thought, “better them than us.”  The Korean street is a capricious thing.

Consider all that the South Korean government was willing to do to free these hostages.  Now, try not to think about the discussion of the thousands of South Koreans (and others)  abducted by North Korea, North Korea’s place on the terror sponsor list, and how hard South Korea has not tried to secure the freedom of those South Korean hostages.  You could burn out some of the diodes in your head if you think about it hard enough.

We have a little more clarity about one issue I had wondered about:  it seems the hostages’ medical  qualifications were somewhere between dubious and fictitious.  Another weight added to the “cost” side of the scale.  (Were they also missionaries?  I don’t really care.  I care about the humanitarian value their mission added.  Not diminishing the sincere humanitarian motives behind missionary work itself, Afghanistan is a deperately poor and backward place.   Spirituality isn’t  the kind of aid the Afghan people need most or are prepared to accept at this particular instant.)

Some Korean “netizens” are now demanding that the sending church compensate the government for its expenses.  Would that include compensation for the ransom the government says it didn’t pay, but which everyone seems to think it did pay?

While Koreans fight among themselves, the U.S. Army and the Afghan government are getting to the grim work of  pulling up  the death cult’s evil roots:

Security forces killed a Taliban commander involved in the kidnapping of 23 South Koreans in an operation that left more than a dozen other rebels dead, Afghan officials said yesterday.  The insurgents were killed in an Afghan and U.S.-led coalition operation that started late Monday in the central province of Ghazni, where the aid workers were snatched July 19, and lasted several hours, the officials said.

Among the dead was Mullah Mateen, a key player in the abduction of the group, two of whom were killed before the remainder were freed “• the final batch of 19 of them late last week.

“We killed 16 enemy fighters and among them was Mullah Mateen, a Taliban commander who, along with Mullah Abdullah Jan, was a key person behind the kidnapping of the South Koreans,” Ghazni police chief Alishah Ahmadzai said.  “We are sure that Mullah Mateen is dead and I’m sure and everyone knows that he was behind the kidnapping of the South Koreans,” he told AFP.  [Joongang Ilbo]

Not a Korean soldier is  to be found helping them track down the murderers, kidnappers,  and perhaps rapists of their people.  I suspect it’s now a race against time to kill these people before they use their new-found cash to kill us.

See also:

*   Politics is a nasty  thing in South Korea.

*   And unpredictable.  The leading candidate of the left-wing quasi-incumbent party is the former opposition governor of Kyonggi Province, Sohh Hak-Kyu.  I’ve never been a fan of Sohn’s.  I never thought Sohn would recover from this corruption scandal, but he did.

*     “South Korean President Roh Moo-hyun said Wednesday that his summit with North Korean leader Kim Jong-il, slated for Oct. 2-4 in Pyongyang, will not produce outcomes that would burden his successor.”  So  the significance of this vanishes when the final two months  of Roh’s term are over?  Someone justify that expense for me.

*   The news from the North is almost  always grim and seldom  trustworthy,  but it  often provokes further curiosity:

North Korea has arrested a number of its citizens on charges of colluding with foreign intelligence agencies, the North’s state media reported Wednesday.

“The foreign intelligence agency employed some unsound North Korean citizens by giving money, providing sex or blackmailing in order to carry out clandestine operations against key military objects and strategic locations,” the Korean Central News Agency (KCNA) said.  [Yonhap]

*   Japan worries about being betrayed by the United States for a deal with North Korea.