Once that Afghan War is over, and the US is gone from the scene, the POWs held from that war must be repatriated.
Most Americans don't get this. Like the Ukrainian government in Kiev, which calls all pro-Russian separatist fighters in Eastern Ukraine "terrorists," the US has been calling all those it is fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan "terrorists," deliberately conflating alleged Al Qaeda terrorists with the Taliban fighters in Afghanistan. The US has also conflated the Al Qaeda and Taliban prisoners it holds in Guantanamo as all being "terrorists."
They are not. There is not one instance on record in which an Afghan fighter has engaged in an act of terrorism against a person or even a physical location in the US (although it should also be noted that with the US conducting military attacks in Afghanistan, the Taliban would be within their legal rights under the rules of war to attack targets inside the US.) That has been true all through this interminable war, and was true before the war too.
Certainly Taliban fighters have engaged in actions that the US calls "terrorism" inside Afghanistan, such as bombing street markets and hotels where westerners (often US-hired mercenary forces and support personnel for the US war effort) dwell, but this is a dirty war. The US military has likewise been engaging in what any honest observer would call terrorism in Afghanistan all along: night raids on homes in which women and children are gunned down, air assaults and drone attacks on wedding parties and the notorious policy of "double taps," in which a suspected Taliban leader is hit with an air strike, and then a second missile is fired at those who rush to help the wounded, or at the subsequent funeral. These are the actions of a rogue, terrorist state.
In any event, it is absurd, and really pathetic, to see Americans and their smarmy elected officials, quailing at and denouncing the freeing of Taliban prisoners, or expressing horror and outrage any suggestion that such prisoners be transferred to US prisons.
If the Allied Forces in World War II could confidently and securely hold thousands of hardened German soldiers as POWs in US camps while the war was on, and could let them go when the war ended, surely this country can survive the repatriation or release of a few dozen remaining suspected Taliban and Al Qaeda prisoners from Guantanamo (remember, none of these guys has even been tried!).
If we can't handle that, we need to change the last line of the national anthem to: "Oh say does that Star-Spangled Banner look nice, o'er the land of the meek, and the home of the mice."
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