States have consistently negotiated with terrorists to get back their citizens

ICRC, since 1994 it has served as a neutral intermediary in the release of more than 1,500 people in Colombia.

The BBC notes that in some of the cases, the release of FARC guerillas from Colombian prison was not in exchange for kidnapping victims, but as a move aimed to improve the chances of negotiations between the two sides.

More recently, France and Belgium have negotiated with, and paid millions of dollars in ransom to, various Islamist terrorist groups in west and north Africa to have their citizens released from terrorist captivity in Mali, Mauritania, and Niger. Shipping companies have paid millions to Somali pirates in exchange for releasing pirated ships and their crews.

Former U.S. president Ronald Reagan, in a 1987 televised apology, acknowledged the U.S. negotiation with Iran in which arms sales were offered in exchange for American citizens held hostage by Hezbollah in Lebanon. “A few months ago I told the American people I did not trade arms for hostages. My heart and my best intentions still tell me that’s true, but the facts and the evidence tell me it is not,” Reagan said.

Bob Baer, former CIA Middle East case officer and now a CNN intelligence analyst, noted that there is nothing unique or different about the deal to exchange Bowe Bergdahl for five Taliban operatives. Arguments can be made for or against this specific exchange on its merits, but what cannot be argued is that the exchange should not have been made because it involved negotiations with terrorists. The fact is, says Baer, that countries involved in fighting terrorism have always negotiated with the terrorists when they deemed it would serve their interests to do so.

Baer, by the way, supports the Bergdahl exchange on its merits: there are competing values here, he says, but the principle that the United States takes care of its own and does not leave soldiers behind trumps other values. Additionally, the only hope for a stable Afghanistan is a regime in which the moderate elements in the Taliban share. We do not know whether or not the Bergdahl exchange was made as part of a larger understanding between the United States and the Taliban – and the United States has been informally talking with the Taliban for a while now – over political arrangements in Afghanistan after the United States pulls out.

In addition, the Taliban and Haqqani Network now have about 15,000 fighters under their command. Baer notes that the contribution five aging operatives, who have been away from the theater for a decade or more, can make to the fighting capabilities of the Taliban and the Haqqanis should not be exaggerated.