US Secretary of State Marco Rubio has just raised the stakes with his announcement that bounties will be placed on the heads of Taliban leaders in Afghanistan, out of fears more Americans than reported could be held hostage. This has been a threat after a prisoner swap involving the Taliban and the United States government, one of the last acts of the Biden administration.
Rubio issued his threat across social media, in a tone that sounded very much like former President Donald Trump. “Just hearing the Taliban is holding more American hostages than has been reported,” he said on X. He added, “If this is true, we will have to immediately place a VERY BIG bounty on their top leaders, maybe even bigger than the one we had on bin Laden,” referring to the Al-Qaeda leader killed by US forces in 2011.
While Rubio did not identify the other possible detained Americans, there have been longstanding reports of missing Americans whose cases have not been formally acknowledged by Washington as wrongful detentions.
In the latest swap with the Taliban, Washington obtained the freedom of Ryan Corbett, an eminent American imprisoned in Afghanistan since August 2022, in exchange for William McKenty, a man about whom not much has been reported. The U.S. freed Khan Mohammed, a man serving life in California on charges of heroin and opium trafficking and accused of seeking rockets to attack U.S. troops in Afghanistan.
Shortly after the September 11 attacks, the US government put out a $25 million reward for information about Osama bin Laden leading to his capture or killing. At the urging of Congress, that bounty was increased to $50 million. No one is believed to have collected that bounty on bin Laden, killed in a US raid in Pakistan.
