The parents of Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl, captured by the Taliban nearly three years ago, have appealed to the Obama administration to swap Taliban prisoners detained at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, in exchange for his freedom.
The appeal, made in a newspaper interview in their home state of Idaho, has induced the administration to make public its efforts to win Bergdahl's release in U.S.-Taliban negotiations that have been stalled since January.
He is the only U.S. soldier known to be held prisoner in the Afghanistan war. U.S. officials believe that Bergdahl, of Hailey, Idaho, is alive and is being held in the tribal area of Pakistan along the Afghanistan border by members of the Taliban-affiliated Haqqani network.
In an interview published Wednesday with their hometown weekly, the Idaho Mountain Express, Bob Bergdahl said the family had become frustrated with "how slowly the process has evolved" and decided to publicly advocate a prisoner swap.
"I'm pushing it hard," Bergdahl said. "We started out by trying to encourage the Taliban to take care of our son. ... Now, we're worried that the government isn't concerned enough to put him on the (negotiating) table."
The Washington Post had withheld information on those efforts at the request of Obama administration officials who said publicizing them could endanger his life.
"We had concerns about the security situation," said one U.S. official, speaking on condition of anonymity. "But this is now a different scenario. If they want to talk about it," the official said of Bob and Jani Bergdahl, "we can't ask for it to be withheld."
The Bergdahls said they were upset that although they have had good relations with the State Department and the Pentagon, they have never heard from President Obama. The two are Ron Paul supporters and have turned increasingly against the war in Afghanistan, although they support the president's plan not to withdraw most U.S. troops until 2014.
"He has never contacted us once," Jani Bergdahl said about Obama. "We haven't gotten a Hallmark card; we haven't gotten a note signed by an aide, nothing."
Accounts of the younger Bergdahl's capture in June 2009 have differed. In the first of five videos the Taliban released, a frightened-looking Bergdahl said he had fallen behind on a patrol in Afghanistan's eastern Paktika province. Since then, reports have suggested he left his base without authorization and was ambushed.
The Taliban have threatened to kill him unless a number of demands they have made over the years were met. These include payment of $1 million and the release of various Afghan prisoners and of Aafia Siddiqui, a Pakistani scientist convicted in a U.S. court in 2010 of the attempted murder of U.S. personnel in Afghanistan.
In a tentative deal reached by U.S. and Taliban negotiators last November, the administration offered to transfer five Taliban detainees at Guantánamo to house arrest in Qatar. In return, the Taliban were to make public statements renouncing international terrorism and agree to work with the Afghan government to find a political solution to the war. In what the administration insisted did not constitute a prisoner swap, Bergdahl was to be released.
The deal fell apart, and U.S.-Taliban meetings have been suspended since January.
While the Bergdahls said they have reason to believe their son is alive, they are worried he could be harmed by U.S. drone attacks in Pakistan.
"Bowe's been under the drone program the entire time," Bob Bergdahl said in the newspaper interview. "It scares ... us."
The last Taliban video featuring Sgt. Bergdahl was posted on the Internet in May 2011. Bergdahl, 26, was a private when captured but has since been promoted.
His father said he hoped to spark a grass-roots movement to "raise awareness that there is an American POW."
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