The Obama administration has bought the freedom of Raymond Davis, a U.S. special forces veteran-turned CIA contractor who was working under diplomatic cover in Pakistan when he killed two locals as they attempted an armed ambush while Davis was driving in Lahore. This transaction constitutes the payment of what is known as “blood money” under the supremacist politico-military-legal code its adherents call shariah. In the process, Mr. Davis’ liberty has been bought at the expense of every American’s security.
In an appearance yesterday on Fox and Friends, I strenuously argued against making such a concession. For one thing, Pakistan has an international treaty obligation under the Vienna Convention to honor the immunity of diplomats from incarceration and prosecution. For another, it is outrageous that a nation we have sustained for over a decade with our largesse – to the tune of many billions of tax dollars since 9/11 – should be encouraged in the belief that it can hold us up for more.
Unfortunately, that is happening in part because the Pakistanis have concluded – with good reason – that the United States is now in the process of once again bailing out of neighboring Afghanistan. They are positioning themselves for the new order there and internally, one in which they will be better served by being seen as a government that has stuck it to the Americans than one that has stuck by them.
Which leads us to the bigger problem, of course: By successfully compelling the United States to submit to shariah in this instance, Pakistan has effectively achieved a significant symbolic victory for adherents to that totalitarian program worldwide. As Andy McCarthy points out in his latest, superb post at National Review Online, no good will come of that: “When you tell the world you can be rolled, expect to spend a lot more time being rolled.”
Some say this blood money/ransom payment brings us pretty much to where we started as a nation some 200 years ago, paying tribute to and buying the freedom of hostages seized by the Tripolitan States. The difference is that when the Barbary pirates first began shaking us down in furtherance of their greed and jihad, we were a new nation with no power projection capability. They could get away with their contempt and piracy and did – until President Thomas Jefferson sent our freshly minted Marines and Navy to lay them low on the shores of Tripoli.
Today, however, we are arguably still the world’s only superpower – even if Team Obama is assiduously trying to abnegate that status. Shariah-adherent Muslims (and, for that matter, other totalitarians, despots and thugs) regard those who have power and lack the will to use it with a special contempt. As a result, the price of paying the wages of shariah in this instance is likely to be high, and growing, over time. Sadly, that price will not simply be measured by what is paid by ever-more Americans taken hostage or in terms of the costs of buying their liberty.
In the end, the ultimate price will be the cost of emboldening the shariah-adherent to intensify their jihad in order, in the words of shariah’s ultimate source, the Quran, to “make them [meaning us infidels] feel subdued.”