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Published on August 2, 2007

The world has been watching in horror as the events in Afghanistan involving 23 South Korean Christian aid workers who were abducted by Taleban militants unfold. The militants have already killed two of the hostages to prove the seriousness of their demand for the government in Kabul to release eight of their colleagues now in the custody of the Afghan government. The insurgents said they would make good on their threat to slaughter the rest of the hostages if their demands were not met. No one should doubt the militants' capacity for extreme cruelty to achieve their ends, which they ascribe to nationalistic aspirations, glorification of their religion or other causes.

They have ignored international pleas to spare the lives of the innocents, who were abducted on July 19 when their bus was hijacked on the road from Kabul to Kandahar province in the southern part of this strife-torn country. The bodies of two male hostages who were shot dead by their Afghan captors have been recovered by police - the first one last week and the second on Monday.

The Afghan government under President Hamid Kazai, and its backers - the international peacekeeping forces led by Nato and the United States - have been under pressure from the South Korean government to negotiate with the merciless hostage-takers to stall for time, if not to immediately secure the release of the victims. It appears that all available avenues, including informal negotiations between South Korean officials and the hostage-takers through their former Taleban colleagues, have already been exhausted.

The Afghan government and the international forces would not have found themselves in this situation if they had information on who the Taleban hostage-takers were, and where they were keeping the Korean aid workers. With this information their decisions would have been more straightforward: whether to mount a military raid to rescue them. The way things now stand, the Afghan government and Nato are being forced to make a difficult moral choice.

On the one hand, they could stick to the moral high ground of never negotiating with terrorists and adhere strictly to the rule of law so as not to encourage them into using terrorism to blackmail again. But then they would have to live with the consequence of innocent lives being taken, which could have been avoided if they had compromised on their principles and met the terrorists' demands.

If they succumb to terrorists' demands, the lives of the hostages may be saved, but this would come at a cost to Afghanistan's fledgling democracy because bowing to terrorists would greatly undermine the supremacy of the rule of law, which underpins a democratic society. Indeed, the Afghan government and international forces have a duty to make sure that people like the hostage-takers do not succeed in terrorising the public or the world's governments into submission.

In March Taleban militants succeeded in getting Kabul to release five Taleban prisoners in exchange for an Italian reporter they had abducted earlier. The question is whether the Afghan government should make the same mistake again by stooping to the level of the Taleban kidnappers in order to save the lives of innocent foreign-aid workers. The cost of rewarding terrorists for their crimes instead of making them pay for them cannot be underestimated.

The abductors first demanded that the South Korean government withdraw the 200 troops it has deployed in Afghanistan as part of an international peacekeeping force under Nato in exchange for the release of the South Korean hostages. Seoul relented by announcing that it would pull out its troops by the end of this year. However, the Taleban militants went on to ignore the South Korean government's response and demanded the release of Taleban prisoners held by the Afghan government instead.

The Afghan government and the international community, including South Korea, must collectively draw a line when it comes to how to deal with terrorists and the inexcusable inhumanity of using human lives as pawns to achieve their devious and unjustifiable ends.

The best approach to prevent hostage-taking from occurring again in war zones where terrorists are known to be active - like Afghanistan, Iraq, Palestine and Sudan - is for travel restrictions to be imposed on foreigners, including aid workers, to prevent them from venturing into areas where they could become easy prey for terrorists.