Call it “surrendering to hostage-takers’ blackmail” and the argument is quite simple. Western governments like the US and the British “don’t do deals with terrorists” which simply encourage further hostage seizures. And they ride out the political fallout whipped up by agonised relatives while making clear their displeasure at others, like the French and Italians, who are widely reported as paying ransoms, albeit on the quiet, for the release of their citizens.
Call it “prisoner exchange”, however, and we are entangled in a different set of arguments and moral choices and different political cultures. The distinction may be purely semantic, but prisoner exchange, after all, has been a feature of Middle East conflicts since the Middle Ages. Popes and princes have been traded. And even the US controversially exchanged five Guantanamo prisoners for US Army sergeant Bowe Bergdahl.
That pragmatic reality is reflected in the Jordanian government's willingness , under huge domestic pressure, to discuss, and discuss publicly, its preparedness to free Sajida al Rishawi, partly responsible for the deaths of 60 people in a 2005 Amman bombing, in exchange for one of its pilots , Muath al-Kasaesbeh . And Japan's government is torn less over whether to do a deal with Isis for the release of journalist Keni Goto, and more about Isis's ambiguity over whether he is part of the Jordan deal.
The “moral hazard” does not go away with a redefinition of the problem. In essence the Jordanians will make a pragmatic calculation that the short-term damage represented by the loss of their citizen is costlier than the long-run theoretical risk that concessions will encourage Isis hostage-taking. Isis needs no encouragement anyway, and might even be more inclined to execute less prisoners if it saw them as a more tradeable commodity.
Like the difficult decision to talk to terrorists, it’s a grisly, amoral, lose-lose calculation that each state must face up to in the light of its own circumstancess.