The Biden Administration made arrangements to free an American civil engineer being held by a Taliban-affiliated group since he was kidnapped in January 2020 in Afghanistan in exchange for an Afghan drug dealer, the Associated Press reports.

Sixty-year-old Mark Frerichs, a Navy veteran, had been working on civil engineering projects for a decade when he was summoned to a meeting in Kabul in January 2020, which was actually a set-up by the Taliban-affiliated Haqqani network to abduct him.  The Haqqani took him from Kabul to Khost, near the Pakistan border.

Frerichs was exchanged for Bashir Noorzai, a Taliban-connected heroin dealer who was serving the 17th year of a life sentence in US federal prison.  President Joe Biden essentially commuted Noorzai’s sentence into order to facilitate the trade and gain Frerichs’ freedom. 

While acknowledging Noorzai’s release “required difficult decisions, which I did not take lightly,” Biden noted that Frerichs’ release was a priority and the Taliban’s new laws barring harvesting poppies for heroin in Afghanistan will make it more difficult for Noorzai to recreate his drug distribution network.  When Noorzai was in prison, the Taliban would tolerate the growth and harvesting of poppies for heroin because they would “tax” growers and processors to support their resistance to American forces and Afghan rivals.  That is not longer the case as the Taliban have taken steps to stop drug production in Afghanistan.