This American Woman Has Given Birth to 2 Children While Being Held Hostage in Afghanistan. Why Is the Family Still There?

The International Security program's report, "To Pay Ransom or Not to Pay Ransom," was covered in Vox: 

Still, it’s hard to gauge how well the new efforts are paying off. US officials say the fusion cell has helped recover 100 hostages, a quarter of whom were once held by terror groups. That may not be as heartening a statistic as it seems, however. The US won’t break down where those hostages had been held; given past history, it’s reasonable to assume that most came from Latin America or Africa, where criminal gangs have spent decades kidnapping Americans but quickly ransoming them back through intermediaries like Kroll Associates.

Even with the changes, meanwhile, American hostages die in captivity far more often than those from other Western countries. In mid-January, a New America Foundation report found that 41 of the 90 hostages murdered by their kidnappers between 2001 and 2016 were Americans. (British captives made up the next biggest group, with 14 citizens killed by their captors.) In one particularly jarring statistic, 14 of the 15 Americans taken hostage by ISIS or its close allies were murdered or died in captivity. Of the 16 continental European hostages held by the group, by contrast, 14 were released.

“American hostages have suffered disproportionately bad outcomes compared to other Western hostages,” it found.

The report attributed the disparity, in large part, to Washington’s “strict adherence” to its policy of not making any concessions to groups holding Americans captive. It found that one of the key justifications for that approach -- that paying ransoms would encourage groups to nab more Americans -- doesn’t hold up to scrutiny.

“Citizens of countries that make concessions such as ransom payments do not appear to be kidnapped at disproportionately high rates,” the report found.