Rubio takes hard line on Afghanistan, threatens bounties on Taliban leaders

US Secretary of State Marco Rubio on Saturday threatened bounties on the heads of Afghanistan's Taliban leaders, sharply escalating the tone as he said more Americans may be detained in the country than previously thought.

The threat comes days after the Afghan Taliban government and the United States swapped prisoners in one of the final acts of former president Joe Biden.

The new top US diplomat issued the harsh warning via social media, in a rhetorical style strikingly similar to his boss, President Donald Trump.

"Just hearing the Taliban is holding more American hostages than has been reported," Rubio wrote on X.

"If this is true, we will have to immediately place a VERY BIG bounty on their top leaders, maybe even bigger than the one we had on bin Laden," he said, referring to the Al Qaeda leader killed by US forces in 2011.

Rubio did not describe who the other Americans may be, but there have long been accounts of missing Americans whose cases were not formally taken up by the US government as wrongful detentions.

Prisoner swap

In the deal with the Biden administration, the Taliban freed the best-known American detained in Afghanistan, Ryan Corbett, who had been living with his family in the country and was seized in August 2022.

Also freed was William McKenty, an American about whom little information has been released.

The United States in turn freed Khan Mohammed, who was serving a life sentence in a California prison.

Mohammed was convicted of trafficking heroin and opium into the United States and was accused of seeking rockets to kill US troops in Afghanistan.

The United States offered a bounty of $25 million for information leading to the capture or killing of Osama bin Laden shortly after the September 11, 2001 terror attacks, with Congress later authorising the secretary of state to offer up to $50 million.

No one is believed to have collected the bounty for bin Laden, who was killed in a US raid in Pakistan.