The case against torture

I wanted to build off Johnson’s great post. Torture is something that still needs to be addressed despite the scandal at Abu Ghraib and the subsequent fall out.

In my view, torture is both unethical and impractical in almost every instance. Many people have this notion of torture being used in Jack Bauer type 24 situations where you know someone knows where a WMD is that could kill many people, you know by torturing him you will find it and thus avert many deaths. In this case, it would be an ethical imperative to torture him because the psychological damage to you and him and the potential media fallout is worth saving all the lives you would save. However, this kind of situation never happens in real life. There is simply never that kind of certainty.

One of the lessons of history, especially from the French experience in Algeria I read about in the excellent Alastair Horne’s A Savage War of Peace, is that torture is always counterproductive. It may create some gains in the short term intelligence. It’s clear that the French were able to win the battle of Algiers and deal a devastating tactical defeat to the FLN through the use of torture despite the fact they got some bad intelligence from people lying to end the torture. However, in the long run it had several important strategic effects that made its use counterproductive.

The first long term strategic effect is that the local population turned against the French. The perception of the French continued to shift towards that of occupiers oppressing the Arabs. People will tend to not view a government as legitimate if it torture’s its people in order to maintain security. Even in cultures where there is little notion of human rights the impact is significant. In those cultures, kinship tends to be very important so people will loose confidence in their government if a member of their family, tribe or even ethnic group is tortured.

The second long term important effect was that it undermined domestic political support for the war. Guerillas use politics to shift the balance of forces. That means building up their forces while weakening the enemies through political means. In this case, the French helped them because the resulting domestic political fallout seriously hampered the French state’s ability to cope with the crisis. Thanks to torture and other factors, the political fight became so terrible it tore the 4th republic apart in a military coup, leading to a new constitution and a new leader. Even after deGaulle restored order with the 5th republic, there was another military coup and a French terrorist group formed called the OAS. The OAS was made up largely of ex-French soldiers dedicated to keeping Algeria French. They ended up killing more people than FLN.

A third important consideration that is relevant to our “global contingency operations” (David Kilcullen has some excellent discussion on what its true name should be) is that our use of torture further undermines our allies as documented in Ahmed Rashid’s Descent into Chaos. When countries like Pakistan and the Central Asian Republics see use using torture it encourages them to step up their own human rights violations, not just against takfiris (Al-Qaeda and their associates) but also against domestic political opponents. As a result, it further undermines legitimacy in those already unstable countries. The use of torture was one thing that led to Musharraf’s downfall because it led to further erosion of support for him among the upper classes as Pakistani society.

The Armed Forces and the US government as a whole should ensure all soldiers and operatives understand this.