Torture and American strategy

It's an accepted fact that America has tortured alleged members of Al Qaeda. Everyone who reads this blog should read Col. Morris Davis' oped in the New York Times: Unforgivable Behavior, Inadmissible Evidence. This post will briefly look at torture through the lens of American grand strategy.

Torture is frequently justified at the tactical level (i.e. each individual case of torture taken separately) by referring to the "ticking time bomb" scenario. Assuming that torture is effective (which it can be), this makes it relatively easy to justify torture because you isolate each event from its long-term consequences. Looking beyond this artificial time-horizon is how utilitarians argue against torture: "The ultimate utilitarian objection to torture, therefore, is that it corrosively delegitimizes the state." This delegitimization harms the United States more than most other countries, as I'll show.

Chet Richard's most recent post reminds us of Boyd's conception of strategy as "pump up our morale, degrade that of our opponents, attract the uncommitted to our cause, and end the conflict on favorable terms without sowing the seeds for future (unfavorable) conflict." The use of torture alienates our allies, helps our enemies in their recruitment campaigns, and in so doing helps sow the seeds for future conflict. But how does torture affect efforts to "pump up our morale", or as Boyd puts it in his "Patterns of Conflict" briefing, "amplify our spirit and strength"?

For the United States especially, promoting internal harmony and strength within society should be the paramount goal of American strategy. The destruction of inner harmony damages the United States much more than it does other countries. Unlike other political communities, the United States does not have a specific shared heritage, ethnicity, religion, or race to fall back upon to unify the country. Instead America is based on a shared political culture, based around the Constitution.

America is perhaps unique among nations for the ability to commit suicide bloodlessly (I suppose the Vatican could as well if the Pope renounced Catholicism). If, for example, Japan were to engage in widespread torture, Japanese would still remain bonded to each other through cultural and ethnic ties. If the United States was to engage in widespread torture, it would represent a break with the fundamental values the country was founded on, and the political community would have less of a reason to exist. Simply stated, Japan does not become less Japanese if its government tortures, however America does become less American if its government tortures.

Even if it's true that we "only" tortured three Al Qaeda members, as Col. Davis says:

Saying a man is honest is a compliment. Saying a man is “generally” honest or honest “quite often” means he lies. The mistreatment of detainees, like honesty, is all or nothing: We either do stuff like that or we do not.

Whether you call it "morale" like Col. Richards, "spirit and strength" like Boyd, or "legitimacy" as Morgan does, it's the same thing. Stephen Colbert might call it "America-ness". Torture destroys it.

Funny but sad

Via Ethan Zuckerman's blog (direct quote from my sister yesterday: "I would be a lot smarter if I read Ethan's blog more often"), we have "the best thing on the internet."


In The Know: Situation In Nigeria Seems Pretty Complex

Laugh it up! Cultural and geographic illiteracy is one of the major reasons why we need smart people to tell us how to operate in foreign cultures, whether that's Lonely Planet writing guidebooks for tourists or anthropologists providing intelligence to the military. My gut (which is never wrong) tells me that some of the reason why Americans ignore the world is that we feel safe in doing so in our unipolar moment - we are powerful enough to ignore the world, and our country is big enough that you can vacation all your life without going abroad. This creates a cycle in which our ratings-driven news business ignores world news to go after the lowest common denominator, which means that Americans never know why they need to know (it took four years to create Human Terrain Teams)... the media is run by the invisible hand of the free market, but one of the preconditions of that market is the information required to make a good choice. But the media is the institution that's supposed to provide that information in the first place....

/rant

African narrative

The past week (really, the past 4 1/2 years), America has had a public debate over the war in Iraq. These numbers have been thrown against those numbers, raising the question "how do you know what you know?" This is a question various professors have asked in my classes again and again.

When Kenneth Pollack (now my professor) and Michael O'Hanlon wrote their op-ed in the New York Times, titled A War We Just Might Win (they did not choose the title), they were criticized for basing their claims off of a week-long tour of US military personnel and installations in Iraq, contextualized by an expertise in mostly conventional military operations. Glenn Greenwald, who I'd guess I share many political views with, is 110% convinced in his own righteousness in criticizing O'Hanlon for cherry-picking numbers (O'Hanlon's rebuttal largely rehashes his original points, showing how Greenwald and O'Hanlon are talking past each other).

When the seven soldiers from the 82nd Airborne wrote their op-ed, coming to opposite conclusions from Pollack and O'Hanlon, they were criticized because their knowledge was so immediate that they couldn't possibly see the larger picture.

Choosing objective measurable metrics, like Eli is trying to do, is a possible fix to this problem. But as he acknowledges, just because you can measure something doesn't mean it's valuable. The corollary to this is that just because something is valuable doesn't mean it's measurable. A further problem is just because a number matters today does not mean it will matter tomorrow - as Eli argues, the strategy has to drive the metrics. Strategies change over time, meaning metrics change over time. This leads to the possibility that the situation might be measurable today but not tomorrow. We are then back to square one. I disagreed with a lot of what LtC Gian Gentile said at this Heritage Foundation event, but he was right when he said that the best way to communicate the military/political situation in an insurgency is through narrative.

Recently Dan at TDAXP has frustrated me with his claims that the continent of Africa has sunk into an abyss of genocide, economic disaster and decay. His argument is that a Western recolonization of Africa is Africa's only hope.

I violently want to disagree with him - I think his data is either sketchy or irrelevant (why would Africans be too unintelligent to turn failed states into functioning states without foreign domination, but other failed societies self-corrected independently?) but I don't have the necessary data to back up my own claims (I actually don't think the data exists to prove or disprove it yet). Essentially my argument is similar to Nassim Nicholas Taleb's argument in The Black Swan - You think you know a lot and I think I know very little, but since in reality we both know very little, I'm ahead of you.

What touched off this rant was watching a video of Chris Abani's talk at TED titled "Learning the Stories of Africa." It's about the importance of narrative, and everybody should take 18 minutes of their time to go watch it.