The Strategic Failure of Torture

By BJ Bjornson

Jay was quite right to note that the torture floodgates have been opened. The revelations about the torture program, and the attempts of the apologists to defend them, remain very much the main topic of discussion these days. Since the rest of the crew is doing a bang-up job on the topic, I thought I'd focus on something that twigged my memory in one of our Senior Comrade Licentious Nihilist Extremist's posts, (see this post's comments for explanation of the title). In particular, two of the points from Bernard Finel.

First, if the United States fails to cooperate with these investigations, it raises the possibility of future difficulties in intelligence sharing and cooperation on criminal justice matters. Our failure to take active measures to investigate and punish torture taints our entire justice system, potentially causing problems on issues of extradition and sharing of evidence until the U.S. system is �clean.�

. . .

Third, we are likely to face problems in the area of military cooperation as European militaries worry about cooperating with or serving under the command of officers who might be deemed war criminals. This clearly could pose problems for NATO.

These points are not really speculative. The issues of cooperation and prisoner access have already come up in the Afghan theatre.

For the almost five years that Canadian troops have been in Afghanistan, there has been controversy over what to do with captured Taliban fighters and other suspected insurgents.

The former Liberal government initially decided to turn prisoners over to the U.S. military, which was then leading the fight against al-Qaeda and other militants. But that policy did not always sit well at home.

Then, when the UN took over responsibility for quelling Afghan's insurgents � and when Washington began to develop a reputation for pushing the limits of the Geneva Convention on prisoners � Canada struck a deal with the new Afghanistan government to turn its prisoners over to Afghan security forces.

It was a couple of years after the transfer to Afghan authorities began that the whole process wound up blowing up into a major scandal for the Canadian government. The reason?

Legal authorities in Canada have said Canadian soldiers involved in past transfers of captives to Afghan security forces � who have a bad reputation when it comes to torture � could be charged with assisting war crimes.

And as noted previously, it was the reputation the Bush administration was creating that led Canada to stop transferring prisoners to their custody in the first place.  A reputation that turns out to be very well deserved indeed, and leads to the same problem for other allied countries.

From re-reading a few dozen articles and blog posts from that time, the issue is that under international law, a country�s responsibility to ensure the humane treatment of captured prisoners doesn�t end when it transfers custody to another nation, and transferring prisoners to a jurisdiction with known human rights issues makes you complicit in the crimes committed against those transferred.

In short, assisting a United States whose record on human rights remains doubtful could result in serious consequences for the soldiers or other personnel who assist them. Under such circumstances, it seems reasonable that other countries may wish to limit their ties to the American intelligence community.

You wind up with a nation cut off from even its own allies, which as John Robb notes, is a really bad idea:

In short, a primary objective of US grand strategy should be to increase its connectivity within the moral sphere.  The embrace of torture does exactly the opposite.  It self-inflicts moral isolation on the US by violating codes of conduct we profess to uphold.  

This moral isolation creates an internal dialogue plagued by mistrust, menace, and uncertainty.  As a result, non-cooperative centers of gravity organically develop (internal opposition movements) and every decision becomes more difficult to accomplish.  Over a long conflict, like the one we are engaged in, anything that leads to slower and less effective decision making this early in the process is nothing short of a disaster.