The Symmetry Between Torture And Terror
5-21-05
Revelations about torture of political prisoners held in US prisons in Afghanistan, Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, Iraq and the
lower fifty have sparked debate about what is permissible in grey area, irregular conflicts such as the fight against
Islamicist terrorism. Brutalisation of terrorist suspects and sympathisers is allowed by a raft of post 9-11 legislation
that also authorises their indefinite detention without charge and the practice of “extraordinary rendition” (whereby
those suspected of involvement in terrorist activities are refouled to the country of charge or origin, to be detained,
interrogated and juridically administered under local conditions).
President Bush explicitly stated in the days immediately following the 9/11 attacks that the US would stop at nothing to
locate, bring to justice or eliminate those who organized, sponsored, supported or in any way collaborated in the
planning of those events, as well as previous assaults on US interests around the globe. He was roundly applauded at the
time by the shell-shocked US public, and it was in that environment that the legal framework for handling terrorist
suspects, along with the Patriot Act and Department of Homeland Security, were born.
Subsequent divisions over the use of torture in US detention centres have surfaced along the intersection of practical
versus ethical considerations. Torture is considered to be a forced necessity imposed by the ungentlemanly nature of the
opponent, or is seen as a moral indictment of the US approach to the “war on terror” that descends into the barbarism
that it purports to fight. The subtext of the ethical debate swings both ways. Zealotry and unilateralism in the Bush
administration are seen as evidence of both moral elevation or moral decay. Faith in the moral virtue of the current US
leadership prevailed among its voting public in the November 2004 national elections (by 52 to 47 percent), something
not that dissimilar from the vote totals received by Richard Nixon at the time of his re-election in 1972. Then and now
it is comforting for the voting majority to know that the United States Government is legally justified in authorising
acts that violate international conventions on the rules of engagement. For Nixon, legal justification of the secret
extension of the Vietnam War into Cambodia was grounded on such a means-ends rationale, and so it is with today’s US
approach to the war against Islamicist irregulars and jihadis.
Politicians, jurists and pundits are left with the unhappy task of morally justifying inhumane acts committed against
suspected enemies or ideological criminals. Myriad others have reason to wax indignant about the perversity of such
arguments. Yet, beyond the pressing ethical dilemmas posed by the use of torture against suspects, there are very
organic reasons for doing so. These reduce to a question of symmetry in war and the reciprocal utility of torture as a
weapon.
Military planners prefer their wars to be symmetrical. Symmetrical wars are those in which opponents are arrayed along a
roughly comparable range of force, with similar weapons and tactics. Although contested, the political objectives of
symmetrical wars, as well as the strategic rationales used in their pursuit, are grounded in shared understandings of
the limited utlity of war. Generally comparable military capabilities and comon expectations of combat and post-conflict
behaviour define the physical boundaries of the armed engagement. That leads to the adoption of norms governing the
behavior of belligerents, resulting in, among other things, the Hague Convention on Laws of Warfare and the Geneva
Convention regarding treatment of prisoners of war. It is adherence to a general set of conventions regarding the
conduct of combat operations within bounded levels of force that determines the difference between so-called
“conventional” and “unconventional” or “regular” and “irregular” conflicts.
The use of force is conditioned in conventional or regular wars by its relative symmetry, which serves to reduce chaos
(and the reach of combat) by providing rules of the game that serve as the ethical and legal foundation for the
formulation of military policy and application of armed force in pursuit of political objectives. Incremental
qualitative gains and relative quantitative advantages in weapons and troops constitute the physical parameters of war.
Within those lines elements of comparative resource base, collective will and technological innovation determine
military victory. Adherence to ethical guidelines for wartime conduct is expected of all belligerents.
Asymmetrical wars are those in which the military capabilities of opponents, defined as weapons systems, logistical
infrastructure, troop numbers and other indexes of armed might, vary markedly. One side dwarfs the other, militarily
speaking. Of itself, that is not what makes such wars unconventional. What does is the combination of ideology, interest
and tactics used. If the ideological motivation of opponents is diametrically opposed (say, a choice between submission
to secular infidels or defeat by medieval heathens), where the weaker actor is fighting for its national, cultural,
religious or ethnic survival whiles the stronger actor is not, then the strategic rationales used by military
adversaries will differ considerably. This brings in issues of pure and situational ethics, and the tactics used in
pursuit of them.
Guerrilla wars are the highest expression of asymmetric wars. They are fought unconventionally by highly motivated
volunteer irregular troops against conventional militaries (often those of nation-states or foreign occupiers, and in
many cases paid professionals). In these types of war the distinction between combatant and non-combatant, symbolic
versus military targets, and offensive versus defensive operations is deliberately blurred and often reversed by the
weaker party (of which there is often more than one, which requires tactical, if not strategic coordination between
them--an obvious Achilles Heel). For the weaker party contestation of territory is of secondary importance. What matters
is cultivation of popular support and weakening of the opponent’s determination to continue to fight in pursuit of its
political interests in a given geographic area. The Iraq conflict is a microcosmic distillation of that fact.
Conventional military planners prefer that force asymmetries be in their favour, understood as superior military
technology, training, organization and tactics brought to bear within a given continuum of force on an enemy that agrees
to play by the “rules.” For the irregular warrior, the object of the exercise is to use time, tenacity and psychological
impact as instruments to wear down the will of the militarily superior opponent. Symbolic acts figure very highly in the
guerrilla strategist’s tactical priorities, and terrorism against so-called “soft” civilian targets is central among
them because it is designed to produce paralysing fear and a desire to acquiesce among the enemy’s support base. This
extends the conflict outside the purely military realm into the area of social cohesion.
The firebombing of Dresden and atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were designed to do more than kill the thousands
that they did. The bombings were designed to demoralise the German and Japanese human reserve and erode civilian support
for continuing the war. So it is with suicide bombers in vehicles or on foot, even if they operate in wars that are
undeclared. The difference is that in one instance a warring nation-state utilises terror by extending the non-military
reach of conflict via conventional military means, whereas in the other case a non-state actor uses non-conventional
methods to do the same thing.
Against an agile and elusive opponent who refuses to fight in conventional symmetry, a militarily superior actor is
muscle-bound. Naval fleets, strategic airpower, armoured divisions and thousands of troops are of little use against
terrorists operating in dispersed, decentralized fashion in and among civilian populations. If used, they are overkill
when confronted by the networked cells that are the organizational latticework of transantionalised terrorism. Sometimes
overwhelming force is simply too much force given the character of the opponent and the contextual circumstance in which
she is engaged. Should the irregular, unconventional actor refuse to be drawn out into conventional symmetry, the only
option for a stronger conventional actor is to engage on her terms. This is the realm of Special Operations and Low
Intensity Conflict (SOLIC), which in US practice has evolved new features in the form of CIA para-military squads and
contract interrogators not beholden to the rules of engagement governing military intelligence and police.
This is what lies behind the US resort to torture. Along with the deployment of special forces teams and CIA squads in
areas in which Islamicists congregate, the US is attempting to get down to the level of its Islamicist opponents in
order to bring symmetry to the conflict. The operative belief is that if Islamicists want to play “dirty” by terrorising
civilians world-wide, then the US government will demonstrate that it can bring to bear all of its power and resources
on those terms. It does so by using the legal, military, administrative and political assets of a superpower to expand
the range of allowable state and para-state violence while justifying and institutionalising extra-judicial treatment of
terrorist suspects. Legal vetting of the wording of a variety of coercive interrogation techniques that require
cabinet-level authorisation is emblematic of the US approach in that regard.
That the US releases many suspected terrorists without charge is beside the point. The objective is symbolic and
systematic, or phrased differently, to terrorise in return. Those subjected to the new standard of detention and
interrogations who gain release will inform others. They will detail the cruelty as well as the seemingly endless
bureaucratic procedures required to seek redress, and they will expound upon their fear. What will be impressive about
their stories is the banality of the reciprocal evil practiced in pursuit of “freedom,” and the sense of hopelessness
and despair they felt while in its embrace. That condition of atomised infantilisation, whereby the subject is
physically isolated, punished and scared while being powerless and utterly dependent on the whim of the captor, is a
state of terror.
Torture of Muslims in US detention centres may inflame passions amongst Islamicist hard -liners (defined as those who
will commit bodies to the conflict given sufficient provocation). Their mobilisation is justified as an acceptable
variant on the honey trap theme, whereby an attractant (or provocation) prompts passive al-Qaeda cells to attempt
further terrorist attacks. At that point they can be identified and hunted down, although some will wreak damage before
doing so. In the scheme of things, that is held to be an acceptable cost of victory.
More importantly, public dissemination of the torture-terror doctrine will serve to dampen the passion of other would-be
jihadis, and deter many who thought to join the Islamicist cause. The point is to demonstrate to the unconventional
enemy and its supporters that the superpower, as well as other states, can well fight irregularly and systematically as
well, if not better. After all, the most common--and effective--type of terrorism in history is state terror, not that
practiced by today’s Islamicists.
This explains the why of using torture-terror as a combat weapon against terrorism. What it does not address is the
issue of objective. If the objective of using torture on terrorist suspects is to extract valuable strategic and
tactical intelligence from otherwise uncooperative subjects, the results have been poor. Sorting out the wheat from the
chaff amid the hundreds of desperate stories told under duress by US detainees has been a difficult process, with
relatively little valuable intelligence garnered from it. Thus, as a information gathering technique torture has not
been a panacea for the US intelligence community, and given media exposure has become a public relations liability for
the US--at least in the West. However, an alternative objective might better explain the rationale as well as the
pragmatic criteria upon which to choose it.
If the objective is to wear down the will of jihadis to persist in their global armed challenge while at the same time
removing their recruitment base, the systematic use of legally-sanctioned torture-terror by the US may bear fruit. In
the measure that it achieves symmetry, it raises the costs of the engagement to the jihadists. In the measure that it
turns the tables and weakens the will of the Islamicist irregulars to continue to fight, it will prevail over the long
term. In the measure that it prevails it re-establishes the relationship between the West and “the Rest,” especially the
Muslim world. In doing so it reconfigures the geopolitical landscape of the Middle East and elsewhere by extending the
cultural boundaries of Western influence to the necessity of recognizing the need for symmetry in war. That, it seems,
is the political syllogism underpinning the torture-terror doctrine.
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Paul G. Buchanan is the Director of the Working Group on Alternative Security Perspectives at the University of
Auckland. He formerly worked at the Pentagon and as a consultant to various US security agencies.