A recent Facebook video has documented prisoner abuse by the Pakistani Army. This, needless to say, will not help Pakistan’s efforts to stem its Taliban insurgency in the Northwest Frontier Province, nor will it help America’s mission in the region.
Regardless of the morality of torturing and abusing prisoners of war (and, to put it mildly, it’s horrifically grotesque and a clear sign of debasement of human character), it’s also bad strategy. Information gained from torture is unreliable to say the least—most people would say pretty much anything in exchange for their captors halting the destruction of their physical and mental states. But on top of all that, it turns the people who you want on your side in COIN operations (namely, the local populace) against you.
Torture is an abomination, and a clear sign of the dangers of excessive state power. America’s reliance on torture in Guantanamo Bay, Abu Ghraib and Bagram Air Base has created a slippery slope of other repressive or authoritarian states (or state institutions, ala the Pakistani Army) increasingly likely to turn to torture, believing it has been legitimized. (And if they already engaged in torture, they were certainly less fearful of the international repercussions of continued abuse.)
Given this news, its little surprise that recent polling shows that 80 percent of Pakistanis don’t want to cooperate with the United States’ efforts in the War on Terror. Dawn reports, “The poll also found only 13 percent cited terrorism as the most important issue facing Pakistan. Instead, inflation, unemployment and poverty topped the list, with 72 percent saying their personal economic situation the past year had worsened.” An effort to lift tariffs on Pakistani textiles would be a good first step to helping Pakistan’s economy, and improving America’s image amongst the local populace.
