Ah!! you and I have found some politics we agree on!!! (nb. just noticed i got one of my acronyms wrong I used ISIL twice instead of ISIL for the US and ISIS for the rest of us...but you got my point and I've corrected it now).
The big problem with torture (outside of any moral qualms) is that if you torture a man he'll tell you anything you want him to. Torture me or you long enough and we'll tell you we were in Ford's theater the night Lincon was shot, or in the book depository with a sniper rifle to cap JFK.....it just doesn't work. The intelligence it produces is generally worthless.
When you see videos of ISIS they are often armed with Armalites instead of the ubiquitous AK47 and guess who makes those. Admittedly they could have been captured from the American equipped Iraqi army but same difference. American weapons equipping ISIS.
The thing with these Islamic fundamentalist groups is that the terms we know them by whether that be ISIS, Al Qaeda or whatever are far two simplified. They are a western construct fed to us by our politicians who feel the need to give the bad guys a label when in reality it's far more complex than that. The Americans just do not get the Middle Eastern life and value system at all. Americans think in American terms. Often these people they are trying to "bring democracy too" have no concept of what they are even talking about. The concept of loyalty to the tribe and to the family are what is important to many Arabs/Pashtuns and such. Take the Northwest Frontier Province for example. They don't even recognise Afghanistan or Pakistan as a country with any sovereign control over them. They are Afredi tribe and self governed. I'm not saying that's a good thing as this area along the Afghan/Pakistan border is one of the foremost breeding grounds of Islamic hatred in the whole world, I'm just saying that the concepts by which we base our modern way of life around have no meaning there to those people. That's just one example though, there are countless others of why western intervention in places like this is never going to work.
It's easy to observe and criticise though, but the real question is what to do? Yes their treatment of women is backward and wrong and yes the hatred preached in these Madrasas is wrong (and dangerous) but what should we (the West) do about it? Should we intervene to stop oppression or does our intervention however well intended (and I'm obviously not talking about the sort of intervention we saw in Iraq when I say "well intended"
) always end in disaster?
I wish I knew the answer to that. Many people in these countries want little else but to follow a peaceful way of life, farming their land and raising their families and deeply resent any foreign interference at all. Even intervention in the form of nation building often ends in disaster as with the operation Herrick series of missions in Afghanistan that begun in 2006 and only ended this year. The initial goal was to rebuild Afghan society and infrastructure not to engage the Taliban - it just didn't work out that way as the fighting kicked off from the word go then the DFID pulled out almost before it even started and it all went to rat shit - for the next 8 years!!. Should we then just sit by and watch while these countries battle on in the effective stone age? If I had the answer to that I'd be a well paid and important mam but I doknow one thing...... After 13 years in Afghanistan (a longer military intervention than even Vietnam) it looks almost certain that a future Afghan government will involve the Taliban (and that's one of the better potential outcomes in comparison to another civil war and the chaos that would bring). So has the last 13 years been worth it? Is the war on terror even winnable?
IMO the only winners have been the US military/industrial system of corporations and the losers have been the innocent people of the Middle East (and also the American people in the sense that many of their liberties have been stripped from them in the name of fighting terror - quite an irony). 13 years on from 9/11 and the world is a far more dangerous place than it was before the twin towers fell. The war on terror has created far more Islamic extremists than it has destroyed. Classic tactics of the underdog - strike first and then provoke the more powerful opponent into over-reacting thus stripping him of the moral high ground and popular support. It's a tactic the Palestinians use against the Israelis all the time. A single Palestinian suicide bomber in an Israeli nightclub scores no military success when he blows himself and numerous innocent civilians up. However, the predictable Israeli over-reaction to destroy an entire Palestinian neighborhood in response secures a massive political victory for the Palestinians.
Isn't the world an awful place.......
