THE REVELANCE OF 'THE BATTLE OF ALGIERS'
My brother sent me a piece from The New York Times on the film "The Battle of Algiers." According to the article, the Pentagon is studying the film for "the advantages and costs of resorting to torture and intimidation in seeking vital human intelligence about enemy plans."

I read a book some time ago on the Algerian War and it's totally fascinated me since. The Algerian war was fought between nationalists who wanted the evict the French colonials and make Algeria an independent country. The guerilla war, which lasted from 1954-62, was very bloody and culminated with Algerian independence. It was a seminal war in French history as it pretty much led to the end of France as a world and imperial power. French African colonies were granted independence so the French state could put its resources into maintaining French Algeria, since the North African territory was legally considered part of France proper, just like Normandy or the Riviera.

The war was a disaster for France. Basically, Algeria was France's Vietnam (or more accurately, considering the timeline, Vietnam was America's Algeria). It divided French society bitterly. Algeria showed how a relatively small group of guerillas could defeat a much greater military power. France had far more impressive military force but the Algerian nationalists had home field advantage.

More importantly, the nationalists had a psychological edge. They were defending THEIR territory. While Algeria may have legally been a part of France proper, psychologically most French didn't really think of it as such. As a result, the nationalists had a much higher tolerance for casualities and fought with a greater ferocity because they were defending their homeland. The French had a much lower tolerance because after a certain point, they didn't think it was worth it to shed so much blood for mountains and sand. French society soured on the war much more quickly than the nationalist community. The nationalists had the stomach for a long fight; the occupiers did not. The nationalists didn't have to win the war decisively. They just had to not lose it. They could inflict by a thousand cuts. And they did. And it worked.

This is pretty much the same thing that happened to America in Vietnam a decade later. A nationalist guerilla movement fighting for their homeland against a foreign power from another continent. The Viet Cong didn't so much beat America as outlasted us. Americans lost the stomach for a fight because, after a certain point, it became too costly for something that wasn't really our fight. In combat between a nationalist movement and a foreign imperial power, the nationalist movement is going to almost always win a war of attrition. Not because they have more resources but because they have more incentive to go the last mile.

This is why empire is so difficult, so expensive and requires so many resources, human and otherwise, to maintain. This is why the Europeans got out of the business of physical empires and went to the much less taxing economic-only empire business.

The film 'The Battle of Algiers' is fascinating, though difficult to follow if you're not familiar with the basica outline of the history. The Battle of Algiers was a French crackdown on FLN (nationalist) militants in the Algerian capital in 1957. It was brutal (and the FLN was an equally brutal enemy) and ended up being an example of the phrase "winning the battle yet losing the war."

There was a lot of torture which the French justified at the time as being necessary. Though it's interesting to note that nearly 45 years later, the French general who oversaw the Battle of Algiers, Jacques Massu, told the French newspaper Le Monde that Torture is not indispensable in time of war, we could have gotten along without it very well. Which certainly calls into question whether torture is "necessary" for extracting vital information or if it's just an excess indulged upon by captors out of an understandable anger or desire for revenge. I've heard former torturers argue that torture is actually counterproductive because you don't know if the information extracted via that method is actually reliable, or if the victim is merely telling you what you want to hear so the torture will stop.