November 5, 2021
Late last week, the United States Institute of Peace published an article by Kadiatou Keita and Emily Cole. The article, “How to Respond to a ‘Year of Coups?’ We Can Try in Mali.” examines how U.S. security assistance in Africa has not only failed to create regional stability, but has actually fueled underlying drivers of social unrest with too great a focus on short-term security objectives and not enough attention paid to long-term stability and human security. Keita and Cole note that the May coup in Mali took place because U.S. and European counterterrorism funding helped create security forces that are insufficiently accountable to democratically elected leaders, while allowing those security forces to kill more civilians than the violent extremist groups did. In the piece, the authors argue that the U.S., France, the EU, and Mali’s other international partners must endeavor to help the country, and its security institutions, to protect human security. In doing so, they argue that Mali’s international partners must prove that they stand by their principles, and are endeavoring to assist their ally Mali to do the same by focusing less on short-term counterterrorism goals, and more on issues of democracy and human rights. Keita and Cole argue that such a focus on values and human rights requires not just a withdrawal of security assistance if abuse is present, but a total recalibration of assistance that prioritizes investments in long-term peace and stability over short-term security gains. To achieve such a reorientation of assistance programs, the authors argue that civil society must be included in all stages of security sector assistance provision. Therefore, when examining the state of U.S. security sector assistance around the world, it is important to look at a variety of views on how to reform security assistance to make it more human security-focused.
Security assistance to foreign governments, authorized under Title 22 of the U.S. Code, covers a variety of programs through which the U.S. provides equipment, military education and training, and other defense-related items and services to foreign governments by way of grant, loan, cash, credit, or lease. The U.S. Department of State (State) supervises and directs these security assistance programs in consultation with the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD). Within DoD, the Defense Security Cooperation Agency (DSCA) administers the Foreign Military Sales program, which is responsible for transferring defense equipment, services, and training to the United States’ international partners and international organizations. Under the program, the U.S. uses DoD’s acquisition system in order to purchase defense articles and services on behalf of its international partners. The other primarily relevant program to this discussion is the International Military Education and Training (IMET) program, which provides for the training of foreign military and civilian personnel in the United States and overseas facilities. Currently, more than 12,000 International Military Students attend training at U.S. institutions worldwide.
While there certainly is room for discussion of the impact of direct U.S. military hardware sales and transfers under the Foreign Military Sales Program (FMS) or the Foreign Military Financing Program (FMF), the focus of this piece will remain more on the training of partner militaries. However, it should be noted that such sales and transfers are vital parts of the discussion on shifting the Western focus in Africa from counterterrorism/counterinsurgency towards a focus on human security. This is an especially important consideration in countries such as Mali, which has seen an increase in arms imports of 669% between 2011-2015 and 2016-2020.
Failures in Security Assistance Programs and the Impact on Human Security
Mara Karlin, formerly of the Brookings Institution, and current U.S. Deputy Under Secretary of Defense for Policy, in a 2017 article, “Why Military Assistance Programs Disappoint: Minor Tools Can’t Solve Major Problems,” notes that, “Today, Washington is working with the militaries of more than 100 countries and running large programs to train and equip armed forces in such hot spots as Afghanistan, Iraq, Jordan, and Pakistan.” However, she also states that, “history shows that building militaries in weak states is not the panacea the U.S. national security community imagines it to be,” and that, “the biggest problem with Washington’s efforts to build foreign militaries is its reluctance to weigh in on higher-order questions of mission, organizational structure, and personnel—issues that profoundly affect a military’s capacity but are often considered too sensitive to touch. Instead, both parties tend to focus exclusively on training and equipment, thus undercutting the effectiveness of U.S. assistance.” Specifically, Karlin notes the poor U.S. experience in building up the militaries of South Vietnam in the 1950s and 1960s, El Salvador in the 1980s, and Yemen, Mali, and Afghanistan in the 21st century.
As noted in, “A Plan to Reform U.S. Security Assistance,” by Max Bergmann and Alexandra Schmitt at the Center for American Progress, “U.S. security assistance is broken and in need of an overhaul. Over the past two decades, the bureaucratic system developed to deliver billions of dollars of military aid to partner nations has evolved and expanded not by design but as the result of a series of ad hoc legislative and policy changes,” and as a result, the system has become broken, with “a perpetuated status quo whereby nondemocratic partners receive U.S. assistance and where human rights abuses are ignored.”
What this all arrives at is a more fundamental issue—that U.S. security sector assistance (SSA) has a number of drawbacks and potential failure points. While there may be a tremendous number of short-term gains to be had by engaging in the provision of security sector assistance to fragile countries such as Mali, there is a growing amount of research which shows that U.S. SSA often fails to achieve the long-term U.S. goals of creating international partners that are able to secure themselves against external threats. Furthermore, such U.S. assistance programs also often create the conditions for internal turmoil that frequently leads to violent domestic upheaval, such as military coups. Specifically, a 2018 Rand Corporation report demonstrated that U.S. SSA in partner countries since the end of the Cold War has appeared to increase the incidence of civil wars. Furthermore, a 2017 article for the Journal of Peace Research by Jesse Dillon Savage and Jonathan D. Caverley noted that there is a, “robust relationship between US training of foreign militaries and military-backed coup attempts, despite limiting our analysis to the International Military Education and Training Program (IMET), which explicitly focuses on promoting norms of civilian control.” Specifically, Savage and Caverly discovered that if the number of soldiers trained or dollars spent moves from the 25th to the 75th percentile, the probability of a coup doubles; and that foreign military training correlates to the likelihood of a successful coup, even when such studies are limited to democracies.
Instead of focusing on the pursuit of short-term security objectives, which often forces the U.S. to commit to providing ever increasing security assistance to already fragile nations even when such security assistance does not lead to positive results—the U.S. should instead invest in strengthening the governance and oversight of security forces in these partner nations. Such a shift would require a rebalancing of U.S. priorities away from military training towards diplomacy, supporting local civil-society groups’ efforts to strengthen accountability.
In Chapter four of the 2002 Stockholm International Peace Research Institute’s Yearbook, “The challenges of security sector reform,” the authors Dylan Hendrickson and Andrezej Karkoszka state that, “before 1989, aid to the Third World—including development, humanitarian and security assistance—was closely linked to the dynamics of the cold war. Security became synonymous with the stability of the international system and regime stability—the protection of client regimes from external and internal threats. Assistance programmes paid little attention to democratic civil-military relations, to effective legislative and executive oversight over the various security branches, or to the creation of a professional ethos within security services that was consistent with the dictates of a modern democracy.” Furthermore, they argue that, “implementing security sector reform in conflict-torn societies presents the greatest challenges. The lack in most cases of a strong national vision and capacity coupled with the urgency of reform resulted in an overwhelming emphasis on an external timetable and model. This is despite the fact that international actors rarely have a clear understanding of the situation on the ground, of what preceded a war or of how the new power dynamics are arranged. Persistent tensions, along with the enhanced role of security forces in political matters, constitute major barriers to reform.”
In a 2015 Carnegie Endowment for International Peace article, “Governance and Security Sector Assistance: The Missing Link—Part II,” the authors Richard Sokolosky and Gordon Adams note that, “the long-term impacts, outcomes, and performance resulting from U.S. security assistance programs are generally not well tracked and evaluated, particularly by DoD,” and that while sustained U.S. assistance to Egyptian military forces allowed for dialogue with their military during the Arab Spring, U.S. security assistance “could not prevent a military coup and its has been frequently used to conduct ‘scorched earth’ operations in the Sinai that have killed civilians and caused extensive damage to civilian infrastructure.”
The United States has done a remarkably poor job of ensuring that security sector assistance to partner countries achieves the goals that its decision makers set out to achieve, and has, at the same time, encouraged corruption and the misappropriation of security assistance resources for repressive domestic purposes. This mis- and malfeasance has enabled partner militaries to carry out anti-democratic military takeovers of existing regimes. As remarked on by Andrew Miller and Daniel R. Mahanty in a 2020 article for Just Security, “the U.S. government as a whole makes no attempt to evaluate the possibility that its security aid has at least in some cases, produced unintended effects detrimental to U.S. interests.” Furthermore, as noted in the paper, “Smart Conditions: A Strategic Framework for Leveraging Security Assistance,” by the Center for Strategic and International Studies’ Melissa G. Dalton, “when the policies of countries receiving U.S. security assistance fundamentally diverge from U.S. interests, the United States faces a dilemma. If it cuts off assistance to demonstrate American displeasure, it may risk losing leverage in working with the partner on other security objectives or broader foreign policy priorities…On the other hand, if the United States ignores the policy divergence, it may lose credibility with the partner, as it then becomes difficult to reasonably press for reform while continuing assistance flows.”
To that end, over the past few years, there have been a number of interesting reports which propose solutions that would improve the ability of U.S. SSA to not only achieve short-term U.S. security objectives, but the long-term objectives of creating stability in fragile partner countries that take part in U.S. security sector programs. To begin, in October 2018, the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) published a report, “The Protection of Civilians in U.S. Partnered Operations,” by Melissa Dalton, Jenny McAvoy, Daniel Mahanty, Hijab Shah, Kelsey Hampton, and Julie Snyder. The report looked at U.S. security assistance partnership programs in Iraq, Syria, and Nigeria, and examined how such security partnerships can aggravate the risks of harm to civilians, depending on the form and significance of the partnership as well as the particular nature of the partner themselves. The report notes that while the U.S. has instituted some level of vetting of aid partners with the so-called Leahy law—which examine the records of military units that are to be the recipient of U.S. aid, cutting off units who have been implicated in gross violations of human rights —such “ultimatum” conditionality is seldom endorsed, as U.S. decision makers frequently decide that the given bilateral relationship is too critical to disrupt for human rights concerns. However, the authors argue that, to influence such units behavior, there needs to be much more done than simply vetting individual units receiving security sector assistance. The CSIS authors argue that it is imperative that the DoD and the State Department incorporate, as part of security assistance programs, training that ensures that military personnel internalize the importance of protecting civilians in operations. Here, they give the successful example of the NATO International Security Assistance Force – Afghanistan (ISAF-A), which created the Civilian Casualty Tracking Cell (CCTC) and Civilian Casualty Mitigation Team (CCMT), whose efforts to track civilian casualties continued through Operation Resolute Support. The authors argue that the U.S. should encourage security partners to engage with local non-governmental organizations (NGOs) as well as the local media in order to build trust with local communities and improve accountability. Specifically they note that these non-governmental organizations often have the insights into the particular needs of local civilian populations and therefore can share analyses of harmful trends with security partners in order to demonstrate the impact that military operations conducted by security forces are having on the civilian populace.
Furthermore, the CSIS report argues that an assessment of security partners needs to factor in not only the command structure and security governance of a prospective partner, but also their history or lack thereof of rights abuses; public perceptions of the group or institution; potential for future instability; and cultural barriers to reform. The authors argue that local NGOs often have much greater local understanding of the relationship between prospective security partners and local civilian populations, making them invaluable resources for deciding on how to structure security assistance partnership programs. That said, the authors note that there are times when the U.S. will need to work with security partners that possess problematic pasts. In those cases, it is vital that policy makers define clear redlines, as well as pre-defined disciplinary actions that the U.S. will take if a partner does not meet expected behavior. In addition, the U.S. needs to make clear from the outset that it has an exit strategy if the performance of the partner does not live up to partnership standards. This is even more important when engaging with non-state armed groups (NSAGs), like the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF). With NSAGs, the authors argue that the U.S. needs to anticipate and prepare for challenges posed by such groups following the end of hostilities, ensuring that these groups demobilize or reintegrate into either civilian society or the national armed forces. In addition, CSIS’ Melissa G. Dalton’s paper Smart Conditions asserts that, “assessing donor and recipient vulnerability at the front end of U.S. policy deliberations can help calculate leverage and determine the right kind of conditions that should be applied.” However, she is careful to note that stricter conditionality will not resolve all the issues involved with the fact that the U.S. often has no choice but to deal with autocratic or authoritarian regimes in order to achieve its security objectives.
Other measures suggested in The Protection of Civilians in US Partnered Operations include clearly signaling the priority of civilian protection early on in the process of designing assistance missions, which allows for consistent monitoring and correcting of issues as they arise, rather than after they have become problems. Additionally, they argue for robust analysis of the impact that military operations have on civilian populations. Here, they again use the example of the CCMT in Afghanistan, which looked for trends showing harm to civilians in military operations, and was able to elevate those observations to the force commander in order to take actions to reduce future risks to civilian populations.
Related considerations for U.S. policy makers are that the U.S. needs to clearly track and communicate when civilian casualties occur, as that can also help enable adaptations to tactics which would minimize the harm done to civilians. Here, they point to the monthly civilian casualty reports issued by U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM) during the Afghanistan War. Relatedly, the authors also advocate the importance of strong U.S. leadership and a command climate that reinforces the overall importance of the protection of civilians. Finally, none of this is possible without sufficient resourcing and sustained commitment by the U.S. Without funding of these initiatives, and the commitment to enforce the lessons learned from such studies, civilians will continue to be adversely impacted by U.S. security sector assistance.
Other deficiencies in U.S. security sector assistance are that, as noted by Jesse Dillon Savage and Jonathan D. Caverly, in their paper, “When human capital threatens the Capitol: Foreign aid in the form of military training and coups,” for the Journal of Peace Research, that while Congressional testimony has, in the past, lauded Foreign Military Training (FMT) programs, which, “‘impart American values to the recipients in foreign militaries, both directly and indirectly. [ … ] [the] recent radical decrease in defense budgets would have resulted in coups which today never materialized, in part because of the learned respect for civilian control of the military,” the authors argue that the effect of such norms are likely to be weak. For example, they point to Egypt’s Abdel-Fattah el-Sissi, who received FMT in the U.S., while clearly not absorbing American values.
In addition, Savage and Caverly argue that FMT makes soldiers harder to punish, as regimes are wont to alienate newly valuable resources that are, at least until the next batch of soldiers receives training, irreplaceable. Furthermore, they note that such foreign military training can, through providing returning soldiers with an increase in prestige and capability, shift the balance of human capital in a partner nation, increasing the ability of such soldiers to conduct a coup, especially relative to the ability of soldiers not receiving FMT.
Involving Civil Society
More recently, in October of 2020, the Center for Civilians in Conflict released their report, “Having Their Say: Guidelines for Involving Local Civil Society in the Planning, Design, Implementation, and Evaluation of U.S. Security Assistance and Cooperation,” which argued that though the U.S. is the biggest security actor in the world, it has not internalized the idea that involving civil society in the planning, design, implementation, and evaluation of assistance programs strongly increases the match between the intervention and the local context, while reducing corruption and the misappropriation of resources used for the repression of civilians. Here, the authors note that outside actors such as the U.S. are frequently unable to force reforms to security services in countries where domestic leadership feels like they have more to lose than gain from such a restructuring. In addition, without the kind of specific, local information, available only to locals, which is needed to address the challenges that leave partners unstable—such as insurgency, narcotrafficking, or organized crime—the U.S. is unable to assist in creating the kind of reform needed to change the human security situation in the country.
Here, the authors argue that the inclusion of civil society in security assistance programs is the only way forward, as while tools like the Global Fragility Act are useful technocratic solutions, they don’t get at the essential fact that getting a partner to implement security sector reforms is not a technical, but rather, a political problem. Specifically, it fails to account for situations where security sector reform poses a political threat to the leaders of autocratic, transitional, or shakily democratic regimes. In addition, Mara Karlin’s 2017 Brookings report also noted that when it comes to strengthening the security sectors of weak states, “like all statebuilding endeavors, these are political, not technical exercises. Instead of focusing narrowly on training and equipment, U.S. policymakers responsible for implementing such programs must address the purpose and scope of the U.S. role and the mission, leadership, and organizational structure of the partner’s military.” Further, as submitted by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace’s Rachel Kleinfeld, “state fragility…is primarily an issue of political legitimacy. No amount of capacity building can redress governance failures. And yet, most U.S. SSA to fragile states goes to non-inclusive states with poor governance – no surprise since countries with exclusionary politics, weak governance, poor rule of law, and high rates of corruption have a 30 percent to 45 percent higher risk of civil war and a significantly higher rate of criminal violence.”
The Center for Civilians in Conflict’s authors argue that, in terms of crafting security sector assistance programs, civil society must be involved, as popular domestic demand for security sector reform is often the only mechanism by which partner governments decide to enact greater levels of security sector accountability. In addition, a report from the Center for American Progress in March 2021 notes that, “In the case of counterterrorism assistance to partners with bad rights records, for example, security assistance needs to be accompanied by increased funding for democracy, rights, and governance to help strengthen civil society and improve election monitoring capacity. If governments do not support or welcome U.S. assistance toward governance and democracy initiatives, security assistance packages should be vetted and reassessed, with an inclination toward realigning funding for nondemocratic states.”
The Center for Civilians in Conflict report’s authors list seven direct benefits of engaging with civil society in crafting security assistance, including a better ability to evaluate the appropriateness of such assistance in the local context; limiting the risks that security assistance programs pose to civilians; improving the chance that such programs address the specific local security needs of civilian populations; ensuring that the true intent of U.S. security assistance is accurately conveyed to the recipient public; that it signals political support for civil society worldwide; that civil society assists in evaluating the effectiveness of certain assistance programs; and finally, that U.S. involvement of independent civil society in a partner country carves out a role for civil society in the reform of the security sector, if it was not already a part of the political process.
The Center for Civilians in Conflict’s report notes that while the variegated nature of security assistance programs makes it difficult to make generalized statements on how to best involve civil society in SSA programs, it is important to clearly identify the best ways to involve such groups at each stage of the planning and implementation process. To that end, the authors outline 15 separate guidelines for the engagement of civil society in such programs. The first is that the U.S. must engage civil society in each country where SSA is to take place. They note that despite the fact that not every program is conducive to direct engagement with civil society, most would benefit from their involvement, especially those programs that have a clear focus on improving local justice and security service delivery. As an example, they assert that the U.S. should conduct regular consultations with human-rights NGOs in partner countries, led by the Embassy’s Chief of Mission, through meetings with regional experts and NGOs during planning roundtables at the State Department.
A second guideline is that such consultations be conducted in good faith, with the assurance that the U.S. will incorporate any feedback into programmatic decisions, regardless of the tension it may cause with the partner country. Third, the authors note that civil society should be engaged all throughout the process, not just in the planning stages, as the ability to receive proper feedback is key to adjusting programs as they are being conducted, ensuring that they meet public needs and avoid potential abuse. The next guideline is that the U.S. adopt a “do no harm” framework, which acknowledges the risks undertaken by civil society groups when engaging with the U.S. on security assistance projects, and that the U.S. must therefore consider inputs from such organizations when considering their level of risk tolerance. As recently mentioned by Aude Darnal and Evan Cooper in a piece for the Atlantic Council, a “do no harm” approach to SSA would look to anticipate negative impacts of security assistance to a country’s political, social, and military systems, and bake in mitigation measures during the design phase to avoid poor outcomes.
The fifth guideline from the Center for Civilians in Conflict report is that the U.S. needs to limit the amount and kind of security assistance in restrictive, repressive environments, as such security assistance in states where civil society is heavily restricted, often leads to corruption or abuse. The authors argue that the U.S. must consider refraining from providing material support to security forces engaged in internal security or elite units operating under extreme secrecy, like those in Egypt, where the U.S. recently suspended $130 million in annual security sector assistance over concerns about the human rights situation in a country with an increasingly restrictive environment. The sixth guideline is that the U.S. needs to take affirmative steps towards inclusivity, paying less attention to those groups with the size or English language skills to more easily attract U.S. engagement, focusing on more marginalized segments of the population. The seventh guideline is that the U.S. should ensure accessibility for local and international NGOs by translating materials into local language and having planners travel to more remote locations in order to meet with community representatives that otherwise may not be able to travel to the capital or even the United States for planning meetings.
An 8th guideline is that the U.S. define the responsibilities for civil society engagement within the U.S. government at every stage of the process to ensure those that do so have the authority to speak on behalf of the U.S. government. The next guideline is that the U.S. should strengthen existing channels for public participation, including through financially underwriting indigenous-led processes such as community-police dialogues, or through diplomatic engagement such as town hall meetings with civil society to discuss the nature of U.S. activities with the Chief of Mission. The tenth guideline is that the United States engage with parliamentary bodies in recipient countries to ensure that such security assistance programs are consistent with domestic law. The eleventh guideline is a need for the U.S. to increase its awareness of the unintended consequences of security sector assistance, including when security assistance shifts NGO attention away from issues of human rights or governance towards too much involvement in the efforts to counter violent extremism. Here, the authors note that often, U.S. counterterrorism programming, such as the sharing of terrorist “watchlist” information, or efforts to counter terrorists use of the internet, often simply provide partner governments with a layer of legitimacy as they look to place further restrictions on civil society.
The twelfth guideline is that the U.S needs to champion transparency, encouraging its partners to do the same, so that budgetary and human rights commitments are communicated to the public, minimizing the incidences of corruption, and increasing pressure on partner governments to ensure that human rights are respected. The thirteenth guideline is that the U.S. should assist civil society groups in building their own capacity, providing technical support, promoting knowledge sharing, and most importantly, offsetting the high operational costs of operating in conflict-affected states. The penultimate guideline offered by the report’s authors is that the U.S. enlist civil society in the assessment and evaluation of security assistance programs, as such groups often have a better understanding of public contentment with the performance of security agencies in the domestic context. As noted by Albrecht Schnabel and Hans-Georg Ehrhart in their chapter, “Post-conflict societies and the military: Challenges and problems of security sector reform,” from the 2005 book Security sector reform and post-conflict peacebuilding, one of the key tasks for external actors when reforming a society’s security sector is that the monitoring of security sector policy must be maintained, and to do so, there is a need to build a well-informed, independent civil society sector to review accountability and efficiency in the sector sector. Schnabel and Ehrhart argue that, “the goals here are to strengthen civilian expertise in defence, justice, and internal ministries; to establish independent audit offices; to establish civilian review boards for police forces and penal institutions; and to create parliamentary committees to cover defence, policing, and internal affairs.”
Finally, the Center for Civilians in Conflict’s report argues that the U.S. needs to coordinate support for civil society groups with international bodies and actors. In doing so, they argue, it would not only reduce redundancy, but it would reduce the impact of negative public perception of one particular donor. For example, while the U.S. does not have a sterling reputation everywhere in the world, if support were provided to such civil society groups by other international donors and organizations in addition to the United States, it is harder for partner governments to malign civil society as the agent of the United States.
Putting Human Rights and Human Security at the Center of U.S. Foreign Policy
Thomas Carothers and Benjamin Press of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace just this week released a paper, “Navigating the Democracy-Security Dilemma in U.S. Foreign Policy: Lessons from Egypt, India, and Turkey,” which argues that the U.S. has not been putting the protection of human rights at the center of its foreign policy, as “confronting partner governments over their political shortcomings risks triggering hostility that would jeopardize the security benefits that such governments provide to Washington.” Here, the two authors propose that, in order to bolster efforts to support democracy and human rights when designing security sector assistance programs, the U.S. needs to consider: what are the specific security interests that partnership with the foreign government will help advance; what the relationship is between security interests the U.S. hopes that partnership will serve and the problematic democratic situations of partner countries; how U.S security interests may be threatened if it pushes harder on democracy and human rights issues; how the U.S. can raise such issues with problematic partners in ways that maximize gains to democratic progress or human rights reform; and asking what is reasonable to expect to achieve by pushing harder on democracy.
The Carnegie authors argue that, for example, the U.S. security assistance partnership with Egypt has continued at a cost of over $1 billion per year, despite relations improving drastically over that time. Therefore, the authors contend that such a relationship should be reevaluated, especially in light of Sisi’s continued authoritarianism and crackdowns on critics and human rights defenders. At the same time, the authors acknowledge that while there are those that say that liberalization or democratization may actually hinder the U.S. relationship with countries such as Egypt—if organizations like the Muslim Brotherhood were allowed to democratically compete in those nations—many civil society actors contend that it is Sisi’s ongoing autocratic tendencies, enabled by abusive security services, that may lead to rising extremism and political instability, undermining U.S. security goals in the region.
The Carnegie authors argue that, when it comes to deciding if or how U.S. security interests may be threatened if American decision makers push partner governments harder on issues of human rights and democracy, policy makers need to realize that going easy on partners is not some panacea, and that remaining silent can see negative behavior from partners continue. For example, the authors point to Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte, whose illiberal behavior has not stopped him from threatening to discontinue defense cooperation pacts with the United States, despite muted U.S. criticism of his regime. They argue that U.S. policy makers should not be afraid that any pressure at all will turn the partner immediately against the U.S.
When it comes to the issue of how the U.S. can raise democracy and rights issues with problematic partners in ways that maximize the chances of democratic progress, the Carnegie authors note that when doing so, the U.S. should emphasize the self-interest of partner governments in decision making. For example, they argue that the politicization of legal institutions in Egypt harms the potential for foreign direct investment, and, as such, U.S. arguments about reform should therefore focus on Egypt’s own desires rather than simply emphasizing generic principles of democracy and human rights.
Finally, in terms of determining what is reasonable to achieve when pushing partner countries on democracy and human rights issues, Carothers and Press argue that U.S. decision makers often focus far too much on achieving total democratic reform. Instead, the authors argue that U.S. expectations must be calibrated carefully based on the relative degree of democratization already taking place in the partner country. This is required in order to determine whether enhanced U.S. engagement will be enough to motivate leaders in partner countries to limit their autocratic tendencies or undertake new steps in the process of democratization. For Carothers and Press, such a process would not resolve all democratic and human rights deficiencies in partner countries, but would at least attempt to achieve a balance between supporting democracy and human rights around the world and maintaining vital security partnerships with countries that are autocratic, authoritarian, or democratically deficient.
Lessons and Takeaways
Overall, it is clear from the existing research that the way that the United States currently conducts its SSA programs is unlikely to achieve policy makers’ goals in terms of democracy and human rights promotion. Furthermore, it is important that, in crafting such security assistance programs, the civil society of recipient partner nations is included from the outset, as those groups are able to provide vital information about local conditions unavailable to even regional academic experts. Furthermore, U.S. decision makers need to not be faint of heart, and establish clear red lines for the behavior or partners that receive SSA, ensuring that there are cut-offs and offramps for U.S. aid in the event that security actors in partner nations are used to abuse civilian populations, violate human rights, or carry out authoritarian repression. Such red lines and clear conditionality is especially important in countries that are fragile and face threats from extremist groups.
As argued in 2019 by the United States Institute of Peaces’ Nathaniel Allen and Rachel Kleinfeld, the U.S. spent over a decade and some $25 billion in security assistance trying to turn the Iraqi army into a modern fighting force. Despite that, it was not enough to prevent them from being driven out of Mosul by ISIS in June 2014. Allen and Kleinfeld argue that the reason for that failure was that U.S. security assistance efforts were focused on building tactical capacity of Iraqi units, rather than addressing the sectarian divides and corruption that pervaded Iraqi security forces.
Therefore, U.S. security sector assistance cannot be simply about addressing American security needs, but rather transforming the security institutions in partner nations so that they are able to overcome corruption and focus on the protection of civilians. As noted in Transparency International’s policy brief, “The Common Denominator: How Corruption in the Security Sector Fuels Insecurity in West Africa,” “Corruption…is not just a consequence of conflict, but is itself also frequently a driver or enabler of armed violence. When corruption takes root in defence and security institutions, its effects on peace and security can be catastrophic and can lead to the degradation of human security, breakdown of the rule of law, and loss of trust in central authorities. As a result, countering corruption and mitigating corruption risks in defence and security forces should be a cornerstone of stabilisation and peacebuilding initiatives.”
While the United States has taken some steps towards creating more robust assessment, monitoring, and evaluation policies for security assistance programs, what has been done is not enough. While the U.S. Government Accountability Office has recommended that the State Department and DoD develop a plan for monitoring and evaluating the effectiveness of human rights training for foreign security forces provided under IMET, State responded that, as human rights training is a key element of its IMET programs, “we do not agree with the recommendation to separately conduct monitoring and evaluating of human rights training for IMET participants.”
Put simply, the United States, specifically the State Department and the Department of Defense need to do much more when defining a role for civil society in developing, monitoring, and evaluating U.S. security sector assistance, particularly in fragile countries. In addition, both departments need to do more to ensure that such security assistance does not have a negative effect on the civilian populace of recipient nations. To do so, the U.S. needs to not only involve local civil society groups in the design of security assistance programs, but it needs to be absolutely ready to cut off such security assistance to partner countries if U.S. aid is being used to repress civilian populations in any major form. While it may be difficult, and will frequently run up against regional U.S. security interests, there is the larger point to be had that in no way is creating more instability in recipient countries beneficial to regional security. In fact, as has been shown in countries like Sudan and Mali, U.S. assistance has actually emboldened, or at the very least enabled, military figures to topple democratic governments. Whether the type of conditionality imposed is negative or positive political conditionality, the U.S. needs a framework that offers concrete ways to shape security and political outcomes in countries where it provides security sector assistance. Such a framework needs to clearly define U.S. objectives in the country, clear steps to achieve those objectives along the way, while simultaneously involving both partner governments and local civil society organizations. Such a framework should be bounded on both sides with further inducements for positive partner behavior, and punishments, up to and including a firm end to the program, for backsliding.
In sum, while it is tempting to believe that the U.S. can simply ignore human rights abuses in partner countries, while focusing solely on the achievement of American security goals, such a strategy is the epitome of foolishness. In Chad, the military’s move to replace the deceased Idriss Déby with a “transitional military council”—which is tantamount to a military takeover of the country—again demonstrates how providing security assistance to a “regional counterterrorism leader”, despite years of human rights abuses by American governing partners like Idriss Déby, has not only resulted in a deteriorating counterterrorism situation, but has created a situation where further democratic backsliding is practically guaranteed. The United States, when crafting security sector assistance programs, needs to recognize the fact that all problems cannot be solely viewed solely through a security lens.
If the U.S. wants its SSA programs to be more efficient and effective in future years, especially when partnering with fragile states, policy makers not only need to involve civil society earlier in the process, but they need to ensure that such programs are designed with robust safeguards, so that short-term U.S. security goals do not overtake the importance of designing a security assistance program that promotes the values of democracy and human rights. Security sector assistance programs need to be designed with clear milestones in terms of the expectations the U.S. has for a partner, along with consequences for failure to meet those milestones. Otherwise, the U.S. risks simply creating the conditions for future instability in those countries, while being simultaneously unable to resolve the short-term security issues.
Foreign Policy Reviews 