 Good afternoon, everyone. My name is Julie Werbel. I'm the division chief for leadership and learning in USAID's Center for Conflict and Violence Prevention. I am pleased to welcome you to the discussion on elite capture and corruption of the security sector. Every day, peace builders around the globe, whether they're working on conflict prevention, violence prevention, atrocity prevention, countering violent extremism, or positive peace, are forced to reckon with the role of the security sector. Those actors and institutions who are so fundamental to peace, yet so often outside the influence of peace builders. In the best case scenarios, they fulfill their mandated roles to uphold the peace and uphold the rule of law. In the worst case scenarios, they harass and even terrorize citizens, wreak havoc on communities, or do the bidding of autocrats, oligarchs, and cartels. In short, they undermine the peace and security they're meant to engender. We see this everywhere, such as in Sudan, where the ruling government, a military junta, is raging an all-out war on the paramilitary force who that helped it to gain power. We see it in Burkina Faso, where military clad troops, accompanied by a government-sponsored volunteer force, commit atrocities under the guise of counterterrorism. And in return, VEOs ramp up their campaigns of violence. In many of these countries, the laws and policies governing the security sector mirror those of our own. On paper, their democratic forces mandated by constitutions, they're organized, trained, and equipped. Many, if not most, have had some kind of human rights training. And yet, in fragile and conflict-affected countries, the gap between what forces and services were constituted to do and what they actually do continues to grow. USAID commissioned this work with USIP to better understand why that is. How is it that security actors and institutions perpetrate violence rather than sustain peace? Too often, donors, including the United States, see a performance problem and seek to solve it with more training. But training is only the solution when a lack of skills is the problem. With this study, USIP has unpacked the political economy of violence to illustrate how actors outside of the security sector itself influenced decision actions and behaviors inside it. I'm delighted to introduce our panelists today to share their perspectives on the study and its recommendations. Let me start at the far end with Ambassador Ann Patterson, former Assistant Secretary for Near Eastern and North African Affairs. Ambassador Patterson has held ambassadorial posts in Egypt, Pakistan, Colombia, and El Salvador. Beside her is Ambassador Dawn Liberi, former Ambassador to Burundi, who also served, I'm proud to say, as a USAID mission director to Uganda, Nigeria, and Iraq. And beside me is Dr. Alex Berg, who's an assistant professor of political science at Georgia State University, a senior expert at the United States Institute of Peace, and the principal investigator for this study. With that, let me turn the mic over to Alex, who will talk to you a little bit about the studies, findings, and the cases that we use to get there. Great, thank you, Julie. Thank you to the organizers of this event for giving us the opportunity to talk a bit about the report. And I also, in starting out, want to acknowledge that this report was a product of quite a large team of people within the US Institute of Peace, our co-chair, ambassadors, as well as authors of the specific case studies, which I'll talk about in a moment. So the starting point of this report is that engagement by the US government with security forces overseas has been and is becoming increasingly important in achieving national security and foreign policy objectives. And while there are cases where it's been quite successful in terms of building capacity and achieving US national security goals, there are many cases in which it hasn't. There's actually quite a lot of evidence linking security assistance to a higher risk of human rights abuses in the recipient countries. There are many cases, Afghanistan, Iraq, that you could point to, in which US security assistance clearly has not worked in achieving what it was meant to do. And so the question this report asks is, why? How can we understand both the successes and failures and ultimately try to improve it? And the premise of the report or the central approach is basically that we've been looking at the security sector the wrong way, or at least not in a sufficiently comprehensive way. Security assistance or engagement with security forces is typically looked at as capacity building. We're building capacity so that security forces, police, military, border guards, are more effective in what they do so they can achieve counterinsurgency or public order or public safety objectives. However, if those forces are not fundamentally geared and oriented towards providing security or achieving those objectives, then it shouldn't be surprising that our assistance in building the capacity is not going to actually improve our objectives. And so it turns out there is quite a lot of evidence out there, especially in academic research, about security forces being oriented and designed and maintained towards goals that have nothing to do with security. And so what this report tries to do is unpack that to try to understand the underlying political economy of what these security forces are trying to do. And then ultimately how US engagement and US security assistance is engaging with that. So we drew from the large academic and policy literature on the topic. And then we did four in-depth case studies of Uganda, Afghanistan, Mexico, and Ukraine, where we tried to understand how US engagement security assistance interacts with these realities. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to just draw out, I'm going to make just three key highlights and talk a little bit about the case studies. And then our co-chairs, I think, will go into more depth in terms of the specific case studies and also the implications for policy. So key takeaways. So the first one, as I started to say, is that security forces are often not oriented towards security, or at least not public security or security of citizens or people. But they're often oriented towards other goals, especially of keeping people in power, keeping elites, the people who are in powers of authority, keeping them in power or maintaining their interests. And so in the report, we lay out as kind of a heuristic sort of four rationales or interests that security forces are often set up to achieve. One is to mobilize politically, so through appointments, officer positions, or recruitment of certain segments of society or exclusion of others, they mobilize political support. They're oriented towards accumulating wealth, deploying security forces in extractive industries, natural resource extraction, profiting from the drug trade, and so forth. They're oriented often towards regime survival. Security forces are often a threat to political leaders. And so political leaders keep them weak. They make sure they can do anything except for threaten the regime. And that often leads to corruption and abuse. And the fourth is what we call asymmetric threats, which is that security forces often partner with non-state militias or local actors in order to fight counterinsurgency or achieve other goals. And that leads to all kinds of perverse outcomes. So if you assume security forces oriented towards public security, you're gonna miss all of these other functions that they're actually set up to serve and that they're being kind of maintained to serve. The second point is that these, this elite capture that the way that security forces are oriented towards these functions happens through their day-to-day functions, right? Day-to-day functions that are in the realm of administration, of bureaucracy, of governance, things like personnel, right? How people are recruited and appointed for top positions, budgets, procurements, money flowing to different ways, accountability systems, right? These are kind of the day-to-day functions through which elites, political leaders, people in power make sure that the security forces are doing what they want them to do. So if you're only focused on the operations, which is what a lot of security assistance is focusing on, you're going to miss all of these other functions in which security forces are set up to do different things. And so in the report we trace in each of the case studies how this actually works. The third point, the third kind of highlight is that elite capture of the security forces often leads to unintended consequences, both in terms of violence, but also in terms of U.S. policy and security assistance, right? So there's quite a lot of evidence on how elite capture can contribute to human rights abuse and corruption. At worst, it can actually contribute to insurgency and extremist violence. It also leads to unintended consequences for security assistance and for engagement, right? So in the report we trace these kind of three patterns of unintended consequences that we often see. The first is just the limited influence and limited leverage, right? So if security forces are fundamentally oriented towards keeping elites in power, as outside donors want, really has little interest to elites, right? And so the more we try to influence it, say, no, you really should do this in terms of operations and you really should make these reforms, they don't really care, right? Because that's not what the security forces are for. The second pattern that we see is that security assistance can sometimes exacerbate the adverse consequences of elite capture. So if security forces are oriented towards repression and abuse, strengthening those forces can worsen repression and abuse. And again, we see that in some of the cases. The third is that sometimes in engaging security forces, we actually run into opposition to change and sometimes strengthen that opposition, right? So in engaging with security forces, we need to work with leaders and elites who benefit from the way things work, from the status quo. So the more we work with them, the more we're actually empowering those people and making it difficult to achieve the goals that we want to. So I wanna just illustrate some of these dynamics very briefly in a few of the case studies before we go continue with the discussion. The good news, by the way, is that the more you understand how these things work, the more you can anticipate and understand. And in the report, we get into some ways to try to mitigate and prevent this from happening and ensure that our engagement with security forces actually is more effective. So just briefly on the case studies. So Uganda, first case study that Ambassador Liberi will also talk about, right? So this case was written by Moses Kisa and Sebastiano Rungabo. And it's a fascinating study of how the Ugandan regime in sort of historically numerous coup d'etat, numerous civil wars. And so the security forces really been oriented towards protecting the regime from those kinds of threats. And they do that through manipulating personnel, procurement, finance, right? And the case study goes through this in great depth. The consequences, though, for U.S. assistance. So U.S. has worked with and relied on Uganda as quite a reliable partner in regional security in the Horn of Africa. But many of the same units that have been effective in Somalia, for example, have also been deployed internally in terms of influencing elections and in terms of human rights abuse, right? So this is a case in which the U.S. may be exacerbating some of these unintended consequences. And the other consequence in Uganda is really the lack of leverage where the U.S. has been unable to really have any influence when the regime has committed human rights abuses. So that's just a snippet of Uganda. The second case, Mexico, which Ambassador Patterson will talk a bit more about, where the Mexican government has really been a partner in a variety of areas, including on the war on drugs. The Mexican system is quite complex where you have different levels, federal, state, local levels of security forces, which create all kinds of opportunities for elite capture. So the case study focuses on one specific state, Nayarit State, where the governor at the time who was later indicted on U.S. federal drug charges, right, actually used the local police forces or created a special police force supporting one of the drug trafficking groups against others to benefit from the drug trade. And what's interesting about this case is that this governor used the kind of logic of the war on drugs, creating a special security unit to maintain safety, right, but actually used it in perpetuating the drug trade. It also, interestingly enough, succeeded in reducing homicides but other kinds of violence increased and violence spiked later on, right? So this is really an example in which all of the security systems we're putting in is not achieving U.S. goals in terms of the war on drugs and, again, the lack of influence that the U.S. have when the security forces are really oriented towards other goals. The Afghanistan case study is a case of the Afghan local police, which was a counterinsurgency force that was supported by the U.S., really a compelling logic to partner with locally legitimate security forces to fight the Taliban insurgency. And the idea was to build them up, to monitor them, make sure that they didn't commit any abuse. In practice, there was pressure to ramp these up so quickly that the U.S. was unable to really stay on top and monitor them effectively. And so the reality was that these local forces served a whole multitude of political agendas. Sometimes they were effective in counterinsurgencies, sometimes they were effective but also committed human rights abuse, perpetuated local conflict, ethnic conflict, and even in some cases, contributed support to the Taliban. So again, a situation with the U.S. actually exacerbated violence in some ways. And finally, the case of Ukraine, maybe the most kind of positive of the four case studies. Here we focus on the case of the Ukrainian judiciary, which since the Soviet era has been manipulated by powerful political and economic interests, and we show how members of these powerful economic oligarchs created networks in the judiciary, resulting in a whole bunch of cases that have eroded support for democracy, that have undermined service delivery, and in some cases, strengthened the hand of pro-Russian oligarchs with broader strategic implications. And in some cases, in trying to actually support judicial reform, the U.S. was working with these same people who are supported by oligarchs, members of the constitutional court, who then would make these decisions that undermined anti-corruption programs, right? So in actually working with the people that were undermining their very goals. The good news is that through efforts by Ukrainian civil society and some support by international actors, including the U.S., there's been, I think, a trend in the other direction and some very important reforms over the last few years. And so this is actually a case in which working with civil society has been actually quite effective in countering some of these dynamics. And we can talk a little bit more about what the implications are for how to do this. So I guess the bottom line takeaway is really understanding the political context in which the security forces are operating can reveal a whole range of ways and reasons why security assistance isn't achieving its goals. So I'll stop there and get into the discussion. So I think Dr. Berg did an excellent job trying to unpack some of the complexities that the report uncovered, but that I think ambassadors have to deal with on a regular basis. And so let me now tune to Ambassador Patterson for your thoughts on the report and on sort of managing this complex issues of endemic corruption, elite capture, and balancing trade-offs. So thank you very much. And thanks to all that participated in this report, I was Assistant Secretary for International Narcotics and Law Enforcement, and then as ambassador involved in three very large security assistance programs in Colombia, Pakistan, and Egypt. And one reason I wanted to be involved in this project is that I came increasingly to the conclusion that security assistance as administered by the U.S. government simply wasn't working. In many of the countries, it has the toxic implications for elite capture, but fundamentally it doesn't improve performance and in many cases it undermines U.S. objectives. We can't afford that anymore. We're entering a period of great power competition now and these countries, recipients of security assistance are going to have to defend themselves more effectively. Great power competition is also going to be extremely expensive for the U.S. because we have to retool our whole industrial complex to meet the Chinese challenges, which means we will probably have less money to invest in inefficient security assistance programs. And then finally, I think this is the point that comes to the crux of the report. We give security assistance in a way that does not promote alliances with us and makes these countries vulnerable to alliances with Russia and China, because basically they're in it for the main chance. And so I think what we can take from this report are some techniques and insights that will allow us to adjust our security assistance program, which let's be honest is a valuable, valuable tool of American foreign policy to make it more efficient and more effective and fairer. I just want to underscore the point that you made about security sector assistance not promoting alliances, which has been sort of the underlying rationale for a lot of our security cooperation for decades now. So that in and of itself I think is a reason to revisit what we've been doing historically. Ambassador LaBerry, may I pass to you for the same question? Sure. Thanks very much everyone for being here and to all the folks who participated in the report. I've also come at this, was US Ambassador in Burundi serve seven posts in Sub-Saharan Africa, including as mission director in Uganda, which I'll talk a bit about, but also have the opportunity to spend almost five years in Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya. So I think I did the trifecta. But one of the things that Dr. Berg was mentioning and what I'd like to sort of focus a bit on is some of the difficulty that we have in dealing with competing priorities and why sometimes it is very difficult to have the kind of leverage we would like to have in order to steer security assistance programs in the way that we would like. So if we take Uganda, let's go back to 1998, the bombings in Kenya and Tanzania. Even before 9-11, that became the litmus for global war on terror in East Africa, Sub-Saharan Africa. It was also followed, that followed the genocide in Rwanda. So what US looked at in terms of security above all was fighting with global war on terror, maintaining peace, if you will, regional stability in the Great Lakes and making sure that that type of implosion, if you will, did not occur again. And unfortunately, while that was obviously a good goal, unfortunately it also enabled an environment where I think a lot of permissiveness was allowed to continue in terms of security sector assistance. And so it gets the issue of competing priorities and leverage because we were also attempting to develop institutions in Uganda and putting money into things that Uganda was doing well. They were doing economic reforms. They were focusing on HIV AIDS. In fact, they were the model for the PEPFAR program that came afterwards, greatly reducing HIV AIDS incidents. They were the first heavily indebted poverty, a hippic country, heavily indebted poverty country to get debt relief. So all of these things pointed into the direction that Uganda was doing things that the United States government wanted to support. And as elite capture was happening in the security forces to basically maintain regime continuation of Husevani, who was still there, there were a lot of things that to a certain extent we turned a blind eye to because our leverage points were taking away the important things that were going well and that we didn't want to see diminished. And this included institutional counterweights. For example, working with the parliamentarians, trying to strengthen the legislature, the judiciary, the private sector. All of these institution building elements that take a long time do require continued assistance. They were the competing priorities that we all had to deal with. And certainly myself as director. Unfortunately, the US government, I think, missed certain inflection points where we could have come in harder, where we could have said, these things should not continue. For example, when Husevani ran for a third term, when he changed the constitution to essentially become president for life. I think at those points, we had more leverage that we could have used and we didn't. And I think that this case study is a way for us to look in the rear view mirror and say, okay, we didn't do that then. What do we need to do in the future to make sure that these things don't happen and that we can maximize security assistance even while we understand we have those competing priorities. And I would maintain that as we move forward, particularly as we look at a post-Husevani regime, particularly just specifically in a place like Uganda, but it holds us, it's a similar kind of example in other countries, that we now look at recommendations from the report to see how we can mitigate these issues in the future and not to a certain extent be held captive by our own competing priorities. We both highlighted the challenges of integrity with security sector assistance amongst these larger global paradigms. First, the global war on terror and now strategic competition and the challenges we have in achieving higher level strategic objectives, often through, by with and through security sector assistance at the expense potentially of other policy goals. I also really appreciated the point you made about pivotal moments and being in this space and time to understand when there's an inflection point that you can actually exercise leverage in these areas. I wanna delve a little bit deeper into some of these trade-offs. I'm sure that trade-offs was something that you faced every day as ambassador. And Alex, I know the report also goes into some of that. Can we start with you a little bit talking through some of the trade-offs that came out through the research and then turn it over to the ambassadors to share their challenges and opportunities? Sure, and maybe I'll, yeah, sort of generally talk about them and then I'm sure the ambassadors who lived it, I will have more to say. And I guess the general point that I would make is that when thinking about trade-offs, right? We can think about trade-offs between different goals, right? Security versus democracy or human rights or short-term versus long-term, right? But there's a point at which, I think this is what the report found, there's a point at which even the goal that we think we're prioritizing like security or the global war on terror or strategic competition, we may be actually undermining that goal with what we're doing, right? And I think that's what the report showed. So for example, in the Uganda case, right? You know, to the extent that the US was prioritizing regional stability, and I think whether they did is a question, the support for the Museveni regime may have actually been undermining that to a certain extent. The Uganda regime supported these kind of external interventions in South Sudan and Congo, right? The extent to which undermining democratic competition is created for more fertile ground for China, right? So there's a sense in which there's a trade-off there. In Mexico, and Ambassador Patterson can speak to this, the support for the war on drugs and the heavy kind of militarization of the state and most of our resources being focused on the military and on security sector has created all these opportunities for corruption in many ways kind of undermined the war on drugs as well. In Afghanistan, we had these kind of short-term, long-term trade-offs. There is the case study shows very clearly the imperative to achieve these short-term counterinsurgency goals, which was then undermining state building. So there's this debate, the case study goes into this debate even within the US government. Do we support, do we do this Afghan local police through the central state, even though the central state is corrupt? Do we work with local actors by that it might undermine the central state, right? These kind of direct trade-off and ultimately, right, they aimed for kind of let's work with these local actors, short-term counterinsurgency goals, but that may have undermined it. And in Ukraine, again, Ukraine was a difficult case in which there was attempt to work kind of on rule of law, on judicial reform issues, but even that in itself, it was not clear the extent to which that was having an effect in strengthening oligarchs. So, you know, you can't anticipate all of these things, but I think if you start asking these kinds of questions, or what are the different interests at stake here, you can start to understand and take steps to mitigate that. And Mr. Ashton, can I? So maybe I'll talk about Egypt for a minute, which is a classic case of conflicting objectives. Egypt is either the second or third largest recipient of American security assistance, somewhere around $47 billion since 1979 and $1.3 billion to date. And the main objective in Egypt for decades has been Israeli security. The overriding political objective for the U.S. government is Israeli security, but this is a classic case of elite capture in security assistance. The Egyptian military, and I want to be clear here, in every country I've been, there are many honorable people in security services and the police and people who want their own country to change because they realize the challenges that much of this generates. But what happens in Egypt, the military has increasingly encroached on the domestic economy, which of course crowds out the private sector and makes job creation even more difficult, which is a critical need in a country like Egypt. Second, the army is not really very good. So all these years of security assistance have not succeeded in improving the capacity of the Egyptian army to actually defend itself. And why is this? It's because security assistance is dedicated at units that support the leader. So you will see a leader with cutting edge ideas and up and comer or somebody who has new ideas and he won't get the resources that he deserves or would get in a more equitable system from the leadership to actually improve capacity. So elite capture works against capacity in a really, really obvious way. And here's what used to bother me a lot. I would go to people and they'd say, you give us a billion dollars in security assistance, but where is it? I never see anything more about it. It is utterly, utterly opaque to Egyptian citizens. So there's nothing they can do to actually monitor how this security assistance is delivered and affect any change to their own institutions, be it journalism or business groups or NGOs or anything like that. So I'm, of course, we're still gonna give security assistance to Egypt. That's because of our overriding is really security concerns. But what this report can at least give us insights is how to adjust the program to make it fairer and more effective and hopefully more transparent both to Americans and to Egyptians. Thank you. The challenge of corruption is probably not new to any practitioner in the audience. I think we face it in all sectors. We have some ideas of what works in other parts of our development agenda be it governance, be it health. But I don't know always that the sectors talk across each other and certainly the security sector has been siloed from all of the governance work that we in the development community are very accustomed to. Ambassador LaBarre, can I ask you for your insights on tackling corruption in general and how they apply to the security sector? Sure, and this is, as my colleagues have pointed out, corruption undermines so much of what we do and it undermines so much of the good faith things that people in country want to continue doing but they see being eroded on a day-to-day basis by corruption. So if you take the US government, we have gone to great lengths, particularly on the USAID side to try to reduce to the extent possible direct corruption and we've done that by making our assistance mechanisms sort of administered in such a way that they don't go to a host country government. They go through cooperating agencies. They go to NGOs, which is good. They go through a mechanism that can be audited, monitored, et cetera. There's a whole process that's been built up around that. AID is trying to get more and more into the local contracting now and I think that that's very, very important. So to the extent possible, particularly out of the development account, the 150 account, we've tried to insulate, if you will, direct corruption, even though at times it does take place. What's more pernicious, however, and I think what this report is looking at are the ways that indirect corruption takes place and in ways that we often cannot control. However, it undermines what it is that we're trying to achieve, both in a development sector as well as in a security assistance sector. And a lot of that has to do with the kind of a lead capture that we've been talking about. So on the development side, even if you have money going through a certain mechanism, who makes the decision on the ground? Where is the project being done? Who's getting the training? Who's getting the advancement? How are some of the development factors taking place? Similarly with the militaries that are in country. As Ambassador Patterson was saying, who gets selected for training? Who gets selected to go on, particularly, very important, either peacekeeping missions or in the case of Sub-Saharan Africa, going to Amasam to fight al-Shabaab, et cetera? Because these things make a huge difference and often what you find is that a lot of it is focused on nepotism, on patronage, but it accrues benefits to that whatever, that tribe, that ethnic group, that regime. And that, I think, is something that we have to be getting better at in terms of trying to parse that out, trying to look at the indicators that would enable us to identify how we can intervene in ways that would produce a different result, how we can start to really help more on the institution building and the professionalization. So that it's not just a patronage system. And these, but these are hard. I mean, this is hard to do. And so I think that that remains still, however, one of the key constraints and one of the key challenges as we look to the future for how are we going to help, let's say, particularly in Sub-Saharan Africa in this case, the professionalization of militaries knowing that there is this elite capture, knowing that there is this patronage system that exists, knowing how difficult it is to get through and try to intervene in that. And it's not simple, there aren't simple answers, but I think that if we do not do that, and particularly as we look to the future where I believe Sub-Saharan Africa is going to be the next frontier for CT for the next five, 10, 15 years, we only need to look at what's happening now in Sudan at ungoverned spaces in West Africa, Nigeria, et cetera, that if we do not start to really tackle this issue now, it will be at our peril. I think Ambassador Elinbury, you teed us up to talk about the so what and the recommendations and what we've seen worked. Clearly we've seen a lot that doesn't work. And Alex, I'd like to turn to you in a moment to talk about the report and the recommendations that it makes, but I do want to note to those of you who are participating online, please feel free to submit your questions in the chat and we will tackle them in turn. And those of you here in the audience, please also feel free to think of questions for the panel. Alex, let me turn to you on recommendations. Sure, and in prefacing the recommendations, I wanna just underscore something that both Ambassador LaBeering, Ambassador Patterson, said Ambassador LaBeering talked about indirect forms of corruption. And I think it's important to keep in mind that elite capture is not something, it's sort of not an individual, individuals are sort of acting on their own to do elite capture, right? It's part of a system of governance in many parts of the world. And that's just how things work, right? In order for people to compete politically and to stay in power, they engage in these kinds of patterns of manipulating the security forces, directing resources to tribe or ethnic group, right? It's not something that coming from the outside, we can change, right? Or, but however, it's important to understand how our resources fit into that system or feed into that system and what the consequences are. And I think that's what the sort of the starting point for the report. I think understanding that can point to ways in which we can try to prevent the negative consequences along the lines of what Ambassador Patterson and Ambassador LaBeering were talking about. So there are recommendations in terms of the understanding issues and then recommendations in terms of the security sector and security assistance, but also looking far beyond the security sector in terms of development and governance and other kinds of programs. So I'll just kind of highlight a few key points. The first is to put resources into understanding these issues, right? There's a lot of talk about political economy analysis and the development community. There's a lot of intelligence gathering people in the government who understand these issues, but it's not necessarily feeding into the right places, right? So the first set of recommendations is about putting in place ways to better understand, analyze, and feed that kind of information to decision makers kind of in Washington, in country teams, in ways that will influence kind of policy on the security assistance, given all of the silos and fragmentation and the kind of decision making trying to link that together. A second set of recommendations is about doing security assistance in ways that's not going to enable these or kind of reinforce these kinds of dynamics and respond more effectively, right? So Ambassador Patterts talked about transparency. A lot of security assistance tends to be especially opaque unlike in the development sector where there have been a lot of efforts to try to make it more transparent and avoid corruption. Security assistance is opaque within the US and especially for civil society and actors within recipient countries, right? So efforts to make security assistance more transparency, to improve tools like vetting, to not only deal with individuals or units, but understand the context and the risks involved, and to complement support to civil society and anti-corruption efforts, and also to build into programs ways to respond, right? So oftentimes we say we're working with this program and then we're locked in and we feel like we can't respond and there are ways to build into the program implementation objectives and goals that have to do with governance alongside operational capability, what we might call off-ramps, triggers at which the US assistance should sort of pull out or shift to other things, right? And those are ways to try to mitigate it. And then third ways to mitigate and ultimately try to address the underlying drivers of this, right? So a lot of this has to do with more focus on governance, right? Within the security sector especially, but also around the security sector. Anti-corruption and civil society efforts are crucially important, working with investigative journalists and media to be able to, for people within the countries to be able to expose and address elite capture. And then looking, once you start to understand how elite capture is happening, looking at the broader connections to the security sector in terms of extractive industries, in terms of the weakness of political parties and democratic competition, right? All of the security sector is interacting with these, right? And so dealing with elite capture is a lot about development programs that get at kind of the underlying drivers of corruption. And so kind of peeling the onion from the security sector itself to the broader contexts is I think what we're trying to propose. Thank you. I think sadly the takeaway is really corruption is the system. It's not an aberration. It's sort of when you're looking at the local system to try to understand the dynamics, that is the fundamental dynamic. I'm also struck increasingly by this connection with extractive industries in particular that you flagged at the end. Obviously that's a key component in the current war in Sudan and in places like Pakistan and Egypt where the military take off their uniform and then assume roles in corporate positions, in government positions, but maintain their affiliations and gain more and more control over extractive industries and others. It sort of spreads the system even beyond just the security sector. Let me pass it to Ambassador Patterson for your thoughts on the recommendations or... So a lot of the recommendations are hard to implement. It's hard to set up a new analytical structure within the US government to look at this much less in embassies. It's hard, hard, hard as we discovered in Afghanistan to understand the tribal and militia and ethnic balances that we just sort of popped into with our security assistance, but here's one that's easy and that's transparency. The US does a terrible job of this too, by the way. Go to the dashboard and I know there's been progress and transparency recently, but look at all the exceptions. And to figure out what goes into these security assistance programs, you could probably figure it out if you worked on various US government websites for a couple of weeks, what we're actually doing, but it shouldn't be like that. When I was ambassador in Pakistan and Egypt, I had something like 17 spigots of assistance and those need to be accessible to citizens in one place. Now DOD publishes its contracts every night. They publish, who gets promoted down to all kinds of levels. So we can do this. We have to do a better job because otherwise people can't see it. And then the second thing is to impose it on recipients. If they publish their contracts, if they publish who got promoted, if they had, would publish to make it accessible to the public. A lot of the problem would be eliminated because people could then see what's going on and they could monitor and respond to it. Transparency doesn't require massive, massive overhaul of the US government. It just requires getting it done. It's not that hard. And I think it would make a huge difference and allow these other steps to would be much easier if you could actually figure out what the story was. That's okay. Right, and so what my colleagues have said, I would add really we need to get civil society much more involved and much more involved in the oversight function and shedding a light on a lot of these issues that would help with the transparency, serving as watchdog functions, I think would be also very helpful because folks at the local level in civil society know what's going on. And so having an ability to report on that in a safe environment so that they know they're not going to get killed as a result of it. So creating the security structure so that people can use their voices to point out when there are issues like this. I think this is key. The other thing that I would say is we have to all play the long game. And I say that particularly for the US government. Everyone has heard the term. We fought 10 one year wars in Afghanistan. We did when I was USA admission director in Iraq. I had 15 months, 15 months to basically obligate 5.2 billion dollars of assistance. I'm sorry. Nigh on impossible to do it. We did it, but to do it well and to do it where it actually makes the difference that you want it to make, to put it into a context where the absorptive capacity is there, where the expected and intended results that you want to have happen occur. And that was an impediment that was put on us by the Congress, by the government, et cetera, US government. And so the imperative of us not looking at the long game and basically cutting off our own opportunities to do institutional development, which takes five, 10, 15, 20 years. That's what it takes. So let's not kid ourselves and say that that's not what it takes. Let's just go in for the long term because if we had done that from the get go in Afghanistan, I think we would have had a much different outcome. We certainly would have had a much different outcome in Iraq. I mean, obviously there were decisions made along the way that in the security assistance sector that were not the correct decisions that put us at a big disadvantage. We don't have to go into all of that right now. But part of it was because we weren't looking at the long game. We were just looking at short-term results and we do that to our significant detriment and I think the evidence is very clear that that does not serve us well. It does not serve all foreign policy objectives. It certainly doesn't serve development objectives and by all means it doesn't serve security assistance objectives. Can I send this? One of the countries I was in was Colombia and I think one of the reasons that Colombia is in a better place than many other large recipients of security assistance, believe me, it's not perfect, but there has been very significant transformation of both the police and the military, and civilian institutions. First, Colombia, of course, is not Afghanistan and had a longstanding democratic transition, but the projects went on for 23 years and not only did it have a lot of support from the administration, but it had bipartisan support in the Congress and then I think made a huge difference to the relative success of the Congress and the long-term it's still going on. It's certainly not finished versus the year-by-year exercise in Afghanistan and Iraq. Thank you. I appreciate the focus on transparency and on civil society and on the long game and that seems like a good segue to open it up to the audience for questions. I know many of you represent these organizations. Maria, please. Hold on, I think we need a mic. First, thank you for a really candid conversation and much-needed one. It's rare that we come across this level of candor with this type of subject, so I really appreciate that. And second, I hear you saying that it's really important to focus on the how we go about this and when you, I'm curious as ambassadors, you've laid out some really wonderful recommendations and I think those are very useful, but I'm just curious at what point in the process, when you, when they say they're gonna obligate one billion in assistance to Egypt or wherever, right? At what point in the process do you have an opportunity to sort of say, well, wait a minute, how are we gonna go about this? What are the unintended consequences? Is there an opportunity at your level to sort of speak up about, you know, how this assistance gets played out? You mentioned in Iraq having five billion to obligate within 18 months and you said you did it. This is a hard question, but was there a choice to say, you know what, I don't think we should obligate five billion, we can't absorb it and do it responsibly? Yeah, so you can offer your opinion when I did. You can indicate what some of the impediments are to the implementation. And I did, not just me, but others. I mean, there were many of us who thought, well, maybe this is not the way to go. And that more is not better. I think we found that out very quickly. More money, more this, more troops, more, you know, the surge, et cetera, did not result in what we wanted. And so, yes, you can raise these issues, but it doesn't necessarily mitigate the wave that is pushing forward against which it is very difficult to, you know, push back on. And people have all good intentions. I mean, no one wants to waste US taxpayer money, trust me, we don't, we want to make sure that it gets put into the right programs and projects. And so, what we did was spend a lot of time trying to identify those kind of projects. Now, a lot of the money went into infrastructure, which is what USA doesn't normally do, but what we had to do, given the situation in Iraq, which we don't need to get into, but a lot of it was infrastructure that took a lot of money. So, some of that, you know, took a bunch of the money off the table into a few projects. The rest of it, though, is we tried to put into things that did make a difference in local governance, trying to build up local communities. We had the biggest program in civil society. We had more money in civil society in Iraq than we had in all of sub-Saharan Africa, all of sub-Saharan Africa. And we were in 35 countries at that point. So, you know, so we tried to funnel it into programs that would make a difference, and a lot of them did, not all, but a lot of them did. But it's not the going in proposition way to do business. And I think that we have learned, I hope we've learned from that. Oh, yeah. Incinives, you're here, sorry. There are incentives. This has been great, by the way. Thank you so much. And I'm looking forward to reading the report. I'm from the Religious Freedom Office at the State Department, and I've worked with Julie and others on CVE and CT and Security Sector Assistance for a long time in various capacities. And the incentives on our side are, you know, strange as well, or motivate that short-term thinking. And you can say that nobody has good intentions, but, you know, the White House and others are making political decisions, and foreign service officers and civil servants are making career decisions, and people at DOD are making decisions based on, gosh, somebody just gave me $100 million, I gotta get rid of it somehow. So these are not good intentions. These are, they're good, they're not ignoble, they're not noble, but they are decisions based that lead us to short-term thinking, that lead us to say, you know, if I wanna make my next grade, I gotta do well here, and doing well means getting this stuff out the door. So that's a big part of the problem. And then to get people to think about something other than the current crisis. You know, and I've worked a lot on Sub-Saharan Africa, and you see people come to you and say to you, the reason why this incredibly huge $1 billion security package is going through is because we need to be able to talk to the president, and we can't unless we're showing our goodwill and good faith, and that's what a billion dollars buys you. And they will say that openly. So those incentives are both ways, you know? And I don't know how to handle it anymore, to be honest, at some times. I just don't think it's gotten better. That's not a question, I'm sorry, but the question is, how do you handle it? Sorry. Perhaps reactions. Counseling session for all of us. Right, yeah. Don't be just, sorry. Well, I think you do raise a good point. And so, you know, a lot of it is not that we don't know a number of things, but that we haven't changed our internal incentive structure for whatever reason, because of the political imperatives, because of, yes, they're getting money out the door, because of, et cetera, et cetera. And so, you know, we do have to have a good look in the mirror. But institutionally, that's very hard to do. And I think that, you know, we, it's, you know, this report makes some recommendations, other things make some recommendations, but we have to keep pushing for that. I mean, it's not impossible, but it's not easy. And I think the more that we can raise the issue and talk about it, and acknowledge it, and then try to feed that back into the system, you know, it will help. But, you know, we have this political structure called, every four years, the administration changes. And, you know, even if it's the same one, they still changes, same party, it still changes. And so, we have to understand the reality within which we live. And one of the biggest arguments that's made in these war zone situations, and I saw it in Iraq and Afghanistan, is we have to support the troops. That's a very difficult argument to overcome, and money just floods in, because in the case of Afghanistan, we had 130,000 troops there at one point. That's a tough one. Thank you. My question is for Ambassador Liberi, who was Ambassador to Burundi. How does security assistance look like in Burundi, and what are some of the complexities that you have to deal with? I'll try to be fast about this. You know, the way that we handled security assistance to the security sector assistance in Burundi was that Burundi, in terms of the military and the security sector assistance, became a very big player in peacekeeping and in the war against al-Shabaab in Amasam. So we did a lot of training of the Burundian troops. They were the second largest contributor after a period of time. They did great on the ground, and so we helped to really professionalize a lot of the military. At the same time, there was a whole process of elite capture by then President Khoranziza, the regime that came in from the Bush that was there for years and years. He changed the constitution. He stayed for a third term, and so we saw that elite capture occur over unfortunately a period of time that went beyond what it should, and for example, is still going on now in Uganda. It did change. I think that there's movement now, hopefully toward a more democratic process, but I think that it's going to take a while, and I think that we have to continue to try to make sure that the professionalization of the military and reduction of human rights abuses, impact on democracy, et cetera, that we watch that and we have to continue to monitor that, absolutely. You know the gentleman in the glasses, how does he? Hi, I appreciate the discussion, Will Ferriero, consultant, and I thought it was kind of interesting because it seemed to focus more on the political economy of the U.S. decision-making system and political system, but maybe one practical suggestion or question about your recommendations is we already have the lehi law that vets for human rights abusers, so back to your specific topic about is there a way that legislation might be apt in this area to ensure checks against elite capture and corruption? Thank you. Yes, I think lehi is too narrow to achieve this, obviously, as many of you in the room are very familiar with it and probably wouldn't as a very specific function, but yes, I think there is a role for legislation if only to provide the resources that allow for more analysis of this because when you're on the ground, a lot of it's really painfully obvious. It's not, you don't need a doctoral thesis to get it, but you do need someone to document it and report it and keep on top of it, which would also allow the possibilities for these off-ramps and review. So that seems to me to be an easy point and of course, Hill has tried to legislate transparency many times and it's been largely ignored, but a more robust legislation on that I think would be helpful too. Thank you very much. Terrific presentation. Mike Jaygis, formerly of the U.S. Institute of Peace, where I worked for Ambassador Bill Taylor and did a book called Criminalized Power Structures, The Overlooked Enemies of Peace and the Alliance for Peace Building published it. Very much in sympathy with your point about the mantra that we need to turn ownership over to the locals, build capacity and turn it over to the locals. So the question is, are they part of the problem or part of the solution? So that's your first recommendation. Detect the elite capture and integrate the elite capture lens into analysis. My question is, does such a lens exist? And if it doesn't, are you aware that there is such a lens that's been used very successfully in Bosnia against the Third Entity Movement and that is a tool, a methodology, that's available for this specific purpose. I think there are a number of different analytical tools that you can use to look at these issues. It's not, and it's understanding the underlying interests and incentives. What some people call it political economy. We could just sort of call it a political analysis and there's a number of tools that you could use to do this and I think there's a lot of people that are actually doing this and very effectively in trying to understand what's going on. So the first thing is use them, right? And provide the resources, provide the mandates that these kinds of things need to get done. But second, then figure out how to use the information. I think actually that's one of the harder things is that oftentimes that we do these analyses and then somebody reads them and says, oh, that's really interesting. Now let me go about my business. The question is how do you use that information to actually force decision making that says, okay, we know these things are happening. Let's not just keep doing what we're doing. Let's try to take a step back and maybe, before the money gets to the USA mission director and see if we force some kind of consideration of these issues. Can I say there's a shocking gap between what the academic community has and what the practitioners have? I discovered this, I taught after I retired, it's absolutely shocking. The practitioners think the academics, they look down their nose because the academics don't have to do anything and the academics look down their nose at the practitioners because they're basically trade people. They don't have cosmic thoughts. And it's an awful, awful, it's an awful, because there's much really a lot to be learned from the academic literature on this, but there's no way to get it into the US government. I'm gonna offer here a shameless plug for a tool that my office is putting out. It's the Violence and Conflict Assessment Framework. It is the update to the 20 year old CAF or the Conflict Assessment Framework. And I think it actually does square the circle on a lot of this. It moves from an identity focused lens about conflict into a much more multifaceted lens that looks at narratives and interests and incentives and builds in both violence and conflict and drivers at multiple levels of society. We will be posting it on the USAID website for public comment in the coming days. There's a session on it I believe tomorrow. So we welcome your feedback on that as well. I'm gonna maybe take a couple of questions at once because we're coming on time and I see a lot of hands. Can we start with you? Yeah. Sure. I think one of my questions is for those of us that recognize how important obviously security sector reform is, at what point in contact, I'll use Sudan as an example, where there is such an ingrained distrust of the security sector among the civilian population, they don't trust anyone that's in it, right? A lot of the generals from the Bashir regime are still there and they don't trust them essentially to do anything right. And so in contexts like that, where there is such a trained distrust of the security sector, how do you still engage them since they're the only ones there? Are reforms like, does the report, for example, address any reforms like lustration or kind of getting rid of top generals or how do you kind of navigate that distrust? Stacey Shamba from the International Civil Society Action Network, or ICANN. Thank you very much for being here today in your comments and I look forward to reading the report. At ICANN we work globally with women peace builders, many of whom do engage and work closely with the security sector, whether it's training or collaborative platforms to prevent conflict-related sexual violence, et cetera. I have a two-part question. One is, what have you seen that's been most effective in terms of the role of civil society in engaging the security sector? And second question, how can we better channel funding and other support to them so that they can do this work? Thank you. So we have questions on overcoming ingrained distrust and working with civil society. Who wants to start? Can I take the civil society? What I've seen is the most effective, at least in my experience, there were two elements. One was the business community, the Chamber of Commerce, because they're the ones that are most disadvantaged by these distortions, immediately disadvantaged. The second one might surprise you, and that was the legislative oversight. Even in countries that are quite oligarchic, non-democratic, you'll often find legislators that because they have responsibility for this, will play an outsized role, and then finally auditors. I know that sounds pedantic, but to have auditors who can actually train AIDS, done a good AIDs, done a good job of training auditors, that's usually a governmental function. And then of course, freelance journalists usually. Yeah, on the Sudan question. So it's a great question, and there are a lot of ways to deal with this through the security sector, whether it's illustration or reform or vetting, but what you do really depends on the specific context. The question is, how do you get there? Especially in a context like Sudan, when currently the people in the military that are part of the problem in the eyes of many are in charge, right? And I think the point, so what this report does is say, well you need to take a step back from that and understand who these people are in the context of sort of the political economy of Sudan. And the point is that there are these two generals, right, who are in charge right now, but they're part of a broader context. And if you look back over the course of the transition over the last couple of years in Sudan, there have been many different moments in which the international community has played various roles in supporting other actors in civil society and political parties or not supported them sufficiently, right? And I think that's the question, right? And there's often a temptation within the US government to say, hey, we need to work with these people because they're the military and they're important actors, which may be true, but oftentimes if you start to understand kind of what that does to the overall balance of power and what kind of support you're providing to other actors, that will then affect what you can do, right? So the question is, how do you get to these kinds of reforms where you can start building trust? Of which, there are a lot of things you can do, but understanding the underlying politics is important. And I think that's where we kind of don't look at the full picture before deciding how to act. The only other thing that I would add to what my colleagues have said is, I think it's very important to support individual champions because there are many people who are out there who are trying to shed a light and they are sometimes, you know, lone voices and they need support and we have to make sure that we are supporting them. And I think the US government in many instances has been able to do that. The other thing is the press. One of the key things is independent press and the more that we can support that, the more that we can help people expose through the press, you know, the story is about X, Y, and Z, I think, again, that is really, really important and we have to make sure that we have programs that do that and not to make them targets because we have to be careful, it's a dueled sword, but to support the efforts that they are doing and that, you know, that leads to other things. Often it leads to sanctions against those individuals and, you know, then, yeah, so. I think we have time for one last question back here. This is a question just on USAID has been pushing the localization, localize everything, so knowing how, this is where the rubber hits the road, it's the money that gets down and that's to small groups, it's to contractors and GOs, partners, but if you can't be on the ground and have all of that infrastructure as a non-elite, how are we going to be able to fund those groups? And I think that's really, what we haven't talked about is the real fundamentals of that and it's all bureaucratic and it's all the rules I know people wanna change, but it reinforces the elites at the end of the day because they have access, they have power, they have bank accounts, they have everything and unless we break US bureaucracy and rules and regulations, tell me how we're gonna change that even when we talk about localization, thanks. I think one of the challenges with localization is that we assume it's only about bureaucratic structures and that it's really about the money flow. It is equally important that we find spaces for local voices to influence what we do and that in many cases has been the missing piece and I take your point 100% that the power dynamics make that incredibly challenging. I think there's a lot of new ways of communication where we can get to different audiences in a safe way to get perspectives that we haven't maybe been able to do in the past, but it's a continuing battle and I would say this is one of the goals of the Global Fragility Act that we are trying to break down these silos and to really think about the interaction among defense diplomatic efforts and development and really how to ensure that local voices are driving the train and the challenge I would say with localization is whose voice, right? This has always been the issue particularly in the security and justice space and why many donors sort of fretted when we talked about non-state justice, right? The question from a development perspective is always where do people go when someone steals their chicken, right? Like at the most basic level, what justice do people seek? What security do they seek? And that is often very different from the state-sponsored system that we all encounter and it's always been a challenge to marry those two, but probably in the face of sort of strategic competition, the ongoing counterterrorism battle, there's no time like the present with the opening hopefully that the GFA provides to do business better and differently, but there's no question that it's a challenge. And it's a point well taken because it's really hard to do, trust me, as mission director, to try to manage down to that level, it's you don't have the staff, you don't have the resources, it's very difficult to implement. However, it is important to do, but I would posit something else. I would say that it's not just the U.S. government resources getting down to that level, one of the most powerful tools is budget decentralization and it is publishing the budget at the local level. Send the school board budget and post it and see how quickly people show up and say, hey, where are the books? We're supposed to have five teachers here, how come there are two? You know, my kid only goes to school for an hour a day, why is that? You know, I mean, you'd be amazed at how many people show up when they actually know what it is they're supposed to get versus what they are getting. And so the more that we can continue to push that help, push that kind of information down to that local level, that's a very key part of localization. I'm very pleased to be ending on an up note because I think we started with corruption as the system and we ended with seek champions to do the right things at the pivotal moments. And I think that's probably the way ahead for all of us. Please join me in thanking our panel this afternoon and enjoy the rest of your afternoon.