U.S. Department of State, 2008–2011
After the assassination of former Lebanese prime minister Rafik Hariri and the end of the Syrian military occupation of Lebanon in 2005, the sudden security vacuum caused by the departure of Syrian troops threatened Lebanon’s internal stability. During the ensuing chaos, it was unclear which government agency had the responsibility of conducting basic civilian policing. In an effort to quickly bolster its security forces, the government of Lebanon recruited approximately 8,000 cadets to the Internal Security Forces (ISF), a move that increased the size of the ISF by nearly 50 percent. Although this served the purpose of rapidly putting recruits on the ground, they were not properly trained and lacked weapons and communications equipment as well.1 In addition, many recruits, like others in the security forces, had split loyalties, feeling pulls from political, religious, and regional affinities. Bureaucratically, the military and policing system lacked a functioning operational command.2
The United States entered into an agreement with the government of Lebanon in October 2007 to conduct a training program for the new ISF recruits. The U.S. Department of State Bureau for International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs (INL) assumed contractual authority for the training program and chose Pacific Architects and Engineers (PAE) as the implementing partner. PAE began classes in January 2008 under a contract meant to last for three years. By mid-2011, the United States had dispensed about $60 million for infrastructure, equipment, and training courses.
What were the overall objectives of INL’s police training program in Lebanon? How were the program’s outputs supposed to be used? What were participants expected to learn as a result of the intervention? What were participants expected to do differently as a result of the intervention? And what conditions in Lebanese society were expected to change as a result of the intervention?
The intended outcome of the program was a “competent, professional, and democratic” police force that was capable of “enforcing the rule of law” and could “ensure public order.”3 Ultimately, that well-functioning police force would contribute to Lebanon’s peace and security, which for many in the Lebanese government meant that the ISF could assist in achieving full sovereignty over Lebanese territory. To summarize, the intended outcomes were as follows:
Intended Outputs
What did the intervention intend to produce? How were the intervention’s inputs supposed to be used? Activities: What did the intervention intend to do? Products: What did the intervention intend to create? Participants: Whom did the intervention intend to affect?
The training courses were intended to teach new recruits and experienced police tactical, management, and community-policing skills and other basic skills.
Activities. The INL program addressed an obstacle to the ISF’s ability to function well, namely, the large cohort of police who were recruited in 2005 and had not received adequate training. To achieve the short-term outcomes of improving policing skills, including community policing techniques and respect for democracy and human rights, INL’s contractor held five training courses:
Products. These training programs were intended to produce police with skills appropriate to their level of command and to train a group of Lebanese police instructors to make the program self-sustaining. The Letter of Agreement between the government of Lebanon and the U.S. government spelled out specific metrics to judge the success of the program:
Participants. The participants and immediate beneficiaries of the intervention were to be the police undergoing the training sessions. The Basic Cadet Training course was completed by 3,051 cadets; 223 officers completed the Supervisor and Management course; 297 noncommissioned officers took the Community Policing course; 348 police officers took the Basic Instructor course; and approximately 1,746 personnel completed the In-Service Training course. Altogether, PAE trained approximately 25 percent of the total ISF.5
Promised Inputs
What resources or capabilities was the intervention supposed to provide?
As of June 1, 2011, the United States had dispensed $60 million for training, equipment, and infrastructure refurbishment. The money allocated for the training component went to PAE, which provided the police instructors.
The INL program provided only nonlethal equipment to the ISF, including 3,000 sets of riot gear, 4,000 sets of basic patrol gear, and around 500 patrol vehicles.6 The Letter of Agreement specified that equipment would include “specialized police equipment, such as handcuffs, duty belts, flashlights, helmets, boots, bulletproof vests, and civil disorder management gear” and “unarmored police sport utility vehicles equipped with sirens and light-bars.” No new training centers were to be built as part of the program, but INL would pay to refurbish existing centers.
Output Prerequisites
What resources, capabilities, or conditions, other than those produced by the intervention, would have been required for the intervention’s outputs to generate the intended outcomes?
Assume for the moment that the INL training program had been successful in producing its planned output: ISF members who were well trained in basic policing skills and the tenets of community policing. Given such a police force, what would need to be true of the ISF in particular and Lebanese society in general in order for that output (i.e., a trained police force) to produce the desired outcomes (i.e., trainees enforce the law and protect communities, improving internal security and strengthening the rule of law)?
The first prerequisite is that the trainees themselves would have to stay in their jobs. Those who do would have to want to apply their training to their jobs. Are trainees fed, housed, and equipped at levels sufficient to enable them do their jobs? Is the pay high enough to prevent desertion or corruption? If the police meet these basic standards, they still may not apply their new training. Is the management supportive to their training? Do internal incentives and punishments impede the trained police from using their new training? Do the police know the laws they need to enforce? Can police get to the areas they need to patrol?
Beyond applying their training is the question of transforming Lebanese society outside of the security sector. Even if trained police act in the way program designers want them to, a number of factors they have little control over will affect their ability to make a lasting difference. Citizens would have to respect the authority of the police. Any armed group that targets police would have to be weakened. A justice system would have to be functioning so that suspects could be prosecuted. After criminals are convicted, a functioning prison system would have to exist to receive them.
The INL program in Lebanon focused specifically on community policing, a law enforcement philosophy emphasizing frequent foot patrols and strong ties of trust and communication between patrol police and the community in which they work. Successful community policing imposes additional output prerequisites. Do police speak the same language as the inhabitants of their patrol area? Do they have time to do foot patrols, or is their time consumed with responses to crimes? Are police trusted by the community? Is the security situation such that police can safely walk through their areas? Do citizens want the police in their community? Do the police have an institutional culture that supports a “soft” approach such as community policing?
Input Prerequisites
What additional resources, capabilities, or conditions, other than those provided by the intervention, would have been required to produce the outputs?
The program posited that by providing trainers, equipment, and money, INL and PAE could take undertrained police and produce well-trained police. The process of producing trained police, however, requires more than externally provided money and trainers. It requires a number of other inputs for success, relating to the recruits, the society and state, and the program itself. Some of these conditions could be addressed by a well-designed program, perhaps with additional money, while other external constraints that could not be rectified would need to be avoided or their effects somehow mitigated.
A training program requires that its recruits are capable and willing to learn in the ways the training program demands. Are recruits adequately fed and housed and able to focus? Are they able to travel to the training or is housing available nearby? Are trainees addicted to drugs? Are they penalized by their superior officers for attending training? Do they get time off from their regular duties to attend training? Do they face financial costs associated with attending training?
More broadly, what are the necessary conditions in the country to produce trained police? Does the country face a level of violence that makes travel to a police training program feasible? Do threats against police prevent trainees from congregating for training? Is the central government stable enough to support its police and provide legitimacy to their actions? Does an adequate transportation infrastructure exist for recruits to travel to training? When they get to the training site, are housing and training facilities available?
A number of factors that relate to program design could hinder the project’s ability to produce trained police. Does the training program have access to high-quality trainers? This requires either a local source of talented teachers or the legal authorization and finances to hire international trainers. Will these trainers have access to training materials? Will the content trainers are expected to teach be appropriate for the level of training the police already have? Overly advanced training will not be useful if trainees lack foundational basic training, whereas overly basic training will do nothing to improve the overall skill of advanced and experienced police. Can trainers speak to the trainees in the local language, either directly or through an interpreter? Do trainers understand the local society enough to not offend the trainees? Will classes bring together groups that will not work well together (antagonistic family or ethnic groups or men and women in conservative societies, for example)? If the materials and syllabus and language are all appropriate, will the training program last long enough to change attitudes and impart skills?
The ISF training program had intended to help create a fully trained police force that would be familiar with international standards of policing and friendly toward the rule of law and would be able to enhance Lebanon’s internal stability and expand sovereignty to all of Lebanon’s territory. An evaluation of the INL training program conducted by PURSUE, a monitoring and evaluation company based in Cyprus, found that the training courses contributed little to changing the actions of ISF police and did not contribute to the ultimate goal of internal stability. Although the trainers were enthusiastic and skilled, the evaluators found that police trainees did not learn how to apply their training in any practical sense:
There was no evidence to suggest that the performance of the ISF had systematically improved as a result of the training program. Despite almost 25 percent of the ISF undergoing PAE training and the trainees demonstrating superficial understanding of their lessons, the evaluation found no indication that the ISF has made significant steps toward the organization-wide adoption of the concepts of civilian policing.7
Many of the problems encountered in the step between learning and changed action have to do with bureaucratic processes and incentives inside the ISF. PURSUE identified a number of these obstacles. Once cadets had completed training, commanding officers did not allow them to apply their training to their daily activities. The evaluators observed that the ISF structure was too hierarchical to be able to adopt American-style community policing.8 Moreover, although the training program was successful in teaching cadets to pass tests and recite what they learned, it was not successful in teaching them how the learning should be applied in real situations or how to respond to deviations from the script. New trainees were often kept off the streets while “doing their time” conducting relatively unimportant administrative tasks. The training was therefore not put to good use in the jobs the trainees found themselves doing.9
Although the program was relatively successful in producing its intended output (trained police), a number of missing prerequisites hindered the program’s ability to turn inputs (trainers, money, equipment) into the immediate output of trained police.
Both the government of Lebanon and the U.S. government had agreed that the 8,000 police who joined the ISF in 2005 needed additional training. By the time the INL project began in 2008, however, these police already had three or more years of experience in the ISF. These officers had already specialized into specific fields (investigations, traffic, etc.) and wanted advanced training to improve their existing skills. Nevertheless, these police were put through the basic cadet program, which taught only general policing skills. Additional training did not lead to better trained police in these cases. Training courses imposed large time burdens on trainees, who were often required to work their regular policing shifts in addition to their full class schedule. Cadets also had to walk great distances to attend class. Finally, students did not always have the desire to learn because of the bureaucratic incentives of the ISF. Police trainers have lower status and fewer opportunities for patronage than regular police, leading many students in the police training program to purposefully fail their final exams so that they could return to regular police work.
The Lebanese and U.S. governments approached the program with fundamentally diverging interests before it ever started. The U.S. government viewed the program as a way to expand the rule of law in Lebanon and teach international standards on human rights, community policing, and respect for democratic institutions. The government of Lebanon, however, seems to have viewed the program merely as a temporary mission for one group of police who were brought on during the ISF’s rapid expansion and needed remedial training. This difference in perspectives hindered cooperation between the two bodies, and as a result the government of Lebanon did not make efforts to make the program sustainable after the end of the INL mission.
How well can the donor design locally appropriate interventions?
A number of internal factors constrained the donor’s ability to design a locally appropriate intervention that would succeed in Lebanon, according to CSIS interviews with State Department personnel involved with the INL project or familiar with State Department procedures.
Because of security rules, U.S. government direct hires for the program would have had to live in the embassy compound, which lacked the room for the required number of staff for the program. In part because of this, the implementation of the program was contracted out to a private company, PAE. Otherwise, the Department of Justice might have implemented the project, specifically through its International Criminal Investigative Training Assistance Program or the Office of Overseas Prosecutorial Development, Assistance, and Training (although these agencies might also have lacked the capacity for a project of this size).10 The limitations on who would implement the program seem to have had only minor effects. PURSUE judged PAE’s trainers to be highly competent, with the failures of the program arising from larger design issues. Direct implementation by a government agency might have resulted in better monitoring of the project and faster adaptation to absorptive capacity issues, though to an un-known degree.
Budgeting regulations created confusion and the need for different offices in the State Department to cooperate with each other without the capacity to do so effectively. The Letter of Agreement for the project was signed much later than expected, due to discussions about immunity for U.S. employees. Until the letter was signed, funds could not be obligated to the embassy in Beirut and had to be spent by the office in Washington. As a result, a greater share of the project’s burden fell on the Washington office than was expected, creating the need for intensive coordination between Washington and the embassy, which they could not do easily.11
Because of the security situation in Lebanon, any direct U.S. hire had to live in the U.S. embassy compound and faced restrictions on talking to some political actors, including Hezbollah.12 Because Hezbollah members were involved in the Lebanese security sector, INL employees could not have comprehensive discussions with all of the relevant groups. This was in part the reason for INL’s undertaking a more modest train-and-equip program instead of a more ambitious and comprehensive security sector reform project, as INL increasingly prefers to do. Given that the breakdown in the program’s theory of change occurred between the end of training and the theorized organic transformation of the Lebanese ISF, a comprehensive security sector reform project might have had better outcomes than the program that was implemented.
For police training work, INL held a base contract of $6.3 billion over approximately seven years with three prime companies: PAE, DynCorp, and Civilian Police International. Specific task orders and statements of work would be drafted against this base contract for specific programs. A junior program officer would draft a Scope of Work detailing the requirements of the program and including a basic needs assessment. These contracts and task orders are written in many cases before all of the information from the specific country or program is in, meaning that subject matter and country expertise are not always written into the contracts. The contracting process does not encourage creative thinking on the part of the contractors but instead encourages them to find “the cheapest ways to get American cops into sketchy places.”13 The only source for creativity is the relatively junior program officer who drafts the Scope of Work, who is usually not a criminal justice expert. INL has since developed a tool for improving the way it assesses criminal justice programs.14
The program that PAE and INL designed failed in some cases to plan for foreseeable problems and to adapt the program to the conditions in Lebanon. For instance, the U.S. police trainers focused on skills that are useful for police in the United States, including rapid escalation of force and shoot-to-kill methods for police defending themselves. These techniques are less relevant in Lebanon, where criminals tend to be less violent than in the United States. In another example, the INL programming focused on basic training for cadets. Many of them, however, had spent time on the force since 2005 and did not need basic police training. Most needed highly specialized training in specific policing areas.15 These two planning problems resulted from poor preliminary studies and needs assessments. The INL team at the inception of the program realized that there was no systematic needs assessment in the ISF and that there was no high-level and coherent understanding of which ISF units needed which kinds of training. One of the project’s goals was that the training program would become institutionalized in the ISF and would carry on after U.S. funding was withdrawn. In fact, that INL provided a training program delayed the government of Lebanon’s need to have one. U.S. funding gave Lebanese authorities an incentive not to take ownership of the training program. The program therefore lacked sustainability: evaluators predicted that when U.S. trainers left, the program would cease to exist.
Finally, PURSUE found widespread confusion at the highest levels over the program’s purpose. The agreement between the ISF and the U.S. embassy in Lebanon was understood differently by each side, with the ISF viewing it as a temporary training program for a specific cohort of officers and the U.S. embassy viewing it as a way to expand the rule of law and teach international standards by building human rights and community-policing training into the ISF curriculum. Such a level of diverging interests could have been addressed at higher levels, not by contracted police trainers or people implementing the project.
1. “Independent External Evaluation: INL Lebanon Police Training Program,” PURSUE, June 1, 2011, pp. 3–5.
2. Yezid Sayigh, “ ‘Fixing Broking Windows’: Security Sector Reform in Palestine, Lebanon and Yemen,” Carnegie Middle East Center, Carnegie Papers No. 17, October 2009, http://www.carnegieendowment.org/files/security_sector_reform.pdf, p. 8.
3. “Independent External Evaluation: INL Lebanon Police Training Program,” p. 14.
4. Letter of Agreement, U.S. government and government of Lebanon, October 5, 2007.
5. “Independent External Evaluation: INL Lebanon Police Training Program,” p. 15.
6. Casey L. Addis, “U.S. Security Assistance to Lebanon,” Congressional Research Ser vice, January 19, 2011, http://www.fas.org/sgp/crs/mideast/R40485.pdf, p. 6.
7. “Independent External Evaluation: INL Lebanon Police Training Program,” p. 74.
8. Ibid., 60–61.
9. Author interviews, November 2012.
10. Ibid.
11. Ibid.
12. Ibid.
13. Ibid.
14. Ibid.
15. “Independent External Evaluation: INL Lebanon Police Training Program,” p. 57.