Returning to "Coup-Proof" with some stuff on coup-proofing

I have finally been poked out of blog-lethargy (blothargy?) by a very interesting discussion about the integrity of some African regimes in the face of rebellion. James Fearon was provoked by M23's seizure of Goma to muse:

Being the president in African countries (and many others besides) can be an incredibly lucrative deal.  Why don’t these rulers, in their own self-interest, take some of that money and use it to build crack units, presidential guards, or strong and loyal army divisions that would protect their hold on power against two dozen putchists, or a hundred or a couple thousand rebels armed with rifles and maybe some mortars?

Fearon's intuition is then the same as mine--that the best explanation is the tradeoff between coup risk and rebellion, as developed in the work of, inter alia, Philip Roessler: 

Keeping the military weak  may lower their coup risk somewhat, but effectively trades coup risk off against higher risks of rural rebellion, insurgency, and foreign depredations such as we are seeing in Eastern Congo. 

But then he notes that Congo is a pretty extreme case in Africa. There are lots of countries that don't seem to have these recurrent problems. It is unclear what, structurally, differentiates these two groups of cases, according to Fearon.

One bit of brush clearing about what we're talking about. Laura Seay, in comments on Fearon, points out that Congo's President Joseph Kabila has in fact done a bit of what Fearon suggests: 

like leaders in most African states, Kabila has a well-trained, equipped, and paid presidential guard that has saved him from at least one coup/assassination attempt as well as a military battle in Kinshasa in 2007.

Goma is pretty far from Kinshasa, as Seay points out, so for the moment Kabila is fine. But clearly he would rather that Rwandan-backed (that seems clear enough) rebels not control a major town in the east. So there is indeed a bit of a puzzle. 

I'm going to try to think through the strategic dimensions of this a little bit, as a first cut. If we want to understand why some countries face these tradeoffs and others don't, I think our best bet lies in predictors of coup risk, and in generating comparative statics through a better characterization of the strategic situation facing leaders.

I think Fearon captures the demand side of things pretty well: presidents do have a pretty compelling interest security services that are (a) effective and (b) loyal, if they can get them. Now, the threat of a successful coup is worse for the leader than the threat of a successful civil or international war, because at least in the latter case, the president probably has a better chance to flee before he/she is captured. Hence the president has to ensure against coups first, rebellions/international wars second. In practice, there are coup-proofing techniques, such as divide & rule, or running multiple internal security agencies all monitoring each other, or relying on loyalists from a communal in-group, that can help reduce the risk of a successful coup, but weaken the army in the face of wars (international and internal). So the president tends to reduce effectiveness for the sake of not having a coup.

I would point out an additional problem attendant on rebellions: they disrupt the calculations of coup-proofing. If, from sources that are in the first instance outside the military, the likelihood that the president is going to get ousted suddenly and dramatically increases, soldiers have much more of an interest in defecting. This was a problem Mobutu Sese Seko faced in 1996-97, or Gaddafi in 2011. The problem in rebellion is then not just effectiveness per se, but also, quite often, loyalty too, and what a president does to keep loyalty against a coup plot might not be enough to keep loyalty against a rebellion.

In any case, the President has a clear preference for a strong & loyal army, and has lots of money, but money doesn't seem to translate into that strong & loyal army. We observe in reality security services are often not effective, and if they are loyal, it's only in the sense that they are not actually launching a coup right this second, not that they are willing to fight particularly hard, or not desert in the face of a rebellion (see Jeffrey Gettleman's masterpiece of sarcasm: In New Tack, Congo’s Army Starts to Fight). There are then three non-mutually-exclusive possible short-run explanations, as I see them:

(1) The problem is on the supply side, not the demand side. That is, the population of individuals willing to supply their military services loyally is too small to meet the demand.

(2) Even if those individuals existed, identifying them is going to be pretty hard. It would probably require credible signals of some kind, but it is unclear what kind of credible signals can be offered.

(3) Direct cash payment is not what is needed to secure loyalty. If I am a colonel, I can hope for a payoff from the next president, not just from this one. In any case promises of cash can attract mercenary careerists over committed professionals. If it is hard to identify one from the other, it sets up something like Jeremy Weinstein's information problem in rebel recruitment, applied to governments. So the money that African presidents have just isn't all that useful in building effective, loyal armies.

So these are some areas where I think we can clarify just what the problems are. I happen to think the identification problem is a seriously tricky and important one. In my paper "Loyalty Strategies and Military Defection in Rebellion," I investigate some of its consequences. I see the reliance on a core group, such as an ethnic minority, as a way of constructing a way of identifying loyalists from the suspect endogenously. A president believes that members of group X are particularly loyal; so promotes members of group X; so members of group X cannot easily defect in the face of a rebellion and hope for good treatment by the other side, being too tightly associated with the old regime. It is a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy. This does, of course, alienate non-Xs, who will be more likely to defect, and as Roessler argues in a terrific paper, it can provoke rebellions in the first place. My paper shows how this played out in Syria in the Muslim Brotherhood uprising that culminated in the Hama Massacre of 1982, in a manner similar to the reliance of the Jordanian monarchy on certain East Bank groups in the Jordanian Civil War in 1970 (and also Saddam Hussein's Iraq), and in contrast to individualized reward-and-punishment approaches like the Shah's in Iran. I think some version of it has been playing out, horribly, in Syria again since 2011.

So, these are some strategic considerations. I think picking them apart will provide further insights into the short run.

But what makes one country more likely than another to have these tradeoffs in the first place? That is, what about Fearon's question about structural preconditions? In general, I suspect that if there are, indeed, structural predictors of the kind of coup-rebellion tradeoff that's at issue here--the specific problem of having a military too weak to deal with these kinds of challenges--that we'll find them in structural predictors of coups, not structural predictors of civil wars, if a coup is indeed the more important threat of the two.

Otherwise, I'm not really sure. Perhaps the mechanisms I suggest above can point us in the right direction on structural conditions. Perhaps the ethnic-identity piece depends on the president having close ties to a communal groups of a particular size (not too big, or else identity gets to be not very predictive of loyalties; not too small, or else it doesn't provide enough manpower), but even then, there are multiple ways to use group identities: Saddam relied on Sunnis specifically from Tikrit, for example. We could maybe look for structural conditions in which there is a large supply of individuals willing to fight loyally to overcome the supply problem. If we game this out, we can come up with some comparative statics. But this all remains a neat puzzle without an obvious answer.

COIN training: the pupil becomes the master

So, the US accuses Hizbullah [NYT] of training Syrian forces:

An American official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said Hezbollah was using “its specialized skill set and understanding of insurgencies” to aid Syria. 

Recently, also, it turns out that Blackwater Xe Academi has trained Canadian Forces as far back as 2006 in some counterinsurgency-related skillz--like evasive driving and bodyguarding--without U.S. government permission, and they've had to pay $7.5 million in fines for breaking U.S. law in this and other matters.

I guess they've learned on the job.

The very existence of private military organizations like Hizbullah and Academi--oh, they'll love getting lumped together--means a limit on the state's monopoly of the use of violence. That's well known. But this phenomenon of non-state actors training state armies in warfare perhaps goes a touch beyond that. Usually in training missions we think about government-to-government (say, the current Canadian Forces mission in Afghanistan) or government-to-non-state-actor (say, the U.S., Soviet Union, and South Africa during the Cold War--or, frankly, Hizbullah itself). Government as tutor, given its specialized knowledge; non-state actor as pupil. But this is the reverse.

It's certainly not without precedent. Non-state actors have trained each other, and in some cases have become state armies through victory. For example, several leaders of the Rwandan Patriotic Front--the rebels in the 1990-94 civil war and genocide--honed their skills with the National Resistance Army in Uganda, fighting alongside them during the NRA's 1980-86 civil war. I wouldn't be surprised to see past instances of non-state actors training state armies in some military tasks; mercenary war in early modern Europe comes to mind. But this is definitely a role reversal in terms of conventional wisdom.

This sort of transaction also seems to go a bit beyond training armed forces in what are, in the first instance, civilian skills--like local knowledge, law, civil engineering, or logistics. Instead, it's a "specialized skill set", but a directly military one--not a non-military skill set applied to a military context. We sometimes refer to the state as a "specialist in violence" (see, e.g., here), and this is what I mean.

That Academi violated U.S. law in training CF personnel without permission suggests an effort on the part of the (American) state to control not just violence but knowledge and skill in its use. (It's still a state-centric logic in that the objectionable thing seems to be that the recipient was a foreign military, rather than a citizen; my friend Mike could teach you how to drive evasively if you really wanted to know.)

Now the logical extension of a non-state actor as a specialist in violence is that they can train others in it. In this vein it's worth noting that insurgency and counterinsurgency are pretty low-tech, at least in equipment terms. In fact, using vehicles in COIN is actually a poor idea, as Syria may be finding out. What really counts, it seems, is experience--that is, something Hizbullah and Blackwater have a fair amount of. There would be a steeper curve for an NSA to learn, for example, how to fly fighter planes and be able to teach someone else. (There is an additional political dimension for Hizbullah--if in fact they are supporting Syria, one assumes it is out of a perceived strategic and not strictly financial gain.)

The question is more on the other side, the state recipient of training. Why not train internally--why outsource your training? Can a government buy out an NSA like this or establish its own capacity? When would it try, and when would it keep with a market transaction? Firm theory from economics might have some insights here, but I'm also interested in the politics, especially in light of the apparent use of outsourced training in small wars. In particular, I wonder whether this is just another case of military resistance to being specialists in insurgency and counterinsurgency. If armies become good at COIN over the long term, then they may have to do more of it--which many don't want to. For example, the COIN debates in the U.S. military have very much revolved around training for COIN wars and how much they should bother--consider that setting up counterinsurgency school at Ft. Leavenworth and producing a new field manual on counterinsurgency were two of the key accomplishments of the pro-COIN crowd.

The key question, of course, is whether Academi and Hizbullah use godawful powerpoints.

Sudan/South Sudan: Some Sovereignty Speculations

Things seem to be cooling down between Sudan and South Sudan. After pulling its troops out of the disputed, oil-rich region of Abyei, Sudan left 169 police officers. South Sudan claimed they were soldiers in police uniform. Whether this is true or not, apparently those are now leaving too. The two countries have apparently agreed on a "road map" for talks and they're set to begin Monday. This all seems like fairly straightforward Good News given the scary moments in the spring between the two countries.

But at the same time, the conflict between Khartoum and SPLM-North is heating up. Médecins Sans Frontières estimates that there are perhaps 100,000 Sudanese refugees in camps in South Sudan, fleeing the violence. There's a plausible connection between the two. Before South Sudan's independence, it seemed as though there were constant tradeoffs between Sudan's various conflicts. For example, it was after the peace agreements of 2003 that the conflict in Darfur reached its zenith of brutality. Whether because Darfur was left isolated by the logic of minimum winning coalitions (don't give up more than you have to to stay in power) or because peace with the SPLM left Khartoum a free hand to assault its other perceived enemies, it seemed like if it wasn't one war it was another. One wonders whether there's a repeat performance.

If there is, how much "real" difference does South Sudanese independence make?

First, by one way of thinking, inter-state conflicts are a problem for the international community in a way that intra-state conflicts aren't. Since the international community is first a community of sovereign states, the thinking goes, the members of that community have a much clearer interest in ensuring that states don't violate sovereignty by sending troops across borders than they do in ensuring that states don't kill their own citizens. It did take a lot of change for the United Nations Security Council, for example, to start dealing with civil wars. But of course internal wars rarely stay internal for very long: consider the path of death from Uganda through Rwanda to DR Congo, or the West African arc of conflict, or the Afghanistan/Pakistan/Tajikistan cluster. More strongly, many see human security as a vital value alongside or trumping international or national security. So if there is a tradeoff between international war between the Sudans and internal war in Sudan itself, the result is a neat barometer of how relatively important you think international and civil war are.

Second, sovereignty may imply taking on a set of new roles and new interests. Consider Somaliland: there is a case that it's because it has managed not to become independent that it's the most stable part of Somalia. It doesn't have access to rents like aid and international support, so it has to tax its population and thus develop some stability and accountability to its citizens. Now independent, South Sudan needs to get oil flowing again, and has to find a way to cooperate with Khartoum to do so. There are new incentives for it to behave with restraint towards its old enemy, to stay on its side of the border--incentives that were weaker when there was no border to mark the farthest its troops could go. And it is now cut off by this international convention from the SPLM-North. It could certainly outsource its conflict with Khartoum to the latter as it sees fit. But now the interests of the SPLM in Juba now differ from the SPLM-North in important respects. There will sometimes be a strong temptation for South Sudan to sell out its old comrades in arms in order to reach a pricing agreement with Khartoum.

Sovereignty is one of those maddening things: it's arbitrary in some respects, a line on a map. But we act like it is a real thing, and so it is.

(Photo: Associated Press)