ATROCITY PREVENTION AT THE CROSSROADS:

ATROCITY PREVENTION AT THE

CROSSROADS:

ASSESSING THE PRESIDENT’S ATROCITY

PREVENTION BOARD AFTER TWO YEARS

James P. Finkel

Center for the Prevention of Genocide

Series of Occasional Papers

No. 2 / September 2014

James P. Finkel

A former member of the senior civil service, Jim Finkel served as the Center for the Prevention

of Genocide’s 2013-2014 Leonard and Sophie Davis Genocide Prevention Fellow after ending

his 35 year federal career in May 2013. During the final 20 years of his service, he held

positions that provided him an insider’s eye view of the evolution of US policy toward the

prevention of genocide and mass atrocities. Mr. Finkel was a participant in President Obama’s

Presidential Study Document Number Ten (PSD 10) effort and was a frequent attendee during

the first year of meetings of the President’s Atrocity Prevention Board. Mr. Finkel holds a

Masters in International Affairs from the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International

Studies and a Bachelor’s of Arts from Rutgers College, Rutgers University.

The assertions, opinions, and conclusions in this occasional paper are those of the author. They

do not necessarily reflect those of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.

This work was made possible by a grant from The Leonard and Sophie Davis

Fund.

First printing, September 2014

Table of Contents

Key Findings ……………………………………………………….. 1

Atrocity Prevention at the Crossroads ……………………………... 5

Recommendations ………………………………………………….. 29

Annex: Progress on Genocide Prevention Task Force Recommendations

Key Findings

President Obama’s decision in August 2011 to launch Presidential Study Number 10 (PSD 10)

and to stand up the Atrocities Prevention Board (APB) the following April significantly

advanced the US Government’s efforts and capacity to prevent mass atrocities and mitigate their

effects. But after two years of operation, the APB has reached a crossroads, and fulfilling its

potential will continue to be a steep climb.

 To fulfill its potential, the APB will need additional resources, closer coordination within

key Departments and Agencies as well as with key Allies and civil society, and a work

force better prepared to wrestle with this toughest of 21

century challenges.

 If the President continues to believe strongly in atrocity prevention and the APB process

that he has set in motion, it will be important for him to reiterate that support publicly and

to make his views clear personally to his most senior foreign policy subordinates.

Most past and current members of the Board would concede that its track record is mixed. While

it has contributed significantly to policy discussions and decisions regarding such places as

Burma and Kenya, among others, it has been less successful, so far, with respect to Syria, the

Central African Republic, and South Sudan.

The Board continues to be viewed skeptically – and occasionally even hostilely – from some

quarters within the national security establishment. The APB’s first challenge has been to find

the sweet spot where it can bring its special expertise to bear in existing interagency policy

forums without slowing those discussions down or disrupting them. I believe the APB enhances

those discussions in two important ways:

 By bringing to the table a structured, functional process for identifying emerging risks for

mass atrocities at a much earlier stage and by helping to plan and execute steps to prevent

them;

 By providing expertise, tools, and perspectives that have often been overlooked or

ignored.

Several earlier initiatives significantly influenced the APB and the PSD-10 deliberations:

This essay was written by Jim Finkel, the Center for the Prevention of Genocide 2013-2014 Leonard and Sophie

Davis Genocide Prevention Fellow. Mr. Finkel left Federal Service in May 2013 after almost 35 years, the last

twenty of which provided him an insider’s view of US policy toward the prevention of genocide and mass

atrocities. Mr. Finkel was a participant in President Obama’s PSD 10 study and was a frequent attendee during the

first year of Atrocity Prevention Board meetings. This essay is drawn from his personal recollections and

discussions with long-time observers of US policy towards atrocities. The conclusions reached in the essay are

strictly his own, however, and do not necessarily represent the views of his former Agency, other Federal

Departments or Agencies, the Center for the Prevention of Genocide, or the US Holocaust Memorial Museum.

 At the end of the second Clinton Administration, Ambassador at Large for War Crimes

David Scheffer established an Atrocities Prevention Interagency Working Group on

which the APB is loosely modeled.

 A bi-partisan Genocide Prevention Task Force (GPTF) sponsored by the United States

Holocaust Museum, the American Academy of Diplomacy, and the United States

Institute of Peace issued a report in 2008 that set out concrete proposals for improving the

US Government’s performance in preventing mass atrocities and mitigating their effects.

Not only did the report provide something of a blueprint for the PSD-10 deliberations,

but several of the GPTF participants went on to occupy influential posts in the Obama

Administration.

 The Mass Atrocity Response Operations Handbook (MARO) produced in 2010 by

Harvard’s Kennedy School and the US Army Peacekeeping and Stability Operations

describes the key concepts and challenges of mass atrocity response and sets out a

common military approach.

The final report to the President of the interagency study group established to carry out PSD-10

contained over one hundred recommendations. In April 2012, the President announced that he

was establishing an Atrocity Prevention Board to put the PSD-10 recommendations into

operation and that the APB would consist of representatives from nine Departments and

Agencies at the Assistant Secretary level or above.

From the start, the APB faced three major hurdles that continue to impact its performance:

 A lack of dedicated resources to fund its work. Launching such a program during fat

bureaucratic times would have been difficult enough, attempting it at the height of the

economic recession proved especially challenging.

 Making its voice heard in the midst of the various and frequently competing interests and

competencies within the federal bureaucracy. The division of Washington’s national

security bureaucracy into regional and functional agencies has long engendered rivalry

and tension, and the APB has thus far had limited success in bridging this divide. The

APB needs a strong Departmental-level champion to make its voice heard, which the

GPTF report expected to be the State Department, but State has yet to overcome its own

regional/functional divide with respect to atrocity prevention. The Under Secretary for

Civilian Security, Democracy, and Human Rights is the likeliest candidate to take the

lead on atrocity prevention issues, and under its new management it may finally step into

that role.

 Managing the expectations – good and bad – naturally attendant upon a body that

recommends US actions in foreign countries. Some observers have been disappointed

that the APB has not spearheaded a more aggressive US policy to stop atrocities, some

fear that it will lead the US into more foreign entanglements, and still others suspect that

it is simply another tool for expanding US power and influence abroad.

Significant recent turnover in the APB and its subordinate body, the sub-APB, presents a new

challenge that has brought the APB’s long-term effectiveness into question.

 It would probably be useful at this stage to hold a combined APB/sub-APB retreat to take

stock of where things stand in the APB process, where they need to go, and how to get

there.

 That discussion should also include other key NSC players and various Regional

Assistant Secretaries.

More importantly, the APB should develop a common understanding of what atrocity prevention

means. The most common conception and practice has been direct intervention during ongoing

conflict, but this is the most complicated and expensive approach, and consequently the least

attractive for policy makers. Atrocity prevention, at its best, boils down to providing security and

development in their broader meaning before things get seriously out of hand.

 Early prevention requires early warning. This has generally been available to the APB,

as recent improvements in social science statistical modeling and more traditional

analytic approaches have provided a fairly accurate picture of which countries are at

greatest risk of atrocities.

 The greatest challenge lies in getting the Government to heed the warning, find the

resources, and orchestrate a robust intra-governmental prevention effort early on.

The fact that the APB meets regularly and brings together a large number of high level

policymakers from a broad spectrum of Departments and Agencies is an enormous advance in

the Government’s ability to formulate and execute a comprehensive and effective atrocity

prevention program.

 Relative newcomers to interagency atrocity prevention discussions, such as the

Departments of Justice and Treasury, have brought additional ideas and capabilities to the

table.

 That such a large number of high-level intelligence consumers regularly meets to hear the

same intelligence briefing considerably reduces misunderstanding and accelerates the

process of assigning new tasking for intelligence collection.

What is still missing, however, is a comparable presentation from the Policy community that

outlines the programs and policies in play, which would enhance the APB’s ability to identify

possible preventive responses. Such a briefing would lead to the collating of much useful but

hard to find material created by diverse Departments and Agencies. It would also spur greater

collaboration between the Policy Community’s regional and functional players.

If the US Government’s atrocity prevention efforts are to be effective and long-lasting, it will

need officials who understand the risks that mass atrocities present to US security and interests

and who are familiar with the possibilities for prevention. Unfortunately, the training

requirements recommended in PSD-10 have largely gone unfulfilled.

Preventing atrocities in foreign countries cannot be accomplished unilaterally but is a multilateral

enterprise. While the US has made some progress in increasing collaboration on atrocity issues,

its outreach efforts to like-minded countries have been far less robust than the PSD-10

participants anticipated.

Introduction

In our increasingly globalized world, genocide and mass atrocities in places far removed from

the United States can have serious implications for US interests and security – such as through

disruption of oil supplies and other key resources, mass flows of refugees that overburden and

destabilize bordering states, or the development of ungoverned spaces that harbor and incubate

terrorist groups. The recent spillover of conflict from Syria to Iraq and subsequent concern for

further potential spillover to Jordan, Lebanon, and Turkey provide just the latest cause for sober

reflection.

Too often, the US only reacts to these situations when the threat to its interests is already present.

At that point, the options for influencing events on the ground are limited and costly – in the case

of military intervention, often unacceptably costly to the American public. Ever since the

disastrous failures to stop ethnic cleansing and genocide in Bosnia and Rwanda in the 1990s,

professionals inside and outside of government who deal with the consequences of such events

have sought to answer whether it is possible to prevent these events before they gain momentum

and spiral out of control, or failing that, at least to find a way to mitigate the damage.

As a former federal official who was involved in the government’s efforts to answer this

question for 20 years, I can say that there has been considerable progress in our ability to identify

situations that threaten to escalate into mass atrocities and in our theoretical understanding of

how to respond to these situations, although there is still considerable work to be done. The

United States has various kinds of tools at its disposal – diplomatic, security, economic, and

judicial, to name just a few – that can help societies manage conflict without resorting to

collective violence and that can deter those who would use violence to secure their interests.

Until recently, the Departments and Agencies responsible for deciding how to use these tools

rarely did so in coordination with one another and even more rarely for the purpose of preventing

atrocities in at-risk countries. As I outline below, the US, through efforts like the President’s

Atrocity Prevention Board, is now working to develop a more consistent government-wide and

multilateral approach to preventing and stopping mass atrocities and to draw up a menu of

prevention tools and approaches to apply as individual situations warrant.

President Obama took an important step forward in the US government’s efforts to prevent or at

least mitigate the effects of mass atrocity situations on August 11, 2011, when he publicly

declared that the prevention of genocides and mass atrocities is a core national security interest

and a moral responsibility of the United States, placing these issues for the first time squarely at

the center of an Administration’s agenda. The President also instructed the National Security

Council to undertake a major Presidential Study, Presidential Study Ten (PSD 10), of how the

Washington bureaucracy could best be organized to achieve these goals – and to report its

findings to him within one hundred days. The following April, after receiving a comprehensive

report containing over one hundred recommendations endorsed by the heads and deputy heads of

his key national security departments and agencies, the President announced that he was

establishing an Atrocity Prevention Board whose job would be to flesh out the recommendations

in PSD 10, put them into practice, and ensure that Washington’s efforts to prevent genocides and

other forms of mass atrocities would hereafter have real bite.

After two years of activity, many past and current Board members would concede that the APB’s

track record at this juncture is mixed. The Board has played a significant role in focusing policy

attention on the plight of Burma’s Rohingya; has contributed to discussions aimed at reducing

the risk of violence during Kenya’s recent parliamentary election; and has launched an effort

aimed at better understanding the potential drivers of atrocities elsewhere in Africa and to

mitigate that risk by working with local US officials and others.

The Board’s engagement with the conflict in Syria, by contrast, has been contentious. The

conflict was already underway when the Board was first unveiled and convened. Board

members have been outspoken during Washington’s intensive discussions of the civil strife in

Syria and Iraq. The President’s announcement on June 26, 2014, that Washington will begin

providing lethal assistance to selected rebel groups in Syria and his decision to come to the aid of

Iraq’s Yazidis in August 2014 suggest that those arguments have finally gained some traction.

The jury is still out on the Board’s work on CAR and South Sudan. Although the press and some

APB participants have generally applauded Washington’s role in the initial international

response to recent events in CAR, others close to that process and some NGOs have questioned

why, in light of the early and prolonged attention that CAR had received from the APB,

Washington appears to have failed to engage earlier.

If part of the answer to the questions

raised by CAR can be traced to the fact that a permanent US diplomatic presence in Bangui has

been lacking since December 2012 and, as some have argued, CAR has been viewed in

Washington as a country where Paris traditionally takes the lead, the same cannot be said of

South Sudan, where the US has had a large diplomatic and development presence since

independence and where Washington played a key role in the country’s birth.

Despite its mixed record, I remain an unapologetic supporter of the APB. It is important to

remember that each of the country situations cited above is complex, some have frustrated

several administrations, and each is the subject of an ongoing deliberation within separate

interagency policy coordinating bodies. The first challenge for the APB has been to find the

sweet spot where it can contribute meaningfully to those deliberations without slowing them

down or otherwise disrupting them. I believe the APB is able to enhance these deliberations in

two ways: The APB offers a structured, functional process for identifying emerging atrocity

situations at a much earlier stage and proposing steps aimed at mitigating them. It also is able to

identify and mobilize expertise and tools that have previously been overlooked or ignored by the

regional-based policy coordinating forums.

Rebecca Hamilton, “Samantha Power in Practice,” Foreign Affairs, February 3, 2014. Accessed August 25, 2014

http://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/140709/rebecca-hamilton/samantha-power-in-practice.

Earlier Attempts

The Atrocity Prevention Board is not the first time the US has attempted to organize high-level

attention to the problem of atrocity prevention, although PSD 10 is the Washington

bureaucracy’s most intensive and comprehensive effort in the recent era that I am aware of. The

initial effort was launched by the State Department’s first Ambassador at Large for War Crimes,

David Scheffer, whose boundless energy and vision have contributed so much to Washington’s

evolving thinking about accountability and prevention as well as to the new-found prominence of

international criminal law more generally.

Scheffer was authorized mid-way through the second Clinton Administration to organize the first

Atrocities Prevention Interagency Working Group. That group, which functioned between 1998

and 2000, met once a month. Its participants included a number of bureaus and offices at the

Department of State,

the Agency for International Development’s (USAID) Deputy

Administrator, and various elements from across the Intelligence Community. Participation by

the Pentagon and the Treasury Department during that initial effort was very spotty.

The format for those meetings resembled what has taken place in the APB: each meeting began

with an intelligence briefing followed by a question and answer session, and then a policy

discussion. The quality of those meetings varied. When they worked best, they consisted of the

following: an intelligence briefing that was solid, well-sourced, and unambiguous; substantive

give-and-take between the analysts and the policy officials; serious discussion of policy options

by officials who, though they might disagree on details, all agreed on the value of atrocity

prevention; a final summing up by Scheffer of the consensus reached by the group. A memo

summarizing the group’s recommendations was then jointly forwarded to the Secretary of State.

I believed at the end of the second Clinton Administration that those who were pursuing this

more systematic approach to atrocity prevention and accountability questions were on the path

toward having a strong structural impact on policy. To my enormous disappointment, Scheffer’s

Interagency Group was disbanded at the beginning of the first Bush Administration.

After considerable deliberation, the newly elected Bush Administration ultimately decided to

retain an Office of the Ambassador at Large for War Crimes, and appointed Pierre Prosper-- a

former Justice Department attorney, Rwanda Tribunal prosecutor, and aide to Scheffer-- to head

it. The office’s work became more circumscribed, however, with its modest number of officers

initially preoccupied with the everyday goings on of the various international tribunals, and

having little time for atrocity prevention. One former senior official has offered as explanation

for this change that the incoming Administration felt it made more sense organizationally to

leave genocide and atrocity issues primarily to the requisite NSC-led regional policy

The position has recently been renamed the Ambassador-at-Large for Global Criminal Justice.

The Working Group participants from the State Department included: the Office of War Crime Issues (SWICI) –

now The Office of Global Criminal Justice (J-GCJ); Policy Planning; the Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights and

Labor (DRL); and the appropriate regional Assistant Secretaries.

coordinating bodies. Politics and ideology may have played a role as well. Primarily through his

work on the negotiations leading up to the Rome Statute and the International Criminal Court,

Scheffer had become something of a lightning rod within conservative political circles. Some of

the Bush Administration’s incoming officials felt strongly that the type of international judicial

activism and focus on war crime and atrocity issues that Scheffer had become closely associated

with needed to be sharply curtailed. Like the Clinton Administrations that preceded them, and

the Obama Administrations that followed them, the Bush Administrations certainly included

senior officials who were passionately concerned about – and continue to advocate around—the

prevention of genocide and atrocities, but they tended to be fewer in number, and, especially

following 911, were more challenged to make their voices heard. And as the wars in

Afghanistan and Iraq got underway, the small interagency cadre who had earlier participated in

and supported Scheffer’s Interagency Atrocities Prevention Working Group found themselves

redirected to a variety of other war-related tasks. Some programs had to be dropped entirely in

order to shift resources to the war efforts.

Reports that Keep on Giving

Meanwhile, a strong current began to emerge within civil society during the Bush

Administrations -- fueled by unfolding events in Iraq and Afghanistan and reflections on

genocides and atrocities committed in such places as Rwanda, the Balkans, Sudan, Liberia, and

Sierra Leone -- that a way needed to be found to help the Washington bureaucracy

comprehensively reconsider how it thought about and responded to atrocities. This concern led

the United States Holocaust Museum, the American Academy of Diplomacy, and the United

States Institute of Peace to combine forces to launch the Genocide Prevention Task Force

(GPTF) with the aim of generating new ideas.

Chaired by Madeleine Albright and William Cohen, the bi-partisan Task Force drew on the

expertise of a mix of current and former government officials with day-to-day experience as well

as academics steeped in theory. It also reached out informally to a broad range of people for

additional ideas and sought to engage its government, Congressional, and public audiences even

as its ideas were still coming together. The GPTF’s final report

took a comprehensive look at

how Washington had handled atrocity issues in the past and provided a series of relatively

concrete proposals for strengthening that performance.

Madeleine K. Albright and William S. Cohen, Preventing Genocide: A Blueprint for U.S. Policymakers, (Washington:

the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, the American Academy of Diplomacy and the Endowment of the

United States Institute of Peace), accessed August, 25 2014, http://www.ushmm.org/m/pdfs/20081124-genocide-

prevention-report.pdf.

For an assessment of the government’s progress implementing the GPTF report’s recommendations see the

Annex of this paper.

Many of those who participated in the GPTF have expressed amazement over how much their

final product appears to have influenced thinking among government analysts, policy makers,

and scholars both in the US and abroad. The report has become must reading for those who

follow atrocity issues and provided a starting point for Washington’s PSD 10 deliberations.

Another important source for those deliberations was the Mass Atrocity Response Operations

Handbook (MARO),

produced by Harvard’s Kennedy School and the US Army Peacekeeping

and Stability Operations with the aim of fostering contingency planning in the US Armed Forces

for protecting civilians in mass atrocity situations. MARO describes the key concepts and

challenges of mass atrocity response and sets out a common military approach.

Timed for publication at the start of the first Obama administration, the GPTF report hit the

streets at a time when government experts and the public were increasingly weary of Iraq and

Afghanistan and were especially open to new ideas. Several people associated with the Task

Force entered government as the first Obama Administration got underway and were anxious to

see the report’s recommendations put into practice. Meanwhile, others who were already in

government but had been following the Task Force’s discussions were already beginning to think

about ways to incorporate its ideas into their everyday work.

For example, one of incoming Secretary of State Clinton’s new initiatives was to initiate the

State Department’s first Quadrennial Diplomacy and Development Review (QDDR). That

review among other things highlighted the requirement to “prevent violent conflict and reduce its

growing costs.” It also called for recognizing the unique horror of genocide and mass atrocity,

the need to develop instruments to better detect their threat, and the need to develop structures

and policies to ensure their prevention.

With the QDDR well underway and the prevention of conflict, genocide, and mass atrocities

firmly established as part of the Obama Administration’s agenda, a small group of State

Department officers from the International Organizations Bureau (IO), Policy Planning, and the

Office of Reconstruction and Stabilization (CSO) (later upgraded to the Bureau of

Reconstruction and Stabilization) began exchanging views about how the State Department and

other Agencies should actually go about preventing genocides and mass atrocities. All of the

participants were familiar with the Genocide Prevention Task Force Report, with at least two

having actively participated in separate Task Force Working Groups. Representatives from CSO

and DRL subsequently organized an informal interagency group that began to identify key,

relevant offices working on these issues elsewhere in the Department of State, the Agency for

International Development (USAID), the Office of the Secretary of Defense (OSD), the

Department of Justice (DOJ) and within the Intelligence Community. That group began meeting

Sarah Sewall, Dwight Raymond and Sally Chin, Mass Atrocity Response Operations: A Military Planning Handbook,

(Boston: Harvard Kennedy School and US Army Peacekeeping and Stability Operations Institute), accessed August

8, 2014, http://www.hks.harvard.edu/cchrp/maro/pdf/MARO_Handbook_4.30.pdf.

once a month to discuss past experiences, work underway, and evolving situations that might

prove troublesome in the future.

In particular, that group served as a working-level bridge to those who were analyzing the same

issues at the Pentagon. Counselor to the Under Secretary of Defense Rosa Brooks had already

been tasked with overseeing the development of appropriate doctrine and training for atrocity

contingencies and directed to take the lead for OSD on atrocity situations. The former

assignment normally would take about five years, but in this instance was being fast tracked. A

number of considerations drove the interest of senior Pentagon leaders in strengthening the

Armed Forces’ ability to act in atrocity situations: experiences in recent conflicts, the likely

shape of future conflicts, the political vibrations emanating from the new Obama White House,

the recommendations of the GPTF (in which a number of former and recently appointed DOD

officials had participated), and US Senate Concurrent Resolution 71 (Dec. 2010), which “urged”

the Secretary of Defense to conduct an analysis of the doctrine, organization, training, material,

leadership, personnel and facilities required to help respond to genocides and mass atrocities.

Brooks’ office had established a series of internal Pentagon Working Groups to explore the full

range of associated questions, including operational issues; plans, doctrine, and training; early

warning; prevention strategies; and multilateral coordination.

It seems doubtful that these activities and discussions would have resulted in PSD 10 and the

APB without the initiative of NSC Senior Director for Multilateral Affairs and Human Rights

(now Ambassador to the UN) Samantha Power. A longtime advocate and journalist on the issue

of genocide prevention, she likely initiated discussions about how to proceed on atrocity issues

with various people in the White House, at the Department of State and at the Pentagon during

the initial months of the first Obama Administration. Those discussions seemed to gather

momentum once David Pressman joined Power’s NSC office as her first Director for War

Crimes, Atrocities, and Civilian Protection in April 2010. Pressman quickly set about

identifying the key players across the government on atrocity issues and how their efforts could

be organized into a “whole of government approach.” He plunged into several rounds of

meetings with people involved with these issues at the Department of State and the Pentagon, but

also reached out to the Intelligence Community, the Departments of Justice, Treasury, and

Homeland Security, FBI, ICE, and various NGOs.

Pressman did not respond to requests to be interviewed for this project and my suppositions

about how he decided to approach the task are therefore speculative. Some of the likely

influences on his thinking were State’s QDDR deliberations, the work of the State-led

interagency working group, the MARO handbook and the ongoing planning process at DOD,

and the GPTF report (Pressman was later known to carry a dog-eared, marked copy of the Task

Force Report into many of what became the PSD 10 discussions, and sometimes to cite its

recommendations by page and number).

Pressman was briefed a number of times on the progress of the Pentagon’s efforts. Brooks’ office

ultimately recommended that the executive branch undertake a whole of government look at

genocide and atrocity prevention and favored creation of some sort of Special Interagency Policy

Committee or Board charged specifically with dealing with genocide and atrocity prevention

issues. Such a body would have been much more operational and would have exercised broader

decision making authority than the one that eventually emerged as the APB.

Meanwhile, the State Department’s small group of genocide and atrocity prevention advocates

had followed up their various discussions with Pressman with a joint, informal memo stressing

the need for a more systematic approach to prevention. They noted that few people across the

relevant Departments and Agencies were responsible for dealing with these issues full-time and

expressed concern that the official atrocity prevention community lacked formal connections to

facilitate quick action. They, like their colleagues at the Pentagon, argued for a comprehensive

study that focused on questions ranging from earlier warning, to non-lethal prevention tools, to

training. They cited a need to incorporate genocide and atrocity prevention into Washington’s

highest level strategy documents and for the President to address this subject in a formal speech.

They also agreed with their colleagues at the Pentagon that some sort of Interagency Policy

Committee was needed and argued that it would best be run out of the National Security Council.

It is not clear how much independent authority the State Department genocide and atrocity

prevention advocates believed such a Committee should wield. The State Department position

that emerged during the PSD 10 discussions envisaged a much more traditional policy

coordinating group and placed a strong emphasis on curtailing structural changes or

administrative procedures that could be construed as challenging State Department or

Ambassadorial policy prerogatives.

For several months after he had completed his soundings, Pressman’s interlocutors heard little

more about the subject beyond an occasional comment that something was in the works. It

seems safe to assume that having decided on a course of action, it then took Power and Pressman

considerable time to win approval for the initiative from others within the White House and gain

agreement for a Presidential speech. Having secured agreement in principle for the project, they

would have had to work with others among the White House staff to flesh out the particulars,

prepare the President’s initial speech, and schedule a date and venue. As far as I am aware, no

one among the Departments and Agencies that subsequently participated in the PSD 10 study

ever saw the President’s speech in advance. A few, myself included, received a phone call two

days in advance of the speech simply advising that we should be prepared for a major

announcement. But the content of the President’s rollout appears to have taken most

Departments and Agencies and their heads by surprise.

Several key supporters of the initiative across the bureaucracy still feel blindsided and remember

scurrying to catch up and explain the background behind the President’s remarks to their seniors.

A number who were aware of the earlier discussions with Pressman still struggle to understand

why the rollout was handled that way. At least two have speculated, however, that White House

strategists may have worried that subjecting the speech to a normal clearance process would have

triggered interminable interagency debate and would have seen the initiative die on the vine.

Although no one with whom I have spoken has expressed unhappiness over the content or thrust

of the President’s remarks, nearly all have insisted that a more traditional rollout, or at least a

broader explanation of what was planned, would have allowed them to better socialize the new

policy within their Departments and Agencies, especially with their Regional Office

counterparts, and ultimately might have made it easier for the Atrocity Prevention Board to gain

their cooperation.

A Complex Discussion

The PSD 10 discussions that resulted from the President’s August 2011 announcement were

simultaneously grueling and exhilarating. The deliberations were grueling in the sense that the

abbreviated one hundred day timeline the President called for led to the initial establishment of

more than a half dozen working groups covering issues ranging from broad strategy to early

warning, to prevention tools, to doctrine and training, to multilateral outreach. Each working

group began meeting for two hours twice a week and generated calls for what seemed like scores

of short-fuse, tight deadline papers. Although Ambassador Power and Pressman envisaged these

taskings as simple “thought pieces” that would be folded into a draft PSD 10 report that would

be reviewed and coordinated later by Departments and Agencies, several Departments and

Agencies insisted that the papers receive formal review prior to being submitted to the working

groups.

To support the PSD 10 process, each participating Department and Agency created its own

internal mechanisms, with some more elaborate than others. The Intelligence Community, for

example, formed a relatively small, interagency group with representatives from each

organization that traditionally has followed war crime and atrocity issues. The Department of

State, on the other hand, favored what, according to descriptions at the time, was a fairly

complex intra-departmental Task Force, under the direction of the then newly organized Office

of the Under Secretary for Civilian Security, Democracy, and Human Rights (known within the

Department by the acronym “J”).

These early discussions, according to some participants, got

off to a promising start with fairly high-level participation. They later became more fragmented

due to the pace of APB work and competing projects and to the recognition that the PSD 10

The State Department currently has six Undersecretary positions: Political Affairs; Economic, Energy, and

Agricultural Affairs; Civilian Security, Democracy, and Human Rights Affairs; Arms Control and International

Security; Management; and Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs. The Undersecretaries report directly to the

Secretary and serve as the Department’s foreign policy “Corporate Board.” For an organization chart of the

Department of State see: http://www.state.gov/r/pa/ei/rls/dos/99494.htm.

discussions might lead to further-reaching bureaucratic change and accountability than some

Department of State players wished to see.

Notwithstanding the challenges of meeting the 100-day deadline, the comprehensive approach

that Ambassador Power and Pressman had laid out and the wealth of creative ideas that were

brought to the table also generated a sense of exhilaration and unity of purpose. As one would

anticipate in any bureaucratic undertaking of this type, no one in the end got everything they

wanted, but no ideas that were brought to the table were dismissed out of hand. For those who

had struggled in the background to deal with these issues for some time, the combination of the

publishing of the State Department’s QDDR, the Pentagon’s work on mass atrocity doctrine and

directives, and the organization of PSD 10 seemed to hold out the promise that these issues were

finally coming into their own.

It is probably safe to say that everyone who participated in the PSD 10 discussions was familiar

with the GPTF report, but not everyone had recently re-read it as the PSD 10 discussions got

underway. Even among those who had read it closely, one could detect at least a modest divide

between those who had actively participated in the process that produced the original report and

those who hadn’t. Those who did generally favored adopting the report’s recommendations in

toto and moving beyond them. Others tended to be more cautious and to argue that, in some

instances, sufficient mechanisms already existed. Yet, even the latter group proved open to new

ideas. To the surprise of many participants, when Steve Pomper – who took over from Pressman

as NSC Director for War Crimes, Atrocities, and Civilian Protection midway through the PSD

deliberative process – completed his draft of the Working Groups’ collective report to the

President, it called, among other things, for: new legislation aimed at closing legal loopholes that

might allow perpetrators of genocide, crimes against humanity, and war crimes to make their

way into the US and preclude them from being prosecuted or deported; additional authorities and

mechanisms for imposing sanctions against individual perpetrators and killer regimes; and steps

to enhance early warning and policy discussion. Contrary to subsequent speculation from some

NGOs, Pomper’s draft was completed within just a few days of the President’s original deadline

and was sent out immediately for full, formal interagency coordination. The draft was reviewed

and accepted by the Deputies Committee with only modest changes in early December 2011; the

Principals accepted the revised draft recommendations soon afterwards.

The PSD 10 participants were told that the President had been kept informed about their

deliberations as the talks proceeded, and that the President had accepted the report’s

recommendations once the principals had concurred. The gap, government participants were

later told, between the President’s acceptance of the recommendations and his official rollout of

the APB in April 2012 was primarily a function of the President’s schedule during that period.

Heads of National Security Departments and Agencies summoned to discuss major foreign policy issues are often

referred to as members of the Principals’ Committee. Similar meetings of their deputy heads of Departments and

Agencies, which tend to meet more frequently, are known as meetings of the Deputies’ Committee.

The lack of visibility into those scheduling issues and the subsequent preparations for the rollout,

however, have nevertheless prompted some former PSD 10 participants to speculate that the plan

was still viewed skeptically from some quarters within the White House – especially by those

preoccupied at the time with Syria -- and that Ambassador Power and Pomper may have had to

overcome continuing hurdles in order to finalize the roll out.

Preparations

In the interim, preparatory work looking toward an inaugural meeting of the Atrocities

Prevention Board was proceeding apace. Within the Intelligence Community, language on the

risk of atrocities had already been drafted for the Director of National Intelligence’s annual threat

testimony before Congress. The GPTF Report had expressed disappointment with the

Intelligence Community’s Atrocities Watchlist, which the Intelligence Community had been

publishing since 1997. Indeed, some former policy officials who participated in the Task Force

insisted that the Watchlist was of marginal value and rarely pointed to situations not already

known by policymakers to be at great risk.

Encouraged by Ambassador Power, those responsible for preparing the Watchlist went back and

refined their approach. The Atrocities Watchlist, whose format and content had already changed

considerably over time, had always been drawn from a combination of statistical modeling –

primarily developed by CIA’s Political Instability Task Force – and expert insights. This time

the analysts opted to increase the number and type of statistical models they employed, develop a

more formal and structured expert survey, and pay closer heed to a number of regular NGO lists

and academic publications.

Anticipating that the Board would want to start its meetings with an intelligence overview, and

knowing that the list of countries exhibiting risk factors for atrocities is actually fairly lengthy,

the analysts finally opted for an approach that included a broad monthly survey of a selected

group of high-risk countries, accompanied by a more focused, detailed study of at least one

country to be presented at each meeting. The latter included preparation of a short-fuse, multi-

disciplinary briefing paper that not only captured the immediate dynamics of the country in

question, but also sought to look under the hood and explore the structural and other drivers of

potential mass atrocities.

Simultaneously, several of these same analysts began laying the necessary groundwork to take

up another of the GPTF and PSD 10 recommendations: a full-scale, first-ever National

Intelligence Estimate (NIE) on the Global Risk of Atrocities.

That paper, as is frequently the

Albright and Cohen, Preventing Genocide, 25.

Albright and Cohen, Preventing Genocide, 28.

case, took nearly a year to complete and by all accounts has been well received by both the

Intelligence and Policy Communities.

Highlights from APB Announcement

The President announced the establishment of the APB in a speech at the US

Holocaust Memorial Museum on April 23, 2012. According to the White House

press release accompanying the speech, the APB was to:

 Include representatives from the Departments of State, Defense, Treasury,

Justice, and Homeland Security, the Joint Staff, the U.S. Agency for

International Development, the U.S. Mission to the United Nations, the

Office of the Director of National Intelligence, the Central Intelligence

Agency, and the Office of the Vice President who were

o at the Assistant Secretary level or higher

o appointed by name by their respective agency heads;

 Be chaired by the NSS Senior Director for Multilateral Affairs and

Human Rights;

 Meet at least monthly and additionally as urgent situations arise;

 “Oversee the development and implementation of atrocity prevention and

response policy;”

 Submit an annual report on its work to the President and have its work

reviewed

o at least twice a year by the Deputies

o at least once a year by the Principals.

After six months of operations, the APB chair was to draft an Executive Order

that would “set forth the structure, functions, priorities, and objectives of the

Board, provide further direction for its work, and include further measures for

strengthening atrocity prevention and response capabilities as identified in the

course of the Board’s work.” As of this writing, this last prescription has yet to

be fulfilled.

While the announcement standing up the APB

designated the agency and rank of those who

would serve on it, the NSC oversaw appointment of the actual members. Ambassador Power

and her NSC Directors hoped to forge a genocide and atrocity prevention effort through PSD 10

that was better structured than those that had preceded it and that would outlast President

Obama’s time in office. They reasoned that quick results were necessary to achieve that, and to

achieve quick results they needed people on the APB who not only shared their general view of

the importance of atrocity prevention but also had sufficient clout to make binding decisions and

shift resources to make things happen.

The idea that APB members should be chosen individually rather than by position may have

been calculated in part to strengthen Board members’ sense of personal responsibility, but it also

made it easier for Power’s NSC office to push like-minded thinkers toward appointment to the

Board. A few of the APB’s original members also regularly attended Deputies’ meetings, which

in theory should have made it easier to elevate the Board’s views in higher circles. Some former

participants in both the PSD 10 and APB processes have come to characterize this first cadre of

APB participants as the “true believers,” although it would be an exaggeration to say, as some

have asserted, that the initial Board was completely hand-picked by Ambassador Power.

Faced with a global portfolio, it quickly became clear that individual members of the Board

would find it difficult, even meeting at least once a month and with membership at the Assistant

Secretary level and above, to keep track of all of the countries and issues that would seize the

Board’s attention during its first two years of operation. As one former PSD 10 and APB

participant observed, Board members and their subordinates never anticipated the volume of

simultaneous atrocity-related crises that they would be called upon to deal with. Pomper, to his

credit, quickly recognized that the Board would require preparatory work from a subordinate

body, and established the sub-APB to help Board members make sense of the growing number of

countries considered at risk and the voluminous accompanying data. The sub-APB, which has

met weekly, also took on the task of vetting ideas and proposals about atrocity prevention tools

and responses.

Serious Hurdles

From the start, the APB faced three major hurdles that continue to impact its performance: 1) a

lack of dedicated resources to fund its work; 2) making its voice heard in the midst of the various

and often competing interests and competencies within the federal bureaucracy; 3) managing the

White House, “Fact Sheet: A Comprehensive Strategy and New Tools to Prevent and Respond to Atrocities,”

accessed August 25, 2014, http://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2012/04/23/fact-sheet-comprehensive-

strategy-and-new-tools-prevent-and-respond-atro

expectations – good and bad – naturally attendant upon a body that recommends US actions in

foreign countries.

The GPTF report envisaged an atrocity prevention process modeled after Washington’s counter-

terrorism and counter-proliferation processes, and the report emphasized up front that additional

resources would be necessary.

The elephant in the room -- both during the PSD 10 discussions

and the standing up of the APB -- for those who understood how many countries actually are at

some level of atrocity risk and what it might take to accurately assess and positively impact the

situation on the ground -- was the question of where the resources to be effective were going to

be found. Ambassador Power had made clear from the beginning of the PSD 10 discussions that

the Board would have to be a resource-neutral undertaking. Launching a potentially sizable

program during fat bureaucratic times would have been difficult enough; to attempt such a

launch at the height of the recent economic recession while Departments and Agencies were

being forced to cut long-standing programs would prove especially challenging. For example,

Senior Intelligence Officers stressed repeatedly to their representatives who participated in the

PSD 10 study that its requirements made up only one of several unfunded mandates that the

White House had instructed the Intelligence and Policy Communities to undertake. It was clear

that White House Congressional strategists were not prepared to launch a supplementary budget

request to support an atrocity prevention program. Moreover, Congress for its part has followed

a pattern of reducing funds for programs aimed at improving governance and reducing graft and

corruption overseas, further weakening some of the most important tools in Washington’s

prevention toolbox.

Its status as an unfunded mandate only heightened the hurdles the APB had to overcome as the

newcomer to turf that was already rife with competing interests. Washington’s national security

bureaucracy, regardless of department, tends to be divided into both regional and functional

Bureaus, Issues, or Offices. Regional bureaus generally focus on a geographic area such as

Africa, while functional Bureaus focus on cross-cutting issues as in the case of the State

Department’s Bureau of Conflict and Stabilization Operations. There is a long history of rivalry

and tension – sometimes stronger, other times less strong – between these regional and

functional entities throughout the national security establishment. The APB’s mission to weigh

in on both countries and issues for which other parts of the bureaucracy have responsibility has

caused it to be viewed with skepticism or even hostility in some quarters whose cooperation is

necessary to carry out its recommendations.

Part of this reaction can be attributed to mundane bureaucratic considerations: the more players

that are added to a policy discussion, the more bureaucratically complex a problem generally

becomes. Hubris or simple turf considerations may also rear their heads, with some participants

taking the position that: “This is my sandbox, I know it best, and you’re not going to play in it.”

A third, more substantive source of resistance is a culture clash that often pits “realists” against

Albright and Cohen, Preventing Genocide, xvii, 11, and others.

“idealists.” The former will argue that if we don’t have any “real” strategic interests in a

particular country or situation, we ought not to concern ourselves no matter what the

circumstances; the latter have taken to heart President Obama’s 2011 characterization of the

prevention of atrocities as a core national security interest and moral responsibility of the US.

Meanwhile, yet another group, the pragmatists, would attempt to square the circle by arguing

that even if traditional US interests in a given “at risk” country don’t initially appear to be at

stake, atrocities have the potential to trigger secondary and tertiary effects that eventually will

bring US interests into play.

The GPTF report assumed that to make itself heard in interagency policy debates and to win the

cooperation it needed, an APB-like body would require a strong Departmental-level champion to

push its cause. The report took as a basic premise that the Department of State should be in the

lead when it comes to genocide and atrocity prevention and suggested that DRL, as the State

Department’s largest genocide and prevention stakeholder, should play a special role.

But the

State Department has continued to have great difficulty coming together on genocide and

atrocity issues since the end of the second Clinton administration and the disbanding of

Scheffer’s original Interagency Working Group. Each subsequent administration seems to have

begun with several organizations within the Department of State -- DRL, Global Criminal

Justice, USAID, and more recently CSO -- all making a claim to leadership on these questions, at

least until the first big prevention test has arisen. At that point, they have found themselves

stymied by bureaucratic politics and forced to subordinate themselves to the appropriate

Regional Bureau, which, depending on the circumstances and personal relations between the

various State Department entities’ senior leaders, may or may not have accepted the advice of the

functional prevention Bureaus and Offices.

This dynamic has continued since the start of PSD 10 and the standup of the APB. Although

Mike Koczak, then serving as Senior Director for DRL, brought a strong voice to the PSD 10

discussions, his boss, former Assistant Secretary Mike Posner, has been described by long-time

atrocity prevention observers as wary of the entire PSD 10 enterprise and fearful that the

Atrocities Prevention Board would distract DRL personnel and resources from what he

considered more traditional and more important DRL missions. At this point, it remains unclear

how much emphasis Posner’s successor, Tom Malinowski, will place on atrocity issues. The

Office of Global Criminal Justice – in the view of some the natural office to take the lead on

these issues -- has remained woefully understaffed as its portfolio has continued to burgeon over

the years. Ambassador Rapp’s heavy travel schedule has frequently found him abroad during

key prevention discussions. While AID and CSO, on paper, would seem well placed to weigh in

strongly, in both cases the number of people assigned to work on atrocity prevention questions

full-time has actually remained very small in comparison to the growing demand for their input

and their general staffing. At the same time, the excellent analytic policy work on prevention

Albright and Cohen, Preventing Genocide, 9.

that AID and CSO have done has tended to be held very closely and often has not even been

shared with the full membership of the APB or the sub-APB. Meanwhile, the Department of

State’s International Organizations Bureau, which has proved one of the Department’s most

consistent advocates of PSD 10 and the APB, has had its hands full just focusing on the UN,

IMF, and World Bank aspects of the atrocities problem.

The creation of the State Department’s Undersecretary for Civilian Security, Democracy, and

Human Rights – which is the parent bureau of DRL, GCJ, and CSO among others -- prompted

mixed reactions in the Department as Bureaus and Offices quietly calculated how J and the

QDDR reforms more broadly might impact their bureaucratic spheres of control. PSD 10 and

APB supporters within State on the whole were initially enthusiastic and looked to J as a way to

strengthen their collective voice. That enthusiasm waned over time as supporters felt that J was

not making sufficient headway winning active, long-term support from the Secretary, the

Undersecretary for Political Affairs, and more importantly State’s Regional Assistant Secretaries.

One former State Department official opined that like the individual Bureaus and offices cited

earlier, “J wanted to take the lead on these questions, but at the same time, it didn’t want to take

the lead.” Taking the lead meant engaging in a lot of intra-State Department arguments, and J

understood that, as in any bureaucracy, it also needed those same Bureaus’ and Offices’

cooperation to get a lot of other things done. The initial State Department Task Force put

together by J to support PSD 10 and the APB fell into disarray over time as senior participants

drifted off to other issues and as J’s reluctance to weigh in more strongly with counterparts grew.

Moreover, the Task Force meetings devolved into information sharing and note taking exercises

rather than being opportunities to actively deliberate over atrocity prevention matters under

discussion at the APB and sub-APB levels with the various offices within the Department. These

issues have only been exacerbated during the yearlong interim between Undersecretary Otero’s

departure from J and the confirmation of her replacement, Sarah Sewall.

Given the lofty goal expressed in its title and the complex and controversial issues it deals with,

the APB naturally invites outsized expectations and suspicions. Although Ambassador Power

has repeatedly cautioned that the “P” in APB does not stand for “panacea,” some expected the

APB would spearhead an aggressive US policy to stop atrocities in places like Eastern Congo,

Sudan and Syria. Others, skeptical of the benefits of foreign involvements after more than a

dozen years of war, fear the APB is a formula for expanding US commitments and expenditure

of personnel and materiel from conflict to conflict. Still others watching from abroad who are

more skeptical of US intentions interpret the APB’s establishment as another mechanism

developed to promote future US crusades and influence.

The APB at the Crossroads

As is common, the start of the second term of the Obama Administration saw significant

turnover in the departments and agencies that participate on the APB. There is strong consensus

among those who have served in the APB and the sub-APB that the turnover within both bodies

has presented a serious test of the Board’s effectiveness and durability. It would be especially

hard to find anyone associated with the APB who would argue that Ambassador Power’s move

to the UN has not had a strong impact on the Board. On the one hand, the move is potentially

advantageous for advancing the APB’s work, since she is now better positioned to roll out

diplomatic strategy and help sync the APB’s efforts with those of various UN bodies and key

like-minded Allies. However, Ambassador Power’s long personal relationship with the

President, combined with her scholarship on atrocity questions, clearly strengthened her hand

during White House scrums. It fell primarily to Ambassador Power and her staff at the NSC to

ensure that the information and views shared within the APB about various countries made their

way into the White House-led deliberations of the many Interagency Policy Committees.

Although Ambassador Power has continued to work closely with her former office at the NSC

and with the APB in her new position at the UN, it is probably inevitable that her successor at the

NSC, Steve Pomper, will face a tougher slog as he attempts to coordinate and push APB

positions through a White House that appears increasingly preoccupied with other issues. But if

one of the APB’s goals is longevity – i.e., to become an institution that will continue to promote

atrocity prevention issues through future Administrations -- then the APB will need to

demonstrate that it can be a strong, confident, effective player in its own right. It will be hard

pressed to continue beyond the second Obama Administration if it cannot firmly establish itself

as capable of operating effectively without Ambassador Power at the helm.

Asked what in retrospect they would want to do differently if the APB were being launched

today, one former senior official suggested that it probably would have been useful the first time

the Board met to go through the GPTF recommendations together in order to ensure that

everyone was on the same page. That suggestion may be even more valid for the current Board.

I would also recommend adding a summary of the MARO and MAPRO

handbooks, a list of all

of the requirements contained in the PSD 10 report, and the December 2010 Senate Concurrent

Resolution 71.

It is even more important that the current Board ensure that it has a common understanding about

what it really means by prevention. I strongly suspect that various Board members have very

different notions about what prevention should and can accomplish. Given their extensive

turnover of recent months, it might be useful for the APB and sub-APB to have a combined

retreat to discuss these issues and take current stock of the APB process, where they need to go,

The Mass Atrocity Response Operations Military Planning Handbook (MARO) was published in May 2010. As the

PSD 10 discussions got underway, the Army Peacekeeping and Stability Operations Institute began work on a

companion informal white paper for the MARO Handbook aimed at policymakers concerned with mass atrocity

and response. That publication, The Mass Atrocity Prevention and Response Options Handbook (MAPRO), was

published in March 2012.

and what needs to be done to get there. Such a meeting might also provide an opportunity to

include other key NSC Senior Directors and various Regional Assistant Secretaries.

One senior US official recently observed that what Washington means by prevention at any

particular moment will depend on where things stand in a particular situation along a continuum

of violence and what else might simultaneously be in play elsewhere. In general, Washington

will continue to face three basic types of atrocity prevention situations: pre-conflict, conflict, and

post-conflict. My own view is that prevention at its best boils down to providing security and

development in their broadest sense (meaning economic growth, rule of law, institutions that

facilitate good governance, limiting crime and corruption, health care, etc.) before things appear

to be getting seriously out of hand. I also agree with the observation of many prominent

genocide scholars that once genocides and other large-scale atrocity events get started, they are

very difficult and costly to stop.

Early prevention requires early warning. The combination of social science statistical modeling

and more traditional analytic approaches have reached the point at which analysts within

government and civil society can provide a fairly accurate strategic projection of which countries

are at greatest risk of experiencing large-scale atrocity events over the next two to three years. I

believe that anyone who has sat in the APB’s monthly meetings, heard the briefings, and read the

accompanying materials and the recent National Intelligence Estimate on the Global Risk of

Atrocities would be hard pressed in most instances to argue that strategic early warning has been

missing. The greater challenge, as Ambassador Power has noted on a number of occasions, is to

heed that warning, find the resources, and orchestrate a whole of government prevention

approach at an early enough stage.

Successful early prevention requires a robust intra-governmental coordination effort, which the

APB appears to be slowly making headway on, but it will continue to take some time before this

type of approach becomes second nature to broad swaths of our civil servants. Unfortunately, at

the end of the day, the press of business, budget cycles, and bureaucratic rivalries simply make it

much easier for individual Departments and Agencies to consider policies and actions in

isolation from one another. This ad hoc, uncoordinated approach is far less effective in both cost

and results.

Most members of the public, if they think about prevention at all, probably still think of

prevention in terms of the cavalry coming over the hill. Barring a stronger shift toward a more

systematic, earlier approach to prevention, direct prevention – whether it involves straight-

forward use of military force or some combination of military force, diplomacy, and economic

sanctions -- during ongoing conflict is likely to remain the more common approach. Yet, direct

prevention during ongoing conflict, with its frequent requirement to employ some element of

Romeo Dallaire, Shake Hands With the Devil: The Failure of Humanity in Rwanda, (New York: Carroll and Graf,

2004), 514.

military force, involves a far greater coordination effort and is vastly more expensive than early

prevention. It is also the least attractive option for senior policymakers, regardless of their

political affiliation.

Time and research by others will tell what the APB and other elements of the US government

and its close Allies did or might have done in the months leading up to the collapse of CAR.

Once the tactical situation on the ground became clear, however, the APB acted to push for

prevention measures at the UN as well as for US logistical support to the French and African

peacekeeping forces in Bangui along with humanitarian aid.

Post-conflict prevention is the third type of prevention that Washington is likely to find itself

called upon to consider. Studies of genocides and other mass atrocities have shown both high

rates of recidivism and a strong correlation of such incidents with armed conflict. South Sudan is

currently proving this point. The APB and the Washington policy community more broadly

should closely analyze the lessons learned from South Sudan, which, unlike CAR, is a country in

whose success the United States has been highly vested. Washington has poured millions of

dollars into South Sudan since its independence. Indeed, Washington was intimately involved in

South Sudan’s creation, and the many hours and careful attention that Ambassador Power and

others spent trying to anticipate and stave off possible problems as the transition in Sudan

unfolded not only formed one of the most detailed and deliberate efforts of its kind, but also

provided a standout foreign policy moment for the first Obama Administration.

Unlike the case in Bangui, the US had a large diplomatic presence in Juba, the capital of South

Sudan. The APB and others had devoted considerable time over the months preceding the

current political crisis to the potential threat of atrocities in South Sudan, but focused on Jongley

State and elsewhere where there was inter-ethnic violence rather than on Juba itself. A lessons-

learned study of recent events in South Sudan ought to examine whether and, if so, why the US

failed to see the growing threat in Juba. Was this simply a case of declining financial resources

and the pull of policy attention elsewhere prompting decision makers to declare victory and

move on before the situation was really in hand? It should also explore whether the same

preoccupation over the September 2012 attack on the US Consulate in Benghazi, which clearly

has factored into Washington’s decisions about its diplomatic presence in Bangui, complicated

efforts to articulate a timely prevention strategy in Juba once it became clear to the US what was

actually afoot.

Compared with the requirements arising out of PSD 10 and the number of agencies participating

in the APB, Ambassador Scheffer’s original Interagency Atrocities Group admittedly looks

pretty anemic. Washington’s understanding of the circumstances that can lead to atrocities and

the theoretical work on how they might be prevented have advanced considerably during the

interim years. The US’s approach to assessing risk has become more sophisticated and more

reliable, but more research remains to be done. There is still much to be learned about triggers

and accelerators of atrocity events. Similarly, while there has been considerable work in recent

years on the economic underpinnings of wars and civil wars, considerably less focus has been

given to the economics of atrocities themselves. I likewise believe that closer scrutiny of the

links between human rights violations, particularly extra-judicial killings, torture, arbitrary

arrests, etc., and the escalation to mass atrocities may also offer additional important insights into

approaches to atrocity prevention.

Simply involving a wider range of players at the table has been a positive development and has

brought additional ideas and authorities into play. For example, the Department of Justice

entered the PSD 10 discussions with a particularly well thought out package of legislative and

administrative proposals designed to fill gaps between existing US law and evolving

international legal norms, particularly as they apply to genocide, crimes against humanity,

superior responsibility, and principles of jurisdiction. Some of those proposals -- part of the

APB’s focus on developing additional tools for prevention -- have already been achieved, while

others are still working their way through the deliberative process.

Sanctions have emerged as a favored diplomatic tool of the several past administrations.

Sanctions were also a focus of the GPTF recommendations.

Treasury’s representatives to the

PSD 10 discussions came to the table anxious to demonstrate that their experience with sanctions

and Treasury’s various other authorities could also be employed as powerful prevention tools.

Treasury later expressed some misgivings about the potential size and scope of a proposed

atrocity prevention sanctions regime, concerned along with others about where the collection and

analytic resources might be found. So far, however, Treasury has managed to overcome these

obstacles when sanctions for atrocities have been deemed appropriate.

From the very parochial view of someone who until recently was charged with ensuring that a

broad range of senior policy makers were regularly kept abreast of the risk of atrocities and other

events as they unfold, the fact that the APB holds regular meetings that bring together a large

number of high-level Intelligence consumers to hear and discuss the same presentation is an

enormous improvement from the fractured situation of past administrations. The prospects for

misunderstanding and the time gaps between policy feedback and additional tasking of

intelligence collection have been considerably reduced. Recent steps by the Intelligence

Community to preview its single country briefings to the sub-APB ought to further ensure that

APB members arrive for Board meetings with a fuller understanding of the situation within the

country under discussion.

What is still sorely missing, however, is a comparable presentation from the Policy Community

outlining the programs and policies that are already in play along with the current gaps. A

comprehensive companion policy briefing, prepared for Board members and pre-briefed to the

sub-APB, should help to further improve the Board’s prescriptive deliberations.

Albright and Cohen, Preventing Genocide, 70.

I would anticipate at least two additional advantages to orchestrating a series of comprehensive

companion policy briefs. The first is that it would force the policy community to bring together

a lot of disparate material that is otherwise often hard to find and traditionally has not been well

tracked. The second is that it should further strengthen collaboration on prevention issues

between the policy community’s functional and regional players. Pomper and others have tried a

variety of initiatives to advance collaboration between the APB and the various country IPCs and

have gone so far in some instances as to hold joint meetings. Nevertheless, efficiently bridging

the functionalist/regionalist divide on atrocity prevention issues government-wide remains, after

the resource issue, one of the toughest challenges to effective prevention. It is one of the most

difficult to wrestle with and has reared its head at one time or another in all of the Departments

and Agencies that participate in the APB, including the National Security Council itself. On

more than one occasion it has seemed that regional NSC Directors who had been asked to

provide the APB a policy briefing were doing little more than conducting a quick “drive by”

intended to persuade the Board that everything was in hand and nothing was amiss. As

evidenced by recent events, that turned out not to be the case in several instances.

The jury is still out as to whether State will succeed at bridging its own regional/functional

divide and take up the leadership role in atrocity prevention that the GPTF report envisioned for

it. With Sewall now at her desk at J, the State Department’s PSD 10/APB supporters are once

again looking to it for strong leadership. One advocate has suggested that Sewall should begin

her tenure with a large meeting of State Department atrocity prevention stakeholders and lay out

clearly how she sees atrocity prevention fitting into the J family’s broader mission. The same

advocate has also suggested that she follow up that meeting with private discussions with each of

the Regional Assistant Secretaries. Another has suggested that she form a small secretariat

within her office staffed by people with knowledge of atrocity issues and extensive experience

within State to resuscitate the Department’s internal APB support mechanism and to ensure that

the various Bureaus and Offices refocus on the PSD 10 requirements and are operating in sync.

Quickly becoming familiar with the various financial accounts available for atrocity prevention

contingencies will be essential, as will making sure that she and her key subordinates have ready

access to all of the latest intelligence. On the latter score, Sewall would be well served by urging

the Bureau of Intelligence and Research to strengthen its War Crimes Division, which has long

been neglected. Finally, her background and experience place Sewall in a unique position to

exert a strong, positive influence over the APB more broadly. Reaching out personally to each

of her counterparts if she hasn’t already would be a good start.

The Intelligence Community has not been immune to the types of challenges that the State

Department and other APB participants have faced. On the analytic side, too few analysts have

been left to wrestle with a global portfolio that continues to expand by leaps and bounds. Prior

to my leaving government service, fewer than a dozen all-source analysts across the entire

Community were assigned to cover these issues full-time. The bulk of those analysts were found

at CIA, with an additional very small cadre at INR. DIA, despite the Pentagon’s program to

establish doctrine and train for atrocity prevention contingencies, has steadfastly refused to

contribute an analytic unit of any size. Among the Combatant Commands, AFRICOM and

EUCOM – the latter perhaps drawing from its earlier experiences in the Balkans – seem to be

more positively disposed toward the APB than any of their counterparts and to have followed

closely the Board’s deliberations and the Intelligence Community’s assessments of risk.

Just sorting out the potential atrocity landscape in some of the countries that have been the

subject of the Intelligence Community’s briefs to the APB has often proved difficult. Most

atrocity events occur in places around the world where the US and its Allies tend to have their

smallest diplomatic presence and where that presence frequently is concentrated in the host

country’s capital. This is often far from where the first signs that atrocities may be brewing are

found. Even where intelligence collection is available, bureaucratic obstacles may still prevent it

from being focused on atrocity questions.

If Washington is really serious about taking a more preventive approach to dealing with

atrocities, it will have to expand the Intelligence Community’s cadre of atrocity analysts, ensure

that they are more familiar with some of the newer disciplines like Peacebuilding, and find easier

ways to overcome the continuing barriers to collection. The best option would be to create a new

National Intelligence Manager (NIM) position with responsibility for atrocity questions and

related problems like political instability, human rights, and humanitarian affairs. The job of the

NIMs is to ensure that issues are receiving adequate attention from collectors and analysts.

The long-term viability of atrocity prevention as a focus of US Government interagency policy

planning and coordination will depend in significant part upon whether the officials involved in

these processes perceive the risks that mass atrocities present to US security and interests and

have a grasp of the possibilities for prevention. The PSD 10 participants devoted considerable

time and attention to the issue of training, or as one senior US official has put it, how to get

atrocity prevention into the relevant Departments’ and Agencies’ DNA. Although PSD 10 laid

out fairly explicit training requirements for all participating APB Departments and Agencies,

those requirements have largely gone unfulfilled. For a variety of reasons, the training offices of

many APB Departments and Agencies remain unaware of the requirements, while others that

have been informed often insist that Congress’ continuing budget cuts have made it impossible to

launch new initiatives. The Pentagon and the Department of State’s International Organizations

Bureau (IO) have been notable exceptions. The Pentagon has actually been out front in efforts to

integrate atrocity prevention into its curriculum, and IO has worked with the State Department’s

Foreign Service Institute to organize a three-day training course that has received strong, positive

feedback from students and has been oversubscribed.

It has been encouraging the past several years to watch academia become seized with these

issues and to see how many government new hires have entered service with a background in

areas especially relevant to atrocity prevention, including various areas of international law,

development, peace building, transitional justice etc. It has also been gratifying to see their

enthusiasm for jumping into the fray and tackling these issues. But at the current rate of hiring it

will take a generation to acquire a workforce that understands the centrality of these questions to

the 21

century. To obtain the broader change in our bureaucratic thinking about these questions

that we ultimately need, we will have to find better ways to introduce these concepts to our

experienced workforce as well.

Preventing atrocities in foreign countries is not a task that can be successfully accomplished

unilaterally. No one who participated in the PSD 10 discussions would have argued that the US

could or should take the lead on its own on all of the countries the Intelligence Community might

flag for risk. The Holocaust Museum’s own recently published list of at-risk countries shows

how lengthy such a list might be.

Instead, it was always envisioned that atrocity prevention

would be a multilateral enterprise, and PSD 10 participants focused on enhanced and earlier

collaboration with key like-minded Allies, international organizations, and civil society. While

the US has taken some steps to develop this kind of collaboration – such as organizing ad hoc,

informal coffees with delegation members of like-minded states and injecting atrocity prevention

discussion into some standing bodies, especially at the UN – outreach efforts have, by and large,

remained underdeveloped in comparison to what originally was envisaged. Two years into the

process, it is time for the APB to step up its multilateral game and take a more aggressive public

stance on these issues.

If, in fact, the APB is making progress with its Regional Policy Committee counterparts, then

strengthening bilateral dialogue with key Allies ought to be less problematic. After all, it’s the

Regionals that traditionally tend to have the biggest say about what issues are raised in foreign

capitals and how that is done. Within the Department of State, some of the back and forth over

whom to approach, under what circumstances, and what ought to be said might be orchestrated

by a revitalized J office, with Undersecretary Sewall weighing in with counterparts to break

logjams as they arise. But outreach initiatives should also arise out of the APB’s broader policy

initiatives, and it will be the responsibility of Steve Pomper’s Multilateral and Human Rights

shop to capture those ideas and assign responsibility for seeing them through in their list of post-

meeting tasks.

Perhaps the single most important factor that will determine whether progress continues to be

made in fulfilling the PSD 10 recommendations over the remaining two years of this

administration is the level of commitment perceived to be coming from the White House.

Bureaucracies are especially adept at parsing senior leaders’ formal pronouncements, zeroing in

on what is said as well as what is not said. This is especially the case with new or controversial

policies, or policies that represent a radical departure from past practices. As noted above, most

accounts insist that the President’s announcements launching PSD 10 in August 2011 and the

APB in April 2012 took at least some of his key subordinates by surprise. In retrospect, this

See The United State Holocaust Museum’s Center for the Prevention of Genocide’s Early Warning website at:

“Early Warning Project,” accessed August 25, 2014, http://cpgearlywarning.wordpress.com/ .

appears to be another one of several cases in which more experienced civil servants have bristled

over the way comparatively younger Obama NSC staffers have handled the details of various

initiatives. One senior administration official is said to have quipped after the APB rollout that if

the President had been really serious about the APB and atrocity prevention, he would have

conveyed that directly to his Administration’s most senior players rather than through a speech.

Despite regular assurances from senior levels within the White House that the President feels

strongly about the atrocity prevention initiative he endorsed, there have been persistent signs that

parts of the bureaucracy remain skeptical of the policy and the President’s “real” intent. This

initial skepticism has only grown as the debates over Iraq, Afghanistan, and Syria have unfolded.

The skeptics have been further reinforced in their view by the President’s speech last fall to the

UN General Assembly – where his remarks on Syria and failure to list atrocity prevention among

the United States’ core national security interests were interpreted as a step back from the

language he used in rolling out PSD 10, and later the APB. These misgivings were further

reinforced a few days later by National Security Advisor Rice’s October 2013 interview with the

New York Times in which she narrowed US foreign policy goals in several Middle East countries

where democratization is generally viewed as an important tool for helping to prevent atrocities

in the future.

Even long-time supporters of the PSD 10 and APB initiatives within the

bureaucracy and among civil society interpreted these remarks as a signal that the Administration

was moving away from its earlier pronouncements on atrocity prevention.

The President’s August 2014 decision to come to the aid of Iraq’s Yazidis for the express

purpose of preventing genocide suggests on its face that the President continues to believe in

atrocity prevention at some level and should generally boost the spirits of APB supporters. At

the same time, they are likely to interpret the restrictive nature of the President’s remarks

announcing the steps Washington would undertake as signaling another troubling retreat from his

earlier remarks on prevention. Meanwhile, those who continue to harbor misgivings about

atrocity prevention, may see the President’s announcement as a slippery slope toward deeper

renewed involvement in Iraq and comparable action elsewhere.

If the President does, in fact, continue to believe strongly in atrocity prevention and the process

that he has set in motion with the APB, it will be important for him to further clarify that support

publicly. If he truly wants to initiate the type of far-reaching change of bureaucratic culture that

PSD 10 presupposes, then it will be even more important that he make his view on atrocity

prevention clear personally to a broader swath of his most senior foreign policy subordinates.

Although the Atrocities Prevention Board has taken a number of important steps forward since

the President commissioned it in April 2012, the Board currently stands at an important

Mark Landler, “Rice Offers a More Modest Strategy for Mideast,” New York Times, October 26, 2013, accessed

August 25, 2014, http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/27/world/middleeast/rice-offers-a-more-modest-strategy-for-

mideast.html.

crossroads. If the APB is going to fulfill its potential, it will need additional resources, stronger

leadership within the Department of State, closer coordination within key Departments and

Agencies as well as with key Allies and civil society, along with a workforce better prepared to

wrestle with this toughest of 21

century challenges. And the APB will need the support of the

President himself to keep on track.

Recommendations

To the President:

 That the President reiterate personally both to the public and to the most senior members

of his national security team – especially at the Department of State, the Pentagon, and

the Intelligence Community -- that the prevention of genocide and mass atrocities is a

priority issue for his administration and that plans and resources for dealing with these

questions should be allocated accordingly.

To Congress:

 That Congress provide additional fenced resources to allow the Executive Branch to

establish a minimum of the following additional positions:

 That the number of policy analysts assigned to work on genocide and atrocity prevention

issues at AID, CSO, and GCJ be increased by a factor of three.

 That CIA, INR, FBI, and ICE increase the number of full-time Intelligence analysts

assigned to cover genocide and atrocity prevention issues by four full-time positions

each.

 That DIA, NGA, and Treasury each establish comparatively sized units specifically

devoted to cover genocide and atrocity issues and implement a global sanctions regime

dedicated to atrocity prevention.

 That Congress allocate additional funds for genocide and atrocity prevention at least in

line with the original recommendations of the Genocide Prevention Task Force.

 That the appropriate Congressional Committees request the same monthly materials and

briefings that are prepared for the Atrocity Prevention Board’s meetings.

To the National Security Council:

 That the National Security Council organize a one-day retreat for members of the APB,

sub-APB, and appropriate associated personnel to assess the APB’s performance to date

and possible improvements to the APB process.

 That the National Security Council instruct State, USAID, and CSO to make their

conflict assessments and lessons learned studies more readily available to APB and sub-

APB members.

 That the National Security Council instruct the policy community to prepare a

comparable policy brief to accompany the Intelligence Community’s monthly country

briefings and to share that policy brief in advance with the sub-APB.

 That the National Security Council review with participating Departments and Agencies

on a regular basis their progress toward implementing the recommendations of PSD 10.

 That the National Security Council commission appropriate Departments and Agencies to

undertake a genocide and atrocity prevention lessons learned study based on recent

events in the Central African Republic and South Sudan.

 That the National Security Council include representatives of the appropriate Regional

Combatant Commands in the monthly APB meetings.

To the Department of State:

 That the Undersecretary of State for Civilian Security, Democracy, and Human Rights

establish a small secretariat in her office devoted to supporting the APB and to promoting

the atrocity prevention mandate within the Department. That secretariat should be staffed

with officers steeped in genocide and atrocity issues and familiar with the Department’s

bureaucratic workings and charged with orchestrating support for the APB across the J

Bureaus and Offices as well as the rest of the Department.

 That the Assistant Secretary for Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor explore ways to

strengthen his Bureau’s participation in and support for APB activities.

 That the Undersecretary of State for Civilian Security, Democracy, and Human Rights

undertake efforts in partnership with the International Organizations Bureau to expand

multilateral and bilateral efforts to prevent genocide and atrocities in line with PSD 10

and the Genocide Prevention Task Force’s original recommendations.

To the Intelligence Community:

 That the Director of National Intelligence create a National Intelligence Manager to

oversee efforts on genocide and atrocity prevention and other closely related issues.

 That the Intelligence Community undertake or commission research into the following

areas: triggers and accelerators of genocides and atrocities, the economic underpinnings

of genocides and atrocities, and the links between physical integrity violations and the

escalation to genocides and atrocities.

EARLY WARNING

●

DNI to Initiate National Intelligence Estimate

IC has completed its ﬁrst ever National Intelligence Estimate on the Global

Risk of Mass Atrocities

●

Establish Early Warning of Genocide as Formal Priority

Some progress, but policy and intelligence communities still not providing

attention required

●

Incorporate Early Warning in FSO and IC Training

Individual eort by State’s International Organizations Bureau and Pentagon,

but systematic eort envisaged by PSD 10 stymied

●

Create Mass Atrocities Alert Channel Modest progress in some departments and agencies

●

Make Warning Automatic Trigger of Policy Review Caught between bureaucratic inertia and resource constraints

●

Expand Cooperation on Warning with Governments, UN, Regional Orgs, NGO’s Some dialogue, but far short of the systematic eort envisaged in GPTF report

TO AMERICAN PEOPLE

●

Build Permanent Constituency

Civil Society has made little or no progress toward building a broad-based

constituency for prevention

TO CONGRESS

●

Increase Funding for Crisis Prevention and Response Initiatives and Urgent

Activities to Prevent or Halt Emerging Genocidal Crises

Financial and personnel resources inadequate and below GPTF base

recommendation

●

Lantos Commission Make Prevention Central Focus of its Work Commission has paid scant attention to genocide and atrocity prevention

●

Request DNI Include Risk in Annual National Threat Assessment

DNI has made early warning of mass atrocities a regular part of his

Annual Threat Assessment

STOPLIGHT RECOMMENDATION COMMENT

TO PRESIDENT

●

Demonstrate Prevention National Priority

Initial PSD 10 and APB speeches set positive tone, but 2013 UNGA speech

backtracked and created confusion at home and abroad

●

Develop and Promulgate Government-wide Prevention Policy

PSD 10 and President’s public acceptance of recommendations important

step forward, but no sign of anticipated Executive Order

●

Create Standing Mechanism for Analysis and Consideration of Action APB at Assistant Secretary level or above meets at least once a month

●

Launch Major Diplomatic Initiative to Strengthen Global Eort to Prevent Diplomatic outreach still largely underdeveloped

ANNEX

Progress on Genocide Prevention

Task Force Recommendations as of August 14, 2014

KEY

●

Little or no progress

●

Some progress

●

Substantial progress

INTERNATIONAL ACTION

●

Launch Major Diplomatic Initiative to Create Network of Like-Minded Diplomatic outreach largely underdeveloped

●

Launch Major Diplomatic Initiative on Non-Use of Veto Diplomatic outreach largely underdeveloped

●

Support Eorts to Elevate Priority of Genocide Prevention at UN Strong eort by Ambassador Power and USUN

●

Provide Capacity-Building Assistance to Partners Willing to Take Measures

to Prevent Genocide and Mass Atrocities

Some progress, but constrained by resources and personnel

●

Secretary of State Rearm US Commitment to Nonimpunity for Perpetrators Rhetoric not matched by ﬁnancial and personnel resources

PREVENTIVE DIPLOMACY

●

APB to Meet Every Month APB meets at least monthly and more frequently as required

●

APB to Prepare Prevention Plans

Modest progress on a small number of countries; constrained by resources

and bureaucratic rivalry

●

State to Enhance Capacity to Engage in Urgent Preventive Diplomacy Modest progress but generally hampered by weak leadership

●

Strategies to Include Credible Threat of Coercive Measures

Serious skepticism at home and abroad that Washington prepared to employ

coercive measures, despite recent activities to help Yazidis

●

Engage International Actors with Inﬂuence over Potential Perpetrators Some progress, but diplomatic arena still sorely underdeveloped

STOPLIGHT RECOMMENDATION COMMENT

EARLY PREVENTION

●

Use Positive and Negative Inducements, Aggressive Enforcement of

Regimes, Etc.

Some progress, but much work still ahead to integrate genocide and atrocity

prevention into policy toward speciﬁc situations

●

Support Development of Institutions in High-Risk States Financial and personnel resources far short of those called for in GPTF Report

●

Strengthen Prevention by Strengthening Civil Society in High-Risk States Constrained by ﬁnancial and personnel resources

●

Expand Funding for Crisis Prevention in High-Risk States Financial and personnel resources far short of those called for in GPTF Report

●

Expand Coordination of Policy and Implementation with Partners Some progress, but diplomatic outreach still largely underdeveloped

EMPLOYEE MILITARY OPTIONS

●

Pentagon to Develop Military Guidance and Incorporate into Policies

Pentagon has successfully fast-tracked new doctrine for genocide and

atrocity prevention

●

Leverage Military Intelligence Capabilities and Link to Planning

Progress at AFRICOM and EUCOM, but scant progress at other

combatant commands

●

Enhance Capabilities of UN and Regional Organizations to Militarily

Halt Genocides and Atrocities

Modest progress, most visible in Africa

●

Work with NATO, EU, Appropriate Governments to Forestall Atrocities Modest progress

●

Enhance Capabilities of US and UN to Support Transition to Long-Term

Peace Building

Modest progress, most visible at AFRICOM and EUCOM

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