Nahal Kazemi*
[This essay is available in PDF at this link]
Abstract
In 2021, the United States government identified countering corruption as a core national security interest for the first time. However, corrupt police and military forces supported by the United States in countries including Iraq, Afghanistan, and Nigeria, actively undermine security and reveal a profound weakness in the previous administration’s strategic anti-corruption priorities. Where the recipient government lacks the will to combat corruption, traditional anti-corruption tools are ineffective.
Experts on combating international corruption, from government, the academy, and civil society agree on the importance of focusing anti-corruption efforts on first, not contributing to the problem. This focus has largely resulted in proposals for increased vetting of potential private sector vendors and contractors and understanding the absorptive capacity of recipient nations for foreign assistance. These proposals have not sufficiently focused on the difference between recipient states that lack the capacity to combat corruption in the security sector and those that lack the will to do so. Successive U.S. administrations have identified the problem of lack of political will and recognized the critical threat it poses to security, but they have not adopted a comprehensive approach for addressing it. The Biden national strategy to combat global corruption did not clearly address the problem.
This Article argues for a novel approach, calling for legislation to require that the U.S. government vet potential recipients of security sector assistance (SSA)and prohibit cooperating with corrupt units. The Article establishes that the Leahy Amendments are the appropriate model from which to design such legislation. By adopting a Leahy-based approach, Congress can ensure that combating corruption does not recede as a national security priority. A vetting requirement would create clear, consistent guidelines for determining what constitutes prohibited corruption and how governments can remediate their corruption risk to make barred units eligible for assistance again. Finally, a codified process for identifying specific and limited exceptions to the prohibition in exigent circumstances would require Executive Branch agencies to clearly articulate when certain priorities require precedence over corruption concerns, instead of allowing various agencies to work at cross-purposes to each other.
*Assistant Professor, Chapman University Fowler School of Law. I would like to thank Sarah Chayes, Jodi Vittori, Lan Cao, Waye Sandholtz, David Glazier, Christopher Whytock, Jonathan Miller, Deepa Badrinarayana, Amy Gaudion, Asaf Lubin, Rachel Van Landingham, Kibrom Teweldebirhan, Kel McLennahan, and Kyle Shen for their invaluable input into this article; the staff of the State Department’s Office of the Global Coordinator for Anticorruption and Bureau of Political Military Affairs for their willingness to discuss the ideas presented in this Article; Sophie Jeltema for excellent research support; and Nico Moscoso, Kyra Du, and the rest of the staff at the Harvard National Security Journal for their hard work in preparing this article for publication. This Article was supported by a summer research grant from the Fowler School of Law.