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CIAO DATE: 05/05
Volume 3, Number 4, December 2004
Towards Effective Democratic Oversight of Intelligence Services: Lessons Learned from Comparing National Practices by Hans Born (PDF, 12 pages, 195.3 KB)
There could scarcely be a more appropriate time than the present to address the issue of oversight of security and intelligence services. In the wake of the events of September 11, 2001, the Iraq war, and the bombings in Madrid on March 11, 2001, many of those responsible for overseeing intelligence in both the legislative and the executive branches of government are currently involved in investigating the intelligence services and the way political leaders use or misuse the intelligence they receive. The U.S. 9/11 Commission and the U.K. Butler Commission, to mention just two inquiries, have dealt with formidable questions indeed: Are intelligence officials working effectively and within the rule of law? Do political leaders politicize intelligence? Do intelligence services need additional legal powers and resources in order to deal with terrorist threats? These and other questions illustrate that the process of intelligence oversight has two important goals in democratic societies: keeping the services in line with their legally defined mandate and ensuring their effectiveness. In this article the focus is on comparing legislative oversight practices in selected democratic states, with the goal of making recommendations for strengthening intelligence oversight. A focus on strengthening oversight is necessary because the changed security climate since 9/11 has underlined the need to balance our commitments to security and democracy. This can only be achieved if the new powers that have been granted to the intelligence services are accompanied by enhanced intelligence oversight.
To many outside observers Moldova—the poorest state in Europe—appears to exist in a time warp, in which the policies and practices of the Soviet era shape the organization of the armed forces, the conduct of security sector affairs, and the form of state structures, official procedures, and elite and popular opinion. Irrespective of aspirations to accession to membership in the European Union (EU) or the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), Moldova faces enormous challenges as it attempts to overcome the burden of its Soviet heritage and to reshape its security sector. Such challenges included making their armed forces—and more broadly the security sector—affordable in light of other priorities, appropriate to the strategic circumstances, and acceptable to society at large. One key obstacle to such progress is the existence and influence of a separatist Transdniestria project and its disruptive impact upon Moldovan security politics.
The international community's five—year performance review of its efforts in Kosovo has come in, and the result is a failing grade. By almost any measure, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), the United Nations (UN), Kosovo's own political leaders, and the myriad other organizations and states ostensibly struggling to foster peace, stability, human rights, and a multiethnic society in Kosovo have utterly failed in their efforts.
The question of why soldiers, policemen, civil servants, or members of civil society are motivated to participate in efforts dedicated to keeping, enforcing, building, or making peace is old as the peacekeeping efforts of the global community, and at least conditionally connected with the phenomenon of "willingness to fight" in classical military operations. The term "willing to fight" should be, within the scope of peace endeavors, redefined into "willing to pacify, but without fighting" because, in the majority of peace operations that have taken place after the Second World War, the given mandates were very limited in terms of allowing the use of weapons. In most cases, participants had light armament, if any.
The past decade has witnessed a proliferation of constitution making throughout the world. The widespread fall or transmutation of authoritarian regimes and the general disenchantment with communist ideology left democracy in all its forms, at least for the time being, as the only viable political ideology and system of government standing. The consequent worldwide surge towards democracy brought with it a natural, necessary, and enthusiastic penchant for constitution making.
Following the end of the Cold War in the early 1990s, North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) military forces engaged in a series of out-of-area missions involving peace operations. The operational staffs involved in controlling these operations entered an often bewildering world of United Nations reports, incorporating Alliance and non-Alliance partners into their own military procedures, and working alongside numerous civilian agencies representing non-government and private volunteer organizations. As the NATO Implementation Force (IFOR) discovered in 1996, success for ad hoc multinational headquarters in the post-Cold War era often came down to the personalities of individual commanders and staff members, but not necessarily overall staff efficiency.
Crisis management and conflict prevention, including crisis response operations that do not fall under Article V of the NATO Charter, have been major themes in the continuing adaptation of the Alliance to the post-Cold War security environment. This article focuses on a key aspect of the adaptation of NATO crisis management and conflict prevention mechanisms: cooperation with Euro-Atlantic Partnership Council (EAPC) and Partnership for Peace (PfP) partners and with other key international organizations that contribute to international peace and security and, in particular, recent developments in NATO–EU relations.
At the beginning of its democratization process, Bulgaria inherited armed forces that had been shaped to serve the Soviet Union's military doctrine. There was no doubt that, among all the Warsaw Pact members, Bulgaria was the most loyal and reliable. In September 1945, in a matter of days, the Bulgarian armed forces transferred their allegiance from the still too young Tsar (and from being an ally of Nazi Germany) to a new world power—Stalin's Russia. The same troops that, until a few days before, were fighting Yugoslav partisans under Tito and their Greek counterparts now had to cooperate with them.
In April of 2004, the United Nations seemed poised to play an expanded role in the rebuilding of Iraq. The Bush Administration had dropped much of its opposition and began to embrace a UN-sponsored effort to internationalize the occupation and transfer sovereignty to the Iraqi people. Yet the ultimate role of the UN in Iraq remains in doubt. This is certainly due to a number of contemporary factors, many of them emanating from Washington. But it is also a consequence of Iraqi history, so much of which has been overlooked in the emotional atmosphere of the current crisis.
After the end of the Cold War, the former Warsaw Pact countries committed themselves to building democratic institutions of civilian control over their militaries as part of the democratization process. In the early 1990s, that issue loomed high on the reform agenda because of the fear that the oversized armies, perceived as pillars of the former Socialist state, would seize power and set up dictatorships. Later on, once the basic framework of democratic control of the armed forces was put in place, new issues were incorporated under the rubric of security sector reform (SSR), a broader concept that not only included all the national security agencies but also focused on good governance and efficiency of democratic mechanisms.