RAND, May 07: Making Liberia Safe: Transformation of the National Security Sector
The security institutions, forces, and practices of the regime of Charles Taylor, Liberia’s former president, met none of the essential criteria for a sound security sector: coherence, legitimacy, effectiveness, and affordability. They were meant to serve the regime, not the nation, and were controlled and used—rather, misused—by one man, mainly against Liberia’s people and neighbors.

Yet even under new, able, and decent leadership, the old structures and ways are unworkable, wasteful, and confused, and they enjoy neither the trust nor the cooperation of the Liberian people at this critical juncture. It follows that Liberia must make a clean break, adopting a new security architecture, forces, management structure, and law.

The government of President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf has made security sector transformation a high priority, and the United Nations, the United States, and others are helping Liberia build new forces. What has been done and planned so far to transform the Liberian security apparatus is valid and important; this study raises no fundamental questions about the soundness of what is already under way.

At the same time, Liberia and its partners need an overall security architecture, accompanied by a strategy to create it. Without an architecture and strategy, setting priorities will become increasingly difficult; gaps, redundancies, confusion, and political squabbling over forces are likely. In offering an architecture and strategy, this study identifies additional measures, including additional capabilities, that would make Liberia’s security sector more coherent, legitimate, effective, and affordable....