VZCZCXRO7358
RR RUEHQU
DE RUEHPU #1773/01 3651920
ZNR UUUUU ZZH
R 301920Z DEC 08
FM AMEMBASSY PORT AU PRINCE
TO RHMFISS/CDR USSOUTHCOM MIAMI FL
INFO RUCBACM/USCINCJFCOM NORFOLK VA
RUEHC/SECSTATE WASHDC 9359
RUEHZH/HAITI COLLECTIVE
RUEHBR/AMEMBASSY BRASILIA 2165

UNCLAS SECTION 01 OF 03 PORT AU PRINCE 001773 
 
SIPDIS 
 
STATE FOR WHA/CAR 
INL FOR KEVIN BROWN AND MEAGAN MCBRIDE 
S/CRS 
INR/IAA 
STATE PASS AID FOR LAC/CAR 
 
E.O. 12958: N/A 
TAGS: EAID SNAR PGOV MARR HA
SUBJECT: REQUEST FOR OPERATIONAL ANALYSIS OF THE HAITI STABILIZATION 
INITIATIVE (HSI) 
 
¶1.  This is an action cable.  Please see para 2. 
 
-------------------------------------------- 
Summary and Request for Operational Analysis 
-------------------------------------------- 
 
¶2.  Action request: The U.S. Embassy to Haiti requests, through 
SOUTHCOM, that the Joint Center for Operational Analysis (JCOA) 
conduct an operational analysis aimed at documenting lessons learned 
and capturing best practices from HSI. The Haiti Stabilization 
Initiative (HSI) is a pilot project designed to test and demonstrate 
highly integrated civilian stabilization, funded by DOD Section 
1207, and designed and implemented by elements of the U.S. State 
Department and USAID.  HSI is focused on Cite Soleil, an area of 
metropolitan Port-au-Prince that was completely lost to Government 
of Haiti (GOH) control until reclaimed by MINUSTAH military 
operations at the beginning of 2007.  While HSI is generally 
considered to be a success, many questions remain open in the areas 
of strategy, operations and tactics.  This exercise would be 
important not only in understanding the true value of HSI, but also 
as a guide to the design of future efforts of this nature. 
 
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Background 
---------- 
 
¶3.  Haiti is among the more unstable countries in the world, and is 
the current instability leader in the Western Hemisphere.  The U.S. 
has had to intervene militarily twice in the last twenty years, 
followed both times by robust U.N. peacekeeping operations.  Order 
and security are presently guaranteed by the United Nations 
Stabilization Mission in Haiti (MINUSTAH), which includes a 
multinational force of seven thousand troops led by the Brazilian 
military as well as approximately one thousand civilian police 
advisors. 
 
¶4.  HSI was designed in 2006 in the U.S. State Department's Office 
of the Coordinator for Reconstruction and Stabilization (S/CRS) as a 
civilian-led stabilization exercise using Department of Defense 
(DOD) funding under Section 1207 of the National Defense 
Appropriations Act of 2006.  Originally conceived with a budget of 
over one hundred million dollars to address a number of violent and 
impoverished urban hotspots in Haiti, the emergent needs in 
post-conflict Lebanon reduced available funds to twenty million 
dollars.  HSI was reconfigured to work in a single neighborhood, 
Cite Soleil, in the north-west corner of metropolitan 
Port-au-Prince. 
 
¶5.  This area has the highest name recognition of any of the 
hotspots in Haiti, and deservedly so.  Heavily armed gangs drove the 
institutions of the State, including the Haitian National Police 
(HNP), from the area in 2004, and had fortified it against all 
comers, turning it into a base for criminal activity, particularly 
kidnapping.  By the end of 2006 fear of kidnapping had so paralyzed 
Haitian society that inaction was no longer politically feasible. 
With approval of the GOH, MINUSTAH troops of the Brazilian Battalion 
retook the area in a series of sharp urban firefights between 
December 2006 and February 2007. 
 
¶6.  The agreement between the USG and the GOH establishing HSI was 
signed in April 2007, and the project became operational in May. 
Under the leadership of three U.S. State Department Foreign Service 
Officers, HSI is organized into several segments.  The Community 
Building, Infrastructure, and Justice segments are administered by 
the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID).  The Police 
segment is administered by the State Department's Bureau for 
International Narcotics and Law Enforcement (INL) and the Strategic 
Communications segment by the Embassy's Public Diplomacy section. 
Adequate sums were set aside for administrative expenses which can 
be very high in Haiti. 
 
¶7.  HSI has now been operational for over a year, and approximately 
half of its budget expended.  Cite Soleil is a much more normal 
area, albeit suffering from the usual Haitian ills of extreme 
poverty, poor services and weak state institutions, especially in 
the realm of police services and the justice chain. 
 
-------- 
Strategy 
-------- 
 
¶8.  HSI was designed by S/CRS at the State Department in Washington 
DC in concert with elements of DOD, USAID, INL, and the Bureau of 
 
PORT AU PR 00001773  002 OF 003 
 
 
Western Hemisphere Affairs, Office of Caribbean Affairs (WHA/CAR) 
with input from all elements of the U.S. Mission to Haiti, including 
State's Political, Public Diplomacy, Regional Security (RSO) and 
Narcotics Affairs (NAS, the field component of INL) Sections as well 
as USAID.  Informed by the book "The Quest for a Viable Peace," 
written by a number of principals in post-conflict Kosovo, HSI was 
conceived as a highly integrated "Whole of Government" effort.  It 
would be very important to know -- with the benefit of present 
knowledge -- how well the designers of the project understood the 
facts on the ground as they existed at the time, how well they and 
their counterparts understood each other and were able to make clear 
and coordinated plans together and how well the original concepts 
and design of HSI held up under operational realities. 
 
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Operations 
---------- 
 
¶9.  The project was designed in 2006 when Cite Soleil was fully 
controlled by heavily armed and well-organized criminal gangs. 
While some small scale assistance was reaching the ordinary 
residents of the area (albeit at the cost of some compromise with 
gang leaders) a project of the scale of HSI would not at that time 
have been possible.  The military operations that opened the area to 
normal life and to government control and services were driven by 
political necessity and were not coordinated with the project.  The 
project was set up by a series of TDYers from S/CRS through late 
winter 2006 and early spring of 2007.  Permanently assigned 
leadership did not arrive until summer 2007, as part of the normal 
State Department transfer cycle.  Office space was provided in a 
reconfigured conference room in the USAID building, the last 
remaining office space in secure USG buildings in Port-au-Prince. 
Haiti is an extremely difficult operational environment, both 
because of uncertain security (Cite Soleil remains a Red Zone, 
meaning that all travel by USG employees under Chief of Mission 
Authority requires prior approval by RSO and the use of armored cars 
and armed guards) and because of the extreme weakness of services 
and support in Haiti.  It would be useful to know how these and 
other issues affected the setup of HSI, and how they impacted the 
operations of HSI and its implementing partners within the USG as 
well as the NGOs and businesses chosen to do project 
implementation. 
 
------- 
Tactics 
------- 
 
¶10.  HSI is the only Section 1207 project that has a dedicated 
staff, intended to ensure flexibility and speed in implementation. 
In fact, given that neither S/CRS nor Section 1207 was the 
beneficiary of "notwithstanding" authority allowing accelerated 
contracting or grants, and that no HSI staffer had contracting or 
grants warrants, in practice a speedy roll out could only be 
accomplished by modifications to existing assistance cooperative 
agreements.  Three national USAID projects, administered 
respectively by the International Organization for Migration (IOM), 
CHF (previously the Cooperative Housing Foundation) and the National 
Committee for State Courts (NCSC) had goals and organizational 
structures that were deemed compatible with HSI, and were used as 
the basis for HSI's Community Building, Infrastructure and Justice 
segments.  Community Building was operational within weeks of the 
official beginning of HSI.  Infrastructure and Justice were much 
slower off the mark, and the Police segment, requiring the formal 
contracting process and requests for proposals, slower still.  It 
would be important to know how these issues affected the development 
and success of the project, and what timing and coordination issues 
were critical or benign to the success of the project.  Further, HSI 
is only one of many actors in Haiti and has operational contact with 
a large number of those actors, including various GOH agencies, 
MINUSTAH, UNDP, IDB, World Bank, ICRC, other bilateral missions, the 
private sector and NGOs.  It would be educational to know how HSI 
and other actors' efforts helped or hindered each other and what 
effect these coordination issues had on the success of the project. 
 
¶11.  Information needed to prepare an Operational Analysis of HSI 
would need to be gathered from the paper trail of the founding, 
setup and operations of HSI in DOD, State and USAID, along with 
interviews of and group sessions involving representative actors in 
the project at all points in its history.  This information would 
need to be gathered in Washington, Miami (DOD's SOUTHCOM 
Headquarters) and Port-au-Prince. 
 
----------- 
 
PORT AU PR 00001773  003 OF 003 
 
 
The Product 
----------- 
 
¶12.  In the shortest term JCOA would brief its findings to the U.S. 
Ambassador to Haiti, SOUTHCOM, and interested USG parties in 
Washington DC to include DOD, State and USAID.  A formal report 
would also be prepared, possibly in more than one version depending 
on the USG audience.  Finally, a rigorous paper would be written for 
publication in a journal concerned with stability operations with as 
wide an audience as possible.  HSI is -- at least to the present 
moment -- a success in that Cite Soleil is no longer a direct and 
immediate threat to the stability of Haiti and therefore to the 
Caribbean region, but it is extremely important to the future 
stability operations of the USG and its friends in the international 
community to know and disseminate the real causes for its success, 
what methods might be applicable to future stability operations and 
what improvements will be needed to ensure the success of future 
operations at the lowest costs. 
 
TIGHE