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Five years after the assassinations in Haiti of Monferrier Dorval, Diego Charles, and Antoinette Duclaire, justice remains elusive. Four years after the assassination of President Jovenel Moïse, accountability is still incomplete. Yet international reporting on Haiti continues to foreground outputs: workshops on gender and youth participation, deployments, and decrees. International organizations, including the United Nations, and the donor community measure what they do. Meanwhile, the Haitian public measures what actually changes.
Call this the output trap: Missions demonstrate progress in outputs without delivering comparable gains in outcomes. Closing that gap requires making outcomes, not outputs, the measure of success. I examine the structural incentives that push international organizations and donor governments to mistake administrative milestones for substantive progress, and review them in light of the strategic benchmarks for the U.N. Security Council-authorized multinational Gang Suppression Force, created to support the Haitian National Police in restoring security. I then trace how the same confusion between activity and results distorts international approaches to impunity, elections, and Haiti’s daily economy, before setting out an outcome-based framework. That framework rests on three elements: shared strategic objectives, accountability integrated across security, governance, justice, and development actors, and performance indicators tied to results, rather than activity.
Haiti’s crisis has persisted through decades of donor intervention — proof that engagement alone cannot produce stabilization when performance is judged by activity and outcomes go unmeasured. With the U.N. Security Council set to renew the Gang Suppression Force mandate by the end of September, and reform debates intensifying under the UN80 agenda, Haiti offers a test of whether international organizations and donor governments can move from output narratives to outcomes — measured by whether citizens grow safer, institutions more accountable, and the state more capable of standing on its own.
The question matters well beyond the Caribbean, often called America’s third border. Haiti has become a laboratory for the next generation of international intervention: lighter, more fragmented, and more dependent on voluntary financing, bilateral security assistance, and private contractors. A model that cannot deliver measurable gains in security, governance, and justice is no credible replacement for traditional peacekeeping. It simply reproduces the same crises at lower cost and higher long-term strategic risk.
Reversing Haiti’s instability requires more than aligning Gang Suppression Force operations with governance, justice, and institutional reform. It implies a strategic reset anchored in a broad-based Haitian political settlement, while outcome-based benchmarks measure whether that settlement delivers tangible improvements in security, justice, governance, and institutional legitimacy.
International organizations and donor governments tend to report progress through measurable activities such as coordination meetings and equipment donated. These indicators matter for management, planning, and accountability to donors, but they have little to do with stabilization.
In this context, an output is a discrete institutional action — a meeting held, a unit trained, or a decree signed — that missions and donors can log and report as evidence of activity. An outcome is a change in real-world conditions that Haitians experience directly: reduced violence, functioning courts, or credible elections. Missions can generate a high volume of outputs while outcomes stay flat or worsen — that gap I call the output trap.
Stabilization outcomes are often multi-causal and cannot be attributed to a single actor with precision. They remain measurable within a defined timeframe through indicators such as declining displacement, the reopening of roads and airports to commercial traffic, reduced supply chain extortion, and the holding of credible elections. Prioritizing quantifiable outputs therefore does not resolve the attribution problem. It risks conflating institutional activity with evidence of strategic progress, thereby reinforcing the output trap. Missions should therefore be evaluated against strategic effect, even if attribution remains necessarily imperfect in a fragmented operational environment.
The disconnect is attributed to a failure to distinguish between four distinct tiers. Stabilization operates across a spectrum, from inputs (resources, personnel, or funding), to outputs (troops deployed or decrees adopted), to outcomes ( arms embargoed effectively, security restored, justice functioning, elections credible), and strategic effect (a state capable of governing without extraordinary international assistance). Sustainable stabilization depends on progress across this spectrum. Too often, international missions show substantial activity at the output level without comparable progress in outcomes or strategic effect.
Afghanistan is the starkest case of this disconnect. Over 20 years, the United States spent more than $144 billion on reconstruction — more in real terms than the Marshall Plan — producing what the U.S. government’s own inspector general for Afghanistan reconstruction ultimately called a mission undermined by absent strategy, accountability, and realism from the outset. Institutions, elections, and security forces were repeatedly presented as evidence of progress. When U.S. support was withdrawn in August 2021, the Afghan state collapsed within weeks.
The Democratic Republic of the Congo tells the same story over a longer timeframe. The United Nations’ peacekeeping mission there has run for a quarter-century at over $1 billion a year, its longest and most expensive peacekeeping presence. Public confidence in the mission’s ability to protect civilians fell from 55 percent in 2016 to under 24 percent by the early 2020s. In 2023, the Congolese government formally requested its withdrawal, citing failure to protect civilians or deliver peace. Haiti has experienced this pattern directly, across a succession of missions over four decades dedicated to policing and justice support that similarly drew down without leaving durable institutions behind.
In each case, missions documented extensive outputs such as troops deployed, agreements signed, institutions trained, and budgets disbursed. None could consistently demonstrate strategic effect: a state able to govern and secure its territory without permanent external support. In Haiti, the pattern repeated itself. As those earlier missions drew down — while leaving outcomes unmeasured — gangs moved swiftly to fill the vacuum left behind. The gap between reported outputs and observable outcomes is evident today: a record 1.5 million Haitians, more than half of them women and girls, internally displaced as of June 2026; no national elections held since 2021; commercial aviation to Port-au-Prince still severely disrupted, forcing travelers through Cap-Haïtien; and kidnappings expanding into once-secure areas, including the daylight abduction of the national police inspector general in Bourdon, a short distance from the prime minister’s office. These are the outcomes behind the outputs international reporting describes, and the distance between the two accounts is the output trap in practice.
To achieve strategic effect, the Gang Suppression Force cannot operate as a standalone tactical force. It must anchor an integrated enforcement chain linking intelligence, targeted operations, investigations, prosecutions, sanctions, and secure detention.
Authorized under U.N. Security Council Resolution 2793 in September 2025, the Gang Suppression Force is the multinational security mission mandated to neutralize gangs, protect civilians and critical infrastructure, and enable humanitarian access. Operating outside the U.N. chain of command, funded through voluntary contributions and bilateral assistance, and supported logistically by the U.N. Support Office in Haiti, the mission emerged from a political compromise: China and Russia had resisted a traditional U.N. peacekeeping operation, and when the Council authorized the Force instead, both governments abstained — along with Pakistan — citing concerns over funding, oversight, and accountability. It replaced the Kenyan-led Multinational Security Support mission, whose record set a low operational baseline: fewer than 1,000 personnel against an estimated 12,000 gang members, with operations constrained by chronic funding shortfalls.
Ten months after authorization, deployments remain well below the approved ceiling of 5,500 uniformed personnel, with full operational capacity not expected before October 2026. The challenge is not only numerical: Testifying before the Senate Appropriations Committee in February 2026, U.S. Chargé d’Affaires Henry Wooster noted that Haiti counts more than ten thousand police officers on paper, but only a few hundred available, equipped, vetted, and capable of sustained anti-gang operations —a reminder that effective capacity, not authorized strength, is the true operational benchmark.
Force generation alone cannot produce strategic effect. Achieving it requires closing two distinct gaps: generating effective force strength and constructing the missing enforcement chain — intelligence, arrests, investigations, prosecutions, sanctions, financial disruption, and institutional protection. Haiti lacks this chain today. International assistance has often strengthened individual components of the security and justice system in isolation, even though Resolution 2793 now explicitly authorizes the Force to conduct independent, intelligence-led targeted operations to neutralize and deter armed groups.
This resulting architecture reflected political convenience. It allowed Washington to avoid an open-ended intervention, skeptical Security Council members to avoid endorsing a traditional peacekeeping mission, and Western Hemisphere organizations to contribute without assuming responsibility for the mission’s long-term strategic outcome. It also left enduring ambiguity over command, financing, and accountability. Meanwhile, Haiti’s gangs do not simply occupy territory: They govern critical economic systems — roads, fuel depots, market corridors, and port access — extracting revenue and authority from the absence of a functioning state.
The combination of the Gang Suppression Force and Haiti’s transitional government — the architecture currently responsible for the country’s security and political transition — carries a deeper weakness: It does not treat impunity as a central benchmark of stabilization. Haiti’s crisis is not driven by gangs alone: It is sustained by political protection, economic complicity, illicit finance, and arms and drug trafficking. Stabilization must therefore target not only armed groups, such as Viv Ansanm, but also the political financiers who bankroll them, and the state and security officials who shield both from prosecution. The United Nations documented this pattern directly in September 2024, when its Panel of Experts on Haiti reported direct connections between gang violence and specific political, economic, and security figures who continue to back armed groups, and its own sanctions committee designated former parliamentarian Prophane Victor for arming and financing gangs for political gain — the first member of Haiti’s political class sanctioned under the regime. Many of these actors continue to operate largely beyond the reach of prosecution. Impunity of this kind functions as a structural foundation of Haiti’s instability, and the Force, which targets gang foot soldiers without addressing this political and financial ecosystem, risks managing the crisis’s symptoms, not its underlying causes.
The assassinations of Dorval, Diego, Duclaire, and Moïse, alongside the killings of missionaries Davy and Natalie Lloyd and director Jude Montis, illustrate the pattern at its starkest. The record so far is mixed: U.S. federal prosecutors secured convictions in the Moïse assassination case in May 2026, but parallel proceedings before Haitian courts remain stalled. Accountability has therefore depended more on foreign jurisdictions than on domestic institutions.
Stabilization cannot be measured only by patrols, deployments, or training. It must be measured by whether perpetrators, financiers, corrupt officials, and political protectors face consequences.
Publishing an electoral calendar, distributing voter identification cards, and holding consultative forums are administrative milestones, not evidence of political readiness. These steps cannot substitute for the political, security, and institutional foundations of credible elections. For years, elections served as the international community’s preferred exit strategy, with electoral observation providing procedural validation even when the political, security, and institutional foundations of effective government remained absent. The growing recognition that elections cannot substitute for stability therefore reflects a correction to a sequencing model long applied in Haiti.
The Feb. 21, 2026, National Pact — the political framework of the current transition — identifies several prerequisites for credible elections, including ensuring that ballots and election workers can reach gang-controlled areas, a reliable voter registry and identification system, effective electoral institutions, and a justice system capable of enforcing the rule of law and resolving electoral disputes. Adopting such a framework is itself merely an output: Its contribution to stabilization depends on implementation and accountability. Conducting elections while gang alliances control major transport corridors, extort supply chains, and displace more than 1.5 million people risks conferring a hollow mandate on a government unable to exercise genuine authority.
Economic stability is inseparable from security and should be assessed through household budgets as well as security indicators. Gang control of major transport routes has resulted in a significant, though underreported, increase in transportation costs — rising by over 50 percent in early 2026 — thereby exacerbating food insecurity and forcing displaced families out of markets and employment. The security crisis generates economic collapse, which in turn reinforces insecurity. These socioeconomic pressures, more than security statistics alone, will ultimately determine whether stabilization is genuinely improving the lives of the Haitian population.
Economic recovery also depends on institutional foundations that remain largely absent. Private investment requires predictable security, the rule of law, and a long-overdue comprehensive cadastre capable of providing secure property rights. Haiti continues to face kidnapping risks, restricted territorial access, and weak state institutions. Promoting investment before these conditions exist repeats the same output trap: policy narratives advance faster than the institutional foundations required to sustain economic recovery.
International reporting must pivot from logging activities to tracking real-world outcomes: reopened commercial corridors, reduced extortion of trade and transport, restored freedom of movement, and the institutional foundations required for credible elections.
Haiti does not need another layer of administrative coordination. It needs a strategic reset anchored in a broad-based Haitian political settlement and built around seven measurable outcomes: governance capable of supporting credible elections, reduced violence backed by effective disarmament and reintegration, reduced corruption and impunity through a functioning criminal justice system, restored mobility via secure, unobstructed road and port access for people, goods, and commerce, more private-sector jobs, durable institutions, including a permanent electoral council and a constitutional court, and safer conditions so that Haitians living abroad can return to their country.
Anchored in that political settlement, this framework could support a fully-fledged United Nations peace operation, provided it is redesigned around performance: a clear mandate, assessed financing, unified command, robust accountability, and outcome-based benchmarks, replacing today’s fragmented architecture with a genuine exit strategy.
None of this works unless Haitians own it. The political settlement anchoring this reset must emerge from broad domestic consensus among actors not implicated in the political-criminal networks described above, with international support following that settlement, not substituting for it. Structured this way, the reset also gives major stakeholders a way out of the current impasse. For the United States, it links stabilization to immigration management, urgent given the Supreme Court’s June 2026 decision clearing the way to terminate temporary protected status for roughly 350,000 Haitians. For China and Russia, it validates their demand for disciplined, accountable missions, free of open-ended mandates. For the European Union, the Caribbean Community and the Organization of American States, it aligns democracy and rule of law commitments with verifiable results. For the United Nations, it offers a chance to reposition itself within the UN80 reform process around a leaner, outcome-driven model. Above all, Haitians would judge international engagement by what it changes in their daily lives.
The stakes extend well beyond Port-au-Prince. Mali, Somalia and Yemen are other examples where international interventions repeatedly show the same flaw: institutions built without authority, elections held without legitimacy, and outputs logged without transformation. Haiti is a preview of the next generation of interventions — lighter, more fragmented, and financially constrained — that will fail unless success is measured through strategic outcomes.
Philippe de Bard is an international governance, elections, and stabilization advisor with more than 25 years of experience advising the United Nations, the European Union, and the Organization of American States in fragile and conflict-affected environments, including senior assignments in Haiti, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Afghanistan, Guinea, and Lebanon.
Image: U.S. Department of State via Wikimedia Commons
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