 So, ladies and gentlemen, let me invite you to take your seats. Thank you very much for coming out today, a great event. My name is Bill Taylor. I'm the Executive Vice President here at the United States Institute of Peace. Glad to welcome you to the Institute of Peace, where we've been doing some work in Afghanistan for a long time. And we've got a team here under Andrew Wilder and Scott Warden and Emily and the whole team here doing extremely good work and are very pleased to host these kinds of events. I see many familiar faces in the room. You've been here before, so you know about the Institute of Peace. We were established in 1984, Ronald Reagan signed us into law and we're funded by the Congress to do work to try to prevent and resolve violent conflict around the world. And we do this out in the world and we do this in a big office in Kabul that many of you have probably visited. I know many have seen the kind of work that we do. That's what gives us some credibility together with our smart people that I've already mentioned and gives us the ability to invite people like you into this building. And today, we are very pleased to host the launch of the latest SIGAR, Lessons Learned. This is a report on private sector development, economic growth. Lately the security situation has been in the news, but we know that in order to maintain or have the hope of maintaining stability and to establish stability in some sustainable way, the economics have to be there. So this is an important issue. To present this report, I'm very pleased to introduce the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction, John Sopko. Mr. Sopko has been have SIGAR, everybody in this room knows SIGAR since 2012. Before that, he was a senior staff member on two House committees and the Senate Permit Subcommittee on Investigations and before that, he was a federal prosecutor. So he comes to this with great experience and ability to drill down on these things. So after John's remarks, Scott Warden will lead a panel. You can see the panel members are listed right here. So without anything further, let me ask John to come up. Thank you very much, Bill, for those kind comments. And thank you very much to the Institute of Peace and our many friends here for inviting myself and my staff to be here today for the launch. It's like old home week back here as Scott and I were talking about because we started the lessons learned program here at the Institute of Peace. Before Scott even took over, we had our first lessons learned where we brought together a number of countries who participated in Afghanistan. We did a conference on lessons, views from the coalition. So we've been doing this now for three years off and on and it's great to come back here to discuss this most recent report on private sector development. As was alluded to, this is our third lessons learned report following a report released on anti-corruption efforts and then a second one on security sector assistance. Two more reports will be released shortly. We will be releasing a lessons learned report on May 24th at the Brookings Institute dealing with stabilization, stabilization lessons learned in Afghanistan. And then later in June, on June 14th at the New America Foundation, we'll be releasing a report dealing with counter-narcotics and what we've learned from the 17 years of trying to attack counter-narcotics or narcotics trafficking in Afghanistan. All of our reports including the one released today are available on the website at www.cigar.mil. Also today's report, I'm happy to announce, is also available in an interactive web format. I think we're the only inspector general, there's 70 of us out there, who actually are releasing reports in an interactive format. This will be the fifth report we have done so and I think this is our second or it's our third lessons learned report that's available in an interactive format and we assume the next two will also. Now, I've been asked why do I do lessons learned reports? Why aren't I like most of our inspectors general who never really talked too much about lessons? As a head of CIGAR, as an inspector general, I'm required by our authorizing act to inform Congress and the Secretaries of Defense and State about problems and deficiencies in Afghanistan reconstruction and development. I'm also required to make recommendations on policies designed to improve the effectiveness and efficiency of the Afghan reconstruction effort. And I'm also required to examine the degree to which the reconstruction programs are coordinated among U.S. implementing agencies, the Afghan government and the international community. I take these responsibilities seriously. Like some of you who are lawyers, this is my brief and I follow my brief. So according to my authorizing act as well as the 1978 IG Act which I fall under, I initiated a lessons learned program which was at the urging, however, of many among others, former Ambassador Ryan Crocker and former ISAF Commander John Allen who suggested we do so. They noted that CIGAR was the only agency in the federal government that had cross jurisdictional authority to look across agencies instead of only within them. The other 70 inspectors general just look at their agency. Congress in its infinite wisdom when it created CIGAR did not house us within any one agency. There are only two inspectors general who are housed accordingly. So we are the sole IG who can look across agencies to look at the whole of government. And any of you who have followed development, who have followed development in high risk areas such as Afghanistan realize it's not only a whole of government, it's a whole of governments that are involved. So this is a very important task that we take very seriously and that led to our lessons learned program. Although our reports naturally are focused on in Afghanistan, they may have important implications for other current and future contingency operations. Now I am encouraged by the very positive reaction government agencies have had to our two prior lessons learned reports, particularly our report on security sector assistance reform efforts which was embraced by the US military command as they finalized the administration's new South Asia strategy. We were requested to brief General Dunford, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, as well as the commandant of the Marine Corps, as well as the head of Central Command. And of course, John Nicholson, the commanding general of Afghanistan among many others. CIGAR staff was also asked to serve on the Joint Chiefs Failure Analysis Team which looked at the prior 15-year effort in Afghanistan. And there continues to be great interest in our findings as we were just recently asked to brief over 300 Marine Corps University students at Quantico and the report is now required reading at the Army War College. We are hopeful that our government agencies and Congress will similarly embrace today's report and are encouraged by early reactions to it. But the question for you, you must be asking is, why is the topic of today's report important? Why should you be here? Why should you be listening? And why should you read the report? Because simply, since the beginning of the coalition efforts, private sector development has been seen as critical to economic growth in Afghanistan, which in turn is seen as the key to maintaining security following the eventual expulsion of the Taliban. A robust economy would presumably provide gainful employment to the young and unemployed men who were considered most likely to join an insurgency. It would create confidence in and legitimacy for the state and generate revenue that would allow the government of Afghanistan to provide adequate services to its people. In addition, US policymakers anticipated that a private sector-driven open market economy would strengthen electoral democracy, individual freedom, women's rights, and a free press. But as the report lays out, hopes for the development of a dynamic private sector economy have yet to come to fruition. As USAID itself noted in 2016, quote, despite recent regulatory improvements and increased access to finance, the business enabling environment in Afghanistan is one of the worst in the world. And in the World Bank's 2017 ease of doing business rankings, Afghanistan was the 183rd out of 190 countries, six spots lower than in 2016. So today's report is an important report. It has been over two years in the making and synthesizes not only SIGAR's work and expertise, but also that of the other oversight agencies, government entities, current and former officials who have served in Afghanistan, academic institutions, and independent scholars. Our team interviewed over 90 individuals who directly worked in or otherwise involved in Afghanistan private sector development. The report, as you will note, lays out 11 findings, identifies 12 lessons, and recommends eight actions. Also, it underwent extensive independent peer review as well as consultation with relevant US government agencies. Now the panel discussion will go into a lot more detail this afternoon on the key findings and observations, but I would like to make a few overarching observations in the few minutes remaining. As our report discusses, the fundamental problem with private sector development effort in Afghanistan was that the United States, one, didn't fully understand the operating environment in Afghanistan. Number two, it didn't create an attractive, enabling environment for business. And number three, didn't manage or coordinate its own programs very well. If the United States wanted to create a thriving private sector in Afghanistan, the first thing it needed to do was understand where it was operating. But the United States made a early misstep when it decided to undertake a light footprint approach to Afghanistan. Officials assumed a positive trajectory of progress for Afghanistan and failed to anticipate the lingering Taliban elements would regroup and grow into an insurgency that would keep the country in a state of insecurity and uncertainty. It was a mistake that unfortunately continues to haunt Afghanistan. The United States and international donors also severely underestimated the amount of resources and time that Afghanistan, a country that had been at war since 1979, needed to recover. A 2001 donors conference is a good example. It only estimated that Afghanistan would need just $10 billion in total to successfully be reconstructed. And that was $10 billion over 10 years. Well, it turned out to be off by, as we all know, over $110 billion. And that's only counting U.S. assistance. While the U.S. and other donors quickly realized more support would be needed, it wasn't until 2006 that it became clear to them that the war had never really ended and that Afghanistan was not in fact a post-conflict environment. Maintaining its belief that economic development was a key to long-term success in Afghanistan, the United States and the other donors did what they tend to do best when confronting a problem. They threw more money at it. In 2007 alone, total official development assistance by all donors increased by 57% and increased further the next year. Despite growing evidence that Afghanistan and its international partners were unable to effectively spend the existing resources. Donor assistance was routinely, routinely exceeding rates considered to be absorbable by a developing country. And in some years, U.S. assistance alone exceeded Afghanistan's entire GDP. In the short term, there were obviously some signs of success. For capita income in Afghanistan did increase more than five-fold from $117 in 2001 to a peak of $669 in 2012. But any hope that the upward trend would be lasting was an illusion. Since it was largely a result of the heavy international presence and the bump in growth typically experienced by the nations emerging from a conflict. In 2014, at the end of the three-year drawdown began in 2011, development assistance was 40% below its 2010 peak and Afghan income was decreasing. The failure to understand Afghanistan also led international donors to neglect to take strong enough steps to prevent spillage from their assistance, from falling into the hands of Afghanistan's power brokers, warlords, and corrupt officials. The problem grew rapidly as donor money began to flood the Afghan economy. In 2004, the annual Asia Foundation Survey didn't even list corruption as an area of concern in Afghanistan for the Afghan respondents. But just four years later, 76% of the Afghan respondents identified corruption as the major problem in their lives. It is clear that the United States did not understand the investment of money and time it would take for private sector development in Afghanistan to succeed, nor did it appreciate the ongoing threat posed by insurgency and corruption. Once they did recognize these realities, their instinct to throw money at the problem compounded matters even further, something which we highlighted in our first Lessons Learned Report on Anti-Corruption Efforts. Nevertheless, on a positive note, some steps taken by the US and other donors did reap positive effects, some which even exist to this day. For example, helping Afghanistan open up its economy to international trade provided benefits to Afghan consumers, and helped to integrate Afghanistan into the world economy. Even though Afghanistan still remains unfortunately at a competitive disadvantage in trade compared to its neighbors. Additionally, USAID and the Department of Treasury implemented a range of activities that strengthened the commercial banking sector, privatized state-owned banks, and attempted to regulate informal money service providers. And because commercial bankers were unable or unwilling to reach poor and rural areas of the economy, the US also successfully supported a number of non-bank financial institutions to offer loans that were attractive to small enterprises. But despite these positive initiatives, over the last 17 years, the US and its partners were unable to create the conditions necessary to attract significant private sector investment in the Afghan economy. Successful private sector development requires the establishment of an enabling environment attractive to foreign and domestic businesses alike. Now I have spent most of my professional career in public service. I did for a time advise corporations, including some of the largest companies in the world. And I learned two things. And those are that these two things make most businesses shy away from new markets. And those two things are uncertainty and instability. Unfortunately, two things that Afghanistan has a surplus of. The security situation inherently creates instability. But businesses need certainty as well. Business certainty depends upon strong rule of law mechanisms that protect property and other rights by providing recourse for grievances. International donors have worked with Afghan government officials to strengthen their legal regime, but a dearth of legal experts and lawyers within Afghanistan coupled with an inept and or corrupt court system has made resolving legal conflicts extremely difficult. Many Afghan laws are poorly understood today, even among Afghan judges and lawyers. Enforcement of the law, especially with respect to property rights has been one of the greatest challenges. Afghanistan's weak judicial system has meant that even the best crafted laws can be manipulated easily by powerful individuals and business elites who use their connections and access to information to circumvent taxes, regulations and other legal requirements. This unfair advantage has also been used against smaller and less well connected businesses to suppress competition. Additionally, many of the new laws and regulations contradict laws still on the book from previous administrations, providing officials with an opportunity to cherry pick which laws to enforce. Predatory officials such as these create uncertainty. Fear of arbitrary and capricious government and regulatory and tax collecting institutions have reinforced Afghan firms' historical inclination to stay small and stay informal rather than expand and risk catching a corrupt officials eye. Patronage networks established during several decades of war, conflict and dislocation have also had significant negative results. Many of the most successful Afghan businessmen have strong connections to political power, providing them with access to contracts, tax exemptions and money laundering channels. Such strong men have acted sometimes violently to quash competition in key sectors. These individuals, whether they are government officials or simply well connected businessmen also have had the ability to send hard currency out of the country, depriving the Afghan government of desperately needed revenue. As US drawdown began, powerful Afghans began to send more money abroad out of the reach of the Afghan government and it's no coincidence that we saw an uptick in property in Dubai at that time. The bottom line is that powerful individuals have taken advantage of a weak legal institution, creating significant uncertainty for anyone looking to do business in Afghanistan and dampening private sector growth in the process. Now, as I mentioned before, SIGAR has repeatedly documented in many of its reports and investigations when we have evaluated the reconstruction programs that the US has made achieving success much harder by not effectively managing or coordinating its private sector development programs. While USAID rightly has responsibility for most US development programs, once the surge began, it seemed like every US government agency in Afghanistan was under pressure to leave behind a functional and self-sustaining Afghan state before President Obama's deadline will withdraw. While USAID's mission in Kabul was the agency's largest, the Department of Defense also began to undertake economic development projects there. The Commander's Emergency Response Program, or SERP, allowed US military commanders to spend money on projects that put people to work, and some of these projects were quite large. Many were also unsustainable, but in the middle of the war, that wasn't a commander's primary concern. SIGAR will be releasing shortly an in-depth performance audit of SERP, so I'll wait till that time to discuss what we found in that area. But there was another program, the Defense Department's Task Force for Business Stability Operations, or TFBSO, which we have looked at in the past. And it had it derided USAID's programs as being too slow. So therefore it spent $675 million in its own effort to jump-start the economy in Afghanistan. Unfortunately, as we have found in a number of reports, DOD has relatively little experience or expertise in private sector development, and TFBSO operated on an ad hoc basis with next-to-no adult supervision. Other SIGAR work has examined TFBSO in detail, but what is clear is that DOD's entry into the economic development field complicated matters at best and may have harmed economic development at worst. TFBSO coordination with other civilian agencies was sometimes considered by them as a mere courtesy rather than a requirement. And in one embarrassing example we have highlighted before, an Afghan official thanked then-sitting American ambassador for a large program that was completed, even though the Department of State, the Embassy, and USAID had opposed and recommended against the program. But that TFBSO had moved forward anyway to the complete surprise of the ambassador. As former DOD comptroller, Dov Zakheim put it, quote, if parts of DOD are reluctant to work in a collegial manner among themselves, what can be expected when DOD is asked to work alongside other departments, unquote. Too often, on too many initiatives in Afghanistan, the instinct has been to throw money against the wall and see if it sticks. And in this case, DOD's expeditionary development effort seemed to have had little long-term effect other than burning through taxpayers' dollars. So, it's important to realize that based upon our knowledge and based upon our recent briefings from USAID and the Department of State, private sector development is one of the cornerstones of the current administration strategy in Afghanistan. Therefore, I would urge making cigars report a must-read rather than some historic tome. Remember, even if the Taliban signed a peace deal tomorrow, the Afghan government still relies on international donors to cover half of their budget. Our soldiers may come home, but our wallets will have to stay. Development of a dynamic Afghan private sector is the long-term solution to that dilemma. If the US and its partners can help the Afghan government stabilize the security situation, strengthen the rule of law, reduce government regulatory impediments, including corruption, and support economic development through well-executed cost-effective assistance programs, then the Afghan people will be able to achieve what both they and the US want. A self-sustaining, independent, and prosperous Afghan state that no longer requires donor assistance. Finally, I would be remiss if I didn't acknowledge the great work done by our team on this report. Project leader Paul Fishtine was ably supported by Mary Lou, I'm gonna have to put my glasses on for this, Zala Zada, Emily Bakos, Lauren Helinski, Nikolai Kandy Padunov, Margaret Jacobson, and Elizabeth Young. And I apologize if I butchered those names. I always call them by their first name, I never their last. They, under the leadership of program director Joe Windrum, have made this report possible. And they have my gratitude and the gratitude of my agency. Thank you very much. And now I think we'll turn it over to the panel. Good morning, and welcome to the discussion portion of this event. My name is Scott Worden. I'm the director of Afghanistan and Central Asia programs here at USIP. I wanna just briefly introduce the panelists here. I've asked each of them to spend no more than 10 minutes. Paul in particular giving a few additional details as the lead researcher on this. And then my other two panelists are Afghan experts that I'll introduce. They'll deliver their comments on the report. We'll have about an hour then for interaction with you all to think of questions. And I will also point out that this is on the record. And when we do come to the questions and answers, we'll have microphones as being webcast. So it's important to wait for that. Please identify yourself when you ask the question. Very briefly. So Paul Fishtime on right was the lead research analyst at Cigar for this report. He's a long time Afghanistan hand. So are the rest of the panelists. He's worked as an advisor in Afghanistan on provincial level development projects for USAID. He served for several years as the director of the Afghanistan Research and Evaluation Unit. He worked on cross-border projects from Pakistan in the 90s. I don't wanna date him, but before that Peace Corps. He was a Peace Corps volunteer. And you can think about when that program was operating. To his right, Mary Louise Vitelli. She's a lawyer and a consultant on energy and extractive projects. She worked in Afghanistan as an advisor to the Ministry of Mines and Petroleum, also to the World Bank and to USAID. She has a wealth of experience outside of Afghanistan as well, helping to structure and negotiate investments in the energy sector. And then finally, Bill Byrd on the far side is a senior expert here at USIP focusing on Afghanistan economic issues. He had a long career with the World Bank, including serving four years as the World Bank's country manager from 2002 to 2006 in Kabul. He has a particular expertise on public financial management issues and development economics. I would just note, we always have really experienced experts here. I was impressed with this panel in particular. Together has spent 20 years living in Afghanistan over 50 years working in Afghanistan if you had it all up. So really can provide a long-term perspective and context for this topic and others. Without further ado, I'll turn it over to Paul. Okay, thanks, Scott. I would just point out that I look out in the audience and there are some former Peace Corps volunteers who are even older than me. Okay. That's good. Thanks again. We're very pleased to be here to launch the report, Private Sector Development and Economic Growth Experiences from Afghanistan. We think the report is quite timely, as Mr. Sofko mentioned. There's a lot of discussion now about renewed emphasis under the administration's new strategy for Afghanistan and South Asia. New emphasis on the private sector, reinvigorating the private sector. Often, and this was the case in 2009 as well as in 2014, a lot of the public discussion is really on the troops. How many troops are gonna be there? When are they gonna come back? But as Mr. Sofko pointed out, some of the real critical issues in stabilizing Afghanistan have to do with building an economy, building a society that Afghans can feel good about and be self-reliant. We think some of the material that's in the report is quite relevant to some of the discussion that we're hearing about the importance of the role of minerals, the importance of increasing trade, moving Afghanistan to being a more trade-oriented or even a trade-oriented economy to try to bring down the trade deficit. As a lot of the, or some of these elements have been present in previous US government strategies, we hope that the documentation of some of the experience that we have in this report can contribute to future progress and to design. The report itself very briefly goes through a chronology of US support to private sector development in the context of overall reconstruction aid, and then it goes through five different thematic areas that our assistance was under. The report, as Mr. Sofko mentioned, is available on the website. I would just mention, as with all the SEGAR Lessons Learned Reports, the intention is not to call out agencies to apportion, blame, to be critical, but rather to identify a whole range of things that worked and things that didn't work so well. I think we all have interest of the people of Afghanistan, the state of Afghanistan in mind, so that's really what this is all about. It's a large report, it covers a lot of ground, and I wanna briefly here present some of the reports more important observations. I would also mention that some of the observations are not unique to private sector development, but rather can be applied to some of the other sectoral work done under reconstruction. So first, as we all know, Afghanistan made significant economic gains, especially in the early years after 2001, which does seem at this point a long time ago. Between 2001 and 2012, the economy grew at almost 10%, I think 9.3%, and incomes increased five-fold. This was largely due to a couple of factors. One was the typical post-conflict bump. Countries that are emerging from conflict tend to have a little bit of lift as populations return, as businesses revitalize. But there was also the importance of the incredible, the very large infusion of international funding, which became much more important, particularly during the surge years. So those two factors, as well as at the beginning, there was a partial abatement of a drought that had been going on for about three years. So you had these factors coming together at the beginning, which gave the economy quite a bit of lift. I think for those of us who were in Kabul in 2002, there was really a palpable, and that's the word that everyone used, a palpable sense of optimism. Afghanistan was open for business. There was even talk of a stock exchange, a stock market, and it was really a time of great optimism. However, as the years went by, some of these gains turned out not to be sustainable at those levels. In large part, and we try to make this clear in the report, this was due to the failure of the larger political efforts to resolve the conflict. In 2001, Afghanistan was labeled a post-conflict country, but in fact very much remained a country in conflict. As the international spending associated with the 2009, 2012 surge declined as 2014 transition approached, the economy got curtailed, it grew at a much lower rate, falling down to very low levels. Property values declined, you had a lot of movement of capital outside of the country, and so that was really where we were left at 2014. I would emphasize again that it was more than insecurity, it was really the uncertainty during this period that dampened economic activity. This had to do with elections, the question about how long the international coalition would remain in Afghanistan, what was the prospect for the failure of the government or other policy changes, so it was really a lot of uncertainty that contributed to this dampening. I wanna emphasize one of the things that we really got right in the early years, and I think Bill may talk about this a bit, and that was putting in some of the foundational elements really at the start. The US and its allies made investments in macroeconomic policies, they supported the development of a new currency, even fighting, there was an initial proposal for dollarization of the Afghan currency, the Afghan said no, we want our own currency, the international community went along with that, public financial management strengthening, and then putting into place some of the basic commercial laws. So there was a lot of basic enabling environment infrastructure that was put into place in the early years that allowed economic growth to begin and set the stage for future process. Having said that, it was really corruption and poor governance, especially the lack of safeguards for property rights that presented another serious source of uncertainty that discouraged investment and expansion. The report therefore underlines the importance of overall rule of law and governance and supporting private sector development. From 2001, Afghanistan went through enormous changes, both in the scale of its economy as well as the sectoral composition. You had close to two million Afghans returning to the country, most of them headed for the cities. You had development of a service economy. So you had these enormous changes taking place and one of the things that the report notes is that the US really overestimated the speed at which the country could transform itself into a Western style market economy. Afghanistan had traditionally had what we'd call a mixed guided economy in which the state had a significant role. But Afghanistan at Western urging adopted the market economy, which I think we all believe is a correct choice. But it was certainly controversial in some areas and many people even who supported the development, the introduction of the market economy felt that it was just rolled out too fast and with too little preparation. Fairly or not, a lot of people conflated the market economy with the corruption that started to rise with the increasing availability of reconstruction funding. Within the ministries, and Mary Louise may be able to talk a little bit about this, there were not surprisingly there was resistance to what was seen as a diminished role for the state. This was seen most clearly in some of the activities around the privatization of the state owned enterprises which was unpopular within the ministries due to a mix of disagreement over economic ideology as well as self-interest. Relatedly with an open market economy, an open trade regime where Afghanistan quickly establishing some of the lowest tariffs in the region ran up against the population's expectation that the government would protect its industries, either revitalize some of the old industries or protect some of the new ones. With the demand for consumer goods fueled by rising incomes in Kabul, there was a flood of imported goods onto the local market and Afghan consumers certainly benefited from those. They benefited from low prices and they also benefited from the availability of goods that four or five years previously you couldn't even have imagined would be available in Kabul. However, the downside to that was that domestic companies weren't able to benefit, they weren't able to compete in markets either domestically or regionally due to a whole set of factors which we discuss in the report, poor infrastructure, high production costs, particularly from electricity, difficulty with export processes and just a general overall lack of competitiveness. Agriculture, the potential export gains from that were limited in part because of a low productivity, very weather dependent agriculture as well as the inability to add sufficient value to its products to get them out of the country in a profitable form. It's been pointed out that certainly Afghanistan's neighbors, particularly Pakistan and Iran didn't help in this process. Certainly some of the accusations that are level that the regional neighbors are meddling really verge into the realm of conspiracy theories but even aside from the lower cost production that these countries have and the export subsidies that they provide implicitly or explicitly to their own products, things such as Pakistani cement, predatory trade practices were fairly widespread. These included setting up obstacles to transition or transport of goods across Pakistan, the insistence of transshipment in Pakistan and I can tell you anyone who's ever stood at the Waga border between Pakistan and India and watched people transship crates of Afghan figs from one truck to another will understand the costs and downsides of having transshipment. And also there were the periodic border closures which ran up huge costs for Afghan exporters and also resulted in the destruction of Afghan agricultural goods. Certainly one of Afghanistan's major achievements was achieving full membership in the World Trade Organization in 2016, something that was considered controversial but which the Afghan government stuck to. Our reports suggest that in the long term WTO will certainly WTO membership will certainly enhance export prospects for Afghanistan and then the short term it had what we'd call a useful forcing function, inspiring and forcing Afghan institutions and businesses to bring their products and processes up to standards that would allow international trade. However, the report also makes the point that we feel that Afghanistan would have benefited much more if domestic industries had been given a little bit more time to develop. International experience says that countries emerging from conflict require about roughly 10 years for their industries to kind of get up to speed and emerge from the conflict. Afghanistan didn't really have that time and we feel it would have benefited from more. The report also notes that in some cases direct financial support to enterprises in the form of grants lent to dependent or non-viable enterprises. The report does note some of the innovative attempts to fill the gap of finance, especially in the agriculture and rural areas, but there's some evidence that some of these institutions found it difficult to attract borrowers perhaps because they were in competition with other institutions or projects that were provided what we call free money. Sensibly firms would prefer a grant to a loan so that was a bit of an impediment. Close, okay. I wanna say one thing about coordination. I think Mr. Sopko mentioned something about this that with such a massive intervention involving so many agencies and aggressive implementation schedules, not surprisingly coordination was certainly a challenge. Particularly between civilian and military agencies who had a very different understanding of, in some cases, the problem, very different style of operations. Groups such as the Afghanistan Reconstruction Group and the Task Force for a Business and Stability Organization operation had a particularly hard time fitting in and coordinating with other agencies for a variety of factors. So let me try to wrap up. Perhaps the most obvious lesson is that it should be that it's not realistic to expect robust and sustainable growth in an insecure and uncertain environment. At times the US seemed to ignore this, both in our programming and in our expectations for how quickly results could be achieved. Afghanistan started as a post-conflict country, but as I mentioned, as the time went on, it turned out to be less and less the case. Given the ongoing conflict and uncertainty, it's hard to assess where Afghanistan should be and in turn to evaluate our interventions, but I think often we forget that it was and is still very much a country under conflict. I think the last lesson I would highlight here is that trying to spend too much money too quickly often has negative and unintended consequences. US spending at the start was very modest compared to other at that time post-conflict nations, partly due to the Bush administration's skepticism about nation buildings, nation building, but in later years spending ramped up and often exceeded US and Afghan institutions' ability to effectively spend the money. In any case, the fluctuations in spending, including what we've called a precipitous decline after 2014 are problematic to agencies who are trying to manage and plan their programs. Let me continue. I think we'll have plenty of time for Q&A. Okay, so I think I'll just leave it there and there will be some other observations that I'll work in during the Q&A. Great, not to be the bad guy, but I want to get everybody's views on the table and so let me just turn it over to Mary Louise. Okay, hello everyone. My name is Mary Louise Vitelli as you've heard and I want to thank Scott, but I also want to say that I don't consider myself at all an Afghan expert. I consider myself an excellent mining and energy lawyer who's worked a lot in Afghanistan and I think that we all should phrase ourselves that way because Afghanistan's quite a complicated, wonderful, fantastic place. Anyone who says they're an expert, I'd like to meet you after we speak. I also want to thank CIGAR and USIP. I have been engaged in Afghanistan mining and energy for almost two decades and this is the first time I've ever been invited to speak on a panel. I'm never in Washington so I'm probably out of sight, out of mind, but I really appreciate your considering me for this panel today. The CIGAR report which I read and conducted a peer review captures an array of critical issues and we understand today we're here to provide constructive thoughts and we don't need to have a blame game any longer. Those days are over, let's move forward and let's consider what we can do next. That said, I was gonna give you a little bit of background and there's a reason for it. I was first introduced to AID, this new notion to a person like me from Connecticut, in 1991 when I was hired to work in Russia and I'm really sorry about my vision, I'm gonna go like this now. I was hired to work in Russia to manage an organization called Partners in Economic Reform which was funded by USAID and we worked in Russia, Uzbekistan, Ukraine, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan and I had an excellent opportunity to work there in the mining sector, coal mining. After working with AID for a year, I then joined the World Bank as a short term advisor which ended up being four more years and continued that project and on my team was a person named Ashraf Ghani and he was an anthropologist and he conducted our social assessment for the various work that we did on the coal lending and little did I know that 12 years later I would meet him again in Kabul. After spending my five years in Russia, I returned to Washington DC and opened up a engineering and law energy and mining consulting firm and we worked all around the world and I ended up joining the board of the directors of Refugee Women in Development which you might have known Seema Wally who unfortunately has recently passed and I was part of that activity and really became engaged in Afghan affairs. I was contracted by a firm called CHF in Maryland to do a quick coal study of what was going on in Afghanistan basically because of my Russia work and that was fine and then 9-11 happened and I immediately realized we have to do something in Afghanistan. All those resources, what's going to happen? I called a friend that I knew from Russia who worked in the very highest levels of USAID and I said hey, when are you gonna do something on energy and mining? I don't wanna have a conflict of interest but I really wanna be a part of the dialogue and she said to me, oh, Mayor Louise, it is gonna be years. We're gonna focus on elections and women's rights. I was completely disheartened. I was completely confused and I put it aside. Thankfully, the World Bank contacted me and asked me to come to Afghanistan and to conduct an oil and gas assessment. I spent three months in Sherbagan with a team. I slept on the floor of the oil and gas director's home because I was the only female on the team and there was no housing for us at that time. My male colleague slept in the office and we did an excellent survey. There were a lot of multilateral assessments that were going on at the time that would ultimately drive some of the strategies for the mining and energy sector. When I first stepped foot into Afghanistan, I realized that there are so many projects. One of the best ways to approach our aid would be to regionalize our aid. Unfortunately, approaches like that were never taken and instead we all expected to do everything for everyone everywhere. I had the pleasure to work with government agencies in Afghanistan and sat in the heart of work on TAPI, NEPS, GORI, INAC, CASA, DABS, Kajiki, Kudbark, Sherbagan, PPAs, cross-border. I was on everything and I really appreciated it and had a great view of what was going on. I was not part of the AID framework. I was not part of the embassy framework but I had interactions with them on a regular basis. My full-time job there was to work with AID for the first year and I really benefited from a lot of the initial monetary and legislative work that was done in order to set a basis for corporate investment. There was the corporations law, the partnerships law, there was monetary stabilization. These were all very positive things for mining and energy for my work. Unfortunately, there was never that trickled down into the sector-specific things that we really needed. What was immediately clear to me was that we sorely underestimated the absolute disaster that had preceded us. There were almost no windows in the ministry of mines and petroleum. There were no computers that worked. There was no electricity. There was no woman's room where I worked in the ministry and all the geodata records had been either burned by the Taliban or taken home by staff and who gradually would bring them back to the ministry and guess what? Most of that data was in Russian. A flurry of design activities ensued and as Paul said, the atmosphere was absolutely electric. The optimism was high and we all knew we could get this job done. However, a lot of the AID planning was conducted by people that may not have worked in a similar situation. I believe that our emergency people completely understood the situation and knew how to get things running. But as the mission expanded and as more and more people came to town, we had a lot of generalists and we didn't have people that would even believe there was potential for mining. One ambassador said to me, it's too bad they don't have minerals here. And as the emergency funding lessened, we moved on to the incredible IQC mechanism for contracting, which is the indefinite quantity contract mechanism. It is a mechanism that I am not a fan of and I think it has been absolutely negative for Afghanistan. And I should go back to 1998. I was the first program manager of three. There were three of us because I was a small business and I had two larger businesses. We were the first IQC managers for AID and it was an energy IQC, $500 million ceiling. It's a military vehicle and it might work for the military, but it's done nothing, I believe, in a good way for development. As for the report, I think there were so many excellent points highlighted and one of the fundamental things that I would bring to the table is when we began looking at private sector development, we needed to have a clear paradigm for what we thought private sector enabling environment meant. For industry, I am to this day still stunned that we have fallen away from the standard model of labor, management, and government. That's a standard industry model. Maybe I'm too legalistic, but all we need to do is look at those three components of industry and we already have some very tangible activities that we can conduct. When it comes to businesses, we need viable credit facilities. We need leasing facilities. We do need property rights. These are very fundamental paradigms and I don't believe there was ever an agreement amongst all the donors in USAID to actually move forward with a structured paradigm. In USAID's defense, I have several things to say. In the earliest days, working with the country, working with Afghanistan, we were told that Germany was gonna handle all things in the South and the United States was gonna do all things in the North and Italy was gonna do the West and France was gonna do here. Well, that all changed. And almost immediately, the United States was given a much larger burden to provide assistance in the country than was initially intended. And in AIDS defense, I think that was a terrible, onerous burden to take on and they just couldn't, they weren't ready for it. A considerable missed opportunity was that USAID, because of this uncertainty, because of the changing staff and policy, never took or cemented a fully leadership role that everybody else in the donor community was expecting. In the mining and energy sector, we expected it, but in all the other sectors, we expected aid to champion these reforms and it just never happened. Policy options often prevailed. The Kandahar Kabul Highway all of a sudden, that was like the most important project of the century. In the meantime, we had mines that were very dangerous but actually somewhat viable and we could have done small improvements to make them economically viable. Again, the USAID procurement mechanisms tied the staff's hands. They couldn't do some immediate turnaround actions. They couldn't immediately give money when money was needed and I do feel that that was quite inhibiting for them. Congressional measures for AID success are inhibiting. They always have been in my 25 years of dealing with US government projects. I can see that they're not gonna change that much but we should still keep it in mind. Changing Afghan government priorities cannot be discounted. They do change quite often and government needs to tell US and US needs to tell government this is how much tolerance we have for a change in your policy. And then finally, the inter-institutional issues are certainly a topic for more discussion and more coordination. Going forward, all I can say is we have to do our homework. I cannot tell you how many times I sat in meetings and people simply didn't know the six border in countries, they didn't know the historic presence of gas export pipelines, they didn't know where the rail lines had been. These are very important historical things. They weren't that historical by the way and we should have reconstituted them. I always say this wasn't a reconstruction effort. This was a construction effort and we came in thinking, oh, we'll just go to the region and put some money in there and it'll be back on its feet. Maybe it wasn't on its feet as we had thought. USAID doesn't have to do all the work. Neither does the US government. They have to share the portfolio and they have to share it nicely. Minimizing USAID approaches and even government approaches, now there's this whole Afghanization approach to all the bids. I work in energy and mining. I don't care where you come from but do you know energy and do you know mining? I don't care. And what happened was we were then given a lot of very well-meaning foreign Afghans to do technical work that perhaps they hadn't had the skills for. And then defining what we mean by an enabling environment. We have not even talked about establishing business centers. We haven't talked about establishing financing centers, skill centers, grievance mechanisms, focusing on labor rights. These are enabling environments for a viable private sector. And then finally, I'd like to say that in our program preparation, I think all of us have suffered from hearing, oh, we couldn't find anybody. I know he's not great but we couldn't find anybody. We put him in there. Just deal with him. No, you know what? If you can't find anybody, don't do the project, right? Stop with this. We put in a mediocre because we couldn't find expert. Find expert or skip it. I'd like to just share my positive note which I love Afghanistan and I love the United States and I really do have hope. And I would like to tell you that the first, I speak Russian luckily after all those years there and the first phrase that I was taught when I was in Russia was Luchipozna Chemnikagda. Anyone? Better late than never. The first clause that I learned in Afghanistan from one of my colleagues named Fossil was Katra Katradari Amesha. Drop by drop a river will be made or progress will happen. And I would like to say as a US citizen, actions speak louder than words and I think we can show by our actions what we want to do there. Thank you. Thanks. All first, second, Mary Louise comment about experts and in my view, you know the most about a country when you've been working on it for about three weeks because you're on a big learning curve and you learn a lot and you think you know more and more as the days goes on. And then at some point, maybe not three weeks, three months or some point you start, the rest of it is realizing how much you don't know. So I absolutely agree with her point. Look, this is an excellent report in my opinion. It's well written. There's a lot of detail. I would encourage you just to leave rather than trying to read it cover to cover which may be heavy going leaf through it. There are lots of interesting boxes you know, on things ranging from the gauri cement plant which was a big opportunity loss to extractive industries which rightly and I think very importantly plays down the prospects for extractives in the short run. And it's dispassionate. I found it fairly balanced and certainly factual and really embodying a genuine lessons learned approach and as others have also said, avoiding getting into a blame game kind of mentality. Let me, I'm conscious that I should probably offset and do less time than the others but at least Scott is not here. Okay, let me just highlight a few salient points that struck me and resonated very much with my own experience. I think the report gets at it but maybe doesn't emphasize it enough. This private sector development and to some extent the overall economic development was really a hostage to the bigger. It's neither the hero nor the villain in the story. In my view, major strategic mistakes made in the early years which then set the subsequent path. And so even if this had been done perfectly it wouldn't have offset the headwinds that came from these bigger strategic political security aspects. One point which the report does mention but it indicates that the assumption underlying much of the assistance is that economic growth and private sector development lead to greater security and stability. I really think that assumption is highly questionable. I think the causation for sure goes much more in the opposite direction. If you have security and stability you're going to get economic growth and private sector development, not the other way around. And so I think this is really important. Over emphasis on the legal framework, imported new laws many of them were actually written in a foreign language and then translated fixation on best practice. Afghanistan had a legal framework which you could argue was good international practice imported from in a various places more or less a French system imported via Egypt and things like that. And it had laws and rules that were more or less you could say state of the art for the 1950s and 1960s. Yet everybody came in thinking about the blank state and blank slate and then trying to put something in new. There are really clear case studies where when you built on the existing Afghan law it worked much better than trying to import a new law. Path dependence, enormous. I think some things were gotten largely right at the beginning and ended up as durable success stories. Whereas early mistakes and inactions they become harder and harder to correct over time. Too much emphasis on privatization and restructuring of state-owned enterprise. I previously worked on India and Pakistan and they're the state-owned enterprise especially India is a serious problem. I think the total number of public sector employees state-owned enterprise employees in Afghanistan is much smaller than the number of employees in even a single Indian state-owned bank. Yet there was enormous both, I think on the US government side but also in the World Bank where I was way over emphasis on somehow privatization as a panacea. And in the banking sector it was really ironic we spent a lot of time looking trying to restructure and privatize these very small state-owned banks which were never much of a fiscal risk to the country. And in the meantime the private sector bank, Kabul Bank, I mean that was where there was a huge fiscal risk. Another point I think that comes out a little bit is trying, putting burdens on Afghanistan that we don't even put on ourselves. I mean that Paul already mentioned the what my view misplaced emphasis on WTO accession. When the US itself now I think is pretty clearly moving away from WTO as a mechanism for resolving trade disputes. So why should it be on a poor developing country to be a paragon of WTO observance? And I was frankly a bit shocked to hear that US has withdrawn from the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative. That really, that's been a centerpiece of Afghanistan's somewhat at least some degree of progress in terms of joining EITI and now the US has pulled out of it. So let me just go quickly to their recommendations. I think we need to distinguish two kinds of recommendations. One are what if there's another country where there's a post-conflict or a peace agreement or at the end of a conflict and going in there and what are the lessons from Afghanistan? The report is very rich with that. Some things you need to get right early on. What can you do better? The other kind of recommendation is what do you do in Afghanistan now? After 17 years, a lot of water under the bridge, as I mentioned, path dependence. You can't go back to 2002 and do things better but you could for another country. That's quite relevant but for Afghanistan what do you do now? And so I'll just finish up with a few points about that. What can you actually really do now to sort of encourage some kind of modest revival and growth of the Afghan economy in this very serious headwinds? Well, I think the first thing is just to have modest expectations. You're not gonna go back to the overheated 9% per year growth. There's no way, a short of peace breaking out. If you have peace breaking out, I'm pretty confident there'll be another post-conflict boom and then maybe that can be harnessed better than the 2001 post-conflict boom was harnessed. Confidence building and stability and there was a lot of talk about instability uncertainty. I really think those are big problems and they were highlighted on the Afghan side. I think it's really important to have continuity and stability in overall international support and better political management. So maybe not all the sources of uncertainty in Afghanistan can be addressed but surely the international community can do better and the US government in terms of not itself being a source of instability and uncertainty. Another point, which I think the report is probably a little less strong on than others is the macro. I do have a background in macroeconomics. Well, what do you do in this kind of recessionary environment? You look for ways to stimulate aggregate demand, right? We should all be Keynesians now. We can't forget the 2008 to 2010 global crisis and as Larry Summers once said very famously, we got into this crisis by misspending and overspending and wasted money and the way to get out of it is by more spending and that's really the logic. What does Afghanistan face? I think you face a problem of aggregate demand. Now the sources may be political, they may be security so you need to do things there but you certainly don't want to, for example, through very strict austerity measures or budget controls, damp inadvertently or dampen further what is already weak demand and the other one is called, this is economics 101, I mean expenditure switching kinds of things, shifting demand from imports to domestic production and exports. Another thing to do now, especially with limited resources, is selectivity and prioritization and I would argue for key urban economies and for agricultural growth polls. You simply can't spread resources too thinly and really what the need now, in my view, is to do less with less, not to do more with less but to do less with less and target it. And the last point, just highlighting again on the import substitution, actually USAID and I would argue has done some pretty positive and useful work on export promotion for Afghan agricultural exports. It would be nice to have value chain development for Afghan products that can substitute for imports plus other forms of protection and it gets back to the point about perhaps joining WTO to owe too early and then being constrained more than neighboring countries in terms of how much Afghanistan can protect its agriculture. I mean the ridiculous thing is almost no country in the world has developed without protecting its agriculture, I'll leave it at that. That's great. Thank you all for the comments. It's a richly set table I would say. Let me, microphones are getting ready. Think of questions. Let me use my moderator's prerogative to really build on what Bill said last and maybe go back to Paul and Mary Louise thinking about the future and what to do now. And let me also kind of get an aspect that Bill didn't touch on. Kind of current circumstances I would say while security-wise are maybe negative but economically and regionally seem to be trending upward. We've had development of a lot of regional infrastructure projects or at least they're advancing in terms of electricity with cost of 1,000 in terms of potentially gas pipeline with TAPI. We've got significant Chinese investment both in Central Asia and in Pakistan on infrastructure. There's the port through Iran with road links to Afghanistan that can facilitate trade. So while we are 17 years in, newer developments maybe present opportunities and of course we have Ashraf Ghani who you've worked with, who's got development expertise in the palace. And so with that, is there one thing for maybe each of you that you would say you see as the greatest opportunity or the greatest like this must be done to progress in the future? Maybe Paul first. Okay. I would say we have to build the next generation. So I think the gap we have never properly developed, you have Kabul University, you have Polytechnic, you have like 70, I think it's 72 regional institutes and technical institutes, vocational institutes but they're not working at the level they need to to funnel skilled labor and skilled management and skilled commercial expertise into the market. So for me, I'm all about next generation, some kind of focus on institutes and even in-house training at the government level and at the enterprise level. It doesn't have to just be academic. Yeah, I would just add a couple of things to that. One is of course, pipelines, extractive enterprises and roads really depend on a level of security and stability. Also, I think the other point that's been made is the nature of some of these regional initiatives or as they would unfold in Afghanistan that some of the, I think that's why EITI was so important because it tried to get at some of the issues that would enable mining to generate benefits for the Afghan population to create labor. If you have kind of enclave functions with foreign investment coming in and setting up mines and setting either highly mechanized or bringing in their own workers, then it's not gonna produce the types of benefits that it would otherwise. The other thing that I would add is a point that I didn't get to make in my remarks is one of the perhaps unintended consequences of some of the construction boom among other things was the immense amount of engineering and construction capacity, management capacity that was created in Afghan firms particularly during the peak years of the surge. A lot of that capacity has been deployed elsewhere in the region whether it's in Dubai or Central Asia and so I think there's still a lot of excess capacity there and if somehow that could be utilized in a way that would be helpful as well. And then also again to build on Mary-Louise's point. Afghanistan has always been known as a trading country, entrepreneurial but I think the generation that came of age after 2001, particularly the young generation, is much more plugged in, much more entrepreneurial, they're much more mobile both with respect to technology as well as geography and so I think that's a human resource that's available for the future of Afghanistan. Great, thanks. I have other questions but let me turn to you all and I'll take a few hands and we have microphones please wait until that gets to you but I'll start with you in the front, sir. My name is Joe Hennessey. I think that's all. I'm an attorney in private practice for the last 10 years I've been representing Afghan companies who are in disputes with US defense contractors. I was a little bit disappointed that Inspector General Sapko characterized of respect for the rule of law as being a particularly Afghan problem. It's not, I have represented companies who have been victimized by US defense contractors whose conduct has been absolutely reprehensible. Taking that and putting it aside for the time being because we're not going, not looking backwards. Taking aside that the fact that the US allows these companies to continue to do business in Afghanistan, I think one of the biggest problems for effective US, Afghan development and business of relationships is that there is zero dispute resolution processes that are available to the Afghan companies. They are forced to sign contracts that have choice of forum, choice of law provisions that require them to come to the United States to enter into any kind of dispute resolution which creates two insurmountable barriers. One is the economic barrier of having, being able to afford to come to the United States to do that. And the second is none of them now can obtain visas, come into the United States and participate in litigation or arbitration designed to resolve these disputes. Wonder, number one, if you could comment on that. Second, may I suggest that going forward that we establish something akin to the US Iran claims tribunal that would allow for a neutral body to adjudicate disputes between American companies and Afghan companies so that there can be meaningful dispute resolution. Thank you, let me take one more question. Sir on the front, wait for the mic please. To your left, to your left. I think it's on. Thank you, my name is Saeed Iyar from the border race in Afghanistan. I'd like to ask a question from Mr. Larry Lewis reviving the investment in Afghanistan beside the US organization that invests in Afghanistan or working at behavior health or work with the EU United Mara to Saudi Arabia and invest in Afghanistan and mining, please. And also another question from Mr. Scott, I'm sorry. From the beginning establishing of the Sivar office in Afghanistan the reports that's come out from Sivar office it was taken very seriously by Afghan government as well as civil society and the public but now it is what we see the response back from Afghan government, the report Sivar rejected and backlash especially the report that comes from Sivar office concerning the security, the statistic which is under the control of Taliban and Afghanistan government but the Afghan government reject that, that's why. Yeah, I'm gonna actually pivot that one pivot that into the current Sivar employee but do you want to start marry the ways with that and then also the general election. So on the dispute resolution I wish I had more time today because I actually had a whole section on dispute resolution international arbitration. There's been talk about the New York Convention and it's very expensive for our Afghan colleagues to have to go abroad even to go to the dispute resolution forum in Dubai is expensive even to go in India is expensive, it's time consuming. So in mining we did establish a claims court for your, to mark your actual perimeter of your mind. However, it's been disbanded as you know we've had different ministers and each minister has their own priority but I do think that in the mining sector there's a little bit more going on but when it comes to contract claims there's not anything and there needs to be something for both domestic to domestic there needs to be something for ministry to investor investor to US Department of Defense or USAID and there isn't. So I think that it's a huge gap in our assistance and it definitely affects the enabling environment. So super point. And then as far as abroad investors from abroad I don't know if you ever heard there is truth to it that we had one Saudi investor that was willing to pay for the entire TAPI pipeline and that investment which would have been quite a huge multi-billion dollar investment but that didn't come to pass for a lot of geopolitical reasons and correct investment reasons. We do have Dubai investors. I have to say that Afghanistan has visitors I work with African investors. I mean there are people from everywhere coming over and unlike other sectors of the economy mining people love instability they love chaos. Miners are miners. You know there's a certain prototype and they will come into a conflict zone or a peace zone. They really don't care. They want to get it out of the ground process it or ship it out make some money. That's they are very black and white investors. So yes there is interest. Is there a viable investment by those countries right now now? Yeah. Yeah I would just say that I work for the Segar lessons learned program and so I can't speak for the rest of Segar. The only general comment I would make is that obviously in an institution such as Segar touches on very sensitive and important issues and so of course it's likely to touch on some sensibilities. I don't know why they would be rejected by the palace or by the government. I can't speak to that but inevitably issues get raised around politics or money that can be sensitive. And the only other thing I would add Joe is that Segar has gone I do know this from reading the quarterly reports the back of the quarterly reports they have gone after U.S. contractors. It doesn't answer the question about the whole dispute mechanism and how difficult it is but it's certainly within their remit. Let me take a couple more staring at the lady on the end. Just quickly Mirgo Kohns and I'm former Fulbright scholar but CV practitioner from Kyrgyzstan. And I mean it's an incredible panel thank you for organizing. My question is since we know and a colleague from Afghanistan actually confirmed that at least 50% of the population of Afghanistan is young people, right? And by young I mean under 25 years old and you maybe confirmed that that's the future. The future that we should count on for a successful society. I was wondering what the role of young people in the development process was ever quantified and if so what is the data for youth role in the risk game? Thank you. Let me take one more. I saw hands back there. Yeah, the lady in the back. What was the impact on youth? Hi, back to the contracting question. So I work at the Small Business Committee on the Hill and I first fell in love with the SIGAR and SIGAR report. So when I was working at the Foreign Affairs Committee and I still like they're my prize possessions. So that's like a total nerd problem. But I just finished doing the Peace Ops grad program at Mason and unfortunately there is just not enough to me besides the SIGAR stuff and sir what you were talking about legal wise comprehensive review of our contracting system as a whole. Obviously at the Small Business Committee we attack it from a certain angle but I was wondering what other recommendations you have whoever has them for the contracting system because after I left the Hill the first time I went to work for a big contractor who won't say who but they're like the New York Yankees of USAID. So I've seen it from a lot of angles and so obviously I have my own opinions but I was curious to see what the real experts would say. Thank you, who would like to start? I'll do the contracting one. So I'll start with the contracting one and then my colleague here I'll handle the other question that you had. I am a Yankees fan. So sorry but when it comes to the contracting it needs we almost need a task force or working committee and it's not just for Afghanistan it's gonna be for the next place we go. It is absolutely out of control and I call it procurement over program. As practitioners we are unable to do what we need to do aside from rates and this 43 day rule of danger pay and where you need to live and what you need to take an American carrier even though it takes seven days versus two days and there's a lot of things that we can do better. We're hurting ourselves and therefore we're hurting our colleagues in Afghanistan because we're not effective, we're not efficient. So I also think that there's a misunderstanding that AID contracting, defense contracting, treasury contracting are the same. They're absolutely different. I have managed virtually I think every kind of US contract there is and they're so different. They require even different resume formats. They require different all the same accounting systems obviously but different labor categories. You know there's some that you have to have pre-approved labor categories. So I think the entire US government contracting system when it comes to our provision of assistance abroad should be reworked, period. I'm from Boston so I'm definitely not a Yankees fan. Ah! So anything that goes after the Yankees of contracting is fine. On a more serious note, the contracting in Afghanistan is something that CIGAR Lessons Learn program does have an interest in and it's one of our potential next thematic areas. So stay tuned. As far as the quantifying the role of youth, can't really do that. Don't know how it would be measured. I mean I think there are a lot of young up and coming research organizations, civil society in all of the urban quote-unquote areas of Afghanistan who have done all kinds of surveys but that one in particular I've never seen anything on. Just quick, quickly on the youth point, I think yes, opportunities. Also it's a challenge because in Afghanistan there are 400 to 500,000 people coming into the labor market every year and there's already high unemployment and you have growth at two or three percent which is basically below the population growth. What do you do with that? What some people, economists would call it a youth bulge or something but it's not people getting overweight, it's more other stuff. It's just a group but so it's an opportunity and I think USIP has actually done studies about radicalization among youth. So it's not, you know, it's not my area of expertise but there are, you know, sometimes they can get directed in different directions and if the economy is also weak it's a problem. On the contracting, I'm not an expert on it and I actually don't want to be but it's a disaster and when you get whatever you call them, you call them the New York Yankees, some people call them Beltway bandits, I don't know which one is more appropriate but the point is they get some big contract, we were talking about a one billion dollar contract for unspecified projects, now what? Sorry, I won't use an inappropriate word but what on earth is that, right? One billion dollars to a single contractor who had previously been blacklisted by the World Bank which I knew from the World Bank side. I mean, this is the height of absurdity and the other point then what happens after that is they might subcontract to, they're not gonna actually do the work, they subcontract to a Turkish firm which then may subcontract to somebody else. Eventually it's some Afghan firm that gets tiny bit of the money and they're supposed to do the project and of course the results will be there. So, you know, I really don't know internally but I do think part of the problem is with Congress too, on some of the things. The quality assurance things they put in place actually, whether they control for corruption, you can say maybe, but they do add an enormous amount of waste. Back there. Hi, Doug Brooks with the Afghan American Chamber of Commerce also with the International Stability Operations Association representing the contractors. If you wanna find out what's wrong with contracting, you need to talk to them over a beer in private. They're not, they're gonna be the last people to criticize their client for contracting issues. But the one thing I did wanna bring up was the security issue. Certainly in Africa we often say that security is 90% of the problem but 10% of the solution. You need to have security for private sector operations and one thing, I just did a quick scan of the book. I don't see any discussion of the Afghan Public Protection Force and what a disaster that's been. There's not gonna be any serious foreign direct investment until companies know they can keep their people safe, the people they hire safe, all their equipment safe and that's just not in place yet for mining or anything else. And so, you're getting some of the adventurous companies to go in but the real serious companies are not going to go in until there's some sort of reform of private security so they can hire their own security. They can't simply rely on the police and military to do this, they have other responsibilities and the APVF has just been a disaster and I don't even know why it's not even discussed in more detail in the book. I'd be interested in that insight. Thank you. I saw other hands in the middle, gentlemen in the middle there. Hi, I'm Tim Niefel from the National Defense University. My question is along the same lines with the whole security economy paradox, chicken and the egg. Mr. Bird, I know that your views on it, you stated that pretty clearly security comes first and so the gentleman behind me just recently, I'd like to hear if there are any competing arguments to that and how foreign direct investment and the private sector opportunities can be a good way to combat that, especially in light of the fact that when the Taliban get to the table and when they do agree on a settlement for peace terms, many believe the violence won't stop because the Taliban itself is not simply an organization with a hierarchical structure where the one person in charge says this is the way it's going to be. There are organized crime groups, there are extremist groups that will continue in drug traffickers that will continue to drain the economy afterwards. So how do we combat that using the foreign direct investment and economic opportunities? Thank you. Let me turn to the panel but insert yet another security question that I've got which also has to do on the donor side in the US in particular, I think there was a tension between the economic development objectives as a pure economic issue versus the stabilization theories of providing jobs in the areas that were the least secure. And I'm also kind of curious in terms of our strategy and choices, to what extent were the competing objectives of economic development versus stabilization an issue in the choices that we made? So Bill, I'll start with you. Yeah, actually good points on security and I would actually argue that even more important than security is political stability. And the obvious thing about the APPF, I mean, if you really, for example, want serious mining companies to come and invest, they'll bring their own security. And so requiring them to use the APPF is just a non-starter. And if I could make a personal plea, Scott had earlier asked what's the one thing to do. I-NEC copper and oil and gas in the North, these are low-hanging fruits. And it's, in my view, virtually criminal that they actually aren't much further advanced than they are. Yeah, the Scott's point, so I think what will help is not that violence suddenly exits the country and you don't need a violence-free country to actually have private sector development. I think actually more, you are gonna have insecurity. Bigger companies can manage it. And I think actually a bigger problem, I would almost fly. I mean, the security situation is really deteriorated. So that's serious. But I would argue quite often, let's say in 2011 to 2014, actually the security situation was better in a lot of the country due to the surge. And there the problems were, I would think on the political side and instability. So right now I don't think, and we have another election coming up. So I would highlight the instability and the political sort of uncertainty as as big, I would argue bigger than purely security per se. Yeah, stabilization versus development. We know during the surge stabilization took over. We often felt in the World Bank in the early years that we were the lone advocate for development. Because the World Bank actually has a long term priority. We made plenty of mistakes too, so I'm not doing that. But it was very ironic that every, there was seemed to be short-termism almost throughout the whole situation. So the stable, and you know, you pretty clear the evidence, I think it's clear. I'm looking forward to the cigar report. But stabilization assistance can maybe help for six months to 18 months. It disappears then, you know. I mean, the effects disappear. You know, I was sitting in the ministry when APPF took into mining the mine security forces. And it was because coal miners were striking because they hadn't been paid. And our ministry was all of a sudden on set with hundreds and hundreds of really angry coal miners, most of whom had never been to Kabul. And that idea was we need to get the miners in order. It wasn't, it was about keeping the Afghan miners in and not getting other people out. And it was a very disturbing time. For a while, it kind of worked. They were given the voluntary principles by the United Nations, which I actually wrote a training manual and delivered it to the APPF on mining. Unfortunately, it's gotten completely out of control and investors won't rely on it. There are now federal rules that you have to hire certain firms. You can't hire your own people. That's not the answer either, because when they were allowed to hire their own people, we had the similar problem. Whether you're from, you know, Italy or Europe or America, the security guys are not really who you want surrounding the perimeter of your mine. And I will reiterate that mining companies will come in in an insecure environment. I wish that you would have a round table with the mining companies and you will hear from them that they are not adverse to a conflict zone. They're used to it. It can't be to the point where they're kidnapped every other day. But where I do see an issue is when you do a project like TAPI and you have this extenuated isolated pipeline in some places and you're gonna create, you know, 5,000 security positions. Is that really the way you want to develop an economy? It's kind of like, do you want to use, you know, develop a lot of casinos to generate immediate wealth? So I think security is a huge issue and we should let our Afghan colleagues at the mine site and at the energy project site help us. The communities know what works and that's the way I would suggest to go more local in addressing the issue. Yeah, just to add a couple of things. Certainly the, on the insecurity versus uncertainty, certainly the extensive interviews we did in the field with Afghan firms, Afghan businesses. Okay, point taken, international firms may not be, may be scared off by insecurity. Afghan firms by and large said that, you know, insecurity is a bad thing but we can deal with it. At least we know how to deal with it. We can work around it. But it's more, and I think in the report that's why we distinguish insecurity from uncertainty. What they really found a problem with is the uncertainty that came from, you know, changing government policies, tax rates, you know, warlords, land grabbing, corruption, all these types of the shakedowns from the police. They by and large feel that they can work around in a not ideal insecure situation. On the public protection force, we don't mention it explicitly. It's implicitly in the box on economic strongmen, there's a reference to private security companies and we just mention them. There obviously wasn't time to go, or space to go into the protection force, but we do kind of allude to it in the box on strongmen. Add one other thing on security. Not so much security for enterprises, but security for our own officials and implementing partners. And this is something that came up in interviews with our own government officials, USAID, State Department, as well as implementing partners. And that has to do with the mobility and the ability to actually get out into the field. And we do discuss a very briefly kind of trying to find a balance between security, obviously maintaining safety of our own staff is primary, both Afghan and US and international, but finding the balance with allowing people to get out to sites. And I think certainly right now, Afghanistan is a fairly dangerous environment. It's much more understandable now, but when you go back to the early, 2002, 2003, four, where objectively there were far lower risks, there were still these restrictions. And this is something that we heard again and again and again, let us go out. We know why we're under no illusions. And again, we're not advocating for exposing people to risk, but it's just something that affects the ability to do monitoring and evaluation and understand what's happening in the field. Thanks, so a few other hands. We go to Andrew and then the gentleman in front. Hi, thanks, Andrew Wilder, USIP. Again, thanks for a great panel. I wanted to come back to the comment about Congress. And we've spent probably maybe a trillion in Iraq fighting wars and trying to rebuild it. We've probably spent close to that in Afghanistan. If we had another situation like that, I guess I'm not confident that any of the lessons so-called learned that we're producing, all of us have been, many of us have been involved in producing them or doing the research are actually learned because ultimately it comes back to a lot of the regulatory frameworks or the incentive systems based in back here in Washington. And after having done lots of research in Afghanistan, I fundamentally concluded actually the real research project needs to be back here and maybe the next SEGAR report needs to be back here because ultimately if we don't figure out how to get contracting right to work in these kinds of situations or removing the use it or lose it incentives for how we spend our budgets in these situations but then fuel the corruption that then legitimizes insurgencies that we all then spend billions of dollars trying to deal with through our military means or fundamental things like how we assign our personnel to work in these contexts where on one year rotations in countries where lots depends on your relationships and networks and things like that. So all these we know and every lessons learned report identifies many of these things but 17 years later, as far as I'm aware, none of them have actually been addressed because ultimately it requires making changes back here in Washington. So I think I noticed in here you have one recommendation for Congress. I guess that would be my complaint and I would highly recommend that SEGAR's report be focusing on this issue because I think if we really want to see change that's what would potentially have more impact than trying to identify more problems in Afghanistan. So sorry for the editorial comment but over to you. Yeah, we'll allow it. This gentleman here at his hand up two rows in front of you and then I'll go to the other side next round. Thank you very much. My name is Safir Sahar. I'm working with Kimonix since 2010. The W2 membership was highlighted in the report. So, and it was also further highlighted that Afghanistan and donor community was a little bit inherited to getting the membership. I was part of this process. I just want to highlight a few points that the proper strategy was behind the membership. You know one of the issue for Afghanistan is that Afghanistan is a landlocked country and they have always the issue with the transit, especially with the neighboring country. So one of the strategy was that Afghanistan become a member of W2 to use the Article 5, the benefit of Article 5 which is freedom of transit. The other strategy was that you know Afghanistan become a member of W2 before the other neighboring countries that during the negotiation when this country is also in the pipeline they becoming the members so they can resolve their bilateral issue as well. So, and there's other opportunity also within the W2O that you know Afghanistan got the observed membership of the GPA, the government procurement agreements. While we are talking about the private sector development I think this is another great opportunity that if Afghanistan become a full member of the GPA there is a trillions of dollars contract opportunity for that. But all that membership cannot help. So Afghanistan become a member and now Afghanistan needs to be an active members to ask for the rights of the freedom of transit and also to get another opportunity which is available under the W2O as well. So for that I think Afghanistan government is needs huge support for the post accession which at the moment the government thinks that they are not seeing that. Thanks. Thanks. Let me take one more over here, a couple of comments. You can think about your reactions to that but Craig let me take a question from you as well. Craig Harck, apology advisors. Whoa. On the mining, you know Afghanistan's mineral resources were exploited throughout the Soviet war and have been on at least a small scale done ever since. Aware of that history I was the first person to push for back in 2002 US Geological Survey to go in and do the geologic and geodetic survey and they prove that the mineral resources of Afghanistan are indeed substantial and do represent great potential. So my question is I see a kind of difference of views on the panel whereas there's some optimism about it and some pessimism about certainly even in the near term. And my question is what can be done to stimulate the community as it stands now under the conditions that exist now? Thank you. Thanks. Who wants to leave? Stimulate the Afghan community? The mining? Yeah. Right. Right, right. I mean I think one thing we, I don't know I'm not in Washington very much but you know it's not just America out there. Every country is in Afghanistan sniffing around the mining sector and I see them and I know them and China we know is there but that's the one that gets the play in the news here but there are certainly plenty of other investors that are around. When it comes to returned Afghans or Afghans who have money that is where I would see the hanging fruit and you go for that right now. The small scale mining, the artisanal mining and something that no one ever talks about which is the quarries. I mean they're just within Kabul alone. There are 238 something like that quarries, right? Everybody talks about building and construction materials. Let's commercialize and help these quarries operate better. They're doing their best but they need a little bit more help. Coal, it's an ugly word in America but everybody else is kind of looking at it because the National Coal, the Northern Coal Company which is the state owned company and it's about to be probably commercialized and corporatized was the largest taxpayer from all the state owned enterprises and guess what? It overpaid its taxes, you know? But the problem with that, those guys literally the management's had never been to Kabul. They live in Puli Humry. They've never been to Kabul so we find that hard to believe. So they have investors coming all the time to their door that Kabul doesn't even know about. They have a lot of Taliban problems right now. That might be an issue for security and mining that needs to be addressed but where their biggest problem was they had something like 434 staff and 6,000 workers on a produce or perish mentality and you do not want that in mining especially in deep coal mining which is dangerous which means you get paid by how many tons you and your team produce. So those are the areas where when I hear enabling environment, give me a labor contract, give me fair labor practices, give me some steel-toed boots so that these guys don't go barefoot into the mine. You know, some very functional stuff. That's where I would take mining right now and then I would gradually go, everybody thinks INAC, big investment, Haji Gok, you know, the time will come but let's get our ducks in a row and let's start where things are already viable and happening. There's more than 3,000 licenses, you know. So 3,000 operations, let me say but they're going on. So let's try to see where we can have some value at it in those enterprises and then go from there. Yeah, first, I mean to Andrew's point very much agree with your points and maybe we can make this a request to SIGAR that they do a lessons learned on the inter because as the IG was mentioning, SIGAR is uniquely placed because it's supposed to look at all different agencies and presumably it could also look at restrictions imposed by Congress. So I think it might be a very good thing to ask for a lessons learned and let's really try to do something there. I think it's a more general problem in the world aid system with many of the same kinds of problems about the focus on projects rather than sectors and programs and outcomes and so on. On the minerals, very interesting, right? I mean, you have these projects, large projects that are more abundant for 10 years and I did a paper on for God's sake, let's get INAC going. And then you've got in the meantime, lots of small scale, you could crudely estimate the value in somewhere in the one to $2 billion range a year which may be up to 10% of GDP that's currently being extracted. Coal is a lot, maybe $300 million of coal. Some of it public sector and there's tons and tons of small unlicensed, unregulated or any basically coal mines springing up. There's a lot of coal fairly near the surface I would guess. And the other point both about coal and also about hydrocarbon is really focus on those as import substitution. Again, Afghanistan imports a lot of energy. So if you can produce it domestically you don't have the headaches of let's say trying to transport iron ore thousands of miles out of the country or something like that. So I would focus on that. But so you sort of got to do some things about stemming the bleeding. I mean, it's really grotesque. What is going on in some cases? I mean, there's case studies of TAL, Collapis lazuli has become so cheap that it's decorating the floors and Dubai airport terminal three. I mean, it should be quite a valuable thing that Afghanistan has a monopoly on. So I could go on. On the WTO, let me just make a point. Let's think about Afghan agriculture. That's WTO risks taking away the protection, whatever potential for protection of Afghan agriculture. And since there was never agreement internationally on agricultural subsidies, the Doha I think failed and all that. What you're left with is WTO is preventing Afghanistan from imposing tariffs on agriculture products. Other countries protect their agriculture through subsidies. But the last thing we would recommend Afghanistan to do is to impose big fiscal subsidies with money they don't have and would have to come from donors. So you left them in a catch 22. And so I would just plead for more protections which I think were there more under the GATT than under WTO that you could really have long-term exemptions for low income countries. And it relates to the point about more preparation to join WTO. I don't think anybody disagrees that joining WTO is a good idea, but how fast and how do you roll it out? And frankly, I'm a little suspicious about the transit stuff and disciplining neighboring countries. Countries may join WTO and just not observe it. There are many members and I think even China is a member of WTO now and they certainly play around. Miss, what do you wanna call it, abuse the rules? Yeah, nothing much more to add on WTO except I would disagree a little bit with the idea that there was no one who thought it was a bad idea. We actually found it to be very controversial and there seemed to be a very limited cadre of personnel and Ministry of Commerce and industry who were in favor of it. I think that was one of the reasons I believe it was Tafa or Atar did a lot of outreach into the community doing surveys and other forms of communication to try to sway a very skeptical public on that. So I think there was a fair amount of resistance, I think maybe for the reasons that you mentioned, fear of losing any leverage over support to domestic industries. Andrew, the only thing I'd say, yeah, that was one recommendation, but at least it was about trying to provide a stable funding. So I think, yeah, that's an important thing and certainly if CIGAR was to do a report on contracting, which initially sounds not so exciting. It could include some of the issues, kind of the political economy of contracting and why things go the way they do. So I would support that, certainly. Let me just take a final set of questions from over on this side. Gentleman right next to you, how about that? Let's start with him. Yes, my name is Saul Helfenbein. I'm one of those older Peace Corps volunteers. Oh! In the 1960s. When there actually was a rather big spurt of private sector development in the late 60s. But the question I wanted to ask has to do with the comments on paradigms and enabling environments, governance and corruption. And I was wondering, as part of looking into the question of governance, particularly the absence of good governance, was there any attention paid to the media and the local civil society in terms of their roles and whether opportunities were missed in helping the media and civil society call government to higher levels of accountability. And in terms of going forward, is there any thinking about what role the media and civil society could play? All right, let me ask you guys to take notes. Let me make this a speed round. So please be brief, but I'll try to include people. Next to you, the lady had a question. Oh, there you go first. Yeah, you're here. Thank you. I agree with the panel that this report is very timely and it can contribute to the world or all ongoing discussions in different areas. From an Afghan perspective, I see one big challenge as an Afghan working with some policymakers as well, is that we do agree with what needs to be done. The biggest challenge when it comes is we do agree with this sort of recommendation is for us to understand how to put it in practice, translating these recommendations into policy, into program. And that's the biggest challenge. Is there any way to help the Afghan or policymakers in not only understanding what needs to be done, how it needs to be done. Thank you. And behind you then. Hi, I'm Mary Beth Tyson. I've worked in private sector development, primarily SME finance in Afghanistan, but on USAID projects for DFID and also Dunedah. And I was in Helmand as DFID's private sector advisor for a year and a half, 2011 and 2012. And I wanna kind of add emphasis to the comments that the panel has made about the importance of establishing a rule of law, but also bring to the discussion that in my experience, what I've seen is a huge and very egregious examples of ignoring the laws and the mechanisms that were put in place by foreign actors there, both DOD, civilians and military, and by USAID and US actors as well. This is not necessarily an Afghan problem. We've just flaunted it left and right. And in one instance, I had a Marine JAG officer tell me that the reason they thought a deed of trust for property in Helmand was not valid was because it was old. And it quote predated the Russians. And they just ignored the fact that the donor community had set up Arazi, which was the central government's institution for allocating government land. It's very important that we accept our own responsibility here as well. Thank you. Last very brief comment on the row here. My name is Sergey. And as you may understand, I'm origin of Russian. So anyway, I was working in Afghanistan for four years, during four years, from 2009 till 2013, and last year for DFID also in Afghanistan, advising for DFID. So I wanna talk about security and what I heard here that mainly security is considered as armed protection, but it's not actually an issue of armed protection. It's an issue of friendly community where you have offices. What I noticed in Afghanistan, every single program is kind of a single fortress with weapon protected by APBF or it was protected in 2011, it was protected by private companies, but with their weapons targeted the community. Instead, as I know history of Russia in 1920s, and 1920s when Russian aid workers were coming to stands and living in the communities. They didn't have this protection. They were successful. Thank you. So my point is I was managing a huge program, helping farmers away from our office, like 600 kilometers. So community where we were located, they did not know that we are good guys. And I think if they knew that we are good guys, we would have better protection, right? Why don't when USAID award a program, why don't they award a satellite small program which would help their security like a community program to teach them ballet. I was, I am a karate master, black belt. So I had a bunch of kids who were willing to teach karate and I wanted to implement this program community. And you know that the experts in Afghanistan, they have nothing to do during evenings. They can do this for free. So this in kind program could have helped to see trust between donor and recipient. Thank you very much. Let me turn to the panel. Thank you. All right, final comments, choose what you want to address. Let me start with Bill. No, some very interesting points raised quickly on putting recommendations into practice. You know, there actually is a lot of experience with that in Afghanistan and there are success stories. And from my perception, particularly focused in 2002 to 2006 when I was based in Kabul, what really made the difference was not the foreign assistance or the quality of it. It was the Afghan ministries and their leadership and management teams. And in my view, the Afghan, the Afghan ministries that had strong management teams and leadership in the early years are the ones that have had durable success. And if you started out like very badly, like the Ministry of Agriculture, the Ministry of Energy, they haven't even caught up since that. And in Ministry of Mines, of course they had a good minister and he was killed in a mysterious plane crash in Pakistan. So if I had one recipe, it would be to make sure you have strong leadership which doesn't mean that the minister has to be a technical expert that sometimes could even be harmful. But you need a team and he needs to delegate and trust a strong management team and that's where you can take off the success stories, Ministry of Public Health, Ministry of World Development, Ministry of Finance, Telecom, especially in the early years. Those all had strong management teams and they could then discipline the donors and they could get out of the donors what they do. I strongly believe, nobody can coordinate the donors except the Afghan government. So this is not the full answer to your question but it really has to be led by the Afghan government and there are success stories to prove it. Yes, I do think these things about the rule of law and it drives me crazy when people say, oh, it's always been a corrupt society. It's never been governed. From the 1930s to 1970s, Afghanistan was, you could argue, not a high performer development-wise but it was decently governed and the Afghan government in that period, however weak it was, it controlled its borders, it controlled the activities of foreigners, it managed diplomacy, which at that time during the Cold War was not an easy task and no government since then, Afghan government since then has done as well at some of those basic functions as the government then. And yes, foreigners should observe. There are so many cases I can remember of rather than being prosecuted, foreign contractors get taken out of the country and all kinds of things like that. Your point about security is right. Security is something, it shouldn't be just the fact that you have a security guard. It really should be something a little more intangible and how people feel comfortable and I'm afraid, I guess, in 2002, it was really, really striking and remember shopkeepers talking to each other and there were some British peacekeeping troops, they were there and there were some women there that said, look, oh, they were joking. Oh, even women are, we're having women protecting us but they were laughing it off and there was so much receptivity to a modest foreign peacekeeping intervention at the time, but at the time it was restricted only to be in Kabul and that was a crazy, that was one of the early mistakes. And so, you know, but my concern now is that a lot of that potential for what you might call community-based security, I'm afraid a lot of the communities have been taken over by people we more like called power holders or warlords. So I just wonder how easy it is to do now. It would have been great to emphasize that more earlier but hindsight is 100%. Quick final comments from the next year. Just really quickly, in response to the median civil society, we had a great program funded by USAID for energy journalists. I could never get it renewed. They didn't see the utility and I wanted to do the same thing for mining journalists. That's the kind of stuff that also contributes to a good enabling environment. So civil society, I think EITI helped to build more civil society engagement around mining and there's certainly plenty more to do. We need more NGOs. We need to actually fund environmental NGOs, to be monitors and to evaluate various infrastructure projects. So there's a lot more to be done there. On capacity, my big thing is to build networks. So if you have the Chamber of Commerce, if you have the Association of Marble, if you have the coal people, whoever you have, the gold miners, everybody has associations already. What can we do to enable them to be even stronger? These things are there. We need to help people facilitate more action. As far as the legal issue, the arrogance that is sometimes just inherent with the U.S. effort, notably in the last three to four years, is astounding. And we all need to go to the country as guests. And we all need to realize that we are in somebody else's home turf and be more respectful. And somehow that training is not happening at certain levels of U.S. providers and it needs to be. And then finally, in community, we have community development agreements in mining. They're not doing very well. They were a big thing for the last 15 years in Africa and in Asia. And now they've sort of fallen away because they're not sufficiently enforced and a lot of other reasons. INAC has a community development agreement attached to it. They really haven't done a thing. So we have to make sure that when we do infrastructure projects, mining, energy projects, we don't build these concrete walls around them. I think your point was excellent. Paul, last word. Yep. Fairly quickly. On the media, yeah, there are a lot of civil society, NGOs doing advocacy work in various topics, particularly, as Mayor Louise mentioned, around mines and some of the equity issues there. I think there's less on other economic issues because I don't think there's, again, there's a good understanding of how the economy operates. And I know I think it was Tafa had a program or a sub-program to have an economic round table for journalists to inform them and help them get the word out. But yeah, very active civil society, maybe less so in the economic realm. And I assume you're asking that as a former advisor to the cobble times. Yeah, just quickly to add response to Mary Beth. I think some of it, not to get too high-handed here, but I think some of it is inherent with the idea that we came in to save Afghanistan and we're helping these poor people. So I think some of that just gets transmitted into people's attitudes. We all have the stories of things we've seen and heard. I think final comment on to Serge Day, is that to some extent, what you describe as inevitable because the reconstruction or humanitarian component was seen as part of the military component and so you had a kind of emerging of development and security. So it kind of got absorbed in the way we operate in that environment. That's another panel. Look, thank you very much. Look, there are still questions in the audience. This has been a long session, but a really productive one. Please join me in thanking Paul and the cigar team for the report and the panelists for their great conversation. Thank you. Thank you. Bye.