 Ginger Cruz, thanks so much for your time. We might begin by having you tell us a little bit about your background. Okay. I'm the Deputy Inspector General for a group called CIGR, which is the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction. Our office was created by the U.S. government to audit and investigate and inspect the $50 billion program that the United States put in place when we engaged in Iraq. And so for the last six years now, I've been overseeing an office where we have looked very deeply at the issues of how the United States engages in overseas contingency operations, and we have issued hundreds of reports that look at all of the different aspects and try and make recommendations that we hope are relevant not just for Iraq, but for engagements of host governments and donor governments all across the world when it comes to fragile states and overseas contingency operations. Given your background and given what you're doing, Ginger, what are some of the key points you think should be raised at this meeting? Well, one of the things we've done is we've, after doing all of the work for six years, pulled it all together into a book called Hard Lessons, which I know many of the participants at this conference have actually seen. And what we've tried to do is capture through a study of the efforts in Iraq, some of the key challenges that the community, the international community is facing as it engages in a very different type of stabilization operation. We firmly believe that the last 10 years has seen a dramatic shift in the types of national security challenges that are faced by the international community. And so it's necessitated a change in response, and we feel that there are many shortfalls because much of that response in Iraq, in Afghanistan, and many of the other locations has been ad hoc. It has not been thoroughly planned. It has not been based in institutions that really understand the differences of the challenges that we're facing today. And so we've tried to distill down some of the key lessons and put them forward. And they're lessons that are quite simple actually, things like it's not a good idea to build large infrastructure in an insecure environment. That's something that's often grappled with, especially by the United States. They're continuing to grapple with that question in Afghanistan. And when you look at how much money it takes to build large-scale infrastructure and you evaluate the impact of building that large-scale infrastructure, it really is not proven that you're going to win hearts and minds. You're probably going to spend the majority of your money on security companies. There's a very large possibility that some of that money will end up in the hands of insurgents or terrorists in a community who are providing services that you're going to rely on. And these are the types of things that as you look at reactions to contingency operations, you start to realize there are so many unintended consequences that really need to be taken into consideration before you plan these types of operations. Do you think then, Ginger, one of the mistakes is made that countries like the United States try to impart what works back home in the country that they're working in, and it doesn't always translate? That is a large part of the problem. Another part of the problem is that the whole concept of rebuilding a fragile state is so dependent on the capacities and the sustainable concepts of whatever state that is that you're trying to rebuild. And too often when there are these contingency operations, the first reaction is to try and build a country up to an international standard that perhaps doesn't fit well with the community in which you're engaging. So I think that has been another lesson that has been learned. One example I think that makes a lot of sense is the Nazarene Water Treatment Plant. I went down to visit it in 2006, and the United States, meaning well, decided that it was going to try and build the most advanced water treatment plant in Iraq. And so we invested $280 million, built this very advanced water treatment plant that could potentially serve a large swath of the community, millions of people with improved water, and they had very bad water systems at the time. The problem was it was put into a place where, under the Saddam Hussein regime, the people of this area and the tribes that lived there were not adequately educated. So when you went in to do training programs, and you gave them the five-week training program, even though it was translated into Arabic, it didn't work because they couldn't even read and write Arabic. They were mostly illiterate. And because of the ethnic tension, you couldn't really bring in people from other tribes who run the water treatment plant. And so as a result, over the past couple of years, it's progressively worn down. They've not been able to connect it to power sources. It's not changed the minds of the community. We just did an evaluation to see if people think of the United States any better, having put this $280 million water treatment plant. It's not changed their minds. So it's a very hard lesson to learn when you put that much effort and you try and do something to make a good impression. And you really end up failing and wasting $280 million in the process. So it sounds a lot like enough homework is often not done, that there should be more research. That is one of the big problems. Needs assessments are so rarely done when you're talking about a contingency operation because the necessity of war and response and the fact that you've got a population in crisis necessarily makes everyone want to react very quickly. So there's a large flush of money that donor countries pour into a location. There is not sufficient assessment of what the conditions are, what would be sustainable. And so all of the goodwill and all of this flood of resources and money very often is lost to waste and inefficiencies and does not create the long-term benefits or results that are intended or frankly that really should be kept in mind as the international community runs shorter and shorter on the resources that are necessary to do these types of interventions. So you're absolutely right. A lot more planning, a lot more forethought, a lot more understanding of a host nation's both formal and informal capacities really needs to occur before these types of engagements begin. So the best of intentions don't always deliver the best of results? Absolutely. I think the best intentions, that's one of the problems. The other problem that our organization has identified is really an institutional one. One of the things that we have found over the course of the last seven years is on the national front in the United States, there really is not a centralized location within our government that is focused specifically on the issue of stabilization. It right now is a whole of government effort which is somewhat chaotic, somewhat ad hoc and could really benefit from more internal organization. I think the same thing could be said about the international community in that there are many international efforts in London, in Canada, in Australia that are starting to build this sieve mill capacity to do stabilization operations, but at the moment there really is no dedicated international organization that focuses just on stabilization to sort of bring together the sieve mill organization here in Australia with the stabilization unit in London, with START in Canada, and with the capacities that need to be developed in the United States. The United Nations has a very different, very broad mission. This is much more specific. This is just stabilization operations and I really do think that there is a need to have some sort of international nexus where all of the different capabilities which are being built can plug in, learn from each other and really develop some best practices. It's interesting, Ginger, because we've had many people talk to us during these interviews about the need for human security and putting humans first, but you're also saying and making a very clear point that you shouldn't get too overwhelmed by the need to do good and emotion clearly because that can sometimes cloud good judgment, is that what you're saying? There has to be a very fine balance between getting too emotional as far as future planning? That's part of it. I think another lesson from many of the engagements recently has been the need to scope more realistic goals for the international community. Very often we'll hear people say that there are not enough resources, as if somehow lamenting the lack of resources is going to result in some benevolent organization showing up with billions of dollars, and that's not going to happen. There is a global economic downturn. Everyone needs to understand there just are not enough resources to be able to do large-scale programs in areas that have so much need, so it necessitates a smarter approach. The only way to close that gap between an increasing threat of failed and failing states and decreasing financial resources because of a global economic downturn, the only way to close that gap is by improving economy efficiency and effectiveness of what we do. It's a need to determine if you can't do 100 things, what are the five things that make the most impact in a situation that you can afford to do and you can do well and you can coordinate with other members of the international community and get the most bang for your buck. I think that the dialogue really needs to turn from sort of the handout saying we need more, we don't have enough, we can't possibly handle all of this and setting goals and objectives that kind of sound like let's achieve world peace, which is not going to be achievable. Setting more realistic goals, determining what the international community can do, determining what is the highest value of sieve mill interactions in fragile and failing states and then focusing on doing that, evaluating how we're doing it and feeding that back so that we can do what we do better because the threat is not going to go away, the resources are not going to magically materialize and if we don't get smarter at this, it's just going to get worse in the next couple of decades. So Ginger, how do we communicate our goals and then how do we evaluate them? I think those are two different things that need to be addressed and they're both critical. I think communicating the goals begins with creating a more intelligent dialogue in the media, in the public, on the internet that engages the broader public and a much smarter discussion of what needs to happen. There is so much information right now that's flying around that people read on the front of the page of their newspapers or they'll read in a blog and they're scratching the surface. They're seeing the reactions of governments, they're seeing the donors, they're seeing the violence that's going on in these locations and they can't understand why the best efforts of so many nations is having such lackluster results and I think it's incumbent upon the media, I think it's incumbent upon the actors that are part of this, NGOs, multinational corporations, government agencies to engage the public in a smarter dialogue that really understands the nuances of what we're trying to do because then you build the public support that pressures the politicians to then behave in a more responsible fashion and I know that sounds very, it's a bit polyannish, it's my version of world peace I guess, but politicians are not going to change the way that they approach this unless they're pressured and that pressure, the easiest way to find the pressure point for the politicians and the decision makers is by building a broad consensus and I think the public is much smarter than most give them credit for being and I think that if they were engaged in a very smart dialogue I think you would find that most people could understand the challenges that we're facing, could help push towards more realistic outcomes. As far as the evaluation goes, our organization does that, the US government is sort of well known for creating entities that then provide quality assurance and criticize how things are done with an eye towards improvement, sort of an independent evaluator that stands next to you, evaluates what is ongoing and then provides sort of that hard response that allows you to honestly know what it is you're doing wrong, what's not working, I think the international community could really also benefit from that, an independent voice that evaluates the outcomes and then provides that feedback as painful as it may be so that the people who run the programs have an opportunity to improve those programs or maybe jettison programs that don't work. Ginger Cruz, thanks so much for your time. Thank you.