 Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. Welcome to the Center for Strategic and International Studies. I'm David Burto. I'm the Senior Vice President and Director of our National Security, Industry, and Resources program. I'm very pleased to welcome you here today. I'm also pleased to welcome our viewers on the web. For those of you in the room, I'd ask you to turn off your cell phones and your other noise makers. I've turned mine off, but I'm leaving it available so that at the end, when we take questions, we can get questions from viewers on the web as well. If you are watching on the web, you can take down my email now. It's D-B-E-R-T-E-A-U at CSIS.org. You can email questions as we go. And when we get tired of the questions from the audience, we'll turn to the ones from the web instead. It's a great privilege to have with us this morning Paul Brinkley to talk about both his book and the life of experiences that led up to it. And perhaps a little bit about what's been going on in the last few weeks, months, and years as well. Paul Brinkley came out of the private sector, had no idea that he was going to end up as a government official. He probably would have planned his life differently had he done that and never answered that first phone call. I first met him when he was the head of the Business Transformation Agency inside DOD, had an enormous set of tasks underway, and then followed his work on in Iraq. We at CSIS had the privilege of doing a couple of independent assessments of some of the work done by the task force that is described in Paul's book. So in full disclosure, I want to make sure you know that we've had an inside view along the way a couple places. Paul will, the way we'll proceed today is we'll have some opening remarks. Then he'll join me on the stage here. And I'll ask a few questions while you guys are busy organizing your own. And then we will throw the floor open to questions from the floor. When we get to that point, we'll give you a microphone and we'll walk you through the procedures of how you do that. So please join me in welcoming the Honorable Paul Brinkley. How are we now? How do you like me now? We good? All right. Did you hear all that stuff? Because I was basically thinking CSIS. I don't need to go over that again. I think today what I'll do is keep my opening remarks as brief as I can and try to focus on some big strategic paintbrush type things and then get into questions and answers. Before I do, there are a few people here I do want to recognize. Sadi Othman just joined us here in the back, an amazing individual I still have the opportunity to work with. Did remarkable work in Iraq continues to stay engaged on behalf of our country and the region. And good to see you here with us today, Sadi. I appreciate your presence. I think recent headlines have contributed to what I hope is a good discussion today. After 10 years, almost 13 years now since the events of 9-11, we're reaching that point, that inflection point in our history where we can start to look back at the events that have transpired since that horrible day and ask ourselves some hard questions about our foreign policy apparatus and how well equipped that foreign policy apparatus is to address the challenges and needs of post-conflict environments and I would say in a larger sense the developing world in general. As Dave indicated, I came from the private sector. I joined the Pentagon in 2004 ostensibly to lead an effort to improve the business operations of the Department of Defense. There are faces here today that I recognize from those days. Many of you don't know that actually you probably do, but it's a little known in the country that the Department of Defense is the largest industrial organization in the world by a factor of about four. It's got the equivalent of multiple airlines and shipping lines and logistics entities and Walmart level distribution operations in order to enable our missions to happen. And so there's a lot of energy and effort that goes into improving the business of the department, making it work more efficiently for our missions overseas. And at home, I took a small team of business people into a rock in 2006 to find out how well the payroll was working for the troops, how well the logistics systems were delivering material to the troops. And what we encountered in 2006, and I suspect we'll talk about more later, is our forces, young men and women, 19, 20, 21-year-olds trained to execute complex combat operations in very difficult environments where they didn't understand the language and had no background in the culture. And when we arrived as business people, they didn't want to talk about the payroll and the logistics systems. They wanted us to get in the field and help them get businesses running again. Your business guys, I don't want to hear about what you came to talk about. Come out into Fallujah with us. Come out into Ramadi. We've just secured this area. All the businesses are shut down. The farmers aren't growing anything. It's been three years since we liberated Iraq. So what exactly can we do to help our young men and women in uniform restore normal life to these war-torn communities? A team was spawned as a result of that initial engagement that grew to hundreds of business people, agronomists, farmers, engineers, accountants who worked all over Iraq, all over Afghanistan, Pakistan, Sudan, Rwanda, a mission that became much larger than it began because we were filling a gap in our national foreign policy infrastructure that remains unfilled today. And that gap was to come in and supplement our foreign aid system, which is focused on the humanitarian needs of war-torn populations and our diplomatic infrastructure, which is focused on creating institutions in countries that are aligned with the values we as the United States believe are endemic to all human beings, to augment those institutions with tactical business expertise and tactical economic development capacity. That remains a missing piece of today's foreign policy infrastructure. Because we were in the Pentagon, our mission was controversial. No one in Washington feels good about the Department of Defense expanding its mission. There's a general good feeling in this town that the Department of Defense represents a huge overwhelming element of our national budget, of our national infrastructure, and to see it expand that role into economic activity made the civilian bureaucracy in this town very, very nervous for a whole host of good reasons. But there's a reality within the Defense Department when it's at war. And when young men and women are dying and letters are being written home and there's a gap in our foreign policy infrastructure, the Pentagon will fill it. And for five years, the Pentagon did fill it. I was fortunate to work with a remarkable group of people who were given complete freedom from normal security protocols. The team was aligned to report initially to the Deputy Secretary of Defense shortly after, directly to Secretary Gates, and removed from the bureaucratic structures that can hinder the ability for an organization to exercise agility in its missions. And for five years, that group of people operated without body armor, outside of walled compounds and razor wire, living and working in and among communities in war-torn places, initially with the troops. And as the troops moved on, staying behind, getting to know who the business people were who actually made and created the bedrock of the communities this country was seeking to stabilize. And that was our mission. And for five years, it went on until it was abruptly wrapped up in 2011 due to legislation generated by a nervous foreign policy system that was concerned about the scale and scope of the mission and the expansion of the Department of Defense's responsibilities that the mission threatened to create. So here we are over a decade later. The United States of America has invested over a trillion dollars in establishing and creating democratic representative institutions in Iraq, the blood of many of our young men and women. I think the latest data I saw, north of $700 billion in Afghanistan. And I think it's fair, as Americans, as tax-paying Americans, to get above it now and look at the approach that was taken and ask hard questions about whether we can do better. Because to me, the country that brought global economic integration to the world can do better than to have young men and women serving in violent places without access to business expertise to assist them. And our foreign policy infrastructure should fairly be expected to extend the most dynamic, vibrant elements of our society, our private sector and its ability to innovate and its ability to integrate nations and businesses into the global economy. We should have the ability as a nation to extend that capacity to these war-torn countries. There are elements of our foreign policy infrastructure today that I believe are antithetical to effectively doing that. They have to do with the security protocols that are imposed today as a result of our concerns over embassy bombings in the past, even recent events, tragic events in places like Benghazi where our diplomatic institutions have been attacked and the visceral American reaction, both political and in our hearts, we feel when our diplomats are placed in harm's way and injured. But I would ask you, placing our foreign policy development infrastructure under those security protocols, I would ask you if that can be effective. To see American development experts in the region today is to see people cocooned in body armor surrounded by armored convoys with guys carrying weapons. You cannot engage a local population if that's your security posture. A local individual who's looking for assistance to improve his life and countering a person cocooned like an astronaut walking among aliens is not going to connect and is certainly going to immediately recognize the sense that your life is more valuable than mine because of the way you're postured. Yet that is the posture of our diplomatic corps throughout the region, our embassies, our walled fortresses for reasons that have great validity in terms of our perception and our desire to keep our diplomats safe. But to put our development institutions into that same posture is to set them up for failure. We're spending hundreds of millions of dollars to improve the lives of people in the region, yet we are shackling them with an infrastructure that makes their ability to succeed almost impossible. I want to confront that. I think we owe it to ourselves to confront that with some hard questions. In my book, I confront that very directly. People in the region today suffer from a myth. There's a perception. We have it ourselves. Most Americans believe this. That when America engages in armed conflict with a country, what you can expect after the shooting stops is rapid economic improvement. And they look at countries like Japan. They look at countries like Germany, South Korea, where the United States was engaged in conflict. And they believe that we went in after the war was over and we rebuilt those countries through things like the Marshall Plan. And we reference those things all the time. But to study the history of the Marshall Plan is to see a very different template for development than what we applied in Iraq and Afghanistan. Three years after World War II ended and communism was threatening to sweep over Europe because of economic hardship, visionary people like Harriman and Marshall and President Truman committed financial assistance and advisory support to the war-torn countries of Europe so they could rebuild themselves. And we set benchmarks for their improvement in their institutions so that they could establish long-term sustainable infrastructure capable of providing the economic underpinning for liberal democratic institutions. That a magnificent success. But we didn't rebuild those countries. They rebuilt themselves with our financial assistance and our advisory support. That is not the experience we applied in Iraq. We came in with our contractors and our dollars and we said, we're going to rebuild. No capacity for creating their own economy was created in Iraq. Afghanistan, it's a similar story. If you look at our spending in Afghanistan, monthly spending on wartime operations, billions of dollars and an economy that has been based on, since 2002, for an aid. I recently returned from Kabul. And obviously President Karzai has been in the news a lot lately as the United States grapples with what it should do next in Afghanistan. You can feel the fear in the air in Kabul because they know that Kabul is an economic house of cards. Got a huge population and an economy 60 to 70% dependent in Kabul on the presence of foreign aid institutions. And as we draw down our troop presence in Afghanistan, I can assure you the vast majority of the NGOs who are operating in Kabul are not going to stick around as violence ticks up. And as those NGOs withdraw and the foreign aid spending exits Afghanistan, we are setting up an incredible time of difficulty for the Afghan people. We have an opinion in this country that if we can go in and establish established rule of law and establish democratic institutions and hold elections that all the other things that we take for granted in our society will follow. Economic prosperity depends upon our institutions. But I would turn that on its head and ask you to show me a single example in our history, human history, where democratic institutions did not emerge from the existence of economic capability and the emergence of a middle class that could sustain those. From English mercantilism that led to the Magna Carta to America's democracy, they were based upon a society and a population that had an economic vested interest in its own access to the sustaining and building institutions that allowed them to engage in their own governance. That hasn't happened in the Middle East. We've built a democratic structure in Afghanistan on an economy that doesn't exist. Therefore, it's fragile. I'm going to pivot to a rock and wrap up my opening comments so we can get to questions. We've seen the circumstances that have erupted recently in Anbar where we began our work in 2006, reopening factories that have been closed through policies implemented early, helping farmers get their crop yields improved and back online. In 2009, we did a study when we were bringing in investors to Iraq and we saw clear trends emerging. Foreign investors into Iraq were very interested in the South and they were very interested in the Kurdish North. Why? Because that's where the oil is. All the oil companies were moving into those places and the secondary and tertiary investment was following those economic waves. Where we didn't see any investment taking place and where there's no foreign direct investment interest was in the West. All that the West had was the Sons of Iraq, the militia program that was established during the surge to create jobs and employment opportunity initially to drive out al-Qaeda, but long term to keep young men and women or young men occupied and off the streets. Well, here we are, we made a proposal that in the absence of a vibrant economic activity, a development effort in Western Iraq, there was going to be an emerging sense of unfairness in the country. Young Sunni see young Shia getting jobs, entry level engineers in Basra today, getting out of school, start at $35,000 a year. We work in Basra today. Basra is undergoing a massive economic uplift as a result of all the investment taking place in the South. In the West, that opportunity doesn't exist. You cannot create along sectarian lines and ethnic lines, economic disparity and address economic disparity and then not expect unrest to reemerge. I'm not simplistic enough in my thinking to argue that economy is everything. There are a lot of elements to why people act out violently, but when you do not create economic opportunity in a population that's 50% under the age of 18 and you do not have access to employment and a better life when the TV, satellite TV and your internet access is showing you everyone else, in your country, starting to prosper, you've sown the seeds of discord. I think it's no accident in concert with what's happened in Syria that we see violence emerging again in Anbar. And until that economic element is dealt with and there's a sense of access to economic prosperity in the west of Iraq, as we warned in 2009 and as I described in the book, we're going to continue to see problems in terms of the internal stability of the Iraqi state. We make hard recommendations. I make a series of recommendations in the book. A lot of people in Washington aren't gonna like them, but their recommendations, their observations, how to free our foreign aid system from the rigidly imposed security protocols that we place around our diplomats. I've never met a more frustrated group of people than USAID workers in the field. They're so frustrated because they join USAID to go and do good and to engage in local access and populations and to help people, but today they're wrapped and armored and restricted from doing the very thing they went to work to do. I make hard recommendations that we unleash that asset to do great humanitarian work. And I make an argument that as a nation, not within the Pentagon, not within the Department of Defense, but it's time to look at our information age challenges in a world where everyone sees the developing world, like India and China, getting access to economic opportunity and leveraging instruments in the United States that extend our economic dynamism to this region of the world where we're confronting so many foreign policy challenges today. To take the heat out of the youthful rest of populations that see the rest of the world prospering and see themselves falling behind after over a decade of direct American engagement. And with that, I'll open up to anything you want to talk about. Well, we could open up by talking about that great comeback victory of Texas A&M over Duke, but we won't. Paul is a graduate of Texas A&M University and I am not a graduate of Duke, so it would be a lopsided discussion. Thank you, Paul. That was a good introduction and overview. For those of you who are looking forward to getting a copy of the book here, we will have some books in the back afterwards and Paul will be available to sit and sign them for you as well. I'd like to ask two or three questions before I open it up. And I want to start kind of at a rock and then kind of work up to slightly more philosophical issues if you will. Your book makes a case and you're certainly not the first or last to make this case that some of the initial actions taken by the Coalition of Provisional Authority to essentially shut down all of the state-owned enterprises across the country to eliminate the military and all of the Bathis from the government, essentially eliminate everything and start over from scratch. Set the stage for many of the problems that were there when you arrived three years later into the process. We can't go back and recreate that history. That's what happened and that's what it is. But as you reflect back, are there things you could have done differently when you first arrived that would have changed the outcome? Were there things that you know now that if you'd applied them earlier on could have had a different impact? Yeah, I think two levels of answer to that. So one is the last question first. Could we have done things differently? The year I regret the most is our first year in Iraq. And this is just reality. You don't know anything about a place until you've been in it for a year. And as Americans, and I was extremely guilty of this, you come into a place and you see a mess and you start trying to solve it, right? Especially when troops are getting killed. That was a desperate time. We remember that time in Iraq and we were embedded with our armed forces in places like Fallujah and Iskandaria and Hilla and Diala, you know, Bakuba. These were horrifically violent places where we were losing soldiers every day. And so the desperation of wanting to help and the intensity of that time led to things I look back on and say, wow, I wish I had just known now, known then what I know now. What would work, what wouldn't work? What was hindering progress? What wasn't hindering progress? And that gets back to your question about CPA. Because a lot of people have, I think, justifiably questioned some of the initial decisions. I've done that on the economy with CPA. But the thing to remember about CPA, CPA started in 2003 and was abruptly ended in the spring of 2004. Just as they were hitting their stride of that one-year learning curve where they could start to grapple with and adapt and modify decisions, they were out. In came a new crew. New crew comes in, they need their year, right? And so we used to hear this in Afghanistan all the time. We haven't been fighting a war in Afghanistan for 10 years. We've been fighting a war in Afghanistan one year at a time for 10 years. Every year a new crew, right? Because we rotate people in and out. And so an interesting business observation. We ended up working in Iraq for five years. And we did that through two methods. We had people who would go and be in Iraq for a year or two and stay. And then there was a core group of people, probably 35, 40 people, who would do one, two, three-week rotations into Iraq and then come home. One to two to three-week rotations and come home. And that felt a lot like what I experienced in the private sector from an international sales perspective. International sales guys are your most valuable guys. Big multinational company, international sales guy who can go into a country and who knows the people in the country and has been in the country long enough to figure the place out and continues to pivot in and out and sustain relationships and knowledge while you then bring in your expertise and they stay for a while and they go. Gives you continuity, gives you learning. You're able to sustain what you learn through that model. The private sector does this all the time. Our government does not. We do a one-year to two-year rotation and then you're gone. You're off to another country or you're off to another unit or another assignment. And so all that learning that's in your head, a lot of it's intuitive and you can't write it into policy or doctrine. It's just what you know about a place. The culture and how they think and how they talk and how to eat and all that stuff that's really important in cultures where we're not trusted, right? Disappears. We've got to sustain that engagement. That's a huge part of what went wrong and it makes it impossible to adapt because the policies that were implemented by CPA at the beginning became code. Every new group that came in just sustained them. This is the policy. This is how we do it. I must do it this way. And by the time they figure out that policy's not working, they leave. And the new guy comes in and inherits the policy. That's a huge brokenness. And I think if CPA had stayed in spite of the early mistakes, they would have been able to adapt. But because they were yanked out and a new group got brought in, they didn't get to adapt. We never saw adaptability in either of these conflicts. We still don't. We apply the same. It's Groundhog Day, right? Sonny and Cher start singing on the radio and here we go again. And it happens every year. One of the most difficult things in government, of course, is to admit that you're smarter today than you were yesterday because it immediately raises the question of why didn't you stop being dumb sooner? And you almost never have an answer to that question. But I think that's a good way to put it. Let me talk about a slightly more philosophical bent, though. And I think when you first met with General Corelli, this was clearly in his mind in 2006. He had the idea that part of the basis of the insurgency, that is the people who were actually doing the dirty work, was that they didn't have an alternative. And in his mind, if you put people back to work, you would reduce the propensity to violence and the desire to work for the insurgency. At CSIS, we kind of like to look at things analytically. And in fact, on that topic, there's a robust difference of opinion as to whether there is a correlation between putting people back to work and reducing the propensity to violence and what are the attributes of the situation that lend itself to that regard. So there's some who say that that correlation is not there. There's some who say it's a negative correlation that the more money there is in Nigeria, the more money there is to buy AK-47s and so violence actually goes up. What's your experience on this and how would you reflect on that both from Iraq and Afghanistan and elsewhere? Well, I tend to put a lot of stock in people who are engaged in trying to secure areas and what they tell you based on their experiences, given the seriousness of what they confront. Okay, these are not casual people. These are not people who just really think it'd be cool to go reopen some factories. Why don't we do that for a change? These are guys who are sending young men and women to go out in the field and they're dying every day. And so one of the things that really was a shocking revelation to me when we got in the field was how much disdain and disregard there often was within our analytical community of the opinions of flag-level officers who were actually in the zone and experiencing the day-to-day reality of the place and dealing with the interrogations of people they'd catch doing bad stuff and investigating the root causes of why and who they were tied to and what led them to do the things they did. So I put a lot of stock in that, okay? I just do. To me, that means something. I'll also go though and be philosophical about it. I think we should be able to take, I wanna believe we can take as table stakes that a population like Iraq, which had 60% unemployment in 2006, 60% unemployment. I wanna ask you how many police would it take to secure this neighborhood right here we're in? Would we be comfortably sitting here having strolled from the metro stop if Washington DC had 60% unemployment right now? What would it be like outside, right? Would you feel good about yourself? How many police would it take to keep this area safe? We sent young men and women, 18, 19, 20 year old guys and in uniform, our military. Not speaking the language, anything else, to walk the beat of Iraq with 60% unemployment and keep that place safe. This is unacceptable. How in the world can you not keep this place safe? Ask yourself, you wanna live in a neighborhood with 60% unemployment? And you say, well, that shouldn't matter. People shouldn't be violent anyway. Okay, I'll take you to a neighborhood. We'll build you a nice house in the middle of a neighborhood with 60% unemployment and see how safe you feel. See how long you're there. So this argument we get into about, oh, does unemployment lead to violence? It's really interesting and people wanna track data and correlate information. I just think there's a common sense piece of this that we ought to be able to take for granted. And if you can, okay, cool. There's really nice neighborhoods in places like Detroit that you and I can go and we'll move in and see how you feel. I doubt too many people who have these intellectual arguments live in those kind of places. And I'll rest my case on that. Those are two interesting angles on it. The topic of economic development, which is really at the heart of your book in a sense, it just happens to be situated in Iraq and Afghanistan, is always a complex story. And those of us who spend a lot of time looking at it know that people who wait for the government to tell them where economic growth is gonna occur are generally not the ones who are making the most money off of it. Because actually, if it were that easy, if you just had to wait for the government to tell you what to do, we'd all be rich. And at least I'm not, so. Washington's getting pretty rich. Washington's getting pretty. Compared to your 6% unemployment. But at the end of your book, you have a chapter, your last chapter called on fixing the situation. And you hinted at a couple of things in your comments at the podium earlier, but and I don't wanna go through all of them because I actually think that's worth a serious amount of effort in a later venue. But what are some of the basic principles that you have that you had in mind in terms of fixing this? You mentioned unshackling people in theater, but it really takes much more than that, doesn't it? Well, I would observe because the first three years I was in the Pentagon, we were engaged in trying to improve the agility and efficiency of the world's largest bureaucracy. Okay, so every comment I'm about to make applies doubly within the Defense Department, which is because of its massive scale. And you don't have to look very hard to find headlines about things that the Pentagon needs to do more efficiently and how it operates its business. Waste, fraud and abuse and all these things that are a byproduct of just being that massive. There's always people who make mistakes and do things in a system that big that need to be done better. The drive we were facing at that time and that the Pentagon always feels is the comparative between government operations and private sector operations. I know that I can log into amazon.com and buy everything from a Pulp Fiction novel to a Chevy Silverado and track it to the front door of my house and I'll know which truck it's on right up to the time it arrives. Yet we just spent $800 million building a website for people to log into healthcare and it isn't working. And so I think that our country is reaching an inflection point where the way we enable our federal institutions to operate is now being called into question. And so one of my theories here is that what made us effective was we were pulled out of the bureaucracy. We were freed and enabled to be agile, to do things quickly. And the trend in the past 10 years in Washington has been the opposite. The rest of the world has gotten smaller and micro, right? Focus on your core competencies, do the things you do really well. We've seen industries that have divested elements and focused on things. This was Steve Jobs at Apple. He only did one product and he did it really well and that's how you excel. Our private sector in the past couple of decades has adapted to getting smaller and focused. The federal government has gone the other way. It's gotten bigger and more and more things piled into larger and larger cabinet level agencies which by their very nature, slow things down, create more process, create less agility. And I think USAID is a great example and I say this. I love the State Department from a diplomatic perspective but I would argue that moving USAID into the State Department was a mistake because you've reduced its agility, you've reduced its ability to be adaptive, you've shoved it into a larger bureaucratic operation at a moment in history when the world is demanding agility. How does Amazon do what I describe? Amazon doesn't own Chevy, they don't own Penguin Books. So how is it possible for me to do such amazing things with Amazon when it's not a single organization? They do it through data. They do it through sharing, very standard information, flowing between disparate organizations who have a set of incentives that are all in line to a collective outcome. If we can start to take our government and embed that kind of thinking in the way federal institutions perform and create the incentives for a common outcome to reward people for behaving the way we want them to behave within a nimble bureaucratic structure, we could start to see things move. And I have a feeling that current events in the decade we've been through, we're gonna see a shift in that direction. It has to happen because the American people see the disconnect between what they experience operationally in the private world versus what they experience operationally in the government world. And that imbalance is becoming too extreme. We need to see government become more capable. And that's very hard. I tried, I worked on that for three years. It's extremely hard to do, but it's necessary. It's one thing of course to do it inside the Pentagon, another thing to do it in a fragile state with violence around you. And sometimes one won't work. And those tracking systems are marvelous, but sometimes I just had this experience with an airline. They were merrily tracking my suitcase as it went to a different state than I was going to. They were different airlines. They were, they were. I'm not gonna have to defend an airline. Let's talk about an ambulance. Paul, let me ask my last question and we'll throw it open. One of the things we learn when you write a book is there's a point in time at which the book quits evolving, right, and goes into production. And then a year or two later, the book actually comes out. But your thinking doesn't stop evolving as you go. What have you learned or thought since you've quit writing and finished the book that would be different, and that you'd say it differently now than you did then? So I wrote this, I left the government in July of 2011. I left with Secretary Gates in July of 2011. And this book was written within the first three months of leaving, and it was supposed to publish in 2012. But the publishing industry is going through one of those nasty exercises and forced agility that the market's putting it through. And so my book ended up getting delayed. It didn't come out until now, which was very frustrating. And then I resigned myself to it and didn't really think about it because I'm busy doing other things. And now this book is out. But I'm actually glad for the delay because I think that the points that I felt strongly were valid in 2011 are much more apparent now, okay? The situation, no one, I defy anyone, maybe somebody can and I'd listen, make an argument that we couldn't do better than $700 billion in 13 years in Afghanistan and we're leaving behind no indigenous economy in a country that has untold amounts of natural resources, untold amounts of agricultural capacity, and really no meaningful effort save what we initiated that was too late and even recently has been further drawn down and reduced and ending this year, which was an unfortunate shadow of what was initiated by us in Afghanistan. I told somebody that Afghanistan it's three to five more years of stability to create and to develop its resources to the level to create revenue and economic structure that can sustain the institutions we've sought to put in place. It's hard for me to see that three to five years. But it's not three to five years from 2001. No, from now. It's three to five years from now. And I am sympathetic to, I mean, where we are as a people because what is the answer to that? Is it to continue what we're doing? I can't argue that. I mean, should we pour more? I would not wanna be confronting the decisions that our national security apparatus has to confront right now. They are very difficult decisions. We've got a great audience here and here's how we're gonna play out the questions, if you will. You'll raise your hand and I'll recognize you. You'll wait for the microphone to come to you. We've got a couple of folks walking around with the microphones. Identify yourself and your affiliation and then ask your question and we'll turn it over to Paul to answer. Let me start up here in the front on the right-hand side. I'll jump back and forth and work my way back. So I'll get back to you. Thanks very much. I'm George Dragnich. I'm a retired American diplomat. You're right on about the State Department. Also a former Assistant Director General of the International Labor Organization in Geneva. So I really appreciate your emphasis on employment, which I think is the key. I was in London after the Good Friday Accords. I said it in Belfast. All my colleagues disagreed with me. They had all these theories. I said, look, you give people a job, you give them a stake in the settlement. I happen to have been in Algeria stationed there in 1988 when the whole country blew up and precipitated a civil war. It wasn't Islamic fundamentalism. It was a lack of employment for young people. Our policy makers don't get it, but I sure am glad you do. Thank you, sir. Thank you so much. I'm Sandy Apgar. I was Assistant Secretary of the Army for installations in the Clinton administration, and like you, had entered the Pentagon from the private sector. But shortly after my service, then it was privileged to help General Petraeus in Mosul essentially establish an enterprise zone. And it was by, I think most measures, remarkably effective. I was only involved for about a year, and the story has certainly been written on that. My question, given your premise, but also your findings, your principles, which I look forward to reading, is whether the Army, military in general, that is the uniform service and all that comes with it, is an effective instrument for reaching the kind of economic development objectives that you've outlined. And in some cases, not just pure war zones, has a set of capabilities that is hard for the foreign service and the political establishment to emulate. So I'm gonna give a really bad answer and say I don't know. I get as concerned as anybody at the notion of yet another expansion. And this is a point I actually opened the book with this. We got a problem in this country, okay? We have allowed our civilian bureaucracies, we've hindered our civilian bureaucracies with so much process and legal, to be honest, congressional interference that has shackled them to the point that they're ineffective, that just about any time anything goes wrong in this country. Now we turn to the uniform military to fix it. I mean, I'll use the example of water bottles of people in New Orleans after a hurricane. We only seem to really believe something's being taken seriously in this country when I see somebody with stars on his shoulder be put in charge. That's not who we used to be. We used to expect our civilian institutions to perform. Somehow in the past few decades, we've lost that expectation and we turn more and more to our military to do everything. And I would argue with people who do philosophical work, I don't like what that feels like as a society. If we're gonna turn to the militarization of every aspect of our civilian experience because they're the only ones who can do it. Well, boy, we really have some hard questions to ask ourselves about what kind of a nation we're setting ourselves up to live in. And so that's a broad answer to a much more focused question but it really has at its root the same problem. We spend billions of dollars on people on institutions that are tasked with doing what you described. It shouldn't fall upon a 19, 20, 21 year old kid who already has a really hard job, right? Walk in a place trying to keep the peace. And oh, by the way, can you go worm some cattle and can you help set up some cotton gins and can you get the local marketplace up and running again? Okay, well, we wanna do that but it just feels to me like we're capable of better. And I'd like to believe that a fresh set of eyes on this problem that looks at this and says we're the largest economy in the world. We uplift millions of people in places that we're not at war with like China and India. We uplift them out of poverty through economic engagement. How can we use our national strength to address these issues? And ideally remove some of the motivations that lead to the unrest in the first place as he was describing in Algeria earlier. I think that I'd rather see us grapple with that but I do know that in the absence of it, our military is an institution that is allowed to be adaptive that is given tactical missions and certainly has a lot of money and will take those tasks on if it has to achieve its mission objective. As a civilian American that should worry you, okay? I don't think that's what we had in mind for what this city was supposed to represent as a representative of the people that we claim we are. Sorry to preach. I'm gonna question here in the front and then I'll go to the one in the back in the door. We'll work our way around. You have the mic. Hi, John Harper with Stars and Stripes. Can you kind of walk us through how the US can leverage financial aid and other resources to help build indigenous economies and kind of explain in more detail how that differs from what we've done in Iraq and Afghanistan? Yeah, let me give you a theory. And I may be completely wrong, but given the experience, I think it would have been neat to see us try it, okay? 2003, Saddam falls, the flags are being waived, the statues are being pulled down. We don't stand down the Iraqi army right away. We don't shut down every factory in the country and open the borders for unlimited imports at zero tariff. And we don't debathify in a radical way the entire Iraqi government. So we take those three decisions, we do them differently. And we offer, I'll pick a number, $5 billion tax credit to American industry if they'll go into Iraq and establish productive enterprises that consume American goods as needed but also create jobs and employment for a population of 29 million people. If we had done that, I have a feeling we would have been out of Iraq a lot sooner. We'd have friends in Iraq today instead of enemies who would have commercial reasons to stay engaged with America. Wouldn't be all about every time we meet with them, it wouldn't be all about Sunnis and Shias, and it wouldn't be all about Iran and Saudi Arabia and Turkey and everybody meddling in their business, but we'd be having commercial conversations. And I think that would have been really, really interesting. And we wouldn't have had to put any people on the ground because business would have gone, $5 billion. I bet $5 billion would have done it. We were spending $12 billion a month in Iraq at the peak of the surge, a trillion dollars over a decade. I think that that's the kind of macro thinking, I think these two conflicts merit. After the fact, if you could do it again, what are the instruments that wouldn't require you to have lots of people on the ground from the government, but would have just incentivized a different kind of experience and drawn some of our national strengths into these conflicts as opposed to expecting civilian bureaucracies to take on missions they never signed up for in the first place? The history, of course, says that while we know today we're never gonna do that again, we always end up doing that again. Let me go to the question back into the way. Yeah, my name is Peter Simon with Capital Intel Group. My experience is I was in four years ago in Iraq, Basra, Yieldville, and Baghdad, and things were going quite well and they're moving in the right direction, and then that sort of collapsed. And my question is really, how do you see Iraq? Yieldville is very advanced, it's a modern economy. They're even talking anti-trust laws. Basra is coming up, I was there without security. They love American investors. If you go to these places as an investor, you're bulletproof, nobody's gonna touch you. But Baghdad still, it's hard to do business when there's bombs going off, and the problem in Iraq I see is to do business deals, you have to be in Amman for the Sunnis, Istanbul for the Kurds, and then Dubai for the Shia, and that sort of disperses the economic and the cross-border investments for MNA and other things. What's your view? Is it too early still to go to Iraq or should we be setting up? Despite the fact that Baghdad is a little bit of problematic, and then we had that really positive news on the Asia-Sales IPO where the bankers started to go, so can we get our bankers into the private sector rather than just doing the sovereign things? Because at my time when I was there, the HSBC and city group would only do sovereign things, they wouldn't go into the private sector. Thanks, thank you, sir. That was great, because I think that you encapsulated the place in a nutshell really well, and I'll just reinforce what you already said with a little more color. I describe Iraq today as a stable but violent country, and it's stable and violent because of the disparity with the West, and the sense in the West that they've been left out. Part of its power, okay, and part of it is economic. And until that's addressed, it's gonna continue to be a stable but violent country. What I mean stable, it's national integrity is not at risk. Iraq is a nation state is, in my opinion, a stable nation state. It has a financial base upon which to sustain its institutions, albeit undeveloped and underdeveloped that they may be. So the violence is in the areas I described and it extends into Baghdad, and that makes Baghdad difficult. You said it very well. I don't use any security in Iraq. I drive with a driver in a soft car from Basra to Baghdad. I never fly because I hate flying Iraqi airways. So I drive, and I get stopped at checkpoints and they see my American passport and inevitably a conversation ensues because there is two views in Iraq, right? The view is they can't believe we left. They just can't figure that out, right? And they'll cast you the way people in the region do. I know there's a plan. I know there's a master strategy. So if you'll just explain it to me, then I'll be cool. But how could you guys have come here? It just doesn't make sense. I just don't see it yet. And I got nothing to say in response to that. But the second thing that the other side of it is they think we're still there. Ah, a miracle, a miracle. You're still here, right? So, and it's a very odd dynamic because to them they're still waiting for the good stuff. I write about this in the book, some of the craziest things. There are kids in Baghdad today who get in their car and they drive to Amman, Jordan. Since the sandbar thing blew up, this may not be true, but I have actual photographs of this from 2012 where they'll drive to Amman, Jordan and they'll load up their trunk with coolers full of KFC and Popeyes and Big Macs and Whoppers and they'll drive all night long back to Baghdad and a day old cheeseburger in an American wrapper on the streets of Baghdad sells for $8. Okay, and they sell out instantly and they get in their car and they drive back. They want that part of the American experience. The best car to have in Iraq today is an American muscle car. Dodge Chargers, everybody wants, every young Iraqi wants a Dodge Charger, right? And they're hard to get. So you asked a salient question about business today. I am not yet at a point where what we're doing in Iraq today is building, we're building businesses. Hands up, we reopen the port of Basra. I feel like Basra is a great economic success story emerging. I don't feel comfortable. I wouldn't feel comfortable yet passively investing in Iraq to say, okay, here's a company, all they need is capital. If I give them capital, I can wait in two years, I'll get a return. I'm a risk-oriented guy. I'm not sure I'd go there yet in general, but I think that it will evolve. You get through the selection cycle, there's some banking infrastructure and banking capital limits and things that are in place that make it really hard for enterprise to take off as quickly as it could be. I think on track for 8% to 9% GDP growth this year as a nation. So that's gonna start to get constrained by some of their financial system constraints. And when those open up, I think that will create an environment where investors can come in and make passive investments that today I'm not sure I would do. Paul, I wanna take the moderator's prerogative and ask a follow-on question of both your description in response to the previous question and the one you just had. You were engaged with the task force both in Iraq, more in Iraq than in Afghanistan, but in both with companies from around the world, not just American companies. We've spent a bit of time here today bashing the government for the way in which the government's not organized well. But I'm not quite sure we should let American business off the hook quite as easily as well. Some of the business models that were being promulgated as the stage of economic development in Iraq, American companies found it difficult to bid on and win. Set aside corruption because there's no way we can compete in a corrupt environment. But is there a business model that others are following that Americans could do well to take a look at? Two answer, two sides of that. So the first is early and the second answer is current. So early on, I go back to the Marshall Plan. The US approach to reconstructing Iraq was, we took $22 billion in something called the Iraq Recovery and Relief Fund, our IRF, and we committed that money and then we hired contractors to come in and to try to rebuild infrastructure in Iraq. So a lot of the early American corporate engagements in Iraq from big multinationals like Bechtel and GE and really blue-chip companies who wanted to participate, one because it was good money, but also they were bought in. I mean the whole country had a spirit, a patriotic support to the mission, and they went in and within a year for a host of the reasons we've already talked about, civil society collapsed and they had people killed. Well once that happens, when a corporation has its employees killed in a place, it takes a while for that to fade. One of the things we did, and it took a big effort, was to bring General Electric back into Iraq just as a sales effort. And they ended up winning a $4 billion contract for large-scale frame-90 turbines for power generation, which I think is very important because that contract would have gone to Siemens if GAN got it and nothing against the Germans, but I'd rather see turbines built in South Carolina than turbines built in Germany, given America invested a trillion dollars in 10 years in the country. But it took a lot of effort to get GE to come back because they had people killed. That's a big deal for a company. Pivot to today. Companies today in the West, specifically British and American firms, the biggest concern I hear and what we have invested in our own efforts, a ton of money in is FCPA. So there is a significant endemic corruption problem in Iraq today, and your ability to compete for and bid on and win government contracts there is extremely difficult in an environment where most of the corporate engagement going on is Chinese, Russian, where there's just different sets of rules. The playbook is different for those entities. So I think that it's a significant hindrance when you're looking at the globe and all the places as an American company, you can go and invest or make a commitment to as a market you wanna develop and then you look at Iraq and you see this list of things. It's hard for that hurdle to be overcome in an American corporation. That doesn't bode well for the future. Let me take the two questions side to side in the back here and then we'll come up to the middle. Thanks for your comments. I'm Jake Husek, I'm with a firm called Cross Boundary and we have projects in Afghanistan, Iraq, South Sudan and other places like that. So my question is going back to something you said earlier about managing the disparity, economic disparity between different areas, especially when it's in the long ethnic or sectarian lines. You know the reality is in Afghanistan it's much easier to work with the businesses in Herat and Mazar than it is in Kandahar. In Iraq it's much easier to work in Basra and Kurdistan than in Anbar. And in South Sudan it's the Dinka people who are already in the positions of power in those businesses. So how do you balance that? Where the actual business opportunities that are attractive, setting aside other concerns are in those places that are already potentially advantaged. And if you go into the less securities you might actually exacerbate those problems because you're introducing money, potential corruption, potential security payments before those places are ready. Yeah, so because I use Ambar as an example because it fits right into your thesis. Because of where we are now, the only way to solve that is a risk reward balance for a company and that can only be dealt with through incentives. So how do I put in place if it's more, right now people invest in the south and the north because there's incentives to invest there. If I want them to invest someplace else I have to show them a set of incentives that draw them there. Those are gonna have to take the form of either, how do we end up getting Mercedes-Benz factories in places where there's never been a Mercedes-Benz factory in America? We offer them incentives. So there are ways to do that. And we could have done that. I argued in 2009, we needed to do that in anticipation of where we are now and I described that effort. Now the Iraqi government will have to do that. And that's a tougher lift because of their own internal political issues and the way that electorate breaks out. And so that's why I describe and I think for the near term foreseeable future Iraq will continue to be a stable but violent country because I don't see the kind of governmental incentive structures being put in place to address those root causes. And I actually don't think it's really much different for the Pashtun areas of Afghanistan. It's the same set of issues. The only thing I would say about the Pashtun areas of Afghanistan is the richest, most unbelievable mineral deposits in those areas are in the Pashtun belt. And the concern then that comes in my mind that I've articulated before is because we didn't proactively engage in seeing those industries developed from the very beginning in a socially and environmentally responsible way, those industries are gonna get developed. That I guarantee you. It's not like we can stop the world from consuming resources. We can either engage in how it's done and through engagement of our own corporate interests in that effort shape the way it's done in a way that benefits the people and the population and the environment. Or we can step back and say, hands off, those are dirty businesses. We don't wanna get in the middle of that. That's nasty stuff. And other nations are coming in to develop them who do not share our value set socially, environmentally or financially. But it is gonna happen. And that's in the Pashtun areas probably what the future looks like in the not too distant term. Paul, we're running about out of time. What I'm gonna ask is that this gentleman asks his question and he needs to hear and all of you ask your questions and I'll give you the final comments and then we'll break for book signing. Hi, my name is Bernie Corot from the NDU Center for Complex Operations. I wanted to ask you about the future. You created the task force for businesses and stability operations at DOD which I think filled a void in the US government which is not particularly adept at promoting the private sector. And a lot of the policies that you've been suggesting are sort of contrary to the orthodoxy of the way the rest of the agencies think. Looking forward though, we're involved in a study looking at civilian capacities and capabilities and structures that were created over the last 10 years. My understanding is TFBSO has been zeroed out. Looking forward, do you think it should remain? Do you think these types of structures would help promote some of the types of thinking and policies that you've been talking about going into the future? So hold that question and let's take this woman here and then the next one over. Hello, my name is Kelly Gibrell and I'm a granddaughter of yours of sorts, Mr. Brinkley. Uh-oh. Uh-oh. There's no DNA involved in this conversation. My wife is watching this, so thank you. Currently, I'm consultant with Defense Logistics Agency and helping the next generation of a program we started, JAX, the Joint Continuity Contracting Services System, which was addressing the way of identifying and vetting local vendors in Iraq and Afghanistan. Of course, in the midst of the drawdown, it's looking at the investment and the good tool that it's using, and we're finding that there's a lot of need for it in similar circumstances for humanitarian assistance, disaster response, et cetera, going around the co-coms. There's new life to what you've started is my point. My question is, this goes back to some of the civilian agencies. How do you foresee improved interagency collaboration when you're looking at really the developing countries and improving economic development with engaging local vendors? And in your book, you talk about the co-com structures with the defense and argue that the civilian agency is more regional structures, and they have some. But I really would like to hear that since we're getting more interagency interest in the next generation of some of these tools that are born out of your leadership. All right, we're doing remarkably well here because there's actually a common thread for these two questions. Let's see about the third one here. Somebody had her hand up right in the same, there you go. My name is Manush Prusey, I am from BBC Persian TV. My question is about Afghanistan. You mentioned you just came from Kabul and the sense of fear, what's gonna happen. You mainly focus in your talk on Iraq. I want to know what you think is possible to do still in Afghanistan, and do you foresee any sort of fix that the government can do or the business or private sector can do in the next couple of years, near future, to prevent the collapse of the whole country, as you mentioned? So if you get the first two questions right, you'll have a better answer for the third one. Okay, so that's probably smart, right. Thank you. So he asked about TFBSO and should it remain. So TFBSO and one of the reasons that I left was that tension between, I mean again I mentioned it, we haven't talked about Pakistan or Sudan or Rwanda and at the time we were being talked to by Ambassador Holbrook was a huge sponsor and remarkable person in terms of wire brushing me very frequently, right, when he didn't agree, which was often with what we were doing, but also driving us to do things and it was his push to have us work in Pakistan. That tension between, oh my God, the DOD is taking on things it shouldn't take on versus somebody has to do this, finally broke the other way. And the task force was shut down, we immediately had to leave Iraq. We had 400 odd people working in Iraq in 2010 that had to leave the country in 30 days. Legislation was passed that basically said, Afghanistan only for one more year and then it has to go to USAID. Well, we had built an organization and had a lot of senior business talent and ag talent and stuff and they all left. I mean, you can't tell people, hey, you've got a year left and you have to only work in one country. That wasn't why they came. And so at that point to me, the Afghan TFBSO and the wonderful people who've stayed on to continue and to wrap up the projects that had been initiated at that point really stopped being a viable instrument for any kind of broader effort, right? It was really focused on what have we started? How do we make sure it gets finished? So the funding that's been committed isn't wasted and that's kind of what they were limited to. So I kind of want to rewind that thought back to 2011. To me, the TFBSO, which was hundreds of people operating and had developed the hard way, knowledge of how to do this kind of stuff kind of quickly wrapped up too early in 2011. So, and what I would argue now is we don't have that in the government. It doesn't exist, okay? It needs to be created. I don't know where. It isn't gonna be in the Pentagon. Shouldn't be in the Pentagon because it shouldn't be limited to places where we only do military operations. And if you put it in the Defense Department, well, it's gonna be limited there. And I actually think from our experiences supporting ambassadors and Rwanda and Sudan, you need it in a lot of developing places. It'd be nice if we could attack this problem before things fall into conflict and the military comes in. So how? I don't know. I'm not even gonna pretend to tell you how, but there are a lot of people who could figure that out in this room. I just know that it's a gap and it needs to be filled and there's lessons learned from the way we had to attack the problem set that could be useful to how that an organization like that gets established. Now, you asked about interagency collaboration and I will go back to my earlier point. When you say collaboration in Washington, the Hill and the executive top level cabinet branch wants to then control. We can't collaborate, so let's centralize the organization structure, okay? And I'm going back to my Amazon oversimplified example, but the theme is the same. Collaboration is generated by incentives. How have you incentivized the workforce to behave together? Are we financially and symbolically rewarding people for doing things in concert to achieve a common objective? We never think about that. We immediately think about, okay, we're gonna need to create a new cabinet level department and we're gonna have to merge all these organizations together and we'll need four new undersecretaries and 15 new deputy undersecretaries and they'll be in charge and the policies will be written and that'll make it work. But it doesn't work, okay? It actually slows things down. So the trick is to get a mind shift into information age management and to try, and I don't know how you do it because there's congressional committees that get stronger and more powerful when you centralize stuff and they get more control over money. So this is very hard problem, but this to me is the root of why there's no collaboration because there's no incentives to collaborate. People respond to incentives and our model in Washington is not to use incentives, it's to use organization structure on Afghanistan. Absolutely, there are things that could be done in Afghanistan to quickly resolve the situation, but why I'm not feeling optimistic is because they're not fair and I'm gonna give a really good example. Afghanistan is grappling right now with a mining law, okay? There are over 40 multinational companies that bid on the first five major mineral deposits in the country, copper, gold, big deposits that could generate billions of dollars in GDP for Afghanistan and if it were done right and I like to use Chile as a model, it could create a basis of wealth and prosperity that would uplift that country and set them on a path to emerging from poverty. But the Afghan parliament has been grappling with this mining law and so I could say pass the mining law tomorrow and quickly award those contracts and quickly get companies in, hiring local people and putting people to work and show the Afghan people that things are better. Now my fair comment, this is a country that has never had anything, okay? Through its whole history and people evoke the Silk Road and things, but Afghanistan has always been a country where there's never been an indigenous source of wealth. The wealth that came in Afghanistan was what you took as convoys and caravans passed through the country, right? It was a trading gateway, but they've never had their own indigenous source of wealth on which to build institutions. How fair is it? They need time. A parliament is just, in 2010, we made visible to them their own mineral wealth, okay? We gave them a complete category, we built a data center, we gave them access to all the information and they're looking at this going, oh my God, we have all this? It takes a human population some time to grapple with how they wanna manage that and so to jam that parliament who is asking questions. Some of them think that it should be done socialistically and we should have a central mining company and all mining should be, all the money should go to our people and then there are people who say no, that'll never work, you have to bring in the private sector and you've gotta give a profit motive. That's a healthy debate for a society to have. I've had mining companies come to me and say, how do we get this country to quickly pass the mining law? I say be careful what you ask for because if they pass that mining law too quick and they haven't grappled with and come to peace with how they're going to do this as a nation, as a people and you come in and you start making a whole lot of money in two years, you're gonna get a Hugo Chavez who's gonna come in and say thank you very much, we'll take that off your hands, right? They need time and that's the conundrum because we started too late. We didn't look at the economy as the most important thing we needed to do upon which could rest democratic institutions. We built the institutions and waited for the economy to take care of itself and that's the conundrum the Afghan people now face. So it would take an incredibly visionary leadership to be able to lead Afghanistan through what they're about to go through and to accelerate a decision making process that would turn that three to five years I gave you into a one to two year timeline. So it's possible, but given what I just described, is it fair and then is it likely? I can't be optimistic about that. Paul, you have triggered a discussion that we could carry on for another hour here and actually if we did, we still wouldn't have fixed it all because in reality, go back to the gap that you started out there's a gap at many levels. There's a gap at the field between the military and the development world. There's a gap in our policy and thinking. The one thing there's not a gap is there's no longer any place in the world that we can ignore and so we're gonna have the opportunity to wrestle with these kinds of questions over and over again with or without military engagement, with or without the American economy being engaged but the issues are gonna be there. Thank you very much for your book that opens up that topic for further discussion. Thank you for your comments here this morning and ladies and gentlemen, please join me in. Thank you.