 Okay, I think we'll go ahead and get going. My name is Andrew Wilder. I'm vice president here at the USIP for the Center for South and Central Asia and our privilege to welcome all of you today to this event. I just returned on Sunday from about 10 days in Afghanistan, Pakistan and Afghanistan. I was there with Scott Smith and we had planned this event to try to give some feedback on some of our impressions from the visit. But the visit had other purposes, too. We were visiting our team, both in Assamabad and Kabul, where we're running programs, wide range of programs. In fact, we're fortunate to have one of my colleagues, KC Johnson, who just got off the plane this morning, who oversees a lot of our work in our Kabul program, especially in areas where they need countering violent extremism. We're also at USIP supporting a lot of research and I would encourage all of you interested in Afghanistan to go to our website and check out some of our publications relating to Afghanistan and Pakistan and the broader South Central Asia region. In particular, I just wanted to highlight a couple papers and some of them are outside and back. You can help yourself to those or download them. My colleague, Bill Byrd, recently published one in Afghanistan's Continuing Fiscal Crisis, No End in Sight. We're going to have some more time to talk about that today because, again, just coming back, that was one of the things that really struck me as the very dire state of the economy and the political implications of that. We also published a very interesting paper by Dede Dirksen on the politics of disarmament and rearmament in Afghanistan, which I think is particularly topical because it focuses in quite depth, great detail in terms of the political dynamics in Kunduz province and that's been, as many of you know, very problematic of late and many of the dynamics that are playing out now. She deals within that paper. One of the things that USIP we try hard to do is a lot of our programs are basically intended to be many research projects over the years. We've done lots of research on the informal justice sector in Afghanistan, among other things. And one of the key issues there is how land disputes are resolved. Land is probably the number one driver of conflict in Afghanistan. And so we just published a paper by Erika Gaston and Lillian Dang, another, both of who used to work in Kabul, Lillian still does, on addressing land conflict in Afghanistan. And then last but not least, I think an important paper by Sean Kane on talking with the Taliban, should the Constitution be a point of negotiation? Sean used to be a former colleague here, then served in Afghanistan for the past couple of years with Yunama. In addition to our work with visiting the program team, however, we did, Scott and I, had the opportunity with our country director, Shama Moud Mioquil, to do the rounds of many officials, civil society leaders, government U.S. and other international officials, and many former Afghan government officials as well. I would not describe the mood as upbeat in Kabul. Unfortunately, I was hoping we have some, we're going to struggle to find a few positive things to say in our presentations, but I think the mood was very down in Kabul on a range of topics, which we'll go into today. But basically, a sense of political paralysis amongst the team, the national unity government team, or not a team, a sense of economic collapse which I alluded to, a deteriorating security situation, and a perception of fading, rapidly fading international attention and U.S. attention in particular, and combined I think that's creating quite a toxic and destabilizing mix. Very specifically on the security situation with Dr. Ali Jalali we'll be speaking on in more detail. I think the statistics now show that between the first five months of this year, more ANSF and some of the associated militias like the ALP have died than total number of U.S. troops in Afghanistan since 2001. So, casualty rates are extremely high and worrying. I spoke to one senior government official who had just returned from Urozgan province and he was quite worried there just by the exhaustion of the ANSF, attrition rates, and without level of casualty rates, increasingly difficult in terms of recruitment. But still fighting hard with the objective of really trying to hold on to the districts of Afghanistan and to get through this fighting season and demonstrate that the ANSF can stand without the large levels of international troops and assistance it was receiving before. But in lots of our meetings, many requests again for reconsideration of the pace at which the international support is drawing down and in particular military support, close air support in particular, and then areas around the ISR or the intelligence surveillance and reconnaissance support that we were providing. Some talk about Daesh. I'll let, again, Dr. Jalali speak a bit more to that. My own personal view and from what I was talking to there, it struck me as it's very different than what ISIS is in other contexts but much more reflecting the fragmentation of power that's taking place as the central government is perceived to be growing weaker. Local actors are becoming stronger and this includes actors like the governor of Valk province or the chief of police in Kandahar or some of the local militia leaders, but also organized crime elements, disgruntled Taliban elements, but also some of the people who've been pushed from Pakistan into Afghanistan due to the offensive in North Waziristan and I think quite opportunistically they are using the Daesh label in Afghanistan. Politically, I think we got a sense of, again, things aren't going terribly well. That said, in the last couple weeks, a sense that there have been a small uptick and I think due to the appointments finally taking place, pretty much a full cabinet now in place with just the defense minister needing approval. And so a sense that things are moving, a chief justice, sorry, the Supreme Court justice is appointed including Anissa Rasuli, a woman, which I believe will be the first time we'll have a female justice on the Supreme Court in Afghanistan. So a lot of the appointments including the final roster of governor appointments I think will be made during the coming week. So that gave a little sense of that things were moving, but overall though a sense of paralysis that things weren't moving quickly enough, lots of questions around the president's management style, relations with Dr. Abdullah and his team. I think when we left from Washington there's lots of talk about the dysfunctionality between the two teams. I think in Kabul what struck me a bit more was some of the dysfunctionality between the teams and I think that might even be a more serious problem than even between the two teams. But questions around parliament, the lawyer jerga, the elections of course and my colleague Scott Smith will talk in more detail about those issues. Again the economy I touched on, I think very serious situation. I think one very tangible demonstration about this, if I can give an anecdote was that Scott and I tended to arrive early at most of our meetings in Kabul for a change because the traffic was much less than usual. But there's just a sense that little is happening on the economic front, very little investment and ironically even some of the real attention that President Ghani's government has given to the anti-corruption agenda and the scrutinizing of contracts I think in some ways is also scared off some investors because before they probably knew with quite some confidence that they could pay off these three senior officials and get a contract whereas now there's a lot more uncertainty in terms of how it works and whether the president will scrutinize a contract and be unhappy with it and reject it but overall just very little happening on the economic front. But Bill Bird will go into great more detail on that. And then last but not least I also was in Pakistan before and then to Kabul and lots of questions about President Ghani's very, the major bold political measure he took in terms of reaching out to Pakistan which in Pakistan was being very, very favorably received. Unfortunately I got the sense that President Ghani was in some ways more popular in Pakistan than in Kabul precisely because of this outreach to Pakistan which was not going down well and there's lots of skepticism. So a really important question there I think in terms of why President Ghani took such a risk and expectations of something in return which I think Mouid will be talking more about in his presentation. So I think I'll leave it at that and with no further ado I think everyone you've sort of kind of introduced everyone you can get biographical information on them. I don't want to take time so I'll turn it over to Dr. Jalali first who is a senior Afghan expert here at fellow USIP but also a distinguished professor at NDU and the NISA Center and he will be talking about the security situation. Then Scott, political bill on the economic and Mouid on the Pakistan and peace process related issues. We'll then open it up for discussion. So I'm looking forward to that but thank you and over to you. Good morning. Thank you, Andhru. Andhru said the tone for this part of the presentation of mine which is on security. Security does not actually can be established in a vacuum it relates to other issues of developed governance economic and relations of Afghanistan with neighbors particularly with Pakistan. But Afghan security forces suffered record casualties this year. At the beginning of last month the number of Afghan soldiers policemen including local police has increased 70% as compared with the same time last year because about nearly 5,000 and that means that the average casualties per week was 330 men which is a very high compared to the experience of Afghanistan in the past 13 years. Why this happened? Let me focus on four issues here in order to present to you the nature of security. First, what are the drivers of insecurity Afghanistan this year? And second, how the Afghan forces are reacting to this and what are the challenges and constraints that Afghan national security forces have. Second, how the Taliban or insurgents are adopting to the situation and using new approaches, new methods that are very somehow different from the past and for how one can improve the situation. What can have and what measures should be taken in order to improve the situation in Afghanistan at least until the end of this fighting season. The driver of security and insecurity in Afghanistan are quite obvious to all. This year is the first year that the combat mission of the international forces ended. This does not mean only that the numbers of troops, foreign troops were reduced but the kind of assistance that international forces were provided to the Afghan national security forces were dwindled and sometimes again to the zero. The most important part of it was the air support, firepower and also most importantly ISR, intelligent surveillance reconnaissance assets which were withdrawn from Afghanistan. At the same time this is a typical fighting season in Afghanistan but under new conditions and the new condition which there are no foreign troops fighting and at the same time the unity government has its own vulnerabilities and being tested by the insurgents and finally the insurgents are trying to get into a very fiver position in case there is a deal with the talks going on in the region whether it will happen or not but they want to get into a favorable conditions. At the same time the tension inside the government of Afghanistan to maintain the tension between maintaining the unity of the government which was established on the basis of a deal and at the same time to govern effectively. Sometime effectiveness has been sacrificed by maintaining the unity and that actually been exploited by the insurgents and terrorists and that means vulnerabilities in the establishing the unity of effort, coordination and also integration of all instrument of power of the government in order to fight the insurgents. At the same time some opportunistic moves by some groups who are claiming to be affiliated with ISIS. You know ISIS is becoming a major concern in Afghanistan although one cannot say that ISIS is there in force but there are opportunities for people who want to use this. I think the most damaging situation is in the Nangarhar province in the areas in the remote districts of the Spinghar province which actually separates Nangarhar province from Teerah from Qurran Valley and the districts in these areas like Nazian like Durbaba like Achin. In that the problems that developed first as tribal feuds and developed into personal Bandeta feuds created a situation where some of them are using this ISIS. Some of them probably are trying or hoping that you will be supported by ISIS. For example in this last weekend quote one group that they beheaded some people, some Taliban they actually asked the people either to join them or leave the quote area. And thousands of people are leaving quote that was in the remote area on the border with Teerah. This incident if they continue this create a new problem, a new problem it is serious enough to make the Taliban to send a letter this week to Baghdadi whether he is alive or not but so it means that they are concerned. This is another issue that some who are disenchanted some who are against the talks with the government some who actually lost resources they would use this opportunity in order to get opportunity and to go to get to a prominent prominence and probably will add to that dimension of insecurity in Afghanistan. All these create this complicated situation. How the Afghan national security forces deal with it. They have their own constraints. The most important challenge with the constraint is the low force to space ratio in Afghanistan. You know if you go to text books and then a counter insurgency you have a certain number of security men that you have to have which is very high. In case Afghanistan some people give it 600,000. Afghanistan will not be able to do that will not sustain such force. So therefore it's overextended. On the other hand the number that we are talking about 352 police and army and about 30,000 LAP but nobody knows how many of these people are really in the field can be used because if you look at the cycle of operation in the army they are either they are in training or they are involved in operations or they are in leave. So therefore at one time maybe only 40%, 30% of the troops that we have on the book will be available even if you do not count the attrition and the desertion in Afghanistan. So it is the problem of low force to space ratio. And on the other hand the concern not to lose territory. This has been an obsession not only today but also in the past in Afghanistan. There are many districts that will not make any strategic difference in the viability of our government but still Afghanistan always wanted to have the control of every district in Afghanistan. And although many districts means only a small security post that post does not have control over the whole area of a district but symbolically it means that the districts and the government control. So now on the other hand the notion that in a insurgency you have to protect the population. You have to have a presence. That caused the national security forces to be deployed over extensively and sitting in small posts invulnerable to the attack of the enemy. I call it sometimes many, thousands of many than been forced, many than been forced that can be easily taken out. You know in April when I was in Kabul the chief of general staff of the army told me that in Badakhshan when the situation became very tense and the insurgents attacked posts in Jerm districts in Badakhshan I asked him he said in that area there's one battalion and one company deployed in three districts Jerm, Yamagang and Wardulj. And the headquarters of that isn't conducive. There's no headquarters in Faisabad. So therefore there's no command and control there and that battalion company was deployed in 41 security posts across these districts. So it is these are posts vulnerable to even a small attack by by by insurgents. And that's why they lost many people at that time. The other issue is the the institution and coherence of the security forces, army, police, intelligence. You know when you go to south in Kandahar or in Helmand or in the core in Jalalabad you have these troops spread all over this area in small security forces. If you want to launch an offensive operation you have to mobilize another force from Kabul usually the 111 division. They go there and they combine they create a combined force of police and cop of commandos of local forces of other police local. And they combine together and they launch the attack. There is no coordination, different cultures, different capacities, different you know priorities. So that problem actually always are there when they launch an operation there they go there they kill some people and then in the media they present you with body counts every week they have a body counts but it does not you know change the situation drastically. On the other hand really the Afghan national security forces suffer from the lack of enablers. I mentioned the Air Force and intelligence assets logistics. One of the reasons that many posts fell to the Taliban was because the Humvees were out of gasoline they could not move it and the soldiers were out of ammunition the logistics were bad. In terms of intelligence one intelligence officer told me in Kabul that in the past last year they could foil the militant terrorist attacks they could foil seven out of ten. He said now we cannot foil more than three out of ten because of this lack of this gap in the intelligence assets. Consequently the army is vulnerable they either sit in post security posts only to be attacked or they launch major sweeping operation like one Zulfiqar in south. Taliban has adopted to this and in the face of major operation Zulfiqar in Helmand they leave the area only leave some snipers in the area and AIDs and otherwise they go underground they go to sweep the area what they do they cause more damage to the population that had to happen in Helmand and Helmand particularly Sangine area one bazaar of 400 tons was totally burned now there is a controversy in Kabul that this was burned by the special forces because they thought this is the enemy so when they leave then there is a conflict between police and army who should stay night the police said ok we are fighting force you are using it as fighting force so we are fighting force we are not police and the army said oh you are police now you have to man the area this kind of an argument continues the other way that the Taliban adopted situation was quick concentration attack on target simultaneously and then disperse this they called Hashar Hashar means traditionally Hashar means to mobilize people for a common cause temporarily so they called Hashar Hashar is a new terminology in the Taliban letter if they concentrate the forces as they did in Kunduz they did in Badakhshan and then they try to kill as many as Afghan security forces give this impression that the Kabul government is collapsing in the same time they disperse and finally they also in the cities they increase the suicide attacks in order to create to generate news and show to the world that the Afghan government is not capable of providing security now I think in order for the Afghan security forces to without this fighting season I think they have to make some adjustments in their operations first of all they should pursue the talks but should not be very excited about it a kind of a momentum was created in February in the beginning of this administration of Afghanistan but it was lost in February actually first because there was so much publication publicity was made about it and that for some of Taliban commanders who were against to become more violent and conduct more attacks on Afghan targets at the same time the Pakistan probably found it more difficult than it promised to force the Taliban to come to the negotiating table but I think one can say that there is change in Pakistan but how this change will translate into reality into practical action is not known the talks in Qatar, Dubai and then in Norway these are all probably the benefit Taliban because as far as I know the Taliban actually had the right to choose the people who come to talk to them most of them they are sympathizers they come there and they are Taliban talking cafe they take advantage of it they use it as a PR it is a substantial change and now in Norway the government delegation is gone but it is not for to talk with Taliban it is to participate in a peace mediation conference in Norway and they hope that on the side of the conference they will have an opportunity to talk to them I don't know so therefore don't get excited it will take time but at the same time you have to be ready to change the situation inside Afghanistan to change the mentality of people outside of Afghanistan you cannot change the mentality outside by asking them you have to change bring changes inside the country in order to change the calculation outside and at the same time in terms of instead of launching major sweeping operations I think there is a need to kind of a small operation on concentration of the Taliban on concentration go after the targets in a larger prince I was talking to one commander in that province a battalion commander who created a kind of savory in the Czech district it was a very insecure district in the past what he did that battalion commander he removed all the security posts instead he spread intelligence cells all over the country whenever he found that concentration at night they launched a raid against that one he extensively used ambushes and therefore he took the war to the Taliban rather than react to their attacks and that secured the Czech province they went to the areas where they could operate better mostly to Jagatou, to Daimirov and to Sadabad districts in the province that they should do instead of sitting in the security posts only to be attacked simultaneously by overwhelming forces and with no reaction capacity to go and help them a security force could provide you with two things provide you with time and space for reaction depending on the size of a security post this time and space differs but only if you have the capacity to go and help them can get you two hours, three hours one day, two days but not indefinitely the culture of security sitting in security posts is now in advance to think that that security post is there to provide security with no capacity to go and reinforce them Yamaghan is lost in Badakhshan because of this Yamaghan is an important district this is the area where the mines the lab's mines are located and some people, some strong men are fighting over the mines but now they lost the districts and now they are mobilizing forces to take it back it's in terms of the words of General Patton they are paying twice for the same real estate so this is the thing they need to change at the same time there should be a balance and the dispersion of security forces with the ability to enforce them within the time to avoid the destruction this is not happening many commanders of the security post have complained to me that this is the case when they are there they are just on their own and particularly logistics is bad they cannot receive ammunition in time and gas is not there and Afghanistan has three brigades special forces brigades and they are should be the main elements of fighting the Taliban or the insurgents and attack them in raids instead of sweeping operation I am running out of time we can discuss some other issues during the question answer but also one thing I wanted to talk here we will talk later about this idea of arming militias is it good or bad in order to make up for the low ratio of space troop to space thank you very much is it good or bad well you have to look at it case by case I will put in a plug for the future of the Afghan local police a recent report by the crisis group Mark Schneider is here with us today so I am sure he will have views on that during the question and answer period but also Day Day Dirksen's paper which I referred to earlier on the whole process of disarm the politics of the disarmament and rearmament of militias also tackles that but now I will turn it over to Scott Smith Scott is our director for Afghanistan and Central Asia programs at USIP Scott first started working in Afghanistan with NGOs working in Afghanistan he then had a long and very distinguished career with the U.S. U.N. sorry working on Afghanistan for most of the last decade including as a special assistant to senior special advisor to the SRSG in Kabul during the very famous 2009 and 10 election however I think the 2014 election surpassed it in interest and fame but anyway with no further ado I will turn it over to Scott on the political issues we saw in Afghanistan during our recent visit Thanks Andrew since you mentioned those happy days with the U.N. in 2009 when I was working for Kai Aida who was a Norwegian SRSG and he used to go to the security council and sort of say no more doom and gloom you know we have to look at the bright side and unfortunately I wish I could say that I would be able to cheer you up after Ali's somewhat depressing presentation but I am not sure that what I will try and do is give it in sort of a small doses as Andrew said a couple of weeks ago we were getting ready to go to Afghanistan and we had been hearing from people including our own team members who had been there recently giving a very negative prognostic and we sort of had the sense that this government of national unity that had been brokered as a result of this difficult election had sort of become a government of institutionalized crisis the way we have been analyzing the legitimacy of the Afghan government since 2001 has been sort of according to three parameters one especially after 2004 electoral legitimacy the other one what Sam Huntington calls performance legitimacy is it delivering services is it getting the allegiance of people because it is meeting their needs and third particular to Afghanistan I think is the international community behind it I think there has always been a key issue for leaders to speak on all three dimensions weaker than the Karzai administration was on all three dimensions I would say and the question is when it is facing the problems that first on the security side we just heard Minister Jalali describe then unless there is some unexpected good news significant economic problems that you are likely to hear from Bill in a little while how can a government that lacks survive can it survive and what are the real issues in terms of this institutionalized crisis what are the dynamics behind it and can it be resolved in any way or improved so the short answer to the question that we had for ourselves is this government in a real deep state of crisis has two parts the first part is yes and the second part is and on top of it is the government for their own political interests in a somewhat misguided way I believe trying to exaggerate that sense of crisis and neither of these answers I think are particularly good news for Afghanistan so let me go through the way I sort of understood the dynamics of what's happening inside this government and perhaps what we can do to improve its functioning as Andrew said the first issue is that the problem is not so much between the two teams between the President Ashraf Ghani and the Chief Executive Officer Abdullah Abdullah these are the two candidates who were sort of brought into this power sharing arrangement after again an election that was contested and inconclusive the first problem is within each team and what seems to be happening is that each of the principles has been losing support for different reasons but with similar consequences Andrew alluded to the management style of President Ghani who is seen at least from what we had heard not very consultative very micromanaging everybody in Afghanistan has a story about the 500 page report that the President stayed up the night before reading and it's interesting for everybody commenting on them and this is not necessarily giving a sense of confidence one of the telling comments that was made about President Ghani was he eats lunch alone and that was sort of this is a time I think the President Karzai used to listen to people hear what's going on consult and so forth so you have this kind of image of a lonely micromanager and it's taking all this burden on himself I think one of the reasons that CEO Abdullah is also losing members of his team is that he hasn't been able obviously to accommodate all of them when you back in Canada in any election anywhere there's obviously an expectation among your top backers that you'll get certain positions when as a result of the election you have to split the government in two and most of those had to be some fairly powerful people who have been left unhappy as a result they've been gravitating towards other centers of political power that I'll describe in a little while so you both have the again you have the sense that even before you get to the problems between the teams the leaders don't necessarily have the full confidence of their own teams that they had seven or eight months ago or ten months ago when these sort of dissipation of power that in a second I'll describe can be more complicated than has been in the past in the Karzai years now then you also have the problems between the two teams somebody pointed out that the structure of the national unity government encourages the extremists on both sides and I think what was meant by that is that the agreement is clear enough with the expectations of both sides that there will be a near parity of the use of power division of spoils and so forth but the agreement is not clear enough to decide how to work out the differences that arise when you don't get that when one side is dissatisfied and what that has led to is a long difficult debates between both sides which has been exhibited through the question of appointments most particularly it's been inhabited we're still waiting I think for the confirmation of the Minister of Defense but it's been a long time coming there's been disputes about individuals there've been disputes about how to resolve the disputes about individuals and there's been disputes about what is or should be the process for deciding who should be appointed and if one might simplify by saying President Ghani but he's also been hobbled by his own rule self-imposed rule of not using anybody who's been a minister before so it's been a very curious process of trying to get these teams appointed there only one third of the Governors appointed there's still disputes over judicial appointments over disappointments on the electoral reform commission and so forth so the question we were asking is well okay you have these differences you have entrenched positions and there are people that are trusted by both sides who can sort of mediate between the two and the answer I was given is those people who try to be go-betweens and who try to mediate end up being distrusted by both sides they're distrusted by the side on whose behalf they're from and they're distrusted on the side that they're trying to be reasonable with so again it's this phenomenon of encouraging extremism and trenching distrust and we might be trying to wait out Abdullah the advantage that President Ghani has is his position is in the Constitution Chief Executive of Abdullah's position is not in the Constitution so there's a sense that President Ghani is just going to try to make this go as long as possible until CEO Abdullah sort of withers away but Abdullah is in a position where what he has is probably about as good as he will get so he can't really relinquish that position so that also adds to this of antagonism and obstructionism which has, as Minister Jalali pointed out undermined performance and governance at the expense of trying to achieve consensus and unity and what seems to be still a fairly poisonous environment so that's within the National Unity Government what you have had emerging is outside the National Unity Government a kind of opposition and this didn't really exist in the Karzai year I think in the Karzai year since he had huge resources in his hands and unlike President Ghani Karzai had unified power of appointments so you had people who were in the government or people who were hoping to get in the government but nobody who wanted to be in the opposition really because that was then you might put yourself out of contention now what's happened is President Karzai himself as an ex-president is sort of playing an opposition role you might have seen the New York Times interview with him today where he says you know I'm kind of retired I don't want to play a role but they also list all of the people who are coming in and out of his office consulting with him he has publicly broken with the National Unity Government over the issue of Pakistan the Mawid will discuss he'll say I can't support it and there are other characters as well who are now beginning to sort of gravitate either towards him or set up their own polls and these are the ones where I mentioned before are somewhat opportunistically hoping that there might be a collapse of the government and if there is a collapse of the government they'll be the ones who will be there to sort of pick up the pieces this is a widely rumored strategy in Kabul I think it's an extremely dangerous strategy somebody we spoke to said that they told President Karzai if this government collapses it will not be you Taliban or Daesh so you know don't play this game but there is everybody seems to think this game is being played and that there are attempts to try to make life as difficult as possible for the government in order to engineer a kind of collapse which will lead to certain scenarios which I'll go to in a moment so this opposition is sort of kind of a new feature in Afghan politics and it complicates the situation for Ghani in particular I think is I say he's trying to play this game with Abdullah to marginalize him at the same time the political forces around him to some extent are getting larger and larger and more powerful and it's very hard right now to read which way that's going to go so you know given the situation given the state of a sort of perpetual institutionalized crisis what is the way out it was anticipated that you would have this situation and the September agreement that created this government also created a path out of it and the path was to have electoral reform then parliamentary elections and district elections and then a lawyer Jirga held according to the terms of the Constitution within two years the problem with this way out and I sort of was critical of it at the time was it seemed to me that two years was far too short a period to allow all these processes to take place new voter registration district council legends have never been held because district batteries haven't been drawn so what was going to happen was you were going to reach a point where either it would be clear that all of these processes could not happen in time and you'd have to extend the timeline or if you're Abdullah and you want to have a lawyer Jirga as soon as possible to institutionalize your position you would have to make some shortcuts and neither of these options were derived at that time there was a four months ago a electoral reform commission was appointed for the duration of four months and there's still no agreement on it what exactly the composition of that electoral reform commission is so just on the reform issue were way beyond the timelines so I think it's going to be very difficult to get out of this situation in the way that was mapped out in the September agreement in addition some people say or for Ghani to go for elections right now because of the diffusion of power that I mentioned President Karzai and then some backers of Abdullah like Ata probably have more power now or could control an election more easily than either Ghani or Abdullah so there's a built in incentive maybe to slow walk the electoral process then you have the problem that Andrew mentioned initially the parliament next week expires there have not been elections there will not be elections so there's going to have to be a kind of extending its term but somewhat unconstitutionally so this has led in Afghanistan to the discussion of other options emergency lawyer jerga which doesn't really exist but it would be a kind of representative body that would be cobbled together somehow and some people also are sort of looking to the US to come in and provide some kind of rescue like they did in September but I don't think here there's a huge amount of appetite so all of that contributes to environment of a great deal of confusion a great deal of a lack of confidence in the future because people can sense the crisis they can sense the government not being able to do what it should be doing by now not being this reform promises that it made it can sense the press of security it can sense the economic demands and above all there's sort of no way out no clear indication of how it's going to get around this collapse I'll give you to conclude three things that I think we should do or not do to try to make at least improve the chances as much as possible of this situation not reaching a collapse and again a lot of people talk about collapse a lot of people talk about the government muddling through but I think the first thing is to avoid in any way encouraging any sort of move towards an interim arrangement that would go out of the bounds which is as you know this government is problematic I do think that the one glimmer of hope as Andrew pointed out is when the appointments are out of the way and the main source of friction between the two teams is out of the way there may be a chance that actual governance will start happening and hopefully they'll be able to recoup the huge momentum they've lost over the last ten months so which leads to the second point I think we especially as Americans members of the international community need to support both on the military side and on the political side and on the financial side we were meeting with a defensive official and it was sort of almost wistful when he said you know we need 25, is it ME 35 helicopters and when you think of what the huge asks used to be and the huge offers from us used to be on the military side just for the next three months to survive we need these 25 helicopters sort of gives you a sense of and the third thing is I think we need to salvage as much as possible of this electoral reform agenda but it needs to be a sane electoral reform and a realistic electoral reform and the final point is I think if any electoral reform project or discussion that is had within a domestic government situation which is as toxic as it is right now will only add to the toxicity I think there really needs to be a greater consensus within the national unity government before we can talk seriously about electoral reform otherwise the reform process which really is in the end going to be the only way that leads us out of this even if it's not elections in two years will just become subsumed by again the deep levels of mistrust that we sensed and that are contributing to a terrible security situation thank you Scott so we're going to really rely on Bill to bring us some good news here but we're fortunate to have Bill here at USIP as a senior Afghanistan expert Bill first started working in Afghanistan in the 1970s so there was a lot of history there then had a three decade career with the World Bank including as the World Bank official who went to Kabul in 2002 to reopen the World Bank office there and served as the country for less most of the time for the last decade as well so anyway over to you Bill and could I just say also just again what struck me again in Kabul was probably even more so than some of the political problems was the economic crisis and I think partly because it doesn't get nearly as much attention because many many of us did not do so well in our microeconomics and macroeconomic classes no one actually knows what he's talking about and the economic friends so over to you Bill well thank you Andrew I think that unfortunately I'm not going to be able to bring a lot of good news but luckily still I'm not the last panelist and we shared with me some data that the Pakistan economy is not doing too badly so there's some good news there I was official data not mine because I think it's too easy to forget what the Afghan economy actually is I'll quickly go through some recent developments and how we got to the current crisis talk a little bit about talk more about the current situation and then if I'm lucky I'll run out of time before I give some thoughts about what could be done I think we just need to at the beginning I'll step back and remind ourselves it's traditionally was a largely subsistence agriculture and livestock economy there was a fair amount of trade but almost absence of manufacturing and most modern services and all along virtually since the mid 18th century Afghanistan has been dependent in different ways on external funds to balance the economy and to run the government so that is sort of a continuing paradigm now in the past nearly 40 years of protracted conflict on top of this basic base a war economy has been grafted and you know that includes a lot of international military spending weapons smuggling opium other illicit activities often geared toward financing war then since 2006 clearly the international military expenditures and aid became the dominant factor in economic trends and these this induced very rapid economic growth among the fastest in the world at around 9% per year but very highly important intensive and service oriented as opposed to agriculture manufacturing and basically unsustainable Afghanistan what are the key I think we also should keep ourselves mindful of what are the key constraints and one of them is water and irrigated land or well situated land and was already alluded to by Andrew at the beginning and the other one I think you could say is human capital because even before the war and during the war the literacy rates and other human capital indicators remained low so it's unlike a lot of other educated and trained and low cost labor force to generate manufactured exports etc that model just doesn't work for Afghanistan I did not mention as a constraint lack of money because money is not the constraint there's tons of private Afghan money floating around some sunk into real estate some of elsewhere a lot of it sitting in the neighboring countries and that's one of the both the symptoms and also one of the sort of potential areas where attracting that money back might help well since 2011 I'll make a plug for a piece brief which I assume is outside just which outlines what happened in recent years but it's not at all surprising when the drawdown occurred and international military expenditures declined sharply and international military related aid but keep in mind the civilian aid has not declined so closely but it's this huge reduction in international military expenditures and associated you know demand in the economy that has caused a precipitous decline in economic growth as I said nine percent per year on average earlier well 3.7 percent in 2013 about 2 percent in 2014 looks about the same Afghanistan's domestic revenue where by the way until 2011 that was a success story from probably two or three percent of GDP at the at the beginning of in 2001 and 2002 it went up to 11.6 percent of GDP which is higher than Pakistan's rate at the time and higher than Iran's non oil revenue to GDP ratio so but coming back to the last so but then it's declined basically by one percentage point of GDP or more per year very precipitously some of it is the slowdown in economic growth other appears to be burgeoning corruption related to the short time horizons in the in the recent transition little business investment high unemployment capital flight increasing flight of people more asylum requests I think in toward the end of last year and this year so none of this is terribly surprising a huge demand shock but I would say perhaps also but perhaps even more important was a declining confidence and the compounding uncertainty and I'll just give three or four factors behind that I mean the long delay in signing the BSA was in my view quite early in the election in Broglie all it just went on and on and so and then when the outcome came it didn't really settle the uncertainty because as as Scott had mentioned there's sort of an institutionalized continuing kind of political crisis. This is not an environment when any sensible private investor would want to to invest and I would argue also last year and was also made people worried and certainly did not provide another a sign that businessmen should invest more deteriorating security and corruption I've already mentioned so the current situation and prospects I mean basically looks like more of the same slow growth growth has not actually yet gone into negative territory and I think the story behind that is agriculture has not done so if they hadn't or if in the future they have a poor harvest the economy will go into decline right now it's basically growing around the rate of population growth which means no growth in per capita incomes the fiscal crisis I won't go into detail because conscious of the time but you can read about it it looks it's quite dire and no end in sight I think Scott has already pointed being these security political and and economic developments can't be seen in isolation and the perceived ineffectiveness and lack of performance of the national unity government the security situation all of these have have effects on economic confidence investment and economic growth there you know to give a couple of positive things there actually has been some improvement in revenue but the final fiscal data for the first four months has come in and actually total revenue grew by about 7% that's not terrible but it's much below the program target for the revenue of growing 25% for the year so it's a little better modest improvement but nothing that will actually in any way really ameliorate the fiscal crisis I mean the fiscal gap is largely due to the cost of the security forces which are among the highest in the world somewhere close to 25 to 40% of GDP and another thing that people sometimes forget Afghanistan has something like 7 or 8 billion dollars of foreign exchange reserves those don't belong to the government they belong to the central bank they're usable for managing the balance of payments do I have time or do I have to say something about that no you have time for something to start with okay well the first recommendation is that there are no silver bullets there are no easy solutions I mean the fundamental way to make improvements in the short run is more Afghan and I forget about the foreign investment and all that kind of pie in the sky stuff Afghan business sentiment that in my view requires that I mean businessmen will look at the political and security situation and if the situation is more of the same on that how can you expect people to start bringing their money back from Dubai or other places and investing in the economy there's been some talk about it using a demand stimulus well you know Afghanistan had during the surge had one of the biggest demand stimulus anything that could be considered even now would be much smaller and don't forget it would remain very import intensive and so limited benefits for the domestic economy and by the way if you pump more money in in the current environment it might also translate into a good bit more to some extent into more capital flight job programs labor intensive public works you know they provide a short-term palliative but again not really much and natural resources that's seen as a silver bullet by some well maybe if we get into the questions it's unrealistic in the short run and counter I mean sort of any I think almost any economist you ask when they talk about natural resource based growth it's a resource curse and economies did not benefit from exploiting natural resources so what can be done here's the constructive part well you can do some modest measures to increase revenues like I mean they got 7% increase I think just by stopping a few very blatant forms of corruption and you know the situation is so bad that you can actually get some modest improvements there were also some other recommendations specifically on the margin donors should really look at their portfolios you know everybody says the Afghan government can't spend money but a lot of it is a donor problem you could shift money on the donor side from slow spending projects to ones that make more of an economic impact in the short run agriculture clearly needs a long-term effort and that's clearly the area where Afghanistan has some new irrigation I mean it's virtually criminal in my view that over the last 12 or 14 years now there has not been a major new irrigation project I mean that's the scarce resource or one of the main scarce resources in Afghanistan so let me leave it on this note that you know maybe not a general demands stimulus but what economists would call expenditure switching policies one of those is exchange rate depreciation right you know be a little more aggressive about that risky it's a pretty dollarized economy in many ways and what I mean basically exchange rate depreciation reduces the cost of labor and switches incentives from imports toward exports it's certainly is going to be needed but how fast and how much benefit you'll get from it but the other way to switch is to focus on some trade policies you know don't protect wheat everybody talks about wheat and how Afghanistan needs to produce wheat well the markets nearby Afghanistan are hopeless for Afghans to export wheat so forget about that and in a good harvest year they're 80 to 90% so you could get a little more wheat and that might be good to have such variability in production again through irrigation investments but where Afghanistan's potential lies is in labor intensive high value agriculture cash crops with a caveat other than opium and so you know protect you know apples from China almonds from California God knows what else I mean you know do a little bit of agriculture protection chicken this may sound very radical but the US in the 19th century developed its manufacturing base but with high tariffs East Asian countries had high protection of agriculture and US and European countries protect agriculture enormously in various ways so why a country that's much poor why should it just open its markets entirely to dumping of agriculture products by neighboring countries out of the box here like a good former World Bank official perhaps slightly more palliative would be let's go for some innovative export subsidies again that's how many countries achieved export performance so let's not rule it out due to WTO or various other things you know you could call them export promotion grants but I would get a subsidy issue but you know and I would just end with a cautionary remark I don't think anything that I've said is going to trump the political and security developments but I hope I end it on a slightly more positive note thank you Bill last but not least Mouid Youssef Mouid's director at USIP for South Asia programs we have a large program in Pakistan he oversees we're also supporting work on Indo-Pac and other things but we're fortunate we had to twist Mouid's arm to stay he was going to climb on a plane he's off to Pakistan in a few hours among other things to finish up his next book on sort of nuclear strategy and tactics in South Asia so anyway thanks Mouid for sticking around to deal with this very easy last topic the Pakistan role in the peace and Ghani's outreach to Pakistan I should note that Scott and Mouid are writing a paper on this which should be out shortly sort of analyzing this outreach and its prospects for success so Mouid thanks Andrew if you're depending on Pakistan for good news we know we're clutching at straws but let me give it a shot but thanks for the opportunity thanks for not letting me only half mind the presentation because I'm going to give you a preview of the paper that I and Scott have done but I won't give him credit just yet for anything I'm going to say till you start bashing me so let me just make four points I'm going to talk about reconciliation and this whole debate about President Ghani reaching out to Pakistan and getting criticized and blamed for it in Afghanistan as Andrew mentioned in his speech on why he did what he did and where we think this is going to be different than what had happened before and whether it may or may not work so the first point to make is that at least in my view his outreach to Pakistan makes perfect sense perfect logical sense not based on any liking for Pakistan any naivety as his critics have blamed him but quite frankly because at least I don't see what his alternative option was when he took power but to try and get to Pakistan for two reasons one reconciliation was still actually more crucial than when President Karzai was trying this the Afghan state is weaker as we've heard the Taliban were getting stronger and if you had to get stability you had to get the Taliban insurgency now then the question why Pakistan why not any other way of doing this and the answer is fairly simple I think for the past 12 or 13 years President Karzai and the US and others tried to convince Pakistan to change tack on its policy on Afghanistan on the Taliban on insurgency not only did it not work but I think Pakistan ultimately proved that unless it felt that its defined interests in Afghanistan were addressed it had enough maneuvering space not only to fend off President Karzai which turned out to be fairly easy but also tremendous US pressure in terms of doing more in terms of you know trying to change policy I think where the US and President Karzai underestimated was how beholden Pakistan is and how serious it is on to its self-defined interests right or wrong despite sort of the US assistance despite US pressure and quite honestly despite a lot of US missionary work which involved pleading and saying please change none of that seemed to work and so if you're President I don't think he had another option but to try addressing changing his paradigm rather than asking Pakistan to address at least first and trying to address Pakistan's concerns second I think one also needs to keep in mind that this is not about the Taliban I think President Ghani has made clear over and over that this is a longer term vision about integration in the South Asian economy about in terms of the roundabout that he talks about in terms of reducing money on the ANSF the expenditure on the NSF all of that rightly or wrongly requires Pakistan and so I think there are people are being unfair when they talk about it second point his outreach I think is fundamentally different or we think is fundamentally different than President Karzai's the contradiction in President Karzai's outreach as I've just sort of alluded was that he was trying to get Pakistan on board but asking Pakistan to change its paradigm without addressing what Pakistan felt were its concerns now the objectivity of those concerns is a question whether the Pakistani concerns were objectively you know correct or not but fundamentally there were four things that I think Pakistan basic that drove Pakistan's policy in Afghanistan over the past 12 or 13 years and I think Pakistan was entirely consistent on these four throughout and entirely consistent in playing its spoiling roles because of these four number one India right or wrong the paranoia, obsession, concern whatever you want to call it anything that India did in Afghanistan Pakistan saw as a net negative and started getting worried about much more than IOU would think it should have second by extension it did not want a leader or a government in Kabul that it felt was sympathetic towards India over it it did not want a leader of the room where Afghanistan's future was going to be decided third it wanted to achieve these two goals without completely rupturing its relationship with the US only superpower assistance coming in didn't want to be on the wrong side so it the US and Pakistani interests diverged on the first two points on India and on the government in Kabul but still Pakistan wanted to make sure that it remained part of while it did this and so the policy was a lot of tactical support a lot of behind the scenes support but strategically the divergence remained between the two sides and I think both tried way too hard to convince each other to convince themselves and to convince us that there was actually no divergence I think the divergence was real and it existed throughout and finally Pakistan did not want any policy or any development and thus it kept resisting the idea of going after the sanctuaries in FATA and against the Kuwait Ashura et cetera let me make one interesting point here throughout this 12 or 13 year period the US and others continued to argue to Pakistan that the reason you're getting backlash is that you are being selective in your approach against militants you're going after some and supporting some until you go after all of them you're going to have backlash and the only view was actually no our problem is we did too much at your behest after 9-11 which created this space in FATA for people to come back at us and so the more the instability in Pakistan the more the Pakistani strategist or the decision makers felt that we are going to be selective rather than not selective so this was a clear sort of divergence between the US and Pakistan on how to solve the problem before and because of these continued to diverge with the US and the Kabul government President Ghani has essentially changed Afghanistan's paradigm not asked Pakistan to change its paradigm first but he's gone ahead and done his first by addressing all four of these concerns and that is what is making him so unpopular in Afghanistan given that Pakistan for good reason is seen as very very negatively in Afghanistan almost on India it's very clear that he's taken a very different line suspended the arms deal his trip to India was very clearly soft on Pakistan he is unlike President Karzai completely in the lead on the negotiations with the Taliban and rather than trying to circumvent Pakistan is going to Pakistan and saying okay you are saying you want to be in the room deliver for us third I think in terms of and this is crucial his ask as far as I understand to Pakistan originally when this conversation started was not military action against the sanctuaries it was not to go whole hog and take out the sanctuaries through military action the ask was you need to deliver the Taliban on the negotiating table choose a strategy that works and this for Pakistan was crucial because as I said for 12 to 13 years it did not want to and did not go after these sanctuaries and so it had now the option of talking doing whatever it needed to do to bring them to the table so I think this was fundamentally different than President Karzai and here I would argue that this makes it the first time since 9-11 that we've now got a chance to really see whether Pakistan is sincere in terms of saying that it wants peace in Afghanistan and will help and whatever or the skeptics are correct that it actually doesn't care and just will watch while Afghanistan falls apart until now Pakistan was holding out I would argue because of its self-defined interest that it felt were not addressed the third point I wanted to make is I am not surprised at how things have gone so far even though everybody else seems to be surprised and thinks that the game is over number one I did a book on insurgencies in South Asia last year and just building off that I can tell you that what the Taliban are doing now which is basically insurgent behavior before you want to really see where the talks can go and simultaneously they're throwing out suggestions and listening to Pakistan and going to China and going to Norway and whatever and talking whether with any agenda or not but saying we are ready to talk but also very clearly surging to push the unity government to the brink and be in a position of strength second I think the splits within the Taliban this is the pro talk group that also tells me it's not too difficult to understand why there is a group that is constantly going after while some may be thinking that there is a conversation to be had third I'm also not surprised to be honest and how Pakistan has gone about this because Pakistan's first sort of attempt is to get the Taliban to talk without changing anything in its paradigm so it doesn't want to go after the Taliban it wants to convince them by talking to them to say why don't you go and talk making life difficult for some of them but not really doing anything that will squeeze or put pressure on the Taliban to really think that this is the moment to negotiate the final point I want to make is that what Pakistan is doing and the way it's set up right now is not going to work and so despite the fact that he did what he should have done and was his only option he is fighting against odds and here going forward to give the constructive part as I end I think this is the moment the next three to four months will tell us whether Pakistan is willing to change its paradigm or not it's clear that it tried to convince the Taliban within the paradigm that it had it's tried to get them to talk I think there is a change in Pakistan on that there is more happening behind the scenes than we know but none of it is working it's very clear that the Taliban are surging the spring offensive goes on and they are pushing hard to see if they can get the unity government to collapse and so whatever Pakistan has done so far is not working and so there needs to be now very concerted we need to see a very concerted effort from Pakistan but the irony of this whole discussion for all these years is that we never got to specifics what is it that Pakistan needs to do you know saying wipe out the sanctuaries okay but it wasn't a conversation specifically I think the strategy that's going to work is exactly the strategy that has worked for Pakistan against the TTP which is to break the pro talks and pro fight groups from within which is to go after the pro fight groups through intelligence and police operations apart from the Akhani network there are going to be no military operations because you are talking about cities so it's law enforcement and intelligence operations and it is everything that President Ghani has put in his letter to Pakistan including arrests, prisoner exchanges etcetera etcetera ironically or interestingly all of what the letter says is what Pakistan and Afghanistan had already talked about and agreed to much before the letter came so both sides know what needs to be done now the question is will we see Pakistan take that route or not two or three months will define that two other recommendations or constructive points one every conversation that we have with the Taliban whoever is having it should be on a one point agenda which is what is it going to take to bring ceasefire what are the prerequisites because that's what's going to buy time for President Ghani for Pakistan for everybody else so rather than having a conversation with him later I think the conversation is what is it going to take what are the prerequisites to get a ceasefire or at least a limited ceasefire on the ground in Afghanistan and right now I feel there's too much going on in terms of these talks without any focus and then internally I think President Ghani one of the mistakes I think he made quite frankly is that he hyped this Pakistan outreach way too much without knowing whether it will deliver much more quietly would have been a different ballgame but now still I think he has to do a better job at PR and explaining internally on what he's doing and why he's doing because he's really getting beaten up over there and finally any perception that the unity government will not last or the ANSF will collapse will only strengthen the hands of the pro fight Taliban so for the US for everybody else and I won't go into details about this whatever it takes to convince people in Afghanistan that the unity government will last and will not fall I think is absolutely crucial of course Pakistan has a crucial role in that by trying to reduce the violence last sentence is that to my mind going back to my book on insurgencies and now pulling back from the situation theoretically the best chance of talks beginning will be after this summer if the unity government and the ANSF prove that they have not collapsed that's what's going to strengthen the hand of the pro talk Taliban to say we can't have outright victory and that's probably where I think space will open up further for Pakistan to do what it needs to do but if it is true that Pakistan is ultimately not willing to do it it's just not going to do it then I think nothing will work thanks thank you very much weed I think we now have time for questions will probably take two or three at a time and then come back to the panel we are this is being webcast so this is on the record please identify yourself but also please try to keep your remarks and questions relatively short we'll start with you Mark thanks Andrew I want to thank the panel as you mentioned we just put out this report on the Afghan local police it's only closer I think it's on mechanical I'll speak louder I think that it really does relate directly to Minister Jalali's comment about security but also affects the political process because what's happened is that over recent years and what this report shows is that rather than increase security funding the now 29,000 Afghan local police 34 provinces when the U.S. is no longer embedded to essentially control their performance results in a significant number of them and this estimates two thirds not contributing to security and in some ways also engaging in the kind of abuses that undermine government support and so what you have then as you mentioned fundamentally stabilization requires strengthening the ANSF both the ANP and the ANA at the same time that you carry out government reforms and if what you're doing is undermining that process which is what this essentially finds you essentially are undermining your hopes for stabilization so what we're sort of saying here is that you need to identify the bad ones help President Ghana get rid of them and that's going to mean not just simply stopping to their funds because you have to do something and then the good ones to have a timeline for incorporating them into the ANSF particularly the ANP I'm Colonel Anil Raman from the Indian Army my question is for Yusuf my question is that like you very clearly brought out that Pakistan has been very steadfast in maintaining its geopolitical aims in Afghanistan why at this stage when it's on the cusp of victory would it seek to abandon all that for some sort of negotiated peace with Ghani it's achieved whatever it's bonded in Afghanistan is it just going to do that for the sort of idyllic sort of state of peace John Rothenberg both political and economic a year ago the Ministry of Finance said that 14% of revenues was being allocated to the Mulsam's cash grant program for martyrs and disabled and unofficially they said that this and other outsized programs would be addressed to Vashraf Ghani one so my question is what are the other outsized allocations and is there any is there any chance that any of these are going to be addressed soon my name is Arnold Zeitlin I covered Afghanistan for the Associated Press in its golden age in the early 70s one question China has been taken an unusual interest in Afghanistan lately do you think that what impact of any would its interest have on Afghanistan's future also does anyone really expect an Afghan future without the Taliban back to the panel do you want to start with I don't know the ALP question and Moid did you want to respond and anyone else you know what the ALP question I think you put it in two context perspective first in the Afghan culture perspective the other one and the context of the international intervention Afghanistan in the past 13 years in the context of Afghan culture the local communities and tribes always helped the Afghan government in order to augment its security forces when there was a need but that was only part of a system government did not create militias the tribes created militias they were responding to the tribal leaders not to the government they were paid by the tribal leaders they were committed to the ethos and knowns of the tribes when the government created militias they became mercenaries and they were not committed to the ethos that the community or the public army which call it that was a good when that system was because these tribes and states are part of one system that works when the system is intact when the system breaks up the tribes find their own ways to deal with whatever they actually support during the 13 years of war they disrupted in people who came in and emerged they actually were empowered by the tribes by the international community by the war by assistance from others so the so called war laws that you called or pattern networks that is different situation and therefore it works only in areas that that tribal system is still intact it works in Aragandab and this works very well and it is peaceful go to Haakres a few years back Haakres was the most unstable area but today the local police in Haakres doing well in Paktika in some areas and also in Paktia in some areas but not in the north that system is not there so those who are hired as local police are loyal and committed to the war laws the other is the in the context of the past 13 years in the past 10 years there was a kind of a contradiction between building state institutions building democracy and also fighting terrorism you fight terrorism with these malicious created malicious and they depended the international forces dependent on these war laws malicious and they were not interested in building state institutions and they listened to those main state institutions that's why DDR didn't work well in Afghanistan partly because of the weakness of the government and partly because the international community used some of these malicious in order to fight terrorists so therefore in Afghanistan today you have to put it in these two contexts it works some areas it does not work in other areas in the north actually it is a disaster in some parts of the south it was not good in Farah you say that the militia was created by President Karzai from Barak Zahiz they went and took their war on the rifle the tribes of new Zahiz that created they paved the way for the Taliban to come and fulfill the vacuum so you have to put all these in this kind of context you also want to comment does Afghanistan have a future without the Taliban? I think Afghanistan we had these talks with the Taliban representative in France and in Shanti and others Afghanistan missed two opportunities to work with Taliban in the past one was in Bonn the other one is 2003 when I was Minister of Interior and they were coming and they were asking something which was reasonable they wanted to be immune from persecution from political party but nobody agreed to that at that time now everybody wants that but the situation has changed you cannot go back to that situation but they can get anything they want only if they go through the legal process of the constitution of Afghanistan if they go and want to change the constitution they should go and do that but today it is very difficult I think the most important thing today when I said this to work for a ceasefire after the ceasefire you can talk seriously about other issues maybe you can work with the Taliban after the ceasefire and they negotiate Afghans always talk to each other even today locally they talk to each other and but working with Taliban creating that peace in Afghanistan is not going to come as a package it will be incremental ceasefire maybe that so on the question of why Pakistan would you know the first thing I said Pakistan has not achieved anything in Afghanistan in the past 13 years except ensuring that others don't achieve what they wanted to achieve that's the real achievement the idea the answer to your question depends on what you believe Pakistan wants if you think it wants civil war then I think you're right I would argue that that's not the case and the reason of the spoiling throughout the 12 years was the four reasons that I just explained to you so if those four are addressed Pakistan I think will may change tack now two things on this one the TTP part the Pakistani Taliban part and the instability within Pakistan it's a much different context than it was in 1990s and 2001 that is Pakistan's number one sort of problem right now number two I think civil war Pakistan does not have the space unlike the 90s to support anymore so if it can't support financially and materially a civil war in Afghanistan where is it going to end up if the Taliban start rising again so to my mind Pakistan's best bet right now is a mixture which is pluralistic where the Taliban are back in but not on top I think that's ultimately the goal as far as I can tell and the indication I'll give you if Pakistan really wanted civil war and the Taliban to rise Pakistan made a U-turn on one thing which is very interesting in 2011 USIP did a report with the Pakistani partner asking the Pakistani strategic elite who were part of you know in the mix and what do you want in Afghanistan one of the biggest concerns that showed up was that the Americans are here under a larger design to change the regional balance they're going to keep permanent basis they will never go in 2013 and 14 Pakistan consistently started saying US please stay please stay please stay don't go if it wanted the Taliban to win in civil war it made no sense for Pakistan to want the US to slow down but this is the moment we'll find out whether it is a civil war or it actually wants what I think it wants anyone else want to respond Bill or just on the budget programs yeah it's very interesting I think it was in 2012 or yeah maybe at the end of 2012 parliament unilaterally tripled the payments for martyrs and disabled which is for families of people who've died servicemen etc and civilian casualties and the interesting thing about that is there was the benefit before was low enough that only those people who really needed it applied and there wasn't much scope for corruption the increase in the benefit was large enough that more people applied a lot more and also it became as not surprisingly useful because it was a large enough amount that they could demand ribs etc so that doubled in 2014 I think so it's now what do you do about it it's a pretty popular thing it would be who wants to go on record for reducing payments to families of people who've died in incidents etc what the government has done is they've just gone very slow and stopped accepting applications other outsized programs it's sort of hard for me to think of too many that are under the afghan government's control there may well be outsized donor programs which we could talk about but one is the intelligence that's gone up to 200 million dollars a year none of that is internationally funded there may be other forms on top of that but the 200 million dollar bill for the national director of security is domestically funded on the other hand minister Jalali said that intelligence was one of the areas where the loss of international side salaries you know afghan teachers make a last I checked make a good bit more than Pakistani teachers are you going to really cut salaries and what about the international reaction if you go slow and increasing the number of teachers which is the biggest part of the salary bill you can just imagine that the reaction about not educating girls they don't actually they're not actually what do you call it present at the schools or lots of issues like that so other than some possible scope if there's some kind of semi ceasefire to reduce the NSF costs there's not a lot under the afghan governments direct control then there's some big donor programs and which may be in need of trimming or reallocating which I mentioned let's go back for another round of questions sure okay we'll put China on hold we'll get back to China and take some more questions and meanwhile give some thought to China back there the young woman in the middle hi my name is Mina Oberdick I'm from public international law and policy group so I want to highlight a point made towards the beginning of this discussion by Mr. Jalali and Mr. Wilder I want to highlight the policy prescriptions for today have predominantly been on top down stabilization efforts such as democratization and broad economic forms more generally so my question is two fold firstly what efforts have been made to address the local drivers of violence at the grassroots level and secondly what could be done to address the issues of the community secondly what could be done to increase such local efforts okay actually right next to you good morning my name is Joseph Sobek and I'm with the British Embassy my question goes towards anybody on the panel who would like to answer but in regards to women's rights in Afghanistan has been one of the major areas that there has been some progress made with the US exiting what do you think might be some of the major threats that the US engagement in the future okay and Marvin Marvin Wildman Middle East Institute is it I know it's coming yeah okay could you phrase it a little differently from what you've had in saying that in fact Pakistan has a new paradigm but the trouble is hasn't given up on its old paradigm it's got a new paradigm in that it sees the Ashraf Ghani government now as one that is in their interest that stability and perhaps prosperity in Afghanistan now is there in their interest in that any notion here of any kind of chaos and so therefore it's willing to make that investment here but at the same time if it adheres to Ghani's demands here for action against the Qatashura and Al-Khani it would be giving up on its old paradigm which is based on the fact that although it may be supporting the Kabul government it has no real confidence or it can't be confident that that government is going to survive so therefore it has to maintain what it has all along and that is have to have an insurance policy a hedging policy and the trouble is that both of them together are contradictory because the very thing that you are banking on in improved Kabul government you are preventing or undermining by not giving up on the on the insurance okay one one more from the front row and then we'll go back to the audience my name is Tamana Hila and I came recently from Afghanistan that's one year ago my question is to Mr. Burd about them I think I heard about their relation between the signing of bilateral security agreement on and its impact on economic situation in Afghanistan if you could more write on that okay we'll go back to the panel and we'll start with China and Mr. Jalal is offered to address that first of all I think with the question that I said the roots of conflict is it is only I was talking about that area in in in war districts that actually that internal feud actually was caused some of these the people or tribal leaders to affiliate themselves with the ISAB were claimed that they have affiliated with ISAB with China I think China is interested there's no doubt about these stability in Afghanistan particularly after the withdrawal of the international forces in track two meetings in the US China and on Afghanistan China has showed interest to empower the national security forces in Afghanistan however no concrete you know actions were taken although there were some suggestions on the table for them but politically also China can use its influence in Pakistan and the major investment is making now in Pakistan whether that can be used by China or whether Pakistan will be you know willing to that kind of you know kind of cooperation with China and bring stability to Afghanistan I don't know however there is a possibility China indicated that it's interested in regional stability in order to you know implement it's one built one wrote projects with the kind of a silk root of China there that's in the interest of China however China is still very you know concerned about security of Afghanistan that's why it has opened its you know contract with the Inaq copper minefield for renegotiation and it is in the it was mentioned several times to Chinese that's why they do that this can bring some kind of stability to Afghanistan but I think one answer that I got from them was that the market value of that copper is going down therefore the Chinese government should subsidize that company in order to make up for the losses on the other hand the kind of a contract that was signed with China actually make it very difficult for Afghanistan to change some part of it and therefore this is the economic part of it they are interested to invest in Afghanistan but provided the security comes first but then the security too China can play a role through Pakistan and also through its effort to kind of facilitate the talks with the Taliban but we have to wait and see I have not seen much practical steps taken in that direction that's what I've been involved in a US-China dialogue on Afghanistan as well it's been fascinating just over the last two and a half years of that dialogue which partly intended to try to get China to take more interest in the situation in Afghanistan just initially there wasn't much interest in just how it's increased of late but again primarily driven not by economic interest which we much talked about but primarily by atem and the situation in western China eastern Turkmenistan independence movement or whatever so I think that's what really is driven their concern I think of late of 46 billion on the recent visit to Pakistan I actually have my own concerns at one level I don't think investing that level of resources on north-south corridors makes much sense unless it can link to east-west corridors which I think is where there's more economic activity but also I'm worried in some ways that Chinese maybe are not learning from our mistakes in Afghanistan with weak institutions does not necessarily lead to security and and I think so that but I think they have a feeling that we were driven by security interests in Afghanistan and their solution is to be driven by economic interests and by economic investments in Pakistan should lead to jobs and that will stabilize the situation whereas I think if they started with more of a political strategy as I wish we had in Afghanistan to use that level of resources to incentivize a peace process for example most importantly on the Indo-Pak side that would do more to stabilize that region of Pakistan and Afghanistan which I think would then ultimately lead to more returns on that investment but we'll see how that plays out just a very good point on the top-down bottom-up I think we do lots of events at Afghanistan and you're absolutely right I think this session is more on the political security economic transitions from a top-down perspective please we do come to many of other events that focus on a wide range we're fortunate to have a lot of expertise here only a fraction of it here today on the panel but we have Bill Key-Samedy here who many many years working in Afghanistan on rule of law civil society women's rights human rights related issues Casey Johnson as I said in from Kabul to our bottom-up field-based programming Barmak Pashak with decades of experience working with civil society groups in Afghanistan Ambassador Steve Steiner in the back who leads a lot of our work on women's rights issues in Afghanistan here in Washington and networking so there's a lot of resources there but I don't know Scott if you want to add something on that as well yeah I mean that's a huge question the bottom-up top-down question let me make two or three stabs at it first of all when you have as I described a president that has appointment powers that go down to district-level leaders there's kind of a connecting line between the top-down and the bottom-up where it's hard to separate what's top-down and what's bottom-up a lot of the research that we've been doing has come to the conclusion that it was sort of rapacious corrupt government at every level which has been a driver of conflict to some degree at every level but certainly at the local level when because you have an official appointment you can say this piece of land which was a feud between our families for hundreds of years is now mine because I get to sign the piece of paper that generates conflict at the same time there are many many layers of conflict in Afghanistan it goes from the top-down I'm not looking at you for any particular reason but meddling neighbors massive influx of cash for example from well-meaning superpowers that nonetheless sort of distort the economy that's sort of top-down and all of it acts in ways which is very difficult for us and even I think Afghans to read what is going on my general theory of the conflict of Afghanistan if you have to have one is that nobody agrees yet on what all the rules are for working these things out and in different places there are different rules and in different places there are different sources of power and as Minister Jalali said there's been this attempt to try to create this institutionalization rule of law but at the same time it hasn't succeeded to erase the kind of anarchy of norms and rules my final stab will just be an example of a project that we're doing right now in Afghanistan recognizing that a lot of the conflict comes from land disputes one of the problems is the process for registering land depends on having documents I think from before 1972 or something so if you don't have those documents then you can't prove this land was yours in the meantime you might have been a refugee there might have been four or five different warlords over the period of the conflict that is seized and lost and retaken or had the land retaken so you know how do you resolve this we've been working with the land authority to try to figure out a way in which ownership of land can be reestablished on norms that are recognized but that don't depend on having documentation from 40 years ago so that's kind of a bit of a bottom up approach and it comes from bottom up research but it happens that President Ghani's like this approach and now is chairing the commission that's sort of looking into how this can be worked out I mean maybe it's not a good thing that he's chairing this commission as I said he's sort of chairing every commission and reading every report but it certainly shows that there is a recognition this is a serious problem and addressing it may be one way of eliminating some source of conflict at the ground level so thanks for bringing up that question but it's more complex and I can give justice to but I hope I give a little bit of nuance to it Moeid and we're running out of time so it's also if you have any concluding remarks you want to make as well yes never fun to be the only Pakistani on the team that's like being the only economist only economist that's right at least you can speak the jargon and get away with it so Marvin I think we're going to steal your line without credit and put it in the paper exactly right the question here to answer is can both be done can the contradiction be removed you know for for the past 12-13 years we kept talking about Pakistan should go after these sanctuaries wipe them out wipe them out and I always wondered why the conversation never got more serious about what it means because if the ask was go after them militarily it was not going to happen so that's why I mentioned breaking up the pro fight and the pro talk breaking up the people from within the Taliban who are not listening to the pro talk within the leadership so that Pakistan is not giving up on that insurance completely and at the same time going after the people who even the pro talk Taliban would want to sideline so that there could be a real conversation now I am not privy to any details on how far you know the community, law enforcement, intelligence operations, selected arrests, families being put in some kind of trouble of the people who are holding out this talk agenda because it's clear that there are certain who are talking who want to talk so I think that's the space if it can be exploited where you go after part of them without going after the movement I think that's probably the space that Pakistan is going to exploit and we'll find out to my mind the reason not right now in terms of just one or two other sort of comments one how does this work to me at the end of the day Pakistan won't be able to have it both ways it can't argue that it's relevant and that it doesn't have leverage and so the question is if it has enough leverage to push them to the table when are we going to see it if it doesn't then it's irrelevant the next few months will tell us but never before I think has Pakistan been in a position or the situation has been such that Pakistan simply can't make an excuse not to do more because it's its concerns I feel have been addressed in a way that they've never been before and so this is going to be the real test ultimately President Ghani though has to do more internally to make sure that the political backlash he's facing through PR through other mechanisms but also probably through becoming stunner on Pakistan in public at least and he's started to do that because otherwise he's going to keep getting this blame from everybody and finally quite honestly I think we here and everybody else who's discussing this needs to understand the complexities and the nuances and the problems in going from here to a ceasefire I mean I feel people are now more impatient than President Ghani is and it happens there are two more attacks nothing is moving even if you play out how the ceasefire will come about this is going to take talks after talks after talks because the Taliban will want something in return of giving up in return for giving up their price sort of commodity which is violence let me stop there I saw a tweet from Barney Rubin today saying pessimism on peace and optimism on war make you a wise man in DC and you know I think there is lots of grounds for skepticism I do think that this is an important time where there's a risk of being so skeptical that maybe indeed something does change but we're too skeptical to take advantage of it but Bill did you want to respond? There was one question directly and then there was a question about women's rights and the threat to them and I don't know which of us can do it but I could say something about it with we briefly because on the BSA I mean I think it's just another example one of several saline of examples of gross irresponsibility in managing Afghanistan both by in this case Afghans President Karzai and in other cases by the international community I mean it's just whatever self-inflicted wounds in 2013 signing the BSA after the law after that advisory lawyer Jirga endorsed it you know contrary to some expectations would have been an easy thing to do it would the point is in 2014 all these sources of instability are concentrated together the international drawdown the elections the economy clearly getting into bad shape why not find an easy source of stability the BSA and so it gets to my general point about the expectations and confidence for the economy reflecting on some of these political actions and it's just such an obvious no-brainer then signing it later after didn't have the same impact because it was through after a long election process which certainly worsened the economic prospects and outlook and with so many uncertainties about the national unity government of course it was good that it was signed in the end but signing it did not have the same impact as earlier I think the topic on women's rights is a big issue it's hard to say much on it quickly it's a challenge I mean one way of putting it is clearly women's participation in development is really critical for Afghanistan's future that's essential in the short run I mean what will some of the Taliban demands be related to so far they're talking a much better line than they talked in the 1990s but we don't know when it you know if it comes down to it and I think there's so there's both a risk of a backlash within Afghanistan and then a second risk is possibly that the international community doesn't give any space for Afghans themselves men and women to discuss it and take sort of knee-jerk reactions so I think I'll leave it at that there are others much better qualified than me to talk about it let's try maybe pick up on that point I didn't talk about the outside the sort of governing arrangements of armed opposition the Taliban and so forth and the possibility of a negotiation which will complicate and has been built into certain scenarios about eventual loyalties and so forth but you know pick it up on the question of women's rights I think it's clear that there have been certain formal rights especially that have been granted and to a certain extent have been taken advantage of and well used and there are also traditional practices that continue and lots of discrimination that happens at the level of society the question I think that is going to be very interesting is if we do get to this negotiating position and the constitution is reopened will these formal rights still you know the quota for women in the parliament and so forth will they still remain in the constitution or will they be negotiated away for the sake of some kind of peace and most interestingly to me will we care at the level of the international community as we get to that point and as we continue our withdrawal and I'm not so confident that that question is easy to answer in the affirmative right now Final point Okay a few points first there's no alternative to the Afghanistan national unity government I think it needs to be supported how I think the Afghan can help and also the international community can help as for the term in the area of security I think there is a need for integration of security institutions to reforms in Afghanistan that reform is very needed however Afghanistan is now facing immediate challenges they do not the leaders do not have the luxury to think mid term or long term they are dealing with immediate actions one cannot expect that much change will take place in the near future I think if by this fall the security forces they do not have to defeat the Taliban if they hold their own and not lose I think then the government will have a story to tell and in order to do that I think it needs international support in areas that I mentioned particularly in the area of training of leadership in mid level Afghan army and police officers and also in terms of material support in the intelligence logistics and air power currently the resolute support is fragmented the US forces the troops that are in Afghanistan they can support only the ministries of interior defense in the core in Kandahar and the Kandahar province not even in Helmand Kandahar and Nangarhar province the core of Paktia province the core in Helmand they do not have the capacity or the resources to support the Herat core as a service was supported by the by Italians in the north court by Germans so there is a fragmentation of resources and it is not even I think this needs to be addressed if the Afghan national security forces should be able to respond to these immediate challenges and on the other hand Afghan national security forces should adopt to the new environment battlefield environment she should come out of the garrison mentality and take the war to the insurgents and through agile and kind of effective raids to disrupt concentration of the time Thank you Minister Jolli made several of my points I just wanted to say that USIP works in many conflict zones around the world and call me naive but I would still take Afghanistan as the potential for a relative success story and I think I'm much happier about the prospects for peace in Afghanistan than I think some of my colleagues who are currently trying to work on Iraq and Syria and Yemen and Libya and many other crises but I think one of the issues I wanted to emphasize though that situation is at a critical juncture and I think every year we say this is the critical year in Afghanistan we're saying the next several months are the critical several months precisely I think from what Minister Jolli said is if the government can get through this fighting season and show that it actually the NSF can stand up and survive without the degree of international support they had in the past and again I think that's a victory I think there's a lot of responsibility for the national unity government leadership to make this work I think it's taken too long for them to actually get their act together but again just really in the last couple weeks once these appointments were made I think that there is a time of hope that this incredibly contentious issue of appointments if they can get through that and actually then start governing and be perceived to be governing and doing things I think that they can regain some of the lost ground because absolutely the message I think we wanted to come back and convey also is there is no plan B the board chairman always says plan B is to make plan A work and I think we really do need to focus on that and discourage talk about other possibilities I really don't think that there are any realistic ones but I do think the next few months are critical I do think that there are some tangible things that can be done I think we've talked about it I think the issue of additional support for enablers I think to me it is again when the national security advisers talking we need 25 or 30 helicopters I think those are the kind of issues that are viewed as critical as well as the ISR support I also do think this economic piece is critical is there something that can be done to help I know Bill probably is not in favor of this with his former world bank up but some kind of stimulus to buy a little political space to help the government during the next few months as well and also very critically how do we counter the abandonment narrative and the perceptions at the international community in general and at the U.S. in particular are pulling out according to in my personal view some artificial timeline I think we should be trying to remain engaged certainly not at the levels of the past but we in terms of in a way that keeps greatly enhances the prospects for stability in Afghanistan because I think if we fail that I think it's going to be a disaster for U.S. national interests in the region in particular I think the impact it's going to have on Pakistan but also first and foremost for Afghans I mean the biggest you know losers if we go back to war will be women and children and then Afghan population in general but also the region and I do think I'm still in the camp that there is Afghanistan could be also the success story for the U.S. if we remain engaged so with that personal view note at the end and hopefully a little degree of optimism will conclude I'd like to thank you all for coming and also thank our panelists so thank you