 My name is Robert Lamb, I'm the Director of the Program on Crisis Conflict and Cooperation here at CSIS. Thank you everybody for staying here after this morning's panels and I hope you're enjoying your lunch. Our program recently published three reports on the question of what we referred to as absorptive capacity. Those reports are available both on the website and also on the back table unless they've been sold out already. And on the issue of absorptive capacity is something that we focused on after observing that in a lot of post-conflict situations and ongoing conflict situations and transition situations that the international community tended to rush in and overwhelm some either struggling governments or new governments or really just any governments. And sometimes the capacity to absorb international aid and attention has nothing to do with the capacity of the recipient society and institutions themselves. It has more to do with how donors try to overwhelm them and have some unreasonable expectations and ambitions. And this goes along with the theme of this conference of know thyself donor. So it's my pleasure to present today a panel of the other side of the equation. We all talk to ourselves here in Washington. We tend to know a lot of our views. It's useful once in a while to listen to the people who we believe were helping. Sometimes we are, sometimes we're not. In any event it's useful to hear their side of the story. It's my pleasure to introduce James Cunder to moderate this panel. All of you I'm sure know Jim. He's been around for a very long time. He's been at CARE. He's been a legislative branch. He's been a deputy assistant secretary, assistant secretary, sorry, deputy assistant administrator and assistant administrator at USAID focusing on Asia in the Near East and spent time as well as the deputy administrator of USAID. And today he is at the, he's a senior resident fellow at the German Marshall Fund of the United States. And it is my pleasure to turn the panel over to James Cunder. Thanks. Thank you very much. And thank you for quickly moving back to your seats. I know it's the toughest things to compete with lunch. When Bill mentioned this panel to me, I jumped at the opportunity to moderate it. I teach a course, I teach a course at the Foreign Service Institute in which we refer to our partners in the affected countries as the forgotten partners. And I, unfortunately, as we engage in these intense discussions about stabilization and reconstruction. We do often undervalue the perspective of the people who are living through the period of instability. So we've got an extraordinarily important topic on this panel. And to do it justice, we've got an extraordinarily distinguished group of individuals who have joined us. William Deng Deng, Hussain Haqqani, and Ruben Zamora are all three individuals who not only have analyzed and thought deeply about these issues, but they are all three active participants in the management of these kinds of issues. And it is no exaggeration to say that each of the three panelists to my left has put his life on the line, quite literally put his life on the line to help bring peace and human progress to his respective countries. We also have the extra gratitude that we want to show to Mr. Zamora and Mr. Haqqani because they have joined us as you can see from your program notes at the last moment because of travel difficulties and, in one case, illness from the planned panelist. I want to express a special appreciation for their willingness to join this panel at the last minute. What I'm going to do to structure the panel is ask each of them to speak for just about 10 minutes to address this question at the highest level. What would you, each of you say to this panel, to this audience of practitioners in front of you, what advice would you give them from your experience in terms of listening to the people in the affected country when we're dealing with issues of reconstruction and stabilization? You know, not that long ago I was at AID visiting a minister in Mozambique in Maputo. And I remember very well sitting in the outer office looking forward to meeting the minister and thinking to myself, I bet he's really going to be happy to see me today. And instead, when I went in, he had a look of weariness on his face. And you know, we had one of those epiphanies where I actually said, you know, what's going on? What's happening with these meetings? He said, well, you know, the Danes were in here first thing this morning, then it was the European Union, then it was the Japanese, and now it's you. And we really were overwhelming him with love and affection and advice. And so I encourage you to really listen intensely to our distinguished panelists today. I'm going to ask William Deng Deng to start off the program and take about 10 minutes to give us his perspective on this important question. Thank you very much. Thank you very much, Mr. Kona. I want just to tell my friends here, good morning, good afternoon, that when you see my name there, don't confuse me with Dr. Francis Meding Deng who was here. He's ambassador, he's more senior than me, a more junior government official. So now talking about stabilization, if you have realized it has destabilized your own meal this afternoon, imagine in that small scale, if it can destabilize you, imagine a post-conflict country like South Sudan. And I will focus my discussion on South Sudan because South Sudan was supported strongly by the United States government. And as we talk today, our forces are being helped to build itself by the United States Defense Department. And what it means is that in order to do that, you should be able to deal with all of our local intricacies, which are sometimes overlooked. So I will walk you through talking point, you're not going to be very big, it's just a talking point, but we will have a chance to interact. South Sudan came into a semi-independent, oops, wrong, too rusty, thank you. Never mind about that, here we go again. Okay, this is just the background to why, how the South Sudan came to find itself where it is today. As you know, we have been going through the civil war of over 50 years. And you know what it does to a country when you go through a war between us and the North for the independent. We have, of course, our own conflict and others like in the neighboring countries, the LRA, we have the issue of electricity in South Sudan. You know, the civil service that came into being is not educated. Our economy does not exist, so don't be misled when you come to Cuba and you see all those buildings that they just came. The country never existed. It existed as a place where you extract resources by the North. So we didn't have a country, we had only a simple ethnic group that were put together in the line of work. So there was no infrastructure, doesn't exist. To go to Bahragesal, those of you who have been in South Sudan, if you are going by land, it takes you no less than 12 hours to drive. If you reach there, and by the time you reach there, you have to take your car to the garage. Absolutely. It's broken. Now, the interests. Since 1978, the United States discovered oil in South Sudan, not in the North, by the way, as has been argued so many times. Chevron was very much involved under President Numeri. And then by 1982 to 1988, Numeri revoked the agreement. And we went back, of course, to the Civil War. And then 1989, President al-Bashir came to power in a coup. And the saga continued in South Sudan. And oil became, of course, your strategic imperative for the United States at this point. So they took interest in the Sudan. The formation of AFRICOM, those of you who are very well aware of that, brought the existence and brought Sudan into the focus when the United States is fighting the war of terrorism, 19, 2011, sorry, 2011, as you can see, the combatant terrorism and ensuring the energy security of South Sudan, of the unstable Middle East. But these are just the background. What I want to really bring into focus is how, after the CPA, really, the sanctions that were imposed by the United States led to the Sudan relenting to the agreement in the South. Then 2005, 2001 to 2005, we had a special invoice from the United States which focused entirely in bringing the two sides to negotiate, because none of us could win the war military outright. We couldn't do it, the North couldn't do it, the South could not do it. This led to the comprehensive peace agreement in January 9, 2005. We had issues of, now, I'm getting lost, sorry. From this time to that time, you can see the United States supported the SPLA through the neighboring countries. And the pressure of this, excuse me, something not going right, okay, it's a continuation. So then 2011 to 2013, the United States Agency for International Development started to put a strategy together. There was a strategy already, but this strategy, in addition to the Department of Defense working with the SPLA, to bring down a huge number of the Army that we have into a line to run the state. It's not an easy job for the government of South Sudan to do, because remember it is not a militia Army, it was a liberation Army, and you cannot just let them off. So you have to do it in a very organized fashion. But this work is being done minus the DDR and the security sector reform. So you do the security sector reform, the vital part of it is the DDR. It's not without the DDR that you succeed with the security sector reform in an Army that was the liberation Army. Now we have some issues which are not resolved. One of them is the BA. We have issues with the demarcation of the border. We cannot do it. We need a lot of help. We are not educated. We don't have a lot of educated people in South Sudan. We have armed conflict in the oil-rich area of the United States and upper Nile, between the North and the South. We have the democracy issue, weak institutional capacity, very important part. South Sudan does not have the capacities to do all the institutional administration, given the fact that a large number of our people are sitting right here in the United States, Canada, Europe, and Britain. These in countries that are advanced like the United States and Britain and Europe, corruption would have a meaning. In South Sudan, I don't call it corruption. I call it not knowing what you are doing. Absolutely, because in countries in which you know how finance are organized, if you move an item from the next item knowingly, that's corruption. But if you take the money because you don't know it was supposed to do and you go and do something else with it, whether for yourself or for some of us, that is known as mismanagement of resources in the wrong direction. Now who is supposed to help us with it? You people are supposed to help us identify these issues. And why? Because we are partners. We are partners. Everything that happened in South Sudan will affect no less than six countries. And the United States of America will be forced tomorrow to bring in humanitarian aid to those countries cost by South Sudan and also South Sudan. So I'm sorry, this is our partnership. We have four infrastructure. How we need you to help us in this, because if you have to come in the United States Agency for Internet Development, how do you move from Wao to Malacal? How do you bring in your person who is not feeling well back to the civilized world, given the fact that we don't have good hospitals in South Sudan? So you need that infrastructure. We have competing national and foreign interests in South Sudan. For example, the Chinese interest in oil, the Japanese have come in, there's a lot of pressure on a young country and people who don't know how international system operate. Now, superimposition of donor interests, the donor have got different priorities than us because it is assumed when you come into a place like South Sudan, we just finish war, you think you know what they want. You assume because you come from a developed country, water is natural. You go and open the tap, it's come out black and you get surprised. So your priority become clean water. Our priority is different, maybe it is food, maybe it is how we live together for how many years, I don't know. Then we have idea of putting all, if we did it in Liberia, we discussed Liberia today, it was done there successfully, so can we do it in South Sudan? Let's just take that one and superimpose it. It doesn't work like that. It's a problem. DDR, the DDR we know in the world is supposed to be a United Nations business. So let us just give it to them, give the money to UN, they will do it. No, because the DDR in South Sudan is not like any other DDR. You are only DDR-ing a liberation army. So I cannot go and tell a guy, let's go home, you will tell me, but we fought together to liberate this country. Who are you telling me to go home? It's not a militia. In Liberia, in Sierra Leone, in those other places in Congo, yes, you are dealing with militia, but this is a standing army. If you try to play with it, we go back to where we started. And then you will be back with us to try to help with humanitarian issues. Partnership is not well articulated. What is it that we are partnership on? Is it what we want, or is it what you want? It is not a matter of just saying, okay, we think you need a hospital here. It's not what it is. We should be able to tell you, it's like a doctor, a doctor cannot tell you when you walk on the street that, I think you are sick. You should be able to tell a doctor that you are not feeling well and then they can investigate what you are suffering from. I don't know why we cannot even learn from that simple approach. Now then, by the way, you must know in Africa, most part of Africa, age is important. You don't send young people to go and talk to very senior people. Most of the people you send as experts, young people have no idea. They just go and say what they think that comes to their mind. You should send senior government officials, people who know how to deal with people. Then you have an appropriate funding structure. Like somebody just said before, you have 150,000 to do DDR. Where on earth can that be? DDR is not a walk-in and out. It's a long-term plan. It's like development. You just don't do it. You walk people through it. Now we have, of course, the companies without regard for systematic, you have to be able to contract companies, yes, but make sure the local technology is transferred to the people locally so that they can move the economy. Multi-dollar transfer is another problem because it is established as the norm here, not as things are there. I know the time is running out. I protest to him already. Okay, punitive measures in post-conflict contexts undermine efforts and stabilization. In other words, you do not consider the local norms. There are people who have got local rules, how to bring about peace, how to negotiate, how to talk to each other. Now you come and superimpose. It doesn't work. Let me write down. The dependency syndrome comes as a result when the aid is brought into the country. We know, we say, okay, they have come. Maybe they will tell us what they want to do. And we will, and you expect us to tell you. So there's no communication. It's like somebody using a computer and telling a computer, okay, you do the job for me. You have to instruct the computer to give you the work. So let us communicate. We are not talking as partners. Mismanagement of resources, including rampant corruption, is what we said all the times in a post-conflict country, especially in South Sudan. I told you why it is not the case. Now, I don't have time left, but I would like to discuss it later on with you more of this, but road communication in South Sudan focus on promise the grass root peace building. Youth employment in South Sudan is important. And this is what I think our international development partners are missing out. They come in with a made-up plan for us to carry out. Thank you. I'm sorry for the time. What a great start. Ambassador Zamora. Okay, good afternoon to everybody. And thank you, Ben. Good afternoon to all of you. And thank you to CSIS for this invitation. Well, personally, I have been in the two sides of the equation. As an A provider in a different country, and as an A receiver in my own country. That's why I think I have a little bit of experience on trying to see the problem from both sides because the problem is both sides. It's not just the problem of foreign aid or just the problem of the country. Recipient aid is an equation of two. But you are asking me to give some experience about receiving aid. Let me tell you something. My experience of receiving aid is a special kind of aid because combined, stabilization with change, that seems to be impossible. But reality obliged us to do it. After a 12-year civil war in my country, we came to the peace agreement through a process of peaceful negotiation of peace. And then we started to rebuild the country. But the peace agreement was a program for change. Therefore, we have to bring stability to the country and at the same time produce change. In theory, it's a little bit contradictory in the practices in many cases. That is the case that you have to look at it to term of the equation as well. Change and stability. Because if you don't change certain things, you are not going to have stability. But change always produce instability. And in that sense, this is my experience. In that experience, I will point out, for the time we have, five points that seems to me is important to look from the perspective of the aid recipient. The first one is what I call the one-way relationship. The agency define what to do in the country and even how to do it. Because they know. They have the arrogance of knowledge. It's the arrogance of the teacher who teach the student, because he knows and the student don't know. And we translate that very easily into the realm of foreign aid. The problem is that that doesn't work. That doesn't work because first things, recipients don't own. They are told. They don't have voice. And to try to produce change with stability, you have to have a voice to do it. And this is, for me, a very fundamental problem. And I see so many projects that has failed, just when the flow of money was cut or finished. Why? Because nobody owns that. And therefore, when the agency goes, the agency was the only one who owns the project. No matter that they do it with the good face in favor of the people, but they were unable to do that. Why? Because there was no voice of the people in the process. And when that happened, in the country developed a sort of perverse attitude. What we call in my country, and I suppose in other countries as well, Tyler in project, the people in the country start to look at the different agency. What does one want? What that one? What I want? Ah, I do a project for that one or for that the other. Because you can get the money from that project. No matter if the country doesn't need. No matter if it's not a priority for the country. The agent, the local agency that implement, projects start to work in the same logic as the donor agency. They know. And then the answer is, OK, I am going to do what you said, that you know. Know what my country needs. And that creates a very perverse relationship between donors and recipient of aid. I think that to some extent, this new talk about partnership now that seems to me is a little bit sort of new, especially in this country, on the relationship could be something that helps if we understand partnership. That means I hear you, but you hear me. It is not the question of aid to do what the people that are supposed to have the aid want to be done. That is another is wrong. Because many time people, because the culture, because the experience that has gone through war and suffering and so on, probably they have a vision that is very short and they want immediacy. Give me bread, give me this, give me that, and give me that. And the good agency is the one who do that. But at the same time, the problem for us, the recipient of aid, to hear the other side. And partnership for me means that you tell me and I hear what you are telling me and I tell you something. That seems to be a possibility to get out of the problem. The second point is the question of continuity versus ownership again in term of the aid. For me, ownership is the center problem, the core problem of foreign cooperation. That's why I see a contradiction as well. And I feel that in my experience that happened between continuity and ownership. Why? Because sometimes the logic of the project is the logic of the agency in term of budget, in term of their way to do things and they do the project for one year. I do a project for two years. I do a project for three months. I do a project for six months. And this is their logic. And you know that they are going to finish the project on that period of time. What about if the kind of project that you are doing do not allow for ownership in six months? It's going to fail. And then you have that contradiction. On the other hand, if you don't put any limit to the project, then you develop in the recipient country the attitude that they are going to have aid forever and never get out of poverty and never become citizen really because they become dependent first from the military and now from the foreign money that come from abroad. I mean, how to find the balance between the two is for me a difficult point. The third point is the tendency that I notice in many of the established agencies to try to work once and again and again with their proven agencies recipient in the country. And that is a problem. But sometimes the proven agencies has developed the culture of tailoring project. And they do what the agency want, but not what the country need. And on the other hand, the other problem that creates is that new people trying to do something different in the country had no possibility to access to the cooperation. And this is a problem that we confront in many countries. The fourth one, because I have the ad, is what already have Mr. Dan Dan say, the ignorance of the agencies about what is going on in the country. For me, the most successful project that I have seen is project with an advisor from the country. And I work in an agency developing project of moving after conflict into stabilization with one of the norms. It's never we will do a project unless the director of the project is from the country in which we are working. And it's a person accepted by the society, but the main forces in society. I remember we sometimes received an offer of $5 million to do a project. And simply we didn't do it just because there was no possibility for a single person to lead a project that will be acceptable to the different main actors. Why? Because if we did it, instead of doing transition to democracy, transition to stability, we are going to deepen the chance in that society. And finally, let me say something that seems to be very difficult from the part of what I call the cult of indicator of success. How many people are going to be benefit for that? Give me your indicator. And then you start to be slave of the indicator and working for the indicators and not for the court. And I have been project, sorry. And I have seen projects that in the indicator are beautiful. And at the end of the project, it's everybody exploding then. But they are horrible in reality. They have not done anything, you see, because they started to move from helping people to filling the indicators. I am not against the indicator. What I try to point out that in many cases, please don't be the servant of indicators because it's not possible, especially when you are trying to change culture, cultural process in society. It's very difficult. And it's very dubious what kind of indicator you are going to use, quite frankly. In the sense, just to finish, now, as a recipient of help from foreign countries, my main advice is please be modest. Don't pretend too much. Because the change in a society is inside that society and the rest is in position and is not going to work. Thank you very much. Well, if I didn't feel modest at the beginning of this session, I'm starting to feel more and more modest. By the way, I should have said at the beginning there are biographies for each of our distinguished panelists. And we chose, Bob and I discussed this, we chose to let them speak rather than need drawn on and read you what you can read yourself. But I do invite you to read their very interesting biographies. Ambassador Harkani. Thank you very much. We've had two very lively presentations. And I endorse most of the points that have been made by my colleagues. I'm going to start with a little story. The story of two friends, one of them called Kalu got a job. And Lalu went to visit him. So Kalu was sitting on a little raised platform with a shotgun. And Kalu said to him, what's your job? He says, oh, my job is to shoot any rat that I see that is disrupting this little mill that's here. He says, rat? He says, yeah, yeah, water rats. They get on the mill and they go, oh, like that one? He says, yeah, yeah, like that one. And he said, oh, or that one? He says, yeah, like that one. He says, why aren't you shooting any of them? He says, shoot them all and lose my job? The reason why I begin with that story is that the three of us are like Kalu here telling Lalu to shoot the water rat. And here are all these people who said at the end of it, if we really listen to these guys, we're all going to lose our jobs. Because President Eisenhower, at the end of his two terms as President of the United States, coined that famous phrase the military industrial complex. No president of the United States has so far used the phrase of the development reconstruction complex that has also emerged in Washington, DC. And I'm very pleased today to address a small segment of that development reconstruction complex in this room at CIS. Pakistan, whom I represented in the United States for three and a half years as ambassador, is one of the largest recipients of American aid since 1947. The total figure for bilateral aid comes to about $40 billion, part of it military, but a significant part of it, economic assistance. Yet Pakistan has the poorest human development index indicators of any of the major countries in South Asia, except perhaps Nepal. Bangladesh, which broke out of Pakistan in 1971, has higher school enrollment than Pakistan does. India, from which Pakistan broke away in 1947, also has better indicators. So why is it that the country that received the maximum amount of aid has the least to show for it? And that is a question that bothered me before getting into government, while I was in government, and continues to me after I have left government for a private life. And here's the preliminary conclusions that I have reached. First, a lot of aid ends up, and assistance ends up, and stabilization programs and reconstruction programs end up being more about the donors than they are about the recipients. I mean, that is something you've heard from Mr. Dengdeng. That's what you heard from Ambassador Zamora. Hear it from me as well. In 2009, I was ambassador of Pakistan. We worked very hard to get authorization under what was known as the Kerry Luger-Burman Bill. The idea was that if Pakistan is given $1.5 billion solid unconditional assistance every year for its civilian side, then it will create better relationship between Pakistan and the United States, strengthen some civilian democratic institutions in Pakistan, enable Pakistan to overcome its human development indicators as poverty, and as a whole, stabilize Pakistan, make it stronger. By the soon after that, the appropriations also came after the authorization. I left my position as ambassador under rather mysterious and unusual circumstances in November 2011. By then, the biggest disbursements of the Kerry Luger-Burman Bill aid was primarily for disaster relief after the Pakistani floods. Most of the money had not gone through the many, many hoops created in the enormous bureaucracy of that great institution, the United States Agency for International Development. And it was so basically what we were going through was study after study of what to do, which led me at one point to make a remark that how many studies do you need to figure out how to run a school? It should be simple. Go to the community and ask them, what do you need? The problem in the donor-recipient relationship primarily is that most recipients are looking for resources. They already have ideas. What this emergence of this huge complex of which many people are very well-meaning partners here and basically I've often thought that at some point if I can learn sufficient Latin, I'll find out what is Latin for paved with good intentions and suggest that that be the motto of every development institution. Basically, there are concerns about if we get, give money in a society where there's widespread corruption, it shouldn't be wasted, all legitimate, all legitimate. So let's have more. You talked about indicators. Very important, the other part of it is the transparency requirements, which are also exhausting. And so you have all of those. Then you have the indicator obsession. And there are a lot of consultants. There are just too many consultants. How much, instead of actually asking people, a school in Afghanistan, a school in Pakistan, what is a school in Pakistan? Ask anybody who's gone to those schools. I was a kid who, not from very well, sort of well-to-do parents, got a scholarship, ended up in a decent school. But I know many people who did equally well by studying in schools where school meant a blackboard, a piece of chalk, a teacher, some books, and shade. Quite often, the shade was provided by trees. That's it. But now you have these complex studies and complexities of various matrices, et cetera, et cetera, of how the teachers should be selected, and how many schools have been built. Afghanistan has done reasonably well. They've got a large number of people enrolled in school, compared to what they were. But hey, if all you have to boast about your successes that we've done 10 times better than the Taliban in female education, there's something wrong with that matrix. So here's my summation on what I see as the primary problems. Number one, there is the question of understanding a society and understanding its history. Now, I know. I've said this many times before. I'll say it again. I always get a giggle over it. But Americans realize it and yet don't realize it. America is the only country where the phrase that's history means that's irrelevant. So history needs to be understood. Where are you going? What are you offering people? Second, the need should be determined by communities and by nations rather than by professionals. There is no technological solution to certain issues. There is no technical expertise required. For example, you can provide polio vaccines, but how do you convince people in Northwest of Pakistan where the Mullahs have said that the polio vaccine is an American conspiracy to make our men sterile, so that we will have fewer children? How do you convince them that that is not the case? So there is no technical solution that you can impose there and improve access, et cetera, et cetera. These are just phrases that the development community uses. Access, there's a whole language that I have not been in. I speak Urdu. I speak English. I speak a little bit of Arabic. I don't speak development. I have to learn it. But there is all this mumbo jumbo of phrases, et cetera, et cetera that's thrown out. And that is not what is needed. And I will endorse the point that Mr. Deng Deng made about culture, but it's a broader point about culture. The development needs, the reconstruction needs of a society are also culturally dictated, very much culturally dictated. And I find the cultural dimension of development and reconstruction and stabilization the poorest, the poorest in this country. Very few people try to understand. What that does is it creates a class of interlocutors, people who speak good English, people who have learned the language of development, and people who therefore end up being your partners when you say we can't trust the government, so let's trust the non-governmental organizations. Well, guess what? The guys who are running the non-governmental organizations are an enterprise in themselves. And they come up with the smart solutions, like, for example, in Pakistan, somebody asked at one point an American team, what do we do to try and make young children aware that bigotry is not a good idea, and that we need to have more open minds, et cetera, et cetera? Many, many solutions were proposed by local people. Guess who got the contract? If anybody can guess that, guess right now that person walks out with the first prize of this afternoon. They decided to do a Pakistani version of Sesame Street. That was their answer, to actually have Sesame Street, Elmo, and Miss Piggy, maybe not Miss Piggy. Elmo and Big Bird were going to teach young Pakistani students, young kids, children, how to grow up, not to absorb the prejudices that have torn Pakistan and Afghanistan apart and have given rise to the Taliban. Now, if that is the level of intellectual comprehension of another culture, this whole process needs to be reconsidered. I'm going to stop here. Thank you very much. Let me ask each of you a tough question from a donor perspective. So I take the final distillation of these many important comments that we should listen more, and we should understand the local culture more. But what do you do when there are a lot of voices to listen to? Especially in the topic today, in societies in conflict where there are not only a lot of voices, but there are voices competing with each other. Should we listen solely to the government? Because some would say, well, we should listen to the government, but we should also listen to important parts of civil society. Or is perhaps the ultimate answer then, as some would advocate, to do a cash transfer, dismantle the aid architecture, and simply transfer resources so that the allocation decisions can be made solely within the country itself. But what do you do with competing voices that are advocating different approaches in terms of allocation of resources? Ambassador O'Connor, please. Since I'm still charged up, so I can just carry forward. Look, first of all, you have to be very clear about what your objectives are. If your objective is to stabilize the government, and you've already made the political decision, because let's be honest, there is a whole huge political component to all this, and to pretend that it isn't is wrong. I mean, the very manner in which aid came about in this country was in the context of the Second World War and post-Second World War stabilization. So this is a political component. So if your objective is to stabilize the government, listen a little more to the government, and be willing to talk to them as well. Look, a psychiatrist listens, but that's a very different kind of listening than the interactive listening that we need on things like this. It's not like the person just listens, and then the psychiatrist already knows what the mental disorders are and is going to prescribe something at the end of it. Most of them usually write the prescription before they start the listening anyway these days. No personal experience here, though. But my point is the listening is a two-way street. Second, when there are multiple voices, again, understand why there are multiple voices and why they are talking to you. The multiple voices have been at all talking to you because you have the money. They want the resources. Now, you have to decide, and this is a very important political question that has to be decided in this highly political city, what is the purpose of our giving here? If your purpose is actually to transform things, then choose the point of view that makes the most sense to you given the cultural context. It'll need a different kind of consultant than expert. It can't be, you know, we have a family planning consultant who succeeded in Columbia. How do we transform that person into a family planning consultant in Afghanistan? No, because family planning is one of those things where even in this country, there's enormous cultural debate. So therefore, the person should not be the expert, the technical expert in sterilization of men and women. It should be an expert in some cultural dimension of how that thing is done. So listen to the voices, but have some judgment and understand what your purpose is and then see what works best to fulfill that purpose. And where you need to stabilize governments, for example, it's very obvious in certain countries your purpose is to stabilize the government, then listen a lot more to that government. I can't understand why you guys have allies, call them allies, and then the rest of the time, all you do is run them down. For, you know, incompetence and this and that and et cetera, et cetera, you know, you have to be able to have the capacity and the ability. You know, before you do stabilization, you need basic diplomacy. And in the basic diplomacy process, you need to establish friendships, et cetera, et cetera, and relationship. I know that the end of the Cold War has been a disaster for many people in Washington DC and in America in general, because they don't know how to deal with the world anymore. And the good old days, it was easy. You know, who's the communist here? Who's the non-communist here? Okay, the non-communist is our guy, irrespective of what he or she does, you know. That's changed and you have to have that complexity. Develop that complexity in this country. Develop that very, the ability to go beyond the surface of oversimplifications about societies and understand their complexities, develop that capacity, and certainly don't throw money around as if that is somehow a solution. Because then the last thing I mean, the one comment I always hated was when I went into a congressman's office and he or she would turn around and say, after all the money we've given you, why hasn't Pakistan done XYZ? I would have rather that they asked the question in reverse, why hasn't Pakistan done XYZ instead of asking, telling me that we've given so much money, because they didn't give that money to me, and if they did, it's not in my bank account. Well, in that case, in our society, almost anything is competing voices. But at least our experience is that behind that competing voices, you could start to discover very common understanding in that society. The problem is that, you know, how I learn about that society and discover what are the basis of that society if a society is only competing voices, disintegrate, because we'll have nothing to help them together, right? Maybe what will help the people together is something that I don't like it, because my culture is different from the other. It could be, but at least you know. But I will make the effort before to try to understand the people and try to get something common out of them. My experience in the other side, working in an international NGO about trying to reconstruct societies after war or after a big, big crisis, is that you could discover that. It's possible. At least in the case that we did it, we did it because there was that common understanding and the whole exercise started with a common paper that was accepted by all the people that sit down in the table and started to work among themselves solution for their country, right? And we could only do it when all the main forces in that country will agree and sit down there because otherwise there is no guarantee of success. Even with that, you could fail. And we have failed in a couple of cases. No doubt about that for many other reasons. But at least we know that if we start to discover what is the common in society, what are the common points in society will be possible to start to build up something that will be owned by the people. This is a very easy question that you are asking because I think the question is self-explanatory. Number one, let me give you example of South Sudan. South Sudan's got 251 ethnic groups. Speaking different languages. Maybe the Dinka and the Nui are the nearest to each other. That's many voices, right? But there is, as the ambassador said, there is a common understanding of how these ethnic groups have existed for thousands of years. Before anybody coming, even colonialism. There is a paradigm in the donor community and especially with the United States. You have two P's on the extreme. One P is passive. You just become really passive about it. We give money to one country and we remain passive. How we give them money, don't worry, like Ambassador said. And the other P is panic. My God, they have messed up. Oh, let's get out quickly, quickly, we can't. We can't even talk to them. I think there's another P in between, pragmatic. That will make the third P. And that pragmatic is not existed in your languages. You gotta be pragmatic. You come to a country, you gotta realize they have their own political understanding. They know exactly where they wanna go to. In my case, we know where we went to because we went to war, we fought. Like United States fought for God's sake. You liberated yourself to determine your own destiny. We did that in South Sudan. Now, what then give you the arrogance to come and say, no, no, you guys don't need this, you need this. I think the best is to talk to us, we discuss. Maybe we need a school, maybe we need a river to be dredged so that we use it because we know it better. But if that's not the case, let's not assume that we know better. This is the problem. So there are not many voices at all. There's only one voice, and this is a voice of wanting all the good things that you have. We need good roads, we need good water, we need to have a school. Don't worry about what kind of sophistication of school. That's not the deal. And then this assumption that all the government official in all those countries are corrupt, they want to take our money and use it for their personal interests. That's not the case at all. The case is, we want you to come in and we say, okay, bring your money in, follow it. Most time, and I will tell you this, in case of South Sudan, United States gave a lot of money, I must say, in the last six years. But can somebody tell me here that actually you followed it to find out what we did with it? I don't think so. I have not seen that. It's a taxpayer money. Ask me, say, okay, how many schools did you build? You know what? We are gonna tell you no, we couldn't build because you did not actually allow us to do that. You wanted it in your own way. We have a problem. We are not communicating, and this is a problem. So there are no many voices at all. If you decide that it is a stabilization you want to do, as you said correctly, deal with the authority and power. And then you advise them. You say, if this is what you want to do, we think you could do like this because we have experience from our own or from somewhere. And bring one of them, let them come and study your system. Or this idea of bringing me a student who just finished to go and do an internship, and then you call them professional, that's an insult. Come on. Bring guys like you who have experience. Old guys. Because we respect age. We respect age. You go to a minister's office, he's going to sit up and look at you and say, okay, what do you want? You bring me girls who have close shot like this and sit in front of the minister. Hello. And he's going to listen to you? For what he will say nice things, but that's the end of the story. You're not going to get anything out of those people. So let us stop that and move to a more practical approach. I just want to speak up for the poor interns right now because I can see quite a few things. Oh, sorry. Look, this has to be culturally appropriate and functionally appropriate. So there's no one size fit all. Number one. Number two, I'll be very frank here that age is not a substitute for intelligence and similarly sort of, you know, youth is not a substitute for experience. We, I have seen senior diplomats totally fumble because they don't understand the context. So I would frame this slightly differently. I wouldn't frame it in the context of age, et cetera. I would frame it in the context of understanding and understanding the difference because the difference is where a lot of things go wrong. What is more important? Now there are many educated, westernized Pakistanis and so you can say, you know what? Why can't I build something that these guys will be comfortable with? So you end up creating a very specialized elitist school for example. The fact of the matter is that that is not necessarily the need of the society. The society might actually need a country that has only 58% school enrollment, 42% primary school, going age kids don't go to school. There I think the primary school should take priority rather than, and that's something that you can do through negotiation with the government as well as non-government actors who are critics of the government who make those valid points. But it's about understanding the needs of a society in an engaged manner. And so therefore, don't get, look, the American way of doing things sometimes is showing up in a country and saying, who's in charge? Take me to your leader. But on the other hand, you also want us all to be democracies. The very fact that we are democracies means we will have multiple voices. So learn to handle our voices, let us figure out the processes inside our societies and work with us on the things that are important to you and us together. And if the only thing you want is to stabilize the government, then recognize that that's all we need to do. Have a cold war, I mean, I have no problem with it. Have a cold war attitude that these are our guys and these are the guys we want to be stable. That worked for many countries. They've come out fine out of it. So have that attitude. What you've ended up doing is you've created far too many models and many of those models have been crafted by what is, I don't know if the term has been used since this morning or not, but they've been crafted by what is known in the business as the Beltway Bandits. And so they've got huge contracts to write these sort of reports which explain how things ought to be done and how they should be measured and all that, et cetera, et cetera. And you want to come and do the, impose them in societies where they are not particularly relevant politically, culturally or historically. And that is something that you have to find a solution to. Let me get your reaction to something that was discussed early this morning that is thought of as a cutting edge theme in this field. And that is the engagement of the private sector, the for-profit private sector. There are a number of people who have posited that with declining government budgets, the real solution to human prosperity and human progress may be more private sector investment. And certainly if you look at the global numbers, even though foreign aid budgets have generally been increasing in the last couple of decades, foreign direct investment has been increasing much more dramatically. So some development experts would argue that the best thing we might do in the donor world is to promote such investment. I recall at AID at one point we were giving a certain amount of foreign aid to Indonesia, but Indonesia was about to launch a, on the private sector side, a new telephone system. And a number of folks argued, and I think quite convincingly that actually internal communication of a telephone system, that point before cell phone, we were talking about hardwired lines, was probably gonna have a bigger development impact than all of the foreign aid going to Indonesia in total. But what about this idea of thinking in terms of promoting job creation, foreign direct investment, and the private sector? Is that something that gives you a warm feeling in your heart or something that causes you some anxiety? Well, I think that promote the private sector to create jobs and invest is absolutely necessary. The government is not very good as promoting investment productive because this is not the role of the government, right? By exception, they have to take that role in specific cases. But the point is not that, I think that it's a point that at least I don't discuss that. If we need job, we need that the private sector invest. Otherwise, there is not going to be real development in our countries. The problem is that when we take the private sector and substitute or create the private sector as sort of the God that explained the totality of society, we do exactly the same error that the communists do. They ended up making the state the totality of society. Please don't do the same mistake with the private sector because you are going to ruin the private sector in the same way that they ruin the state after 60 years of real socialism in Soviet Union and many other countries. I think that the problem is beyond that. There are certain things that the private sector is the main actor and has to be maintained the main actor and the role of the government and aid is to promote that. That's all. But there are many other things in which the private sector is horrible. And the only thing at the end that creates corruption. I don't want to talk about the United States. You mean in context of corruption? Yeah, no, no, I don't want, but look at your reality. What is happening with health, with medicines in this country? It's life you are dealing with. What is happening, right? Why? Because there was sort of an overextension of the role of the private sector, right? Then the point for me is to understand what is not to discuss the important, it's absolutely important, but to discuss the limit in the same way, the government is absolutely necessary. The important thing is to discuss the limit of government, not to trespass those limits. This is for me, for both, it is the same solution. I would just say that transferring resources from sort of the government in another country to the private sector of a third country is not necessarily the promotion of private enterprise. I mean, private enterprise usually means that it should be a viable idea that can be done on its own. So there, the real role of development is essentially a development professional. There's maybe professional expertise, you know. You train people how to be entrepreneurs in a society that doesn't have a culture of entrepreneurship, et cetera, et cetera. But if you're gonna make transfers to companies and say, you know, you guys, that is not, in my opinion, the function of development, assistance. Second, our stabilization assistance. Second, what are you essentially trying to do? What is the function that you're trying to do? Go back to it. If the function is essentially to help societies get back on their feet, then it's about facilitating that and that alone. That's what it should be. It should be a minimal kind of function. It should not be creating dependence. Aid dependency is not what the objective should be. In fact, the best aid and assistance should be one that after a few years, people turn around and say, thank you very much. You did a good job and let's celebrate that. And now can we see you off at the airport? But countries that you've been sort of involved in for 60 years, 50 years, 30 years and haven't stabilized them sufficiently should give you some pause for thought and reflection. Again, the India versus Pakistan. I mean, India's private sector functions. India's government functions. People joke about it, about various, there's corruption, there's political interference. There's everything. What happened there that didn't happen in Pakistan needs to be understood. In Bangladesh, for example, they took the microfinance idea. They made it bigger and bigger and then created an entrepreneurial class that wasn't there at the time of Bangladesh's independence. In Pakistan, all you've ended up doing is give a few members of the entrepreneurial class extra resources to own a microfinance bank. So that's what needs to be understood. My colleagues have eloquently put it to me. My colleagues have eloquently put it but I will just put it in the context of South Sudan. I mean, how do you really transfer the fund to a private system in a country that we are busy trying to build it? There was no state in the first place. So, and my understanding is that the state is there a free for where the commerce and private sector start to spring out of it as an activity. But if the private sector takes, how do you put it in South Sudan? I mean, even the many voices you are talking about is going to be actually more many voices than what it is. I think it should not, as my colleague put it there, the decision should be, what is it that we want to do really? Is it that we want to stabilize the country and put it back on the road to be able to implement this? Or what is it that we're doing? I think that we need to go to and look at it carefully and go for that. Rather than getting many things together, then we end up having more consultants than what we need. Again, back to where we started. Thank you. The sure sign of an excellent panel is that you hate to have it end and the time to conclude has come all too soon. I don't know. And so we're going to adjourn at this time. I don't know about you. I learned an awfully lot this afternoon. I hope you'll join me in thanking the panel. And thank you, Jim, for moderating this really energetic and interesting session. Thank you to all three of you for coming in, especially for those of you who were able to step in at the last moment. I'm going to take a 15 minute break now. Thanks.