 Good morning, we have a very packed day so we're going to get underway and we have, for those of you who are just arriving, there's more seats over here. Good morning, my name is Nancy Lindborg and I'm the still kind of new president of US Institute of Peace and thank you very much for joining us today. USIP is very pleased to be co-hosting this conference this morning with Stanford University and Chatham House in London. And my remarks, I'm just going to make a few welcoming comments and then ask Andrew Wilder to open us up. But I do want to recognize Ambassador Carl Eichenberry who is, where did he go? Over here. Thank you Carl and Eric Jensen of Stanford and Michael Keating and Paul Fischstein of Chatham House. And that team worked very closely with our USIP Afghanistan team led by Scott Smith and Andrew Wilder really put this together, which couldn't happen at a more important time. I actually just arrived yesterday morning back from a trip with Andrew to Afghanistan and Pakistan and I noticed a number of faces of people with whom we met while we were there. So I'm very glad everybody could make it here and for everybody who's traveled I think there will need to be an afternoon jump up and down session just to keep everyone fresh and awake. But you know this was a very useful visit in terms of it was the first time I'd been back in five years. I was there a lot from 2000 and 2009. And having had a five-year gap really underscored I think the changes that have gone on and despite the considerable challenges that exist in Afghanistan, I was heartened to feel that there was this sense of optimism and a sense of possibility. So this conference is happening at a really, really critical time because of the confluence of factors that are happening right now that do give a fresh perspective on what the possibilities are going forward. And I was really struck by how active the voices were of civil society, of educators, and of the government officials and what they saw as the ways forward. But also some genuine questions of how to understand some of the policy options, how to understand the way forward. We met for example with a really energetic head of the land agency that's working to mediate disputes and come up with a registry system. As we know this is just a heartbeat to so many issues going forward and a desire to understand what some of the policy options were. Nobody wants to repeat the mistakes that happened before. And everybody is really hunger, has a real hunger to understand what the best ways are going forward. So this conference will be I think critical for understanding what were the lessons that we learned going forward. So we have a really impressive speakers list today, a very comprehensive set of topics and a range of voices from the U.S., Afghanistan, and other international people. All of you have a really deep I think background and expertise in the issues and the policy issues and the background of what happened. I'm sorry I won't be able to stay with you the full two days but I'll be going in and out with an effort to learn and to hear as much as I can. So one of the great things about this job is the opportunity to work with real deep experts in the various issues and areas in which USIP works. So it was a great opportunity for me to travel with Andrew Wilder in Afghanistan and Pakistan who carries such a so much expertise on this issue. And so it is my great pleasure to introduce Andrew Wilder who is our Vice President for South and Central Asia. Well, Andrew. Thank you Nancy and thank all of you for coming. I was just joking outside that the true test of impact of this conference is how many people can keep awake for the duration. So particularly a word of thanks for many of you who come a long way. As Nancy mentioned we just got in yesterday morning but I know people like Nader just got in this morning at about 2am. So again, thanks and we will try to keep it interesting and keep you awake. Two days is really not enough to try to talk about all the state strengthening state building lessons from 2001 to 2014 clearly. But two days is a lot of time to be asking of all of you to come be with us and participate in this event. So again, thanks for all of you busy people who have given us time to join for this thing, for this conference. I want to acknowledge up front that the selection of topics is very difficult. Trying to agree on what the priorities were. All of us on the organizing team had different views of what was important and what we could maybe not cover during the course of the conference. We did try to identify the most important themes to find the right balance between inclusiveness and incisiveness. But there are some topics that did fall between the cracks that are important and we wanted to acknowledge that up front. As my colleague Scott Smith noted in a way the process of trying to prioritize what to cover during our two-day conference was a small microcosm of maybe the whole effort to what to prioritize in Afghanistan during the state strength efforts and state building processes. Everyone had their own priorities during that period. You know, was it going to be corruption, were going to prioritize, was it going to be democratic rights, human rights, we wanted to prioritize, was it the military, that was the priority and a lot of those competing pressures I think were one of the real challenges that I'm hoping during the course of this conference we're going to be able to uncover and talk about. Because for me personally this issue of the inability to really focus in on basically what were the key priorities and what was the overarching strategy to guide what we would focus on was one of the issues. And it was an environment where I think in many ways there was too much money at times which meant we actually didn't have to prioritize in terms of resources, financial resources, but we were operating an environment for a limited institutional resources and human resources at a time and I think that lack of prioritization did hurt us. So I'm hoping that that's one of the things we will be able to cover. I'd also like to thank our co-organizers in this, you know, Stanford and Chatham House for all the work that they've put into helping us get to where we are today. In addition I'd also like to thank the donors who actually helped make this conference possible. And in particular the donors through Chatham House were the governments of Australia, Norway, Sweden and Switzerland who covered the transportation and accommodation costs for many of the participants who flew in to join us today. I'd also like to thank the Office of Afghanistan and Pakistan Affairs at USAID, which has paid for quite a bit of the research that USIP has done which will be presented during the next couple of days as well as funding some of our experts here including Dr. Bill Byrd in the back. He's been very prolific while here at USIP writing a very policy relevant topic. So thank you to all of you. And again, thanks to the speakers and discussants, but also to the participants. I mean I think when I, just last night I was going to the invitation list and who's RSVP to attend and what was striking to me was that many of the participants in this conference just as much if not more expertise than many of us will be sitting on panels and discussing. So I think it should lead to a really rich discussion, not only during the event but also a time of old friends getting together. It's great to see many very good friends from many, over many years of working in Afghanistan here. And so I'm hoping the time between sessions will also be productive and I'm hoping you'll all be able to join us at the end of today for a reception that we're going to have. Last but not least, I'd like to introduce a man who is no stranger to unraveling political order and to international attempts to put it back together. Ambassador Jim Dobbins is present at the creation of what some have called the Afghanistan project as a U.S. representative to the bond negotiations. More recently in 2013 and 2014 he was called back to diplomatic service as a special representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan at the State Department to guide U.S. policy during this crucial year of transition. He's a diplomat and a scholar of political transitions and it is difficult to think of a more appropriate, experienced and thoughtful figure to launch our two days of learning from past state strengthening efforts to inform the future. I would like to now invite Ambassador Jim Dobbins to give our opening keynote address. Thank you. Well, it's flattering to be asked to speak to such a well-informed audience. It's also a bit daunting to speak before a number of people who know more about Afghanistan than I do. The topic that I was asked to address is really the origins of the Afghan project, the original bond conference, what was achieved there, what flowed from that, and what lessons to draw from those early years. I think looking back at the bond conference, the surprising thing is the degree to which the bond declaration, which was essentially a provisional constitution for Afghanistan, actually was implemented almost in its entirety and largely along the intended timetable. So the document envisaged a provisional government for six months, followed by a loyal jerker, followed by an interim government for a couple of years, followed by another loyal jerker which would adopt a constitution, followed by elections, followed by a fully legitimized government. And all of that occurred and it occurred more or less within that timeframe. And I'd say that a couple of things are responsible for that. First of all, I think a lot of the credit goes to Lakhtar Brahimi, who both chaired the original bond conference and then became the special representative of the Secretary General in Afghanistan over that first several years. And the second was, and this goes against some of the common wisdom about bond, was that the bond agreement really did represent the desires and consensus among the Afghans. There is, I think, occasional charges that somehow the international community essentially manipulated that gathering and that the arrangements, particularly the strong executive, which derived from the bond experience and then was perfect. And then became formalized in the provisional and then the final government was somehow imposed on the Afghans. And this really is, at least in my experience, completely the opposite from what actually occurred. The bond conference was interesting. It took place in a hilltop conference center that the German government had put at our disposal. It was actually, it had been the seat of the High Commission in which the three Western powers originally governed, West Germany, until power was transferred formally to the German government in the early 1950s. It was a conference center which had been expanded and so it had room for all of the Afghans and a number of the major countries actually could live in the conference center. But the actual work was done by the Afghans alone with only the UN team in the room and the US, the Russians, the Indians, the Iranians, the Germans, others were not physically present during any of the discussions that led to the adoption of the bond declaration. It was somewhat unique. It was in the middle of Ramadan and so the Afghan participants fasted all day long and then worked all night long. And the international participants ate and talked to each other all day long while the Afghans slept and then went to bed while the Afghans met in the evening and basically would meet from like 10 o'clock at night till 4 or 5 in the morning. And then we'd get up the next morning and be told what they had decided. Everybody had of course flown from large distances like some of you have today and all the Afghans were being very observant, more observant than they might otherwise have been given that they were under scrutiny in effect. And so it was the first conference that I had ever attended, international conference, in which everybody there was tired, hungry and sober. And I actually wondered whether any international meeting that took place under those conditions could produce a result, but it did. I personally involved myself in the substance only on a couple of occasions. For the most part, I and I think most of the international observers simply encouraged the Afghans to coalesce around a result. The Bush administration, which I was representing, really had no fixed opinions about the character of the government that should take over in Afghanistan. They simply didn't want to govern Afghanistan themselves. They wanted a replacement for the Taliban and they wanted it as quickly as possible. And I had no written instructions and very little guidance about the character of the government. Other than that it should be produced as quickly as possible. Now there's others here. Barney Rubin, for instance, was on the UN team at the time and I expected a different and more informed perspective because the UN was actually in the room and brokering the negotiation among the Afghans. Whereas we on the outside were largely putting convergent pressures on them to come together. There were a couple of occasions in which I personally intervened to suggest outcomes when the process became stalemated for extended periods. One was after a week or so very little progress had been made toward selecting a government and under the then draft there was an addition to a government that is a council of ministers. There was also to be a quasi-legislative body of about 50 people who would exercise some sort of general oversight over the government. And it was clear that they were having a hard enough time coming up with 15 or 16 names for the government that they'd never come up with another 50 names for this larger body. And so I did suggest that they just drop that and agree on the composition of the government. I also suggested a mechanism for picking the chair of the government which was to allow the Rome group who were supporting a return of the monarchy at that point to nominate a chair. But on the condition that it then had to have the assent of the other three groups that were represented there. And that particular compromise was accepted by all concerned and the conference then moved to the more difficult task of actually picking the members of the government and the chair. The second intervention was on the final night of the conference. Elect Oberhime asked me to come see him about one in the morning. The general chancellor was supposed to arrive the following morning to officiate at the conclusion of the conference. The bond declaration had been fully drafted and was complete. But there was still no agreement on the essential outcome which was an agreement on who was going to govern Afghanistan. So the actual names of the ministers had not yet been agreed. And the problem was that the Northern Alliance which physically controlled most of Afghanistan at that point was insisting on having the vast majority of the ministries. Including all of the important ministries. And the other three groups were unwilling to accept that kind of unbalanced outcome. And so I suggested to Oberhime that we gather the international participants who had most influence with the Northern Alliance. Which included the Russian, the Indian, and the Iranian representatives. The Iranian was actually Savaj Zarif who is now the Iranian Foreign Minister and is negotiating with Secretary Kerry on the nuclear program. And so we met from about one o'clock to about three or four o'clock in the morning with the top Northern Alliance representative, Yunus Kanoni, in an effort to persuade him to moderate his demands and accept fewer ministries so that other groups could share in the process of governance. And for several hours we made no progress at all. Each of the participants, the Russian, the Indian, the Iranian myself each made presentations, argued, made no progress at all. Kanoni explained that his faction had a number of constituencies. Every one of them needed to have representation in the government. He had to satisfy Marshall Faheim. He had to satisfy Isfail Khan. He had to satisfy Governor Atta. He had to satisfy. And so finally the Iranians, Zarif, asked Kanoni to come to the corner of the room. And they whispered together for maybe 30 seconds, 45 seconds. And Kanoni came back and said, okay, I'll give up two ministries and we can create two more ministries. And that'll give you four ministries that you can distribute to others. And that should satisfy. And that was the final conclusion of the conference. And when the German chancellor showed up the next morning, there actually was an agreed government. And as I said, the arrangement that the bond agreement represented and presaged of a very strong executive and a unitary form of government reflected, I think, the desire of the Afghans, not particularly the preferences of the international community. Certainly the United States would have been satisfied with almost any outcome. There was some there who actually favored a return to the monarchy. There were others who would have preferred some kind of more federal solution. But the Afghans were really only familiar with one kind of government, a weak unitary government. And there was a feeling that any form of federalism would further divide the country and would further exacerbate the divisive tendencies within the society. So moving from the bond conference, I think it's useful to look at what have we achieved since then. At RAND, where I was before going into the government two years ago, and I'm now again, we did a study which looked at the results of 20 international interventions since the end of the Cold War. So they included all of the large American interventions, Somalia, Haiti, Bosnia, Kosovo, Afghanistan, and Iraq. And also a dozen or more UN-led operations and a couple of European-led operations. And we tried to evaluate the results of these against some kind of hard criteria. And so we took a set of internationally recognized indices to judge the effect of these interventions. So we used IMF data to measure GDP growth. We used the World Bank Index of Government Effectiveness to measure increases in government effectiveness, if any. We used Freedom House data to measure increases in democratization, if any. And we used UNDP, Human Development Index, to measure improvements in human development. Each of these organizations produces an index in which rates every country in the world, every year. And so you can look year over year to see whether countries progressed or regressed against those indices. And so we looked at all 20 of these, we looked at a 10-year span, which in the case of Afghanistan, we go from 2002 to 2012, and said what kind of progress was made. And what we found was that on the GDP, Afghanistan ranked two out of the 20s. So it was the second highest in terms of GDP growth of the 20 countries that had experienced an international intervention of some sort. On democratization, it ranked around in the middle. Rather surprisingly, in terms of government effectiveness, it was second from the top. That is, the government effectiveness had improved more than 18 other interventions. And in terms of human development, it was at the top. That is to say, in terms of improved human development, Afghanistan had moved farther in those 10 years than any of the other 20 countries. In fact, when we looked further, we found that Afghanistan had a larger improvement in human development than any country in the world over that 10-year period. Now, what's behind those figures? Well, what's behind the figures is that the Afghan GDP has gone up over 400%. That literacy rate in the country has doubled. That longevity in the country is up by 20 years. The largest increase in longevity that any country has experienced over a 10-year period since we began measuring longevity. You've got 150 TV stations in the country, roughly. 90% of the country has cell phone coverage. There are 16 million cell phone contracts in the country in a society of about 30 million. There are women in the police, in the army, in the government, in the parliament, and maybe most notably, there are 4 million girls in school. Those are the kinds of things that the Human Development Index measures by and large. Those figures are why Afghanistan experienced the largest improvement. Now, it's still a poorest country in Asia. This is a question of rate of improvement, not absolute outcomes. But, and here I think that the important point is, we also measured all 20 of these interventions against another criteria, which is whether or not they produced peace. And Afghanistan didn't produce peace. Of the 2016, we're peaceful after 10 years, and four were not, and Afghanistan was one of those four. Now, to say that you'd achieved all of these other things as the result of an international intervention, but you hadn't achieved peace, is a bit like asking Mrs. Lincoln, other than that Mrs. Lincoln, how did you like the play? Because after all, you know, the United States doesn't invade poor countries to make them rich. We don't invade authoritarian countries to make them democratic. We sometimes invade violent countries to make them peaceful. And that's exactly the same criteria the United Nations has. The United Nations doesn't send peacekeeping forces to poor countries so that they become rich. It doesn't send peacekeeping forces to authoritarian countries so they become democratic. Economic growth and democratization are instruments that the international community uses when it intervenes in order to turn violent countries into peaceful countries. And the overwhelming criteria, the main criteria for success or failure in an intervention is whether or not you leave behind, when you leave, a country that's a peace with itself and its neighbors. And in this, of course, we have so far failed. Now, so what can we gather? What have we learned? What should we have learned from this experience? Well, I was, of course, involved in all of the Clinton administration interventions of the 1990s, starting with Somalia, then Haiti, then Bosnia, then Kosovo. And in my judgment, the Clinton administration on the basis of those lessons had drawn several big lessons. Lesson one was that you should deploy a very large force to begin with, establish a secure environment, deter the emergence of a violent resistance movement. You're always going to get resistance, but you want the resistance to be political and criminal if necessary, not a violent resistance in which your forces are being attacked. So deploy a large force, deter the emergence of violent resistance, and then scale the force down once you've made your point. Secondly, that in the aftermath of a civil war and an international intervention to bring the war to a close, you should assume that the indigenous institutions for public security will have either been completely disintegrated or so discredited by reason of their behavior that they're not going to be useful. And the intervening authorities are going to have to assume responsibility for some interim period for public security until new indigenous forces can be created. And thirdly, that you need to involve the neighboring states in your project, not in a military sense, but in a political sense. Because the neighboring states by reason of their proximity, by reason of their familial, commercial, economic, religious, criminal, and other connections with the society in question have the capacity of undermining your project if they feel that it's not in their interests. The classic case for involving the neighbors would have been the resolution of the war in Bosnia, where the United States invited the presidents of Croatia and Serbia, Milosevic and Tudjman, to the Dayton peace accords. Both of those gentlemen were personally responsible for the genocide that we were trying to stop. Tudjman died before he could be indicted. Milosevic was indicted for genocide. But we had to choose either to let the war keep going or deal with these individuals in order to end the war and chose the latter. Now, the new administration, the Bush administration had of course been in opposition during the 90s. They'd been very critical of the Clinton record in this regard. President Bush had, during the campaign, promised that there would be no more nation building. In fact, rather remarkably, in the three Gore-Bush debates, the only international issue that was ever raised was nation building, and Bush said we're not going to do it anymore. I think what a happy time it was where the only international issue that rose in three or four and a half hours of presidential debate was whether or not we should do humanitarian interventions. So when they were faced with the necessity in Afghanistan and subsequently in Iraq, they were very loath to follow the Clinton model and chose to do it very differently and particularly to do it more economically. So Don Rumsfeld sought to explain and justify this by arguing that in flooding Bosnia and then Kosovo with international military manpower and economic assistance, the United States and its allies had turned that society into a permanent war, those societies, into permanent wards of the international community. And we were going to avoid this in Afghanistan and then in Iraq by making an absolutely minimal commitment in order that those societies could become self-sufficient much more quickly. This was in effect a transposition of the 1990s domestic American debate on welfare reform to the international agenda. And the analogy could not have been more untapped. The strategy of making a minimal commitment and then reinforcing only under failure, adding resources only once the initial commitment had been shown to be insufficient, turned out to be a vastly more expensive way of addressing these kinds of contingencies than doing the opposite, super-sizing to begin with and then drawing down once a secure environment had been created. And so there was a minimal American force in Afghanistan. I think it was total of 8,000 troops in a country of 30 million people at the end of the first year. And there was a minimal American economic commitment. The Iran actually made a larger pledge at the first pledging conference for Afghanistan than the United States did. Iran pledged $500 million, the United States pledged $350 million, which was incidentally money that had originally been set aside for humanitarian relief while the Taliban was still in power. So having thrown the Taliban out of power, we didn't increase the amount of money that we intended for Afghanistan. If you compare the economic assistance levels between Afghanistan in 2002 and 2003 and say Bosnia or Kosovo, what you find is that the average Bosniak, for instance, got $800 worth of economic assistance per year for the first several years after the war. The average Afghan got $50 per year for the first several years after the war. So it was a 16 times larger commitment in Bosnia. But if you compare the peacekeeping and security forces in the country, you find that the international military presence in Bosnia was 50 times bigger on a per capita basis than the international military presence in Afghanistan. So that was, I think, one of the initial errors that led to the failure to secure peace in Afghanistan. Now a second was, as I said, one of the lessons of the Clinton era was that you needed to involve the neighbors in a constructive way in your political project and convince them that it was in their interest as well. We had a good start at that at the Bonn conference. I've already explained how we were able to work together with countries that we normally didn't have very good relations with to put convergent pressures on the Afghans. But within a few weeks of the Bonn conference and the success there, which as I've already indicated, was due, at least in part, to the efforts of the Iranians. President Bush announced the Axis of Evil, which included Iran as well as Iran and North Korea, and turned down several Iranian offers to help train the Afghan army and participate in other ways in a U.S.-led reconstruction program. The U.S. also took its eye off the ball with respect to Pakistan. It paid a lot of attention on residual al-Qaida, worked with the Pakistanis to track down the few al-Qaida elements that were still present, but paid almost no attention to the reconstitution of the Taliban and the Pakistanis' role in offering sanctuary and assistance as the Taliban recruited, reorganized, refunded, trained, and began to project an insurgency back into Afghanistan. And finally, the last flaw in the policy during these early years was the failure to pursue reconciliation. There was a 10-year gap between when the U.S. overthrew the Taliban and when the U.S. began to be willing to talk to the Taliban in an effort to promote reconciliation. And it wasn't until 2011 that the United States made an unconditional offer to hold such discussions. Now, I mention these because the same grand study I talked about where we looked at these 20 cases, one of the questions we asked ourselves is, is there any correlation between success or failure across these various indices that I mentioned and the conditions in the country? For instance, did richer countries progress better than poorer countries? Did countries that were homogeneous in terms of the composition of their society progress better than countries that were divided religiously or ethnically? Did countries that had previous experience with democracy progress better than countries that hadn't? Did countries that were poor or rich progress better than countries that were poor? And the answer was none of these correlations were – none of these correlated. That is to say, poor countries progress just as well as rich countries. Countries with no experience of democratization progress just as much as countries that had democratization. Countries that were homogeneous did no better than countries that were divided ethnically or religiously. Now, obviously, rich countries were richer at the end of the process than poor countries. We're talking about rates of approval, not absolute levels. And countries that were somewhat democratic at the beginning had a higher democracy rating than countries that were starting from zero in that regard. But in terms of actual approval rates, none of those correlations proved to be explanatory. We did find two correlations that did explain successor failure. One was whether or not the intervening powers succeeded in co-opting the competing patronage networks in the country into a collaborative form of rent-seeking, in which they, in effect, could continue to seek power and wealth in a peaceful rather than a violent fashion. And democratization and economic growth provided the incentives for a peaceful form of cooperation, which was far from ideal in terms of corruption and other, but which was peaceful. And secondly, whether or not the intervening authorities succeeded in securing the support of neighboring countries in their project. The first of those, of course, in Afghanistan, as I've said, and also in Iraq, incidentally, the United States went in not intending to co-opt the competing patronage networks into some collaborative structure, but rather to exterminate the most important patronage network in the country and exclude them forever from participation in the competition for wealth and power. So in Afghanistan, it was the Taliban. In Iraq, it was the Baathist Party. In both cases, the U.S. view was that they could never participate in the political process or the economic life of the country again. And this was a much more difficult thing to achieve than the kind of co-option which had worked in most other cases. The second, as I've mentioned, involving the neighbors is an important finding. We found out that in all of the cases in which the neighbors supported the intervention, the intervention succeeded in producing peace. And this is an important finding because it means that diplomacy actually is very important in these kinds of situations. We're a lot better at persuading governments to do what we want them to do than in social engineering, than in changing the underlying natures of societies. And what this finding suggests is that if you can persuade governments to support your objectives, you're most of the way toward achieving peace. So I think those are the explanations I would offer why, despite having achieved remarkable progress across the social and economic and political areas that I cited the figures from, we didn't secure our number one objective, which was to leave behind an Afghanistan a society that was at peace with itself and its neighbors. Let me just end by saying what we should expect at this point. I think we have to expect that there's going to be hard fighting. I think the current, the upcoming fighting season is probably going to be the most violent to date. Certainly with the highest, almost certainly with the highest level of Afghan casualties to date. There has been encouraging news about the prospects of the beginning of talks between the Afghan government and the Taliban. It's hard to know whether this will be realized. We've come close to this before and never quite been able to grasp the ring. But if those talks do begin, they're likely to be lengthy and difficult and not lead to a diminishing in violence in the short term. And finally, the Afghan government is going to continue to be dependent on international assistance, international economic aid, and frankly international military advice training support for some extended period to come. And so I expect these are the kinds of issues that you all are going to be discussing over the next several days.