 Good morning, it's great to see everybody here. We apologize for the tightness of space and chairs. I think a few more chairs maybe, are there some more? Yeah, so as I speak, there will be a few more chairs coming in to allow some of you who are standing up in the back to sit down. As I say, it's really great to see everyone here. Both of these issues are critical, meaning Afghanistan and corruption. I don't think today's speaker needs much introduction. I suspect everybody in this room has been following the work of John Sobko and his incredible team. Let me just say briefly, he's a former prosecutor with more than 20 years of experience on Capitol Hill in a variety of really critical oversight and investigations positions, including among others, House Select Committee on Homeland Security, House Energy and Commerce Committee, and the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations. That is both the culture and not just the experience, but the culture that he has brought to this job as a cigar. I was out there for most of the time covered in this report, and without trying to disparage anyone in order to cast light on Mr. Sobko, I remember, it must have been 2008 or early 2009, I had this meeting with these folks who were supposed to be the special inspector generals for Afghanistan, and it was kind of like having a meeting with cooked spaghetti. I mean, this was the biggest threat to the mission, and these were the people who were supposed to be doing something, at least bringing it to the attention. I was working as hard as I could at that time to try to make, you know, particularly the military, this was on ISAF command, understand that this was going to undermine the success of this mission if it wasn't addressed, and got it, corruption isn't typically in the mandate of a military force, but when you are the biggest operation in the country, if you don't pay attention to it, that's a decision, that's in effect supporting enabling and facilitating it. I cannot describe the contrast when John took this job, and I would also like to point out that there aren't a lot of other IGs in operating or investigating U.S. government activities that have done so with the type of rigor that John and his team has. I'd also like to call out Jim and Kate. Would you two stand up, please, if you are not already standing up? Kate, are you in the room? Yeah. So these are the two who really, and I've met with them and spoken with them over the many months that they've been working on this report, and I just think that you really have to understand the effort, the rigor, the diligence, the writing, the socializing that these two and their, the folks working with them, have put into this. Two last points. There is one U.S. government institution that played a very significant role in corruption in Afghanistan, whose activities are outside the scope of this report. Now, this is a report explicitly about reconstruction, and this organization was not involved in reconstruction, but it did spend a lot of money that was completely unaccountable, and its relationships were unaccountable, and I think that no conversation about corruption in Afghanistan or in the other countries in which we will be engaged, both we, the United States, will be engaged both in contingency operations but also in more standoff operations, particularly in the counter-terrorism space, but not exclusively. And so it's time for us as American citizens and members of the policy community, I think to be a little bit more vocal about this, and that is the CIA. The CIA contributed enormously to the almost cancerous development of corruption in Afghanistan, and this is something that we all, I think, can't continue to ignore. I might be tempted to greet this event and this report with a little bit of, I told you so. I have spent, you know, I mean, those of you who know me know I'm almost a broken record on this topic, and there's some other folks in the room thinking about Jodi Vittori, who's sitting in the fourth row back here, who's also been extraordinarily active in this space. So this is the message that we were really, you know, kind of harping on going back to 2007, 2008, that, you know, if this wasn't addressed, we were going to lose the war. I mean, this intervention was going to fail. But that's not the point of either this report or this event. The point isn't to look back at Afghanistan. The point is we are engaged. The United States is engaged in an ongoing basis, in really important, again, contingency operations like in Iraq were there, but also we have made partnering with host countries the center point of our counterterrorism strategy going forward, because we don't want to die ourselves. Well, guess who we're partnering with? We're partnering with some of the most corrupt regimes in the world, and those regimes, the corruption of those regimes partly explains why they are under attack by extremists. So this is the logic that we got wrong in Afghanistan, and if we don't apply the lessons that are drawn from this piece of work to ongoing U.S. foreign and security policy, then we will see, frankly, failures like we've seen in Afghanistan repeated into the future. So with that rather lengthy introduction, please welcome John Sartre. Thank you very much for those kind words. I do second what you said about Jim and Kate, and as I told Kate the other day when we were briefing somebody, I just hope I can live up to the great work that they and the team did. You know, good morning, and it's a pleasure to be here. I'm pleased to be here today to release our first Lessons Learned publication. A study of how the United States has understood and tried to address corruption in Afghanistan. As this audience more than most understands, corruption is an enormous threat both to the stewardship of U.S. taxpayer dollars and to Afghanistan's prospects for developing into a peaceful modern nation state. Corruption is, of course, not unique to Afghanistan, nor is it new. In 70 BC, a young Roman lawyer named Marcus Cicero made a name for himself by prosecuting a corrupt governor of Sicily. Speaking at the trial before the Roman Senate, Cicero attacked the governor as an embezzler of public funds, a robber and a disgrace in ruin to Rome in the province of Sicily. Cicero's rhetoric and evidence was so damning that the governor immediately fled to a distant province, not the first or last bad actor to escape justice in that manner. As a former state prosecutor and federal prosecutor with the organized crime and racketeering section of the Department of Justice, I know a little bit about organized crime, a little bit about corruption and a lot about Sicily. I too saw firsthand the damage inflicted by corruption and the difficulty of our own government to fight organized crime and corruption. And as the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction, or the CIGAR, I regularly sign off on reports and investigative material audits and other projects that uncover egregious corruption occurring in Afghanistan. CIGAR's findings over the last few years have implicated federal employees, military officers and enlisted men, American contractors, as well as Afghan and third country nationals. But the best summary, I think, of what we have found in Afghanistan was provided by a Defense Department report commissioned by U.S. Marine Corps General Joe Dunford. In that report, it said, corruption directly threatens the viability and legitimacy of the Afghan state. Corruption alienates key elements of the population. Corruption discredits the government and security forces undermines international support, subverts state functions and rule of law, robs the state of revenue, and creates barriers to economic growth. I suspect everyone in this room has been appalled and discouraged by accounts, many of them produced by CIGAR, of massive bribes, everyday extortion, theft of fuel, theft of weapons, ghost soldiers, ghost teachers, ghost clinics, contract fraud, shoddy construction and other misdeeds. For the reason cited in the Dunford report, and I must say in many of the reports produced by Carnegie and Sarah Chase, it is critical that these corrupt acts be identified and their perpetrators punished. But we need to do much more than that. We need to understand why U.S. and Afghan anti-corruption efforts have consistently fallen short of their objectives. We need to understand how U.S. policies and practices may have unintentionally aided and abetted corruption, while fostering the perception among Afghans that the international assistance effort itself was corrupt. We must recognize the danger of dealing with characters or networks of unsavory repute, tolerating contracting abuses, accepting shoddy performance and delivering unsustainable projects. These practices may serve short-term goals, but they reward corruption while breeding public cynicism and contempt for our presence in Afghanistan. Most importantly, if you expect that the United States will continue to be drawn into overseas contingency operations, whether in a conflict setting such as Afghanistan or in a non-combat contingency operation like our response to Haiti's devastating earthquake, we need to know what we can do to improve execution and outcomes in the future in the face of the corruption threat. Considering that more than 2,300 Americans have died in Afghanistan and that Congress has appropriated nearly 115 billion for Afghanistan reconstruction, a number that doesn't include the far greater cost of US military operations there, it would be an absolute dereliction of duty not to try to extract some lessons from that 15-year struggle. As background, lessons learned is also a statutory obligation for me and my office. Our legislative mandate includes providing recommendations to promote economy, efficiency, effectiveness and leadership on preventing and detecting waste, fraud and abuse. For those reasons, I established the lessons learned program in the agency in late 2014. Former Ambassador Ryan Crocker, General John Allen and other distinguished Americans with experience in Afghanistan encouraged us in that decision and we are grateful for their suggestions and their support. Many others noted that many of the lessons of Bosnia, Iraq, Haiti and other venues had to be relearned again in Afghanistan and must not be allowed to fade from memory again or go unaddressed in doctrine and in practice. Now to carry out this new project, which is a different project than what normally IGs do, SIGAR assembled a team of subject matter experts with considerable experience working and living in Afghanistan, as well as a staff of experienced research analysts. For example, Jim Wasastrom, who's the team leader for today's report, worked for many years as the senior anti-corruption advisor to USAID and the State Department at the U.S. Embassy in Kabul. Principal writer Kate Bateman also worked at the U.S. Embassy in Kabul and for the State Department here in Washington where she provided support to the SRAP, the special representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan. Many of our other lessons learned program employees have served in the military, worked for state, aid in the intelligence community as well as other federal agencies. In addition, the program staff's work undergoes a very lengthy and strong peer review by other subject matter experts and formal review by U.S. agencies, not to mention careful scrutiny by our own professional editors. In addition, what makes this report unique is it benefits from SIGAR as a unique position as the only independent oversight entity authorized to examine any and all U.S. reconstruction activities in Afghanistan. And that was something in particular that General John Allen at a breakfast reminded me. We are the only agency in the government, other than possibly the NSC. That has that unique broad mission. Most other IGs are focused on just one agency. They're stove piped by a statue. SIGAR's broad mandate uniquely positions us to extract this whole of government lessons. In keeping with that broad view, our lessons learned staff not only used published materials but also submitted requests for unpublished official documents, consulted with experts in academia and research institutes, and conducted in-depth interviews with key personnel in all agencies that had significant role in Afghanistan. In the process, the lessons learned program staff may have made the greatest use yet of non-public information resources to trace the story of the U.S. experience with corruption in Afghanistan. They conducted scores of interviews and written exchanges. And in particular, I would add that officials at Defense, State, Justice and Treasury were especially cooperative in dealing with our inquiries and candid in offering feedback. Their engagement greatly strengthened our report and we are extremely grateful for all of their help and assistance. Now, today's report will be the first in a series of products from our lessons learned program. Later this month, I think in two weeks, we plan to release a report in conjunction with the U.S. Institute of Peace sharing insights from the international community's experience in Afghanistan reconstruction. Additional reports on security, counter-narcotics and other critical topics are in the process to be released over the next year. Excuse me for one second, I think I'm getting a dry mouth. Now let me actually return to why we're here. Today's report, which examines how the U.S. government, mainly Defense, State, Treasury, Justice and U.S. AID perceived the risk of corruption in Afghanistan, how the U.S. response to corruption evolved and the degree to which that response was effective. Our report points out while corruption in Afghanistan predates 2001, it has become far more serious and widespread since then. By 2001, obviously the brutal conflicts of the 1980s and 90s had already decimated government institutions, the social and political fabric of the country and the economy. But after 2001, internal drivers of corruption and including insecurity, weak systems of accountability and the drug trade combined with new drivers. Namely, a huge influx of foreign assistance, poor oversight of that assistance and a willingness to partner with abusive and corrupt power brokers. All these factors increase the opportunities for corruption among Afghans and foreigners alike. The result for Afghanistan was systemic corruption, pervasive and entrenched, affecting the courts, the army, the police, banking and financial and other critical sectors of the country. It is this endemic corruption that poses the existential threat to Afghanistan and to U.S. policy objectives. Our report discusses evidence that for many years defense, state and U.S. AID did not place a high priority on anti-corruption. This flowed in part from an early, high level aversion to quote-unquote nation building which was not conducive to long term investments and accountability. But the lack of attention to corruption also flowed from the overwhelming focus on security, political stability and rebuilding. These goals largely took precedence over building good governance and the rule of law. That approach, we point out, rested on a false dichotomy. Anti-corruption efforts should not be seen as subordinate or mutually exclusive from security or reconstruction. Rather, fighting corruption is a fundamental part of creating lasting security, political stability and economic health. Our report recounts how the United States collaborated with abusive and corrupt warlords, militias and power brokers. These men gained positions of authority in the Afghan government which further enabled them to dip their hands into the streams of cash pouring into the small and fragile Afghan economy. Limited U.S. oversight, institutional and political pressure to spend money quickly for fast results and Afghan awareness that the inflow would not run forever combined to create perverse incentives. For our part, the bureaucratic temptation to use money as evidence of commitment and the urge to spend down accounts for fear of losing funds in the next round of appropriations added to the rush of the reconstruction funding stream. Eight years into the reconstruction effort, however, U.S. officials were increasingly concerned that corruption was fueling the insurgency and was counterproductive to our national security goals by financing insurgency groups and stoking popular grievances. U.S. agencies, as we lay out on the report, then set up and supported several U.S. and Afghan organizations to tackle the problem. And we talk about that in some detail. But those efforts faced that catch-22, that success required political will and cooperation from the very Afghan elites and networks that benefited from the corruption we helped fuel for eight years. We could train Afghans to investigate and prosecute cases, but we couldn't force the political leaders to use those special units. We could urge institutional reform, but undertaking reform was up to the corrupt Afghan government officials. On the other hand, U.S. political commitment also started the waiver at that time. Given our security and political goals, U.S. officials had to make hard judgment calls on how much political capital to invest in anti-corruption efforts. The United States did not fully employ, therefore, more aggressive tools like visa revocations, strict conditionality on aid, or prosecution of corrupt officials with dual citizenship. While agencies appear to agree that corruption posed a threat, there didn't appear to be a consensus on what to do about it. Perhaps for this reason, various U.S. anti-corruption efforts in Afghanistan have never, even to this day, been unified by a broad, coherent, single official strategy. On the positive side, our report chronicles how U.S. agencies did devote more resources to studying corrupt patronage networks and how DOD and USAID in particular improved their oversight and vetting of contractors. Those improvements, however, coincided with the drawing down of our presence, and some effective units were downsized or closed, possibly prematurely. Today's report, however, and I want to make this clear, is not an audit. It's not an investigation. It's not an indictment. Things that Cigar routinely does. It is not meant as a critique or a criticism of the many brave men and women who worked in Afghanistan over the last 15 years and were faced with the corruption threat. However, the lessons learned report, and particularly this report, just like all the rest of them, is meant more as a learning experience or a learning document. It draws together what happened. It draws together the evidence and analysis into findings that can underpin key lessons. And we believe these lessons should inform reconstruction efforts at the outset and throughout contingency operations as they continue in Afghanistan or any else in the world. And what are these lessons? They are, first of all, anti-corruption efforts must be a top priority so that corruption does not sabotage our overall policy objectives. As Ambassador Crocker told our staff in an interview, quote, the corruption lens has got to be in place at the outset and even before the outset in the formulation of reconstruction and development strategy. Because once it gets to the level I saw, it's somewhere between unbelievably hard and outright impossible to fix, unquote. The second lesson is that to counter corruption, U.S. agencies must analyze and jointly understand how corruption works in the political economy and networks of the host country. There is a military term for that, which is basically situational awareness. What we're demanding is consider corruption when you do situational awareness. Thirdly, the lesson is that the U.S. government must better assess how much foreign assistance a host country can reasonably absorb and improve our ability to oversee and monitor such assistance. Fourthly, the U.S. government should limit alliances with maligned power brokers. Our report acknowledges that these actors are not easily marginalized. But U.S. decisions to engage with bad actors should be based on a real cost-benefit analysis. Policy makers must weigh very carefully whom we do business with, ally with and train, and include in that cost-benefit analysis the risks that corruption and abuse by our partners can seriously undermine our primary security goals. Fifth, anti-corruption must be part of security and stability goals, not treated as a trade-off or tangential item. Sixth and finally, none of this will bear fruit unless the United States recognizes that endemic corruption requires political solutions and high-level consistent political will to secure host government reforms and ensure U.S. entities are not exacerbating the problem. Our report notes that failure to effectively address corruption in future contingency operations means U.S. reconstruction programs may at best continue to be subverted by systemic corruption and at worst may fail. You know when I last spoke here in December 2014, I quoted our good friend and colleague, Sarah Chase, who made the point so well, I'll quote her again. Well, there is increasing reason to believe that acute corruption contributes to international instability by creating grievances, spurring indignation, and generating support for anti-government militants. In addition to this, I would add from today's report that corruption also diverts U.S. taxpayer dollars away from vital purposes and reduces the quantity and quality of goods and services delivered to the Afghan people. Where the U.S. government is seen either complicit in or contributing to opportunities for corruption, our legitimacy and credibility, including that of our armed forces, are damaged. The bottom line to remember is corruption isn't just an academic topic, corruption can kill, and we should keep that in mind. Corruption, in other words, is a corrosive acid, partly of our making, that eats away the base of every pillar of Afghan reconstruction, including security and political stability. These realities explain why corruption and the rule of law appeared in first place among the seven critical threats identified by SIGAR's high risk list in December 2014, and why SIGAR takes seriously to lessons that anti-corruption strategy and planning must be an original component of contingency operations and reconstruction programs from the get-go, and that structures and practices must be better adapted to exert effective pressure on corrupt networks. Our corruption and conflict report therefore offers 11 recommendations based upon those lessons that build on those lessons, as I said, from 15 years in Afghanistan. Three are legislative, and eight are executive. The first recommendation is that Congress should consider making anti-corruption a national security priority and contingency operations and requiring an inter-agency strategy. Second, as we suggest that Congress authorize sanctions against corrupt officials, foreign officials and their allies to provide a deterrent effect and powerful tool to hold accountable such officials. Thirdly, we recommend requiring joint vendor vetting by DOD, state, and USAID, which could institutionalize one of the lessons we did learn in Afghanistan, that it is vital to know whom you are doing business with. Our recommendations for the executive branch include having the National Security Council establish an inter-agency task force to formulate policy and lead inter-anti-corruption strategy and contingency operations, using the intelligence community to regularly assess links between corrupt officials, criminals, traffickers, and terrorist organizations, and establishing dedicated positions in offices for anti-corruption work and contingencies. We also recommend expanding Treasury's list of transnational criminal organizations to include individuals and entities who have transferred the proceeds of corruption abroad as an important tool to bring pressure to bear on host governments. We suggest promoting anti-corruption as a high priority for host government and international partners from the outset of a contingency. And finally, we recommend increasing State Department internal reporting on corruption issues and building greater expertise on corruption and anti-corruption activities within key agencies. The CIGAR report has details on these recommendations and the report is posted on our website at CIGAR.mil. We believe that our recommendations are evidence-based, actionable, and prudent steps that together can make a difference. Put in place in policy and practice, they can provide better planning for contingency operations, reduce the risk that our aid will make matters worse, mitigate the corrosive effect of corruption, and deliver better outcomes for the host country, for the U.S. taxpayer, and for U.S. security, political, and humanitarian objectives. Now, you will note that our recommendations do not constitute a tactical manual or a best practices guide or a how-to book. That is a different undertaking than this report. Rather, the corruption and conflict report today lays out the strategic case for taking corruption seriously and for making the attitudinal and structural adjustments needed to fight corruption from the outset of planning and conducting contingency operations. You may also notice, but I have not mentioned Afghanistan's role in the fight against corruption. That is because, ultimately, the United States cannot wage the Afghan government's anti-corruption campaign for it. Indeed, I also want to make this point very clear. Many Afghan officials serve their country with integrity. Even where corruption is widespread, not everyone in Afghanistan is corrupt. Many people in Afghanistan, government and society, risk their lives every day to fight corruption. With great risk to themselves and their families, they are pushing on with objectives and with goals to clean up their country. I and other CIGAR staff who have met with President Ghani and CEO Abdullah believe they are sincerely committed to fighting corruption. They are also keenly aware of an international donor's willingness to support the Afghan government depends partly on progress against corruption. We at CIGAR are encouraged by the invitation for CIGAR to participate in high-level meetings of the Afghan National Procurement Council and by other measures that President Ghani has taken. But we must also recognize that President Ghani and CEO Abdullah face powerful, entrenched interests and that fighting corruption demands sustained political commitment by both the Afghan and U.S. governments. The best intentions and exertions of a host government also does not relieve the United States government of its prudential duty to improve its institutional and practical safeguards against corruption in zones of contingency operation. I want to close by noting that President Ghani told the UK's Guardian newspaper back in the 2014 election the following. The Afghan public is sick and tired of corruption, adding we are not going to revive the economy without tackling corruption, root, stock, and branch. I believe President Ghani was quite correct in saying that. Corruption is a vicious threat to all governments, whether emerging democracies or established states that requires comprehensive and sustained vigilance and countermeasures. I hope you will agree with me that the analysis and recommendations of this first Lessons Learned Report, Corruption in Conflict, makes a solid contribution to that effort, and I welcome your comments, support, and questions. Thank you very much. Thank you very much. Agreed. Just a word. I'll be sort of picking people. Wait for the microphone to come to you, and given how tightly packed you are today, that may take a little bit, so just bear with us. I'd also like to start out just by giving a plug for a couple other things out there. The intelligence requirement that John referred to as one of the... is quite significant. Corruption shouldn't be thought of as a practice that a couple or even many venal officials engage in. It's actually the operating principle of a sophisticated and often very successful and resilient network that underlies the sectors that we often divide up in our minds between the public sector, the government, the private sector, oh, that's business, that's over here, and the criminal sector or even the terrorist sector. These networks are horizontally, as well as vertically integrated across those four sectors. And so what we're really talking about, you said situational awareness. I think another military term or policing term is network analysis. We have got to engage in very sophisticated network analysis. So I have started a really rough kind of stab at what that might look like. Sorry, it's called structures of corruption. It's out there. It's three non-Afghanistan countries, but that also helps project us into the world of about 60 to 65 countries that are affected, in my view, with what one could call systemic, endemic, acute, or acute corruption, whatever word you want to use. There's also a kind of draft priority intelligence requirements. A lot of you in the room know that the intelligence community doesn't just go out and do something because it wants to. It is responding to queries sent to it by its customers, which are the civilian or military leadership of this country, and they have not sent down intelligence requirements on corruption. So I did a kind of sketch of what those might look like. So with that, I saw a hand going up over there. Please stand by for the mic. Hello, my name is Rafiq Kitab. I am a program director for a company called Capitalized International here in D.C. My question has to do about what to do about it in Afghanistan. I know the lessons learned is for future contingency operations, but Mr. Sopko, before I make my question to you, I would like to disagree with what Ms. Sarah Chai has said before that accusatory statement you made about the men and women serving in the CIA. I've worked in Afghanistan for eight years with the government, and I respectfully disagree with your comment, and I find it irresponsibly disrespectful. Mr. Sopko, I read most of your reports every time that you published. I saw a lot of focus on audit and auditory investigation and finding corruption problems, but too little focus on what to do about it. Isn't it too late that you're coming up with the lessons learned affecting Afghanistan now? Your job, your office was mandated not only to find out about corruption, but also to recommend something, to do something about it. What I found in all of the undertones of your reports was my understanding or impression was that I got an undertone of the reports trying to promote a political agenda rather than offering a technical solution. What's your comment on that? I am curious, it's the first time I've ever heard of being political. If I do have a political agenda, I wish you would tell me what it is. I'm a nonpartisan political pointee. I don't think we support, have said, the findings we find are nonpolitical. We do audits, okay? That's my job. We come in and we audit things. We do financial audits. I don't know if you know what a difference between a program audit and a financial audit is, but we will come up with findings. Not very political, if you ask me. We also do investigations. We indict people. We don't indict people on politics. So I take offense of somebody saying we are political in our work. This report is totally apolitical, and it is meant to be apolitical. It is applicable to Afghanistan. It is applicable to any country in the future. It deals with both Republican and Democratic administrations. So that's the first thing I would say. In each of our audits, program audits, we have findings and recommendations. So since I started in 2012, and even when the organization started in 2008, as we issue audits, we make specific recommendations for that specific program being audited. What we are doing here in Lessons Learned, and maybe this should have been done earlier, and I will take some criticism for that, but I already got appointed in 2012, and we had to get a basis of what was going on in Afghanistan before we could start actually drawing lessons. And that's what this report is all about. So I'm either confused by the question or whatever, but I think that's why we're issuing this report, because we're making recommendations. Couple points. One is I was not making an ad hominem attack on any individual public servants. However, there has been a consistent pattern by the CIA in Afghanistan and elsewhere to focus its energy on targeting, and therefore to be at the head of the colluding and collaborating with corrupt and abusive officials that has been identified in this report. I experienced it on the ground in Kandahar. I experienced it frequently seeing CIA station chiefs get in the way of anti-corruption investigations that were ongoing in Kabul, and there is no independent inspector general releasing any kind of reports to the American public about the use of cash in Afghanistan or other places that the CIA has deployed. It took the New York Times to put out the facts about bags of cash going to President Karzai with no oversight. That is conducive to corruption, and I just don't think that you can deny a certain pattern of behavior. That is not to cast aspersions on individuals in the trenches who had this kind of guidance coming down to them from their hierarchy, but we as Americans have got to take a good look at how the agency performs its functions. On recommendations, again, I'd just like to second what John just said, but secondly to say I spent a couple years in DoD. I was working to two commanders of ISAF and then to the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. I can't begin to tell you the number of absolutely detailed plans that I wrote to address corruption, both on a provincial level as part of the second wave of surge into southern Afghanistan, where I had it person by person, like out of this group of ten provincial officials in Kandahar, pick your five, but they are incredibly destructive to the outcome, to U.S. objectives in this area. And if you're doing a troop surge, you have to do a governance surge at the same time. This was incredibly detailed focus on Kandahar. I was part of a team of civilians who were helping General Petraeus, at the time General Petraeus, transition into his position as ComISAF. We built a very detailed campaign-wide anti-corruption program that was abandoned basically once it became clear there was not political will in Washington to support it. Subsequently, I kind of raised the echelon level of that kind of planning for the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff just to say that it gets really easy when people take a step back to say, wow, the reason there's no progress on this is because people don't get the equation, so we have to take a step back and make the argument, as John said, that this paper is doing. Then people say, okay, okay, we get it, but where are your recommendations? Like, I just spent the last 10 years making recommendations that you're not following because you don't understand the reason why they're necessary. So who's next? Right here in the middle. Wait for the microphone, please. Thank you. Naseem Stan, as I work for Voice of America, Afghanistan Service that's broadcast to Afghanistan TV. With regard to the report in corruption in Afghanistan, as you said in the report that Afghanistan government should bring some changes in legislation and executive. Afghanistan should bring some changes in legislation and also if they have an executive branch or the power to identify and prosecute corrupt officials. Do you think Afghan government has ability in political well, given the fact that they are fighting a brutal insurgency? If they don't have, which I doubt that they will have this, what can the US government do to help them achieve that goal that hurts both of them? Thank you. Nations to the Afghan government. It's not my job to make recommendations to the Afghan government. I have enough problems making recommendations to US government. We work with the Afghan government and there probably are some things which I think the national unity government is trying to do. I think we just note and I note in the speech that they're up against entrenched opposition. Think of the National Unity Government, it kind of reminds me of Teddy Roosevelt and the reformers we had in the early turn of the century, fighting entrenched corruption, whether it was in Tammany Hall or in Chicago or Philadelphia or Cleveland or all of that, as well as national. This is a generational problem. It's going to take the Afghan people and the Afghan government a long time. I think they can learn from the US experience to some extent. What we're saying is you ignore corruption to your peril. I think that applies to the Afghan government as well as the US government and the donors. That's the most we can say. We will provide the tools, but they have to provide the will. There is no magic. Here's three steps to provide political will. I think you have political will now with the Afghan government at the highest levels. I think it's reflected in some of their actions. But I am not naive in having been a student of organized crime and corruption in the United States and having looked at government organizations and having taught a course on organized crime in the United States at American University some years ago. It's not easy and it wasn't easy for us here and we weren't fighting a war going on. That's all I can say about the Afghan government. But again, we make no recommendations in this report for the Afghans. Right here down the front. I'm Jade Wu. I was a former rule of law advisor in Afghanistan. It was funded through the State Department. And I've also worked in Iraq and Kosovo. And like many of my colleagues in the room, focusing on the US end, we've seen a lot of corruption there. Waste, fraud, mismanagement. I remember reading recently an article about your office prosecuting or investigating some individuals on the US end who are involved in these matters. And what I'm wondering is what new safeguards, what new hoops do we have in terms of the contracting field to prevent this from happening again when we're hiring these contractors to go overseas and implement these projects? And who's responsible to be implementing these new safeguards? That's a very good question. And I think in our report, we allude to the joint vetting strategy approach. We actually highlighted as a good lesson we learned there. And it was done by aid and DOD. Unfortunately, that vetting process, although it was pretty robust in those agencies, there wasn't an interagency sharing of information that could have been made it better. And unfortunately, with the drawdown in troops, I think the DOD function has basically disappeared. I think aid still has their vetting process. There are some hoops like that, you call them hoops, but there are some things we can do on that. I'm actually encouraged by the fact that I believe General Nicholson is trying to reinvigorate the old Task Force 2010 to do vendor vetting. It's important to know that the vetting wasn't focused as much on corruption. It was focused on counterterrorism, the links to terrorists. What we're saying is this vetting process should be focused on corruption as well as counterterrorism. So that's one way forward. Who would do it? If you read our recommendations, we're not really saying where it should be. We don't want to micromanage. We just say it should be done. We're thinking the NSC should take this as a serious issue and should go from there. As I said, this isn't a how-to report. We wanted to get the attention of the policymakers that this is an important issue, corruption. But we don't want to micromanage and say you should have this here and that there and these people and how many people and all of that. I think we'll leave it to Congress and the administration to do it. But obviously the agencies that are working there and the people on the ground, the State Department people that I talked to, my staff people, the aid people, they have a good handle of what the problem is. It just needs to be incorporated as a serious government-wide issue. So I hope that answers your question a little bit. Charlie Clark with Government Executive. I was leading off what you just said. Do you anticipate any resentment of this report from State and USAID and Pentagon? I don't know. I mean, you have to ask them. We got a lot of buy-in and a lot of cooperation in writing this report from both officially and unofficially from State and DOD, Treasury and Justice. So we got a lot of support and they reviewed the report many times and it's not their report. It's ours, but we took their recommendations and suggestions as much as we could. We tried to get consensus from everybody and tried a consensus document. And that's why this is a little different from the normal reports that come out of CIGAR. My normal reports are they're audits or they're indictments. I mean, they're not really cooperative documents, to say the least. You know, the best way to get somebody's attention is indict them. But that doesn't mean you get cooperation all the time. The best way, you know, audits come in and, you know, this was your program, this was your goals and this is what you did. And it's, you know, well, we make recommendations. It's not usually fun things. I don't think... I don't know of any government official who wakes up and says, gee, what great news, the IG is coming. We're hoping with the Lessons Learn program, which we created, again, it's a separate unit, that they'll be less inclined to shut the blinds and flee the jurisdiction when the Lessons Learn people showed up. And as a matter of fact, we've seen that response because people know we're trying to develop lessons. So we've got to lay out the history. We can't develop lessons and make recommendations without laying out the history. And that's why if you look in this report, we lay out the history. But we tried to do it in a way that we're not accusing General So and So of doing this or Ambassador So and So who did this or USAID guy didn't do this or whatever. We're not trying to be accusatory here. We're trying to give, tell the story. The story of corruption and anti-corruption for the 15 years we were in Afghanistan. And then in cooperation with those agencies, in cooperation with people who served there, try to say, okay, what does it mean? Could we have done it better? How could we have done it better? Remember, this report, although it's a cigar report, is based upon 80-some interviews with ambassadors and generals and aid officers and other people, interviews with think tank people, people like Sarah who lived there. And it's incorporating all of that. So we're hoping the response will be positive. But you can bring a horse to water, but you can't make him drink. And obviously, some of our recommendations officially the government agencies may not like. Because officially it may impinge upon some program or cost more money or whatever, or they haven't gotten interagency buy-in. We understand that. That's why we're an independent agency who issues reports. We hope they will be taken with the intention it was established, the Lessons Learned Program, to try to make the next time we do this better. And that's what we can only hope for. Hello? Corey Chipman, a law student at the George Washington University Law School. Is there a role for government contracts litigation in combating corruption? And what is that role? This lesson was learned. So I worked with the Army this summer, and they've had some litigation that they've done in their contracts with local civilians in the area. And your view and what you've learned from this history, what role does litigation play in combating corruption? That plays an important role. Starting first with the issue of suspension and debarment. That leads to litigation sometimes. That's a very important tool that the government can use on enforcing contracts. We don't think it's been as aggressively done. That's why we're suggesting giving more tools, not so much to suspension and debarment, but more tools to the government in that area. I mean, I've spoken before, maybe here or elsewhere, I've always been flabbergasted that we can use classified information to hunt you down and arrest you and kill you. But apparently, I was told by the chief suspension and debarment officer at the Pentagon, oh, we can't use classified information to bar you from contracting with the government. Apparently, you have some amendment to the Constitution that gives you a right to contract with the government. But I can have classified information that says you're Taliban or that you're corrupt as hell, but I can't use that information. Now, we thought that was kind of silly. And we've been arguing that issue, and I think we've got new people over at the Pentagon who agree with us. But yeah, you can use litigation a lot in this area, so it's an important area. And I think the contractors, there are many honest, honorable contractors who are faced with corruption every day, and many of them come to us and complain because they're getting shook down by somebody or they can't go somewhere or they can't invest. And so litigation does play a role, but we don't talk that much about it. I think you talk about it. Yeah, and I'd like to, you know, just broadening that out a little bit. The point I'd like to make is what I have seen in the use of both prosecution tools, not specifically contract, but the various prosecution tools that exist, but other tough kind of sanctions like narcotic kingpin sanctions that, sorry, this is feeding back, that I have seen applied and mea culpa I made the wrong call on sometimes, is there's a tendency for that as currently applied to this case and others to be a little bit scattershot. So it's driven often as is often the case in law enforcement by, you know, where's the evidence? So preponderance of evidence is what is guiding which cases are selected to prosecute. Whereas ideally if you had a network diagram and you're seeing, wow, who is a significant, you know, player in this network? Who's at a node between two different elements of the network? Or who is, you know, boy, if we get them they're likely to be able to get us information on so and so, the way organized crime is taken down. I have not seen prosecution ever. I'd agree with John that it's been underutilized, but it certainly has not been targeted in a strategic way, either in Afghanistan or elsewhere, and that's something I would advocate for. I think we're moving. Did you have one? Yeah. Can I have this back? Does this officially end at 11? I can't remember what we said. Yeah, so you know what? I'm gonna, is someone in the room afterwards? Okay, so I am unilaterally extending this for another 15 minutes from now, which means we'll wrap up around 11.20. Anybody who needs to go, if you could do so in as non-invasive a way as possible, that would be great. Thanks. Hi, my name is Katharine Potts. I'm an editor for the Diplomat, and my question's pretty simple. You mentioned that corruption is basically as old as civilization. What can be done to, or what is the reason that previous lessons learn, because I'm sure people have written lessons learned, reports numerous times before on various operations that involve significant corruption. Why are these lessons lost and what can be done to keep these lessons so you don't have to keep sort of beating the same dead horse? That's an excellent question, and I wish I was a psychologist and we maybe have to hire some for our lessons learn program. It's just sort of the psychology of large bureaucracies and how they operate. You know, a couple points I want to make. Bureaucacies tend to be very conservative and don't change too radically. And problem with lessons learned programs in the past, and my humble opinion is nobody owns the lessons learned. And they kind of dissipate. So there's no buy-in. That's why we talk to the agencies and we try to get buy-in from the people on this thing. I hope it works. I can't say it will. You know, I spent 15 years working for Sam Nunn, former Democratic Senator from Georgia who was chairman of the Armed Services Committee, and you know, so I think, oh, here I am, back again. Sometimes I have an out-of-body experience like that. But, you know, he has always sent me out to TRADOC, which is Training and Doctrine Command, and the Army in particular loves to do lessons learned. I remember some general telling me, he says, we all do lessons learned. We really do. They write them all up, and at least with the military, there is a tradition of turning those lessons, if they're accepted, into actually doctrine and then down into manuals. Most of those lessons learned are tactical. You know, when you attack a hill, go this way, go that way, use this type of gun, this type of stuff, there's a very tactical approach, I think, from the military. And the military at least has a culture for that. They also have a culture for oversight in which we can talk about. I mean, they're used to a guy with a clipboard every morning saying, your shoes aren't shine. You got to do this and that. And every time there is an action and somebody gets wounded or expenditure of money, they'll do some after-action reports. You don't have that culture to some extent because we don't give them the money for it at state and aid or treasury or justice. You go down the line. I was with the Justice Department Organized Crime Section. We never did any actions. We never did any lessons learned. What do you mean? You go out and you prosecute people. You never learn any lessons. That's probably one reason we used to lose a lot of cases. But you didn't have the budget or the time for it. So that may also explain why some of the lessons are never incorporated. I mean, I went over and talked to Secretary of State's office and I'm trying to remember who the Depsec, my mind, it's gone on me now. And actually encouraged her to set up a lessons learned program, a real robust lessons learned program. And she was thrilled by it and actually started to promote it and she set up a program and assigned somebody over at state to do that. And I thought it was really great, but then unfortunately that person at state got transferred out after six months and I don't know where the program is. Part of it is this. If we really want to learn lessons and incorporate them, we've got to appropriate the money and we have to change the thinking of senior officials and all the government agencies to devote some resources to it and then to listen. Listen to the people who went out there, gather the information. This is an interesting thing. I remember talking to my former head of my office in Kabul. He worked at the Department of Justice. There were hundreds of DOJ lawyers that came through and you worked on rule of law so you may have met some. They all came through. They had their experience for six months or nine months dealing with the Afghan government. And he proposed because he came from the Department of Justice that they write up their experiences and we get a whole book and we try to develop lessons learned. It was ignored by the officials in Washington. They said, now we don't have time for that. So we missed the opportunity of collecting all of that information from DOJ. All of the many people in aid and state who have gone through Afghanistan, I hope and I don't know for sure, there was a method to collect their experiences and bring it back here and then have a team just like we have a lessons learned team who's paid and promoted for studying those and coming back with actionable items. We don't really have that culture outside of the military. And I would argue for that. It's not in this report, but I mean in my humble opinion, I haven't done an audit and it's not my job to audit the State Department's internal operations. I just look at reconstruction. But based upon my long 25-year experience in Washington, D.C., a 30-year experience, and from talking people at state and talking to people at aid, that needs to be done. Now let me just, I know I'm not filibustering, but there's one other thing to do. And this is what is unique about this report. I disagree with you one thing. I don't think anyone in the government has produced a report like this which looks at the whole of government approach to corruption. General Dunford commissioned a fantastic report on corruption as it relates to the military. There is no comparable report by state or comparable report by aid or by treasury or by justice or by agriculture or by the NSC. This is what General Allen told me at breakfast. He said, John, you, your little agency with 150 people, is the only one if you look at your statute. Occasionally it's good to look at the statutory authority. It's supposed to do the whole of government. And so that's how this lessons learned team got started. Allen and Crocker and others said, look, you're the only one who's going to do it. You're the only one who can look at, take for example, the PRTs. Okay, now you are. Okay, I know, but the PRT. No, no, no. You got to get everybody. Yeah, we got everybody. So, wait a second. Especially because I want to add just one, two little things to that briefly. One is the best similar report that will help answer your question is by a guy called Comer, K-O-M-E-R. It's called bureaucracy does its thing. It was written in 1972 about the Vietnam War and you just substituted gyro for GVN and you got the exact same issue. So that's a really good one. But the last thing I'd like to say doesn't have to do with lessons learned, it has to do with corruption. And I actually think we are living, yes, corruption has existed as long as humans have organized themselves in any kind of government, but we're living in a new era of it that really as I've been looking at a variety of countries where it's led to security crises, what I've found is I ask people, wait, come on, corruption's always existed. When did it go off the rails? And from everyone I've gotten a year, we are usually in the mid to late 1990s. My personal hypothesis is that a combination of the collapse of communism and globalization and an ideology of greed, quite frankly, an ideology that has moved all of us toward a place where we are using money as the exclusive yardstick of social advancement has really contributed to corruption in, as I say, about 60 to 65 countries worldwide and if you want us to get political, I don't think the United States is off that spectrum and I think all of us need to think through the forms that corruption takes in our own country. I think we've got a question up there. Bill Goodfellow at the Center for International Policy. There's been very little mention of, in fact, we're in the middle of a war in Afghanistan and the war is not going particularly well and President Obama said in June, the only way this war will end is with a political settlement between the Taliban and the government of Afghanistan. Now it's hard enough to get the Taliban to the table but an even bigger challenge, I would argue, is that the Afghan elite have no incentive, none, because they are getting incredibly rich from this war. Now Sarah has written how the Taliban, the corruption drives the insurgency but it also drives the Afghan elite to have zero interest, the ones that are corrupt, in backing a political settlement and the gravy train would stop if the war were over. So short of your old friend Jack Blum said you want to end the war, cut off the money but short of that, how do you make peace profitable? How do you incentivize peace? How do you... Otherwise I think as long as the money flows the war is going to continue. There's not going to be a political settlement as long as the money is there. Why would they? This is one I'm not going to filibuster on. I mean that is really beyond, that's a good question and it's beyond our report, which I'm talking about today and that really gets above, that's probably more at a policy level that I do process, I don't do policy. So I'm going to defer to my good colleague here and see if she can answer it. I really don't know the answer but it's a good point. I think I'll punt this one too just because I do think it's outside the scope of what we're talking about today and I'd have to go down a road about whether putting the two most repudiated forces in the country opposite each other at a table is in fact a recipe for peace. I mean if a lot of the Afghan population hates anybody they hate the government and they hate the Taliban. So why putting those two across the table from each other is the way we get to peace is kind of lost on me but that's a whole other conversation. So let's take another question back there. The other part of the assumption is a good one that so long as there is this kind of money to be made through corrupt practices there is not going to be any kind of future for the country. Ma'am. Yeah. All right this might get to the other, the previous question as well. I completely agree with you. I think the NSC should do something a little bit robust about corruption. Afghanistan corruption, writ large. That's who you are. Most people did kind of automatically for which I appreciate. You mean you don't know me? No, I'm just kidding. My name is Mawari Zafer. I'm a PhD in anthropology at the University of Oxford and I've been studying the production of cultural knowledge particularly among the Afghan diaspora or these Afghan elites for counterinsurgency operations to include international development in which I worked for three years in Kabul and found to be an incredible shit show. So with that what I wanted to say was that I think the biggest challenge to what you've argued and I think you guys argue well in your own point but I think that the biggest challenge is a perception of corruption as something inherently cultural and this is an idea that's not only supported but leveraged by these group of again entirely socially constructed Afghan elites who are often diaspora members who went back and have filled their pockets and reiterated these ideas about tribalism and satiric conflict which I'm not saying that don't exist but I don't think that there were at any point historically were as much of an issue as they are now because now they're explicitly reinforced to support corrupt measures. Two things about that one is that our approach towards because I think we were aware that there was a perception of corruption as cultural but I think it fed into US post-Cold War fears that were we to allow the Afghan government to develop in a way that had any sort of resemblance to the previous Soviet structure that that would be unpalatable to our end goals and I don't necessarily think that that was true but that's the approach that we had initially going on it was having centralized mechanisms that would look as brief as you can. I'm so sorry. I'm going to give my whole dissertation going now but the last point of that is that if we continue to think about corruption as cultural it renders it into these discussions that are highly intellectualized rather than something that can be fed into more pragmatic resolutions so that's just one point but I don't know to what extent you address that in the report. I think we do. I think it's a very good question and I'll be very brief too. There's a slippery slope when you start talking about corruption being oh there's good corruption, there's productive corruption corruption can actually help and then there's a culture. The Afghans are just inherently corrupt and they like taking money. I think it's false in all areas and I think it also leads to a oh well it's okay we don't have to do anything about it you know it's that attitude that oh it's Afghanistan and I think that's a mistake. That's first of all very very bad view of our partners the Afghans. Now the Afghans will accept a small amount of corruption they've told us that if you look at all the surveys and the studies but what we're talking about what Sarah is talking about is a corruption level that the Afghans are so abhorred to it's so abhorred to them that it's counterproductive to their support of the government it's counterproductive to the developing of the economy so listening to the Afghans the Afghans will accept some corruption but the level we're talking about is endemic it is so bad that the Afghans are actually turning on their own government and turning on us so I think that's important my fear is I hear this sometimes and I'm glad you raised it that oh well it's Afghanistan I think that's a horrible attitude to have I don't know if you want to respond I'm really glad you raised that point too I get it all the time and I get it not just about Afghanistan I get it about most of the countries that I have researched I want to say two things about it one is I have never had an Afghan tell me I mean in ten years focused living in Kandahar focused on this issue most of that time I've never had an Afghan come up to me and say Sarah would you get off your corruption stick we don't really mind it like not an Afghan, not a Tunisian not an Uzbek, not a Nigerian ever I've only ever heard that argument from western potential interveners or observers of these places there's another point I'd like to make I actually raised this question in an op-ed that's out there too some of you have heard about the issues that some US military folks have run into in trying to counter the practice the rather widespread practice in southern Afghanistan of prepubescent boys being used for sex and that this was happening on US bases and a number of US serving officers confronted their counterparts who were participating in this kind of behavior and were disciplined in one way or another by the US military because quote this is part of Afghan culture so yes that practice was relatively prevalent in southern Afghanistan that doesn't mean it's part it is accepted by the body of Afghan people and so what I mean I'm living down there and this was a fact of life and I can't say I got up on my hind legs against it either because I'm sitting alone as a female downtown Kandahar but the point was people detested it it's a very complex practice I think even the way it's been covered in the United States is not really accurate because it isn't just plain old rape it's not rape it is very often a grotesquely complex relationship that involves abuse, abuse of authority, physical abuse but also favoritism, advancement the families of these boys often gave them to more socially senior Afghan men in anticipation of the advancements that they could get the kinds of gifts that they could get for it so it is a very complex practice that was detested and it was indeed part of the way that Afghans saw us as being complicit with corruption in the broadest sense of that term our complicity with those practices not only did it get three Marines killed but it was part of what was driving people into the arms of the Taliban so it really is a very important question and unfortunately with that we are going to have to wind this up thank you all for being here