 Ladies and gentlemen, good afternoon and welcome to the U.S. Institute of Peace. We are very pleased to see such a great crowd here today to host the launch of a new report by the Open Society Foundation that is titled Irreversible Damage, Civilian Harm in Modern Conflict, and how the U.S. and the Allies undermine their missions by hurting civilians and how to change that. This is an important and timely issue given the recent attacks on civilians in Afghanistan, which is a focus of this report, as well as the even greater suffering and harm to civilians in conflicts like Syria, Iraq, and unfortunately elsewhere around the world. USIP is a fitting location, I think, for this discussion and for this launch, given our conflict resolution mission but also our extensive work in Afghanistan, Iraq, and other conflict zones where we try to bring peace to difficult situations. For those that don't know, and I know most do, for those that don't know the Institute, Congress established USIP over 30 years ago as an independent national institute dedicated to the proposition that peace is possible, practical, and essential for the U.S. and global security. We pursue this vision of a world without violent conflict by working on the ground with local partners and we provide people, organizations, and governments at every level with the tools, knowledge, and training to manage conflict so it does not become violent and to resolve it when it does. Today's discussion will be with three distinguished authors of the report, Chris Colando, Rachel Reed, and Chris Rogers. It will be moderated with comments by former Under Secretary of Defense for Policy, Michelle Flornoi to my left. I'll briefly introduce them and then turn it over to Ms. Flornoi and the panel for the discussion. I should just, some housekeeping notes to this event is on the record, it's being webcast so for the question and answer period, there's microphones here. Please wait for the microphone before stating your question so that others watching can hear. Brief introductions. Christopher Colando is a senior military fellow at King's College in London and president and CEO of Colando Strategic Leadership. Chris was recently a senior advisor in Afghanistan in Pakistan too under Secretary Flornoi and served as a senior advisor to three commanders of ISAF. He served four tours in Afghanistan and drafted the McChrystal Assessment and counterinsurgency guidance among many other pieces of advice. Rachel Reed is the policy and advocacy manager for the Middle East, North Africa, Southwest Asia at the Open Society Foundations. She was previously with Human Rights Watch in Afghanistan and focused on civilian casualty issues and she worked for many years at the BBC before that. And Chris Rogers, this is a senior policy analyst also with Middle East, North Africa, Southwest Asia Open Society Foundation. He was previously a researcher with the Center for Civilians in Conflict in Afghanistan and Pakistan investigating and reporting on civilian harm from the military and counterterrorism operations in the region. And then finally, we're very pleased to have Michelle Flornoi here to share some remarks on the report and to moderate the discussion. She's the co-founder and CEO of the Center for New American Security. She served, as I said, as under Secretary of Defense for Policy from February 2009 to February 2011 and she was the principal advisor to the Secretary of Defense in the formulation of national security and defense policy, oversight of military plans and operations, and the National Security Council Deliberations. So people that really know what they're talking about for this important report, when we turn it over to you, Michelle, thank you. Thank you very much for the... Thank you very much for those kind introductions and thanks to all of you for coming to a discussion of a really important and timely topic. It's a particularly pleasure for me to be here because I've had the honor to work with Chris in many incarnations over time. He has served four tours in Afghanistan and was a strategic advisor to me and the whole interagency process when President Obama began our strategic review of Afghanistan. He later was forward deployed to work with General McChistel and then back for more punishment to Washington and to more hours in the windowless room trying to improve U.S. policy. I was really pleased to see that he and his co-authors chose to do this work. After more than 15 years of war, there's still far too little reflection on what the lessons we should be learning from these experiences are, particularly at the strategic level. The U.S. military has a very well-defined, well-honed tradition of capturing tactical and operational lessons learned and those get filed away and filed somewhere and hopefully influence future doctrine and training. But at the strategic level, I think we as a nation too often forget to pause and reflect and digest and learn from what we've experienced. We tend to move on to the next thing. And so I applaud you for trying to step back and capture this set of lessons at this point in time. I'd also applaud you all for going the next step. Too often we stop at the insight, but we don't then say, okay, so what, so what do we do differently? And this report is full of very practical, pragmatic, concrete recommendations on everything from policy guidance to mechanisms for data collection and analysis to how we should train and advise allies and partners in the field. So it gets very concrete and very specific, and I think that will make it much more impactful as a piece of work. And the last thing I'll highlight before turning it over to Chris to walk you through the details is I appreciate that the scope goes beyond just U.S. operations and recognizes that in this era of counterinsurgency and counterterrorism, so much of our work will be by with and through partners and how our partners behave and whether they take care to avoid civilian harm and civilian casualties will not only impact their performance and effectiveness and reputations and legitimacy, but also because they're our partners, it will reflect back on us. And so we have a strong interest in ensuring that not only U.S. forces understand the lessons in this report, but the partners that we will work by with and through also fully understand and apply these lessons. And so I think that's a really important set of insights that we should highlight as well. So again, kudos to all three of you and I'll turn it over to Chris to walk you through the report in more detail. Michelle, thank you very much for the introduction to the report and your and your remarks and also to USIP for hosting this event. Nine years ago today, I was commanding U.S. forces in Kunar-Nuristan province. In fact, Harlan Kofalis was one of my soldiers there, one of my non-commissioned officers during that period of time. And we were engaged in the summer of 2007 in a number of major firefights. And through those series of firefights in the summer of 2007, four of our soldiers were killed and scores and scores wounded. And as we began looking at, OK, why are we facing the kind of threat that we're facing? Why is there an insurgency in this area? What's going on behind the scenes? The more we dug into this issue, the more we realized that this issue of civilian harm was a critical catalyst. And what had happened was an individual who had a blood feud against a locally significant, a local community leader had given manipulated intelligence to U.S. forces in the past to dupe them into targeting this individual. So this individual faced with a choice whether to surrender and go to jail or fight back, chose to fight back. And in that particular area, the entire community went with him. And part of the reason why they went with him is because of his personal credibility. But also through that time, there were also a lot of civilian casualties, as well as harm to the family community well-being. As we began to look at this issue through Afghan eyes and to see the effects of U.S. military actions, our actions on the Afghan population, when a husband is killed, the family breadwinner is removed. And the rest of that family is either impoverished or needs to rely on others for support. The damage that these challenges, these casualties and this disruption to community life and family life begin to have on the wider community become significant. And these had accumulated to the point at which you had essentially a public insurrection in this particular area in the summer of 2007. And that was our turn to fight it. So I began to learn from that experience, first of all, the importance of understanding the environment that we're operating in, understanding the people, understanding the political, social, and economic dynamics, as well as learning to see ourselves and our actions through Afghan eyes. And through that process, we began to learn how to apply military force and other capabilities in ways that we're far more productive to achieving our aims. And also learn from that experience that civilian harm is broader than this issue of just civilian casualties, civilian harm as I defined it, the adverse effects of military operations on community and family life. And I have to emphasize, and so by 2009, after that experience and after coming to work for Michelle, I began to see that this was actually a wider problem, that this was a systemic problem across Afghanistan. And not only was it targeting due to the sort of manipulated intelligence oftentimes, but also predatory behavior on the part of warlords and Afghan militias, particularly in the 2001 to 2009 years, had a significant impact on the Afghan population and the direction of this war. So by 2009, as we were looking at how to change the strategy in Afghanistan, and as General McChrystal began to look at how to implement the President's new guidance, civilian protection became a critical part of that. I do have to want to emphasize that there is no military engaged in combat operations in a foreign country that has taken better care of civilians than as ISAF post 2009. And I think it's critically important to recognize as Michelle highlighted that the levels of care that the U.S. military undertakes to protect civilians and to prevent civilian harm is absolutely extraordinary. And what we're looking at in this report is civilian harm oftentimes that has caused, even when we're operating within the law of armed conflict, can have major strategic consequences. So for our study, we interviewed over 60 experts, scholars, current and former policymakers and military officials to include former President Hamid Karzai, former Afghan ministers of defense and interior, two commanders of ISAF, General Petraeus and Alan, as well as many former and current U.S. and Afghan commanders, and a wide range of academic literature and sources. And we found that when we looked at this issue of strategic impact, and we looked at insurgencies and counterinsurgencies broadly, that when an insurgency tends to be successful, when it gains tangible internal and external support. And civilian harm in Afghanistan was advancing the prospects, was essentially mobilizing people towards the insurgency in very damaging ways. And secondly, in these sort of historical studies, that a host nation that loses legitimacy tends to be unsuccessful. And civilian harm was undermining, damaging the legitimacy of the international mission and the Afghan government and creating major rifts in the U.S.-Afghan relationship. So civilian harm in terms of its strategic impact in Afghanistan from 2001 to 2008 was accelerating both problems, helping the insurgency become sustainable, undermining the legitimacy of the Afghan government and the international mission. So it was like burning a candle at both ends with a blow torch. And it became absolutely critical to change that. And General McChrystal was the first one to really make this strategic connection between civilian protection and battlefield success. And that's reflected in his assessment and his counterinsurgency guidance. And began a process of reforms, and that's when I first met Rachel, when General McChrystal in 2009 asked me to look at this issue. I met with people like Rachel Reed and representatives from Civilians in Conflict and Others. And that began a series of reforms that unfolded over time that had significant impact. And I just have to say, as a plug for Rachel, she has, her efforts have literally saved hundreds, perhaps thousands of Afghan lives. So it's an honor to have done this report with you, and I'd like to turn over to you now. As before we turn to Rachel, there are three open seats up front. For those of you bold enough to come up, there are seats, please join us. Thank you, thank you, Chris. Chris is always too kind to me. I had, first went to Afghanistan in 2006. And by about 2008, when the conflict was at this high level and civilian harm was at such terrible levels, I was working for Human Rights Watch. And I met Chris when he went, as he says, he came for General McChrystal, and he really was responsible for that strategy rewrite in 2009. I remember, there are many of you in the room who spent quite a lot of time in Afghanistan with many familiar faces. I'm sure many of you remember reading that 2009 strategy. Jules were dropping at how precise its analysis of what was going wrong was. It was really surprising, because until then, there'd been this feeling that the thinking was very blinkered. So there is this growing realization of something very serious is going wrong. It's having huge strategic impacts, as Chris has described. And then a series of reforms are put in place. Now these included things like a civilian casualty tracking cell, this was a crucial building block for starting to really realize the scale of civilian harm and start to believe it with their own numbers, not just listen to the UN's numbers that were coming from outside. A series of tactical directives were put in place, which did things like define when airstrikes could be used, require call-outs before night raids. And you saw a very dramatic drop in civilian casualties. So in 2008, pro-government forces, the US primarily, was responsible for 39% of fatalities, which is extraordinary when they're up against this terribly indiscriminate adversary with very low precision weapons like the Taliban. By 2012, that had dropped to 9%. So it's a very dramatic fall, even through the troop surge and an uptick in the tempo of operations. So it's a very impressive period in terms of the speed with which these reforms took hold in terms of the civilian casualties. It wasn't enough that there were tactical directives. Command emphasis was critical. And many of the people we spoke to stressed that it was the leadership from people like General McChrystal that really drove home the message that this was of strategic importance, a strategic necessity, not just a legal nicety. Also critical was improved analytical capabilities, both in terms of the continuous learning so that it was really understood what was causing the civilian harm, but also broadening the lens so that there was more understanding of this wider frame that we're using. We're talking about civilian harm and not just civilian casualties. So the example Chris gives is a very clear picture of those wider consequences of harm, whether it's entrenching, super empowered, abusive local security actors or militias, the kinds of things that will drive communities away from their government. And again, in terms of my experience, I felt like there was a real opening of the doors to information from outside sources, the kind of credible civil society organizations that had a lot of information to share and had been trying to do so for some time. So dramatic results, it was too late, frankly, to repair the damage in terms of many of those communities that had already switched sides. It did start to help to improve the relationship with the Afghan government. There were some concerns from, I'd say, a minority within the military that this was causing them harm. This was putting at US military at greater risk. And this is hugely important as we did this research. We really wanted to examine this, particularly in a sort of campaign climate where you've had presidential candidates arguing for the gloves to be off or even war crimes to be committed. So we really drilled down the empirical evidence that was out. There really didn't find anything to back this up. In fact, if you look at a time period from 2007 to 11, you do see a spike in the use of IEDs by the Taliban, which did result in more US military fatalities, but not in terms of the numbers of US forces, because that was during the troop search. So actually, in terms of ground engagements, US fatalities and ground engagements, which is the best indicator of where the forces were being put more at risk, you actually see a decline during this period as a percentage compared to the numbers of troops there. So it's a period of extremely positive lessons in many ways. The US demonstrated that it could put in place much improved civilian protection for a relatively low cost. So the question we wanted to answer with this report is to what extent has that been institutionalized and absorbed and applied in terms of working with partner forces, which is so key in so many of the US operations today, but also in terms of the US engagements itself in other contexts. So looking at ANSF briefly, unfortunately, I would argue basically that it was too little too late with the ANSF. We've seen sadly a big spike in civilian casualties caused by pro-government forces in Afghanistan. In 2014, it jumped by 51% in 2015 by 28%. And this is partly to do with the changing nature of the conflict, of course, but it's also, I think, because the ANSF have very thin adherence to IHL. And I think they certainly haven't grasped that lesson that it matters strategically to them to be really improving their civilian protection efforts. They do on the positive side have a civilian casualty tracking cell, which is a great start at an important foundation stone, as I say, for ISAF, at least. But they're massively undercounting harm. So if you look at numbers in 2015, they think that pro-government forces were responsible for 200 civilian casualties. The UN puts that number at 1,200. So there's a massive gulf between those two numbers. And I'm afraid my money is on the UN in that case. There's a lot more work to be done there. And I think particularly on the analytical side, they're starting to be able to do the reporting, but they really don't have the analysis capability yet. In terms of other conflicts, then, and the US's partnerships, I mean, Yemen is unfortunately a rather poor example at the moment of US efforts in working with other partners. The Saudis, as we know, have been responsible for very serious violations of the laws of war in their operations in Yemen. And they're doing so with US assistance on refuelling arms trade and intelligence sharing. And I know the US is starting to try and work with the Saudi military to try and improve its protection of civilians, but it's clearly got a very, very long way to go. In Iraq and Syria, now it's a very complicated environment. And here you've got actors like Assad's forces and ISIS committing egregious war crimes. So to talk about US civilian protection efforts in that context is difficult clearly there in another league and really hard to compare. But I do think it's fair to say that the US really does not know the scale and impact of the civilian harm that it's currently causing in Iraq and Syria and the civilian harm being caused by its partner forces, particularly partner forces who we know have somewhat different strategic priorities and track records in terms of civilian protection. There are already some very serious allegations being made about some of the Kurdish partner forces in terms of their adherence to laws of war. And again, there is a tracking cell that's in place in Iraq and Syria. It's a good first step. Again, there's a massive undercount. They're admitting to, I think, the current number is 41 civilian casualties, civilian fatalities at present after more than 9,000 airstrikes, which compared to their track record in Afghanistan, would suggest an extraordinarily better track record in terms of civilian protection, so it doesn't quite seem credible at the moment, so there's still a long way to go. So I'll turn to my colleague, Chris, who will talk you through some of our practical recommendations. Sure, yeah. And so as Rachel outlined, the performance of the United States on civilian harm and these more contemporary conflicts is uneven and reveals really concerning gaps. And so the question is, how do we truly institutionalize the lessons that have been drawn from the experience in Afghanistan? First and foremost, what we would propose and recommend is the adoption of a uniform policy on civilian protection. This policy would cover all US operations worldwide. This policy would also standardize the methodology by which the United States tracks, monitors, and defines civilian harm in all of its operations, and standardize its post-incident response, so improving its transparency in terms of public information after incidents of harm, as well as amends, and standardize the provision of amends when and how those policies are implemented. Secondly, this policy would integrate all US efforts, particularly within and between State Department and DOD, within which have a multiplicity of actors with different lines of responsibility and authorities. And a policy like this would set out a common vision and clear lines of responsibility to organize and much better coordinate those efforts. Secondly, how would we make this policy an operational reality? What we would propose is the creation of civilian protection cells, modeled after what ISAF created around 2009 with the civilian casualty mitigation team, but this time it made standing and permanent. We would also recommend that those cells be made real at three distinct levels. Firstly, at the operational headquarters level, which would allow for the collection of data and the analysis of information that would be truly responsive to commander's needs on the ground. Secondly, at a combatant command level, which would be especially helpful and constructive in managing US military partners, relationship partners, and assistance to security forces. And finally, at the Joint Chiefs level, which we think would be instrumental in ensuring that lessons learned are discerned across services and pushed out throughout US military forces. So what would the civilian protection cells do? Well, I think there's two areas in particular, again, drawing from the experience in Afghanistan. Number one, collecting data. And this means not just gross numbers of fatalities, but actually disaggregating the causes of civilian harm. For instance, the use of close air support in populated areas in Afghanistan, or trends on escalation of forts incidents in Afghanistan. And this would also allow the US military to broaden its ambit of information to include very relevant and critically important factors around civilian harm, such as displacement, access to services, economic insecurity, and also draw on information from civil society and international organizations, as well as open sources in a much more rigorous and standardized way, which we think would also be particularly important in context where the United States doesn't have the kinds of boots on the grounds that it did in places like Afghanistan in years past. Secondly, and critically, analysis. One of the things that the civilian casualty mitigation team in ISAF did was not just tabulate numbers, but it was to dive down into that information and analyze it to identify trends, identify drivers. And based on that, make recommendations that were specifically tailored to the tactical and operational realities that commanders were facing in order to produce real gains in terms of civilian harm mitigation. And so it's this latter piece, this combination of data and analysis that we think is important to allow for that feedback to enable commanders to have the information so that they can learn how to conduct operations better in a more strategically sound way. Finally, we advocate for ensuring that this policy extends to U.S. partner forces. Partner forces, whom as Rachel mentioned, whose legitimacy is increasingly critical to U.S. strategic objectives around the world. In Afghanistan, as Rachel mentioned again with ANSF, it's clear that a lot of efforts were too little, too late. And so from that, we think that it's incredibly important that from the beginning, POC and Protection of Civilian is built into partner training and support strategies, and that's integrated across DOD and State Department in all U.S. efforts. In particular, when it comes to training and also leadership relationships, commander-to-commander relationships, making sure that protection of civilians is not just a legal nicety, that we are clear that this is critical not only to our partner's success, but also to U.S. strategic objectives and to further assistance and support. And finally, drawing on the experience of data and analysis, ensuring that in areas where the United States is engaging deeply with partners, that its own data and analysis captures its performance of partners, and that it transfers that capability over to partners so that they, over time, may use that information to develop their own tactical and operational reforms. So finally, I think when we step back at a fundamental level, a lot of the recommendations and drawing on the lessons that have been discerned are really about improving our knowledge. It's about getting data. Right now, we don't know what we don't know. And I think we're also very realistic that recommendations such as new protection cells in a climate of flat or declining budgets may come up against certain headwinds. But I think what we would stress is that this is really something that's practically possible, would be a fraction of the cost of what the US spends in operations in Iraq, Syria and to assistance to partner forces and would really be a low-cost, very high payoff way for the United States to address these new threats and the new reality of the strategic cost and threat that civilian harm poses to its operations throughout the world. Thanks very much. Great, thank you very much. So we now have the opportunity for you all to ask questions. We have two microphones here. If you'd like to ask a question, please get my attention and introduce yourself. Tell us what organization you're with and please do make sure there's a question mark at the end of your short statement. So yes, sir, right here on the aisle. Thank you very much for a wonderful report. My name is Nick Kessler, new reservist with Vet Impact, helping veterans, great businesses in those conflict countries, much like Afghanistan, Rumi Spice, Combat Footflops, that sort of stuff. Questions quickly that I've got. One, we're looking at this from a whole-of-government approach. So from the public sector side of government and what we can do. Would love your thoughts, though, regarding how civilian harm really works into economic opportunity as well, both during conflict and post-conflict reconstruction and then how it really ties into any relationships we have through public-private partnerships with private industry in order to help the reconstruction efforts. And then lastly, based on this report and everything you've seen, sir, over since 2009, especially, and ma'am, Michelle, from what your standpoint was, do we see this as a shift in how the national military strategy actually works to support our national security strategy overall and then any lessons learned then regarding how we actually work this post-conflict? Nick, thanks for some great questions. Whenever you apply military force in a combat zone, it's going to have effects on the civilian population. It's going to have effects on the broader political, social, economic dynamics. Unless you are in a situation like Gulf War I, where you have mass-armored formations in the middle of an unpopulated desert, then the consequences of civilian harm are going to be much less because of the environment that you're operating in. But that's a fairly unique, maybe one percentile environment for conflict. What we've seen certainly since September 11th, but also more broadly, is these military operations, wars are taking place among, within populated environments. And I know growing up in the military, one of the things that we were taught as we're putting together strategies and operations for how you succeed in a conflict is you have to manage the interplay between achieving military objectives and protecting your own force. And sometimes it's very painful trade-offs, but the part of the art of command was to achieve your objectives in ways that you're protecting your own force. So you're using your force and your capability smartly. And I think what this report shows is that sort of view of what we ask commanders to do in that view of the art of command is, needs updating, is not, it needs to be supplemented. And I think it needs to be supplemented with a third component, which is civilian protection, because civilians have agency on the battlefield. And commanders, as we saw in Afghanistan, commanders have to manage the interplay between military objectives, force protection and civilian protection, because all of these are interacting in ways that affect the environment and at the strategic level are affecting our ability to achieve our aims. So in terms of how do we shift leader education, how do we shift development of leaders across the government, I think it's widening the aperture of how we view the art of employing U.S. military capabilities across the government and seeing it in terms of the interplay of these different variables. I would just add that I think to the last piece of the question, as I understood it, you know, I think that we tend when we use the military instrument in a major way as in Afghanistan, we tend to understandably focus in a very fine grain on the details of the military aspects of the campaign. And too often that becomes the shiny object in the interagency discussions. And we spend too little time discussing what Ambassador Cunningham was concerned with in Afghanistan, which is, you know, once you have some degree of military success on the ground, creating a more secure, stable environment, how do you then take that last 20 yards to actually translate that success in the security domain into your ultimate political objectives? And I think that gets to the other instruments of power and the fact that we tend to not pay enough attention to those elements of strategy, but we also as a government, as a nation, don't fully resource those instruments. And so, you know, I've watched a number of integrated plans, whether it was in Iraq or Afghanistan, be beautifully designed and integrated in, you know, and then sent up to the Hill for funding and they come back with the military piece, 100% funded and the state and, you know, the diplomatic and development pieces grossly underfunded. And so the whole plan sort of falls apart or is suboptimal. So, I think we have a long way to go in that last, you know, 20 to 30% of translating tactical and operational military success or progress into the actual achievement of our objectives and having a clear enough picture of that to then have that also inform how we're conducting the military operations in the first place. So right here, can you bring a microphone right here to this gentleman? Thank you. Good afternoon, am I on? Nope, nope, good enough? Okay, yeah. Hi, Jeff Abramson with the forum on the arms trade, which is a professional network of people who look at arms trade and security assistance with potential concerns about civilian harm and other impacts. Thanks for the panel. I'm looking forward to the report. I have a couple of questions. One is sort of around how this applies depending on the intensity of the conflict, if that makes sense. I mean, certainly where we have a lot of forces in major military engagements, is it easier to have a civilian counting cell? I'm thinking in particular, there are a lot of engagements now which are very standoff, which are drones where there's a lot of opacity. These might be in Pakistan or in Yemen before the Houthi took over. How do these recommendations apply? And then secondly, and related to sort of a question around how you make evidence potentially that collected by civil society actors taken more seriously, not just by the US but at the international arena. And I'm thinking today in the sense of the use of cluster munitions in Yemen by solid coalition forces, US and UK cluster munitions, which the Saudis are completely denying that UK are saying maybe they're not our weapons or who knows what's going on. The US seems to be a little further along and saying, well, we're going to sort of stop the transfer of this and it does seem like this might be occurring. But it often feels like the acceptance of evidence that's pretty hard to deny takes a long time to reach credibility at the international level and sort of thoughts around that line. Thank you, Jeff. That's a good question. I will answer the second part of the question actually. I'm going to let Chris do the intensity question if that's okay. So in terms of transparency, you're absolutely right. And we should actually, I think, be including in our talking points that we don't just want these cells to sit on the information. It should also be accompanied by much greater transparency. And I think you've highlighted the particular problem with Yemen and Pakistan where we really still have got nothing from the administration on what they believe to be the scale of civilian harm that they're causing there. We are promised, at least Monaco promised recently, that this would be coming soon. So we're all looking forward to that, hopefully in coming weeks. But I think as a matter, of course, there needs to be much greater transparency. And I think part of the problem is that, obviously the military has its own processes of investigation to go through. So there's often this huge time lag which is a great opportunity for insurgent forces often to seize the propaganda value. I think then in Afghanistan, what we saw was an improvement in terms of getting into a routine of saying something upfront, acknowledging the seriousness of the allegations and rather than dismissing them, denying them, which often, I think, compounded the harm itself, that sort of attitude of hostility and even sometimes contempt, to be honest. So I think an openness from the beginning is really important. I mean, one thing that we're interested in is encouraging forms of investigation and transparency that are potentially somewhat separate from the legal processes where you have a set of drivers which discourage openness and transparency. And that then discourages the learning culture that we want to encourage. So I think having a process whereby there's routine investigations, much more transparency, but also the incidents that are being seen in the whole so that real lessons can be learned would be hugely important. But can I pass on the first question about what applies in terms of intensity and conflict? Jeff, I think it's a terrific question and it gets to what Chris was talking about in terms of data collection. So our research suggests that when our partners harm civilians using made in the USA weapons, equipment, training and support that it undermines US credibility. When the Saudis are committing war crimes or large-scale civilian harm using made in the USA weapons, equipment, training, support, it's damaging. How damaging is it? We don't know because we're not collecting the data. When you look at Iraq and Syria, are the restrictions that we are putting on the use of military force, are they strategically harmful or are they strategically beneficial? We don't know because we're not collecting the data. And the reason why we think these cells are so important is because it allows us to not only operate within the laws of armed conflict, but also operate in ways that are strategically sensible. So for us, this is a critical part of the recommendation. I mean, imagine doctors giving medicines to patients and having no idea whether they're harmful or beneficial. I mean, that would be preposterous, although we did that for the longest time and when we started measuring the data, doctors figured out, well, the bacteria in operating rooms is actually killing more patients than we're solving. So it's the same sort of principle. When you gather the data, you can make much better decisions and we need that capability. Can I just push you on this a little bit? In situations where we don't have boots on the ground, we may not even have an embassy functioning. There's very little US, little to no US footprint. What are the techniques that you envision using to actually collect reliable data? Yeah, I think that's going to be obviously very context dependent and dependent on particularly the kinds of partner governments, partner forces you're working with. But I think that up till now, there's probably been too little effort, too little resources and too little innovative thinking about how to do that well and how to do that more systematically. And also how to create protocols and the right incentives within the US government say to ensure that there's both rigorous credibility assessments of information from civil society organizations on the ground, but also assessments that don't put their finger on the other side of the scale and discount them too quickly or feed into confirmation biases. So I think looking holistically at how the systems are operating and often these are not someone who necessarily himself or in an office disbelieve civil society, but these are biases that are sometimes embedded within organizations, within bureaucracies. And so I think that's the role for policy to try to take those on and think about where corrections can be made. And in addition to think about where targeted assistance, technical assistance, other kinds of assistance to civil society, two partner forces on the ground, say the ANSF in Afghanistan, who are now the ones who are gonna be in charge of documenting and collecting information, same with Kurdish forces in Iraq and Syria and others to make sure they have the tools to do that well and to do it rigorously. And oftentimes I think that's not a huge amount of money but that's money smartly spent and smartly directed with people who know how to provide that kind of assistance to people who I think really demanded. I just add very briefly, I mean, there are other actors at play here as well. I mean, in Iraq and Syria, obviously it's an extremely difficult environment methodologically to get good data. The UN is somewhat of a fault here. I think they could be doing a lot more to provide us with good data. In particular in Syria, they're sort of refraining from doing so, even if they could provide a range, I think it would be extremely helpful. I think as Chris says, it's a mix of things that are required. There's some technology that's needed. If you look at the use of air BDAs, which we're extremely reliant on in a remote operation like Iraq and Syria, there was a really fascinating study done that looked at 21 incidents of civilian casualties in Afghanistan where ground troops had gone, investigated, determined that, yes, there were civilian casualties there. And then somebody went back and looked at those air battle damage assessments, the video that's used to determine after an incident, after an operation what the damage was caused. In 19 out of 21 of those SIVCAS incidents, they didn't see civilian casualties from the air video. So that, I mean, I'm not saying that that's, it's going to be as bad as that in all situations, but in Iraq and Syria, we're very reliant on air video. So it gives you an indicator of what's lacking. So I think more investment, frankly, into improving that technology would be helpful, but it does also say that you are also going to have to be much more open to open source data. The State Department is currently trying to provide some information to the Department of Defense of potential civilian casualty incidents. It's hugely under resourced. It's basically one person scanning open source data from two countries in multiple, where multiple languages are being used. So that's an obvious deficit. And then I think it's about also building trust with organizations that have useful information to give you, so that you can start to trust those organizations enough to see that data as credible. My name is Christy Edwards. I'm the Director of International Monetary and Law at the American Red Cross. And I'm very much looking forward to reading the report, but wondered if there's any specific recommendations that are made, particularly as we're seeing more asymmetric warfare and warfare that occurs in really dense or heavily populated areas. If there are recommendations made, particularly also for our partner forces on how to reduce civilian harm in areas that are extremely difficult to mitigate that harm. Thanks, Christy. It's an extraordinarily difficult, really, and complicated issue, of course. And it's a great question. And I guess my answer would go back to you've gotta gather, first of all, you've gotta gather the information. You've gotta gather the data. Some of the empirical studies that we looked at for Afghanistan suggest that in places where a militant group has got greater local affinity than the government, when pro-government forces cause civilian harm in those environments, they pay significantly higher penalties. Then when they cause harm in pro-government areas. Conversely, when pro-government forces inflict harm in areas that are, have greater sort of affinity towards a militant or asymmetric group, that asymmetric group gets disproportionate gains. And so imagine if the North Korean army were in your neighborhood, and you had people in your neighborhood fighting back against them, and those people inflicted some civilian harm in the crossfire. The tendency would be to blame the North Korean army for being there in the first place and not blame your own people who were fighting back. It's that sort of dynamic. And so one of the challenges that we found is that when you try to play sort of blanket restrictions, you lose that kind of fidelity. And you may be on the one hand, missing opportunities to advance your strategic interests. Or in a different context, you could be actually harming your interests in ways that reinforce support for the local militant groups. And so, but you don't know that level of fidelity unless you gather the information and then you can make much better decisions on those questions. Eric Schmidt with the New York Times. There's been some recent reporting that the US military in Iraq and Syria, in order to accelerate the airstrikes, had pushed the authority to take strikes that might result in harm to civilians, to the local commanders, General McFarland and his subordinates, and that they've also been made willing to, or accept a higher risk to civilians with the logic that the fighters are now embedded in urban settings and so you just have to go along with it. What's your understanding of what the situation is now? What the rules are that the US military is operating under in these kinds of situations? I guess speaking for myself, I'm not sure I have any more in-depth knowledge than you just outlined there. And then I think that has been publicly reported on in terms of that shift in sort of the threshold or let's say, perhaps willingness more colloquially to accept civilian casualties. I guess without opining on what precisely that level should be, I think this is to reiterate the point that I think Chris also again just made, which is in the absence of knowing how many civilians you're actually killing in these operations. In the absence of knowing what the strategic impact is in these contexts, I guess I would query what the basis is, evidentiary, scientific or otherwise, to move that needle, to move that threshold. And so I think that the more important question there, at least especially with respect to, I think the findings that we're putting forward here is how rigorous is the process by which they come to that number? What's that based on? And what are the sources of information? As Rachel outlined, the information is I think pretty clear that what the US military has thus far publicly acknowledged in terms of civilian casualties, which I believe is around 41 and over 8,000, 9,000 strikes is just not credible and represents basically about a 10 times increase in the accuracy of what they were doing in Afghanistan where they had 100,000 troops on the ground. So I think that that to me is the more important question then, which is if that's the gap, how credible is the information that's justifying that kind of move? And from our perspective, what are the constructive steps that the military can take to make sure when it is making those determinations, it's relying on the best information that it can? I would just add to that. I mean, part of the reason we're all trying to dodge that question is that we don't know what the rules of engagement are and that's part of the problem. And I think one of the reasons we think there needs to be this uniform policy on protection of civilians is so that we do actually have the government committed in principle to a set of guiding principles on protecting civilians rather than having everything context specific and ad hoc and theater dependent and opaque. It's that combination of things that makes it so difficult to assess whether all is being done or as much as being done as could be to mitigate and prevent civilian harm. But it is very clear that they don't really have a handle yet on how widespread civilian harm has been caused by the US and their coalition partners. So we certainly want to see a lot of progress there. And I think, I mean, I do understand that there's been some degree of restraint in the use of air power despite criticism from some in Congress about that. And I think that's partly because there is an awareness that they're quite dependent on the intelligence coming from partner forces whose reliability is sometimes in question. Yeah, I'd just like to add to that very briefly from the Afghanistan experience. I personally believe that the more you can decentralize power and authority to well-educated, well-informed, well-trained commanders on the ground, the more likely it is that you're gonna use military force in the smartest way possible. What was, one of the things interesting in Afghanistan is when General Petraeus came in 2010, he got grilled on this question of, are restrictions on the use of military force undermining force protection? And he get grilled on that in his confirmation hearing. So he said, I'll take a look at this. And we laid this out in the report. And he reviewed the tactical directives and how they're being implemented. He said, you know, the directives are basically sound. But what's happening is that commanders down the chain of command are placing more restrictions and more approval processes. And what that's doing is it's eroding confidence in, at the tactical level on whether the right of self-defense is being compromised. So General Petraeus lifted those restrictions, did not allow people to place more restrictions than he was on the chain of command. And actually what you saw was not only did civilian casualties continue to decline, but US force protection continued to improve. And so I think that's a very interesting lesson on this issue of how do you emplace restrictions and who does them? And it goes back to the data gathering and professional education pieces. The better we are at that, the more empowered we can have commanders to make the right decisions and seize upon those opportunities without placing unnecessary restrictions on them. As a potential position, what actions do you take to ensure that the military in terms of the co-cons, the combatant commands and the services, invest the time and resources now to develop the relationships with the civil society organizations where you say we want to depend upon during crisis? As we don't invest time with them now, they're not going to work with us then. Well, I'm completely setting aside the erroneous or presumptive premise of your question. No, I think that in my experience, one of the challenges is that the department, this is from my own experience, tended to engage with civil society organizations whether it was Human Rights Watch or MSF or others, only after a crisis. Only after a huge, tragic, horrible crisis that occurred. And I think what has been learned and re-learned a couple of times is that we're much better off if we identify those key partners in civil society early, figure out who's in the theater operating alongside us or maybe not alongside us, but in the same area of operation that we need to invest in as a sort of stakeholder in what's going on and develop some relationships and some trust and some lines of communication so that when something is wrong or of concern, we can try to deal with it in a more proactive or preventative manner. I mean, I think one of the things that became clear with the MSF tragedies, they were just desperately trying to figure out who to call to let people know this was happening. And I think now because of some good work after the fact, they have a whole Rolodex of who to call in what situations and so forth, but we I think need to do much better. And this goes back to the leader development and education piece that if you're a commander in a battlefield that's in and among the civilian population and you're operating with NGOs in your space, it's your responsibility to make contact with them, to establish relationship and trust with them and to figure out some ways of at least communicating if not actually coordinating. I'm Tamana from Women for Afghan Women. And my question is like, we had several civilian harms and casualties when the troops of United States and international community were large in Afghanistan. So now there's a decrease in number of the troops. How is it related to casualties and harm in civilians? Is it decreased the numbers? Do you have any findings that show or it's increased? How is it? Thank you. I'm sorry to say it's increased. In particular as a share of civilian harm and civilian casualties. So I gave you that number earlier where the fatalities caused by US forces had dropped to 9% in 2012. So if you now look at the civilian harm being caused by Afghan security forces, it's back up to around 40% I think now. So it's a much greater share. And it's partly because the nature of the conflict has changed, so a lot more of the civilian casualties are coming because of ground engagements which civilians are in the crossfire. So but it's also because the Afghan security forces are using a lot of heavy artillery. They don't have the precision weapons that the US had. And I think there's also, as I was saying earlier, I think there's also a limit to their commitment really to issues of civilian protection at this stage. I think there's willingness certainly rhetorically at the top level. You've seen the president himself and the chief of the army talk about the need to protect civilians, but there's a lot further to go in terms of capacity of the troops in terms of the equipment that they're using in terms of the strategies that they're employing and also just in terms of whether or not they've absorbed that really key lesson from our work, which is that this is a strategic matter and not just a moral humanitarian or legal one. Well, unfortunately, we have reached the end of the hour. I commend to all of you who have not had a chance to actually read the report. It is very readable. Please do go through it in detail. There's a lot of great research and analysis and most importantly, practical recommendations for trying to ensure that we take account of some of these very important strategic lessons learned going forward. So please join me in thanking the authors in our panel. And thank you, Michelle, for moderating. Thank you all here and on the web for watching. Thank you.