 Good afternoon. We're very pleased to welcome everyone to the launch of USIP's report on Elite Capture and Corruption of Security Sectors. My name is Leigh Scrande. I'm the head of the United States Institute of Peace, which is established by the US Congress in 1984 as a national, nonpartisan public institution dedicated to helping prevent, mitigate, and resolve violent conflict abroad. We're delighted to be joined today by Assistant Administrator for the Bureau of Conflict Prevention and Stabilization at USAID, Robert Jenkins, who has been USIP's partner on this project. The USIP report that we are launching today was produced by a study group that was led by four distinguished co-chairs, US Ambassadors Anne Patterson, Don Liberi, Carl Eikenberry, and Bill Taylor. Like many other countries, the US invests significantly in security cooperation and security sector assistance. Although there are cases where this assistance has worked well, there are many more where it hasn't. USIP's study group has been looking at why. Over the course of two years, the study group has met with dozens of security political and humanitarian experts and also with the defense industry, civil society leaders and academics. Senior internationally respected researchers have prepared four case studies, one on Afghanistan, another on Mexico, a third on Ukraine, and the fourth on Uganda. And a core interdisciplinary team of experts has compared the experiences of these countries, pulling out patterns and commonalities that together paint a very concerning picture. The report itself is organized around four conceptual blocks and the four case studies I mentioned. The first section examines the reasons that elites try to capture and corrupt security sectors. The second section describes the mechanics of elite capture, how it actually happens on the ground. The third section analyzes the short, the medium, and the long-term consequences of elite capture. And the fourth section includes 24 comprehensive recommendations that can be used to help detect, confront, and roll back the malign influence of elites and reduce the likelihood of future corruption. The stark conclusion of the report is that the main reason U.S. assistance is not having the kind of impact that we think it should is because the security sectors we are providing this assistance to are captured and corrupted by elites who are using these sectors for their own enrichment and political purposes. Until and unless this corruption is addressed, our assistance is likely to be ineffectual. I'm very pleased to introduce the four co-chairs of the study group. Ambassador Anne Patterson has served as ambassador in El Salvador, Colombia, Pakistan, and Egypt, and was the assistant secretary of state for Near Eastern and North African affairs. She is the two-time recipient of the State Department's Distinguished Service Award, has served on two congressional commissions on Syria and the U.S. national defense strategy and was named as one of the 100 top global thinkers in 2011. Ambassador Don LaBerry is a career member of the Senior Foreign Service, who has served as U.S. Ambassador to Burundi. Ambassador LaBerry served with U.S. AID in Senegal, Niger, Ghana, Uganda, and Nigeria, and in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Libya. As U.S. aid mission director in Iraq, Ambassador LaBerry managed the U.S. AID Reconstruction and Development Assistance Program of over $5 billion, and in Afghanistan was the senior civilian counterpart to the commander of Regional Command East and the head of the Interagency Provincial Affairs Office. General Carl Eichenberry is a retired Lieutenant General in the U.S. Army and former ambassador to Afghanistan. He has commanded and served with mechanized light, airborne, and Ranger infantry units in Hawaii, Korea, Italy, and as the commander of the American-led Coalition in Afghanistan. The General is the recipient of 11 military awards, four top awards from the Departments of State and Defense, and has been decorated by Canada and France. General Eichenberry is an expert on China and publishes widely on U.S. and international security. Ambassador Bill Taylor is the Vice President of the Europe and Russia Center here at the U.S. Institute of Peace. In 2019, Ambassador Taylor served as the Charger d'affaires at the U.S. Embassy in Kiev and as the U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine from 26 to 29. During the Arab Spring, Ambassador Taylor oversaw U.S. assistance and support to Egypt, Tunisia, Libya, and Syria. He has served in Jerusalem as the U.S. government's representative to the Minis Quartet and worked in Kabul in 22 and Baghdad in 24. Ambassadors, thank you for joining us today. Rob, may we invite you to the podium. Well, thank you, Lees, very much. It is always an honor and a privilege to be here at the U.S. Institute for Peace. You know, USAID is pleased to collaborate with USIP on this study. Our Bureau for Conflict Prevention and Stabilization has benefited from a strategic partnership with USAID, sorry, with USIP, since our inception. With like-minded strategic visions, we've been able to chart a course together on the Global Fragility Act and on tackling a host of wicked problems, like countering violent extremism, measuring peace, or navigating complex conflict systems. Security sector misconduct and abuse is pervasive, and it's a pervasive cause of instability, violence, and violent extremism. Study after study has pointed out the direct correlation between security force abuse and conflict atrocities and violent extremism. Too often, the U.S. government and donor response is to offer training or human rights education. Too often, those interventions, often accompanied by larger equipment packages, fail to alter the abusive behavior. As a bureau charge with conflict prevention and peace building, we wanted, we needed to know why. Security force behavior has a direct and immediate impact on our partners and on development outcomes overall. Approximately 80% of the places where USAID works are experiencing, recovering from, or at risk, of conflict and violence. Those same countries face a range of other threats, from public health crises, to food insecurity, to climate change. The list goes on and on and on. The inability of security forces to support peace and the rule of law, or worse, their direct implication in the violence, as we see in the Sahel, Sudan, the Middle East, and elsewhere, means that peace cannot take root. And without peace, there is no long-term sustainable development. Violence is development in reverse. The results of this study underscore the importance of the Global Fragility Act and the U.S. strategy to prevent conflict and promote stability. Directly addressing security force behavior is beyond USAID's direct mandate, but deeply affects our partners and our ability to achieve humanitarian peace and development outcomes. With the Global Fragility Act, we now have a framework to enable greater coherence across the defense, diplomatic, and development arenas. On March 24, President Biden sent to Congress 10-year plans for implementing the U.S. strategy to prevent conflict and promote stability in four priority countries and one priority region, coastal West Africa. An important aspect of the plans is partnerships. The strategy has four objectives, one of which is partnerships. Not only with government, not only with civil society and other donors, but also across the U.S. government, across the 3Ds, as we refer to them, defense, diplomacy, development, but also beyond that to our entire interagency. This study is one tool to help us collectively address long-standing impediments to peace and security and chart new pathways for peace. There's an esteemed panel here of amazing diplomatic heavyweights, so I will step down and let them take the stage because that's why we came today to hear from them. Thank you very much. This has been a study group led by perhaps the most distinguished group of co-chairs in the history of the Institute. We want to start by thanking all four of you for committing to doing this work with us over the course of two years, and for exceptional leadership in bringing out a report that we hope has significance on the way that the U.S. addresses security assistance. We wanted to start with the first question, and Anne, with your permission, I'll start with you about why you wanted to do this report. Why was this such a significant subject that you wanted to commit two years of your career to helping us work through? Well, thank you very much, and let me thank the staff that worked on this incredible report. I wanted to be involved in this because I've been very closely associated with very large assistance programs over the years, and by and large, with a few notable exceptions, they weren't working and they needed an overhaul. Security assistance is a vital tool for the United States, vital and expensive, and it needs to work, particularly in the current environment. So what I saw was, one, it wasn't very effective at improving the capacity of these security forces, which was really its first goal, and you'd see after years and years of assistance that they weren't much better than when it began. The second thing I saw was the militaries would, particularly the militaries, but other organizations, would drive the security assistance to groups and leaders that supported them. So up and coming leaders modernizing the security forces, supporting the rank and file, those were a lot lower priorities than keeping your hand on power. And then finally, and this is not so obvious unless you're overseas, the perception of the United States, because often the people who live in these countries know we're giving security assistance, but they have no idea what it's doing, they don't know, they don't see improvements in security, and they think the U.S. is either lying or colluding in corruption, and that's not good for the image of the United States. So I'm very pleased to be involved with this because it gives some analytical framework to the issue. Anne, when you were ambassador in a number of countries in a leading position, and you knew that security assistance wasn't working the way it was supposed to, were you able to communicate that to people in Washington so that they could make the changes that were necessary so that it would be more effective? Yes, and it's not that people in Washington don't know this doesn't work, but some of these programs are so large and so entrenched and really have nothing to do with security assistance reform, but have to do with the broader relationship. Let me take Egypt, we've given $47 billion in security assistance to Egypt, but we give security assistance to Egypt because of Israel's security, that's the bottom line. So there's a lot less interest in security sector reform after what, 40 years of assistance. Anne this is going to be a theme that we come back to several times in today's discussion, the trade-offs that the U.S. often faces when we're trying to promote reform and at the same time maintain a strategically important relationship in a country of great strategic importance to us. Bill, why did you want to be part of this study? Thanks, Lees. I've been spending a lot of time thinking about Ukraine and Russia, of course, and there's an aspect to this issue of security assistance that began before, which we began before the big invasion of the Russians into Ukraine, and at that time the elite that we were concerned about, and I'm looking at the team here that, on your staff here, Lees, who did such a great job, recognized that the elite capture, this idea that some people in big positions, important positions in these countries, can work the assistance programs, our assistance programs, to their own credit, and we wanted to identify the elite in Ukraine, and it was the oligarchs. So it was a little bit different from some of the other examples, so I wanted to be sure that we got that part in. Now, since we've been doing this study, the Russians have reinvaded in big time Ukraine and security assistance to Ukraine has gone up a lot. We were over at the State Department here tonight, two days ago, and they described how security assistance to Ukraine has gone up by 10,000 percent. This is a lot now, and this is a good investment. I'll leave it at that and we'll come back to this. Because Bill, one of the things that we'll want your insight on is the question about investing in a security sector or a justice sector that we know is correct, but we think it's so important because of the threats that they're facing and their importance to us and their importance to global security that we do it anyway. This is a tension lease that is worth exploring, and the Ukraine example is the perfect one. You're exactly right. We want Ukraine to win this war, and we want them to win the peace after the war. So they need to both defeat the Russians and they need to reform their institutions, and so they need to do both. They need to win both. They need to win the first one first, but then they need to have this kind of work done now. And we know, Bill, that in the discussions in Congress and across the administration that this issue of corruption, of elite capital, of the institutions of Ukraine, is part of the discussion about the support that we provide them. You're absolutely right. You're absolutely right. In order for the support to continue, in order to maintain support from the American people, the Congress, which has been there, it's been bipartisan so far, so far, we need to be sure that the Ukrainians are using this assistance well. And they know this. The Ukrainians know this very well. That continued support from the United States, but also from Europe and other institutions depends on confidence in them. Don, why did you want to be part of the study? Right. Well, similar to my colleagues, as you look at security sector assistance and you're on the ground for many, many years, witnessing it in different programs, the key thing that does come up are the lack of results and this effectiveness gap that we are looking at and that we're trying to parse and get to understand better for the future. Certainly in Iraq and Afghanistan, we saw this a bit in epic proportions, but I would say though one of the key reasons I wanted to be involved with this was looking toward the future and particularly in sub-Saharan Africa, as we start to see that Africa, I think, will be the next wave of CT as the U.S. looks forward. We've already seen this happening. There are large swaths of ungoverned spaces. Many militia, as we know, are developing. We have internal conflicts, such as what's going on right now in Sudan. And we know that there are also issues related to rare earth minerals that are also manifesting as another part of great power competition and that will only continue. The other thing is, as we look to the future, there's going to be increasing humanitarian issues in sub-Saharan Africa, a tremendous amount of internal displacement, waves of migration, and one of the things that I'll just put out there that I'm not sure is fully on the radar of some people is that the doubling of the population in sub-Saharan Africa in the next 20 to 25 years poses its own element of security issues. And so what we have to do now is look at how can security sector assistance from the United States help to address some of these issues. We certainly know that the U.S. military is not going to be able to fight in many fronts, can be thinned out. And so what we need to do is really work with our partners on the ground in these countries to help ensure that there are well-trained professional militaries, particularly in sub-Saharan Africa, because it's not, you know, it is 54 separate countries. And so it's a lot of modernization, a lot of bilateral as well as regional and multilateral work that needs to go on. So applying the lessons learned that we've gleaned from this report I think is extraordinarily important for the future, and that if we don't do it, it will be at our peril, particularly as we look at the challenges to come. Dawn, one of the things that we hope to explore in today's discussion is how do you do security assistance in countries where the political leadership is looking in a different direction, is much more interested in the status quo and in changes. And if you look at a number of the countries where you've represented the United States, where you've served, this has come up. When you've been faced with that situation, what do you think is the best course of action for the representative of the United States government? Well, you've highlighted one of the key challenges that we have in terms of elite capture, and particularly what it relates to regime survival. We face this in Uganda, which we'll talk about in a little bit. And I think that one of the things that we have indicated in terms of the recommendations for the future is to really highlight, confront this issue of elite capture, try to mitigate it. I think it's incumbent upon the United States to use the tools at our disposal to not just push things under the carpet, but to elevate the issue and make sure that we are engaging in the kind of conversation that we need to have with our counterparts. I also think it's very important to help develop the institutions that can serve as a counterweight, if you will, civil society, looking at other elements outside of the executive that's trying to maintain its own regime survival. So assistance to legislatures, assistance to the judiciary, assistance to a free press, these are all elements that the United States government can support in these countries, again, to try to address the issues of elite capture and try to mitigate, highlight them, mitigate them, and lay out a course of action for the future. Bill, the situation couldn't be more different in Ukraine where you have a leader who in the middle of a war came out and said, I'm going to take these steps against corruption. But the height of the war was so committed to countering the problem of elite capture that he took these extraordinary steps. He did, Liz, he did. And it goes back to one of your earlier questions. He has to show that there's no tolerance for corruption. And when the press in Ukraine dug up, found out, exposed a real problem of the Ministry of Defense buying food for soldiers at elevated prices. And Zelensky, you're right, President Zelensky, no tolerance. That guy's gone. They unearth other problems. And he acted against those as well. But it's for exactly the reasons we talked about earlier. He has to demonstrate to his people, to the Ukrainians in the first instance, but also to the donors, the people who are supporting him with a lot of money that he has no tolerance for this. Carl, you've been ambassador and a very distinguished general with a foot on either side of the security assistance continuum. Why did you want to be part of this report? Well, Dawn actually mentioned what my primary interest was, and that she referred to great power competition. So what I'd like to do, Liz, is first just talk about my free colleagues here, and then come back to great power competition. So you have Ambassador Ann Patterson. And she has served in the Middle East. She's served in South Asia. She has served in Latin America. She's had global portfolios for international narcotics and law enforcement. You've got Ambassador Bill Taylor. And he's got not only Ukraine time, which he's well known for, but he's got North Africa time. We were cellmates together in Afghanistan when I was a major general, and Bill was there working hard in Afghanistan. We have Ambassador Dawn LaBerry. We've served together in Afghanistan as well. And she's one of the most, she's in my mind one of our top Africa experts we've got with government service behind her. And she's got North Africa time as well, along with Central Asia. So we just covered a lot of the world there. And we're all colleagues. And in this project, we would come together a lot, enabled by this tremendous staff. And we talk about our experiences. And this question of elite capture of the security sector, it really grabbed all of us. And here we are with our experiences around the world. Now, to get back to great power competition. So we're in this era of great power competition. We had our unipolar moment right after the Cold War, then there was the war on terror. And now it's great power competition. So you have people that talk about great power competition. They say, well, that is great power competition is going to be in the Western Pacific. And it's going to be in Ukraine, maybe in the Caucasus, and maybe in the Balkans. That's great power competition. Great powers, by definition, in their near abroad, they have intense interest. And if they're a great power, they've got global interest as well. So what great powers do, they think they look at the world and say, I need access here. I need access to markets. I need access to protect my investments. I need access for movement of goods. I need to protect sea lines of communications and airlines of communication. I need to have stability. In these parts of the world. And I'm going to be competing at times. And I'm going to, at times then with intense competition, need to be thinking about ways how to deny a potential adversary influence. That's not to say then that great power competition means that the whole world now is going to be proxy wars. But hopefully we can find ways to collaborate and to coordinate and to work together. But we're going to find a lot of instances where there's going to be competition, an intense competition. So Russia today, it's concerned with its near abroad. But it's active in Africa with the Wagner Group. It's active in other parts of the world. China, it's concerned with its near abroad. But increasingly, as its interests go global, it's out there competing. And then we look at that part of the world to get back to our conversation. Much of that world that we're looking at is poor. Or it has huge problems of income inequality. It has problems with fragility, insecurity, instability. And that gets back then to what my colleagues have been talking about, about the importance of security assistance and security sector reform. So these are issues that we ignore at our own peril. There's that line from a tribute to Trotsky, that you may not be interested in war, but war is interested in you. So with security assistance, we may not be interested in it, but it's interested in us. And it's something we have to deal with. I think this report has done an exceptional job of identifying problems in possible ways ahead. Carl, there have been other reports since the end of the Cold War that have drawn attention to this problem. And I think one of the issues that all of us share, a concern we all share, is what is it going to take for the US to change the way that we do security assistance? Why will this report be different? I would say, Leigh's, that many times when you look at global security problems from a US perspective, you can say that perhaps the so-called national security elite are out front and trying to pull people behind them. I think we're in an environment right now where the American people, somewhat disillusioned after the experiences in Iraq and Afghanistan, are looking inward right now. And I think that an important part of this is getting out there and talking to the American people, make sure that they understand what the stakes are, and then they, in turn, go to their representatives. I'm going to use that as a segue to talk about the four case studies. So if you read the report, there is a section that identifies commonalities across countries where we are providing security assistance. And then the report has four in-depth case studies. One is on Mexico, one on Afghanistan, one on Ukraine, and one on Uganda. So Carl, when you talk about issues of concern to the American population, bringing this issue right to the heartland, Anne, you oversaw the case study on Mexico. And I think anyone who lives on that long border or near that border, or in any of our cities where there are large numbers of immigrants that come from Central America and come from Mexico, that we're really concerned about what's happening with the security forces of Mexico. We know that predatory security forces are a major driver of immigration. Tell us about the case study in Mexico and what we learned from it. So, Lisa, this relationship with Mexico, there's nothing more important to the American public in general. And you look at overdose deaths, there were 100,000 overdose deaths in the United States last year from drugs versus a couple thousand when we went from cocaine, when we went into Columbia with Planned Columbia 20 years ago, 100,000 deaths. And the effects on Mexico are dramatic, too. The violence in Mexico was soared. It's one of the most violent countries around now. So one of the reports show actually there are two case studies embedded in the Mexican part. What they both show, though, is the militarization of the drug war in 2006 had very toxic results. And one of them shows how the consolidation of law enforcement and prosecutorial authority with the case of a corrupt governor only managed to accelerate organized crime under his jurisdiction. And despite U.S. assistance, which I think the report suggests was sporadic and not very well focused, and nothing like the resources and the long game, which is one of the important recommendations of this report, nothing like the long game that we invested in Columbia over 23 years. So I think U.S. assistance was perhaps not well focused in this situation. And then we've talked to people involved in some of these programs. And they say, this was surprising to me about Mexico, that we really didn't have a good understanding of the complexities of the federal relationship and the overlapping jurisdictions of the law enforcement agencies. So there's a lot in here to digest, but I think it's hugely valuable. And again, nothing is more important to the citizenry of these two countries. Don, when you oversaw the project on the case study on Uganda, what was very striking about it? Well, as you were saying, Lees, context is hugely important. So we have to look at the context in which we engage in Uganda and in which we do our security assistance. So in 1998, there were bombings at the American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. Uganda was meant to be the third one. It got thwarted. And part of the reason it got thwarted was because we did have an engagement on the security side. And as we looked at that, even before 9-11, that launched a whole element of the global war on terror. And so the United States was looking very closely and carefully at who could we partner with? And so Uganda emerged as a very large partner in the fight against the global war on terror. And so what happened over time is that we engaged in our security sector assistance. Unfortunately, though, that also gave license to the ruling regime to develop elite capture of the security forces and to focus themselves on regime survival. And it's worked. They've been in power for 37 years. So we have to look at what some of the consequences are of elite capture. Now, during that time, we had very good relationships with Uganda, not just from the security sector assistance element, but also from the bilateral element. We had excellent programs in helping Uganda do economic reform, in having programs on reducing HIV-AIDS, and looking at the Africa Growth and Opportunity Act. So we had a very robust bilateral relationship. Unfortunately, though, over time, we kept using the lens of the global war on terror, if you will, to sort of look away a bit at the elite capture, the corruption, the insidiousness that was happening within the ruling regime as it sought to co-opt the military, to use opportunities for rent-seeking activities, to militarize the civilian institutions. And so, unfortunately, there were many unintended consequences of our interaction and our relationship. And the case study bears this out and shows how that happened over time, but also the context in which that occurred. So one asked the question, well, why didn't we do more to stop that? And you have to then look at what are the levers that you have to try to enact some of that change. And they're difficult, and you have to make some very hard choices. And U.S. policymaking is part of a long process. There's a lot of interagency interaction that goes on. And so you don't want to use a lever that, for example, takes away the HIV AIDS program or impairs some of the trade activities that are going on. And if you're looking at the lens of the global war on terror, you also don't want to stop the security. And then in 2007, we had Amisam happen with al-Shabaab, and so then Uganda became renewed in terms of its, I think, importance in us combating terror in East Africa. So all of these things served to indicate why we continue to engage with Uganda, but also points out that there were inflection points where we probably should have been better at using certain processes to let the Ugandan government know that we weren't happy with some of the elite capture that was going on. And for example, when they changed the Constitution so that U70 could run for a third term, changed the Constitution again so that he could essentially become the ruler for life. So these are all inflection points where I think we probably had missed opportunities in terms of our policy interaction with Uganda. But the case study bears all of this out, and I think it's the in-depth analysis that will help us lead toward recommendations for the future. Don, when you were serving in countries where the US had a number of interests at stake, and as you were describing, it was forced every single day to make calculations that ended up being a trade-off. It's hard, and it's not, so it's difficult, and at the time when I was in Uganda, I was the USA Admission Director. And so we had a very, as I said, robust bilateral program that we wanted to see continue. And there was a whole process of interagency interaction, if you will, in terms of trying to weigh the different priorities at the level of the country team, at the level of the ambassador. But also at the level of Washington. And I think the challenge there is to enable the interagency process within the US government to also, I think, work better in terms of prioritizing our various priorities in country, and also getting a full handle on all the assistance that actually is occurring in country, because sometimes we don't know. And I think it raises the uncomfortable question about whether the issue of a trade-off is used as an excuse for not taking the principled stand that we, in a sense, all know is necessary. And this is a very legitimate issue to raise. And I think this is where the United States has to get better. We do have to look better. We do have to look inward. We have to make some of those very hard decisions and not just use that, not just use the lens of global war on terror or great power of competition as the excuse that says, well, we'll turn the blind eye to this because we need to do that. And I see you smiling. Did you want to come in on that one? No, but there is, in the Middle East Bureau, we used to say that there is no place in the world where our values and our interests are in greater conflict. And that's basically the tension. Bill, you were presiding over a case study that, when it started, was important and then became central to global peace and security. It turned out that the great power conflict that Karl was talking about played out in real time. But the case study that we started and started before the big war, the renewed war, and finished while it was going on was very interesting. I mentioned the oligarchs as being part of the problem. And the way the oligarchs influenced decisions and the way they used it was through the judiciary, through the courts. And the case study actually today picked out one of these courts. And Rob, USAID mission there in Kiev, really helped on this, because this court was notorious. It's the Kiev District Administrative Court, so KDAG, the Kiev District Administrative Court. And it was known to be A, corrupt, and B, corrupted by Russia-oriented oligarchs. So the Russians could influence decisions of the Kiev District Administrative Court. Now, District Administrative Court, you think, what influence can they have? It turns out, because they had responsibility, authority, jurisdiction in Kiev, they could oversee decisions, any decision of the government, of the national government. And so they would overturn decisions of the Rada, of the government that the Russian oligarchs didn't like. So I said, the USAID mission there, I said, there must be something we can do. And it turns out that the USAID lawyers came up with a solution. They said, you know, the president of Ukraine can, we found this provision in the Constitution, in the Ukrainian Constitution. The president of Ukraine can eliminate a court. So I said, good, write it up. So they wrote it up, I took it in to the president and his chief of staff, gave it to them. This was in 2019. They said, thank you very much, this is very interesting. Didn't do anything, at least, until last fall, in the middle, your question before, in the middle of the war. And it was so clear that the fight against the Russians, the Russian invasion, the Russian threat, the Russian aggression was such, they didn't take all measures they could. Great power competition is played out right there. And they eliminated the court. They just eliminated that court. And that's in the case study. So that was, so I thought the case study was very helpful on this one. Carl, you oversaw the Afghanistan case study. And of course, we are all aware that with the withdrawal of US forces from Afghanistan, there is a national project underway to rethink what we did in Afghanistan and take a critical look at why what we set out to do didn't turn out the way that we had expected it to. Well, first thing I wanna say, Lee, is this report, the whole report, but the section on Afghanistan, which I know reasonably well, I've seen for 15, 20 years, reports on Afghanistan. This case study, not me, it was the staff. The very best analysis of Afghanistan that I have seen to date, it's superb. Detailed, it's balanced and it's policy relevant to get to your question, then what's the so what here? So the particular case study to try to do it justice very quickly was that 2009, 2010, the United States knows that it's failing in Afghanistan. So it's going to raise the level of effort. Even before President Obama's surge. So more resources starting to go, more military commitments, and the Afghan National Security Force project is not delivering the capabilities to provide security around the country and the government of Afghanistan relatively weak and fragile. So the idea is, well, we've got troubled areas in Afghanistan and the way that we'll get security here is to raise local militias in a very controlled project called the Afghan local police. So there's areas around the country that the Afghan National Security Forces can't get to. They're important. So we'll create these local militias with good oversight and they'll provide local security. You know, think back to our revolutionary award. It's going to be the militiamen that are taking care of the communities. Sounds like a pretty good plan and there were some successes. The balance of the report shows there were some successes but by and large it was a failure. What happened, elite capture with all of these local security forces entrenched interests that were not understood and the entrenched interests took control of those security forces. And what happened in fact, we violated the at least do no harm rule. So we then created these security forces and they proved toxic and cancerous. Sometimes they would increase the inter-ethnic fighting. Sometimes they would cause problems of more criminality, more narco trafficking. So then what do we learn from this? Well, the idea about the community approach, it sounds reasonably well but when you want to go with the community approach and you're militarizing it, you've got a lot of problems that are there. First of all, what's your assumptions? Well, on the US side, our assumption was that we were clever enough. We had the local knowledge in order to do this but we didn't. These are, I was once talking to the Russian ambassador in Afghanistan and sitting with Andre and he had been in Afghanistan during the old Soviet occupation. So he talked about these areas which I remember the case studies were done in in four different provinces and this Russian ambassador was saying that particular area was trouble for us throughout the occupation. It was trouble during the Civil War. It was trouble during the Taliban time and we come in and think we're going to be able to figure this out. And then what's the longer term commitment that we're showing? For the Afghans that have seen the Republican government have seen the Soviet occupation, have seen the Civil War, have seen the Taliban and now seen us come and go? What are their timelines? So we're there in these communities saying we're here forever and they knew we were not. And then lastly, you have this project of well, we'll get the local community to stand up its own security forces and our assumption is that we will leave at some point and we'll quickly tie them into the central government but the central government was never going to show up in a reasonable period of time. Closed with what Don had raised in this idea of what is the central problem that we're trying to fix when we go into a particular place? And Don, I agree with you entirely. I went once a couple of years ago to a very large African country that has a problem with Boko Haram which I won't mention the name of the country. And so they're talking to the American country team and talking to the Nigerian military leadership. So what's the problem? Boko Haram, Boko Haram. So look, I'm not an expert but I know that your country's got more problems than Boko Haram. Finally, I got a quiet session at the embassy and I had a quiet session with that military and they said look, we get money from the United States and we get money from Washington if we define the problem as Boko Haram. If we defined it in another way, we're not getting money for this. So this is a real challenge that we've got to face with the programatics. What is Congress saying this money is appropriated for? What's the administration saying this money is appropriated for? And that has consequences because you'll start then defining the problem in order to make sure you're aligning with the programatics. And another point that Don, you had made about great power competition taking that too far forward. Yeah, I can see in certain parts of the world where now it's not Boko Haram, how do we compete against China? But you get inside of that country and that's part of the challenge but it's not the real challenge. All right. Carl, one of the things that was so striking about this report. You read the overall report. You sit down in one setting and you see a very compelling set of general observations. Then you see these fabulous, as you're all describing them, case studies. And then you get to the back section where there are 24 recommendations. And for people who really care about this issue and want to see the US change the way it does security assistance, that's the heart of the matter. So the question to all of you is, do we have to implement all four of those 24 recommendations together to make a difference? Are there some of those recommendations that are more important and more urgent than others? As you were co-chairs putting together that critical last section of what we have to do differently. Do we have to do them all? Are some more important than others? Can we sequence them? What's your reaction to that? Can I add it to 25th recommendation? No, the report, if we look at the analysis and then we come on to the recommendations, it's worthy of a good read there. I'd go back to what I'd said earlier, Liseva. What's the, in my mind, what's the most urgent problem here? For me, the most urgent problem again is the American public. Needing for the American public to have an understanding of what are the stakes right now. It's not about, we'll think about the far Western Pacific and we'll think about the Caucasus in Eastern Europe and we're done with that. We are a global power and we have to be able to compete globally. So that'd be the first. Secondly, in terms of then what needs to be done and how hard is it? Well, if you look at our government then, getting back to this question of programatics and prioritization, there's a challenge that we have within Congress where we need more cohesion within Congress. And here I'm not talking partisan, bipartisan. Our committee structure where you have a committee that's the Senate Armed Services Committee and the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and the Appropriations Committee, the need for them to come together and have more coherence. Within the administration side, yes, there's also a challenge there where I think, and you'll probably talk about that and we've talked about it a lot though, but very frankly, the erosion of state departments, authorities, especially after 9-11 and the need to rethink then as an administration of executive branch, how do you integrate your efforts? And then finally, how do you integrate the efforts between Congress and the administration? And that's hard work because it's legislation and legislation is sometimes difficult to get through. And a final other point, and I think this can be done, but it still requires legislation is all of these trouble spots we're talking about are troubled in their own ways. And you've got to be close to the ground in order to have the empathy and the deep analysis to get back to Washington and say what is the central problem here? But so much of what goes out to our embassy teams is stovepipe, streamline, and you end up then with ambassadors that don't have a lot of flexibility in order to have a comprehensive country team approach. So that'd be the final point, ways to delegate more out to those country teams. And when you looked at the recommendations, it struck you. So some are easier than other, not more important. And the easiest one, I think, and it's not that easy is transparency. The US government does a terrible job of being transparent on what it actually provides to these countries. So it's very difficult even when you're in the system and in an embassy to see what's really going on. And I think this is expanded, this problem has expanded dramatically in recent years with new defense authorities. So you have this proliferation of programs and assistance. So the American public and American officials can see it. And then we need to require the countries that get the money be transparent too. DoD, actually on domestic issues who gets promoted, what contracts they're granting. DoD has all these transparency efforts. None of that exists overseas. It would make a huge difference because people inside the country then could make judgments on what their government is doing. And this is, again, not easy but certainly given existing databases, not impossible. Much more difficult is to understand the ethnic and religious and tribal makeup of countries. It's alien to Americans anyway. And we don't put the effort into it, certainly in countries like Afghanistan but even in countries in Latin America, that's hard. And that's gonna take a lot more work and a lot more understanding and language ability. Don, are the recommendations which struck you? That's the most important one. Well, for me, I would say play the long game. I think one of the key things that we do is that we assume we're going to be in a place for a short period of time. We've all heard the term. We fought 10 one-year wars in Afghanistan and I think in many ways we did. Had we gone in there and said, well, we are going to be here for 10, 20 years, we need to take that perspective and we need to build up the institutions and make sure that we have partner relationships with those institutions so that we can counteract elite capture and ensure that there are other entities that are working for the benefit of the population, not just for the benefit of the regime. And I think that that's going to be very, very key for the future, particularly in place like Sub-Saharan Africa. What we haven't realized yet is that those on the ground will outweigh us. And so we have to also understand that playing the long game is understanding that we have to change some of our structures. When Carl and I were in Afghanistan, I think one of the key frustrations we had on the ground was the constant turnover of personnel. Just as soon as you have anyone who's able to understand and implement a program, they're out the door. And so that has to change in terms of our own implementation, if you will. And finally, I would also agree in terms of getting the support from the Hill because we do have to have legislation that supports us. Right now we have congressional earmarks that often tie us up. And they don't allow us the flexibility that we need on the ground to change and pivot and to address these issues in a timely way because those decisions for funding were made two years ago and they can't get changed now quickly. And I saw you nodding in agreement. Yeah, the earmarks are a big problem. And that's not only on the security assistance side, but on the general assistance, on the overall AID assistance and every other program that's earmarked. Bill, on the recommendations? Yeah. Transparency is, I think, a really important one. For all that Ann started off with. And for maintaining support within the country that we're talking about, but also here, if people understand, if Congress understands, if American people understand, if we understand what the issues are, what the solutions are, what we're trying to do with the security assistance, that will increase support for it. And it is important to have that. And the other one has also been mentioned. That is understanding the complexities in the field that we're dealing with. Because, yes, they live there. They're going to be there forever. We're temporary. And they understand the problems, whether they'll deal with them or not, they understand the problems better than we, much better than we. And so if we're trying to design solutions, we're not going to succeed if we're not fully aware of this complexity. You know, one of the aspects of the report that isn't stated exactly, but implied, is that in trying to assist security sectors, in some cases, in many cases, the U.S. is actually making them stronger, actually contributing to the problem, making it worse for the people of those countries. And one of the obvious conclusions, if you follow that line of logic, is, since we're not doing this very well, maybe we shouldn't do it at all. What is the case for security assistance? Why should we be doing it if we're doing it so badly? Bill, start us off. Well, this is an easy one in Ukraine. So we did some security assistance before 2014, before the Russians first invaded, at a pretty low level. When they talked about 10,000% increase, it was from a very low base. But there was some assistance going on there, and that was important to do. When the Russians invaded in 2014, that started to ramp up, and it was effective. The training and equipping that we did, that NATO did, out in the western part of the country, at a training base, paid off. And now, the Ukrainians understand that they would not be where they are today, holding the Russians off, and about to break through. This counter-offensive is coming. And they could never have thought about doing that. Holding off the Russian army for 14 months, this is a major, I say, this investment is paying off. So it's important to do this well. On how would you respond, Tre? Well, just building on what Bill said, this is a key piece of U.S. foreign policy. And we need as many legs of the stool as we can possibly get to engage and to implement our foreign policy. It's not a question of not doing it, it's a question of doing it better. And looking at how we can learn from these lessons learned through the case studies. But it's key for the future. I mean, I've seen the same thing in Uganda, Burundi, et cetera, militaries that were, frankly, a bit ragtag at the beginning, and then as a result of the kind of training that they got from the U.S. military, equipping, et cetera. Militaries want to be professionalized, and the U.S. is the gold standard. It's prestige. They want to be able to perform well. They want to be able to defend their borders well. And I think one of the key things that we have to enable countries to do is to do it in a way that has the kind of ethics, you know, command and control, military code of conduct, the kind of professionalization so that they don't do human rights abuses, so that they understand the role of civil society, so that they actually take orders from a civilian government. And inculcating all of that in countries, I think, is very, very important. And our neighbors, you know, and our countries that we're working with, they do look for that. Anne? So I think the short answer is the U.S. can't afford or doesn't have the personnel to do all this itself. Those countries have to be able to defend themselves. And there are success stories. Ukraine, I think, is one that brings tears to people's eyes. But I think Columbia was a success story, too, over many, many years. And the U.S. had been involved there really since 1952. But we need to, particularly with the challenges of China and to a lesser extent Russia, we have to make it more efficient and fairer and quicker, I would say, to get results. So it needs, desperately needs modernizing. I would say, yes, in many cases, it's been negative more often. It's just been a waste of money. And we can't afford that anymore. Yeah, so I think everyone has heard when the Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis had made that, did he say it at Congress or not sure in an interview, but he was saying, if you don't fund the Department of State, then you're going to have to buy me more bullets in ammunition. And so to the question of, well, this is hard work and we don't have a great track record. Should we just walk away from this? And I think what we've talked about up here this afternoon is you walk away from it at your own peril for a lot of reasons. And you're going to be back in there, and it's going to be a lot more expensive. But I hope that in this conversation we haven't come across as pessimistic that this is too hard. There are things that are being done right now by the administration, by Congress. I'll give you a military example. So the United States Army very innovatively several years ago created what they call Security Force Assistance Brigades. Several thousand soldier elements officers and non-commissioned officers. And what their focus is, is a particular part of the world. They work with a regional combatant commander and they develop a cadre that's good at security cooperation. That's a big innovation. And I know the State Department, the USAID, they've talked about how can we develop more core regional expertise. That's hard work to do to manage a cadre of diplomats or soldiers that are devoting a large part of their career to a unique language group and a unique part of the world. So not easy, but can be done. And then secondly, I think that there is more realism as we get farther from Afghanistan and Iraq. More realism about as you approach these problems not looking for that breakthrough that in a year from now we'll declare victory and leave. That this is going to be long-term work. It's going to be dynamic. We'll have setbacks we might have to leave because the lead capture has gotten so bad and we can't resolve the issue with the transparency that we'll have. But on the other hand, I do see now more conversations going on about taking that longer-term approach. There was a famous quote about Afghanistan from the UK at that time, a conservative parliamentarian, Rory Stewart. And Rory Stewart said, when you look at these problems, the question is not what you want to do, it's what can you do. And within the area of security assistance, there's a lot you can do. All right, well said. With your permission, may we take questions from the floor? Yankup, I think you're keeping track of some, please. Yeah, first question from the chat here has to do with exactly what Ambassador Eickeberry just mentioned on long-term investments. And so the report recommends that the US government and other donors play the long game by addressing drivers of elite capture through long-term investments to improve governance. How easy or difficult is this to do in practice? Can I just mention one? I think that we haven't talked enough about some of the lower-hanging fruit that I think we need to expand upon. One of the, I think, key success stories of US foreign assistance has been our exchange programs. And when you look at training, this is a long-term endeavor, but we've done it in academia. We've done it to a certain extent, military with diplomats, et cetera. And I think as we look at the security sector assistance going forward, expanding that is going to be, I think, one of the key elements that we can be looking at in terms of the long game and looking at the future. I wouldn't ever underestimate the kind of values that people start to look at when they come here to the United States and they're exposed to what we're doing in terms of just, again, on the military side, working for civilian governments, looking at a military code of ethics, the kind of training, the discipline, et cetera. And I think this is one of the key things that we probably haven't explored as much in the report, but I think going forward will be another key element that I think we should expand upon in the future. And it's not difficult, it's not expensive. As I said, it's among one of the easier things that we can do that can continue to build the kind of bridges that we need for the future. Anne? On the building up institutions, the audit capacity, the capacity of legislators to review how security assistance works, the capacity of journalists, this is hard in authoritarian countries, but in each and every country you'll see brave and interested people who will step up to the plate and investigate these issues. And we need to double down on this because it's cheap to train these people in that oversight capacity. And so that's, I think, an important element too. Again, each of these countries is created very differently, and the problems are quite different. But there's a risk when we go into a particularly troubled country with our own background to see the solution as democracy all the United States. And so the idea that the solution, the beginning solution to the problem is a free and fair election and not understanding that these institutions we're trying to develop, we see those institutions, but the particular country that we see those institutions developing in have decades and hundreds of years of history where those institutions don't exist and what exists behind the screen are power brokers and needing to understand that distribution of power and you're not going to change that by having a sudden election. So what can be done then in that environment that expertise that's needed to be able to report back that here is the real distribution of power and how can we try to get this group to come together and maybe an election, for instance, is only going to be a validation or a stamp of approval which was really already agreed upon by the elites. But what can, or the power holders, what can be done though is then you look at the programs that you're going to administer in that country. Will most of an elite group, will they be okay with a good healthcare program for the country? Many times they will. An education program. Many times they will. A basic provision of security. So the question is then what can we do? Yes, institutions are very important but not trying to overreach and be unrealistic and the lead being that we're going to see how fast we can get to a free and fair democratic election and that will then lead to stability. Carl, there was a question that came in before the meeting that I think is in your area. It was about China. And the question was, is China doing security assistance differently than us? I think the answer is obvious. The question then had the corollary point, are they doing it better? Yeah. Their level of security assistance is not near what the United States is. If we take, for instance, arms sales, I think things have changed a lot in the last couple of years, part of it Ukraine, but there's Egypt and theirs. There's Israel. When you take arms sales, the United States, of all the global arms sales, 40% United States, Russia's dropped. I think France is number two. China might be number three, but still far behind the United States. Still, they are very active in Africa. They're very active in South Asia. They have been trying to get active in Latin America. So I think we're just starting to see the first signs of China having a much more global footprint with its security assistance. They're out there in another way too. They have security contractors. They've got economic interest everywhere, and they don't rely totally on local policemen to defend those. So they've created their own private security companies, and they're out and about, and those private security companies clearly have at least indirect ties to the People's Liberation Army. So to answer the question, still, they're far behind the United States, but I would expect over the next 10 years we're going to see a lot of movement from them. Thank you. Other questions from the floor? We have two. Thank you so much. It's a brilliant report. I wanted to zero in on one particular piece. I think it's clear. I apologize for the echo here. It's clear both from the anecdote that you offered on Ukraine and existing research, and I believe it's one of the takeaways and the recommendations, that there's a need to empower partner civil societies, partner medias to take on an enforcement and monitoring role because we will never be able to do that as effectively. We will never have the level of knowledge of how a particular system works. Now, since that was a recommendation, sort of who can take on that job? Within the USG, do we have the capacity to support civil society to develop security policy capacity to offer some sort of protection? I get the impression sometimes that it's not really anybody's job in particular and so it doesn't happen. I can say a little bit about civil society in Ukraine because Ukrainian civil society has driven all of the major changes in that country since 2004. You think of the Orange Revolution when President Putin tried to put his thumb on the scale and get one of his cronies elected in 2004 and the civil society went to the streets and demonstrated in the winter and got that election overturned and rerun. Same thing happened to the Revolution of Dignity in 2014. Again, it turns out that same Ukrainian who tried to steal that election with Putin's support in 2004, well, he actually won in 2010 and was part of the problem in 2014 and was run out of the country is now in Moscow. But civil society did that as well. Again, through the winter and they organized themselves. It was not the government. They fed themselves. They established health clinics. It was amazing what they have been able to do. We gave some support to that. We, the United States, USAID has done good work on supporting in particular independent media but also some civil society but really the credit goes to, in this case, the Ukrainian people but there are other places around. They're just the lead example of this time. The one element of civil society we don't pay enough attention to and these issues is the business community. AID has done a good job of training in Latin America legislators on how to construct budget but the business community is the one most affected by these economic distortions that elite capture causes and it's the one with the most power and the security sector is least liable to go after it. I think we don't... That's where I would start after my years overseas. I also think that USAID has supported a number of programs in Sub-Saharan Africa that has enabled civil society and particularly the press to really put a spotlight on a number of issues either related to elections, related to corruption, related to human rights activists being put in jail, things that we wouldn't know about otherwise are highlighted through the local press and a lot of assistance has happened as a result of USAID programs on the ground and I would advocate for us continuing and expanding those kind of programs for this reason. Don, I'd agree with you just looking at the Afghanistan experience trying to build institutions like the parliament very, very difficult and hard task but I think that USAID did enjoy a pretty good degree of success with the media and creating a pretty robust media until things started to fall apart exactly like you've said putting a spotlight on things. Now each elite group had their own media but they were competing with each other to tell stories about the other side leading to transparency. I think we had a question up here. Thank you. Good afternoon. Just backtracking to the previous topic about how China is gaining a stronger foothold in the security sector in the great power competition to Ambassador Liberi's point playing the long game. Are there any suggestions or good case studies or any positive influence factors that we can start to implement now before China gains too strong of a foothold that we can't combat anymore? Yeah, so the competition that we have with China, when you get into the area of security assistance, many will say, well, what China offers is cheaper systems that are pretty good and not as expensive as US systems. The Chinese will not ask questions so you hear that from the customers. They don't ask questions. United States, you've got all kinds of questions. You've got Leahy so we don't want to do business with you. You should be careful about then, do we take that and so now we're just going to throw values aside and we'll go ahead and not worry about disclosure of our technology we have to compete. You want to be careful about that. First of all, with regard to the equipment piece of this, still the United States not only our equipment but we the United States has is look at our alliances and our partnerships around the world if you look at the Gulf region what can we do there what can we do in most parts of the world. Not only do we have a very good military and a very reliable one but we can bring a lot of other people in as well. We're conveners. We're the only ones that can do that and then this question about, no questions to ask. Well, you're talking to some of those people that say Chinese don't ask questions and you can look at them and say you've got an enemy across that body of water and when I've talked to them they say the same thing. The Chinese don't ask any questions. So is that real leverage from that particular country or do you need to take a more strategic view? But all of that said is that as Ambassador Patterson has said at the outset of our dialogue here that at the end of the day these pose real dilemmas for the United States in terms of that competition. We have those dilemmas in the Cold War and you were talking about the Middle East is such a great challenge of values versus real political, geopolitical interest and trying to find that balance. It's never going to be black and white there's going to be a lot of shades of grey. Please if I could just add to that. It's an important question. I think as we look at Sub-Saharan Africa a number of African countries now one are getting very tired of having their infrastructure being held captive if you will to China and secondly they are very very concerned about the debt issue because suddenly what was being told to them as something coming in as a grant is actually not a grant it's actually alone and the Chinese are saying we want this to come do now and African countries are saying no wait a minute and so they're realizing that they're being held hostage on two levels that the infrastructure significant infrastructure that they're now relying on China for and if they can't pay their bills China is now going to take over all of that in order to enable the debt issue to go away and so we need to be looking at that I think I would agree with Ambassador Patterson with Anne that we need to help focus more private sector investment and we also need to work multilaterally so that we're working with our other partner agencies to ensure that African countries don't get caught in that debt trap. We're at the end of our time together today and I know that in your role as co-chairs you've been engaging with US elected officials and with representatives of the administration many of the departments what do you hope comes from those discussions and let me phrase it this way what do you think will come from those discussions and what do you hope will come from those discussions Hill? As we've said security system is important it's important to be done well it can be it can be done better we've got some suggestions on how to how to do that reaction that we've gotten from the administration two of us went to two of you went to the Hill had some comments so I I hope that these recommendations will be taken on the challenge will be on as Anne has indicated it's harder than other legislation is harder. Anne? So I've actually been surprised about how the importance of this issue seems to be raised out there and that's because of two reasons China because of the competition with China we have to do a better job and because of Ukraine no one at least in my generation ever thought we were going to see another land war in Europe and we have so I think these security issues in a way they weren't and we were the sole superpower. Raised awareness on the part of our congressional colleagues but also what I hope does come out of this is more flexibility both legislatively as well as from an appropriations standpoint so that we're not just being earmarked to death if you will and that will have more leeway to try to implement these that make sense on the ground and that helps us to look at the long term implications of this and that we get that kind of congressional support as we move forward. Hope springs eternal here. So the I would agree with what Don had said about the long game here if this report contributes and I think it will to a increased consciousness within our national security committee within our government the importance of security assistance that would be huge when great powers as they go through history their environments change the paradigm changes so most of us were old enough to experience the cold war paradigm then the Berlin wall came down and we were trying to find a paradigm until 9-11 and then we created a paradigm and maybe that wasn't the best paradigm but we're clearly moving into an era right now that there's a new paradigm being developed it's got great power competition but it's global in nature and it's going to find a way to integrate this very complex set of security challenges that the United States faces and security assistance is going to play a very fundamental role in this new security paradigm of that I'm confident so I'm hoping then that this report will get out there and it will a stimulated debate Thank you Before we conclude we would like to appreciate and acknowledge the exceptional team that worked with the co-chair to produce the report Philippe, Alan, Jakob all of the colleagues who were part of it you can please stand so we can applaud you Yes Don, Bill and Carl Thank you for being the co-chairs for being with us today and for taking these issues forward Thank you very much