 Good afternoon everyone. Thank you for coming. My name is Peter Bergen. I run the national security program here at the New America Foundation It's often said in Washington that somebody doesn't really need an introduction In this case everybody in this room knows David Kilcullum, but I'm still going to give him an introduction As you know, he's had an incredibly distinguished career both as an anthropologist an academic Advisor to David Petraeus on counterinsurgency in Iraq an advisor to condo senior advisor to Condoleezza Rice the State Department He's written many books his most recent book is out of the mountains the coming age of the urban gorilla Which I think is going to get rave reviews. It's incredibly well written a great analysis I think probably your best book David and they've already written a lot of good books already So thanks for coming David's gonna Tell us the big ideas in the book for about half an hour Then I'm gonna engage him in brief Q&A and then throw it open to you. Thank you David Thanks, Peter, and thank you for having me. It's a wonderful venue New America And I appreciate you all taking the time when it's such a beautiful day outside to be inside here with me and Again, I should I should just start by actually thanking Peter for the title of the book Which is actually a quote from Asama bin Laden in an article that Peter wrote three four years ago where he interviewed Asama bin Laden's son Omar Who said, you know when we used to live in Pakistan our dad used to make us hike across the mountains all the time into Afghanistan? And these were teenage kids and we used to whine about it all the time We'd say you know why are we doing all these grueling tracks across the Hindu Kush into I guess it would have been somewhere in the current agency and Bin Laden said to his kids we never know when war will come We have to know our way out of the mountains and this is the quote that I thought really encapsulated a lot of what I Wanted to say I began writing the book Right after getting ambushed in basically that same area of Afghanistan and thinking to myself You know this doesn't what I'm seeing here doesn't really quite fit the paradigm of counter insurgency Which we'd all been working to for about a decade by that point and I started to really question some of our If you like reductionist constructs that we apply to the violence we see on the ground Since then I've done a lot of work in a variety of garden spots around the planet And I've written about some of them in the book places like Moog at issue and Tripoli a couple of places in South Asia and Southeast Asia and Latin America and what I've tried to do is to Capture some of what is going to be happening in the next 20 or 30 years in terms of conflict on the planet So if you like I thought I might talk briefly about that and then we can pick up some specific issues Peter and and kick the rest of them around with with the group If I look forward between now and let's say the middle of this century what I see is Operational continuity, but a very strong environmental discontinuity Let me explain what I mean by that if you start your clock running in about 1846 at the time of the Mexican War and you run that clock forward to today. You see a very consistent pattern in US military engagement We very rarely do purely conventional state-on-state conflicts The vast majority of the time we're doing irregular operations or a regular warfare where the primary adversary is a non-state armed group About 80% of the time we're engaging in those kinds of operations We do about one Large-scale or long duration Irregular intervention about once every 20 to 25 years. That's a very consistent pattern ever since the middle of the 19th century We do smaller ones every five to ten years Now in the last 60 years to 75 years or so War between nation states has been declining in frequency on the planet But war between or among non-state armed groups has stayed at roughly the same level So that in fact today proportionally on the planet the vast majority of conflicts are irregular in nature One of the interesting things about that pattern is it's completely independent of presidential preferences At the beginning of last year President Obama made a statement where he said that we're going to get out of the business of Doing large-scale or long duration counterinsurgency. We're no longer going to structure Or scale the force for that type of operation By my count he's about the seventh president in the last hundred years to make basically precisely that same comment Very frequently political leaders say, you know, this isn't good. We shouldn't be doing this We shouldn't be engaging in these irregular operations in complex messy environments But we seem to do it at about the same rate as we have for the last 200 years Irrespective of that political debate now I didn't in the book get into why that is right I think there are some Elements in the deep structure of the United States's relationship with its region and the planet that that lead to that what I'm primarily focused on is What's the environment going to be like in which those operations take place because although there's a strong Set of data that suggests Operational continuity the same data suggests a very different operational environment from what we've been used to So let me walk you through the key elements of that environment For what I call mega trends are really shaping the conflict environment on the planet population urbanization Littoralization, which is just a social science word for things clustering on coastlines and Connectivity dramatically enhanced connectivity in the last decade Let me walk through each of those in turn Population at the beginning of the industrial revolution in Europe in 1750 the total population of the planet was about 750 million people It took from 1750 until 1900 for that population to double the first time to get to 1.5 billion in 1900 and then doubled again to get to three billion people on the planet by 1960 and it's interesting to note that that second doubling happened during the same timeframe as both world wars and Global influenza pandemic which between them killed about a hundred and twenty to a hundred and fifty million Largely young and healthy people so the population continued not only to grow but to accelerate in the pace of its growth Despite that fairly significant loss of life Between 1960 and 2000 the population on the planet doubled again to six billion and in just the dozen years since then We've added another slightly more than a billion people to the planet So today the planet sitting at about seven billion people the people that do The analysis that results in this data mainly the Bureau of Economic and Social Affairs at the United Nations Projects that that accelerating population growth isn't going to continue forever We're going to top out at somewhere around nine point five billion people on the planet around the year 2050 But that still represents about another three billion people on the planet and That's the same number of people that it took all of human history right up until 1960 to generate so a very substantial number of you know new humans will be Arriving in the next generation they won't be evenly spread The vast majority of people on the planet will be going into urban environments So that's the second major trend urbanization Again around the beginning of the industrial revolution roughly three percent of the planet lived in a city of a million or more By 1900 we're looking at about 25 percent of people About five years ago. We passed the 50 percent urbanization mark Projection is that by the middle of the century will be somewhere between 60 and 70 percent Urbanized so two-thirds of people on the planet will be living in a city and those cities again will not be evenly distributed The vast majority of urban growth on the planet is happening in developing Countries low-income countries what used to be called the third world East Africa West Africa Latin America the Caribbean South Asia This is where the vast majority of that population growth is centered and again. It's not just anywhere It's on coastlines Already today 80% of people on the planet live within 50 miles of the coast And we're going to see an increasing aggregation of population in these urban centers that lie on coastlines in the Mediterranean Basin alone Which is North Africa the Middle East and Southern Europe between 1970 and 2000 nearly 30 million people move to coastal cities and it's interesting when you look at the patterns of unrest and uprising in the Arab Spring the three most heavily Coastal the urbanized countries in that area were Libya Tunisia and Egypt and There's a strong connection, which I'll get to in a minute between rapid urban growth overstressing of urban systems and population growth particularly youth popular youth bulge Between that type of demographic change and the sort of conflict that we saw in the Arab Spring those three trends Population growth urbanization Latoralization, there's nothing new about those in the middle of the 1990s people in the military here We're already writing about the urban Latoral guys like general Krulak Ralph Peters General scales we're talking about these issues the guys that invented concepts like Three block war and the strategic corporal and the urban Latoral We're talking about this 20 to 25 years ago The new factor is connectivity Because when people were out there writing about these things in the 1990s That was the pre-sulfone era. It was before satellite TV It was before the internet had penetrated to any significant degree into the developing world today The environment is completely different. I Was in Mogadishu as part of the work that I did to support writing the book and I spent a lot of time walking around On the streets about 25% of Somalis own and use a cell phone There are four major cell phone companies in Mogadishu alone This is a country that it hasn't even had a government for about 23 years But it's still very heavily connected and people that live in Somalia Particularly in Mogadishu are able to tap into global networks of connectivity that really were not available to them even a decade ago another great example is Libya and a third is Egypt. Let me talk about those briefly when President Gaddafi of Libya Decided to sort of rejoin the human race and get rid of his nuclear weapons and Ken Bayer programs in 2003 one of the side effects of that was the emergence of cell phones the internet satellite television in Libya so there was an opening up of Access to the to the outside world People that lived in Sirenaka the eastern part of Libya Had known sort of vaguely for a while that they were being kept under the thumb of the regime Sirenaka is where most of the oil and gas that that generates Libya's primary revenue comes from and the old King King Idris of of Libya came from that area On the other hand Gaddafi came from the western part of Libya and spent most of his time favoring people that lived around Tripoli if you lived in Sirenaka particularly in Benghazi Under Gaddafi you are a second-class citizen. You didn't have access to electricity access to water Urban infrastructure didn't function the streets were covered in sewage every winter because the water table rose and there was no electricity to pump the sewage you lived in basically a Slum city compared to what was going on in Tripoli people sat down quietly under that To to a greater or lesser extent until they started to see places like Dubai and Kuwait And Abu Dhabi on their satellite televisions and go hang on a second These are our countries that are generating oil and gas just like we are these cities seem to be pretty different from What we're we're doing and one guy that I spoke to said, you know, we're drowning in sewage and we look at Satellite television and we see that Gaddafi's son paid for Beyonce to come and sing At his party in Tripoli and at a cost of you know millions of dollars. So this led to a pretty significant Upswelling of grievance in eastern Libya when people started to see that another good example is is Syria Half is Al-Assad the the president of Syria through the 1970s until 2000 Hated why he was a bit of a Luddite He came from a peasant background, but be he kind of hated the idea of the Syrian people being connected to the outside world So until 2000 you couldn't get a cell phone. They're only about 30,000 cell phones in use in Syria you couldn't get on the internet and You didn't really have access to external television or a satellite TV Actually, you could get a satellite dish through the black market from the Syrian army who ironically were the guys who controlled the black market in satellite television But most people didn't have access When half as Al-Assad Passed away and Bashar al-Assad became the president in 2000. He had a very different attitude He'd been the head of the Syrian computer society He was a bit of a wingnut in college and sort of keen on computers and he opened up Access to connectivity in a way that had never happened in Syria. We've seen about a 4,300 percent increase in use of cell phones and the internet across Syria since 2000 When hafez his father tried to crush the Muslim Brotherhood uprising in Hama in the 1980s He was able to crush a series of uprisings one at a time because none of the population knew what was going on around the country If you talk to journalists that were in Syria at that time They'll tell you that if you went to say Aleppo or Idlib people would say hey We heard something happened in Hama like what's going on and people didn't have a very clear understanding of what was happening this time around That unprecedented a level of connectivity meant that people not only knew what was going on in Egypt and Libya and Tunisia They knew it was going on in the rest of Syria when the uprising began in Dara'a It spread Within days to other cities within Syria and within weeks was across the whole country And the regime wasn't able to just crush one uprising at a time It rapidly got away from them because people were talking to each other in a way that they really were not able to do in the past So connectivity is a new factor. It affects conflict, but it also affects everything else, right? It affects trade and commerce It affects people's access to information in ways that don't have much to do with conflict I think generally it's a positive thing But it's a change to the environment that we hadn't really considered last time we looked at the urban Latoral and that was before 9-11 since 9-11 people like me and like a lot of people in the audience have put a 110% of our attention on a Very specific and difficult set of problems that don't have a lot to do with This future that I'm painting in terms of the planet. We've been very focused on low contrast fast-moving Lightly equipped irregular rural gorillas who operate mainly in Mountainous landlocked environments. Now a lot of us served in Iraq I'm not of course ignoring the fact that the US engaged in a lot of very heavy urban fighting in Iraq But there were 50 countries engaged in the coalition in Iraq 51 in Afghanistan The only country that saw significant urban fighting on a coastline in either of those campaigns was the British and Basra in Iraq American urban fighting happened far from the coast in a landlocked area of responsibility and of course the vast majority of fighting in Afghanistan Doesn't happen in cities that happens in small villages in rural valleys Away from the urban centers and for most of the war the cities in Afghanistan have been some of the safest places until about two years ago So the what's become kind of the default setting for NATO militaries and for aid agencies and to some extent for diplomatic services Is actually not the environment that we're seeing if we look at the data for the future planet So let me end by sort of throwing out a few thoughts about what that means and and what we might want to do about it The first thing is that I don't think that Conflict in Remote landlocked rural areas is going away There will still be fights in the desert fights in the mountains fights in rural environments, and we will still be engaging primarily non-state groups both criminal and military But as a proportion of the whole because wars happen where people live Predominantly, we're going to be engaging in more urbanized very heavily connected coastal Environments, so we need to get comfortable with that not only as the military, but as aid agencies as As diplomatic services as businesses as as academics as communities We need to understand that the environment that we're going to be operating in looks a lot more like Dhaka or Lagos or Mumbai then it looks like a Place like let's say where I got ambushed in Afghanistan at the beginning of thinking about the book The second factor is or the second observation. That's worth making is Again pretty obvious There's no purely military solutions to this set of problems and yet there are no solutions without some kind of security So there's a conundrum there For urban populations more police and more military coming into their environment is often just a lot more opportunities To get shaken down and pushed around it doesn't necessarily result in more security but if you want to engage with people who are threatened by The challenges of urban growth, which I'll talk about in a second You've got to be able to provide a secure environment or they're not going to be able to engage with those those problems And they're going to rather be pushed to pick up weapons and fight each other to gain some measure of control as we think about that the sort of third key observation is that Yes terrorists will still be out there. Yes The successes and imitation imitators of Assam bin Laden will still be running around Trying to undermine society and cause mayhem but if your city's half underwater and No one has enough electricity and no one has enough food to eat and a gang just took over the transportation system and You don't have a functioning sewage. There are six billion cell phones on the planet There are only four and a half billion toilets That's a lot of people that have a cell phone, but no access to clean sanitation Those are the sorts of problems that are going to confront you. Sure. There's going to be cherished out there But your major issue is going to be your city is not coping So as we think about that we need to sort of ask ourselves What's the best way to understand a city under stress and I think the first thing to say is that Cities need to be the new unit of analysis not countries So we particularly in the US government, but other governments to organize Around the country team the country desk the embassy we focus on what happens at the level of the nation state but actually cities are very different from each other and Districts within cities are very different from other districts we actually need to bring ourselves down a level to what's going on at the city level and in fact when you get To that level you see that there's actually a huge amount of diplomacy and foreign assistance and security work that happens at The city to city level. It's not necessarily nation state to nation state So we need to get down to that level and as we think about urban environments There are some useful constructs that are out there and one of them is an idea that I spend a lot of time talking about in the book Which is the idea of urban metabolism This is not a new idea. It's been around for 40 years or so in the urban ecology world Where people talk about how cities cope with the influx of material that moves into the urban environment So if you think about a city as being like your body and you have a metabolism in your body You have various intakes like food and water and air These things come into your body You have various processes that transform them and that produces energy it produces biomass But it also produces waste products that have to be somehow metabolized and dealt with otherwise Toxins build up and you get sick guy called Abel Wallman in the 1960s Wrote a very influential article called the metabolism of cities where he basically said cities are like that too There are inputs like water carbon fuel Air that come into an urban environment that get transformed that produce waste products and the city has to have the carrying capacity To metabolize that and deal with it Otherwise, you're going to see a build-up of pollution and a bunch of other issues that are going to ultimately cause problems for the city What I've done in the book is to take that and take it in a slightly different direction and instead of looking at physical inputs To look at things like information and money and energy and trade goods and weapons and drugs Talk about a sort of non-material flow analysis of the city and try to understand cities in terms of how well they cope With the pace and scale of those inputs and it turns out that that's actually a pretty good predictor for conflict Mogadish is a good example It's what the Naval War College professor Richard Norton calls a feral city Which is basically a sort of mad max environment where the state has collapsed But the city doesn't go away people emerge and take charge of different key functions and it goes kind of wild In Mogadish you I think our traditional way of thinking about it based on movies like black hole down and Understanding of what happened in the 1990s is that first what happened was the Somali state collapsed and then Mogadish You went feral But if you talk to Somalis on the ground and listen to some of the Somali writers that have spoken about it They tell a different story, which is that the city was overwhelmed By rapid population growth people moving into the urban environment in the generation before the fall of the siad barre regime Different rural groups came in and basically tore the government apart as they fought for control of the city So the city didn't become feral because the state collapsed The state collapsed because the city was already feral It was a failure to cope with that rapid urban growth that led in part to the collapse of the state And we see very very similar patterns when you look at places like Tunisia Libya Egypt Iraq to some extent and Syria So there's a sort of urban metabolism dynamic. That's worth thinking about for the military guys in the audience Most of us were brought up. I think to think about a city as a piece of urban terrain Static it doesn't change what you do changes you may change the city by blowing bits of it up But it's basically static when you look in a slightly longer time frame. You see that actually cities are Flow patterns people coming in people going out resources moving through the environment the built environment changing as those flows shift and What you see is the physical manifestation of the city is actually just a snapshot in a long and changing flow When you start to see a city that way you start to get some quite different ideas about how to deal with it so I'll end with a couple of those ideas and One of these is the idea of co-design Every year across the planet, there's slightly more than a hundred western interventions in Developing world problems. Some of them are military. Some of them are more social or economic most of them fail one of the things that that suggests to me is I Think a fairly obvious point to most people white guys with clipboards turning up in some Developing city and telling the locals step aside, you know patting them on the head. I've got the solution to your problem That's clearly not going to work But I think there's an equal and opposite error Which is to think that you just have to ask the locals and they'll give you the answer Just turn up and ask an Iraqi or ask an Afghan or ask someone who lives in Mogadishu And they'll just tell you how to fix the problem. That's equally unrealistic It's like turning up in Detroit and asking a crack addict on the street. How do we fix the problems of Detroit? The guy doesn't know he doesn't have access to the sorts of information that you would need to even understand that question And other people probably don't agree with his version of events either So there's actually a co-design element that has to has to happen here people who come from outside the environment that have access to certain kinds of knowledge certain technical or functional skills and are Probably equally important impartial in some of these conflicts need to bring that knowledge But the locals need to bring Hyperlocal context and insight and most importantly leadership and there are a lot of examples actually when you start looking for them of successful Efforts that have followed this pattern. One of them is the way that the Liberian women ended the Civil War in Liberia Which involved not only a grassroots women's movement in Liberia and actually a couple of other places outside of that country but it also involved a very strong movement of lawyers and human rights activists and Missionaries actually from outside of Liberia Partnering with this grassroots women's group to lead to that outcome if you think about ceasefire Chicago closer to home Or the ceasefire movement that's occurring in many downtown areas in the United States It's another good example of co-design where you have Outsiders who understand a particular methodology They're familiar with a set of best practices for controlling Violence amongst urban populations and they understand how things have worked or haven't worked in different environments Those people are partnering with local communities the leadership and the insight comes from the local community But some of the technical knowledge has to come from outsiders and there are other examples like that also None of these things work without some kind of public safety structure Better I think that it should be The local community that provides security if they can't do it then local police if they can't do it then local military obviously the worst Option is for us to go in and try to provide security That said I go back to what I said at the beginning Turns out if you look at the last 200 years, we have a bit of a habit of intervening in these kinds of conflicts which seems to be Unconnected with the reality of what our leaders want to do or how things are changing on the ground So I think for people that are associated with the military or law enforcement we have to assume that we're going to be doing more of this and that means we have to get much more familiar than we Have been over the last decade with the kinds of crowded urban Coastal very heavily networked and connected environments That are really becoming the norm across the planet and I guess that means we need to get our heads Into the city and out of the mountains So let me stop there and let's let's continue the conversation Thank you Thank you. Dr. Cochle and I just want to recognize also doctor Cochle's wife Dr. Janine Savitson who has a distinguished career as an academic pilot senior job at the Pentagon also her father and stepmother Who are here in the audience today? David the the opening scene in your book I think is indicative of One of the ideas that you're trying to communicate which is counterinsert you talk about counterinsurgency theory Suggesting that it sort of flew it and Tell us about that opening scene and what it You know what you what what lesson you derive from it? So it was about four years ago Meet about this time actually mid-September of 2009 and I was an area that some people want to may know well Dara Inua district which is in Nangaha province northeastern Afghanistan and we had been Visiting a series of provincial reconstruction team pro projects a hydroelectric plant slaughterhouse a school and On the way down the valley in the afternoon We got ambushed as you often do a lot of Afghan values only have one road So when you go up there in the morning everybody knows exactly how you're coming out in the afternoon So you always have to expect to be hit in the afternoon as you come down the hill And I can remember thinking as we were getting ambushed. This isn't a very good ambush You know, I taught ambushing at the British Infantry school as an Australian exchange instructor I would have failed my students if they put together a half-assed ambush like the one You know, it was over in about three minutes. I think we killed all of them One of our vehicles got hit. No one got hurt It was pretty pretty badly done and I thought this isn't like the Taliban because even then the Taliban were getting pretty smart in The way that they Conducted their operations. We got to the bottom of the valley and I was talking to my vehicle crew And one of them said how many how many Taliban do you think we killed? And I said, well, how do you know those guys were Taliban and they said well, dude, they were shooting at us And I think we we have this framework Which is counter insurgency right now, but it's been other frameworks at different times Which is what anthropologists would call an ethic framework. It's our framework that we impose on the environment It's not how local people Understand what's going on people in Afghanistan don't wake up in the morning and say how am I going to run my insurgency today? And they flick open to the relevant chapter of fn3 24 and you know crib off of our now dropping that that's not how it works If you really look at how things go down in Afghanistan, I would say that the vast majority of conflicts or actual combat that I've seen Was not driven by ideological support from some in London or the Taliban or any other element like that It was driven by things like contracting like access to influence Like competition between different groups that we're trying to use the presence of rich ignorant foreigners right to either build up what they needed in their society or to Bring down a rival and that actually explains more about what you see on the ground Then counter-insurgency does which is not to say counter-insurgency is wrong, right? All models are inaccurate in some way all models are a systematic over simplification of reality and That doesn't make them wrong. It just makes them, you know models, right? I mean Einstein said that Science proceeds by a process of simplification and the key thing to do is make things as simple as possible But no simpler right and I think what we've done here is we've come up with a model That's actually a pretty good fit for what we've been dealing with in Afghanistan But as we think forward to this slightly different environment, it's gonna have to evolve that doesn't mean going back to Folder gap massed armor, you know that kind of thing But it means thinking about what's actually there on the ground and one of the things which I know Janine has written about and others have Spoken about too is this idea of an overlap between crime and war where things that Sort of seem fairly neat in a US legislative framework are not actually that need on the ground another key thing is an Intersection between international and domestic and I write about this in the context of drones and cyber operations in the book Where what we're now doing is actually breaking down some pretty fundamental constructs in international law and in In military theory about how things work. So I guess, you know, I think we're about due for a paradigm shift This may not be it right. This is just my thoughts, right? I'm just the dude walking around looking at stuff taking notes, right? But I think we should have the discussion and think about what are we doing that may or may not be relevant to the future that's coming well this confusion Understandable confusion between war and crime, which is sort of bedeviled us since 9-11 You know, is that do we not have the language to explain something that is sort of a bland is it partly a linguistic problem? I Think it's partly a linguistic problem and it's also partly a problem of the observers point of view so one of the one of the case studies in the book that I think is quite revealing is a study of drug smuggling organization and use that term for a minute Based in Kingston, Jamaica known as the shower posse and in 2010 the Jamaican military Spent six weeks occupying Mordering their own capital city in order to arrest one guy the guy called Christopher Koch that we were after to extradite him to the United States for smuggling of drugs into New York City and Tampa Toronto and a couple other places But this isn't actually when you look at it It's an outgrowth of the way that Kingston and a lot of other coastal cities have developed in the last generation as People move to a city They tend to settle on the outskirts of the city and they tend to settle in areas that don't have government Services and don't have a lot of access to infrastructure And so what often happens is you get this kind of donut donut shaped ring of Territory around the outside of a growing city, which isn't very well controlled by the government It doesn't have a lot of services you get this kind of ring of slums and urban planners talk about transitional and Periurban environments and in those environments non-state armed groups not necessarily military groups, but gangs Become the government these areas, you know used to be fashionable in the early part of the so-called war on terror to talk about Ungoverned spaces these places are not ungoverned. They're very thoroughly governed but just not by the government And so you have these groups that control territory, but if you think about it like this happened in Nairobi It's happened in Kingston as well These people have a chokehold on the city because where that ring of territory is that's where the city used to grow its food It's where the water catchment area comes from used to used to be it's where the transportation routes pass so the groups that dominate this ring of territory around the old city actually can shut the city down and Politicians have to recognize that and they do and they have to cut deals with these guys So in Nairobi, for example, there's a group called Mungiki in Kenya that dominates the transportation system by shaking down local bus companies and politicians have had to make deals with them because the group can Essentially shut the city down if they want to in the case of Kingston the port the airport Most of the major roads a lot of the voting public that supported the political parties in in Kingston Were tied in with groups like the shower posse So particular political groups had to make deals with them so that they could survive and in those districts Groups like the shower posse are the law. They're the courts. They provide jobs. They have contracts They provide housing they provide food and water electricity has run through them So one of the things they do is they smuggle drugs into the United States But if you live in Kingston, that's not the main thing they do the main thing they do is they're the government Right now there are things that economists call negative externalities right there that come out of this You know other people get upset about drugs flowing into their environment But that's not the main thing as far as people in Kingston are concerned So I think we've got to sort of shift our point of view a little bit to see things from the standpoint of a differentiated local population instead of from these kind of Universal paradigms that I think fit well with some kinds of challenges But not necessarily with these sort of blended or hybrid challenges that we're seeing Tell us a little bit about your your business and where you're operating and how do you write a book when you're running a business tough In fact, I see Jason Knoblock up the back there. Hey, mate One of our our great Team members in Keras who's now moved on to work with his hands actually But Jason was part of a project that we did for the World Bank in Africa last year where we went out and mapped communities Who were experiencing a high degree of crime and violence in a couple of countries in Liberia and in Nigeria? And we actually worked with a lot of community groups and women's groups in that environment We were going into slum areas on coastlines that are actually pretty dangerous. The police don't go there it's a little bit too dangerous for them and You would think that hey the Liberian government's got to know what's going on in Monrovia, but actually no Turns out there are whole parts of the city that no one really Understands very well it's also pretty hard to understand a city when there are no street names and no house address numbers and there's no Way to plot what you what you find so we actually went out and mapped with the community the areas where people felt unsafe And if you think about it when you walk through a dangerous urban environment at night time You don't know if you're going to get mugged, but you do you know if it is going to happen It'll probably over there, you know So people have this feeling of where things are unsafe We were able to make those those maps with some software that we built To do that and then share that with people who could say well Maybe we don't need to flood this area with cops and troops We just need like one police station there and a bit better street lighting over there and some you know some additional elements of urban Infrastructure that can really solve that problem. I think where it gets very interesting is when you back up to a large-scale satellite image of a place like Monrovia and you see that these areas where the community feels unsafe they actually have a visual signature You can pick them off the map once you know what you're looking for So we do some of that work. We work with aid agencies to do some work in Syria We do a lot of work in Afghanistan validating the effectiveness of aid programs And that's that's the sort of work that we do and a lot of it comes down to modeling environments or understanding What's actually going on what's normal? What's abnormal and basically helping analysts and communities figure out You know, what are the two or three things that I can affect that will make a difference to the environment? We tend to stay away from the sort of presidential level of politics. We're down at the At the grassroots, but we think that's where a lot of the important stuff happens in this kind of environment So are you writing the book on a plane a lot of the time? Yeah, on the plane and on people's sofas and kitchen tables and My family here in the States are extraordinarily generous in their respect What I what I typically do is I have these whole boxes of these little black moscow notebooks And I'll take very detailed field notes when I'm in the field And I will then typically write them up either the same night Which is sort of how that's the way that the academic discipline works that I came up in or Often in many cases of lucky enough to have a 15-hour plane right ahead of me So, you know, I'll try to scroll them up I find that the closer you do it to the time the more Granular is your recollection and the better you can capture what people actually say as a sink from what you sort of Subsequently remember, which is always a little bit neater and tidier than what actually happens, you know, sorry You've written some great I think Bob Woodward has the same approach when he does Bob Woodward's method is to terrorize people Well, that does that too You ought to talk to me. Prisoner's dilemma, right? You got to talk to me because everybody else I've never been able to do that myself. I don't have the gravitas So you mentioned, you know, we've had John Sopko here the the person who's Somewhat controversial because of his critis criticisms of a lot of Afghan aid programs I guess a lot of people in the USA ID side think that he's overly critical or focusing on You know the particular things that are maybe dated or and he on the other hand is saying look This is American taxpayer money so when you are come in and assess the effectiveness of Programs in Afghanistan, I mean who you're with it as if it's proprietary don't have to answer but who are your clients and and How do you measure success or lack thereof? So we work we work for USA and We have actually worked with Other agencies at times like diffid the British aid agency and as I said the World Bank and the United Nations But primarily in Afghanistan, it's USA Aid in conflict environments is really complex, right? I mean there are two elements that we normally talk about monitoring and evaluation So monitoring is did the project actually happen, right and the money that you gave people to build the bridge Is there actually a bridge there, right and and it's actually non-trivial to find that out in many cases We do operate in areas that are denied that the people don't get into and we have Afghan staff that that work in that environment The other element is is Evaluation so did the Project have the effect that you wanted it to have and that's very very difficult We talk about we call the attribution problem. So there's never only one project in a district There's always multiple things happening simultaneously. That's very hard often to attribute what you see to the aid project as an example A guy who's over at the US Institute of Peace Andrew Wilder Did a really groundbreaking study a few years ago where he was asked to look at aid effectiveness in Afghanistan? And he's an amazing guy. You should read his stuff if you have the opportunity, but Andrew went out and did Research which showed that the strongest predictor for a high level of Taliban violence in an Afghan district is a high level of USA spending and So some people said well hell that means that USA does funding the insurgency and aid causes Violence actually doesn't say that right? It's just a correlation And if you look at our policy our policy is to spend the money where the violence is highest So it may actually not be that aid causes violence It may be that violence brings aid right and there are other policies that you can adopt But you first you've got to figure out like what's actually happening on the ground And I find it's almost impossible to do that without both looking at a very big big data Model of what's actually happening and putting people on the ground to validate that I think that's that's largely what we've Tried to specialize in in what we do. You know as you were going through the four big Changes, you know the the city that left to mind is like is Karachi Where whether where the Sin Rangers are just being sent in to restore order. I mean, it's an almost perfect kind of Breakdown of order. Did you write about Karachi much in the book? I touch on Karachi a little bit It's the launch point obviously for the lush getiva terrorists who attacked Mumbai in November of 2008 And so I talked about it in the context of its role as a base for that attack But I think it's actually a as you say a very very interesting study when I was a Teenager in Australia. There's a great television channel down there called SPS Which does programming from around the world and there used to be a program called Karachi cops Which basically involved as far as I could work out two cops running around Karachi and beating the crap out of people with like is you know big sticks to get them to confess to crimes Which they may or may not have committed and that's basically how things work But that was that was 25 years ago, right? I mean the city's grown enormously in that time it now the port of Karachi handles 40% of total Pakistani seaborn trade by volume which is huge right and what happened in the case of the Mumbai attack was that the The guys from a let who did the attack blended into this very dense coastal shipping traffic and a lot of people thought that they were smugglers they were seeing everyone knew they were there But people didn't really correctly interpret what they were looking at these guys Sailed from the port of Karachi went out to see an infiltrator the Indian fishing fleet in the middle of the night They hijacked an Indian fishing trawler Killed the crew got the captain to sail them to over the horizon offshore from Mumbai they crossed decked into Zodiacs rubber boats in the middle of the night with about a two meter coastal swell running Which is really difficult for those that haven't done it And then landed in a slum area that had grown up in Mumbai Really close to the target in the area that went to Zurich or Colaba, which I know, you know well in South Mumbai which is a mixture of old urban development high-rise hotels and office buildings and Fishing villages that are still sort of there surrounded by the rest of the city And it's a classic example of rapid unplanned urban development as these guys landed. They were seen They wasn't a covert insertion everybody knew they were there, but people thought that they were either smugglers or illegal immigrants That they just sort of fitted into a general background pattern now that wasn't by accident Lashka, you type of spent a year studying exactly how Mumbai flowed and functioned. They didn't look it as a piece of terrain They looked at it as a flow model and they tried to infiltrate the bloodstream They feel like I'm like a parasite and move around within the city and the way they did the attack I think is a very sophisticated example of the sort of upper end of the spectrum of where some of these threats may come in The future littoral environment, but you know Karachi itself gives you a lot of examples of other types of threats Just basic unrest lack of urban services lack of police presence or government presence emergence of non-state armed groups one of the new things in Karachi is that It's been a base area for all kinds of people for 20 30 years But the fighting typically hasn't happened directly in Karachi in the last year or so. We've started to see More and more over the active urban type fighting Happening in the city itself. It's quite an interesting experiment to see what's gonna happen What before I hand it over to other questions from the audience What is you know, obviously in the Pentagon? There's a group of people who are thinking very hard about a future conflict with China and how to What is what are the implications since so much of the Chinese population do live on the coast and many of the things that you Write about surely have applications Well, I think we often there are people who think about a conflict with China and I have to say I don't think either side Wants a conflict so I think it's largely a theoretical Debate but people tend to think of that as in some way Qualitatively different from the other kinds of conflicts that we're engaging in but the fact is any major conflict with China in fact with any other Sophisticated country is likely to rapidly become just as urban and coastal and complex and complicated as any other I mean the vast majority of the Chinese population lives within 50 to 80 miles of the coastline There are really three China's right. There's a very developed coastal densely populated area There's the middle of the country and then there's sort of Western Xinjiang area So there's that but there's also the fact that the Chinese You know literally wrote the book on unrestricted warfare so that if indeed we do get into a Conflict in that environment. It's not likely to be conventional fleet against fleet in the blue water There will be that if indeed it happens, but rapidly people will find themselves in these kind of very complex coastal hydrography Latoral river in type operations that I talked to any Navy officer I'm not a Navy officer But if you talk to people that have operated in those environments dramatically more complicated you get the overlapping effect of sea land airspace, but then you have like subsurface seabed undersea and of course now cyberspace It's a dramatically denser and more complicated environment than either a purely land or a purely maritime Environment there are folks out there that specialize in thinking about this I think that where I'm coming from is a lot of us have spent a decade thinking about completely different stuff and in that time Urban theories moved on Analytical techniques have moved on Connectivity is dramatically transformed There's now all kinds of ways of thinking about the problem and sources of data It just didn't exist a decade ago So then we need to rethink some of the things we think we know from what we did in the 20th century Throw it open to your questions. If you have a question, can you wait for the mic and identify yourself? Annie's got the mic here. So raise your hand if you have a question Start with the gentleman over here My name is Andrew Neil Smith. I'm an advisor at the State Department right now have a Question, why do you define the littoral differently from you mentioned say Baghdad earlier any other Inland major city what defines a littoral city as being somehow different in this urban flow in your thesis as opposed to anywhere else? Well cities tend to grow where there is already an urban settlement and there are a variety of reasons why Most cities happen to be on coastlines But the data is is pretty clear if you look at the 25 largest cities on the planet 21 out of those 25 are either directly on a coastline or on a Riverine Delta only Beijing Moscow Mexico City and Tehran Among mega cities are not on a coastline Or in a major river Delta why that is a variety of reasons But once you get a significant urban settlement people tend to move to that settlement I think one of the things that I've seen in the research I've done is that there's a if you like a connectivity differential Between urban environments and rural environments if you want to tap into the global economy You need a certain level of connectivity. You are not going to get that from a rural environment So a lot of people are now moving to urban environments Not just because of access to the national economy because that's how you tap into the the broader world economy when Cities grow on coastlines. There are some different features than what you see with an inland City, one of them is that you often are constrained by terrain So that instead of being able to sort of expand and sprawl You run into things like mountain ranges and other rivers and so on and you tend to get this kind of very Like I said a sort of donut shaped pattern of slum settlement that happens around the outside of the city But the other key thing that happens is you get this inter intersection of land and sea effects so in the military, right the the technical doctrinal definition for littoral is It's basically the area of space where land sea and aerospace affects intersect So it's it's the it's the area of sea that you can hit from the land The area of land that you can hit from the sea and the aerospace above that now That's obviously dependent on weapon systems, right? If you're armed with a pistol then the littoral Extends about 20 meters offshore, right? But if you have silkworms, you know, it goes a long way Out to sea so there's there's a much larger area of the planet That's now littoral than there was even 20 years ago because people can reach further. I think probably the the most stark example that that I actually mentioned in the book is the capture of Ford operating base Rhino in Southern Afghanistan in 2001 by Marines under General Mattis launched from a Naval ship Pella view In the Arabian Sea something like 600 miles from the target now a landlocked desert airstrip in the middle of Afghanistan Wouldn't by any normal means be considered to be littoral But if you can hit it from a sea platform Offshore and in the blue water, you know away from the coastline and you can then sustain that presence, which is very important You know, it's effectively littoral. That's another point. That's worth bringing out It's it's kind of sexy and interesting to talk about the tactics here, but the real challenge is logistics How are you going to sustain the things that we're talking about? We've spent a decade doing basically garrison operations, right? We think we're pretty badass for doing like four tours in Iraq and Afghanistan, you know with our ice cream and our electricity Yeah, but actually when you go into a city where the reason why you're going in there is Precisely because there's not enough in the environment to sustain people that live in that city Our traditional contract-based way of doing logistics in the military is not going to work You won't be able to hire contractors to sell you the stuff that they don't have themselves So you're going to be doing, you know sea-based logistics or expeditionary logistics and that Becomes dramatically complex when you start to do it in these kinds of mega cities that are Very complicated but also not secure So there's just a huge amount of thinking to do I think one of the controversial things I think that comes out of it is that logisticians or civil affairs people maybe need to be battle space owners in the future Maybe the infantry and the armor are just protecting the guys that are doing the actual work on the ground I'll exit quickly so people don't throw things at me. That's that you know That's we have to really open up our our aperture a little bit Hey, what what are you doing in Syria? In Syria we provide humanitarian reporting on where the aid is going to who controls which parts of the country and conditions on the ground and So what's your assessment of? Well, I don't think you can call it anything but a tragedy by any means it's It's really interesting to see how the environment in Syria has shifted over the last two years When we first began our work I Would say that the the rebels against the regime were a much more mixed group than they are now But we've seen the rise of different extremist organizations on on different sides That's really sucked the oxygen away from the middle in in the in the uprising over the last year or so Another thing that I think is you're probably well aware of but other people may not be is that we're seeing the emergence of A whole different class of terrorists now in Syria than we'd seen in the past not only has the conflict given our New lease of life to al-qaeda in Iraq But we've seen the emergence of groups like Jabhat al-Nusra our al-shams Islamic State of Iraq al-shams, which are Successor organizations that al-qaeda in Iraq, but they're doing dramatically better than al-qaeda al-qaeda in Iraq Perform pretty badly in some key ways After the the end of the surge group called answer on the jihadine wrote basically a jihadist after-action review of What happened in Iraq where they went through a series of lessons learned You know, we didn't engage the population correctly. We didn't do enough to win people over We focus too much on terrorizing people are not enough on governance They went through actually spent some times insulting me in a paragraph But that you know, they basically did a fairly honest assessment of what went wrong It's almost like these guys have read that and have thought about what am I gonna do now this time around and we've seen Groups emerge that draw a lot. I think on the way that his bulla operates Jabhat al-Nusra Which is led by Gakut Agilani who's from Syria. I think people tend to characterize that as being just an al-qaeda clone I think it's a lot more than that It's indigenous it does things like charity programs and governance programs and supports the community It protects people as well as well as terrorizing people this organization has been known to do Humanitarian deals with the government to get medical supplies in to support communities I mean that al-qaeda would never have done that in a million years, right these guys Signed up in their allegiance to al-qaeda central primarily to get themselves under out from underneath al-qaeda in Iraq And I think one of the reasons why we're seeing these guys perform at this level is because You know, they're just a learning organization But another reason is that some people that are in that organization came from the Syrian regime as defectors And a lot of those folks would have previously worked with his bulla and his bulla is probably the organization par excellence for this this broad spectrum Approach to engaging a population that does both coercion persuasion and administrative work to win people over I spent a whole chapter in the book talking about that which I call the theory of competitive control So I think in Syria, we're seeing this humanitarian tragedy But at the same time we're seeing the emergence of a whole new class of threat. How are you able to work in Syria? Our staff are Syria, right. Yeah, Rob. You blow up. Don't wait for the light. Thanks I am Rob Dubois and my silver tune did the hydro recon for Camp Rhino We opened the door for them and let them come across the beach So you were the guys who were basically taking photos and then emailing it to people's personal emails on the penalty, right? That wasn't me but Your group right those offset concerns. It wasn't me, right? But so, you know that's like nothing compared to what you can do now, right? The level of connectivity out there is just made help develop that back in the 90s Yeah, oh is for a speck recon and from the woods and the mountains What really turned me on about what you talked about here in coin Being a failed model not failed model, but a failing because every model fails. There's so much criticism against coin I'm one of the coin Deneesters that are attacked by the critics of coin in my opinion coin has never been fully used You can't claim something's failed if it's never been fully used. You're working with aid today To do a whole spectrum Intervention on an environment with an insurgency requires all sorts of cooperation It is beyond the kinetics beyond a couple of majors with handbooks that Petraeus helped sign so There's no czar that makes aid I mean makes state and defense work together. Well, we need one So they can sort of herd the cats But are you seeing more of the holistic approach with the USG currently and other other powers? So I would just say, you know, I'm a straight in by background We love to hate ourselves and we talk about how bad it is that working mistake Go look at how the Aussies do it and how the Brits do it and you'll be very happy with how we do it, right? We're actually pretty good. I like I hear people say, you know Defenses from Mars and states from Venus. Yeah, I think states the only diplomatic service in the world that has its own fleet of gunship helicopters Right, and I've worked with some pretty badass State Department and aid people out in the field as I know you have to Rob Right, and I see one of them here Dave, you know, there are guys that have just immense Regional expertise that are willing to, you know strap on a backpack and go to the countryside and and do that stuff and we shouldn't Underest understate, you know, how important That is I guess where I would pick up your comment is on this issue of coin as a paradigm, right all paradigms Eventually get overtaken by reality, you know car pop of the German theorist of logic said, you know that you you Your theory proceeds by refutation, right? You don't have a theory and then go and try and find all the information that supports that theory because sure enough You're gonna find it, right? What you've got to do is find things that go against the theory and try to think how do they how do they fit with what? I'm looking at and if you get to a point where the cognitive dissonance is such that you've got to break that Theory then we have what, you know Thomas King called a scientific revolution and you get a new Paradigm I think that's kind of what happened to us, you know, three to a five We went through a paradigm shift in the military away from things that people were very comfortable with to a whole new way Actually a whole old way of thinking about right the environment And I think we're about due for another one of those shifts, which is not to say that counterinsurgency is wrong It's just to say that it is a human theory about stuff that you know, it's what it is I would I would also say that As we think about the future operating environment, there are whole new ways to think about complexity and To think of to model the environment that were not open to us even a few years ago one side effect of connectivity is There's just masses of data out there as controversial point to talk about here with you know Edward Snowden running around and Shedding rooms the data about what people have been collecting living inside the human rights and privacy issues associated with That sort of domestic surveillance program The fact is that you don't need to be sending spies into the Hindu Kush like the British had to in the 19th century To figure out what's going on. You just have to look on Twitter, right? You know the community will tell you what's going on Well, they can't you know, I think that one of the reasons we don't really understand what's going on in Syria We think we do because because of social media. We feel like we know what's going on But if you actually number the active Hardcore journalists are in there as CJ Chivers and a few others But one of the reasons that we I think have an information deficit about what is going on is is The fact the social media kind of papers over this absence of real reporting gives you the illusion that you know What's going on and of course it is helpful but So I guess as a reporter myself it just it seems to me this is a conflict There were a lot of good reporters in Iraq as you know and Dexter Filkins and John Burns And we had a pretty good sense of what was going on Obviously, they're not exactly analogous But I think one of the reasons Obama and the administration has been so reluctant to get involved is Not only was it a mess, but it was a mess. They didn't understand and I think partly is an absence of traditional journalism Just yeah, I mean you you understand this better than I do, but I wonder whether the traditional paradigm of of You know conventional journalism is alongside counterinsurgency one of these paradigms that isn't necessarily going to work very well right in this future hyper-connected environment In the specifics of Syria, it is not enough to look at the social media It really is not you have to understand the the big data picture But that's kind of like the jungle canopy right you're looking at it from above and you can see the canopy But what's what's underneath the trees right? You have to be able to put people on the ground under the canopy to validate What you're actually seeing in the social media But using techniques like queuing and sampling you're actually able to you don't have to put somebody in every street corner You can you can work in a structured way to to generate Insight and it is possible to do that in some pretty dangerous places I wouldn't actually count Syria among the most dangerous places on the world in the world places like San Pedro Sula in Honduras which has a Murder rate of 169 per 100,000 people bag dad during the height of the surge was only 48, right? We had a team there earlier this year doing work for an aid agency and trying to map exactly where the The drug crime is happening on the street. It's pretty day. I would say more dangerous than Syria in some ways You know these unpredictable by the way. Yeah, well Yeah, we're just following up on Rob's point. Did you think have we learned anything for I mean? We've been in Afghanistan for a long time. I mean, you know You what you talked about the the insurgency being driven by a lot of other things than by the Taliban Suddenly that was an insight the US military seemed to gather by 2009 2010, right? So what what would you point to that? We've actually got right in Afghanistan What would you point to you that we've continued to get wrong? I Tend to think of Afghanistan as a cycle that's driven by corruption. So you have this enormous influx of Foreign funding and other sources of money, but it's coming into an environment where there's very little accountability Not through any fault necessarily of the Afghans but just because it's a war and you can't get out and validate things as we talked about earlier and That creates kind of a tsunami of illicit cash that washes around Afghan society Which leads to a lot of abuse and a lot of corruption that alienates and offends the population and creates space for sort of armed groups to step into that that Gap and portray themselves as clean and just and incorruptible and win over the population And that is kind of the Taliban stick right since the early 1990s. They've really been vigilante law and order movement more than a classical Insurgency in the way they've engaged with the population. So I think that's the cycle that I see in Afghanistan And if you think about that that means to deal with that, we need really four things. We need a counter corruption Program, we need some kind of governance reform and capacity development program to handle the problems of abuse We need some kind of national reconciliation and reintegration Program and then we need a counter insurgency program and we actually have all four of those They and they're all doing, you know, reasonably well I think that people look at Afghanistan and they're worried about the wrong thing They're worried about the military situation and they're worried about how do we get to 2014? I'm here to tell you we've defeated the Taliban militarily Hands down three or four times over they keep on coming back because we haven't effectively dealt with all the other aspects We've never effectively done local level governance hand-in-hand with the Afghans We've never prevented abuse against the population driven by corrupt actors We've never effectively done local level reconciliation that could produce something lasting that could sustain the secure environment that's created by defeating the Taliban and so insurgents always come back So as I look at Afghanistan, I don't think that the problem is how do we get to 2014 militarily the problem is the 2014 elections The political stability that may or may not result from that the level of corruption that happens at the local level and Who's in charge of the country after that? And I think that's what we should be all worried about is the political future of Afghanistan after we draw down Not the current fight against the Taliban Bernard fall who I'm very fond of quoting his a 1960s counter-insurgency theorist said that the Government that's losing to an insurgency isn't being out fought. It's being out governed In Afghanistan, we have conti consistently out fought the Taliban But the Taliban have consistently out governed the Afghan government. So we're kind of missing each other and I think what's going to happen in Afghanistan is you'll probably see a fairly substantial amount of violence and corruption around the 2014 elections and after that you'll get either overtly or not to essentially a power-sharing arrangement where significant parts of the population and the terrain are controlled by the Taliban Whether that's stable or not as a matter for Afghans But we have to figure out how to enable that outcome and not so much be focused on just the mechanics of drawdown Which is I think what we're focused on right now Chairman of the back here whose hand up Good afternoon. My name is Ahmad Peter. I have one question and one comment For the question for us you said you you mentioned many factors for struggles Inside the many countries including the Middle Eastern countries, but you forgot or actually you didn't mention anything about the religious factor I know that and which brings me brings me to the next comment. I'm from Syria I know that information about Syria It's much less than that you see in the media and the reason because many of Publication about what's happening there are published in Arabic for me. I met many people here I try I spoke with them. I found out that they their ideas about Situation in Syria. It's much more different than the real one. My city is in Aleppo Northwest where the horrible thing has happened there and I arrived like one month ago So I stayed on the whole area and in Syria So the religious factor is very important like, you know, you can have a struggle in the city But if without, you know religious factor, it's like a spark. He can flame everything and I have just one note regarding al-Nusra Actually, there is two radicals in In my city. It's a doublet al-Iraq and al-Nusra. Al-Nusra actually is not attached to al-Qaeda They want Syria to be an Islamic state, but independent from al-Qaeda while al-Iraq Doublet al-Iraq wants to be attached and they are fighting each other in in Raqqa and in my city Aleppo through bombing cars and killing each other. So regarding the information in Syria I know that it's complicated for journalism and journalists to enter Syria and for us like journalists It's it's so I'm used to be a journalist, but I quit because it's so much dangerous It's like you could be killed Possibilities of being killed it's more than being an armed person So I think the problem is like the opposites or the people who work for the opposite are much more powerful in Translating this news into many languages. So people has, you know, some biased idea like, you know, the opposites are, you know Fighter for freedom. They're fighting that regime with their bare chest and do nothing while the regime is dictatorship Yeah, it's the regime is dictatorship. We know all that but it's like the situation in Syria It's more complicated than just two parts like many of parts like we said there is Shabeeha There is senior army security forces. There is radicals themselves. There is Taliban. There is al-Nusra There is some independent radicals who just came to die in Syria and met the heaven and go to the heaven and met the mermaids there They just yeah, actually there is people come across all the world just to die in Syria because they told them that Syria It's like a holy place if you killed in Syria You'll be in one way through the heaven like, you know There is one bus station between Syria and the heaven and there is many more for the opposite Thank you for your comments, sir. Yeah, so thank you very much. That's a great point. I think it's a great point. And I think Our full team that works Syria are Syrians And so I know that they get very different perspectives on What's going on then sort of people here necessarily in Washington do I think I would just pick up the issue of religion I haven't directly addressed Islam or religion other than in a paragraph or two in the book And and the reason for that is it's not because I don't think it's important It's because I think we've spent a lot of time thinking about that issue in the last decade And actually it's not necessarily the driving factor behind a lot of what we're going to be seeing in the in the future Um, yes, it's true that a lot of the places on the planet that will be these urban Coastal crowded environments happen to be majority muslim places in north africa The marker ebb east africa and so on But we see the same things in rio. We see the same things in honduras We see a lot of the same things in southeast asia The entire west coast of india is going to be one giant conurbation by 90 by 2040 So it's not something that's unique to the arable world or the islamic world And I think we need to sort of again Just be cautious about applying paradigms Like the war on terror or like is Islamic radicalism To this set of phenomena because it's actually it's a little different as you said more complicated than that You have a token islamic radical in the front called akkad malik who is a fellow here My name is akkad malik some of you already know me My karni fellow in new america, but also Assistant professor in national defense university in islamic. I'm going back at the end of the week. Um I wrote a whole Page full of questions on karachi, but then you preempted me on that But I I wanted to take that and go into Very concisely about baksan highly complex environment where the 60 70 plus Radical extremist groups, but on top of that there's many other non-seductors that that are finding Ground to root there or express the grievances for example lack of governance in the last five years Absolutely terrible mismanagement of services the whole country in that respect and you've got Literal services laur for example is not literal But you you clarify that part because striking laur from from from from the coast would be an option But that doesn't really make it literal If the u.s. Was again involved I guess But that complexity and the future situation there Did you address that? I mean, I've not read the books. I'm looking forward to that but address The massive variance not just one or two parties Massive variance of different parties different objective different ambitions And then you've got a government in military who're trying to compete with that and I've been getting my head around this trying to write a strategy and counter as I'm working on that for the last four Five years now Um still working on it. So I didn't directly address Pakistan In in the book except in so far as uh to in the Chapter that includes the case study on Mumbai I talked a little bit about how laski taiba were trained and how that operation was run um, and I think It's easy to look at pakistan from outside and say well these guys were trained in a pakistani military base They had advisors who were either current or former members of pakistani special forces There were ISI officers in the safe house that was running the operation that must mean pakistan's You know running the attack we actually know that the situation is much more complicated than that that people wear multiple hats and that it isn't a case of Just because something happens in a government organization that means it's government policy Anyone that lives in washington dc ought to really intuitively Understand that um, but I think where pakistan is very interesting to me is as an example of what we see across all of south asia Which is one of the fastest growing? coastal urban regions in the planet actually the fastest is dakha in bangadesh If you were born in dakha in 1950 you would have been born in a town of 400 000 people Today it's 12 million It's going to be 20 million by You know the middle of the century we We have this idea of stability and this is one of the things I talk about in the book and I think it's relevant to pakistan People focus on stability. I think and say how do we stabilize the environment and there's an assumption there Which is that normal is stable, right? And if we get it back to normal we somehow stabilize it everything will be fine But if you're in a city that's growing as fast as dakha or karachi or mumba normal is not stable, right? and there's a whole series of government policies and other things that have happened in pakistan and in india and in in bangadesh Which have been kind of just a little bit too late to to to deal with the situation by the time those Solutions come in place that the society has already gone beyond them Jfc fuller who's a british general of the 20th century Watched the french headquarters during the collapse of 1940 when the germans invaded France it's kind of not really clear exactly whose side he was on But he said, you know the the french high command repeatedly came up with Plans which would have been workable 24 hours before Right, so they were just slightly behind the curve of where the the campaign was developing on a longer time frame You see that with dakha and karachi and mumba and a bunch of other places in south asia Where the government continually comes up with plans that would have been Workable for the situation that existed sort of four or five years before but the society's already overtaken That so i think we need to be focusing not so much on stability trying to find A characteristic of the system that actually doesn't exist We should be focusing on resiliency, which is a characteristic of actors in the system Not trying to hold the tide back, but trying to teach people to swim right figure out how communities and businesses and police forces and everybody that's operating in these These cities can actually cope with rapid unplanned urban growth rather than trying to turn it off And i think that's where a lot of these co-design ideas that i talk about towards the end of the book are relevant You know, it's not so much people coming up with the answer and imposing that solution But it's people finding something that helps them cope with the environment respect to one of rob's points We We criticize counter insurgency for a lot of failings that are not unique to counter insurgency They're not even unique to theories of conflict if you look at the unesco Water intervention in Bangladesh in the 1990s You see exactly the same set of problems that we've seen with counter insurgency intervention In afghanistan, you know lack of knowledge of the environment bad understanding of metrics Not a good engagement with the population and a need to Do better accountability all the sorts of things people say about afghanistan So what that tells me is that those problems are not actually inherent To counter insurgency. They're inherent to interventions of all kinds by outsiders in these kinds of environments So getting back to pakistan that tells you that the solution For pakistan's problems lies with pakistanis. It doesn't lie with international community imposing some kind of set of requirements or You know, it's it's something that only pakistanis can deal with what i'm encouraged by as I look at pakistan very free press very free judiciary free, you know free academic debate Not perhaps as free as we might like but dramatically better than in some other places and just a lot of Urge for democracy and social justice Among people in in pakistan and I think there's a lot of of positives there How would you assess iraq? You spent a lot of years there and is it going We've had a debate on this stage between two people, you know, joel rayburn and dug all of them both of whom are fellows here Joel has long said that iraq is going to hell in a hand basket He's a serving colonel in the u.s. Army who worked for patrice Doug was the guy who helped write the battle plan for bagdad in 07 I was the nsc director on iraq who's saying iraq is going pretty well So my answer would be like compared to what right? I mean the If you look at iraq now The level of violence in iraq today is about where it was in 2006. Yeah, which is bad bad. It's very bad There's a bit of a debate about why that is right clearly What's happened in syria has given a bit of a new lease lease of life To islamic state of iraq to al qaeda in iraq a bunch of other groups that we had just talked about But that's not the only factor. There's also a syria dynamic And a dynamic between the maliki government The regional governments and different groups at the city level that that's driven That what I would call backsliding of the security environment Um, frankly though, that's kind of a us-centric way of thinking about it Right that we made it awesome by 2010 and then it went bad, right? Actually, you know, you can look back on iraq and say well, you know, we did successfully reduce violence in iraq By about 95 percent between the end of 2006 and about september of 2007 But it's it's been on an uptick ever since right, so if you have to put in You know 500 000 international troops including, you know Half of those being americans in order to pull something back from the brink Maybe it's better off. You're better off not to go there in the first place right, so I think We people I don't see iraq on the front page I think that's because people don't see it as our problem anymore because we're not there anymore in any significant strength That doesn't mean that it's not real and it doesn't have an effect on On the regime But on the region one of the things I think that's most important in iraq that gets talked about least Is the Kurdish dynamic and it gets back to syria So we have talked about a number of radical groups in syria. There are also Kurdish groups Who are not just rebelling against who should control syria. They're not just rebelling against the Assad regime Some of them like pyd Are rebelling against the very idea of syria itself. They want to have a Kurdish autonomous state That is, you know across syria. It's across part of iran It's cross cross part of turkey and northern iraq and we see a lot of folks coming from Iraqi Kurdistan into northeastern syria to work with those Kurdish groups We've seen the turks change their point of view Significantly with respect to Kurdish regional autonomy in the last year partly because they're saying, you know what you want to have an autonomous Kurdistan much better you have it in Kurdistan than in syria than have it in in turkey So I think there's a very significant regional dynamic associated with Iraqi Kurdistan that has to do with where the oil goes It has to do with things going back 20 30 years in the relationship between Kurds and Arabs in in iraq And I think that's one of these kind of under reported big issues that Will potentially transform the region in the next decade or so Gentlemen over here My name is david couch from the department of state David could you be a bit prescriptive in terms of what the us government could do to be A little bit more effective in in these kinds of interventions in these environments that you anticipate particularly I mean we see steward bowen the former special inspector general for iraqi reconstruction who is beating the drum for the us office of Overseas contingency operations a bill's been introduced. It's probably not likely to go any place But nevertheless, that's one effort to go and do something so be a bit prescriptive in terms of what can realistically be achieved In terms of the political will in the united states right now for our further involvement in these kinds of situations going forward um Thanks, david at the risk of embarrassing david cats He's one of these badass state department guys that I was talking about right Do you spend 20 years in the region david something like that? Yeah, there's been pakistan and afghanistan prt time Embassy time, you know a huge amount of local knowledge and the willingness to you know strap on a Backpack and go some pretty you're in new ristan right in 2000. Yeah So, you know, this is what we have we actually have a subset of people across all these departments That really understand the environment and have worked together over the last decade and again That gives me a certain amount of hope right because yes It's a big organization the us government But actually the community of people that does this stuff's relatively small and as people grow up together Through some of these experiences you start to get a community of practice around These kinds of issues I think at the you know, we could talk forever about how to do this and I actually have an appendix in the book It talks a lot about how the military needs to think very technically about about the environment from a state department and from a us aid standpoint if I may I think that structures like cso and like oti in us aid Are the closest thing we have now to organizational structures Specifically designed to deal with the the environment of the last 10 to 20 years So I think that's the place to start when you think about how to adapt The organization for this more urban more connected environment I also think some of the ideas that came out in the transformational diplomacy Thinking of about five years ago and in the qddr are worth thinking about I think we want to be careful about Some of these ideas like the the overseas presence the American presence posts and sort of one-man Consulates that we talked about at one point I think Benghazi points you to some of the risks that are associated with those kinds of of outposts But I think a lot of what the state department's done with e-diplomacy And engaging with communities in a slightly different way also gives you a sort of start point to begin from I think and it's not this is nothing new to you, but I think focusing on You know people that are not English speaking men that live in the capital city Right gives you a much better understanding of what's really going on in some of these places than that traditional elite focused discussion that we often have In the diplomatic world that doesn't mean it's not important a lot of the decisions still get made by Those people but to understand the environment that you're operating in you need to be able to get out and engage with the population In a different way and I think the connectivity dimension that we have now allows you to do that without having Lots of people out on the ground And little one person presence posts I think that state needs to think carefully I would argue about how it wants to carry the risk Of operating in this kind of environment Right now we've chosen to carry all the risk at the level of the individual officer, right? So the rso knows that he's going to face the the original security officer the guy responsible for security in the embassy Knows who's going to face an individual Accountability review board if one of the officers in the embassy gets killed But the ambassador still needs to have reporting from the community So you have these guys breaking bounds and going out and engaging with people Without cover in order to do what has to be done, but no one's backing them up I think that there's some value in thinking about how dss operates And how oti operates and how cso operates and thinking what can a guy in the polychon section of a of an embassy do That's a little bit like that that allows them to get outside But do it in a structured way that we think through and we train people for that We equip them for that for it and so on I talked to some of the More senior members of the foreign service when I worked in the state department about how things used to be done Before the 1980s and I asked a guy who worked in west Africa Hey, um, you know before there was a diplomatic security service How did you guys operate like outside the embassy? And the guy said to me what do you mean? You would just like strap on a 44 magnum and get a new jeep and drive up country like that's what we used to do So we used to have state department officers running around doing all kinds of stuff In the 50s and 60s and 70s that you know You would never do now because there's this organization that says you shouldn't be doing that I think we've got to think past that to think how do we how do we actually operate? But I want to go back to something I said to rob which is I actually think we've got a pretty good basis here In terms of what's already there in state and usaid and defense. It's about Not so much coming up with a better organizational fix in washington It's about protocols and training and equipment and stuff to to make that work and final point fungible funding So people don't go into a district and they say Hey, I can see that there's five things wrong with that just this district But I have money for that So that's what i'm going to do and you do see that happen periodically where people come up with solutions that are Perhaps irrelevant at best or unhelpful in environments But it's because they're they're constrained by bureaucratic structures that force them to go down a particular path with with funding So there's a lot of unsexy stuff right that I think we should be doing I agree with you. I don't think usoko is going to get up There's just too much opposition to that very idea Within congress, which is kind of a pity because I think that stewart put forward an idea that's worth debating You know Do our structures that we have now which really derive like oti from from bosnia, right? Do they really are they really the best way to organize? Uh, I think it's a debate. We ought to be having maybe internally if we can get apso on board We're good I want to thank dr. Kilcullen. He's going to sign copies of his book After this. Thank you very much. Thanks. Thanks for having me