 The security gap approaches to policing in conflict. The hashtag for today's event is hashtag policing in conflict For as some of you may know USIP has a very rich history on working to improve policing in conflict affected settings. The Institute's research and policy engagements have contributed to a better understanding of how to establish and maintain security and rule-of-law in conflict affected countries and how to promote a holistic approach to policing and security sector governance. Our policing programs in the Sahel, Kenya, Pakistan, Tunisia and elsewhere are currently helping USIP to realize the potential of international policing assistance. Over the last year USIP has decided to significantly re-energize its position as a central actor in the field of security sector governance. So we're happy to say that over the next two years we plan to strengthen our capabilities to deliver timely, high-impact technical support to address strategic security sector governance challenges in key conflict affected environments. So this is therefore the first of a series of events that we're planning on hosting at USIP in the field of security sector governance in the next few years. So we wanted to start this series with this event, with an event that is focusing on policing and conflict for a number of reasons. First, most of us have spent time in the field working as, who have spent time in the field working in peace operations or as part of peace processes have realized that once hostilities have died down, there is another set of security challenges that tend to kick in. There is indeed a need to quickly re-establish basic security to allow humanitarian relief to flow, to allow people to return home, to allow children to go back to school and basic economic activity to resume. These are challenges for sure, but we also see them here at USIP as opportunities. They present unique opportunities to start repairing the numerous broken social contracts in many communities and we see police as a particularly important vector for repairing these social contracts because police are often the most common point of interaction of citizens with the state and as such they provide crucial opportunities to re-establish the legitimacy of the state in the eyes of citizens at a key moment in time. The second reason we wanted to host this event today is that, and you will see this from our panelists in our discussion and it will make it very clear, from our perspective while there is broad consensus and agreement that meeting these security needs is crucial, what we know is that international experience over the last decades has illustrated how difficult it is to support the provision of effective policing in these situations. So we are in many ways at an important point of juncture today. If we look ahead, we know that there are a number of security challenges that will be faced by local populations in countries that are currently facing conflict. We can think of Ukraine, we can also think of many countries in the Sahel region, for example. But we can also look back and looking back we have a unique opportunity to assess the challenges that were faced over the last decades in places such as Bosnia, Kosovo, Iraq and Afghanistan and more importantly the lessons and insights that emerge from these various international efforts to support policing services in these settings. So for that reason we've structured today's event into two main part. During the first part what we want to do is we want to take a hard look and a candid look at the hard lessons that have emerged from these efforts in Kosovo, Bosnia, as well as in Afghanistan. And then during the second part, we will be examining models that have been developed in order to better address these challenges. So this is how we want to structure our discussions today and we're very much looking forward to to these discussions. So with that I'd like to introduce you to our distinguished panelists. We're very lucky to be counting on a very good set of panelists today, and I wanted to start with introducing Ambassador Las Guna Vigamark and we have the pleasure of welcoming him today online. Ambassador Vigamark is the head of mission for ULX Kosovo. He has been leading the ULX mission in Kosovo since 2019. Over his career he served in a series of positions as a member of the Swedish Diplomatic Corps. He led recently the EU delegation mission to Bosnia and Herzegovina from 2015 until 2019. We're privileged today to benefit from his current first-hand experience with international policing challenges in Kosovo. I also want to welcome John Sokko back at USIP. John is the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction, following over 30 years of experience in oversight and investigations as a prosecutor, congressional counsel, and senior federal government advisor. John has been a regular speaker at USIP for many years, and we're grateful to be able to benefit from his thoughtfulness once more today. We're also joined by Jaswant Lal, who is the officer in charge at the Strategic Policy and Development Section of the United Nations Department of Peace Operations Police Division. Jaswant joined the UL Police Division in 2008 after having served in the Fiji Police Force for 26 years. Last, I want to extend a particularly warm welcome to Colonel Giuseppe di Magistris, who is the Director of the NATO Stability Policing Center of Excellence. Over his 30-plus year career with the Italian Carabinieri, he has served in numerous roles in Italy and overseas, including in Iraq, Afghanistan, Kosovo, and in Bosnia and Herzegovina, and working with NATO and the United Nations. I want to thank him and his entire team at the NATO Stability Policing Center of Excellence for helping to make today's conversation possible. It has been a pleasure to partner with him and his team, and we are very much looking forward to continuing to strengthen our partnership. So with this, I will ask all our panelists to come on stage so that we can start our discussions. And welcome, and thank you for joining us. Great. So as we just mentioned, let's jump right into the discussion. And first, what we wanted to do is to take the opportunity to look back and to focus our attention on a number of concrete challenges that we faced in different contexts over the last few decades and take a hard look at the hard lessons that we've learned. And then we'll move on to discussing about models that have been developed in order to better address these challenges. So what I wanted to do first is to turn to the context of Bosnia and Kosovo. The reason we wanted to do this is for many practitioners in this field, Bosnia and Kosovo was one of the first source of lessons that started emerging when the international community was focused on providing international policing assistance. And there are a number of concrete lessons that have emerged from these contexts. And we wanted to turn to Ambassador Vigomak in order to have a sense of the lessons that have emerged from Kosovo and Bosnia. And since he's currently the head of the UX mission in Kosovo, we thought that Ambassador Vigomak could provide a number of interesting insights on that one. So I wanted to start with Ambassador Vigomak. I don't know if he's able to join us online. If he's... Hi, I'm here. Hi. Good. Hello. Good to see you and thanks for joining us. Good morning. Good afternoon here in Kosovo and Pistina. Yeah, I was listening to part of your introduction and the meeting I was also trying to send some messages here on Signal because we have an unfolding incident in Northern Kosovo as we speak which involves our so-called foreign police unit there in a monitoring role, their monitoring situation. There's a so-called speaking of gap, security gap. There's a real security vacuum right now in Northern Kosovo. I don't know to what extent the other panelists are following this, but probably some of them are. They have experience from this region and similar situation. So maybe I'll start there as an example. We have had a presence here as EU rule of law mission since 2008-09 when we took over the rule of law mandate from UN and the early days of this mission we had a very large presence of police officers here with four or five so-called foreign police units. At the beginning I think there were up to 1600 police officers. Now we're down to our regular foreign police unit which is all Polish 105. We just deployed a small reserve of Carabinieri and a handful of Lithuanian special police in early November on November 8th. We could actually use some more here. We're going through something called the European Jean-Dar-Marie Force which is a kind of coordination mechanism for 70 EU member states that have Jean-Dar-Marie type of police and we had some of this reserve here earlier this year from France and Portugal when we also had a tense situation around elections in Serbia and whether they could be held or not in Kosovo in early April in the end they were not held in Kosovo for the first time in Kosovo's brief history and right now it's also about elections actually because all the mayors in the four northern predominantly Serbian municipalities ethnic Serbian I should resign a few weeks ago and new elections for for bi-elections for these four mayorships have been called for 18th and 25th of December although there are not so many candidates so far who have been nominated for for running in these elections and there is a real concern with from a practical point of view with security in particular because the Kosovo Serb police we drew resign from from from the Kosovo police force we're talking about close to 600 police officers in total so policing in northern Kosovo right now is ensured by about I'm sure I should divulge exactly how many Kosovo Albanian police officers there are there but between 40 and 50 I would say regular police then there's some special border police at the crossing points between Kosovo and Serbia we are there monitoring situation we have increased our patrols uh triple we tripled our patrols over the past month um we've been very visible I must say and quite successful in terms of at least reassuring the local population and others that there is a presence there but our mandate does not allow us to engage in in in um any kind of of investigative work arrests or some we do do not have it so for executive mandate and anymore in as a mission we had it until 2018 both in the judiciary and in certain aspects as far as policing is concerned related to the executive mandate in the judiciary that was changed um although if you go back and look at when when this mandate was handed over by the UN to the EU to the EU lex in 2008 of course that was a mandate based in large part on on UN Security Council resolution 1244 1244 which regulates um so we say the peace in Kosovo from from from 1999 onwards and this also the basis for the for the NATO presence here there's still a also much reduced but still significant NATO peacekeeping mission here that has special responsibility for a safe and secure environment in in in northern Kosovo so this is a situation that literally is unfolding as we speak now this early November these latest developments are due to um the ongoing still ongoing dialogue between Belgrade and Pristina with the aim to to finally try to settle the outstanding issues conflict and the mutual recognition of comprehensive normally or normalization at least of relations between um Kosovo and Serbia and we see now how our role here and my role of I'm less of a diplomat in this role as head of of mission we don't only do policing by the way we still monitor the judiciary we work with correctional services here we work with forensics in terms of helping the authorities to identify missing persons from from the wartime in particular in the late 1990s so we have I would say quite a quite a broad mandate still but as I said um not specifically an executive mandate what we do have is we have a sort of hybrid or quasi executive role in case of a specific request from the Kosovo police to support them in particular in terms of crowd and riot control so that's sort of the the extreme end of the of the scale we we do regular reconnaissance patrols in northern Kosovo especially with or without um kind of crisis intentions that we've seen over the past month and as I said we've increased our presence there patrolling we've also started doing foot patrols that's a decision I took as head of mission uh two weeks ago to also get out of our vehicles to patrol in the urban areas mostly one major city in northern Kosovo Mitrovitsa and then they're a handful of smaller uh smaller towns um so we can we have we have this capability to engage in crowd crowd and riot control which is quite an extreme at least for me as a non-police officer but not much in between this monitoring and patrolling and the crowd and riot control we cannot engage in regular police work law law law enforcement uh nor can k for so this is very much in the hands of the Kosovo police but the Kosovo police as I said all the Kosovo serve police officers include starting with the director for the northern district um resigned about three weeks ago so there is there's no very little official police what we do see is that some of the Kosovo serve police officers who resign seem to now um unofficially be patrolling a bit uh they've been offered by the way contracts by the municipal authorities there that are supposed to be paid for by by by Belgrade um and they have been these parallel structures all along over the past 10 years since the Kosovo serve moop police was integrated with the Kosovo regular Kosovo police um uh some 10 years ago um this was part of the the then dialogue uh under the then higher happy ashton um and involving Belgrade and Christina of course and they're also the judiciary has withdrawn from from northern Kosovo as well as as I mentioned the mayors and some some municipal um workers now maybe very briefly a word on both your heads really not although I I had little or nothing to do with the EU police mission there I understand there are colleagues on the panel who have uh direct experience from from that mission there was a new police mission there um for a number of years I came there in 2015 as a special representative head of delegation um of course we're very much living with a with a legacy of of Dayton first of all and the arrangements that were post Dayton reached with with a very fragmented police core in in the federation entity in particular with 10 different police um course in in in a sense because each canton and you have six six cantons as I recall that are predominantly bosnia can four never crowed in the public asepsia you have a more coherent system with one one police force for all over public asepsia um which sometimes is a is a concern I think in in the federations are able that the public asepsia the Serbian ethnic Serbian Bosnian police seems more more coherent um it's a unique solution for for Bosnia Herzegovina which I think is is is particular for that for that country but on the other hand there are plenty of if I my memory serves me right also in the United States you have different police in different states and and so on and they have slightly different rules of engagement and and so on so there's not one uniform police police core and maybe other other examples um of that as well um what I must say is to to to conclude um is that um our foreign police unit here although right now we're talking about a total with this reserve that we have as I mentioned of some 135 police officers in an area in a region that's quite large but not very densely populated maybe a total population of um northern Kosovo maybe 50 60 000 people in total as I said predominantly serve but there are pockets of Kosovo Albanians and a handful of other minorities in that part of Kosovo as well so even if we did have a more robust mandate it would not be possible for us to really engage in in um a full-fledged law enforcement capacity I think that would be it from my side thank you thank you thank you so much for giving us a good overview of how things are looking from your perspective right now and we wish you good luck in in responding to the evolving situation in northern Kosovo right now um when we will um go into the question and answer I think we'll be particularly interested in trying to figure out if there are one or two hard lessons or challenges that you're currently facing that we should be taking into account in our discussion but speaking of challenges and lessons learned I wanted to then turn to Afghanistan and look at the case of Afghanistan and ask um John to enlighten us a little bit about this this specific context and the reason why we are we were particularly interested in having John with us today is that he released recently I think it was in June earlier in June this year a report that was entitled police in conflict assessing the U.S. and international efforts to establish an effective civilian police force in Afghanistan it is a very comprehensive report that has a tremendous amount of rich and detailed information at the experience in in Afghanistan so John to the extent that you can within 15 minutes present to all of us here the main insights and results of your report we would be particularly grateful thank you thank you thank you thank you very much for that kind introduction and also for introduction to this report and for inviting me today the remarks I give today are really based upon years of research conducted by my agency which culminated in that report and we brought copies of it it's available on our website too www.cigar.mil that along with 12 other lessons learned reports from Afghanistan which I highly recommend anybody who's doing any planning on working on reconstruction or redevelopment in a post conflict environment I think it behooves you to read those reports because we have a 20 years of experience on issues that I think are relevant to all of us as we look forward to other areas around the world you know in particular the horrors taking place in the Ukraine remind us how quickly stability can disappear and even the the most modern looking of countries and experiences in places such as Afghanistan remind us how difficult it is to reconstruct a viable police force in the aftermath of military operations I believe that we must use the lessons learned from our experience in Afghanistan in future endeavors to build police forces in post conflict environments whether it's the Ukraine and Haiti the Horn of Africa or some conflict we haven't even thought of yet for nearly 20 years the United States and the international community provided assistance to Afghanistan's government with the goal of creating a legitimate accountable and effective civilian police force that could protect Afghans from criminals and terrorists alike without such a civilian law enforcement authority as our report notes the odds were greater that that country would remain unstable or revert to active conflict which of course it did in Afghanistan yet except for some specialized police forces community policing and law enforcement capabilities in Afghanistan were weak or non-existent despite more than 21 billion dollars with a b that was spent by the United States and the international community overall the afghan national police or a and p proved incapable of enforcing the law protecting afghan citizens from criminals and attacks by the Taliban and islamic state or ensuring that afghanistan did not become a haven for terrorism and as we all saw live on tv the a and p quickly collapsed following the u.s and nato troop withdrawal one of our critical findings is that the u.s and its international partners failed to fully understand the history of policing in afghanistan where the police the where excuse me has there has never been an effective nationwide police force dedicated to protecting its citizens primarily the police in afghanistan have existed to protect the government power often through corrupt or abusive means in particular the u.s and international community missed an opportunity in the early days following the invasion by ignoring the need to rapidly deploy police and rule of law advisers to stabilize what was at that time a post-conflict country now this was opposite to the approach taken in kosovo just a few years earlier instead the united states implemented what was called a light footprint strategy for maintaining a small troop presence an international community followed suit with the u.s focused on pursuing al-qaeda and taliban sponsors this allowed senior afghan government officials and power brokers to seize the opportunity to re-establish a police force that was beholden to them and protecting their interests as a result for decades the newly constituted afghan police force operated with near total immunity the afghan government and the international community did not hold afghan police officers particularly those with political connections accountable for numerous acts of corruption and human rights abuses this rapidly rapidly eroded any hope that the population had that the new afghan government would serve their interests and the taliban exploited that lack of trust for their benefit by mid 2002 the international community belatedly recognized the depleted state of the afghan police and by 2003 the department of state was given the responsibility for recreating a police force our report found out found that even though establishing law and order in a post-conflict environment is critical the u.s and international community unfortunately lack a deployable police assistance unit that has the required resources and required specialized expertise although by law the state department is the lead u.s agency for police assistance it does not have a dedicated team of deployable police development experts instead in afghanistan it was forced to contract out the entire police assistance mission with little or no oversight from the start the program struggled in no small part because the training program assumed that afghanistan remained a post-conflict environment and they had years to implement a professional police training program the state department also failed to embed experienced police advisors with newly trained officers to provide follow-up training in the field our report concluded that despite having the legal authority and the budget the state department was ill-prepared to operate in a high threat environment like afghanistan given the state department's difficulties the defense department successfully advocated to take over that role and by 2005 it did so but i as i and my staff over the last 12 years have found many times in afghanistan more resources did not lead to better results despite i would say one of the best reports i have seen on the subject which was co-offered by the institute of peace in 2006 that concluded that the u.s military was ill-equipped in iraq to train foreign police forces our u.s military in afghanistan quickly deployed advisors to partner with police forces and basically deployed units that were attached to the afghan military to do so therefore the u.s police assistance mission became in essence an extension of the military training mission but just because the defense department had more personnel and more money did not mean that it had the right personnel to spend that money police mentoring teams continued to be staffed mostly by soldiers who lacked a basic understanding of law enforcement or community policing principles or even anything about criminal investigations rather as you would expect they had experience in infantry tactics combat aviation or other military specializations things were so bad that cigar found helicopter pilots assigned to train the a and p and actually one instance i think the australians assigned submariners to help train the afghan police we also found u.s soldiers using videos of american tv crime dramas to as training materials because they had no other materials to use the train the afghan police who for the most part were illiterate compounding matters u.s police assistance prioritized rapidly increasing the quantity of police officers in the a and p over the quality and sustainability of police training and all through this time the taliban insurgency grew stronger as a response the defense department leadership decided to focus the afghan police to reflect us military counter insurgency strategies so instead of focusing on policing most police units focused on security and support to military operations they became the little brother to the afghan national army the afghan police therefore failed to develop the basic law enforcement capabilities required to prevent and respond to criminal activities that were plaguing afghan citizens and growing at that time this in turn undermined what legitimacy the central government may have had and turned those afghan citizens in many communities to the taliban or to tribal justice for security and for justice the widespread use of illegal detention and torture of suspected insurgents for example also led many of these communities to welcome back to taliban as liberators and i may add this highlights a dilemma i think that u.s advisors the u.s and the international community have in general and that is was cooperation with brutal brutal but militarily capable security forces worthwhile if it restored security or did that cooperation create more conflict in the long run in afghanistan and we don't answer that but that is a an obvious question uh that we need to address now to collapse of the afghan government and security forces highlights i think the importance of creating an effective police service in post-conflict and fragile states and that's the bottom line of our report but let me conclude with just two key findings before i i conclude my presentation here today and i hope it's developed into questioning the first is that the u.s donor u.s and donor community lack an expeditionary police assistance capability with police assistance experts required for them for most of the stabilization and reconstruction missions that we face around the world foreign police assistance is often a civilian led task but as we saw in afghanistan and to some extent what we're seeing in kosovo civilian agencies lack the force protection and mobility to operate in areas of significant violence and also lack usually the experts who can be rapidly deployed this result in is this results as it did in afghanistan and usually the military stepping in yet militaries usually lack the technical expertise to develop a civilian police force and associated ministries and since military advisors are likely to train the police on what they know best this increases the risk of severely militarizing the police our report notes that the united states should consider using its relationship with allies who have unique assistance capabilities such as italy and then the internationally respected carbonieri as well as many other organizations or police forces in europe that have military status as well as law enforcement status the genre a that was referred to by the ambassador the second key lesson i want to leave you with is that pre-deployment training and education for police advisors must include an understanding of the nation's legal traditions its historical relationship between the police and the population the extent of police corruption the command and control organizations the rule how it's tied into the other ministries to succeed this knowledge will help advisors avoid interjecting police concepts that may run counter to the host nation's criminal justice system as for example when us advisors try to import common law concepts to afghanistan where the legal system has historically been based upon civil law traditions intertwined with religious and other traditions if in the future police advising efforts should succeed and hopefully get a better outcome than what we saw in afghanistan policymakers must learn from our 20-year experience there and make those hard choices necessary to invest police assistance and undertake necessary reforms i'm reminded of something said by somebody far smarter than me and far many years ago ben franklin who said failure to plan is planning to fail and i think our 20-year experience teaches us all that afghanistan is in essence an example of what happens when we fail to plan when we fail to utilize the lessons learned by the institute of peace even when they looked at iraq or by some of the other lessons learned by our experience i think in the Baltic the uh in in kosovo and other countries so i urge everyone to if you're a policy maker who's looking at what we should do in ukraine or what we should do in Haiti i highly recommend you go back and study what we learned in afghanistan thank you john many thanks for for your comments and this candid evaluation of of of the challenges but also the the hard lessons that were learned in in afghanistan what i think i noted during your presentation is that this is almost a perfect segue to to just set this presentation because one of your lesson is that there is a lack of capabilities that can be easily deployed in order to ensure that there are effective policing services that are being provided on the ground and so we wanted to turn into turn to the second part of the event which is to start looking at the models that have been developed uh in in this case i think john was pointing to a lack of national capabilities but also john's remarks pointed to the need to for the united states and other governments to partner with nations that might have and i like nations that might have useful capabilities to be able to deploy and so in that context i wanted to turn to uh joseph and ask joseph to um talk about the models that have been developed at nato and you're particularly well positioned to to address this that might help address some of the lessons that john and his team's reports have highlighted with the experience in afghanistan so to the extent that you can cover some of those models that have been developed by nato in relation to the security gap and stability policing uh i think that would be particularly appreciated by one of the participants and the panelists joseph first of all most thank you for having me here and let me brag about being part of mr sopco team and since the center of excellence for stability policing uh cooperated since november 2019 have been cooperating with has been cooperated with the cigar so right yesterday we signed an extension of our cooperation agreement until 2024 so with that said let me start with the some questions to the to the audience just to quote a great friend of mine mrs hozna jalil former deputy minister of interior in afghanistan did you know that in afghanistan 150 percent more was the percentage of the fatalities amongst the civilians for crime related action rather than terrorism related actions did you know that the afghanistan police was almost entirely devoted to counterinsurgency counterterrorism operations just the 15 percent 15 percent of the imp was devoted to community oriented policing to fill the very gap the ambassador mentioned before it was going to fill this gap then going back to bosnia zegovina you may remember sir pedi ashdown the united nation special envoy for bosnia zegovina and bih she said the international community may have done made a mistake since criminal pause the greatest threat to stability in boy in bih yet instead of having posing the priority to the rule of law i mean the problem was the political problem so the priority was put on early elections without taking care of stability without taking care of the rule of law so it's like no using that terms which is pretty familiar for me since i've been in the law enforcement for my whole life putting aside all the crime related issues back in my country and look only on mafia related issues and what about the wall that blew up in that village in a no in a remote area in close to a rat only because the coalition build another wall to support the local population by doing so they move part of the revenues of this world from the local chieftain who will run a very small when to those who were running the well and really yesterday was told by a very seasoned practitioner that it was a wrong choice building a second well because we took money from that local chieftain so we destabilize the area no i might reply was this is mafia so we must feel this vacuum i mean another finding which comes from my great friend james canning a former cigar project leader of the police in conflict report is a finding from rand corporation after the second world war did you know that half of the countries which experience civil war revolved back to their situation within five years one fifth of these countries revolved to the previous situation within one year the record is Afghanistan nine days so law enforcement it is not a NATO task too often though NATO is called to step in because nobody else does it no actors are taking the stage at this point so NATO which is a political military alliance which has got expeditionary forces is to step in and so as it happened the result support is also to take care of all those issues relevant to the capacity building piece for policing but there are also gender military forces which can support this endeavor yet what is stability policing according to NATO we have to talk about police related activity aimed either or temporary replacing the local police in a fragile state or reinforcing these policies in order to uphold the rule of law so one of the stalls that the three legs of the stall know that the rule of law cops course and correction which must be addressed simultaneously public order security and then the protection upholding human rights which is a huge basket according to NATO doctrine which encompasses an awful lot of cross-cutting topics but we'll talk about it later so as you can see the center of gravity of stability policing activities is the population and the law enforcement of the of the host nation as I said through stability policing NATO addresses multiple threats somehow precluded to the combat forces of the liars think about any formal crimes think about no kinetic operation of terror related to terrorism ultimately you cannot chase our rubber with a tank but you can do so with police means going back to history when we talk about the security gap is everything started in bosnia de govina in august 1998 when the forefather of stability policing was deployed the multinational specialized unit because there was an issue it was not possible to implement the Dayton agreement so through the peace implementation council after the born conference in 1997 in december 1997 it was decided to make things happen to implement the Dayton agreement so to address the spoilers of the peace process which my great friend Michael Gigi always talk about which undermine the end state of the mission because they do spoil the mission from the scratch from the foundaments and by doing so they prevent the alliance to achieve their end state ultimately the military addressed the enemies the police address the adversaries of the alliance that said let me talk one second about the actors who can perform stability policing according to NATO there are multiple actors the first logical choice according to NATO doctrine are the gendarmerie type forces there is now a NATO grid term which took me took two years to agree with this term about gendarmerie type forces we are talking about armed forces fully interoperable with the military part of the military instrumental power integral part so we are not paramilitary we are inside the military we have the same structure the same organization the same ranks which performs back in their country policing towards the civil population they can do so also in a fragile state when they are deployed thanks to their robust assets so in a national as general Mike Jackson the first command in general from the UK in both in Kosovo said we are talking just about soldiers with the mind of policemen so what is stability policing in a national is just bringing the police dimension into military operations current post previous conflicts are very complex there are we must address challenges at threats which are very different and sometimes intertwine like the asymmetric threats we have to address threats in the great zone challenges in the great zone that cannot be achieved by the military instrument of power cannot be reached the actors the first logical choice as I mentioned the gendarmerie type forces however also the traditional military police those who carry out combat support operation can be part of this club the military themselves but also in a permissive environment also civil police or contractors when across the the full spectrum of NATO operations so across the four operational teams and most importantly stability policing activities can be performed in the three NATO course tasks collective defense which is now in a more proactive fashion defined after the the Madrid summit in late last June is a is not any more cooperative defense but is defensive deterrence crisis prevention operation and crisis prevention and management of operation non article five operation a cooperative security these are the three main core tasks of NATO and so in a really in a national stability policing is just shifting the gendarmerie type forces model overseas in operations in fragile states but when you think about a fragile state think about a country which is worn torn think about a country which was wiped away or its institution by a tsunami maybe you can name it as a war or you can admit like a man made disaster or a natural disaster this is it so it's important to note that the core business of stability policing according to nato doctrine is the civil population and the host nation police when we are especially in our or enforcing mission so either we replace the police or we sustain their endeavor in order to build their capacities time is flying so let me draw to an end the end state of stability policing for sure is a very quick empowerment of the local law enforcement the soonest we we transfer the authority the better true stability policing the alliance consolidates its gains focusing on that gap that nobody else addresses unless we leave the floor the ground the battlefield to our enemies and adversaries however let me say that robust policing requires a robust robust legal framework not the life footprint approach to echo inspector general so so that's conclude my briefing depending your questions just said many thanks for the for this overview of the the models and that are currently being developed by nato not being developed but also part of nato doctrine thanks to the work done by you and your team which then makes me want to go to the united nations and try to assess as well the models that are currently being developed or the frameworks or the tools that the united nations have also been developing as these lessons have started emerging from the context that we've talked about so just want to the extent that you'd be willing to to share with us what how does the un police division is approaching policing in conflict-affected settings generally and what are the frameworks and the tools that are considered as well at the un level so to feel free to take the podium and and share with you with us in the audience a few thoughts thank you very much thank you very much to us happy for inviting me to be together with such esteemed colleagues to talk about policing i do not wish to stand here and offer the real right solutions but what we are doing within the united nations so basically as a brief excuse me the united nations does not have an entire unit that it deployed so basically we are left at the mercy of the 193 member states that we have got out of which we have got 80 police contributing countries who deploy police officers to the field where we are mandated to operate and more recently until recent times we were just sending our police officers to peacekeeping operations special political missions now we are able to send police officers to non-mission settings which is anywhere around the globe so our policing started with the united nations in 1960s where we used to provide humanitarian assistance and monitoring only the mandates the complexity of tasks have grown from debt to monitoring interim law enforcement training and mentoring advising operation support reform restructuring and rebuilding law enforcement capacity building and development and security sector reform post-conflict development so basically we have gone onto all the gamut of the whole policing and law enforcement areas in between 1995 and 2002 we served in Bosnia Herzgavena one of the critical aims in Bosnia Herzgavena was to enable the police officers to be able to serve in UN peacekeeping operations and which we do now we have got 36 police officers in South Sudan and Cyprus now how do we do policing in post-conflict situation post-conflict situations are a bit of a moving target for us so you've got 100% heat where there is active conflict and that is probably the worst place for police to be involved and and because you cannot do policing or we cannot do policing so when it comes to about 70% heat that's where policing tends to increase its intensity that's where united nations police are most effectively deployed now when we look at post-conflict policing we had to go back within ourselves to ask our questions what are the lessons of our deployment our 40 years of deployment that we have learned firstly we didn't have any doctrine or guidance even though the UN General Assembly had asked back in 1994 for the police to have a standardized guidance we were still lacking that so well what we attempted to do beginning in 2008-2009 was develop what is now known internationally recognized when I say internationally recognized I mean 193 member states together with the other actors and through the United Nations Security Council resolutions three resolutions out of which is known as the strategic guidance framework so basically that provided us with the doctrine to base our policing efforts on now a strategic guidance framework doesn't answer the nitty gritties of undertaking capacity building and development or operations in specific niche areas it provides a basic bronze standard so that there are parameters that we operate with so that whatever we deliver is responsive responsible and representative of the population that we serve when we were developing the strategic guidance framework we found there were four challenges in fact three right one was the growth in demand for policing services or policing interventions worldwide the second one was the complexity of the tasks that we were the international community were asked to deliver when we were doing our interventions and the third and most important was the lack of capability within the donor or the or the contributing state to the state in conflict which led us to desire go back to the drawing board and find the knowledge and capacity and doctrine gap and this is the purpose for which the strategic guidance framework was there developed it was developed to provide a certain level of a certain level of answers to enable the contributing states to provide the right people in the right quantity at the right time to enable the right results because we were finding that we were getting lessons from everywhere but this was not being coagulated and synthesized and learned in a manner that could provide a brown sort of metal and I will always insist this is a brown sort of metal all countries have got internal security forces or law enforcement agencies not all countries have got policing services and that is the key word because policing is about policing for the people for the individuals in the country rather than policing for the government and that's where that's the foundation of our strategic guidance framework now within the strategic guidance framework there are four basically pillars one is the operations command administration and the last but most important is the capacity building and development pillar what we insist within the capacity building and development pillar is there five areas that interventions need to address to be successful and this is after studies with the member states I mean contributions from from the member states from institutions from interpol and other organizations those five areas are support to the policing services the actual policing services support to the enabling services that is they need to have enough budget to enable the services to be delivered there needs to be a framework for their operations for the host state police to for their operation the fourth one is the accountability and governance within the police service so they need they need to be accountable and the fifth one is the local ownership engagement which is the stakeholder engagement those who are involved in the policing within a country need to be engaged while we are developing the capacity of the whole state police and law enforcement agencies and basically we found that once these were able to be delivered we were able to build the capacity of the whole state police that was able to deliver sustainable policing through the thick and thin of times because we we believe that the policing and law enforcement and is a central chain of the security sector as well as criminal justice chain it is it is the nexus it provides the nexus between security sector reform and the criminal justice because that's where the commonality lies and we believe that the development of the whole state police is critical to have the development and the economic development of the country now with that intervention i'd like to leave the time for questions thank you very much appreciate your patience thank you jasmine many thanks feel free to come back and sit down so that we can now address a number of questions from from the audience both online but also our audience in person so i wanted to turn to the audience here first to see if there are any questions for our panelists today yes and if i may ask members of the audience to introduce themselves and then lead with a very quick crisp question please thank you very much for the life changes formally uh senior program officer here at usip and currently at george basic university i want to begin by applauding usip for addressing this issue and for having an all-star cast with us to identify the lessons that we need to learn and my concern about this is that these are not new lessons we've known for 20 years that there's a public security gap and we currently be able to address it appropriately and more recently we've identified that assessments which have been identified as a critical question assessments of corruption assessments of potential spoilers are essential so i thought my questions uh have to do with that and for currently majesties to set you my dear friend um nato has taken on this issue and i think it was about four years ago that ally command transformation provided to nato a stability policing concept what and could you describe for us what the status of that is and what the issues are that need to be overcome so that it can be adopted uh because we have heard we desperate we the us not just peace and stability ops but the us really lacks this capability and as far as assessments and that's i i think uh a question for our our colleague from uh u n police division i believe you mentioned the strategic guidance framework which stefan feller developed and in that guidance framework it talks about u n policing being used and he specifically talks about spoilers and the police role in that but the conundrum we face and it's the unspoken well giuseppe i think mentioned it or at least alluded to it the police and the government that they work for if you will are part of the problem rather than the solution so is there any u n assessment not just of capability but of the corruption risk the spoiler risk that the u n uh would is like in fact not as likely 70 percent of the time in my own work 70 percent of the post cold war to i'm sorry post cold war um missions have had spoilers so uh assessment is a critical issue as you your speakers are you thankful thank you very much i think in there there's a question for nato that i will ask giuseppe to to tackle and then there was also a question i think for just one to to answer so maybe giuseppe you can go first and then we can turn to just one to first and foremost a disclaimer i'm the director of the nato stability policing center of actions which is neither part of the nato command structure nor part of the nato force structure so i do not speak on balfour nato but i'm as my capacity as of the director the concept the strategic concept on stability policing is still on on its way now is on the ends of the international meter staff they will soon retask act a like command transformation to address several challenges within the concept itself so it has not been approved it has not been approved yet which are the criticalities uh i would say really uh in a national they are relevant to the misconception the mis-understanding on the actors and the function stability is policing is a function not only for the gendarmes but it's open also to the open club that i mentioned it's open also to the other actors in the general operation middle police the traditional ones those who provide support to the force in their combat support fashion i mean for protection mobility support detainees and policing discipline for the force are part of this club they can join however they will do they will discharge policing duties not military policing duties so this is the somehow the misunderstanding because there is a confusion confusion between the actors and the function itself however also the military can be part of the open club think about patrolling the a lake or a riverine area i mean you do need robust patrolling through maybe the marine corps and the same applies in a permissive environment as i mentioned to the civil police which can be part of this open club because we do need the instructors and as it was said also in the in the cigar report there is no country across the world which has got both the capacities the capacity and the capability to express such niche skills so only by moving forward in unison we will be able to make the difference thanks for to you for the mention to the spoilers once again the spoilers can be identified through policing means not only through intelligence means you do need also investigation capabilities however you do require these robust legal framework that empowers the robust policing to be deployed in any theater of operations thank you so much thank you josephi and i think in addition to the legal frameworks and the investing the investigative capabilities i think the question that michael is addressing here was also the need to be relying on strong or rigorous assessments of the situation on the ground so that we can identify and i think joseph and michael's discussion as part of assessments the importance and the role of assessments within the un set of tools and frameworks i think that's what michael's questions was also referring to so joseph do you have a few thoughts or to share with with michael thank you michael i mean personally i mean in my previous life i was a planning officer so i i essentially believe and it is all part of whenever we deploy un police to the field prior to any deployment we do an assessment and evaluation of the current capacities within the ground and that is very critical because we cannot provide any intervention without assessing what is already there because we do not intend to replace any of the services that are there so i think that is a basic requirement for our terms of reference for any deployment we do a in uh in country capability assessment capability and capacities assessment because that will determine the type of intervention the type of support that we can provide uh to the whole state michael hold on to the follow-on question okay okay just hold on to the following question because i wanted to make sure that we also tackle an important question with uh with john first and then we'll turn to to eulax and casserole the question i had with john is i think what was very clear in the various discussions today in the examples that we saw is that there is there is a transition in place where at the very beginning when at the end of armed conflict you may have an international mandate a multilateral or a national force present that could deploy uh some some capacity and capabilities to help address the security challenges but then after that there is a transition where ultimately and i think uh legitimately there is an expectation that these policing services will be implemented by effective legitimate local police services on the ground my question to john is i think afghanistan have shown us how difficult this transition has proven to be how difficult it is to move from the provision of international capacities uh or or means or resources to building that capacity so i wanted to ask john first if there are a number of lessons and you've highlighted some of them what would be the two or three most important lessons according to you that the u.s has to start operationalizing today uh so that these transitions can be better anticipated and better implemented well i think that's a very good question thank you for it i think the first thing is you have to realize that that period can be very brief and i think our report highlights study done by the un i think it's talking about in a matter of weeks you need to get somebody out there and start working so uh because then you you lose it uh the population realizes they're not being helped and then the bad guys come back and it's not just the terrorists it can be the corrupt officials it can be the warlords it can be the oligarchs or whatever so we're talking about a matter of weeks of months you need to get somebody on the ground at that point it's relatively safe for civilian advisors to get out there but you need civilian advisors who actually know how to advise police and what we saw with the state department when they put their advisors they just contracted it out to somebody and of course when you contract it out it takes months to get it on contract so you know nine months or a year later you get contractors coming in and there was really no oversight so you need people who have that capability that's why we talk in terms of this niche capability that the car benieri have that the gendarmerie we have somebody here representing the romanian gendarmerie you have these people who know who are highly trained as police officers and in their home countries they act as police officers but they also have that long not a law enforcement but almost a quasi military capability they know how to operate in dangerous environments and that's why i think there's been much talk about that and that's why we we cooperated with the car benieri in working on this report was because they offered a sort of a you know a capability to come in beyond the 12 weeks or 20 weeks and to do that but realizing that the car benieri and the gendarmerie whether they're spanish romanian or the car benieri they have law enforcement authorities back in responsibilities back home and as uh josep he told me yesterday i mean if you pull out a thousand car benieri you got a hole in the italian police force so nobody nobody right now has that capability to send in a thousand or 800 gendarmerie for a long period of time they may be able to do it for a short period of time but it's not going to work this is why the open club matters yes yes yes this is why the open club matters to kickstart design lay the foundation but then all the others can join in can i just add one other thing which i i didn't really mention too much in my presentation but we discuss it in report and i go back you call it the spoilers uh josep but i think it was ambassador ryan crocker who's very famous ambassador in the united states he was ambassador in afghanistan as well as in iraq and i think he's spoken here many times you know he said early on and he was the first ambassador i worked with that the the the main threat in afghanistan was never the terrorists it was corruption and that was the spoiler and he comments about how we ignored that and and that's what it was with the policing we ignored that the corrupt elements came back and basically you know spoiled the soup so and so that uh so thanks thanks for for for for this uh john i wanted them to move to a question to ambassador uh because if we think of this idea of a transition and making sure that we start on the right footing which i think is the point we were discussing if we look at the case of kosovo uh when ambassador bigom went to uh and started his work at ulex he found a very different setting he found himself out of much much further um in this transition process where at the beginning in 2008 on their and within the framework of security council resolution 1244 elex deploys has a significant amount of executive mandate responsibilities as people on the ground will will refer to but provide uh and help and support uh operationally a number of police operations moving forward uh in 12 years after that uh as he has described to us elex is now in a different position where the kosovo police services has emerged as a functioning institution is providing is the first responder to address these challenges and the mission has adapted to be monitoring a lot of these activities providing operational support and specific under specific circumstances at the request of the kosovo police services so my question to ambassador bigomak is even when we are much further in this transition and we've we've we've landed in a position which i think many people in other contexts would dream to find themselves in what are the challenges that you're seeing from your vintage point today even in a situation where things have moved on and the local capacities to provide policing services have dramatically improved thank you thank you and thank you for also for very eloquently describing the situation here as it stands today um and i would say first of all trying to to reply to your your specific questions that many of the comments in particular from john i think are still very relevant also with this situation first of all um yes indeed our mandate has evolved here in response to i think in general positive developments in kosovo they do have their own police force now that was established i think it's a fairly credible police force that enjoys support by most of the local population at least the kosovo albanian population the problem is in northern kosovo right now and that's not a new problem where the kosovo serb police was integrated with the kosovo shall we say albanian police from pristine on other parts of kosovo but then integration was never fully completed and here i think we as international community european union us whoever you may want to pick um i wouldn't say we have failed because these things take time um but the because of a serb police was never fully integrated in spirit if i can put it that way there was still a somehow a bit of a difference but but they were the ethnic serbs also in northern kosovo and in other parts there are predominantly serbian enclaves throughout kosovo also in the in in the southern part in fact the majority of of ethnic serbs live south of the e-bar and they are integrated into the structures but there are also still this phenomenon of so-called parallel structures i would not go into that now in in detailed in in in the interest of of time but the risk now is that the kosovo serbs police officers in particular but also judiciary and others who have now resigned about a month ago that they will not return that they will instead assume a kind of unofficial role in a parallel system and eventually that system will morph with again the serbian system and then we have what i don't want to say the word out here loud in in in in a in a public forum but i think you can all put two and two together so while we have moved ahead why i say we why kosovo has moved ahead and i'd like to think also the region moved ahead this this this risk is still there and we see just over the past several months because these tensions as i said came to a boil about a month ago and just today we had some incidents with election officials from christina going to the four northern most municipalities to start preparations for local elections in to replace the local mayors who who withdrew they were sort of pushed back shall we say nobody was was was injured from the reports we have where they're monitoring the situation but i'd like to come back to the general not to focus too much here now on the specifics in kosovo i fully agree with with the previous speakers about the need for some sort of expeditionary force in the european union we have this european gendarmerie force which is not an EU body per se officially speaking but consists of EU member states that have this gendarmerie capability including but not excluding excluded to to italy france also romania was mentioned slovakia um poland has it we have have polish police here but they also have a kind of gendarmerie like the nedlands actually have a gendarmerie spain portugal also uh now there are various political reasons why i think it's unlikely that certain of our members states would deploy here we have the carambiniere here we're we're very grateful but as was i think said um very well by by by john sopke even um countries or golden donors um whatever um such as france or italy that have very large gendarmerie forces uh mounting about a hundred thousand or or more and and uh for them to to deploy more than one or two platoons is is unlikely if i can put it that way uh from everything i understand um we have our own capacity here by the way to deploy within eight minutes but only one one platoon for crowd and riot control and maybe a second one for backups our capacity on the ground is is very limited i also fully agree with the observation that there are times when you really need to do this and what we're talking about is different segments in terms of timing timing is everything um and the first sort of instance the first example and having served in afghanistan 20 years ago was one of the first sort of you you are representatives there starting in january 2002 i think the need for policing was there from day one uh and i can recall the eu set up a police um training mission there but it took quite some time germany had a particular there was a kind of tasking within the international community but germany took on the role of of training the new afghan police and so on um i sort of lost track of it after um after that but i think there are lessons here to be learned for um that are not unique to any one one theater or or or or uh conflict and that is what relatively limited means we saw here over the past month or so how by simply increase increasing our patrolling we could fill part of this gap but we cannot fill it for for an extended period of time and as i said our mandate it also is also limited and i fully agree with what john and others refer to that military is not meant to do policing there the difference between green and blue boots is a real one there may be situations where uh so we say a tougher a more robust uh military style of policing is is necessary but for most instances we're talking about local community policing and i'm myself now without going into too many details considering whether because we have this highly trained very capable crowd and riot control uh force here predominantly i have a handful of police advice senior police i would like to have a few more police advisors who could just be on the ground ideally speaking local language or they have to at least have as was also pointed out and understanding what's going on i have a slovenian senior police officer who just deployed this summer he's big serbian he's now in in in in um in northern kosovo uh he and his colleagues but there are too few of them i would argue and i made the same reflection actually 30 years ago uh when i was for my first posting in belgrade and i remember meeting two swedish police officers who were working for the ose that at least until recently was another actor in this this this field um and they were part of a small group of about 40 police officers deployed under an ose umbrella in bosnia herzegovina we're talking early 1992 now so before the conflict erupted in april and they were saying look if there were 400 of us and we were deployed across bosnia in local communities because what they were doing they were they went around talking to local villagers local communities where sometimes you had an old conflict between neighbors over overland or a family feud or maybe a tree that was growing on the wrong side of of the fence and which unfortunately then deteriorated into to to bloodshed once the the the the conflict um uh erupted so to have this sort of bottom up approach i think we tend to come in with uh you know it's good to send in the marines uh at a certain point but but you also need to have uh other softer tools to use um and i think that's the purpose of this this this discussion um and um i'm in very close contact here with with um with nato colleagues with the force commander for k4 who's italian by the way and he was very helpful in in making sure that the the carabinieri that we we now had asked for arrived on time by contacting his his counterpart in rome because they have a sort of seven mil coordination there and and he himself was a former force commander in kosovo so he understood the need to act quickly so we they did deploy very quickly but i can tell you we had started preparations for this deployment already back in in in august when we had the last incidents here and we saw the need for a reinforcement i would gladly have more uh more of a reserve here but it's not all about numbers and the confidence building and the conflict prevention aspect of all of this is is essential but here again timing is essential you can't wait for months for years to deploy police or start to train this is a long-term effort in combination but we need to look at this as a sequence of different actions um from the policing point of view for your remarks i think that's all the time we have um but i wanted to thank to turn to the panelists and thank them uh really uh sincerely for taking the time to come here at your sepia and talk about these important technical um and host these important technical discussions very often questions of policing security gaps the kind of things that we've talked about today can be seen as highly technical theoretical but as we've seen in the case of afghanistan as we've seen in the case of kosovo even today these are very practical and they're crucial and the policing and effective policing is a crucial vector of any efforts to to build a sustainable peace so i wanted to thank everyone uh today in the audience people online for for joining us for this important conversation as i've mentioned this is the first of a series of events that we will be hosting at us ip in the upcoming years so thank you for joining us today and i want everyone to extend uh i want to thank you to all our panelists here today with me so thank you very much yeah