 I want to say thanks to all of you. Welcome, we're glad to have you here. My name is John Hamry. I'm the president at CSIS. This is when Dr. Lam proposed having this conference, I said absolutely. This was the first topic that I ever brought to CSIS when I came. I came back in 2000. I had been at the Defense Department. I was the deputy secretary of defense and was, at the time, we had had long and rather difficult experiences in Bosnia and Kosovo. I can still remember going to Bosnia, and this was in 1997, and talking with the commanders. And the entire conversation was about the challenges of re-establishing civil society. We're pretty good about overthrown governments. But we don't know how in the world to create new civil society afterwards. And I can remember this, our commanding officer, three-star general, and this remarkable insight he had, which he said, I found out the most important thing that we should do to get things going here is we've got to get the schools opened. He said the reason is, is because moms are the foundation of civil society, and they're not going to abandon their kids unless schools are operational. It was a remarkable insight. It's nothing that a DOD guy like me would have ever thought about. And it's one of those insights that you get that's a product of painful experience. We've had, what, 15 years of painful experiences. And we are right now going back into our normal pattern, which is government amnesia. We're going to forget all of this. This tends to be the norm, I'm afraid. I can remember so many times in 2000 when we were, or 2001 when we were getting ready for this invasion of Iraq, we were involved at the time because of work we had done and tried to put in front of a template. This is what you're going to experience. This is what we learned from this project. And we stumbled our way into it all, all over again. We've now had 10 years of this experience. We've been mapping it. The SIGAR, the Special Inspector General, has been documenting all of it. But what's the structure to remember it? And how do we make it part of us? This is what our fear is that we're going to, this amnesia is going to take over. And we ought to try to save ourselves, making mistakes one more time. So fortunately, we found two really very important partners to help us with this. Arthur Keyes, I have to say, the most remarkable meeting I ever had, first meeting I ever had with somebody with Art Keyes. We were going to have breakfast over at the Metropolitan Club. And he shows up with a dozen eggs. I said, well, they have them here. But he has, it's a micro, he's a micro farmer. He's got his own chickens, and he showed up with, but it grows a bit out of his spirit. This is a remarkable man. He created IRD. And in the last 30 years, it has distributed almost $2 billion of humanitarian assistance. I mean, talk about a remarkable organization and a remarkable set of accomplishments. And it's done by ingenious concepts of development. So when we started talking about this, and he said yes, we would be willing to help with something like this, it really gave life to the idea. And David Wall is with us from ACOM. He's the International Development Senior Vice President at ACOM. Deep and long experience in Iraq was it with USAID, I think, for seven years. And was actually one of our experts on economic development and finance development. And so ACOM said, yes, we're interested in this too. We need to still harvest what we can learn from this experience. And these are two organizations and two gentlemen that are committed to doing that. And so that's what we're going to do today. And all of you are very important to have you here for this. So I want to say thank you to all of you for coming. And thank you to these gentlemen for coming. Arthur, let me just start with you. Let's open this up for real. And would you please welcome Arthur Keyes. Thank you. Thank you, John. Only correction to your comments is we're only 15 years old, not 30 years old. But I want to thank you for your remarks this morning and for helping IRD and ACOM to cosponsor this important conference. We began this idea of the conversation that John and I had some time ago. It's great being here today to see everything coming into fruition. John has a direct experience of these knowledge of the importance of stabilization from his years of service at the Defense Department as well as CSIS. So we thank you for hosting us today. Let me thank Robert Lamb and the very competent CSIS team focused on crisis conflict and cooperation for making this conference happen as well, including Joy Ohn and Catherine Mixon and many others that have been working on this. I'd also like to thank ACOM, our cosponsor today and our partner in several international programs in the developing world. David Wall has shown great leadership and foresight and we're privileged to work together with him and ACOM. We undertake this conference at a key moment with so much happening in the developing world that challenges US foreign policy. From instability and transition problems in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Iran to Libya, Egypt, Syria, and other Middle East issues, to Mali, Niger, Chad, Burkina Faso, West Africa, from Sudan and South Sudan, Somalia and Yemen to political transitions in Burma and North Korea or to the presence of large numbers of internally displaced persons in Colombia. The international community is faced with a host of complicated and dangerous decisions to protect and facilitate stability and help advance strategic interests that will lead to peace, economic growth, and reduction in world poverty. We're glad that CSIS entitled this conference Rethinking Civil Civilian Stabilization and Reconstruction because that's exactly what we need to rethink. We now have a lot of experience from the Balkans, Iraq, Afghanistan, and Africa for us to look objectively at what has worked and what has not worked as well as we would like to have had. Of course, every political and social situation is different. And we have different historical backgrounds. But there are many common themes that we need to explore and see how we can do a better job in unstable situations that are bursting forth all around us. We need a rethink that is focused both inwardly, probing our civilian-led stability, instrumentation, and effectiveness, as well as externally, focused on how host nations perceive and benefit from these activities. What lessons can we learn? From the breakup of the former Yugoslavia in the 1990s to Yemen and Somalia today, fragile states pose security and financial threats to the entire international community. Yes, there is a strong track record of success by civil society groups in helping stabilize such societies by protecting vulnerable people, building resilience against renewed conflict, and rebuilding economic and governance institutions. Recent civilian stabilization successes can be traced to efforts launched by IRD and other international and local NGOs in the Balkans in the 90s, where civil society groups became critical partners in sustaining the peace and laying the groundwork for solid economic and social development. Since we're talking about the real world, it is fair to say that some civil societies, economies, and sovereign governments have developed differently in the Balkans. All were at peace today. Most economies have grown, and the civil society has continued to flourish. The stabilization programs, the community revitalization through democratic action program we did in Serbia, started out with Quick Impact, and then it moved to local government programs. And then on as the government and the economy began to take off in the straight economic development programs, it was a continuum. And I think today we can look at the Balkans in Slovenia, Croatia, Serbia, Kosovo, Macedonia, and Montenegro and see significant progress in all of those countries. Bosnia-Herzegovina, it's a mixed bag. Yes, there is peace. Yes, the civil society does exist. But there is a weak functioning or non-functioning government, and the economy is dormant. At the same time, two of the states of the former Yugoslavia have entered the European Union, Croatia and Slovenia. IRD and other NGOs are now applying similar community-based models of development in other conflict and post-conflict zones, including West Africa, Yemen, and Afghanistan. A relatively new development is that NGOs and donors now cooperate and coordinate directly with US and international security forces. In places like Iraq and Afghanistan, the coordination has been so close that NGOs' work has been viewed as a key pillar of effective counter-insurgency, particularly in the build phase of COIN's clear hold-build strategy. Both military and civilian leaders repeatedly point out that civilian agencies are often better equipped to understand and work directly with local communities. They are generally better received by local governments and populations, while some development organizations say such partnerships compromise their political neutrality. Beneficiaries recognize the congruency with the NGO community's mission to assist vulnerable populations, especially those caught in armed conflict. IRD believes that the vulnerable populations cannot wait until all of the ideal conditions are present for development. In fact, our experience shows that social development and economic growth are key elements that speed the securing of stability peace in long-term development. We have learned that it is important to bring in civilians early. According to one of our government, US government civilian counterparts in Afghanistan, even before the initial clearing operations in Argon Dopp had concluded, Uproad IRD in its lightly armored SUVs, ready to join the military in engaging local leaders in dialogue. Stability requires the trust of the host community. Trust is about winning the hearts and minds of the local population. Distrust is endemic in unstable environments, so modeling accountability by your words and deeds is by far the most important aspect of trust building. Beginning from the first engagement, we must deliver on our promises and expect and help our host country residents and officials to do the same. Security is always a major concern in fragile areas with open warfare always just around the corner. You can't develop your way to security, a PRT commander told me, describing the challenge of pushing a road into an insecure area of Afghanistan. One of our leaders was in a convoy that where an IED exploded and he got a call from Ambassador Eikenberry in Afghanistan and our leader, IRD leader probably responded, get the hell off the telephone. Why would our Ambassador Eikenberry be telephoning me? So after three or four exchanges like this, the Ambassador was able to convince him that he really was concerned about him and that he really was the Ambassador. But it does give an example of how the fragile relationship is in terms of stability and how important it is to have open dialogue with all the leaders on the same page. Programs should plan for an attempt to reduce risk in communities, work areas, project sites and field visits and build the key relationships to the local power structure that are so vital to our personal safety and our development objectives. It is important to keep lines of communication open to military and police leadership and outside security forces. The international NGO has an important role in being an honest broker, building lines of communication between community leaders, program leaders, local political leaders, the police, national government ministries and officials and military leaders. Civilian led stabilization programming is vulnerable to being sidelined or marginalized by several different actors. The military, foreign policy institutions, local communities, local governments, national governments and international donors. Too often these policymakers or military leaders are not familiar with the life cycle of stabilization and development programs and are often frustrated with the speed, pace or direction of programming on the ground. Policy changes can happen very quickly and interrupt programs that are underway. And there are many actors involved in this situation and it's very important that they keep working together in the same direction and problems come when different actors and go in different directions. But it is important to recognize that stability programs are intended to provide stability from both the military and security standpoint and stability to vulnerable populations needing access to healthcare, sanitation services, water, food and an ability to learn a livelihood for your families. Stability and reconstruction initiatives need to be large, significant and strategic to show immediate results and improvement in living conditions. This might be in the form of electrical power restored to a community or the extension of electrical power to a village that has never had electricity before. Or it might be in the form of the distribution of seeds to farmers to cultivate or in the farm of agricultural implements or the rehabilitation of irrigation ditches that have been destroyed by conflict. Civil society is strengthened when underrepresented groups women, ethnic groups, minorities, geographically isolated villagers and others are invited to become partners in building a new society. And it may be in the form of giving legitimacy to local, regional and national government structures who are seeking effectiveness and recognition. Jobs and employment need to be generated quickly. Some of the most effective stabilization and reconstruction tools come in the form of training, upgrading the skills of a workforce that is desperately yearning to get back into economic activity. This can often be done under the auspices of a government agricultural ministry or decentralized outreach project. IRD has learned that the more we build our stability and reconstruction programs around a common long-term community, provincial, and or national development plan, the more successful we will be as conflict areas move from instability to stability and on to successful development. In Serbia, the Djingic government when it came into play had a very clear policy of privatization. It had an EU focus. It strengthened local governments and it decentralized a lot of powers and it was committed to a market economy. So in that regard, the programs we did in Serbia sped up that process and major economic and social growth resulted. And as you know, in Afghanistan, a major challenge is for the US policy and the Karzai government to be working on the same page. Ministries have to be aligned together with stabilization programs for stable post-conflict stability. Stabilization programs must be flexible, nimble, and adaptable. The ability to respond quickly with targeted programming is crucial but it is even more important to be ready to adapt rapidly to the host communities working and living environment. Program results must be prioritized, documented, and communicated. High levels of funding injected into small areas naturally increase the visibility and expectations that come with stability operations and may be followed by high levels of mistrust, criticism, and media scrutiny. We must insist that our programs model accountability, invest in strong documentation systems and build robust communications plans targeting beneficiaries, donors, and stakeholders. Also, from the NGO perspective and people involved in stability, we have to stay close to our donors because they drive the process and they also make changes. When we were working in Afghanistan, there was a lion of a man named Richard Holbrook who was very involved in major decisions. I can remember very clearly how he took an interest in our AVEPA program which was agricultural program which was distributing seeds to farmers in the North and wanted to move it into the South to become part of the counterinsurgency. On the July 4th of 2007, I got a phone call from Kabul and said we really appreciate this program. We want to move it in. The Marines are going into Hellman. We want you there quickly and we're adding $300 million to your agreement. Boom, get to work, we're watching. So the donor is very important and very much a key actor of this whole process. Monitoring and evaluation of course needs to be a priority from the start and throughout implementation. It is important to measure program achievements against plans and continuously monitor results and make changes as necessary. That is being flexible, nimble and adaptable. Detailed M&E plans before startup must prioritize hiring and training local qualified staff. The most successful programs welcome independent evaluation and measurement from and in collaboration with outside experts. And as we all know, every large stabilization program in a conflict zone will be audited and usually by multiple agents. In closing, I would like to thank everyone for attending today's conference. I know I speak on behalf of IRD's 3000 plus employees around the developing world who look forward to hearing about this conference and our expert discussions. I hope we can work together collaboratively to take the lessons we discuss here today and try to help and make an impact in future programs for the benefit of those vulnerable populations who need and indeed depend on our effective support. I'd like to thank our participants from various sectors from host country representatives, US government officials, for-profit development firms and international NGOs. This conference is really a testament to how important they feel this topic is. I think we all stand unified in our goal of developing peaceful, stable and effective transitions in conflict environments so that economic, social and political development can take root helping vulnerable populations to succeed and flourish. In summary, General Petraeus recently noted that shedding our capacities and capabilities for stability operations will not make the need for those capabilities disappear. All future operations will continue to include some mix of offense, defense and stabilization and most will be comprehensive civil military endeavors requiring us to employ every tool in our diplomatic, economic and defense arsenals. Development has always been the weaker institution at the conflict table. Nevertheless, it must be elevated and supported or the other institutions risk diminishing their own effectiveness and success. Thank you. Thank you very much, Art, for your very kind words to John and to Robert for inviting us to participate and inviting us to sponsor this event. On behalf of ACOM, I want to welcome our distinguished guests as well as everyone who's participated. There was some discussion early on, I guess, about the topic of stabilization and whether it was still relevant and judging by the participation, I would say it is indeed very relevant. On behalf of ACOM, we're very excited to be here and sponsoring this event but also very happy to participate with IRD. Some of you may or may not know, we do have a fairly close collaboration across a number of programs in a number of different countries and we enjoy a very close collaboration in that regard. We view stabilization as really almost an emerging, if not kind of here to stay activity in the development framework. It's unfortunately becoming an increasingly more prominent activity in a lot of the programs that we see around the world and as a result, we've seen unfortunately a sort of trend whether it's through our OTI programs, Office of Transition Initiative with USAID or just straight up stabilization activities whether it be in Afghanistan or elsewhere around the world and I think it's important to echo, I think John's earlier comments about old wine, new bottles if you will. This is not a new thing for the United States government or the United States foreign security apparatus to contend with but I think it certainly bears worth a careful analysis as we begin to embark on the next phase if you will because of the relevance of the lessons learned over the last 12, 13, 14, 15 years. It's not even that quite frankly. I think if anybody who's a student of this particular arena or this particular paradigm if you will within the development context whether it's Beirut in the early 90s, late 80s, whether it's Central America or even going back to the Vietnam Hamlet Evaluation System, I mean there's a tremendous body of data that's out there for us to look at as development practitioners and as folks who participate in foreign security operations and I think it certainly is more relevant today than ever as we begin to see a pull back if you will of the military sort of hard power aspect of things and the resurgence of soft power and I think we really do need to look at the tools and the lessons learned if you will. So as far as we're concerned from ACOM's perspective we think the relevance of this conference at this particular juncture is paramount quite frankly in the discussion and I think as we were just chatting earlier on this morning as many folks are sort of running away if you will from this discussion I think it's very important for us to remain engaged and remain committed to the debate and the discussion and finding out again lessons learned and what works and what doesn't work so on behalf of ACOM I wanna thank you and welcome everyone and in the interest of time I think we'll just hand things over to Robert and get things underway so thank you very much. Good morning everybody my name is Robert Lamb I'm the director of the program on crisis conflict and cooperation here at CSIS. Thanks to all of you for filling up this room today and thanks as well to all of you who are watching live from the internet. This will be the last C3 conference and will soon be known as the old CSIS building. In two months we're moving to a new building on 1616 Rhode Island Avenue and I personally am very excited. It's got amazing new conference facilities not to mention nice new offices. There's an addendum in the program that should be there I would just have you take note of some of the program changes that we've had to undertake due to some unforeseen circumstances. We have a great agenda today. Everyone who will be speaking today, all of the panelists, most of you here in this room and watching from the internet live today are all involved in a very interesting field involved in somewhere another working to reduce violence and conflict whether the risk of violence to mitigate its effects to prevent it. The field broadly speaking has a wide number of sub-disciplines whether you call it post-conflict reconstruction, transition, stabilization, consolidation. There's a lot of different words peace building as well. But all of these fields have one thing in common. Would all of us in these different sub-disciplines of peace building, stabilization, reconstruction, transition, and consolidation, what we have in common is that the demand for civilian powers is not going away. Public opinion, will wax and wane. We were for humanitarian intervention before we were against it. People were for counterinsurgency before they were against it. The media might be with us, they might be against us. Congress might be providing more support, might be providing less support. But the truth is there's always going to be conflicts and the demand for the United States to do something about them isn't going away. That doesn't mean the United States should be the world's police, doesn't mean the United States should be intervening everywhere in the world. It does mean that there's always going to be pressure for the United States to do so and there's always going to be temptation for the United States to do so, which means that once in a while the United States is going to intervene somehow. Now there's a clear preference in our data set and through the broad experience of most of people in our field that the top political leadership of the United States prefers to use civilian power to respond to these crises before they spiral out of control. We prefer not to use military power. There's some notable exceptions but the overall broad trend is clear. The problem is that the support given to civilian institutions to respond to and support transitions, stabilization and reconstruction work is really pretty poor. So the demand for what we do in this field is not going away and so we really better learn how to as a society to support civilian power. So that's the public message that we wanna send that the American people should not lose faith in this field. They seem to be. Another message of this conference though and it's gonna be a theme throughout the day is that while we've had some successes in this field we really do need to do a better job of giving Americans a reason to have faith in what we do. In 1927 there's an economist named Alan Young and what he said is that even an industrial dictator with all the power to move capital and labor in the world could not compress a half century of normal progress into just a few years. That's a lesson that we've been learning over and over for 85 years. In 1949 the World Bank said that development and reconstruction of any society has to be led by the people in that society itself and those of us in the outside world who wanna support that can only support that and we should coordinate with each other and we should coordinate with the people in that society and their government. That's a lesson we've been learning for 64 years. The World Bank also said in 1949 that it's not just the capacity of the people who live in that society that's a constraint on their ability to reconstruct and develop and stabilize. It's also donors blindness, our ambitions, our objectives, our assumptions, sometimes our arrogance. That sometimes we don't understand what's actually happening in the places that we're trying to benefit and so we implement things that we know how to do and they don't work and then we wonder why and we've been learning that lesson for 64 years as well. Now in those 64 years we've done a lot of really great things in the world. Not just in Europe and Japan but more recently in the Balkans. There's been great progress in Colombia and many other places as well. But the truth is, we keep learning the same lessons over and over. I was joking to a colleague last week that there's really only about 13 lessons in our field and we just keep learning them over and over again and every decade we just call them something else. And the truth is, if you read the 1927 Allen Young, the 1949 World Bank, even Albert Hirschman in 1965 who said that what we think are constraints in a society that we're trying to help might not actually be constraints. The human capacity for creativity and survival is pretty enormous and what we think should work in a place might not be what locals think can work in that place. That's another lesson that we've been learning for decades. All of these lessons sound suspiciously familiar if you read the Paris Declaration, the Accra Agreement, Busan commitments, any of these documents that we keep coming out with every few years. So I'd like to humbly submit a research agenda for our field. Whenever we do a program evaluation, whenever we do social science research about aid effectiveness, whenever we collect best practices and lessons learned, let's not just end with a policy recommendation that we should do X next time where X is coordinate with a local population or let the host society take the lead or fill in any one of the 13-ish lessons that we all know. We should do that, obviously. But don't stop there. Do a little more research. Ask, why didn't we do that this time? It's not like we didn't know. What we need to do is research on our own institutions. Not only the good technical capacity assessments and needs assessments and political economy assessments of the recipient societies. It would be useful for us, for our own research agendas, to look at the political economy of our own organizations, understand what's preventing us from understanding local population, preventing us from implementing a lot of the things that every few years we tell ourselves we need to learn how to do. Because the truth is conflicts aren't going away. We're going to be getting involved in these things for many, many years over and over again. Our dataset showed that about every two and a half weeks there's a new political crisis in the world. It's rare for the news to actually demonstrate that, but this summer we've had Syria, Turkey, Egypt, about every two and a half weeks. It kind of matches our data very nicely. There's a lot of other topics that our field should be looking at. One of them is gender. What you'll notice on our agenda today is that it's pretty male dominated. A lot of the research in our field in dealing with gender as treats women as victims. And there's a pretty rich and growing literature on that topic. There's a fascinating small literature on women as perpetrators of violence and conflict. It's very fascinating. And there's a new and growing literature and interest on women as peacemakers in conflict areas. And that's a line of research that really should be pursued pretty vigorously. Last week the Fund for Peace release, their failed state index, and Christa Hendry, who's here today, said that the three Ds should be placed by four Ds. That it's not just development, diplomacy, and defense, but the fourth D should be data. With the release of the new GDELP data set, a quarter of a billion data points. Who did what, when, where, with what attitude? Geocoded precisely. This new era of big data. This is a new world. Mere correlations and regressions are not gonna be enough. If you're going out in the field and you're collecting data and you're not geocoding it, you're living in 1995. If you then take that data and fail to share it with other people in a way that's accessible and aggregable, you're not being helpful. This goes to all of us. We've collected data. Now we've tried to make our data set available online as well. But sharing data, aggregating our experiences, and especially geocoding it so we can pinpoint where it's happening and understand better the subnational spatial dynamics of what's happening in our field is gonna be critically important and it's something that we can no longer afford to avoid. Finally, there's been a lot of interest in the private sector, recognizing that in fragile states and in conflict and violent areas that official development assistance has not made nearly enough progress there as it has in other places. And so now there's a lot of interest in wondering, well, maybe the private sector can do something that the public sector can't. There is indeed private sector activity taking place in conflict zones. We don't always recognize it as such. It's informal, it's done by illicit actors, it's done in sectors that we don't quite understand, but it does happen. But we also need to be cautious. We can't believe that just increasing private sector activity in a fragile area or a conflict zone is going to automatically lead to good development outcomes. We have to study much more closely what the potential for positive spillovers are. How do you capture the positive spillovers? How do you avoid the negative risks of increased private sector activity in conflict areas? Now these are topics that our program is actively engaged in. These are topics that our program is actively fundraising around. And these are our topics that a lot of us should be collaborating with each other a lot more on. And I want to encourage that. So today as you listen to all of the speakers, as you raise questions, as you talk with each other over coffee, I want you to think too closely about the two basic messages of the conference today, which is the American people can't lose faith in this field because the truth is the demand for this field isn't going away. And we in this field need to be worthy of their faith by continuing to rethink how we operate, what we're trying to accomplish, how we're studying it. So welcome. We have an exciting program today. And thank you for all of your attendance. Thank you as well to IRD and AEcom for co-sponsoring with us today. Thank you Arthur and David for your comments and thank you Dr. Hamry for opening up today. Thanks. To get this conversation started, we're gonna have a conversation between two people who barely need an introduction. Extended biographies are available in your program for all of our speakers today. So we won't spend a lot of time introducing people. I do want to say that Ambassador Jim Dobbins is a name that should be quite familiar to all of you. He has spent many years in the field back here in Washington working at RAND, studying nation building, studying conflict, understanding how we can do it better. And when he was named the new special representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan, it occurred to me that there were very, very few people in the world who could really step up to that challenge of that position. So I'm extremely pleased that Jim Dobbins will be joining us this morning. In the media, a lot of people have gone negative on our field and some of it's justified, some of it is not so justified. But David Ignatius of the Washington Post has been one of the few mainstream journalists, columnists who regularly write about the things that are happening in our field with the depth of knowledge and intelligence that many of us in this room would envy. It's my pleasure to have David Ignatius and Jim Dobbins join us on the stage for a conversation about where this field's going. So thank you to Robert Land. Thanks to all of you. I'm David Ignatius. I want to introduce Jim Dobbins who's really our speaker, but I want to do so with a few introductory remarks. As Robert said, I have been looking at and thinking about this problem now for, it feels like a couple dozen years. I have to say that I think you're gathered here to discuss really the most important issue for US national security policy. It isn't often seen that way and I think that's part of the problem. But the more I think about where we are in 2013, the more this set of issues seems to me to be absolutely central. Just to think for a couple of minutes with you about what you've all seen, what I've seen as a journalist visiting in and out. I've visited over this last decade so many PRTs in Iraq and Afghanistan trying to find a new way to bring development assistance, counterinsurgency assistance, intimate contact with people. I can recall going up and down the Kunar River Valley, hearing about the road strategy and roads we're going to bring business and business was going to bring stability and I can remember all the things in Helmand Province, walking around Marsha with people who were just telling you that stability was going to happen maybe tomorrow if it hadn't happened yesterday and in the belts west of Kandahar, the same feeling of positive energy and dynamism, a whole similar set of hopes and expectations in Iraq before that and if we're honest and look at the accomplishments of those programs, we have to admit that they're not what we dreamed, that we spent an awful lot of money let's be generous with uncertain results where we're still hopeful and we'll talk to Jim about what Jim's own expectations are but now we're in the period where the expeditionary armies that allowed programs like the ones that I'm describing that I bet most people in the audience can remember clearly, those expeditionary armies are coming home and as the president says as his challenger Mitt Romney really ended up by the end of the campaign echoing the period in which we'll do that we'll send these big armies abroad to stabilize conflict zones probably is ending for some good long while and so what I've been writing about is what I see as the power gap that exists as the armies come home how does our country project power and shape events in this incredibly turbulent world that we see stretching across Africa, the Middle East and Asia when I look at the institutions in Washington that are nominally charged with dealing with problems like the ones that you're gonna talk about today here's what I see, I'm a journalist I get to say whatever I want so I'm gonna be as frank as I can I see first USAID, an institution with a long and admirable history but an institution that in the eyes of many people has become more of a contractor than an operating agency, an agency that's got an awful lot of its own bureaucracy that it has to deal with an agency that worries an awful lot about what congressional appropriators and authorizers think and gets pretty nervous about steps that it has to take so an agency whose mission is central but whose performance is a complicated set of problems I see the US Institute of Peace and its magnificent building next to the State Department nicest real estate in town and I see many friends there who are doing wonderful work, wonderful studies but I see an institution that really if I were to say, how does the USIP fit as an instrument of national power I think a lot of people in the building would kind of run the other way because that's not the way they wanna be seen and they feel that they can't do their mission if they're seen as being tasked by the NSC, the interagency process they're very deliberately and self-consciously a boutique I see the conflict and stabilization operations Bureau of the State Department you'll be hearing from its director at the end of your sessions today a wonderful idea, the projects that it's doing I think seem really good but it's pretty small and we're talking about the biggest foreign policy problem that the United States has by my account and we have less than 200 people the last I counted they've had to really narrow their focus to a few particular areas where they're gonna try to make these operations work so that can't be the answer you see the CIA which has as its political covert action mission shaping developments in parts of the world that are in turmoil that's a complicated function intersects in complicated ways with political leadership but also you'd have to say the new director John Brennan has made clear that he wants to bring that agency back towards its traditional mission of collecting intelligence so to the extent that that would be a place you'd look you have to be careful and then finally NGOs doing such incredible work the expertise that's been built up in that sector the way that it's learned to cooperate interact with governments is magnificent and yet if you look from the former Soviet Union Russia itself and the surrounding countries Egypt and other countries in the Middle East and North Africa you see that this is a world in which NGOs are having more and more difficulty and not just American NGOs in operating in this turbulent political climate I was just down in Tampa visiting special operations command they bid large to fill this space no one should have any doubts that Adam McRaven and Socom think if you have a power gap that needs to be filled there is a network of people in 80 countries around the world and they're ready to fill it so and there's a lot of ways that I'm sure you all understand in which there are compelling participant in efforts to deal with this stabilization reconstruction problem so that's what I see when I look at the map when I look at the news or when I travel I'm seeing Egypt struggling to make a revolution work you have to say so far honestly unsuccessfully I see Syria in the throes of a revolution that you have to say honestly right now is leading to the breakup of the country the collapse of Syria's ability to function as one country so the agenda couldn't be larger the stakes couldn't be higher I feel as a journalist that we in my business don't write enough about what all of you in this room do that it really is at the center of our national security going forward you are the way that we're gonna project power is interwoven with what you do so that's why when Robert Lam asked me if I would come today I said you bet and I'm eager to hear formally informally about your experiences as you go forward and struggle with this problem so that's my word of introduction let me turn now to Jim Dobbins there's a phrase that one of my professors in college used when he was talking this is about the structure of the medieval world and he talked about the great chain of being and where power and knowledge was handed from person to person, generation to generation and I hope I'm not overdoing it when I say that Jim Dobbins is part of the great chain of being in US national security policy we have great figures whose names we celebrate at CIS in particular Dr. Kistcher, Dr. Brzynski, Richard Holbrook and then if you were gonna extend that list you'd extend it to Jim Dobbins first on Afghanistan which I hope we'll talk a good deal about that's now at the center of what Ambassador Dobbins does because he has replaced Mark Grossman replacing Richard Holbrook as our special representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan he, it's fitting that he has this job because he was the person who was in there at the beginning, at the bond conference when today's modern post-modern, yeah modern post-Taliban Afghanistan was created and so I think really more than anyone he knows the personalities in the story he also was deeply involved in the transitions in the former Yugoslavia in the state in the intervention and post-intervention stabilization in Bosnia, in Kosovo, across that region and so you could say that he's seen the toughest example of this challenge in Afghanistan but also seen areas where it can be successful and I hope that Jim will explain to us what the source of the success where it's been found has been but with that introduction I just would like to ask Jim to begin by talking about his current mission I think Afghanistan has receded from the news some but not from our concerns Jim has overall responsibility as a special representative for guiding this policy and I'd ask you Jim to describe where we are now as you see it and where we're heading as we move toward the crucial year of 2014 in which our combat forces will leave and a handover to the Afghans will take place. Well, thank you, we are indeed facing a number of important transitions over the next 18 months transition from a NATO and American combat operations to Afghan dominated combat operations although our plans do retain a small American combat force thereafter 2015 directed largely toward Del Qaeda and its affiliates, a transition from an externally funded economic growth to a more internally promoted economic growth and a transition from no peace talks to ideally some peace talks but the most important transition is the transition from a Karzai led government to a somebody else led government assuming this takes place and I think there's every reason to believe it will take place it'll be the first time in Afghanistan's history that you've had a peaceful transition from one civilian government to another indeed from any government to another and this transition more than anything else I think will determine the prospects for Afghanistan if it's successful then the other pieces will fall into place and if it's unsuccessful it's gonna be much more difficult but let me try to put the experience in Afghanistan in some perspective given the larger topic that we're here with today. I spent, I've been back in the State Department for two months now and I spent the previous 11 years reflecting on an earlier set of experiences and looking at experiences of others in the post-conflict reconstruction and stabilization field and just a few weeks before leaving the Rand Corporation Laurel Miller, a colleague and I finished a study which I think illustrates the overall experience in this area and puts the Iraq and Afghan experience in some perspective because I think we're in danger of over learning those lessons because they're first of all the largest of these efforts and they're the ones that we're most heavily engaged in but they're not the only efforts. At Rand we looked at 20 cases in which there'd been a combination of a civilian and military intervention in a conflict or post-conflict society since 1989, in other words, nearly 25 years of experience and this is a pretty comprehensive list that includes all the big American experiences, Somalia, Haiti, Bosnia, Kosovo, Afghanistan and Iraq. It includes a dozen or more smaller UN civil military operations and a few that were conducted by others and we tried to measure the outcomes in these operations. That is what did they accomplish and we used a number of criteria. We used World Bank figures to determine government effectiveness. Did the effectiveness of the government improve? The World Bank rates every country every year so we've got an index and so you can look over a 10 year period what was achieved and we took a 10 year period. We used IMF data for economic growth. We used Freedom House data for democratization and we used UNTP data for human development which is a, that index is a combination of education, health and standard of living. And of course we tried to determine whether or not the country or society was peaceful at the end of the 10 years and then rated all 20 of them. Now these 2016 were at peace so the success rate for peace was quite high 16 out of 20. Across the other indices they almost all even the ones that weren't peaceful showed a good deal of progress. That is to say there was an improvement in democratization there was economic growth, there was improvement in human development and there was increases in democratization. And in terms of human development for instance these societies on average improved at a higher rate than the world as a whole. In economic growth they grew at a rate higher for the most part than their regions and their sectors in other words lesser developed, middle developed. They grew faster than those. So the efforts, the assistance efforts, the reconstruction efforts broadly speaking achieved measurable results across all of those. And I'll come to Afghanistan because its results were quite striking. In democratization it was about at the average point I think about a 15% improvement in your Freedom House score over a decade. In economic growth it was the second highest of all 20. In government effectiveness it was the third highest of all 20 and in human development it was the highest of all 20. And you can see that and I'm not talking about absolute levels obviously Afghanistan is not the most highly developed country in the world. It was the level of growth, the improvement in the index over that period that we're talking about. So all of these societies if they started poor ended up poor, if they were poorly governed they ended up poorly governed. They were just less poorly governed and less poor at the end of the period. And Afghanistan in the area of human development was the highest and this is because longevity has gone from 44 years to 60 years. Literacy has gone from 15% to 30 some percent and it will be over 60% by 2025 if the kids in school now stay in school. Per capita GDP is up 130%. So across these indices you see significant improvements. Now Afghanistan was one of the four countries that wasn't at peace which of course is why we intervene in countries. We don't intervene militarily in poor countries to make them rich. Neither does the UN and we don't send troops to authoritarian countries to make them democratic. The United States, we the United Nations, we the international community sometimes intervene in violent countries to make them peaceful. And if you don't make them peaceful then whatever else you've achieved you haven't achieved your central purpose and we haven't achieved that yet in Afghanistan. We didn't achieve it entirely in Iraq. And the other two cases that were found to be not peaceful were the Congo and Somalia. What was it that differentiated the peaceful from non-peaceful? The major differentiation was whether or not the entry of foreign troops was consensual. In cases where there was a peace agreement that needed to be enforced and the parties invited an intervention with one exception they were all successful. And this included cases where the peace was coerced. In other words in Bosnia and Kosovo we kept bombing them until we said we're gonna continue to bomb you till you agree but they did agree. In other words it was a coerced agreement but it wasn't agreement. We didn't just enter and disperse the one regime and replace it with another regime. We compelled the regime to agree. And so there were peace agreements in Bosnia and Kosovo which have held. So that's the main differentiator between peace and non-peace. The other one is size. The country the size of the Congo was just very difficult to stabilize. They have a weak government that can't control that much territory and the international community simply can't afford to dispose the kind of assets that would actually be able to stabilize the country of that size. We found that none of the other factors that you would think would determine success or failure that is ethnic diversity, levels of poverty, levels of education, levels of democratic experience. All of those things had no effect on levels of improvement. They obviously had effect on absolute incomes. If they started rich they ended up rich. If they started democratic they ended up democratic. But in terms of level of improvements those had no effect. The two things that had effect were geopolitics, whether you could curb the behavior of malign neighbors and secondly whether you could successfully co-opt competing patronage networks within the societies in order to get them to essentially seek rents peacefully and competitively within a peaceful environment rather than violently. And in cases where you didn't curb the malign behavior of neighbors and in cases like Iraq and Afghanistan where you actually tried to exterminate one of the patronage networks rather than co-opt it you had less success in promoting peace. So those were the lessons of the study and I think it puts the Iraq and the Afghan experience in some perspective and suggests that in drawing lessons for other situations around the world we need to look at a broader universe of cases than just those two. Let me take Afghanistan and your immediate challenge over the next year, 18 months and that is the political transition from President Karzai, a man that you know all too well I would expect over many years. But we can assume that with this election transition we'll have some new political leader. The question I wanna ask you is one that I find myself scratching my head over all the time and that is how on this absolutely crucial decision for a country that we have decided is of enormous importance to the United States to the point that we have spent some hundreds of billions of dollars to influence its future. How can we effectively shape this political transition so as to get the best possible result for Afghanistan for the United States, its interests including the interests of neighboring countries without going over the line and I'll just leave that definition fuzzy for the moment. What are your thoughts about that? How do we shape a political environment without doing something that we shouldn't? Well it's difficult as I said this is the most important transition the one that's most crucial for American interest as well as Afghan interest it's also the one over which we have the least leverage and to the extent we have influence we have to be careful about using it for precisely the reasons you've suggested that it could be counterproductive. I think we need to be, first of all we need to look at both process and outcomes. The international community, American public, European public are going to focus heavily on process is the election free and fair. Most Afghans are going to focus on outcome. Did the process produce somebody in whom they have confidence in somebody with whom they can live? And I think the polling after the last presidential election is indicative most Afghans, according to opinion polls thought the election was fraudulent and were quite satisfied with the result. And so ideally we need to go for something which meets both those criteria. If the election is procedurally flawed to a severe degree that is it skews the outcome and the fraud in the last election didn't skew the outcome. I mean it was clear that Karzai was going to win that the degree of fraud which inflated his vote was unnecessary he might have had to go to a second round but he was 20 points ahead and was certainly going to win. So the fraud in that case didn't skew the outcome. Fraud that did or could have skewed the outcome would be much more problematic. So process does matter but so does outcome. And Karzai is a controversial figure increasingly but he has been successful in creating a political and patronage network which transcends sectarian boundaries in that country and which allows him to project political influence in Tajik, Uzbek, Khazara and Pashtun communities in areas where the formal institutions of the state don't exist or extremely weak. And so it's going to be important that this upcoming campaign produce an outcome which results in a leader that has a substantial constituency across sectarian lines. And this means encouraging Afghan elites to do as they are doing, to try to coalesce, to try to put together not just individual candidates based on personalities and command of small voter allegiances within narrow sectarian communities which is the natural pattern in an electoral system in which there are no parties in which anybody can run and you have a two-term presidential system but rather to put together slates in which a candidate has a couple of vice presidential intentions who are of different ethnicities than himself or herself that has indicated who's gonna be the defense minister, who's gonna be the interior minister, who's gonna be the economic minister in general terms so that they're running as a slate in effect. And there are conversations among Afghan elites trying to coalesce around one or several candidacies that transcend narrow sectarian divides. And I think to the extent we can encourage that and frankly it's not something that we can directly influence other than benignly noticing that it's going on and applauding it, I think if that succeeds and if you get one, two, or three candidates who have coalitions of that sort, then the election is more likely to produce a result that is of enduring value for the country. So let me just bracket that and ask you to briefly expand on a part of it and not necessarily restrict yourself to Afghanistan but you neatly described a basic dilemma that the United States has encountered every place I can think of starting with Vietnam, which is that it's in our interest to find a leader who can put together a patronage network that allows the leader to govern across what are inevitably different ethnic, clan, tribal divisions and operate effectively as a leader. To that leader's opponents, to people who are not part of the network, that looks like corruption. And so as you travel in Kandahar and Helmand Province and you hear about Karzai and you wait for the government to deliver services, what you discover is that the government is seen as and to some extent is this network of patronage appointees but not really a national government. And so how do you, Jim, resolve that tension between having an effective patronage network and having something that's a clean enough national government that it meets those first world tests? Well, first of all, I think it's an overstatement and indeed quite inaccurate to argue that the Afghan government doesn't deliver services. You're not getting a doubling in literacy rates because the Afghan government isn't delivering education. It is delivering education. There are millions of children in school. You're not getting increases in longevity because they're not projecting healthcare more broadly in the population than it's ever existed in the past. You're not getting increases in public participation because the government isn't supporting a private network of 75 TV stations, cell phone towers that give coverage to 90% of the country, 18 million telephone users where they were only 40,000 10 years ago. The government's either directly promoting those services, healthcare and education, or largely government run services in the country, or it's creating a framework in which private enterprise can profitably project things like cell phone, television, half the families in the country have access to television. So the government is providing some degree of services. Now, you're absolutely right that one person's patronage network is somebody else's corruption. And I think the levels of corruption in the country are unacceptably high. Although, again, if you compare the country to its immediate neighbors, it has a slightly more efficient tax collection system than Pakistan. It certainly is more democratic than China, Iran, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan or Turkmenistan. And it's not noticeably more corrupt than many of those. And those are better comparisons than Switzerland or even the Balkans, in terms of how quickly you expect this society to evolve. But that said, I mean, I think that we do need to continue to try to contain corruption and criticize it where we see it. But at the same time, we do need to understand that in a country with very weak institutions, none of which are more than a decade old, and none of which therefore inspire the kind of loyalty that our institutions inspire in us, people are going to focus on how to help their brothers, their cousins, their extended family, their tribe. Those are the primary loyalties that are likely to dominate the society. And one is working against that gradually by building up these formal institutions. That's a good answer. I want to ask you to reflect a little bit on what I was describing as the toolkit for reconstruction and stabilization, this array of agencies in Washington. In the period that we're now living in, you know, you're gonna take care of the rest of this story of Afghanistan while our troops remain. But looking beyond that, looking at a toolkit that, as I said, has USAID, USIP, CSB, CIA, NGOs of various descriptions. How do you, in your own mind, think about the use of those different instruments? And what do you think we need to do better to fill what I describe as the power gap as our big armies leave? How do we fill that with those agencies? How directed, or maybe with some new institutions that we don't yet have? Well, I think there are, I think the civilian elements of our government are not as functional and not as integrated as they could be. And so I'll come back to that in a second. But I do want to put this in some perspective. You know, I commented before I took my current job on a number of occasions that modern generals are fond of saying that there's no military solution to the problem they face. And this usually means they're losing. And they're usually losing not because there hasn't been enough civilian capacity directed to the problem, but because there hasn't been enough military capacity directed to the problem. That's not to say that, you know, in Afghanistan from 2002 to 2008 or so, or in Iraq for the first year, a year and a half, there were enough civilians. But the inadequacy of the civilian response wasn't the reason those societies plunged back into civil war. The reason was that they weren't, we hadn't deployed a stabilization force that was adequate to the task. It didn't have a mandate and it didn't have the training and doctrine necessary to conduct those kinds of stability operations. And as a result, those societies degenerated back into civil war. So it's very difficult in a conflict or post-conflict environment to register the kind of progress I talked about across these 20 societies if there's no security. And civilians are not going to bring security. Civilians operate in an environment in which somebody else is going to have to provide security. Now in some cases, indigenous institutions are capable of doing that. But increasingly, we are finding ourselves in situations like Egypt, like Tunisia, like Syria, where we the West, we the international community, we the United Nations are not ready to deploy peacekeeping forces, among other reasons because the societies don't want them. I'm not suggesting this is necessarily a viable option. I'm just suggesting that trying to stable those societies with purely civilian assets is difficult. And the lessons from the studies I've done really probably don't entirely apply in situations like that. Now, in terms of the efficacy of our institutions, my preference would be to see the Agency for International Development rebranded the Agency for Reconstruction and Development that the various civilian programmatic functions that are carried out elsewhere in the US government. Transferred to that agency, along with development activities like AIDS combating and the Millennium Challenge times things, put all these development and reconstruction functions in a single agency. Still supporting that agency to the State Department because in post-conflict environments, as I said, the most important factor for successor failure is the geopolitical factor. It's curbing the behavior of maligned neighbors. And a reconstruction strategy has to be directed from a policy standpoint, not from a developmental standpoint. But put all those, including the things in the State Department now, into a bulked up, much more substantial agency. I mean, that's my answer. That's what I suggested in the last, what was it called? The QDDR, Quadrennial Diplomacy and Development Review. I think it's probably not gonna fly in the Congress. It certainly didn't fly in the administration. I don't expect to have any more success now that I'm in the administration. And it's not an area for which I have any responsibility. So that's really a comment not from somebody in office, but from somebody who had a lot of experience in sometimes studying these problems. Might make a good newspaper column, though. Yeah. It's all yours. So I wanna ask you one last question and then ask you to sum up the points that you most wanna make to this audience. And my last question is, again, one that vexes me when I travel. And that's the intensity and persistence of anti-Americanism, sometimes in the countries that we have tried hardest to assist. And I think in particular of Pakistan and Egypt. These are two countries that we know that every policy analyst knows are crucial for the security and stability of the regions where they are, they're anchors for those regions. They're countries where there are historic ties between the US and the military that ought to give us a good starting point. They're places where heaven knows we've appropriated a lot of money. It's not as if we weren't spending the money in those places. And yet, I find year after year, we just seem to get less popular. To the point that the other day, the leader of this Egyptian liberal uprising won't even meet with Bill Burns. Holy smokes, how did that happen? So let me just ask you to ruminate a little bit on this problem of anti-Americanism, sometimes in the places we've tried hardest to help. You know, I don't know if I can give you a generic answer. There's clearly, you know, people have written Why Do They Hate Us, as it relates largely to the Arab or Muslim world. You know, it's a big literature on that. And there are historic reasons that really have relatively little to do with the specificity of what's happening in Egypt or Syria at the moment. I do think that in places where we've successfully contributed to stabilization and reconstruction societies that are peaceful and more prosperous as a result of our efforts, there's usually substantial gratitude and a quite pro-American attitude. Not necessarily shared by those who were marginalized as a result of our intervention or who were our initial adversaries. But even there, there's a grudging respect, for instance, in the Balkans. And so this problem doesn't exist. I mean, I think it's partially a function of the broader issues of integrating the Muslim world into a modern, globalized world and us as the primary face of globalization, westernization, secular democracy that creates some of this. And in some cases, it's simply where we haven't succeeded that our efforts, however well-meaning, have been ineffectual and because we're being powerful, we get blamed for the difficulties of a society not successfully making a transition. So, Jim, finally, let me ask you to wrap up this portion of the discussion. This group will talk through the day about really all the important stabilization challenges around the world and perhaps you could just leave them with your parting thoughts about the issues they need to think about. Well, I guess I would just argue again for trying to put these problems in some perspective. You know, because we're living in the middle of an admittedly somewhat turbulent era, we tend to think that we're overwhelmed by the range of challenges and that the world is chaotic and violent, but in fact, there seldom been periods where the world has been more peaceful and less threatened by catastrophic violence of the sort that we saw throughout the 20th century and indeed for much longer stretches of history. Now, maybe we're coming out of a period of unusual peace, but certainly since the end of the Cold War, up to, certainly up to 9-11 and even after 9-11, the number of people getting killed in wars was going way down, the number of internally displaced and refugees was going way down, the number of conflicts was going way down. I mean, we reduced the number of conflicts in the world between 1989 and about 2000 by more than 50% and the casualties resulting from those conflicts by well more than 50%. And although that pace of reductions slowed in the subsequent decade, it didn't stop entirely and in Africa there are far less civil wars and violence today than there have been historically since the end of the colonial era. We're focused on the threat of militant Islam in a few countries in Africa and it's certainly something worth being concerned about, but in terms of levels of violence in that continent, it pales in comparisons with what you were seeing in earlier decades. So I think the whole thing has to be put in some perspective and similarly the success or failure of international interventions as a whole. Again, I think looking at the experience overall suggests that we're successful more often than not. There is a big difference between trying to stabilize large populist countries and small countries. There's a big difference between trying to do it in countries you don't care a lot about and countries you do care a lot about and clearly if the country's small and you care a lot about it, you're going to be able to have a more transformative effect on Kosovo or Bosnia, for instance, than if the country's really big and you don't care that much about it, the Congo, for instance, and you just have to accept that you can't replicate that level of success in big countries that you're not that, you're not willing to commit that level of engagement to. That was for me fascinating. I hope also for the audience have a wonderful day talking about the biggest problem in the world and we wish you luck. Join me in thanking Jim Dobbins. Thank you.