 I'm Dan Rundy. I hold the Shire Chair here at CSIS. It's a real pleasure to have Anjaye Chibber, who's the Assistant Secretary General for and Assistant Administrator of UNDP and Director of UNDP's Regional Bureau for Asia and the Pacific. Mr. Chibber spent 25 years at the World Bank before coming to UNDP and has the primary responsibility for UNDP's work in Afghanistan. He's been asked by his country of India to come back to India and to go into public service. So he's been a multilateral public servant for much of his career and I think we're very fortunate to have him here today to give us his perspective on the development challenges but also frankly the development progress and the development opportunities in Afghanistan. I think far too often in Washington and there's a lot of good reasons to be concerned and there's you know that there are a lot of things to worry about in Afghanistan but there have been a lot of progress in Afghanistan in the last 10 years. If you look at the number of cell phones it went from 50,000 in the year 2000 to something like 15 million. You can now make payments electronically on cell phones in Afghanistan. There's been a flourishing of independent media in Afghanistan. Significant amount of infrastructure has been built, not complete but been built. If you look at the health metrics on any number of different metrics I believe polio I think has been eradicated in Afghanistan whereas before it couldn't happen if you look at the any number of different health metrics and then if you look at in my mind the most important is the number of girls in school. I think everyone knows that famously there were zero girls in school during the Taliban. There's something now depending on the day something around three million girls in school every day in Afghanistan. Now okay granted there are certain regions of the country where it's tougher for girls to go to school every day but that's not in every region of the country. There are over 20 provinces in Afghanistan and not every one of them makes it difficult for girls to go to school. This is a tremendous development accomplishment and it's going to change the society over time. We're going to talk about Mr. Chibber is going to share his perspective. We're very fortunate to have UNDP here. UNDP was in Afghanistan during the Taliban period. They are going to be in Afghanistan for the long haul. They are there in good times and in bad in countries and I have a lot of respect for what UNDP does. It's an incredible thought leader. On any number of different metrics whether it's the human development report that they put out or the Arab human development report which I think changed the world or they're growing inclusive markets work they're very important player in development and so we're very fortunate to have them here. After Mr. Chibber's remarks I'm going to ask my friend and colleague Andy Cuchins who runs a Russia and Eurasia program to talk about an initiative. This is in line with this discussion about the progress and the challenges, the progress and the opportunity in Afghanistan to talk about an idea that Andy and a colleague developed several years ago that's taken a lot of has gotten a lot of momentum around the concept of the new Silk Road and the role Afghanistan plays could play in such a new Silk Road. So without further ado I'm going to ask Mr. Chibber to have the floor. Thank you very much Dan, thank you for that very warm welcome and I see some old friends and some I know of course a lot of new friends. So it's wonderful to be here with you and as Dan has already announced that I'm leaving I guess that means I can speak even more freely. That's what we're hoping. But anyway first I think exactly what you said Dan which is you know the story is always about bombings and conflict and death and destruction and security and all that. But there are people living, there are things happening on the ground as well as we speak and part of what we tried to do I don't know if you all managed to get a copy of the development advocate but my colleagues who work I cover you know 39 countries so I'm not daily working on Afghanistan but my colleague Diodat Maharaj is here who's the division chief for our Afghanistan division and he and his colleagues have put this thing together called the development advocate which is to highlight you know some of the positive development stories that are happening sort of inch by inch if you like in Afghanistan under very difficult of course security conditions but there is things happening and Dan already gave a sense of some of those, the children going to schools, the you know the communications improvements etc. And I'll come back to this communication issue a little later because I think we could do a lot more in Afghanistan on that despite the fact that there's already been quite a lot of progress already. So the and as he said also you know the UN now has this sort of special mandate type of presence with political presence mandated by the security council in the form of UNAMA which is an integrated UN mission but that the UNDP is part of that but UNDP has been there well before UNAMA was there and probably will be there well after UNAMA has disbanded. There's no talk of disbanding UNAMA at this point so don't get me wrong because there's still a lot to be done but UNDP is basically there for the long haul and therefore focused in a sense on the long haul as well. I thought I would start with pointing out of course some of the challenges that we see up front and wherever possible I'll try and interject what UNDP is trying to do to help address some of them wherever UNDP is relevant I will try to do that. I think you know the one of the things that I think is very important is that in the first stage since born one a lot was done to build the sort of institutions in Kabul and after born two I think a lot more needs to be done to focus attention away from Kabul and focus much more at the sub-national level I think this is pretty well known. Now of course you have a situation where the transition you know with so many different types of transitions that are being described in Afghanistan one major transition that is underway in addition to the troop withdrawal is that the PRTs can you put up your hand if you know what a PRT is a lot of people know what PRTs are the provincial reconstruction teams and pretty much all the international donors that were there or members of the ISAF if you like the international force picked a province and put up a PRT there or select a province in which to try their hand at development in addition to trying to provide security and establish these PRTs and quite frankly while you may have some visible success with PRTs in the sense that they fixed irrigation system here and there put up health posts and you know various types of things that they were trying to do our assessment is that in the long run PRTs were actually quite detrimental to the buildup of genuine sub-national governance capacity in this country and not to mention the fact that now that they have to be handed over the issue is really who to hand it over to and if you hand it over to a sub-national authority that is not capable of managing these assets then how do you maintain them how do you service them and how do you go forward from there so that's a major challenge that in a way has been also partially left into the hands of the UN to say you take over these PRTs and you know when initially when this sort of request came to us we said we are not going to take over PRTs we are you have to hand them over to the Afghan government or whatever authority that exists in the provinces and we can try and help to see how best they can have the capacity to work with them or have the ability to be able to manage these assets going forward but it's it's not an it's not an easy challenge but I just leave that out there as a major issue that now sort of these these teams that have left behind have created the second I think big challenge is is is a fiscal challenge which is that you know the whole structure was so dependent on aid and the World Bank had already estimated that it was more than 100% of GDP but now if that that amount of assistance is starting to come down in a post 2014 period then you have this huge fiscal gap that is staring everybody in the face and you don't have really the capacity to raise revenues in a manner that would be nowhere able in in in in any reasonable manner to be able to fill this kind of fiscal gap so how do you then manage your budgetary expenditures how do you manage to run things in a much more cost effective manner than has been the case so far and yet ensure a modicum of services and and you know facilities that the government is to be able to provide I think this is a huge issue that sits out there as well and part of it is also that the absorption capacity of that assistance is very weak and therefore being able to move even existing amounts of aid through that weak capacity has been a big issue but let me come back to this one again I think the third issue that faces this transition and a challenge is that we had such a strong emphasis on security that at the neglect of justice and the rule of law so you have to think about how we can transition from this huge emphasis on security alone you know train the police train the army pay them whatever give you know provide them all the facilities etc but very little effort on rule of law and on justice and in some sense giving the Taliban an opportunity to provide the kind of swift justice if you like and gain some popularity from that as well so I mean it's it's interconnected with the security issues but you need to address these issues simply because the emphasis on security alone will not be enough I think the other thing that these three issues that I have just raised have probably been mentioned and discussed you know many times but I repeat them here as well I think the issue also that staring Afghanistan for the long term in the face is the youth bulge in Afghanistan I mean if you look at the population pyramid of Afghanistan you are going to have a very very large increase in an age group from 18 to 25 so if you don't have jobs you have no way of making a livelihood or a job opportunity for this huge huge youth bulge then you are opening yourself to a lot of discontent and local insecurity one factoid that is not well known is that Kabul the city of Kabul is the fastest urbanizing city in the world today so you know we think of Afghanistan as probably this huge spread out country but partly because there's been so much concentration of money in Afghanistan and efforts to develop Kabul and partly it's that there's a lot of still a lot of insecurity and lack of development outside of Kabul you have a very large number of people flocking in into Kabul and and also you have returning of refugees into the country so there's a lot of displaced people vulnerable people there's very minimal property rights or services that are being provided to these people and leaving them vulnerable of course to huge issues like diseases etc but also I think creating the opportunity for destabilization into the future so these are the big challenges as we see them and hope that we can play some role in them for example on subnational governance this is a very big area for our work in the country and some of it of course is highlighted in the development advocate as well the the work that we have been trying to do with the district the elected district assemblies but also at the subnational governance level that working with the municipalities to try and improve their finances so that they can and improve their capacity and their finances so that they can deliver better services to the people but the big debate that is now on in Afghanistan is how do you how do you devolve in some way how do you devolve financial power from Kabul how do you do you do you give a block of money to each of the provinces and say you decide what are your top priorities and how you would like to spend this money do you come up with provincial plans whereas you still have money going from say the ministry of education to its counterpart at the provincial level and then down into the local and district levels or or do you actually hand over blocks of money to particular provinces and let them develop their priorities and plans as they see fit and this is obviously a debate that is very important for any future you know mechanism for service delivery and it's very important for us as well because once the structure of how that devolution will take place is agreed upon then agencies like UNDP can of course you know design their assistance programs more effectively around those issues but at the moment subnational governance capacity is very weak it's very varied also across different parts of the country and that's why when you think of the Tokyo agreement in which you know there was a mutual compact of assistance that would be given to Afghanistan in return for which of course Afghanistan was required to improve transparency improve accountability etc the latest estimates are that the implementation rate for that assistance is only at about 40 to 50 percent and a lot of that has to do with the fact that the channels through which this money has to flow through remain very weak so if you want the Tokyo mutual accountability back to be effectively implemented implemented one of the key areas for that is the capacity at the subnational governments in addition of course we have been working very closely with the ministry of finance in making aid budgets work of course the ministry of finance is as keen as anybody to bring more and more of the aid money through the budget this is also an issue of tension between within the government because many of the line ministries are quite happy and quite cozy in the relationships they have with donor agencies don't want any interference from the ministry of finance consider that if it if the money has to have some flow through through the budget it will actually slow down the implementation rate even further but for the long-term future of the country you cannot have a situation where a very large part of your development budget does not go through the ministry of finance with the money that is coming through UNDP what we have I signed an agreement with the minister of finance minister Zakhilwal to try and bring most of the money that goes through UNDP through the budget but also have an arrangement where the monitoring the auditing of that money will still follow to some extent UNDP rules so that we can have accountability to the donor community but yet be able to have the ministry of finance be part of the mechanism of approval of these funds of these monies flows into various ministries the we are also of course working I mean the country clearly needs a major civil service overhaul you can't have a situation where in ministry after ministry every time a minister changes the minister then brings you know 40 50s 100 political appointees into the ministry as jobs for the for the boys and girls from wherever province that they are coming from and that cannot be the way that you can run an effective civil service in the future so a kind of civil service reform a major merit-based recruitment system is needed as you see in the development advocate this is being done piecemeal we have made an attempt at more I mean the headline is more merit-based recruitment right and you'd say is that a is that a headline to have that you have merit-based recruitment for the first time in a part of the government I mean that should be the normal practice in most governments but it becomes a headline in Afghanistan because it's so new and it's so against the current culture that has persisted in the in the country but step by step we we can see that we have that has to become the norm in most ministries or part of an overall overhaul of the way people are being hired and promoted as well I think the other big issue is that because of these parallel age systems you have a dual or a multiple salary structure in Afghanistan you have people being given top-up salaries to retain the best people but you ended up with a system where you have you know such numerous sort of salary systems operating at the same time and this again in a period when aid budgets will decline will mean one of two things either these people will walk off and do something else and some of them already have begun that kind of an exit or we have to find another way to be able to retain the best of these in a system in which salaries their top-up salaries will obviously have to be much lower than they have been so so far so but you could if not handle well you could have a sudden collapse of important capacity critical decision-making capacity in major ministries in the country and we have to find a way to address some of that I mentioned earlier the issue of shifting from a focus of security to a greater focus on the rule of law and justice and this is as you some of you may know we UNDP helps manage this law and order trust fund the Lotfa fund and this fund so far has focused a lot on the security side it's focused on you know the payment of police salaries their verification induction of police women into the police force their training etc but we do believe that there is an opportunity here to widen this trust fund into a genuine law and order trust fund rather than a trust fund that is basically focused on the police system itself there has been some efforts in this at things like you know community policing etc but it's it's quite small at the moment but I think that's the direction in which it needs to go and in that case I think the engagement with the Afghan government has to be broadened out of the Ministry of Interior alone and take into account a broader justice and rule of law program in the country I don't want to take up too much time Dan but let me mention that of course we are still heavily engaged on the immediate transition not just at the long term but and one of those issues of course that is very big on everybody's mind is the next election in the country it it would be in a way a defining election because it will determine whether I believe it will determine you know if it is carried out effectively it could end up producing the kind of legitimacy to the next government which is very badly needed if an engagement with the Taliban has to be carried out effectively by that I don't mean just fighting I mean just even the negotiations have that has to be very important part of it of course the effort of the Taliban will be to disrupt that election as much as possible the UNDP elect project has a very important project that is now working with the election commission to put an effective reasonably effective operational system in place so that you can have an election that is as I said has a modicum of acceptability credibility and legitimacy and but also our effort is as we have in many other countries in which we have worked on election issues is to try and leave behind an election system that is stronger than the one that was there before UNDP was engaged in it so it's a step step by step process for example we were have been involved in Indonesia's elections the first one right after the fall of President Soharto the UNDP's engagement was very heavy the second one less heavy and by the third one we were almost out of that business so it will take probably longer in Afghanistan but anyway our effort is very much to work on that side and we are UNDP provides the technical support the political affairs department of the UN DPA works on the political side together with Unama and we hope that we have at least in place a better system that we can leave behind for the future one of the big issues of course for us is women's rights and women's participation in this election which is obviously going to be a huge issue most of the women's groups feel that their rights will be set back and their ability to participate in the electoral systems etc like we saw in bits of Pakistan recently would also be a huge issue as well two more things I if I could mention one is that on the agriculture side this is going to be very important I mean if you want to create jobs and income gains and poverty reduction I think the I mean a lot has to be done in other areas but certainly agriculture has to be a very very critical part of that here again we we believe that you know there are good programs in place but there's too much effort on supply on kind of supply of inputs to the agriculture sector you know whether it's irrigation or fertilizer or seeds it's a little bit piecemeal and not enough has been done to look at the entire value chain as it were in different agriculture products in food processing capacities so I think some of that shift in that direction is something that we are we are suggesting as well now for the issue of I mentioned the issue of you know the fiscal gap and aid and I mean there's an effort to put in a lot of money now which cannot be easily absorbed as we are seeing with the 40 50 percent implementation rate and the risk that after 2014 there'll be very little money so you say if you can't increase the capacity so quickly and yet you will need money later then one answer that we have is to set up a trust fund or you know in addition to the existing trust funds that the World Bank has and ADB has is to think of setting up a trust fund that will be able to sort of a capacity building trust fund that will be able to keep the funding now in place and be able to disperse it in a way that will increase the capacity which will also improve the implementation rate in the future so this is something that we are discussing at the moment with donors and with the government of Afghanistan you know and it's a way to negotiate our way through this transition the aid transition so to speak for the future as well to have a kind of a service delivery trust fund a capacity building trust fund that will help in building the capacities and also be able to over a period of time bring more and more of the monies on on budget as well the last issue I want to mention and in a way this is segue to to you as well is the whole issue of regional cooperation that we believe is very very critical for a variety of reasons one is it's critical also for you know the ability of a post 2015 political situation to sustain itself and it's very critical also for the kind of employment generation economic regeneration that Afghanistan needs I do believe that the mining issue has been overplayed a bit I mean this is going to take a while for the mining industry to develop in Afghanistan and to be able to bring things in and out of Afghanistan in a cost effective manner but that doesn't mean that there's a lot of other trade that cannot be encouraged particularly on agriculture and and of course the new election in Pakistan is actually in my mind a very hopeful and a very positive development because you have now the possibility of a peace agreement between India and Pakistan and so the traditional markets for Afghanistan which were always south in a way the large markets for Afghanistan those could be easily reopened and could change very much the economic calculus of agriculture production in the country quite significantly but that also means that the regional cooperation regional integration with countries to the north of Pakistan is also of course very very important and we had helped UNDP had helped establish a unit in the ministry of foreign affairs focused to build their capacity because so far regional cooperation in Pakistan was talked about by everybody else except you know but there was no capacity in Afghanistan to assess what is their interest what are their priorities etc so we started working on that but I think this will be important for any post 2014 transition as well and may I stop here Dan thank you so much thank you very much Ajay I'm going to ask my friend and colleague Andy Cutchins to talk about the New Silk Road within the context of what we just heard Dan thank you very much for this opportunity to talk about the New Silk Road and it's a special honor to share the other podium with Ajay Chabir the UNDP this is a topic I used to talk about quite a bit two or three years ago and I'm a little bit less practiced right now but I had a couple of caveats I always had to make before I would speak about it one you know I'm not an expert on Afghanistan I'm a trained sovietologist I would joke what are you doing with that working in Afghanistan Andy I would say well you know I just found working with the Russians so difficult I thought I'd do something easier fix Afghanistan secondly I'm really not I'm not an expert on on development at all and so with those caveats let me explain a little bit kind of how I how I came came to this how we our team here and with some others came came to these ideas because in some ways we were the intellectual godfathers for what has taken on a policy life of its own and it's it's not an experience that one actually has that often in think tanks when this this kind of happens and I'm kind of proud about this one but it was very serendipitous like because as I said given my given my background in 2007 shortly after I came to CSIS colleague of mine I don't know whether you've got this handout this one this one page Steve Benson he was a retired naval logistician came to my office I didn't know who was and like you know what the hell is he bringing me this for what what is this and so Steve explained what it was and basically this was a 1999 it was a satellite shot of telecommunications taking a place across the globe and you can see here in the northern hemisphere where it's black that means there's a lot going on now this can reflect economic activity can reflect construction activity can reflect military activity it reflects what we sort of just called it was human human activity and this is the northern corridor of modern modern activity here in the northern hemisphere now if you'll notice there's one spot where it's very very lightly colored it's very disconnected from the rest well that happens to be in the area of central asian afghanistan probably the epicenter would be on the the tajik the tajik afghan afghan border and this was a very powerful graphic to me and I'll tell you why because if even then we knew in 2007 if we taken another snapshot we would see quite a bit more black dots in what we called then the modern activity gap and this was symbolic of a very large phenomenon taking place that we've called the reconnection of eurasia and it's primarily economically driven and you got to remember that during the cold war your largest powers on the eurasian continent to a great extent were not really engaged in a lot of trade and transit activity that being the soviet union that being the people's republic of china and even and even india things began to change substantially of course when the chinese began to reform in the late 1970s the soviet union collapses in 1991 the borders come down middle 1990s india begins to reform and suddenly the economic forces in drivers from these countries are exerting powerful forces and they're looking to connect with europe they're looking to connect with each other looking to connect with the greater middle east etc and that's what's driving i think a lot of what is this of this reconnection in of eurasia and transcontinental trade is growing dramatically now most of it is ship by sea but increasingly more of it was being done by done by land and the the interests of large states were intersecting at this at this gap now the gap states themselves those that were sort of somewhat disconnected and they suffered from a number of pathologies relatively relative poverty corruption poor governance growing role of islam increasing role of radical islamic groups nearby proliferation of nuclear states ethnic conflict terrorist activities etc etc a lot of the pathologies you associate with instability and it comes essentially from the disconnectedness so this reconnection we saw is a is a major strategic change that was taking place that was frankly a much larger than afghanistan we didn't think of it in terms of at the time of afghanistan and we thought of a project we were going to call visualizing eurasia which was essentially to map out how this change was taking place now the interests of the various players were shifting and changing as a result that kind of language for wall didn't really go anywhere suddenly in night in 2009 my colleague here at csis arnaud de borgrove who runs the transnational threat program he had dinner with general patrice in january of 2009 just after general patrice had returned from central asia and was starting to develop the agreements that would lead to the establishment of new transit quarters for the supply of non-lethal goods via commercial routes to support our troops in afghanistan now i didn't know jack about logistics at the time either i quickly found out that about close to 90 percent of what supports our troops in afghanistan or anywhere else are non-lethal goods and they're typically uh transited by by uh by commercial carriers and they were looking to open up at new routes that went through central asia that went through the caspian and the hmm that's interesting that's an interesting proposition and the reason they were doing this because of the expectation of the much larger military footprint we would have increased demand for for those goods plus you wanted to have we were at the time entirely dependent upon one what the military calls ground lock of communication from the port of carachi uh through across the afghan pak Pakistani border at the torquem and shaman gates all the material all the non-lethal material was going going that way and uh the demand was going to increase and plus you wanted a more competitive situation so you weren't over leveraged by pakistani trucking industry port operators etc that's what uh that's what generated this and when this project came to us i said wow this in this gives us a hook into what you see is this uh this reconnection of uh of of eurasia so to so to speak and so as we began to study the uh the issue what we found out of quite uh counterintuitively is that the biggest problem to getting things in and out of in and out of afghanistan a logistical challenge that general patrice i think described as trying to supply almost the only thing more difficult of the planet would be trying to supply Antarctica uh it was not the lack of physical infrastructure although that was a problem railroads roads etc it was also not the the security problems although that was a problem but it was not the main problem the biggest problem in getting things in and out of afghanistan on a commercial basis was uh what i've described as basically borders acting as toll booths bureaucratic institutional barriers corruption uh which would make it very unpredictable uh both the time that a good would get from a to b as well as the cost of good getting to a and b that was also a rather counter a counter intuitive um finding and it led us to start thinking about uh well when we were working on this in the fall of 2009 there was the big debate about afghanistan policy going on in washington and i was amazed at what seemed how narrow the debate was because it really boiled down to counterinsurgency versus counterterrorism af pack versus pack af um you know uh you uh mr chipper said uh you know there was you're saying there was so much emphasis emphasis on security uh that there wasn't that much thinking about you know justice and governance issues and there was even less thinking about uh at least in this town about economic strategies for recovery for the long term in what passed for economic strategies were really just nice wish list there was no sense of prioritization implementation et cetera that came that came with them and that was just kind of amazing to me i mean you know again like i don't know anything about uh about about sort of development and in conflict and post-conflict situations but you know if you're not thinking about the longer term prosperity of this of this place then you know whatever gains are made on the on security are likely going to be lost and secondly if you're thinking about you know afghanistan and are in a quite a narrow geographical fashion uh not really thinking about the other four states that uh covers borders not not only them but also the other major states in the region besides besides pakistan you're also i think missing missing the boat and so the debate in this in this country at that time it kind of boiled down to to the extent that there was a debate about economic development it was sort of minerals or agriculture okay well look you know it's not going to be a or b it's going to be both both a and b but if you're not thinking about actually how these goods are getting to markets then they don't have value and so what's what's the point of it all and this is where we thought that this focus on trade and transit as a strategic enabler for all economic development not only within afghanistan but also with its with its regional partners was essential you had to have a regional economic cooperation plan because that would help for the the partners to have some kind of economic thus and thus political buy-in to greater stability and prosperity within afghanistan that was the idea at the at the time the people that were thinking about this uh in the government ironically were mostly located in do d and in sent com and we kind of we kind of hooked up and we produced this report in may in may of 2010 called with the modest title of the key to success in afghanistan a modern silk road strategy um you know ignorance is bliss so uh but it was endorsed by general patreus it was endorsed by uh by president carsi uh it plugged into you know something that the afghans afghans have been continuously talking about since their first afghan national development strategy back in back in 2000 2005 um and uh it it was this concept which really was the leading uh idea that president cars i presented in july 2010 at the the cobble conference the so-called heart of asia is heart of asia speech it's really basically about about this now we thought this would be attractive the u.s leadership because you know the biggest challenge it's a political challenge it's not so much you know the investment in the infrastructure although that's important and and that has to be dealt with um but it's political leadership which is going to try to bring together these various interests to endorse a common plan um and that's been very very hard to come by but we thought that could be something that would be attractive to the united states we thought it could be attractive to uh to our european allies who are even more rapidly becoming tired of the uh of the security engagement at afghanistan and ultimately it is the private sector which is going to drive this process um but the uh but the need for the articulation of the idea it had to come from the from the president the president of the united states that's what this whole report was about we even drew up a national security memorandum from the president about what need to be done when the president says something then you get uh you're more likely to have bureaucracies working in tandem together because this is the ultimate whole of government challenge and public private partnership as well all right well let me just conclude by saying what's what's happened well the good news is that the state department took leadership and this was evidenced by hillary clinton's speech in chennai india in july of 2011 and there have been many very talented dedicated bright really hardworking people that have been working their tails off for the past nearly two years to try to make this happen but there are a lot of problems as one would expect with a big challenge like this and one of it is the first piece is that you know the president our president has not said anything about it and i think that's a really that's really unfortunate because that that sends a message not only to our our bureaucracy in our government here but to the government in the region as well secondly most of the attention that the president has gotten as far as december 2010 speech about the withdrawal in 20 2014 and that uh uh has created the impression that basically the united states is heading for the exits um thirdly even when secretary clinton gave the speech it was only as a vision it's not a strategy it's not a plan now i understand there there's a real political sensitivities and that you can't have the strategy or a plan that emerges from the us of a it's got to be an afghan strategy that has the buy-in and endorsement of its regional regional partners but again when we call it a vision it doesn't help i think the political prospects here fourthly you know um i mean there is just an international miasma of groupings and institutes institutions and endeavors uh in this sort of new silk road uh a vision there's the six plans of the istanbul process there's the 25 deli deli investment summit efforts there's the 17 reka the regional economic cooperation council of afghanistan uh projects and policy priorities there's the 12 karat the central asian uh regional economic council projects etc there's a fair amount going on but it's not prioritized it's not it's not coordinated and so i think the sum is far less or the whole is much less than the sum of its parts so just my last statement why should president obama get his teeth into this now well i still think it is the right thing to do for afghanistan and to get afghanistan right but so far that argument doesn't seem to be enough so let me offer another one i think we need to think about the incorporation of the new silk road vision strategy plan or whatever in tandem with the so-called pivot to asia okay if the pivot to asia let's face it may not be politically correct to say so but it's basically about the management of the rise of china um but in typical american fashion we're thinking about asia is simply east asia from northeast asia to southeast asia only to china's west well i can tell you when china thinks about asia they think about asia very differently and they think about what's north and they think about what's west and they think about what's what's southwest let me just give you one quote to leave you with from an article in october of this year by one of china's leading geostatic thinkers wong gz at pecking university he says the title is marching westwards the rebalancing of china's geo strategy quote the obama administration has recently proposed a rebalancing strategy centered around the idea of a return to asia following changes in the global economic and political structure russia india and the e you and other major global players have also adjusted their geo strategies this new round of geopolitical and geo economic competition between the great powers is becoming increasingly intense personally the focus of u.s strategy is shifting eastwards while the e you india russia and other countries are beginning to look eastwards located at the center of the asia-pacific region china should not limit its sites to its own coast and borders or to traditional competitors and partners but should make strategic plans to look westwards and march westwards now china is going to be the biggest already is and will continue to be the biggest economic player in central asia uh and af and afghanistan and we need to think more carefully in a strategic way about how we work together uh with the chinese in this capacity and not only the chinese but indians pakistanis and other regional partners as well and we shouldn't be essentially throwing away the baby with the bathwater uh as we make our withdrawal from of our military forces from afghanistan 2014 thanks thank you andy we've got time for a handful of questions we're going to do this world bank style so i'm going to ask people to raise their hand and i'm going to capture a handful of questions the gentleman up here up front and we're going to do this we're going to take three three questions so this gentleman here this gentleman the uniform gentleman here and then let's get some uh anybody else other other hands please anyone else i'm doing to make sure there's uh the uh well i'm something for a little gender balance here we got you okay and those women back there okay so these are going to be the three questions go ahead sir uh yes my name is uh ij saying uh former world bank staff member but also a professor at the national war college so i know a lot about prt's many of my students being there i enjoyed very much uh what mr j chipper had to say uh i got hackles down my neck when i heard uh what mr hutchins has to say there's nothing wrong with the silk road what is certainly wrong with the idea that the us should manage all this if you go to the region you'll find that the regional partners have not even worked on sark if you remember sark has been there for a long long time and they're not going to work as you correctly state until they you know take care of their own accords and i don't see peace coming because if the northern alliance people are left out there might be another 20 years of war in afghanistan but if you went and talked to the indians or the pakistanis or even the afghanistanis the last thing they want is the us planning the silk road okay gentlemen over here and i'm gonna ask both my colleagues to respond to go ahead sir thank you very much and return from the uk mr chipper thank you very much for your your presentation and points i just wonder whether um there is a discerning aim within the un to secure strategic persistence across all of the various donor community whilst we go through this the security transition and how in real terms you see afghanistan in let's say 2025 because money has been sustained and the fiscal gap has been avoided hi my name is carly i'm from global witness um mr chipper you mentioned that the mining issue is a bit overplayed i was wondering if you could comment on that a little bit more andy why don't i start with you so okay good question or or comment um the uh i mean i would be the first to say that uh the planning of the silk road uh cannot be a us led endeavor um but i also don't think that uh the silk road is going to uh and i feel very strongly about this recreate itself uh as quickly or as effectively without the united states involvement um again because the the biggest problem being uh in facilitating connectivity being uh related to the nature of most of the governments that uh constitute the silk road that they're basically patrimonial regimes that read that uh uh are rely on patronage politics uh and the funds uh that are collected and distributed in border regions um you know are are more the first priority is maintenance of regime stability i think rather than rather than you know broader national interest and uh um and prosperity of of people and uh without um more focus being brought on that and i think it's something that the united states can do reasonably well and the other problem being that the region suffers from enormous distrust amongst each other and historical rivalries uh that perhaps the united states could have some value uh in the role of kind of an honest broker now that's a great stretch and that's probably raising even more hackles on your neck but uh raise hackles on the neck i don't know but um uh you know like i said it's i think it's i think it's kind of it's kind of a political catch catch 22 um you know i don't i don't think it happens as effectively as quickly as uh as you want without uh some kind of significant uh u.s leadership leadership role but it has to be you know a very muted leadership role and one which is done in concert uh and really led uh at least the context of the uh of afghanistan from the afghan afghan government itself okay ajay let me i'm hoping you can comment on all three of the uh both questions and comments if you would please okay thank you i'll try to be quick uh thank you for those questions i mean i i think yeah you i mean the best times in afghanistan have been when it has been the as president kaza i said the roundabout uh in the region i mean if you go back to very long history uh and if any of you saw that exhibition of afghan uh treasure that was saved during the taliban that probably came through washington i saw it in new york um you know you can see that it was the crossroads of of china india and the near east uh in the past so if you can get recreate that that's probably important i mean perhaps the new the word new silk road and or the u.s involvement i don't know which one may have raised some issues but the idea itself is is not bad and i think uh now with the possibility of the pakistan uh you know part of that sark arrangement opening up then of course i do think that regional cooperation will be now the downside of it is exactly what ajay says that if there is if there is a split in the northern alliance um you know bifur kate so to speak then of course you know it's uh all up in the air the uh issue on the long term 2025 of course you know it's a you want a scenario a hopeful scenario in which uh the progress that dan described in the beginning so far can be preserved and the preservation of that will require you know establishment of national systems you know as we talk about you know a nationally owned development strategy uh to which the international community in various forms uh will you know support rather than a strategy that is determined by each each donor or each group of donors as they see their interests and uh it's not going to be easy of course in afghanistan to have that we we all are well aware of that but our effort is very much the un effort is to say what would be the building blocks of budgetary systems of uh you know trust fund arrangements of um capacity that would be needed not just in Kabul to build a national plan but at the state and local levels to be able to implement that easily as well and uh it's not going to be an easy process but that's i think the kind of arrangement that we need at least for the future and uh one thing i didn't mention that while of course we are very happy that there have been uh 14 14 million people with cell phones and all that and you know i met last time i was there in january i met with the information minister um and uh raised with him the possibility that what we've seen in other countries like bangladesh is how do you digitally connect the different provincial cap headquarters the district headquarters to each other and to Kabul because these days as you know a lot of services can be provided digitally and given the terrain of afghanistan given the logistics difficulties of moving things around afghanistan to my mind i mean that that is a use of technology that we have not seen so far so he he has informed me that they are now working on the fiber optic cable and if if that arc is completed then they will be able to play with that that is a platform from which medical services educational services basic you know training recordation etc can be done now we've just helped the government of bangladesh finish all this in bangladesh so it is possible and we are arranging a visit from afghanistan to bangladesh so that they can see the terrain is very different i understand but the idea is an interesting one and i think quite useful for afghanistan for the future i'm not down on mining i think the potential is huge it's just that um you know it's going to take a lot of time and effort to get to a point where you can actually see some results from it and for the immediate and i agree also that you need to work on all fronts um in fact one of the other ideas i've pushed in afghanistan is a kind of cash for work program which is for this period of transition when investment people will still be holding back not being uncertain of the political climate then um perhaps uh and with this youth bulge numbers that i talked about perhaps some you know cash for work programs for maintenance of roads for reforestation for you know helping with critical needs in the country could be a way to to have people show up daily to get a wage and you want to see them and you want to check them out because otherwise they're with the other side you know so it's an idea which we have also discussed a little bit it hasn't got as much traction from this government as i would like but uh because they say we want genuine private sector uh employment but i tell them that you want to get the private sector employment but till you get there what about all these unemployed people and what do you do with them and uh you know so that's another idea anyway thank you i think i think our time has ended please join me in thanking uh aje and andrew thank you