 Cha-cha-cha. He-two, two, two, two, two, two, two. Well, let me get us started with a welcome. My name is Nancy Lindborg. I'm the president of the US Institute of Peace. And I'm delighted to welcome everybody here this afternoon. Everybody who has foregone the beauty of a Friday afternoon sunshine. Delighted that you're here with us to have this conversation. For those who don't know US Institute of Peace, we are a congressionally founded and funded nonpartisan federal institute dedicated to the prevention and resolution of violent conflict around the world. And we work with partners on the ground in conflict zones to help them do that prevention and resolution. And we are here in the mall, right across from the Lincoln Memorial, hope everyone saw it coming in, which is a daily reminder of the terrible impact of civil wars and what happens when a country doesn't resolve its conflicts with peaceably, but rather resorts to the kind of violence that tears communities and countries apart for generations. So that's the nut of the problem that this conversation will examine. And we're delighted to have with us a number of people who have worked on this project put together by Carl Eikenberry, Ambassador Carl Eikenberry and Steve Krasner, who's a member of our board. They have had the leadership and the vision in pulling this project together and assembling the volumes of this publication. So I want to encourage participants who are watching or who are here with us today to participate on Twitter with the hashtag Ending Civil Wars. And with that, it's now my pleasure to turn over to our fearless leader, Ambassador Carl Eikenberry. Carl. Nancy, thank you very much. Can everybody hear me? So the first thing I'd like to do on this beautiful Friday afternoon is to thank the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. And we're represented with the head of the security program in the back, Francesca. If you'd stand up. Francesca, thank you and the Academy for your generous support. Second, I'd like to also thank Nancy and USIP. Nancy and Joe Hewitt from USIP not only contributed one of the best of 24 essays that appeared in the American Academy's Arts and Sciences Quarterly Journal Datalus, which was a compilation of all of the essays by our project's participants, but also has been a wonderful host and facilitator for a lot of dialogues on topics related to our study. What I'd like to do is one, quickly introduce our project and some of our major insights. And then more importantly, I'd like to then turn and giving the briefest of introduction to fellow panelists here. I'm going to ask them a set of questions, which I hope will give you a good idea of the scope and the breadth of what we've been looking at. And then, most important, will be to open it up to the floor. We want to hear what you have to say and would be ready to take your questions. A lot of old friends in this audience here. So when I say truly interested in hearing what you have to say, very sincere. So let's first talk about the project. This project began about two years ago. When I left a long military service and my time as ambassador in Afghanistan, I went to Stanford University. I had the honor in 2012, a year later, of being inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. And at Stanford, surrounded by a lot of colleagues who have thought long and deeply about the question of interstate violence and foreign interventions, I started to think increasingly then informed by my experience in Afghanistan, but much more globally about whether it would be worthwhile to get a group of like-minded people together and to study the question of civil wars and international responses. I went to the Academy of Arts and Sciences, got full support, and then I talked to Steve Krasner and asked him to be the co-director of this project. From there, we recruited, not only in the United States, but globally, a really superb set of academics, political science, and other disciplines. We had a group of policy practitioners, so to speak. Those policy practitioners coming from areas of diplomacy, international organizations, concerned with these challenges, military, had leads to set from BBC World, a tremendous presenter for BBC World, who's spent a lot of time reporting from very troubled places in the world. We had 28 US participants, we had eight non-US. The non-US were chosen not only for their expertise in particular parts of the world, but all of them from particular institutes when we thought ahead to, after we published our two volumes of Daedalus, we wanted to go out and have outreach activities. These were people who were placed in places like Columbia in Ethiopia, areas that we could go to with them hosting and have exchanges on our insights. So for one year then, we met twice in workshops and our efforts culminated, as I have said with the publication of two volumes of Daedalus devoted to this topic. Fall of 2017 and the winter of 2018, and I believe we've got copies outside if you'd like to pick those up on the way out. What were the major components of this study? So section one is looking at the state of the state, so to speak, looking at trends in civil wars and interstate violence, primarily since the end of the Cold War, but going back to the end of World War II, looking at what trends we can see and projecting ahead. Number two was to look at the threats that are emanating from these countries right now that we had identified in our study. And these were the areas that we're all familiar with and questions of contagion of civil wars, problems of refugees, problems of terrorism. One very interesting essay from another one of the disciplines that we had, which was healthcare from two really brilliant world-class healthcare experts at Stanford University. They looked at the question of the risk of pandemic outbreak in countries that are facing a civil war. The third area and perhaps the one of most interest to this audience is the question of given this, then what are the policy options that are available to the United States, to our allies, to major world powers, to international organizations? So that's how that we had divided the essays up. After the publication of those two volumes of Daedalus, then we have begun our outreach activities that I referred to earlier. We have three components to the outreach activities. One is in the academy, so to speak, beyond the Academy of Arts and Sciences. So we've had a very good gathering at Stanford University. Upcoming, we have Northwestern University, Ohio State University and others planned. Then there's policy outreach in the United States. So this morning, we on the stage here, we're over at the National Security Council and talking to the NSC about our findings. Great dialogues where they're interested in what we have to say. They're giving us a critique and then they're also offering their own gaps that they have in their thinking and asking for our views. So we've done that with the National Security Council. We've done it with the Office of Secretary of Defense and the joint staff. We've had dialogue with the Department of State, USAID. In fact, USIP had just hosted a wonderful lunch here today where we had many from Department of State and USAID, World Bank and others. We've been up to New York City. Steve Krasner was at that session. Maybe we'll talk about it. But some very good several days of dialogue with senior leaders of the United Nations and maybe more importantly, the mid-level staff that lives these problems every day. The last part of our outreach activities is the international, which I referenced earlier. So thus far, we've been to Ethiopia. We have trips planned to, I'm sorry, to Nigeria. We have a trip planned to Ethiopia that Steve will be doing, one to Columbia that I'll be taking. What we do on these trips and all these outreach activities, of course it's not all 36 authors and co-authors. We take a subset based upon their particular interest and where they think that expertise, where we think that expertise would resonate best with our host and counterpart organizations. Let me conclude then with the insights and here I'll be very brief because this is what I know my colleagues are going to want to talk about. Let me give you four insights. First of all, I talked about threats. I had mentioned pandemics. That I think to Steve and myself and to most of our colleagues, we found that to be a very unique insight in the correlation or the possible correlation that is between regions that have the right conditions for pandemic disease and interstate violence. So imagine in the 2014 Ebola crisis, two of the three countries that were the source then of the spread of Ebola, two of those three countries had suffered from very violent civil wars in the 1990s. What if you had the Ebola outbreak in several countries which were afflicted by huge levels of interstate violence? Number two is the question of how difficult it is for outside powers to intervene in a country where their goal is to try to achieve stability and sustainable development. And that's a question of alignment of interest but I know our two Steve's up here will want to talk about that. Third is having said that this is a very difficult problem. Is there a chance, is there a possibility that within the policy community, within the military, even within NGOs, that given the very difficult conditions that we faced in Iraq and Afghanistan, that there's been a swing in the pendulum now which has gone beyond be more modest in ambition to a view that nothing can work. You look at Assyria, well that's Afghanistan, nothing can work there. But when we looked at the success that the United Nations has enjoyed since the last couple of years of the Cold War and through until most recently, terms of its ability to go into countries and through what's called the standard treatment regime of combination of mediation, peacekeeping forces and some at least limited development. If you look at the success rate, it's pretty extraordinary. Now small countries, unique conditions but I think that our view was we have to keep this in mind in terms of thinking of the future because there are success stories there. Not at great scale but there are success stories. Let me end here and now I'd like to turn to panelists and colleagues and ask them a set of questions and then set after that we'll turn it over to the turn the mics over to the audience. I said that one of our insights that we had from this project was that the difficulty of the solution is profound and it's difficult for NGOs, it can be difficult for governments, it can be difficult for militaries to address this problem squarely. But Steve, you've written about this a lot, you actually lived it when you were within the Department of State. Why is it in your view that although all of us would agree stability and development is good, why is it so difficult to achieve these goals? So I think at least an opening point to recognize is that the number of countries that have become both wealthy and democratic is limited in number, limited in geographic scope and limited in time. That most of the 100,000 plus years that human beings have been on earth, life was nasty, brutish and short. Whether you were with a state, involved in a civil war or without a state. So I think it's difficult because actually, we kind of tacitly assume that everyone can kind of be just like us, without recognizing at the same time that getting to this very comfortable place with this very nice memorial across the mall, as Nancy knows and those of you, of us that have been involved in USIP for a long time and might've been better if we were still in some obscure building on Rhode Island Avenue and 16th Street that had made us more of a target. So, but getting to this very nice environment is something that's actually quite exceptional in history. And in my view, depended a lot on luck. If those of you who saw Dunkirk, if the weather had been bad at Dunkirk and the small boats had not been able to go across the British channel, it's completely clear that the British would have sued for peace. If the British had sued for peace, the Japanese might have attacked Pearl Harbor, but there would have been no North African campaign for Roosevelt to involve American troops in Europe as opposed to Asia. If the winds in the English channel had blown south instead of blowing north when the Spanish Armada showed up, you know, next to England, if the Spanish Armada had been successful in escorting the Duke of Parma's troops across the English channel, the history of the world would've been very, very different. So, it's hard to get to the OECD world and getting to the OECD world is involved a lot of luck. In terms of solutions, if I could just say a few words, one thing that I thought was very persuasive in the discussion in our volumes was that the standard treatment, as Carl indicated, has actually worked pretty well. What's a standard treatment? It's U.N. peacekeeping plus some foreign assistance, but the standard treatment only works if there are no spoilers, which may be internal or external, and if there's a hurting stalemate. So, it's not clear that the standard treatment will actually work in the future, as well as it's worked in the past. A second solution is give or a chance. I mean, we do have an article in our two volumes about Sri Lanka. Well, give or a chance actually works. You can end civil wars that way, but it's pretty messy, or potentially quite messy. A third way of dealing with civil wars, and it may deal more with the root cause of civil wars, is to improve governance in badly governed places. I mean, the challenge is, I think, and here's where the panel will disagree, is what level of improvement could we expect or hope for? My view, and the view of some others in the volume, but not everybody, is that you can only get governance improvement if the objectives of external and internal actors are at a minimum complimentary. And the range over which complimentary objectives might work is limited, and there may be some places where there's no overlap at all. So that your ability to actually frame up effective policies and get better governance, ought to be the objectives which you pursue, ought to be extremely modest, because by and large, people in badly governed states that are afflicted with civil war, interested in staying in power, they stay in power through corruption and by making sure that the people with guns or spears or whatever have enough resources to support them. We would like to see something better from the outside, but that range of overlap is actually pretty limited. So the basic conclusion that I came to as a result of our study, and most but not all the people in the volume come through is that, yes, you need better governance, but what you can expect in the area of better governance is pretty limited, unconstrained. Thanks, Steve. Let me turn to Steve Biddle, Steve Biddle with George Washington University. Steve, following up on what Steve Krasner was talking about, Steve refers to the limited opportunities model. You've written extensively and persuasively about the challenges that's posed when the interest of the intervener are not aligned with the interest of the host nation, and could you talk about that? Yeah, I mean, it's important to begin with the recognition that the interests of the intervener and the interests of the host are almost never aligned. There are exceptions, but they're rare. For example, if the partner that the United States seeks in a conflict in a place like Afghanistan or Iraq or Syria or elsewhere, we're governing in the interests of the governed and the way we say we want them to behave, there probably wouldn't be an insurgency that we would then need to counter. If we're getting involved to try and stabilize weak states, it's typically because there's a weekly institutionalized political system that has difficulty adjudicating conflict among multiple armed elites, and that's giving rise to misgovernance defined as a situation in which a significant part of the population believes that their interests are ill-served and they need some sort of violent recourse. In this kind of setting where there's an underlying misalignment of political interests where the United States getting involved from the outside is concerned primarily about an insurgency or a terrorism threat or a cross-border risk from some threat outside the regime group in the partner country broadly defined, the regime group in the partner country broadly defined is typically worried much more about the internal balance of power among rival armed elites within the regime set broadly defined, and less worried about the external problem that the United States focuses on. In a setting in which what we want and what the partner wants are this different, our assistance, which we intend to be used against the external problem we care about, typically gets used by the partner as a form of largesse to assist in an internal balance of power among rival armed elites that is the first order problem for the recipient, and as a result it gets diverted commonly into corruption, cronyism, politicization of the military, all sorts of pathologies that produce an effect from military assistance in these kinds of countries that is much less efficacious against the insurgents, much less efficacious against the terrorists, much less efficacious against the neighboring rival than we would like it to be. And our effort as a result ends up being substantially less useful than we would like and the process is often unsatisfying and frustrating for the United States. If we want to do a better job in the kind of small footprint assist the partner to solve the problem rather than solving it ourselves with 100,000 American soldiers strategy that is now increasingly common in the American political system, then it seems to me given this problem of interest misalignment, the first step towards a better solution is understand that this is not an engineering problem in which a partner who wants what we want but simply lacks enough stuff, enough soldiers, enough weapons, enough equipment, enough schools, enough hospitals, enough wells can be empowered to solve the problem we care about simply by transferring these resources that is rarely a good analysis of the situation in any of the countries where we're engaged in these kinds of policies. A first step towards a better outcome is recognizing that this is an intrinsically and deeply political process in which if we want the aid we provide to be used against the threat we care about and not against the threat that the partner for understandable reasons cares more about, our assistance needs to be configured in ways that create political incentives for the recipient to use it in the way we want and not in the way they want, especially when for them to professionalize their military with our aid in the way that we say we want is a serious existential risk to the lives and families of the recipients in the elites in the countries that we're assisting with this sort of aid. A more proximate threat to the prime minister or the president in receiving countries than the insurgency is normally a coup d'etat or an armed uprising by a militia leader within the boundaries of the country of interest. So when we tell them professionalize your military, use our aid against this insurgency or against these terrorist havens or against this cross-border threat from a rival, we're asking them to take enormous risks. And if we're going to do that, we're going to have to frame the aid in a way that gives them a political incentive to do a little bit more professionalization and a little bit less distribution of largesse to reinforce clientelism that they're using to balance against their own military. And that I think requires things like monitoring and conditionality that we've had a very hard time doing and that we typically do rather little of and that we typically configure our aid programs in ways that complicates rather than eases. But I think if we want more progress with respect to the interests we hold in these conflicts, that's a necessary first step. Steve, you've written that Korea, a security assistance program in Korea, which begins in the 1950s, is a rare example where you've got a lot of success over a period of years and you juxtapose that to say Iraq and Afghanistan where it's been much more problematic. What's the comparing contrast there? Why does it work in a Korea? Yeah, part of why I find this so fascinating in the Korean context is that the Korean military had exactly the kinds of politicization, cronyism and corruption that we see in Afghanistan and Iraq prior to the North Korean invasion. Because prior to the North Korean invasion, the primary threat to the political leadership in South Korea was not the North Koreans. It was other South Koreans with guns in the military and therefore it was necessary to engage in cronyism, to control that institution. When the North Koreans came pouring across the border and the South Korean military collapsed and every armed vehicle in South Korea was in reverse with the accelerator to the floor on the way to Busan to try and preserve any survival of the regime at all. The threat calculus for the recipient regime changed. And the threat to the regime was now, the primary threat to the regime was no longer the South Korean military, it was the North Koreans. That was the threat we cared about. Thanks to the North Korean invasion, our interests and our partners aligned to a remarkable degree and the kind of barriers to professionalization that we so often encounter in situations where there isn't a North Korean army racing to Busan went away. And as a result, our assistance was able to dramatically increase the performance of the South Korean military in a remarkably short time. So obviously the answer therefore is to encourage people to invade our allies, because that'll make our aides so much more efficient, or perhaps not. But what the case does is to show that it- You're an institute of peace. Yeah, well, we in academia are fond of somewhat heterodox policy recommendations, but encouraging invasions is a little further than I think I would personally go. But the reason I bring up the illustration is because it shows what the cause and effect relationships are here in an unusually stark way. And it shows what is possible when interests do align. And there are other things that can align interests than North Korean invasions, happily. But it also shows what kind of problems you get if interests don't align. Great, thanks, Steve. Claire, so Claire Lockhart from the Institute of State Effectiveness Co-Founder and head of the Institute. Claire and I shared time in Afghanistan. And so Claire, I'll give you an example that you will recognize everyone in this room does. So in Afghanistan 2002, 2003, in the early days of post-intervention, a lot of thinking and hard work and good work being done in trying to help stabilize the country and to get it on the path to political consolidation and economic development. So take an example, the police. We need training for the police of Afghanistan, which very quickly then begs the question of how good are the police going to be unless we have a good court system. But then we also need to think about then correction institutes and prisons. And we need to think much more broadly than the police. And then you go through this process and you can start to be discouraged and say that everything is so complicated and interconnected, any one program is just not going to deliver. You'll get some short-term effect, but this is a system that you're dealing with. And unless you take a systemic approach, which means a lot of time, maybe a lot of money and a lot of expertise, it's just going to be too hard. So Claire, you've written, again, persuasively about alternative models of development and you've emphasized prioritized, as I understand it, prioritized institution building, sequencing, and could you talk about that? And I started my analysis with an observation which is probably an obvious one, but that the discussion tends to focus on two poles of the spectrum, and for good reason, that these have been some of the marking events of the last 15 years. But at the one end, there's Iraq and Afghanistan where billions, tens, maybe hundreds of billions of dollars are spent, very large interventions. And then the other end, partly informed by a despondency that leads us to think, well, anything we do is counterproductive. And at the other end of the spectrum, we have a sense that any kind of intervention is going to be counterproductive, therefore doing the least possible or not intervening at all is better. And I think the former carries the immense risk that actually sometimes the problem is too much money because of the corrosive and corrupting effects it has on the society. But the other end of the spectrum, what we're not doing is necessarily always calculating the risks and costs of not engaging, especially to the people who live there and the effects on the neighborhood. And so what I've sought to do with my essay was look at, is there something that's not necessarily a third way but is there another set of approaches that can engage through engagement but not at the cost of the hundreds of billions? And if we look behind the veil of the standard treatment regime, I think we see some cases that haven't worked and some that have. And the work of my colleagues and I has been to look at, are there a set of principles? There are no seven steps to success but are there a set of basic principles that inform whether an approach is likely to be more or less successful? And so what I've argued is that there's a sort of model B in between these poles of model A and C where at vastly less cost, there's certainly to the international taxpayer and to the taxpayers of the country that some successes have indeed been achievable. And what are some of the characteristics? I think one is that the plan has to be the country's own. Now, does that mean, and but starting also with a recognition that in many of these countries there's a sovereignty paradox. Those in the seats of power do not represent the interests of the people of the country always. And as Steve has said, they're not necessarily aligned the leaders of the country in the positions of powers, interests are not aligned with their own people nor of others who have an interest, a common interest in stability. So I think the second principle is actually putting the people of the country first. While in diplomacy, you may be dealing with the leaders of the country, how does one look beyond this to actually the interests of the people which may be for fewer grievances, for better social services, for better provision of justice? I think that the third area is that we're talking about really long time frames so that we probably aren't going to be able to realistically measure success in a one or two or three or even five year period and that those countries that have succeeded have done so really over a period of decades. The World Development Report of 2011, many of you are familiar with of the World Bank, that looked at this question. I think the authors came to the conclusion that it was probably around 30 to 50 years, was an appropriate timeline. That's not to say that engagement or intervention needs to last for that time, but if you look at the country itself, the kind of institutional change that takes one from insurgency, corruption and stability to stability is going to be measured in those kind of time frames with enormous implications for them what can and can't be done in any one time period. I think they ended up putting 20 to 30 years. I had the honor of the former Colombian foreign minister speak to my year class this morning and she remarked that Plan Colombia started in 1990 and the peace agreement was formed in 2017. So it's about 27 years from the start of an effort to the conclusion of a peace agreement. Absolutely the political outcome is one that has to be thought and I think Plan Colombia did. The political outcome was closing the trust gap between the government and the people. And then the question of both sequencing and incentives. I haven't seen a successful case, except perhaps the shock therapy in Poland and that could be debatable where somebody tried to do 10 things at once or vastly comprehensive campaign where leaders have been successful is they've been incredibly realistic that in any one period of three to five years they're probably going to tackle two or three major issues. And that means making some really hard choices and having interviewed some of the leaders who've been involved in these successful transformations over these period of time. They said sometimes they said, well that means we're just not going to be able to address the health system for 10 years. And so we're only going to focus and what they tend to focus on is the reform of security forces. And often that's not about making them bigger or better equipped. Sometimes it's just stopping or trying to reduce the predatory practices and address grievances. And the other key one is to focus on public finances. Is there a way to increase the revenue? In Colombia they did a tax on the wealth to help pay for the military. So very selective in what they did but with an idea that over a 20 to 30 year period they could still put forward a goal and objective that they could convey to the people that it was worth sacrificing for. And then finally I think where there's been international assistance in such cases and as Steve has argued very compellingly for is actually being recognizing that incentives are not always aligned but that incentives really matter. And use very tough in some cases uses of conditionality that if the funding is being diverted or wasted then it's gonna stop. So clearly communicated rules of the game around conditionality and I'll just close by saying I think in, you know, is this approach going to work in every circumstance? No, there are gonna be some cases where it's not appropriate for a range of reasons but I think in some cases it has been demonstrated to be so. And second that I think the world, as we know the world has changed in very many ways in recent years and one of the trends we're seeing in the family of so-called fragile states is a vast demographic change with growing young population who are technologically savvy. So I think there are a lot of questions as to what needs to change in our approach today. And then finally a call to academia and policymakers to invest more time in trying to understand these cases that have worked. Thanks Claire. Nancy's a president of USIP. Nancy we spent a lot of time during our author workshop and during our dialogue talking about this question of the difficulty of the solution. So Claire offered powerful insights about different ways of approaching development that might give us a higher prospect of success. You have placed a great deal of emphasis on as we were talking about the unity of purpose making sure when you're the intervening group that you have clarity as to what is the purpose of what we're trying to accomplish. It's not unity of effort. It's just churning in work. What are we here to accomplish? And then you've also talked eloquently and written eloquently about the need for related to this better coordination processes between US government agencies, international organizations and you've lived in that world. I know the audience here would be very interested in your thoughts on this. Great thanks Carl. And I want to start by one of the barriers to having a greater unity of purpose is just differing understandings of terms and what are we trying to accomplish? And I would argue as the essay that I did with my good colleague Joe Hewitt that is in the volume two is that that list of threats that you started with are actually all the results of fragility and that there is increased scholarship that helps us understand the relationship between where you have illegitimate governments in the eyes of their people or governments that aren't able to provide core services to their people. You have a greater level of extreme poverty, incidents of violent extremism, the potential for unchecked pandemics and outflows of migrants and refugees and civil wars. And so the core of the issue is addressing this state fragility problem. And just echoing a little bit of what Claire said, the development world has really undergone a paradigm shift over the last decade and a half where there's an understanding that you just can't be putting money into health and education and get there, but that there needs to be a different way of understanding how to work and what to focus on and Claire gave a rundown on a number of those. There've been some real milestone documents, the World Development Report of 2011, the Pathways to Peace that just came out recently, the World Development Report of 2017 that looked at the need to understand the politics and the incentives for elites. But it can't be a development alone conversation and what we see over and over again is that the development world can really do all these things, but if it's not aligned with the political actors, the diplomats and the security world, that it will not have the impact that people are seeking to have. And there are so many examples of this. Carl, you participated in a study that Stanford and USIP and Chatham House did looking at a decade of effort in Afghanistan where it turned out that despite considerable investment and energy, there were three lines of effort going on. There was the fighting al-Qaeda, there was fighting Taliban, and there was state building. And in fact, they were undercutting each other because there wasn't a shared understanding of what's the problem and what are we trying to accomplish. And so it's that unity of purpose that both has a shared understanding of what's the problem, what's the goal, and enables effort to proceed so that it has greater impact. Steve talked a lot about the criticality of aligned interests and I would say that's one of those principles that's emerged in terms of the importance of inclusive locally led effort that will take a long time to happen and those need to inform a unity of purpose as well. We collaborated here at USIP with Carnegie and CNAS two years ago on a fragility task force that looked at some of these issues and came up with very specific recommendations for how the US can create that greater unity of effort within our development security and diplomacy capabilities and talked about a 4S framework of the action needs to be strategic, selective, sustained, and systemic. And the selective goes to this issue of you're not gonna do it everywhere, you need a partner on the ground, there needs to be some alignment of interest. Strategic I think encompasses a variety of issues but I wanna call out what Claire mentioned about the sovereignty paradox that you do have opportunities to work with other than the government in this multipolar, multi-stakeholder world. And sometimes that presents opportunities. And I think one of the most important is sustained. We looked in the study report, the case of Columbia and not only did that, the plan Columbia that the US did engaged our diplomats, our development actors, our security actors in a shared effort that has now lasted over four administrations and two administrations in Columbia. Now in a way it underscores how hard this is but it also starts setting the polls of what's possible when you have those conditions. I wanna end with, first of all, I really appreciate it's not an engineering problem because all of this needs to be iterative and contextual and creative on the ground. But I was at an event recently where this discussion was happening and the issue of the role of international actors really looms large. And in these civil wars that are increasingly internationalized, they become much harder to solve, much more protracted. And the Lithuanian senior official noted that this was an extra impetus for them in Lithuania to really consolidate, to become more resilient as community and state so that they were not as vulnerable to the predations of Russia. And it goes to the importance of this whole way of thinking about fragility as prevention. And it's important not just for addressing civil wars but particularly in an era of rising gray power competition to lessen the impact of what we're seeing in places like Syria. Thank you very much, Nancy. And that really is a good segue to very closing MIT and the security studies program at MIT. We've primarily been focusing on conditions within a country or an intervening power going into a country. But these kind of interventions are taking place within a larger geopolitical context. So in the case of Afghanistan when we first went to Afghanistan in 2001, we were primarily thinking in terms of the United States who we were trying to fight there and Afghanistan. And then our consciousness increases and we start to think more about Pakistan. Now, with a diminished level of effort there, abundantly more clear is roles of Iran, India, Russia, possibly China. And we have in the world today a growing diffusion of power from the United States and the West to the rest. And Barry, you've written and thought about this question, not only with regard to civil wars about what are the implications for international security, US security for a diffusion of power. How do you think it relates though to this question specifically of civil wars and the ability of the international community to treat them? So I was in part motivated to start thinking about this because of an observation one step removed from all this, which is that much of the original thinking about how to manage civil wars grew up in a period of US preeminence so that it wasn't crazy to think you could go into Afghanistan and treat it as a problem between us and whatever the problem was inside the state. This was international relations theorists and pundits call this the unipolar moment when the United States was so strong. Students of ours who look back on the bipolar world had observed that civil wars in the bipolar world look very different. And what often happened is the two great powers chose sides and once they chose sides the sides could neither win nor lose because their sponsors would not let them lose but at the same time their sponsors were sort of too afraid of escalation with the other to allow their side to try and win so the stock of these civil wars grew and grew. So as I look at these observations and I listen to other folk for example the intelligence community talk about the changing possible changes in the structure of world power, I scratch my head so well what difference might it make if it turns out that the world is trending multipolar that they're gonna be two, three, four, five great powers in the world against the backdrop of civil wars. Now, it doesn't mean that things will necessarily get as problematical as they were in the bipolar world where every civil war becomes the playground of the same two powers with the same two sets of incentives but it does mean that it's much more likely that civil wars will become the playgrounds of other great powers, right? So if that's the case, then when you look at the way sort of the holding company of concepts or temporal periods that people who think about civil war talk about, right? In terms of places you could intervene you usually talk about could you prevent or if it starts can you accelerate the pace to a conclusion or if you can get it ended can you stabilize it so that violence doesn't emerge and let the peace builders, economic recovery people do their work, right? And my conclusion is on every one of those points the problem of a multi-polar world begins to exert itself. For example, and by the way Syria turns out to be kind of the poster child for this and it's possible we'll see more Syrians. One problem is on the prevention side is that if you're looking for internationally legitimated intervention in a country that's beginning to come apart politically then the mandate has gotta come from the Security Council and it's the great powers who are gonna fight that out in the Security Council. And one of the things about other great powers in the world is they tend to be jealous of their sovereignty so they tend to protect the sovereignty norm so they tend to not want to jump into civil conflicts as they emerge and they are often other powers aside from the US or its friends are often quite favorable to the central state even if the central state is not very nice as it wasn't in Syria. So in general you can expect the more great powers in the world to make for slower preventive interaction not faster preventive interaction. Once you're in the conflict, people study civil wars sort of say they can end a couple different ways but two that I won't say people like but that we observe are victory by one of the two sides or something more esoteric which analysts call the herding stalemate which is when the two or more sides in the civil war basically beat one another to a pulp and come to the realization that nobody can win the costs are high and they really ought to make a deal. Now it's very hard for this to happen for example in the bipolar world when the two sides have lots of outside resources. So if you have another civil war and you have several great powers that are backing the local players it's gonna be very hard either for one to achieve a victory over the other and bring the war to end that way or to get to a herding stalemate because each of the clients in the war is gonna go back to its paper and say if you give me just a little more material or something I can stay in the game. So this tends to suggest to me that if indeed the distribution of power is becoming more multipolar then we can expect longer and nastier civil wars. The final story is the problem of policing a settlement. Depending on how you get to a settlement it may be the case that all the great powers who could conceivably provide the peacekeepers and the money and everything else to try and make a settlement work have all discredited themselves with somebody in the civil war because they've been on one side or another. So then you start chopping around for someone to manage this transition to a different kind of politics and it's hard to find a legitimate party with the power and with the resources to be able to manage it. So here I am, I study international politics mostly I dabble in civil wars. My view of international politics is generally pessimistic and I found my way to another kind of pessimistic kind of conclusion. And it's not clear whether a few years of trend data tells you very much but if you follow those who collect information on civil wars while not yet the most numerous type of civil war it appears that one of the fastest growing kinds of civil war is civil war with outside intervention. So that tends to lend a little bit of support to the observation I'm making as does the sorry path to the Syrian war. So on balance while all of these inside out ideas are useful to whomever ends up managing this problem the larger structure of the situation is kind of hostile to success these days. Thanks Barry. So Barry as you talk about the diffusion of power you've got then regional powers that are gaining more relative power than they occupied that they had in previous years. You've got Russia much more concerned and active what's going on in periphery. China is an interesting case where they are going at blockbuster pace and rather than slowly along the periphery requiring more interest they're driving towards Europe with the Belt Road Initiative. They're in Africa, they're in Latin America and they're getting increasingly concerned about risk to their equities there. How is you look at the great power balance in games? Is there going to be a difference in how China approaches these problems? Well on all matters Chinese I always defer to the China expert on the panel which would be you in this case but be that as it may I did do some interviews about some of these questions in Europe last year and people in European foreign ministries are quite concerned about what they see as the emerging sort of Chinese modus operandi in some of the countries in say the southern part of Africa. From their perspective the Chinese are in some sense hyper realists so the Chinese will work with the power constellation that's there in the view of these Europeans. They're not very fastidious about good governance and Europeans who take good governance very seriously they are concerned that the Chinese are buying short-term stability at the possible risk of long-term instability and of the many factors that people who talk about civil war and civil conflict often talk about one of them is demographics and there's a very, very high pace of population growth in those countries and people from those countries have demonstrated that they can access Europe. So from the point of view of European foreign ministers they view this particular emerging Chinese modus operandi as being potentially quite dangerous to them if their theories of conflict are right which is to say bad governance leads to bad development leads to bad politics leads to conflict leads to refugees or people simply leaving their countries for better economic opportunities so that's a piece of an answer to your question but not a complete one. Thanks. Before turning to the audience last question and for you Nancy and Claire and anybody else who would like to add to this so if we talked about the standard treatment regime it did still enjoys a degree of success you've talked about lessons learned over the last 10 to 15 years we do have examples of success stories that are out there. Can you point to in this contemporary world 2018 can you point to recent success stories say modest ones that you could give as an examples of what you're advocating as a better approach? Nancy? Well I cited sort of the classic that we all are heartened by which is Columbia in that it was there was a shared purpose within the US effort an aligned effort that aligned internally as well as with our partner in Columbia and it was sustained over time. I do think one of the key lessons that I wanna pull out that Claire mentioned as well is that we often we often determine the effectiveness of our response by the amount of assistance that we put out and these gigantic packages do often have corrosive impacts on a country and so I think as we look at Iraq right now we have a really important moment of a country that has a new sense of its own identity that they won what is now the third campaign and are headed towards these elections. There's a new mood of a sense that the people are demanding a more inclusive cross sectarian government. This would be the wrong time for us to pull out and if we go by what we often do is declare victory after the military campaign and decide we're done I think it could have very detrimental consequences. Is there a do you think there's a correlation in their Nancy between our level of effort and our ability to sustain? So I thought one of the paradoxes of President Obama's surge into Afghanistan in 2009 and for that matter probably the Bush surge into Iraq was that when you use the idea of the term the surge which means then you're going to have to come back out and even though you want to think through this clinically as an engineering problem and of course we can use more military we can use more development assistance to be thinking through the realities of politics in the United States would we have been better to have a lower level of effort that could have been politically sustainable? Probably and looking to what we're facing right now in Iraq I don't think anybody is recommending that we do another gigantic package of physical reconstruction. That will be an international job, an Iraqi job but there are ways in which we can and must remain engaged to support the process that's underway and to support some of the actors who are and the voices where we have aligned interest to move towards a more inclusive country. Otherwise it'll just relapse into ISIS 2.0. Thanks and then Clary and you had said that this can take 30, 40 years so your answer can't be we're gonna have to wait 30 to 40 years to see a success story. Well I think as I think there've been a family of successes in different regions and of course the East Asian successes of which within which both South Korea and Japan the US played a major part but there are others a fantastic book How Asia Works by Joe Studwell tries to explain the sequencing and the differences. There've been a number of Latin American successes and I absolutely agree with Nancy that Columbia to me is the most inspiring and the most recent and you know with so many lessons about integration about sequencing, about partnerships about how to deal with this sovereignty paradox and one example of President Arriba recognizing that the lack of trust of the people in the government was a core and he used to take his cabinet to villages and towns around the country the cabinet meetings weren't held in the capital city they were held out. He used to give out his phone number to the people saying call me if that minister doesn't do what they promised. Columbia, but I think we've also seen a number of countries that did have the standard treatment regime of a peace agreement and peacekeeping forces and so on that now have fallen backwards and if you look at the Northern Triangle El Salvador, Honduras, Guatemala those are some examples and I think there what that shows to me is that we didn't pay enough attention collectively to the corruption, criminality, transnational crime element which is just coming to the fore more and more in today's world and then there are a number of them have been in smaller countries so Timor-Leste, it's a small country but has been remarkably successful they've managed to set up a $20 billion sovereign wealth fund I mean they've discovered gas so that helped but they've stewarded their own resources. Kosovo, probably a success but Sassudan not so I think a reign but probably one can come to sort of 12 to 20 cases that have been relatively successful in the last couple of decades and I would say absolutely also agreeing with Nancy a lot of money has gone into the physical reconstruction and sometimes infrastructure is important and there's now a lot of attention on the political which is imperative but I think we often ignore or the leaders of the countries often ignore two other dimensions and it's the social and the cultural and the level of trauma inflicted on a society and what it takes to heal at a conference of leaders of post-conflict transitions they said the thing they regretted most was not paying enough attention to this psychological and trauma dimension and that the need for some kind of healing process and then the cultural dimension of what's appropriate within the culture of the society. Thanks Claire, I've triggered two thoughts on essays that appear in these two volumes of data list. What has Claire talked about case studies there's a brilliant essay written by two German contributors about the interventions of the West Balkans and very nuanced differentiating about conditions that led to various degrees of success with the interventions there. The second getting to a Claire's question of timelines which I think all of us agree to all the participants agree to is when you talk about pre-existing conditions that can either facilitate or can limit the opportunities for success and intervention obviously who are within a particular society what's the degree of national identity and what's their norms about rule of law that really has to inform your approach. Frank Fukuyama wrote an essay about the importance of these two factors national identity rule of law and he looked at English civil wars since the period of about 1200 AD to the glorious revolution and so it's a period of 400, 500 years and he makes the point that as many with a superficial understanding of English history will look at the problem Magna Carta is signed and then from the Magna Carta on England is on a steady path towards consolidation of national identity rule of law. The reality is frequent civil wars occurring within a year of the Magna Carta the deal is broken and so Frank in this essay quotes from a former British Prime Minister Gordon Brown who Gordon Brown talking about this long, long march that England had towards consolidation of rule of law the his essay starts off with the Gordon Brown quote when it comes to the building of rule of law it's the last 600 years that's the most difficult question. Why don't we do this? Let's turn to the audience and do we wanna wait for microphones? Great, if you'd wait for a microphone and I'll call on you and if you would start please with your name and if you have an affiliation. So right here gentlemen in the purple tie. So far I've seen from the embassy of Iraq. So reminiscing a novel written by Indian diplomat novelist Kushwan Singh the title of the novel is a train to Pakistan that is describing the atrocities of the partition between India and Pakistan. And also reminiscing when Iraq won the Asia championship in 2007 and there was a big turmoil in the country so when the Iraqi team won the championship all the sectarian differences were gone. My question is what about the historical models or literary walks or even sport? To what extent can they play a role in creating an awareness to avoid a future civil war or in recovering after one? Thank you. Thank you and when you ask your question if you wanted to direct it to anybody on the panel or just leave it open. Nancy do you wanna? Well I feel like I'm doing a lot of dittos to Claire but absolutely and as Claire said you know that healing after conflict is very very important it's something that we put a lot of emphasis on here at US Institute of Peace about what are the different mechanisms and models for bridging the divides that are deepened and exacerbated by conflict and sports and different cultural events can be wonderful whether they're films or poetry or sports. I mean the famous one of course was the soccer game that or that was it the rugby that Nelson Mandela organized to bring that country together. So you know these are the soft side of things that often get left out of the conversation but they're often those aspects those activities that are truly transformative as a country seeks to emerge from conflict. As Brad knows in Afghanistan we in fact did invest in efforts like that we the United States with partners so the cricket team of Afghanistan is extraordinarily good and when they came to gather it was just fascinating to watch Afghan pride in this cricket team whether you're Paschun whether you're Tajik whether you're in Uzbek it was your team. The second project that we undertook was to rebuild the help restore the citadel of in Herat old Persian cultural legacy but Afghan legacy there and when it was rebuilt it was a fantastic project and once again Afghan sense of pride this idea that they've had a really rough modern history but to be able to look back into a past giving them confidence and hope about their future. The final point I'd make about the citadel of Herat project three million dollars of U.S. taxpayers money one U.S. Army soldier one U.S. Marine in Afghanistan for one year one million dollars. So what we did for the citadel of Herat was three soldiers in Afghanistan for one year each. All that said you've got to understand the political realities and I was Obama's ambassador I have great respect for President Obama but you wouldn't be surprised to know that in many video teleconferences live from Kabul back to Washington D.C. He never once asked me about the progress we were making on the citadel of Herat. In the back please he did that's fair. Hello I'm Madeline from the Stimson Center thank you very much to all the panelists I have a question for both Claire and Stephen who both mentioned contingency and incentives creating incentives and I wonder if you can respond to what Barry said about what kind of incentives work in a multipolar world. So this idea of if you're making aid or assistance contingent on something and then Russia comes in arms you know the Central African Republic or something and they do not have they do not make it contingent or you know development assistance from China. What kinds of incentives work in a multipolar world. Well I mean I've argued in the paper in this anthology that there's a fairly low ceiling on what these kinds of small footprint assistance projects can achieve even if they're conditioned and even if they're designed and framed to create incentives for the recipient to behave contrary to their own interests and more aligned with others. In part because the entire inspiration for a small footprint approach is the desire to limit resource investment on our part and that in turn means we're going to have a limited degree of leverage commensurate to an important degree with the scale of resources we're willing to devote. Now that said we can devote even very large resources as we were in Afghanistan in 2009 to 11 as we were in Iraq in the 2007 search and get no leverage out of that either if it's provided in an unconditional capacity building model but if we want the partner to behave in ways that are more aligned with our interests we have to provide incentives that are sufficient to motivate partners to take actions that are extremely risky for the partner and that's not inexpensive and to the extent that we're not willing to make that investment then we need to be correspondingly modest with respect to what kind of outcome we can reasonably expect. Now I'm of the view that whatever we invest should be invested as efficiently as we can and that requires in my view that it not be in this kind of engineering a political capacity building model but there are two pieces to sound policy here it seems to me one is doing whatever we're going to do as well as we can do it the other is understanding what we're willing to do can actually accomplish and sometimes the logical implication of that is not becoming involved if we don't think that the level of effort we're able to invest is going to be sufficient to solve the problem to a satisfactory degree that it will meet American domestic political requirements for action but I think modesty is appropriate here and I would certainly agree that there are limitations both increased limitations in a multipolar world and also when a country has its own significant domestic resources the external component of financing may be very small I mean even in Columbia I think at its height the Colombians own budget was many more than 10 times sometimes 20 times as much as the external financing coming in so I'd very much recognize the limitation having said that in many many cases external actors are funding 50, 80% of a country's budget and there just is as a matter of reality tremendous leverage there and your conditionality as I'm sure you know has a very mixed record over time and it can be poorly or better designed but I think this is where the IMF and the World Bank which is still when I last checked global organizations can have enormous potential to be able to align a set of conditions and there's much more creativity at the moment in looking how that's done and there's results-based funding so the funding's available when certain results have been achieved or floating tranches so that it's not necessarily time-specific because sometimes you don't know when a country's gonna have an open moment for reform to advance something I think something we know doesn't work is the type of conditionality so that right you're gonna do these four things this year and then there was enormous pressure to disperse even though those outcomes hadn't been reached so some creativity but absolutely recognizing that there are limitations F.C. Steve please I just wanted to say so there's some very interesting work by Desher George who's an associate professor at Georgetown and it follows exactly on what Claire said I mean if you're in a situation in which there's no alternative source of funding for instance no raw materials and you don't care that much about the place where you're actually engaged you can make conditionality effective but you can see the irony or the contradiction that's involved in a situation in which would we invest or anyone invest significant resources in a place that we don't care about if we care about the place it makes conditionality very problematic Nancy in talking about different processes that the US government develops to for intervention for development assistance security assistance Steve had made the point that the asymmetry of information between the intervener and the host nation is it's always very skew it's skewed in one direction we have a hard time getting enough information about local conditions that said it's true we think that at least those people that are operating in that country USAID, the Department of State, the military they maybe they don't have perfect information they don't but they probably have more information than Washington D.C. has and yet the way that we organize our development assistance it seems that our military is given much more latitude and much more discretion in how it applies aid not so USAID at least in my experience in the Department of State much more control a lot of checklists that have to be followed very rigid in your in your view with your experience is this a factor? Yes, it's absolutely a factor if you look at 2008 when Kenya exploded from very violent elections the aid budget at that time was in the neighborhood of 80% dedicated to PEPFAR and there was very little room to do anything that was relevant to the violence that was disrupting the country on the one hand I would also note that you know the entire aid budget is pretty pretty rife with earmarks that keep it from being more flexible the stabilization assistance review that state aid and DOD have just completed which I really commend to people I find it a very encouraging document and it does have a call for several variations of funds that are more flexible but I want to make one other point because we've kind of glossed over this issue but the real way that change happens is when people want it locally and we've talked about that in terms of aligned interests but the genius of of the fragile states new deal is that it was a framework that was based on a lot of evidence that said here are the principles for going forward to to moving out of conflict it was you know inclusion it was a legitimate politics it was all the things that we would agree with but it was their framework and they signed up voluntarily to this and then the international community partnered with them now it has not fully realized its potential and there are a lot of reasons and there's a lot of study for why but I think it still offers a vision of how it could go forward when change is driven by the conflict affected countries themselves because that's where you're gonna get the greatest forward traction when we it goes to the heart of the issue when we as external actors are trying to drive the change it's never gonna be as effective as if it's being driven as when it's being driven locally and by both governments and uh... communities who are engaged in the process my name is Hakeem I'm a student graduate student at the George Washington University uh... I have a question regarding the peace prospects in Afghanistan and uh... if you ambassador and professor better if you both would uh... respond to this uh... I understand and most of us do recognize that the collapse of the Taliban regime was not a civil war issue however my question is uh... would have it changed uh... the calculation had the uh... international community considered you know reaching out to peace deal after their collapse uh... after they were collapsed in early two thousand uh... if so how would that change the scenario up to this point and uh... that's one part of it in second how aligned uh... are the international community interest with the current afghan government in the peace process and how optimistic should we be towards the reaching a peace a sustainable peace agreement yeah thank you so very briefly uh... when the united states uh... went into afghanistan in two thousand one uh... it was to uh... hunt al-qaeda i mean that's that's cutting to the chase that's why we went there was not for state building in afghanistan we failed in the attempt to uh... get bin laden we let the trail went cold so to speak so we begin to begin a build-up in afghanistan and over time is that build-up continues we need the military presence in afghanistan because we can't go into pakistan over time then new interest start to develop new interest are one uh... now we're fighting taliban in afghanistan and number two is we come increasingly concerned about stability in afghanistan and we take that on as a uh... mission to wind the clock back in two thousand one the counterfactual and what if we've gotten bin laden in two thousand one ten years later would we have a hundred thousand troops in afghanistan i don't think so uh... that said had we when we did go in had we thought more clearly about not just bin laden but since we're going into afghanistan we have to think about political outcome here what is this country it can be modest it can be ambitious there was not that kind of clarity of thought and so what did we do tactically we aligned ourselves with the northern alliance whose depredations against the afghan people had led to the rise of the taliban and so uh... we thought taliban was a spent force in fairness many afghan elite thought taliban was a spent force but they weren't they came back in and then we went down the path that uh... unfortunately we've walked the prospects uh... for peace there u.s. influence is uh... even with fifteen thousand troops it's not it's not as high of course as it was when there were a hundred thousand troops and even when there were a hundred thousand troops it wasn't as high as when say in twenty oh five we we had uh... thirty thousand troops so if you're afghan and you hear the united states of america say we're really here this time with fifteen thousand troops but i remember several years ago we had a hundred thousand troops here what's our credible commitment to them so it's the united states the ones that can guarantee then peace in afghanistan my own view would be if you're an afghan you'd say no that doesn't mean we don't have an important role to play increasingly if there's going to be peace in that country it starts with pakistan starts with their own national reconciliation it also first and foremost begins with pakistan and until pakistan finds their interest either through coercive diplomacy of the united states coercive positive diplomacy by china uh... and we can get a consortium of countries together who are all players iran russia china to an extent india pakistan until that day comes where we have a common interest among those countries in a commitment not to metal inside of afghanistan i think peace is going to remain very lucid with at least two former u.s. ambassadors to afghanistan in the room ambassador heikenberry and ambassador newman in the back the the views of a political science professor on afghan peace prospects are worth less than you're paying for them that said we in academia have never been known to be deterred from talking about things that that others are more qualified to address so i'll talk about it since since you asked uh... my preferred option is the time machine approach but let's get a time machine but let's go back to two thousand two and let's negotiate a more inclusive settlement after the taliban you know government was driven from the country i don't know that that could have guaranteed that there would be no insurgency but i think it would have made the insurgency if it still occurred substantially less virulent uh... and i uh... i'm sympathetic to the notion that if the settlement had been structured well and followed up upon properly that that perhaps the odds of recidivism in this civil war you would have been tolerably low uh... the time machine option of course isn't available to us and there are lots of understandable historically contingent facts that explain why the bush administration didn't do it when they did the mood in the united states to put it mildly was not conducive to inclusiveness toward the the taliban government that soon after nine eleven so now it's fast-forward to twenty eighteen in the peace prospects now there are all sorts of good reasons to be skeptical we could have taken this entire panel just let the time allocation listing them all if however one's position is going to be that the negotiating prospects are negative enough that we're not likely to get a settlement i think the the policy implication at that point for the united states is disengagement rather than continuing to invest money and lives in an effort that's just extending the duration of an extremely violent civil war if you don't think we can negotiate some significant reduction in violence i think the implication for the united states is it would be a quicker end to this if we get out and we encourage you know a military solution on the ground which probably won't favor you know the government of afghanistan sooner or later the congress is going to defund american participation in this war i i know others in the room disagree with me on this and as a general rule i i try to avoid disagreeing with ambassador newman in particular because it's it's unwise uh... that said i don't think a korea model where youth as you posit that the united states is going to keep this war on life support indefinitely with no prospect for a settlement that could end it we're just going to keep it going without a and without a plan is politically viable in the united states this this entire war effort was very nearly defunded a few weeks ago and it could be defunded again thursday morning and if it isn't thursday morning it could be monday morning right i did i i think an obligation of good governance in a democracy is if we are going to continue to spend the public's money and continue to get the occasional american killed in this environment and keep a war going that's killing vast numbers of afghans in the meantime to the extent that we influence that at all it is incumbent upon our government to articulate some sort of plan for how this is going to come to a good end i happen to be on the reasonably optimistic end of the spectrum of opinion in this town on whether a tolerable settlement can be obtained the fact that president ghani has recently it's spoken out in favor of some of the fact that the taliban has spoken out recently in favor of a settlement the fact that the pakistanis appear to be conducive to so i think at the moment relative to six months ago or a year ago that the stars are better aligned than they have been the settlement if we get it is not going to be a surrender instrument for the taliban it is going to be a compromise settlement in which the government of afghanistan and the united states and other international backers of the government of cancer and make real compromises in order to get the violence to end on issues that we care about and should care about but if we are not willing to do that the logical alternative is not the current policy i personally have long been frustrated with for example the department of defense's default perspective on negotiation which is we can't negotiate because we're weak we have to change the momentum when we were strong we can't negotiate now because we're gaining ground that means we can't negotiate but no negotiation theorist no academic negotiation theorist in the room i'm sure we got at least one out there somewhere it would say that negotiating space goes to zero if one side is weaker than the other one of course not it simply affects what the scale of distribution of stakes is going to be in a settlement we're gonna have to make more compromises than we would like because we are not where we would like to be militarily on the ground in afghanistan in my view that means we should get on with the business of making the compromises and begin to move what will inevitably be a long messy complicated internally politically complex negotiating process forward rather than letting it sit you know in stasis for what is worth nancy we've reached four o'clock do you like to uh... do you want to uh... make a hard stop at four o'clock under the u s i p rules and protocols i know that does i think one of our panelists has got a uh... flight to uh... catch maybe we should use this is the uh... the point to conclude uh... i wanted to uh... thank all of you coming again my thanks and nancy to you in u s i p francesca to the academy of arts and sciences this process that i've gone through uh... the past two years to work with uh... such distinguished colleagues as we have here on the stage and many more has been uh... absolutely wonderful for me this is an important dialogue that we're having i wrote in uh... in the uh... co-wrote with the steven our introductory uh... essay to volume one i was inside the pentagon on nine eleven and i wouldn't i'm very fortunate to uh... be here uh... american airlines flight uh... eighty eight uh... almost literally one underneath my office which is in the outer ring on the uh... third floor of the pentagon why do i tell you that story because in that introductory essay i refer to the fact that uh... that was such a shock for the united states of america i recall that during the cold war there used to be these posters that you'd see in the pentagon some in the department of state in the c i a and it was made up like a mock travel poster and it was from a mayday parade of the soviet union so a group of soviet tanks and mechanized vehicles and rockets going through red square and then a spoof uh... travel poster which was the soviet union visit us before we visit you on nine eleven we were visited by al-qaeda with sanctuary inside of afghanistan so the notion that we can just uh... say that there was a horrible experience in iraq look how hard it is in afghanistan so we have a binary choice we either go at scale and fail or we just turn our back on it we don't have that choice in the united states of america these dialogues that we're having right now are good because i think we're far enough uh... distant from iraq at scale in afghanistan at scale that we can start to have more reasonable discussions and it was great to have you included in this particular one thank you nancy