 Just sit here John, if you guys sit in the front here. Good morning everyone. Good morning everyone. Good morning everyone. We're about to begin here. Welcome to New America. I'm Peter Bergen, I run the Global Studies program here. It's really a great honor to introduce our speaker and also after the first session we'll also introduce our panel. This is the launch today of the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction's report, Candidate Coddix. As you can see it's a very thorough piece of work. And it's my pleasure to introduce John Sopko who of course is the cigar. He has had that position for six years which I think must be some sort of world record. He has been to Afghanistan some 20 times and has led the effort to really understand what is going on in Afghanistan for the United States during that time period. So he's gonna basically speak for about 20 minutes or so with some of the key highlights from the report. Then we'll have a Q and A, we'll open it to conversation then we'll have the panel which will also discuss some of the findings of the report. Good morning and thank you very much for those comments. I hope I don't turn off the lights or something a little computer here but I think it'll work. Again, thank you for that kind introduction and also I wanna thank New America for hosting today's release of our report on our counter narcotics efforts in Afghanistan. We believe today's report represents the most comprehensive and independent government assessment of the counter narcotics efforts in Afghanistan. It is the product of over two and a half years of research and based upon extensive interviews done with over 80 current and former officials, academics and researchers with many of them having long on the ground experience in Afghanistan. It also incorporates our staff's review of previously undisclosed official documents and the unique use of geospatial imagery to better understand and evaluate the impact of hundreds of projects in Afghanistan. The result which comprises 223 pages of narrative and graphics is available online at our agency website, www.cigar.mil in both a PDF and interactive format. Cigar is to my knowledge the only IG office that produces such interactive publications which have broadened our reach to an audience that prefers to access news and information in a condensed format developed better for smartphones and iPads. Cigar's lessons learn program for some of you who don't know much about it was launched in 2014 at the suggestion of the former US and NATO force commander in Afghanistan, General John Allen and former ambassador Ryan Crocker among others. It was intended and is intended to draw upon Cigar's oversight work which amounts to over 300 reports and other agencies to extract larger lessons to improve outcomes in Afghanistan and where appropriate in future contingency operations around the world. Cigar is, I must add, uniquely qualified to undertake our work as General Allen and Ambassador Crocker reminded me when they made the suggestion. Why? Because the 2008 statute that created my agency made us a truly independent oversight shop not based or housed in any US government agency. As such, we are the only US agency with the mandate to examine all aspects of Afghan reconstruction and all money spent by the US government on reconstruction in Afghanistan regardless of its source or regardless of the agency involved. Now, producing this lessons learned report on counter narcotics has obviously been a major task for our agency. Why did we do it? Well, first of all, because our enabling statute, the 2008 statute requires us to make recommendations to the government on improving government operations and programs. And as you will hear today, this was one government operation and program that needed improvement. And secondly, because narcotics production and trafficking is a serious threat to the public health, law enforcement and stability and sustainability of the Afghan state which has been the ultimate goal of our 17 year adventure in Afghanistan. As the United Nations Office of Drugs and Crimes has noted, poppy cultivation and opium production threaten sustainable development, foster political instability and help fund the insurgency. Now, I know firsthand like many of you do how serious the fight against narcotics trafficking can be. As a former federal prosecutor with the organized crime and racketeering section of the Department of Justice and as an investigative counsel for the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations for over 15 years, I have seen the drug business up close. Here on the streets of the United States as well as in the jungles of Peru, Bolivia, Ecuador and Mexico. Likewise, during my more than 20 trips to Afghanistan, I have seen fields of poppy growing throughout the countryside as well as the countless drug addicts on the streets and under the bridges of Kabul City. I mentioned the US and other countries narcotics problem to point out a critical fact. Even in wealthier and more developed countries where the cultivation and production of drugs play a smaller role in the economy than they do in Afghanistan, combating the drug trade is no easy or simple task. One thing we in Afghanistan have in common is that our wars on drugs have been long and not very successful. That is a key message today. Fighting drugs is not easy, especially in a war zone, especially amid larger failures in a reconstruction effort and especially with partners who cannot or will not take on the corruption and violence that narcotics fosters. The corollary message is that we must do a better job if we want to mitigate the ways the drug trade undermines our national security goals in Afghanistan. Let's consider the facts. From fiscal year 2002 until 2017, Congress has provided $8.6 billion for the counter narcotics effort in Afghanistan. That's on one side of the scale. Now let's put these facts on the other side of the scale. Opium cultivation in Afghanistan jumped by 63% from 2016 to 2017 to a record high of 328,000 hectares, which is equal to about 1,200 square miles, which is equal to approximately 20 times the land mass of Washington, D.C. At the same time, that record opium crop could support the production of up to 900 tons, that's tons of exportable heroin. The value of the 2017 opium output was between $4.1 and $6.3 billion, or equivalent to 20 to 32% of Afghanistan's entire GDP. Opium poppy production has become so ingrained in the Afghan livelihood and Afghan economy that it is estimated to provide employment for over 590,000 full-time jobs, which is more than the entire Afghan army and police force combined. And yet, at the same time that we've had successful seizures of drugs, the amount of opium drugs seized over the last 10 years is equal to less than 5% of what was produced in 2017 alone. To put it bluntly, these numbers spell failure. And unfortunately, the outlook is not that encouraging. Cigar noted in its April 2018 quarterly report to Congress that the Afghan government has been slow to implement an effective counter-narcotics strategy. We have also been slow to do so. And that the US Agency for International Development does not intend to plan, design, or implement any new programs to address poppy cultivation. The US military and federal civilian presidents in Afghanistan is far below the 2011 peak, further constraining our US ability to conduct counter-narcotics programs. Meanwhile, Afghanistan's narcotics sector continues to fuel insurgent violence and foster corruption throughout the Afghan government. The opportunity to profit from the opium trade has resulted in alliances between corrupt government officials, drug traffickers, and the insurgency. As some have said, the opium production is the economic glue that binds together many political coalitions in Afghanistan. On the other side of the struggle, last November, US and Afghan forces began airstrikes against drug labs that process raw opium into morphine and heroin. And what DOD now calls a quote unquote air interdiction campaign. General John Nicholson, the commander of the US forces Afghanistan, has said 60% of the insurgent financing may come from the drug trade. While it is good, and our report notes this, that US forces Afghanistan are focused on cutting off this financing, time will only tell if bombing labs is an effective cost effective way to do that, reach such a result. Labs, as our report notes, cost only a few hundred dollars and can be set up in three or four days and are easily movable. And any civilian casualties from the strikes could further alienate rural populations. Moreover, while all experts agree that money from the drug trade helps fund the insurgency, those same experts differ on the amount and differ on the percentage that is being taken away from the Taliban by destroying these labs. Therefore, our report urges that interdiction operations, whether on the ground or by air, need to be based upon robust intelligence, something that our report recommends that needs to be done. To be fair, we must note that the counter-narcotics struggle in Afghanistan has achieved some positive results. In particular, we note that some provinces and districts achieved reductions in poppy cultivation. The problem is there was temporary. And we do note that US support in mentoring, mainly done by the DEA, has helped stand up a well-trained and capable Afghan counter-drug units that have become trusted partners to the DEA and the rest of the US government. But these outcomes fall far short of being strategic game changers. As our new report documents, other results loom larger and are deeply disappointing. Cigars' key observations include these. First, no counter-narcotics program from 2002 to 2017 led to lasting reductions in poppy cultivation or poppy or opium production. Now let me repeat, no programs did. Last year's record setting, opium numbers are testimony to that. Now perhaps cultivation and production figures would have been even higher without the counter-narcotics programs, but their overall impact has been negligible. Secondly, eradication has had no lasting impact and were not consistently conducted in the same geographic locations as development assistance. Our report notes that this at time was a recipe for deeply alienating farmers who often had borrowed money to plant that crop, which was eradicated. Destroying their crop without setting them up with other income and leaving them in debt is not a good way to win the hearts and minds of the average Afghan farmer. Thirdly, our report notes that alternative development programs were often too short in term and failed to provide sustainable alternatives to growing poppy. At times, unfortunately, and again as noted in the report, we found that some of these programs even contributed to increased poppy production. Fourthly, and this is important, until the security situation improves, there is little possibility of significantly curtailing opium poppy cultivation and drug production in Afghanistan. As I noted, this last observation cannot be overemphasized. It is simply unrealistic to expect significant progress from counter-narcotics efforts without being able to exert reasonable and persistent levels of control over land area and transportation routes. So now what? Now I take pride in the research and analysis that underlies these conclusions. But I certainly take no pleasure in relating them today. The human suffering, criminality, corruption, and financial support to the Afghan insurgency that's tied to narcotics poses an existential threat to our entire mission in Afghanistan. We can catalog and diagnose failures, however, but we must go further and propose ways to work smarter toward our national security objectives in Afghanistan. Our report goes into considerable detail on these measures, and I believe the panel discussion will also go into more detail on those issues. But let me summarize just a few of our recommendations. First, our report recommends that the United States must outline a strategy that directs U.S. agencies toward a shared, prioritized goals and that the U.S. Ambassador should lead the implementation of that strategy. Goals should be integrated into larger U.S. security development and governance objectives. Now this sounds simple, this sounds obvious, but our current counter-narcotics strategy has not been officially updated since 2012. Parts of it have been overtaken by events and whole of government activity and coordination have been seriously lacking. In essence, we are using a six-year-old strategy that we know has failed in the hope but miraculously it will succeed. Now I've been doing this long enough, hope is usually not a good substitution for a real strategy for a government. As one State Department, Senior State Department employee told me on one of my trips to Afghanistan, unfortunately, and he joked about this but I think there was a bit of seriousness in it, he said, basically our strategy comes down to praying for drought, bad weather and insects. We don't think that's the strategy for dealing with a problem like this. Secondly, we recommend that elements of that strategy should be and must be closely coordinated and implemented together on the ground. For example, if the US government is going to pay for eradication of poppy in a province, that activity must be co-located with longer-term development assistance and focused in areas where the government has a modicum of control. This would increase the chance, as our report talks about, of achieving lasting reductions in poppy cultivation and reduce the risk of alienating further the populace. Thirdly, we recommend that our support for Afghan counter-drug units should be tailored to the Afghan government's demonstrated ability and willingness to also support those units and to target particularly senior drug traffickers. We have created great units but a complaint that I have heard for the last six years from DEA, Department of Justice and others is that those units are limited by the lack of political will on behalf of the Afghan government to go after the big fish, the big targets. And until they do, as good as those units are and as good as a job at DEA is done, it's not going to succeed. The United States and its coalition partners cannot win the drug war in Afghanistan alone. Progress will depend upon political will in Kabul and upon adequately staffed, trained, motivated and effective units in the Afghan security, judicial and attorney general's office. Fourth, we recommend that the US ambassador to Afghanistan and the commander of the US forces of Afghanistan must closely coordinate the implementation of any counter-narcotics strategy. Because there is an increased chance of success and an increased chance of failure if we don't, it is necessary for this strategy to be to be implemented in secure areas, so therefore it's important that that strategy is integrated into the wider security plans and strategies of US and coalition military operations. Now our report has much more detailed analysis on these matters. In fact, in addition to a historical record and assessment of US counter-narcotics efforts, it includes 13 key findings, 11 lessons and 13 recommendations of which three are specifically focused in Afghanistan. And as you can tell, I have merely scratched the surface of this 248-some-page report. So I encourage all of you to consult the full document and read more on the areas of interest. But I would stop for a second and draw your attention to a key piece of this report, which I believe is very unique and it is innovative because we utilized for I think the first times, first time geographic information systems or GIS imagery that helped our staff as well as we believe that will help you to understand whether different programs were coordinated on the ground and what impact they had over the years. GIS imagery enables researchers, for example, to measure areas under opium cultivation. Note the effects of improved irrigation systems or the location of alternative development projects. Check on the results of eradication efforts and extract other useful information. I believe this dimension of the report makes an important contribution to the ongoing discussion of how to better monitor and evaluate not only counter-narcotics programs, but writ large reconstruction and development programs worldwide. So in conclusion, I recognize it would be presumptuous and probably delusional to claim that any report, any lessons learned report or any set of lessons and recommendations will stamp out the narcotics trade, its production or use. As this report makes clear, there are no silver bullets when it comes to eliminating this scourge. But if we can't kill this cancer, we can at least mitigate it. And we must mitigate it in ways that reflect realistic timelines, realistic goals and the facts on the ground. And don't repeat failed policies and failed programs in the hope and prayer that they will miraculously now work. As President Garfield once said, and he was quoting the Bible at that time and saying, the Bible's correct. The truth will set you free. When he added this caveat, it'll make you miserable at first. Well, this report and the findings of this report will make you miserable and depressed. But in the long run, we need to face the facts and build upon them a better strategy and a better program to address this threat. The findings, lessons and recommendations of today's report go a long way toward delineating a smarter and more effective path forward. Some of them may be controversial and there may be opposition to some of them. But again, quoting another great United States president, Woodrow Wilson, who said, if you wanna make enemies in this town, try to change something. This report tries to change something, namely how we approach the fight against the opium epidemic in Afghanistan. And as the head of Cigar, I am very proud and grateful to the skilled professionals in our lessons and learn program who worked so diligently over the last two and a half years on it. They include program director, Joe Windrum, and definitely our lead analyst, Kate Bateman, who also was one of our lead analysts on our first lessons learned report almost two years ago on anti-corruption. In addition, thanks go to our research analysts, Matt Bentrop, Nikolai, Kandy Padunov, and Matthew Rubin and to our great graphics designer, Olivia Peek and editor, Elizabeth Young. I also wanna thank all of you who participated in reviewing this report and we had a lot of great experts take a look at report and gave comments which we took into consideration when we finally issued it. I would also like finally to thank Dr. David Mansfield, who has worked on this issue in Afghanistan for nearly 20 years. His contribution has been invaluable to this report. Now we believe that teams analysis is persuasive and their recommendations are valuable. We urge Congress and the executive branch to review and consider them for appropriate action. But I also think it's important that you, experts, you opinion leaders, lend your voices to the call for a better strategy to tail with the drug issue in Afghanistan and elsewhere. Thank you very much and I'm open to questions. Thank you very much, sir. One of the striking things you said is 590,000 people are employed in this. That probably makes it the most successful sector of the Afghan economy. I think it is, yes. So, I mean, the only other sector that is really succeeding is sort of the telecommunications. Yeah, so that kind of raises the issue of the political problems here, which eradication, which you mentioned, I mean, they tend to, was it your conclusion that eradication approach to this tends to penalize poor farmers as opposed to drug kingpins or what was your conclusion on that front? Well, I think the staff's conclusion was exactly what you said, but if eradication is coupled with alternative development or eternal economic development, then the problem, the punishment, the reaction is modified to some extent. And that was the point, if you look at our geospatial data, you will see that we were doing eradication here and we were doing economic development over there. And where you see him overlapping, you have more chance of success. I will remember when Richard Holbrook was SRAP, he was obsessed by pomegranates. So, I mean, that's a way of saying that the United States has been engaged in this problem for a long time. And a lot of the things that you mentioned, the problems, the solutions are things the United States have done. So it's sobering to hear that 2017 was sort of the worst year for this problem. And if Afghanistan was the forgotten war, this seems to be the forgotten part of the forgotten war. And so what is the realistic chart you've made these recommendations? Obviously, the security situation's never been worse. You mentioned the lack of civilian presence. I mean, how do you implement some of these recommendations? What would it take realistically, financially, politically? Well, I think it goes back to the point we make about having a strategy. We really need to focus on what is important. And if the strategy, and again, we don't do strategies, so we look it up, operations and how well we do it. But if the key threat is the funding that comes from narcotics to the terrorists, the funding that goes to pervert the Afghan government through corruption, then we need to focus on that. And it's probably less important as to how many hectares are under production. It's again, focusing on the labs or focusing on the moneymen who are perverting the government or contributing to the Taliban. That's why we say we're glad that the Afghan forces or Afghan forces and US forces are focusing on the labs. We question whether using B-52s to blow up labs about the size of this part of the room is the right way to do it. So, but it's a good first start. If you have a question, can you raise your hand and identify yourself and wait for the mic? And the mic is in the back. No questions? My name is Ibrahim Nasser. I'm from the Voice of America. Quick question on the aerial spray. It was a few years ago that came out, but it was discussed widely and then it was opposed inside Afghanistan. Why do you think it was not the right strategy why it failed and you think it's still an option? I think our report discusses spraying in great detail. And basically our conclusion was that it drove a lot of dissidents in the approach to counter narcotics because the host government, the Afghan government, the Afghan people, many of the coalition partners were opposed to it. And it wasn't going to work. And it has never worked unless the host government accepts it, even in Columbia where I think there was widespread spraying at one time, it was only when the host government agreed to do it. So we don't really come down to saying spraying or no spraying other than practically you have to have buy-in from the Afghans. And you can't compare Columbia to Afghanistan because of the co-mingling of crops. The poppy crops are very close to houses and very close to water sources. So it's far more dangerous to do it in probably a place like Afghanistan. Are there any lessons learned from applying Columbia for Afghanistan since it seemed to have worked pretty well over time? Well, we spent a lot of time in the report saying it's comparing apples and oranges. You had Columbia for the horrors they went through for 20, 30 years fighting narcotics was a pretty functional government, functional economy. The opium trade as bad as it was, or not opium, I'm sorry, it was cocaine trade down there. It still was an infinitesimal amount of the economy and the employment. Also the Colombians paid for I think 80 to 90% of the war fighting, they supported it. And it was basically United States and Columbia working on the issue together. In Afghanistan, a poorer country, a bigger problem because of the economy. But there are some parallels. I mean, if FARC essentially became a drug cartel having originated as a Marxist insurgency is that a sort of similar situation with the Taliban or is the Taliban still an ideological force? Well, you know, we don't really know. And that is one of the things we're calling for is really we need an intel analysis of the funding sources for the Taliban. And we speak of the Taliban like a one organization. The Taliban is not monolithic. And I think the FARC was a little more monolithic and all of that. So when we talk about it, we got to keep that in consideration. There may be local drug lords slash Taliban officials and another group may not be involved. And then there's the other terrorist groups operating. Just to clarify on the lab. So I mean, because back in the day, I'm talking maybe a decade ago, the lab seemed to be all in Pakistan. So this seems to be a shift, is that correct? Yes, there are actually more labs in Afghanistan now than before. Other questions? Good morning. My name is Samad Ali. I'm an intern in the Library of Congress. Thank you very much for that comprehensive report and presentation. I'm actually from Afghanistan. I got my LLM from the University of Washington. This is my kind of last days in the US. I'm gonna go back. I'm talking from a kind of a perspective that someone has been in the field. So recently you would have noticed that unemployment is really increasing in Afghanistan. And at the same time, poverty is increasing in Afghanistan because 42% of the people of Afghanistan are now living under the poverty line, and 20 more percent of the people are really prone to falling under this line. So don't you think that one of the causes of this population or increasing population is these unemployment of the people and poverty? Because once people do not have any other alternatives, they will look on the ways to end money, of course, for their sustenance. This is my concern, I think, because this is one of the concerns we can look at. At the same time, if there is no demand, there is not gonna be a supply for that. Are you, at the same time, addressing the countries that are buying this poppy from Afghanistan? Once it is processed in Afghanistan, all of that is not gonna be used in Afghanistan. It is gonna be kind of exported from Afghanistan to other countries. Do you have any specific strategies to address that? First of all, I think you've made a very good point. We talk about it, and that's one of the reasons we talk about the employment. One of the reasons you have so many people in Afghanistan connected to poppy production cultivation is because of the lack of other jobs and employment. So it's not as if the Afghan people are morally in favor of producing drugs. It's a crop, and it's an easy crop to grow, and it's an easy crop if you're an itinerant farmer or sharecropper, and that's one of the things we point out is we didn't really understand how the drug market worked and how important it was about keeping these people employed who may not even be landowners. So we'll actually, if you go to the report, we focus on some of these food zones, the helmet food zone and the candor food zone, where what happened is we actually had eradication, enforcement, and alternative development, but it was based upon and focused on the owners of the land. Well, you had these itinerant workers. Well, they had no jobs. So what did they do? I mean, they got to eat. So they started to move to desert land, and somebody provided them money for wells, pride, and money for fertilizer, so these people moved. So what happened was if we did succeed in one of the food zones, but we basically just moved the crop because we didn't focus on all of those unemployed farm workers, sharecroppers, we would call them in the United States, who needed jobs. So you made a good point. The second point you raise is yes, there's a symbiotic relationship between drug producers and drug users, and you will be having the wise expertise of a former senior DEA official in the next panel who will tell you how easy it has been to fight drugs here in the United States. You're right, but yeah, put you out as well. And that's the same issue. When we were looking at issues in Colombia, the Colombian said, hey, look it, if you'd stop using drugs in the United States, we wouldn't grow it here. I agree with that. Unfortunately, my jurisdiction, my brief is looking at Afghanistan. I don't look at domestic opium production or use here in the United States. So I can't really tell you more about how we can fight the scourge of drug use in the United States and the rest of the world. Hi, Cheryl Garner, State Department. You actually brought up a really good point with domestic use because Afghan heroin is not a main driver to our opioid crisis. So the question I have is from an America First policy standpoint. There seems to be in your language an underlying assumption that this is our problem to solve. So does your report kind of address what Canada or Russia or European countries can do since they're the main markets for this? The other question that I have is, do you think that we should be supporting the Afghan's national drug action plan as far as strategy goes, as opposed to creating something that then we want to impose on the Afghans? Thank you. Our report does not look at what Canada is doing. Other is part of the coalition in Afghanistan or Russia or any of the other countries. But you're right. The countries around Afghanistan get most of the drugs. Iran in particular gets a lot of the drugs. China does. And then the former Soviet Union gets a lot of the drugs. But we don't focus on it because of jurisdiction, my jurisdiction. As for the Afghan strategy, there's been a lot. I understand about imposing a strategy from above from the coalition, but obviously you have to coordinate this strategy with the Afghans. But we're not gonna be able to win this without the Afghan will. Now I think the government in Kabul, the senior leadership, realizes this is a problem. But they have to deal, and that's what I was talking about, these great units that the DEA trained. Well, they can try to make cases, but if the corrupt prosecutor won't take it or the corrupt judge won't take it or the rest of the system isn't there, then it's gonna fail. So you really do need a willing partner in this. We can't do it alone. Great, any other questions? Mr. Johnlund here. Thank you. I'm Dr. Yakub Zheshnevsky from the Council for Logistics Research. You pointed out the size of the opium market, something like 23% of Afghan GDP, 590,000, 520,000 people employed. Realistically, are there any sectors that could absorb that level of economic activity, provide that number of jobs, replace that level of income if the government of Afghanistan and the United States were successful in eliminating opium cultivation? I would probably defer to my colleagues who have looked at this for two and a half years, but I think you could look in the agricultural area and that is probably a good area. I mean, at one point Afghanistan actually exported crops. I'm not certain they would be able to do it, but I think that's an area. It's basically an agrarian society and that would probably be the area we would focus. And again, we're not critical of the aid programs of trying to develop alternative crops or alternative economy. We're just saying is they weren't well coordinated and they also weren't in place for a long enough period of time. We tried to give alternative crops. He usually takes five years or more for that to kick in and actually provide an income to the farmers, but our programs usually were far less, two years or three years, so we never were able to get there. So I would think it would have to be agricultural, but I will defer to Kate and the rest of the staff here because they looked at it in a far more detail. With that, we will segue to Kate and the rest. Thank you very much, sir. Thank you. Thank you very much. Thank you very much. Ambassador Newman, we're in the middle here. Kate is here. Doug, you're by Ambassador Newman. Okay, so we are gonna have a panel to discuss some of the findings of the report. Kate Bateman was one of the lead pans on the report and she has had a distinguished career at the State Department. She spent considerable time in Afghanistan in 2010, 2011, and then Ambassador Newman in the middle who was, of course, ambassador to Afghanistan. Actually, he spent his honeymoon in Afghanistan. Is that correct, sir? Well, almost, almost, okay. But whose father was also ambassador to Afghanistan before him and spent a great deal of time in the country, one of the country's leading experts on Afghanistan. Then Doug Wonkel to the ambassador's right who was the drug czar in Afghanistan, was in Afghanistan in the late 70s working for DEA, long senior DEA official. I met Doug when we were in Urazgan in 2007 going down on an eradication mission and it really struck me then how big the problem was because we stayed at the Governor's Mansion which is this two-story building. If you stand on the roof, all you could see in every direction were poppy fields that went right up to the walls of the Governor's Mansion. So I was like, well, okay, this is the scale of the problem. And then, of course, Matt Aikins who's a fellow at New America who has written extensively on the drug trade in Afghanistan among many other things that he's focused on and is also writing a book which he is completing about the experience of being an Afghan refugee fleeing into Europe. And he, to write that book, he became an Afghan refugee as it were. So a very distinguished panel. We'll start with Kate and then we'll just go this way. All right, great. Thank you, Peter and New America for hosting this event and to everyone on the panel. I'd like to expand on two key points in the report, both of which the IG has mentioned. First, the importance of integrating counter-narcotics or CN into broader US goals. And second, the contribution of the report's use of GIS imagery. One of the most important takeaways from the report is this. Poppy cultivation and drug production impact every part of the US reconstruction effort. As Mr. Sopko said, Afghanistan's OPM output last year was worth around 30% of the country's GDP. And yet for 16 years, the issue of counter-narcotics has often been treated as a silo, relegated as a side project and not well integrated into the US's broader security governance and development goals. This sounds a bit abstract that CN needs to be integrated into the larger effort. So what do we mean by that? We mean, for example, that any development project, especially those in rural areas, needs to take into account how it could affect poppy cultivation and conversely, how poppy could affect the project. This perspective should be built into the program at every stage, design, implementation, monitoring and evaluation. And in the development world, this is known as mainstreaming counter-narcotics. We realize that CN is not going to be a top-line priority for the US in Afghanistan anytime soon. But the drug trade is not going away. It will keep undercutting everything we try to do on security, governance and development. And this is what Mr. Sapko spoke to so well. So with fewer resources to work with, the US has to ensure that counter-narcotics is part of and aligned with our broader priorities. Now shifting to the report's use of GIS imagery, I have some pretty pictures to show you. This is the first report to our knowledge to use GIS analysis to map how different parts of the counter-narcotics effort were sequenced and co-located or not in a geographic area. How is this done? The imagery puts development programs and eradication points on the same map to determine whether they were carried out in the same place. Also GIS analysis helps us see what crops are being grown in an area over many years. So we can put these data together and we can ask questions like, did eradication in a given area lead to more or less poppy in subsequent years? In other words, did crop destruction deter farmers from growing poppy? In the past, this is the key argument that has underpinned advocacy for eradication, that eradication has a deterrent effect. So we can test this with the GIS imagery. And here's one example. This first image for 2006 is in Kugiani district in Nangahar province and it shows the green represents wheat and it shows very little poppy, obviously. You'd see just a small plot of red to the left. In 2012, the very same area, geographical area, you see poppy is now a 36% of total agriculture and it may be hard to see further back but there are dozens of white little white stars all over them in the center part of the map in the upper left that show, those are plotting eradication points. And then in 2016, poppy has ballooned to 69% of total agriculture. There's no eradication data for this year but we see that four years after very significant eradication in this area, four years later, poppy has nearly doubled. The takeaways that eradication did not have a lasting deterrent effect in this area and we found this again and again in images of many other areas. An example of how GIS can be useful is looking at, or another example, is looking at how different development interventions have affected poppy cultivation. For instance, USAID reported that one program rehabilitated irrigation canals that increased the productivity of about 250,000 acres of land but wouldn't we want to know what crops are being grown with these irrigation systems? GIS can help show us that. This is not to say that we deny the valuable development impact of such improved irrigation projects but we just want to point out that US agencies should have risk mitigation strategies in place in a major drug producing area to ensure that a development project does not make the poppy problem or the drug problem worse. To summarize, GIS imagery lets us look at program locations and outcomes in an unprecedented way. The imagery is important to the report for two reasons. First, we draw some of our key conclusions from this analysis, such as the observation that in many cases areas that saw the most intense eradication did not have little or no alternative development programs at the same time. And we're not, a second, the GIS imagery is a really powerful proof of concept. And we're not saying that it's a panacea, of course, but it is an incredibly useful tool for helping us better understand what is happening on the ground. The costs of the technology have fallen sharply so we recommend that US agencies make much greater use of GIS for monitoring and evaluation. And finally, I want to reiterate Mr. Sapko's acknowledgment that the report would not have seen daylight without the work and talents of Matt Bentrot, Matthew Rubin, Nikolai Khandipatinov, or without the deep expertise of Dr. David Mansfield. And thank you very much. I look forward to more discussion. Thank you. That's an even. Thanks, Peter. You know, as one who has had some responsibility at one point for actually executing part of this problem, let me say that I agree with this report. I actually have read it. Thanks to Kate Sending it to me in a barcode form with a good week because this report takes a while. And I really find this report quite excellent. What I want to do is just touch on two problems. One, a philosophical problem that goes in much broader in policymaking. And two, I want to go a little further than this report goes because I think it points at a conclusion that it does not say. Philosophically, maybe that's too large a word, we had in Afghanistan and we will continue to have the problem of making decisions when we do not have all the facts, when we are not capable of designing a coordinated strategy before we begin to act. There are a lot of situations. Afghanistan has repeatedly been one where we are under pressure to fight a war, to make decisions, to deal with problems. And the idea that you can tell the Congress, the people or the situation you're involved in in about two or three years, I'll be ready to start designing the strategy to work on a problem is just not gonna fly. The criticism that we didn't have it is totally just. But I think people need to go beyond that to understand that you're not going to be there in many cases, some cases you can, great. And the fact that you can go as many years as we have without quite getting problem. But the fact is we're gonna repeat that kind of problem. And so one of the things we have to get to is a very different kind of learning culture. How do you use failure, mistakes, whatever, to adjust? Because we have a bureaucratic and a political culture that is designed to prevent, to make that kind of adjustment as hard as possible. Programs that fail are failures. They're not some place you learn. People who design programs that fail are failures, not to necessarily be re-employed in a program. Your report doesn't say that, but that's the political consequences. Criticism, outrage, how could you screw this up so badly? Those are the natural political consequences of things that don't work. And so when those beckon on the horizon, the natural and human response to criticism is to do one of two things or both. One is to deny the problem, circle the defensive wagons, which means that it is as hard as possible to learn from it and use it. And the second problem is to, reaction, is to seek for an immediate answer. What can I adjust right now in policy, in program? And a lot of what you document here were those kind of adjustments. We've got to have something that works here. We've got to have more alternative livelihoods. We've got to have, in my case, but sometimes we've got to have more eradication because one thing that I don't think you noted in the report, in my period, Congress had a requirement on our aid budget that prevented us using, I think it was like 25 or 30% or more of the aid budget unless we could certify progress in counter-narconics and we had to certify at a local level, government level as well as a national level. What that meant practically was you were never gonna be able to use a big piece of your aid unless you could get someplace you can't go. And in fact, because of the different timing of our aid budget and the harvest season, you would not even see the local government action to actually be able to say whether or not you could certify until you were well into your program year. So it was really a hamstringing provision. It had the out that you could use a national security waiver. But when you're gonna use a waiver, which we did repeatedly because we had a lot of other things and a war going on, you need to be able to say that you have some expectation of change. This is a political reality. And so one of the things we did was to see some degree of progress that we could hold up for the Congress. This has nothing to do with effective counter-narconics. It has everything to do with getting on with the whole rest of the war. And so at one point we set targets that were sometimes not realistic and we knew they weren't realistic and we set them for political reasons. And given that situation, I'd probably do the same thing again with the same honesty about what I'm actually achieving. So we have a big issue in how we change so that we can use failure so that we can make initial decisions in uncertain situations and then build from them and then learn from them rather than have reactions that are very counterproductive. The time, and I talked about the time scale, which brings me to my second point and I'll quit after that. The report very accurately says you can't do this where you haven't got security. And it notes that, as John just noted, that security stinks right now. But that takes you to a place which I think is sort of evident but which the report doesn't say, which is probably fair enough. And that is you can't do a policy right now. When you look at the three recommendations that are specific to Afghanistan, they're kind of, they're good, they're right. But they're hold the line when nothing else is really gonna be possible for a while. And that means effectively we're going to have to significantly win the war. We're gonna have to make enormous progress in security before you have the rest of the drug strategy possible. And all the other recommendations which are posited in the report as the general recommendations for broader use, they're correct. But you can't do much with them in Afghanistan right now because you haven't got the security you're not gonna have. And that means you have to get up and say to Congress and others that we're actually not going to do much about this problem right now, not because we don't want to, because it isn't serious, because it isn't destroying other pieces, but because we can't, because it's not realistic. And so we're not gonna have these other programs right now. And actually there's some interesting historical experience, China, Burma, Thailand, all faced drug problems when they had ongoing insurgencies. And in all three of those cases, they decided whether consciously or not, I don't know, but they just didn't do anything about them until they won the insurgency. But that is a, if you're corrected, you can't do most of these things well until you have security. And to Douglas talk about that, so I won't. There is a conclusion that you come from that, which is that all the other stuff we're talking about, we want to do someday. And there's a few little things, they're not little, they're important, but they're not gonna change things greatly that are kind of holding the line and building what you can until you get to that point. And that's an admission that is going to be extraordinarily hard for a government to make. But without that, the impulse to find other stuff to do and coordinate and work on it and say this is our answer is gonna be overwhelming. Over to you, sir. Thank you. You always leave me with the easy stuff. Yeah, well, I sent you out to the field, new room, had the bags of money, a little bit of guns, what do you want? Whoa, whoa. Now when I tell people I live in Malibu, they'll know how that happened. I just, first of all, I would like to say congratulations and thanks to Miss Bateman and her staff and particularly Mr. Mansfield, who's kind of a pain in the ass, but he's really, really good about what he does. And he knows from whence he speaks. He spent a lot of time in Afghanistan working and doing things. And he and I have had a lot of conversations and some of them went well and some went well. But anyway, he's a very, very talented guy and it's obvious to see from this report how well everyone has done. The report is accurate, it captures what happened, it captures the background a lot, I think of what went on with the various entities and stuff like that. It talks about one thing only briefly and I wanna highlight that. One of the real tragedies, the real tragedies of the last 17 years and may soon become a crisis is that Afghanistan now has become the largest per capita user of opiates in the world, okay? Used to be Iran many years ago, Afghanistan as far as the past that is very bad. I was just in Afghanistan two months ago, met with two deputy ministers who said they think that there may be as many as 4 million drug users in Afghanistan and of course that means 3 million or so probably opiate users. More opiate users in rural areas than in your urban centers of Afghanistan, okay? Even this report when you read, you'll see that some testing that was done in the period of 13, 14, 15, came up with one quarter of all rural households had an opiate use problem, one quarter of all rural households in Afghanistan. So that's a serious problem and it could, as I mentioned, become a crisis and eventually we're going to have to figure out what to do with that. This report is 10 years too late, frankly speaking, okay? It would have been nice, it's not Sapko's fault, whatever he went in around there then, but it would have been nice if we'd have had it 10 years ago, but nonetheless, I think that it's very valuable to have this report the way it's presented and we can learn from it. I won't say it's less than it's learned yet because I'm not sure what's been learned. This staff learned, but does Congress learn, does the executive branch learn, let's see. I think there are a lot of recommendations that apply to other countries very well. I agree with the ambassador, I actually agree with every speaker thus far. It boils down, in my mind, it boils down to this. Unless and until you have security in Afghanistan, you have the extension of rule of law in Afghanistan, which is another thing, rule of law never really has moved too much out of Kabul in the past, okay? And three, you deal with corruption in Afghanistan. If you go on the web and look up Transparency International, the Transparency International Index, that's a group worldwide that kind of does measuring of countries vis-a-vis corruption and they do it from one through 180, okay? With Norway being number one. United States is like, I don't know, 16, 17, 18, 19, probably below that maybe, I'm not sure. Afghanistan's 177. You got Somalia, Syria, somebody else, worse than them. That's a serious, serious problem and that's the, it was ushered in during the last administration in Afghanistan as far as that level of corruption. To the point as Mr. Sopko talked about a little bit about some of the great institutions that were developed and what went on. Well, guess what, they arrested a guy in the car's eyes office, the guy got turned loose because he didn't like the way that went, okay? The border chief up in the north of Afghanistan used this car, smuggled 100 kilos of heroin, not him, but his staff. They all got arrested, they got convicted, former president commuted her sentence, turned him loose. So you're gonna have to have, and Afghanistan is not, it may not be a failed state, but it's not a fully functioning state. So at some point you've gotta have security, extension of rule of law, working against commitment, a functioning state that is committed and that works to support the other partners in this effort. So that's kind of what we're faced with in Afghanistan and that's a lot of I think what Ambassador Newman was saying as far as trying to move forward on various drug strategies and policies and that, you gotta keep that in mind. Unless until you do the preliminary work to get the security and the government right, the anti-corruption effort and all this, you can only have short-term sort of success. Sure, well I would concur with you both if there's little in the report to disagree with. It might be a little naïve of me, but I was surprised that there was no discussion of the global demand that underpins what is fundamentally an economic process. And the risk of falling into what David Mansfield as book criticizes as a master narrative, I don't think you can understand the Afghan opium problem without understanding its role in a global economy. So just to give two examples, and I have to be careful with my history here because the panelists were actually there, but you know the- You're gonna blame me I guess, right? Yes, it's yeah, in the CIA, right, in the 1980s. In the 1980s, one of the reasons why opium took off in the tribal areas, not just because of the war that broke out there, but was a successful counter-narcotic strategies in Southeast Asia, in the Golden Triangle, which led to a global shortfall in supply. In 2001, after the Taliban successfully banned opium for a season, which is discussed in the report, there's a quote in there actually from Barney Rubin saying that one of the reasons why opium took off so quickly in 2001 was because Afghan peasantry had a heavy debt burden. Well why do they have a heavy debt burden is because their debt was nominated in opium, opium prices. Opium prices went from $100 a kilogram to 500, right, in a few months. Why? Because of global demand. And so framing this as a problem that can be solved in Afghanistan or should be solved in Afghanistan I think is highly misleading. There was an Afghan gentleman earlier kind of raised this point and that you will hear it a lot from Afghans. If you talked about this, they feel why is this just our problem? The reason this is happening is because of global demand. And in fact, there is a silver bullet in a narrow sense which in this case I'm not surprised that it wasn't included as a cigar policy recommendation, which would end illicit economies like the Afghan opium economy, which would be to end global drug prohibition. Now we may disagree on whether or not that's a viable strategy to end global drug prohibition but I think 100 years in, it's incontrovertible that these kinds of illicit economies are an integral part of prohibition, right? It's a feature not a bug in the system. And so seeing the Afghan opium economy as part of a global system, I think, has some policy implications to build on the point that Ambassador Newman raised. There's very little that you can do. The report kind of makes that point. There's a lot much you can do. First, do no harm. The report mentions a lot of strategies that were basically counterproductive. For example, an overly militarized, securitized approach can actually increase the ties between drug trafficking and insurgent groups. Who would you rather traffic Afghan opium, the government or the Taliban? That's a real question. And then so finally I would just say that I think we also have a moral responsibility. There should be a moral element to our counter-narcotics policy in the global South, in countries that bear the burden basically of producing, of meeting this illicit demand. Perhaps that could mean policies that are less punitive to Afghans. Favourite carrots rather than sticks. That brought up a very important point which is that in Afghanistan there was traditionally no problem of drug abuse really. Heroin use was virtually unknown. HIV was not a problem. It's become a big problem now because of intravenous transmission. And there's a dire shortfall of treatment programs, especially proper modern ones in the country. So this is definitely something that I think would be good to fund. Well, thank you, all of you. And I mean, you all made so many brilliant points. But I mean, the gifts material about the kind of counterproductive approaches eradication I think is a very important finding of the report. And Ambassador Newman mentioned Thailand and I mean, it is a reminder that some countries have succeeded. And so one question that Matt sort of prompted was, you know, there is a legal market in medical morphing, which is essentially, as I understand it, monopolized by Turkey, India and Australia, I believe. And you know, Afghanistan, one of the poorest countries in the world hasn't been allowed access to that kind of. So with one thing that we could do, understanding as everybody has said, there is no silver bullet, allow Afghanistan to be part of this fairly large, legitimate market for medical morphing. Short answer is no, okay, because? First of all, if Australia actually was allowed to produce to its talent, it would drown Afghanistan because it's much more efficient. Secondly, that program works where you have strong states that can compel the market to focus only on selling legally. You can't put it in a weak state with no administration capable of enforcing that. So if you have legal sales in Afghanistan, what you would actually be doing is setting up a second market and you would produce the normal economic consequences, you actually increase demand by setting up a legal market and you will increase production probably. And third, when you talk about buying it legally, I don't know what the figures are now. Back in my day, I think we were using a figure of something like 600 million as the farm gate price. So you're talking about, I was just talking about corruption. You're gonna deliver $600 million through one of the most corrupt governments in the world and expect it to get to the farmers. And you're gonna do it in a rigid government-controlled system, which means that in all probability, the traffickers who are much more flexible can outbid you and buy it at the farm anyway. So this is like trying, I can only imagine that if you tried to water your vegetable patch with a bucket after you shot it with a shotgun, you would deliver more water. I mean, this is a, it just sounds great and I'm glad you asked the question because it does come up and it does sound great and it is just as full of holes as you could imagine. Well, you know, the conversation is quite depressing because... Yeah, I didn't help you. No, no, no, no. I mean, because there's really two big pillars on which it becomes depressing. One is the security situation that the Ambassador Newman mentioned and the other one is the corruption dimension that Doug Wonkel mentioned. And as John Sokko gave his presentation, I was, as he talked about all the problems, you know, that around the drug trade, I mean, it's really a kind of subset of the corruption problem to some degree, right? And then obviously the security. So we, I mean, security's never been worse in Afghanistan since 9-11, I think it's fair to say. I can make it more complicated. Okay. And that is, we have attention. I don't have a good answer to this, but we actually, Doug is correct about meeting rule of law. But we think of rule of law in terms of a fairly complex judicial system. What Afghanistan needs is certainty of justice. And in fact, we set up an enormous, there's an enormous tension between our whole notion of rule of law and enforcement. You know, if you really want to crack down on corruption in Afghanistan, you've probably got to move substantially away from a juridical process. You've probably got to take very senior people and either jail them or shoot them with a minimum of evidence. Because if you look at how long, you know, okay, but- Do you say shoot them? Well, you know, at least they wouldn't get out. That's an apology of us, as they say. No, but, you know, I want to be realistic about this. Look at how long it takes us to build the evidentiary file for a major drug pin conviction. New pin expound on that. And so you get this huge problem and then you want to do this incredibly complex process as you're only levered to deal with it. I don't think that is, it may work eventually, but it is very complex and it involves building a very large and complex institution before you can actually have an effect. Now it's almost impossible for the United States to work in any other form, particularly in our view of human rights. And it's very difficult to imagine more draconian practices that don't become simply strong men and have nothing to do with justice. But, you know, I very much doubt that when Hanarabi produced road security, he did it through extending courts. Some of you have to look up the reference. Yeah, I'm not a political scientist, but isn't Afghanistan, is it an anocracy or what is a kind of particularly weak form of democracy that political scientists have? Yeah, it's a weird mix, but all I'm saying is I agree you need to crack down on this. Yeah. And I don't have an answer. The answer will have to be an Afghan answer, but it will have to be, it is likely if you can do it that it will be one that will not be very pretty and that will give us a number of problems. Anybody has a question? Raise their hand, wait for the mic. If you have a particular person on the panel, you want to direct the question too. Would you have a different way? Just have them in here. Thank you very much. Well, first of all, thank you very much for this, for all you speeches panelists, and thank you very much for your presentation for this cigar. So, I would just wanted to... What's your name, sir? Oh, Anthony Bretton, sorry. And what do you do? Intern of the Library of Congress, just like my friend. I'm from Canada, by the way. And I just wanted to balance again on what has been said from the panelists. It's a very good report we have, and we definitely have it. We should have had it 10 years before now, since the coordination aspect of the US agencies, we needed to get a comprehensive approach on the narcotics war in Afghanistan, was basically missing 10 years before. And I just wanted to emphasize, basically just a comment on what will happen 10 years from now. Are we gonna say we should have this report that basically introduces this comprehensive coordination, global coordination aspect that we do not probably have in this report, which addresses the global supply aspect, which again is an address in this. So I just wanted to emphasize on that. Thank you very much. It's a version of that question. I mean, we used to have an SRAP, there used to be a lot of political energy around the question of Afghanistan. I mean, maybe it's come back a little bit with President Trump's speech on August the 21st. But I mean, what would it take politically to get some of these recommendations going in terms of Congress, the president, president doesn't really talk about Afghanistan, he's never visited, despite the fact we're increasing troops. So what does it take politically? What will it space for somebody else? I can answer a slightly different question, perhaps that I think what the report does a fair job of doing is point out that actually to your earlier question about Planned Columbia, if there is something we could take as instructive at least for Afghanistan, the effort in Columbia was really led by the country team, by the ambassador, and it was led on the ground, the policy was established and led on the ground. So I think we can at least say that there has to be someone in charge in Afghanistan who has the commitment and ability to direct multiple agencies who may disagree on the right thing to do, but direct them towards shared goals. And do they, does that need political cover and support in Washington, the ambassador, and others are probably better. I totally agree with it. I wrote an article with two four stars making that with Danny Blair and Eric Olson, one who was director of national intelligence and one who commanded worldwide special forces for us, recommending more of that kind of integration, actually recommending a role, a much stronger role for ambassadors in controlling military side of operations. Really? I have no fear that this will ever happen, by the way. But it was interesting to produce such an article with one diplomat and two four stars. But the need for greater control in the field is very large. It's antithetical not just to this administration so far. It was totally antithetical to the Obama administration which moved more and more control back here in an NSC that was too large, too active, and too slow and mostly inhibited things. And does technology kind of amplify that problem? Yeah, but it's a human problem that people try to control downwards. So nowadays we've got all kinds of super technology and you can see something happening on the screen. You think you're in control. Way back in my youth it was three layers of helicopters piled up above each other trying to tell some poor lieutenant on the ground how to run a firefight in Vietnam. But the tendency was the same. But now it's just amplified it. It's very hard to beat. I didn't answer your question. Doug, in all your years at DEA, I mean, will you hear what John Sobko says in the report? I mean, the fact that it's worse now when you spend so much time there, how does this feel? A lot of people said it was my fault. I was in Afghanistan, 78, 79. The Russians invaded, I left, went to Pakistan. 79, 80 on the border area, Nangahar border area with the tribal areas of Pakistan. Shinwari's or Freeti's and Moman's, I hope there's no Afghans in here or part of that tribe, but we're the ones that got involved in the heroin business. So that's when it started, 79, 80 in Afghanistan. And I was in Pakistan, kind of saw that there. And then later I go to Afghanistan in 2004 to be the Colizards, the drugs are, and for some reason Ambassador Newman kept me on when he came in, but did that. It's a very tragic situation, as I mentioned, for the Afghan people. And they just really are getting short shrift in this thing. And a lot of us, because of their leaders or lack of leading from their government, I should say, the corruption angle on that. There's one thing I meant to mention earlier that rains a little bit more on this situation that I forgot to say. Two years ago I was talking with a friend of mine who was at the time, part-time serving as consultant to the Afghanistan National Security Council. And they were quite concerned at the time by the coming or the expectation of the coming of ISIS into Afghanistan. And they had, they tell me they had information back then that Al-Baghdadi and others from ISIS at the supreme leadership level had bought off on or approved Afghanistan as a satellite or a place to set up a new ISIS entity function because they would be able to be self-sustaining from a financial standpoint because they could get involved in drug business whatever way it was to be put together that get involved and do stuff. So, and we see now that ISIS came and actually ISIS started in the Nangahar area which is long been it's not such a big area now of opium cultivation but that was where heroin processing where it first started used to be a big opium growing area as well too and all this stuff. So that's a serious problem here. The other thing keep in mind, this is not just an Afghanistan problem. The security situation is not an Afghan problem, whatever. You've got Iran, this is something to me is amazing. Iran is now sometimes funding Taliban in Afghanistan. So here you got a Shia country that's opposed to Sunni pretty much on a lot of stuff. If you look at Saudi Arabia and all the other stuff that they get involved with over there, Yemen and what's going on. That are funding a little bit to cause disruption in Afghanistan. You've got Russia with this resurgence that has also provided arms and stuff not too long ago to the Taliban, okay. You got Pakistan doing what it's been doing since you know about the time of Christ I guess. I don't know but it's a long time they've been you know fomenting and doing the stuff in Afghanistan. So you've got all these external players, many of them who are impacted really badly by the opium and heroin situation in Afghanistan. Russia now has something like 20 tons of heroin used a year thanks to their little foray in the 80s back in Afghanistan, okay. So this is really a complex, difficult situation. I think it's important that there is a meeting of the executive branch and Congress to play into to look at okay how can we finally really sit down and do a comprehensive everybody engage strategy with somebody in charge and let's line up and sign on to this. We ain't never done that really, okay frankly speaking. We talk the talk sometimes but the walk hasn't happened. So maybe this time we do some of that and we see what can be done but at the end of the day you still have to solve the security situation, get the rule of law and a government that's fighting corruption finally in order to make this stuff move beyond any short term type thing you do. Matt raised the issue of sort of displacement, solve it in one place, it pops up somewhere else. I mean Doug memory serves, Pakistan really had a major heroin problem in the 80s which it sort of more or less has dealt with. How did it do that? I was there then too, I got blamed for that. They had a lot of opium cultivation in Pakistan and in the areas that bordered up against in Pakistan against Afghanistan and the Afghans dealt with it somewhat but again you had a lot of the heroin production in the border tribal areas of Pakistan against Afghanistan and the drugs in the 80s were moving out of Karachi, moving a little bit out of Islamabad but a lot out of Karachi Sea and also the major airport there and stuff like that. So the Patans, I hate to blame this on the Afghan Patans but the Patans were heavily, heavily engaged in it whether Afghanistan or Pakistani and it was a huge problem. They also had a big addiction problem. I don't know how they dealt with that or how that's come along. They came about in Pakistan as well but right now Afghanistan is just more of a safe haven and as Mr. Sapo mentioned it's much easier to produce heroin there than it is, you don't have to do it in Pakistan now. I wanna thank the panel, Kate Bateman, Ambassador Newman, Doug Wonkel, Matt Acons and also I wanna thank the team from Cigar and the Inspector General again. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.