 Good morning. My name is Robert Lamb. I am a Senior Fellow here at CSIS and the Director of the Program on Crisis Conflict and Cooperation. Our program is celebrating its 10th year this year. We began about 10 years ago with the Commission on Post-Conflict Reconstruction that CSIS did with the Association of U.S. Army. And in May we'll be doing a public event that we'll be looking back at the last 10 years of reconstruction and stabilization. And of course, more importantly, looking forward at the field. There's fierce competition for conference space at CSIS, so we're still working out the date and the details. But please keep attuned to that. And I hope you'll be able to attend that. Also on April 12th, here in the B-1 Conference Center, the full conference center, at 2.30 in the afternoon CSIS is hosting Minister Wardak, Minister of Defense of Afghanistan, and Minister Mohammedi, Minister of the Interior of Afghanistan for a public event and a discussion about U.S.-Afghan relations and the future of the security transition. We hope that you'll all attend that one as well. We had handed out a little bit of information about our program and some of our recent and forthcoming publications. I hope you take a look at those as they come out. We are thrilled today to be able to talk about civilian assistance to Afghanistan and the effects that it's had there. We're obviously entering a very difficult period in Afghanistan. U.S. forces are drawing down. The forces of our NATO allies are drawing down as well. And what's going to be left over are a lot of civilians, a lot of diplomats, and a lot of development professionals working to hold on to the progress that's been made in Afghanistan over the past 10 years and hopefully forge a path forward so that Afghanistan can continue to stabilize and develop in the years to come. But it's going to be very, very difficult. The security situation is still a bit sketchy. There's questions about how civilian personnel can stay safe in the absence of military personnel present with the transition from private security companies to the Afghan Public Protection Force and many other difficult issues going forward. I'm particularly happy today that Ambassador Hakimi has joined us this morning. Ambassador Hakimi is the Afghan ambassador to the United States. He's also the non-resident envoy to Mexico, Brazil, Colombia, and Argentina. He has worked with the Office of the Vice President of Afghanistan. He's been the ambassador to both China and Japan. And he has worked as the Deputy Foreign Minister in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, working on political affairs there. I'm going to ask Ambassador Hakimi to come up and make some comments and then we'll open it up for a brief opportunity for some questions and answers. And then after that, we're going to introduce Alex Steer and Abigail Friedman to discuss some of the recent work that's been going on in Afghanistan. So Ambassador Hakimi, thank you so much. Good morning, everyone. Thank you very much, Dr. Lam, for very kind introduction. And thank you very much for having me this morning. Thanks to Asia Foundation, USCID, and also CSIS for having me this morning. You may all know that we have made a lot of achievements for the last 10 years or so in Afghanistan, particularly the support that we received from United States, among other donors, is something that we are grateful. And through the assistance that we received, we have accomplished a lot. The most recent reports from USCID, quite frankly, I found it very detailed and comprehensive that gave you an overall picture of what has been done in Afghanistan in different sectors, mainly in education sector, in health sector, and also in energy and telecommunication sector, among all other sectors that we have achieved a lot. You may know that in 2002, less than a million students we had in Afghanistan, but now we have over 8 million, of which 40% are girls. In education sector, the primary access to health care from 8% now, it's increased to 60%. While the mortality rate decreased now, we have the life expectancy rate increased from 45 years to almost 64 years. And the electricity accessibility, which all our population had only 2%, now over 18% of our population have access to electricity, of which 2 million within the capital, they have 24-hour electricity. And also, almost half of our population, they have a mobile phone, and they are using mobile phone regularly. Our GDP on economic growth in 2002 was 150, while we have right now 530 today. And having said all that, there are a lot of achievements recently, but we need a long-term and enduring partnership with our international partners. Most recently, we have signed strategic partnership with our international partners, mainly United Kingdom, with France, with Italy, with India. There are some other partnership in the pipeline that we will sign, one with the United States. Also, we will sign with Canada and Australia. So all that will not only help us to rely on our own resources, but also the commitment from our international partners is something that will give confidence to our people, and it serves like an assurance policy for us. So in order to have our own institutions to rely on their own resources, we have some objectives. Those objectives are that we should build not only a capacity within our own institutions, but we have to bring some reform as well. Strengthening our public financial management is another area that we are focusing a lot. In order to eliminate corruption, we are working to make our system more transparent and accountable. And among all these regional cooperation is very important to engage with countries in the region and to have a mechanism to make Afghanistan to play its nature role, which is bridging countries from the region. We have a national development strategy, which we have laid out in 2008. And based on that, we have created national priority programs in common process. So all those national priority programs now, they are focusing on 22 projects. And those projects recently in Tajikistan, we had fifth RECA conference, which is Regional Economic Cooperation Conference. There we have presented all those projects, and that's our goal to present that in upcoming Tokyo conference, which is in July of this year. And the difference between this conference with other conference would be that we will have our donors to focus on one project, and from there we will need their support. You may all know that according to World Bank recent reports, there will be a fiscal gap after the international coalition forces will reduce and draw down. So in order to fulfill that gap, we may need assistance from our international partners for years to come. So also you may know that there will be another conference in Chicago, which will be NATO summit in mid-May. There we will have our leaders to come and we talk about our national security forces, not only the structure, but also their budget for the years to come. So our expectation is that this summit will give us an assurance, especially for our national security forces budget. And with USCID, as I said, the reports, I found it very comprehensive. And I'm glad that now USCID, they're focusing more on what they call foundational investment versus quick impact projects. We have talked with our donors that if they can realign their resources with our needs, this is our expectation, and this is how we're going to talk with our donors in Tokyo Conference. There were some principles that we have agreed before, like Afghan ownership, harmonization, mutual accountability, capacity building, and sustainability. Those are the principles that we anticipate from our international donors to stick to those principles that they have all agreed. So with that very brief note, if I may, I stop here. And if you have any questions, I'm willing to answer that. So with that note, I want to use this opportunity to thanks not only US taxpayers, but US government and also US Congress and USCID as an implementing agency for their efforts, for their support, and their dedication for the last 10 years in Afghanistan. We couldn't have achieved all that without their support. So we are grateful for that. Thank you very much. Thank you Ambassador Hakimi. As the moderator, I'd like to take the privilege of asking the first couple of questions if I may. Looking forward, we have, as you said, the NATO conference coming up in Chicago and the conference coming up in Tokyo. And there's going to be some very important and difficult issues that are going to be addressed at both of those. In Chicago, one of the most important is going to be the question of obviously the international forces presence there. And it seems likely to me that there will be a lot of discussion surrounding the ability of the Afghan national security forces to hold the country together as international forces draw down. Do you think that the current targets for the size and composition of the national security forces is realistic, given the international community's records so far of being able to identify the number of trainers and the resources available to do that? Would you find that the current plans for the national security forces are realistic? And then the second question, looking forward to Tokyo, the international community has, let's admit it, a pretty terrible record of respecting local ownership and focusing on sustainable projects and systems. There's more of a project focus rather than a focus on building systems that are sustainable. How confident are you that the international community will be able to use the conference in Tokyo to actually take seriously those principles that they've committed themselves to? Sure. Thank you, sir. Thank you. Well, on the first question, in Lesbon Conference in 2010, we have agreed with our international partners that we will have an Afghan national security forces with that structure and with that size. So we all agreed that 352,000 Afghan national security forces will be formed. And by October of this year, we have to hit that target, the total number of 352,000. If the international coalition forces, according to the plan that we have made, will draw down by 2014. So we are talking with our NATO partners now because, as I said, one of the agenda within NATO Summit in Chicago would be about the new structure and also the size of the budget. That we want our partners to be flexible enough on the size, especially because we, if the situation would be ideal, and we have a peaceful Afghanistan, we may not need a big army and big police force. But also for the worst case scenario, you have to have that flexibility. But we have full confidence on our national security forces that they are capable to take the lead and defend our country that we have been defending for centuries and centuries. So yes, they are all shortage of equipment. They are all shortage of trainers. And this is something that we have been communicating with our partners from time to time. And hopefully that issue will be addressed there some one way or another. And there will be a fixed budget line for that. And from there, there will be a portion from our own government. And we anticipate NATO members, some other non-NATO members to contribute to that budget. And our expectation is, as usual, that the United States will give us a big chunk of that budget. In regards to Tokyo Conference, as you said, this time it will be a project-oriented conference. So we have a certain project that we will present to donor. And for example, we have railway connectivities. We have made a plan for that. So from there, we ask each individual donors, those that they are interested to help us in that, to provide us support in this regard. And we are talking bilaterally also with some of our international donors. And we have received assurance that gave us reason to believe that we will have strong support there. But let's not forget that the security of Afghanistan, one way or another, it depends on the security, not only in the region, but other countries. And I'm glad that, at least in this city, everybody admits this fact now. So we are hopeful that part of those military expenditure, while they draw down, they will reinvest in Afghanistan development as well. Thank you. Thank you, sir. We have time for about 10 minutes of questions, because we also have two other speakers that we want to turn to as well. What I would like to ask is that, when I call on you, please state your name. Wait for the microphone, actually. It will be brought to you. State your name. A very brief question, please don't make long speeches, and please limit it to one question. Thank you very much. Sir? Thank you very much. My question is that president and many nations have just returned from South Korea. They always talk about Afghanistan. Is Afghanistan ready when NATO and U.S. leaves? It's a security question. And second, are you or can you say that Afghanistan is today free of terrorism, Al Qaeda, and this reconciliation is working, and you don't have any problem from across the border? And finally, once Afghanistan was an export country, it was used to export everything from many items, and today you know where Afghanistan is. So what happened to your natural resources? Thank you. Thank you. On the first part of your question about the security and our national security forces, as I said before, in Lisbon of 2010, we have signed a declaration with our NATO partners and non-NATO partners that we have agreed on the transition plan that we should gradually should give the opportunity to Afghan national security forces to take the lead. As you know, we are in the second phase now, while we should provide them training and also adequate resources that they should be ready. And as I said, we have full confidence, but according to the schedule that we have already made, they are ready to take the lead. On the second issue about reconciliation, on the overall strategy of fight against terrorism, this is something that we have agreed not only within Afghanistan. We had a peace jerker that for us, it's the highest authority that all our people enormously, when one voice, they endorsed the plan for the reconciliation, but also our international partners agreed that this is the best way to go for. But all the details, how we're going to do is to make sure that not only internally everybody should be on board, but all our partners should be engaged in that process. This is something that we are committed. We are going toward that path. There are some questions here and there, but once we get to the stage that we will talk about substance, so we will keep everyone informed. In regards to our mining and the resources that we have, you mentioned about our exports. In the old days, I know that we have sent a lot of exports to other countries, so we are not there yet, but the foundation has established as such that hopefully for the years to come, we will match those numbers, those export numbers again. But in regards to a mining sector, we are in a very preliminary stage, even though we have given one of our strategic copper mine project to a Chinese company, they have invested for more than 3.5 billion US dollar. We have given another iron ore project to Indian joint Indian companies and also a Canadian company, and JP Morgan already invested in our gold mine. There are some other gas and oil projects in the pipeline that's going through the tendering process. So all in all, even though that will take some time, but we are hopeful that once our mining sector will pick up, that would be our resources for us to count on. Thank you, sir. I'll take two questions, and then I'll ask you to answer both of them, if I may. Hi, thank you. Emily Kade with Congressional Quarterly. There was a congressional hearing this morning actually about aid in Afghanistan, and there are a lot of concerns expressed by the two members of the panel who were there about security costs now that Afghans have taken the lead. I was wondering if you could assess how you think the security is performing since that transition point, and why you think it's more important to have Afghans in the lead, even though it's costing more. And I'll ask as a participant there to bring a question. Sir, good morning. George Nicholson from Strathcorp. This morning and a briefing with the British Embassy in Kabul, the foreign minister of the UK, Alistair Burke, made the comment, quote, corruption is not addressed. It could completely destroy people's confidence in their own country. That's been brought up in some of the congressional hearings, a briefing with General Allen on Monday. Again, can you give some kind of insights into the metrics and what's being done to address that, because in terms of perceptions, that could undermine the whole future of providing support to Afghanistan. Thank you. Okay. You're going to answer the first one? Because that was part of your hearing. Well, as I said before, we have defended our countries, our country for years and centuries and centuries. And the resources that we received and also the support that we received, and as I said in Chicago, with the plan that we will present to our partners, we have full confidence that our security forces will be able to defend not only our country, but they will be in a strong position to enforce law and order. Security situation, if you compare those areas that they have already gone through the transition, and our security forces already took over the responsibility in those areas, quite frankly, those areas are quite now. The situation is much better, including Helman. But the key for a sustainable security situation is that we should provide basic services to the people. So having said that, all the development projects that we have promised that that was part of the transition package, those needs to be implemented also. So that's the key. In regards to corruption, we as a government, we have always admitted that Afghanistan is not an exception. If you see all other countries, there are corruptions, one way or another. So Afghanistan is not immune from corruption. But our government, they're committed to fight against this. We have not only made a lot of reforms within the administration. Our Attorney General Office and also the Chief Justice Office and the police as a law enforcement agency, they are pushing this matter through. But it's a process. You cannot eliminate corruption overnight. There are causes into that. A, the very low salary of our civil servants, because quite frankly, we haven't able to implement a proper administration system with proper pay and grading system, with proper pension system to give them that assurance, unfortunately. But a lot of things are happening. We are not there yet. Also, quite frankly, we were not ready for that much resources that we have in Afghanistan now. And not only within our system, most of the contractors that are functioning in Afghanistan, a lot of corruption is coming from there as well. So it's not a good excuse to say that corruption, because the contractors there, so there should be a corruption. No. We have made a lot of progress to make sure that not only corruption should not happen, but it's a process. It will take some time. We have arrested some judges in Attorney General Office. We have prosecutors. We have arrested them. But we don't think that would be the solution. So we have to have a proper anti-corruption package to provide. And also, security and assurance for their future is very important in order to deal with the corruption drastically. Thank you. Okay. Thank you, sir. On behalf of CSIS and our co-host for today's event, the Asia Foundation, I'd like to thank you, Ambassador Hakimi, for being kind enough to come over here and share with us your thoughts on these very difficult situations. It's my pleasure to introduce our two speakers for the remainder of our event this morning. Alex Thier is the assistant to the administrator at USAID and head of the Office of Afghanistan and Pakistan Affairs. Alex has been involved with Afghanistan and Pakistan for years, I guess decades, is probably the better metric. He was Afghanistan and Pakistan director at USIP. He spent a good deal of his time in the 1990s, traipsing around Afghanistan, if I'm not mistaken. He's directed a program on state fragility at Stanford, has worked for the International Crisis Group, has done work with UK's Department for International Development and has done legal and constitutional work on South Sudan with the United Nations in Afghanistan. He's a gentleman who knows his stuff on Afghanistan and we're very much looking forward to hearing what he has to say about the effects that at least USAID's work in Afghanistan has had. It's also my pleasure to introduce Abigail Friedman. Abigail is currently a senior advisor at the Asia Foundation. She's been at the State Department and the US government for many years before that. Most recently on the National Security Council's staff as the director of the Afghanistan office, although I think you had some work on Pakistan as well while you were there. She's spent some time in the field in Afghanistan, north of Kabul, doing some work with the brigade there and heading up a few provincial reconstruction teams. She's been posted in Quebec, Tokyo and Paris and has worked on North Korean issues, Balkans and Bosnia. She is, she still has, I believe you still have some affiliation with the State Department and so the views that Abigail will be expressing are hers. They do not necessarily represent the views of the Department of State and if I know Abigail, she will certainly express her views. So without further ado, I would like to introduce Alex who has had the pleasure of just coming to us from that briefing on the Hill that happened this morning and hopefully we'll provide you with some more pleasant environment. Thanks Alex. Thank you very much Bob and CSIS for doing this event. It's a pleasure to be back in this room. This is one of the rooms in Washington. There's about a half dozen of them where the folks who have been focusing on Afghanistan for at least the last decade have over and over many of the people in this room over and over met to talk about what's going on and it's actually critical that we have this community of people who pay attention, who are critical thinkers, who go in and out of government. So I want to thank CSIS and Asia Foundation for hosting this. Great thanks to Ambassador Hakimi for coming, for representing his government so ably, particularly at such an important time and I also want to thank our staff at USAID and in particular Heather Sullivan who I don't see, she'll wave back there. Today is the launch of this report and everybody should get a copy. It's also going to be available online and the reason we decided to put out a report is that in the last two years that I have been doing this job, I have been struck by a couple of things that we really wanted to embody here and I'll just make some brief remarks about. The first is that there is a really truly untold story about Afghanistan, unfortunately increasingly so in the media and that is that by some indicators Afghanistan has made remarkable progress in the last decade. When you look at it cumulatively and I'll go to cite some of these things, but there really are a lot of remarkable stories and those of you who know Afghanistan, who go back and forth, I was just there a couple of weeks ago, I've been in Afghanistan literally every four to six months since the fall of the Taliban and when you have that kind of view of the progress in the country, the progress that the people have gone through, the economy have gone through, the political system has gone through, is really remarkable and that story is not told enough and one of the things that I think coming into government from the outside is that we're not effective enough. The US government is not effective enough in telling that story and you have to tell that story in a way that's credible and that means having facts and figures that can demonstrate what was really spent, where did that money go, what were the results achieved but also frankly to say what hasn't worked well because we all know those stories are out there too, I think in fact they're told far more frequently and disproportionately than the good stories but you have to have an honest narrative and that's what I hope is represented in this report but you can all look at it and judge. But the other bigger part of the narrative that's going on for me is that when I look at this incredible progress, the other side of that story is that that progress is fragile. You all I think are aware that there is a deep level of uncertainty about Afghanistan through 2014 and beyond and we collectively as the international community and the Afghan government together need to make sure that we are doing everything that we can to safeguard the incredible amount of investment in dollars and human lives over the last decade to secure that progress that has been made in the face of enormous challenges and one of the ways that we need to do that is by first of all figuring out what does really work and again that's what hopefully part of this report is intended to do but it's also by making sure that we remain committed to this purpose and as somebody who has been involved in Afghanistan literally for 19 years now that's something that I can speak to at a personal level. So the first thing that this slide shows is all of the US government funding through USAID that has gone to Afghanistan. Our overall allocation of funds in the last decade roughly is about 12 billion dollars and let me frame that in a way that really hits home. It's at a significant amount of money and I think we have results to demonstrate what that has done. That represents approximately four to six weeks of the military campaign and so when you look at what we have been able to achieve with those funds and why I believe we need to continue at this in a robust way, bear that in mind. It would be a terrible time for us to be penny wise and pound foolish. The other thing that hopefully this report does is to bring transparency. I was one of the people sitting in a think tank in this case USIP trying to write reports about what we were doing in Afghanistan and often found it frustrating to find real facts and figures and so we have made a real concerted effort. If you look at our website, if you look at these types of reports to be much more transparent about that money and where it's going because that's important. Finally, making some real reforms in how we do business in Afghanistan. That means increasing accountability which is more vetting frankly of our programs. It's a much deeper analysis of the cost effectiveness of our programs, where we're having successes and where we're not and getting rid of those programs where we're not but also really focusing on sustainability because if this is going to work, if this transition to greater Afghan sovereignty and lead across the board is going to work, our programs in Afghanistan need to be geared towards sustainability. That means making the Afghan state more sustainable and it means making our individual projects more sustainable. This chart is Afghanistan's domestic revenues. Again, it tells a remarkable story when you look in percentage terms and also in real dollar terms what the Afghan government has been able to do over the last decade and particularly in the last three years to boost their revenues. The fiscal gap that Ambassador Hakimi was talking about is real and some of that will be made up by donors but some of it has to be made up by the Afghan government ability to collect revenues. One, they have to have the ability and the will to collect those revenues and two, there has to be legitimate enterprise from which they can collect those revenues and we're working on both of those things. This next slide, this next slide shows you something that I also think is really important as we think about sustainability. Electricity in Afghanistan has seen remarkable growth. This is one of those stories where a couple of years ago Kabul was called the dark capital of Asia. You literally would fly over and see nothing at night. The lights were not on and that obviously pertained to much of the rest of the country as well. So there's a couple of challenges, increasing generation, getting power into the country but equally important is the number of connections to actually distribute the power to people because that is also a challenge and then third, collecting money for that power so that it's sustainable and you can build more of it. This chart shows in even more remarkable fashion that we have gone from 200,000 some electricity connections in 2003. This is not even in 2001 to over 750,000 and we're doing this on a daily basis around the country even in places like Kandahar where we have a program to add 50,000 more connections. But equally important is collecting the money and we have a great partner in Dabs, the Afghan energy utility. Dabs is a remarkable story because first of all it didn't even exist a couple of years ago. It has a great leader and they have taken their revenues from 39 million to 159 million dollars, a four-fold increase in about the last three years. And what is that doing? It's allowing first of all the Afghans to be able to pay for the maintenance of their energy system going forward but it's also giving them the capacity to manage this investment themselves and that is really one of the most important things that we need to do because all of this investment has to be carried forward into the future and it needs to be carried forward by the Afghan government. I realize this one is a little bit beaten to death but I have to say it because it is so fundamental to Afghanistan's future. In 2001 there were 900,000 boys in school and about 0% of the kids being educated were girls. Today there are 8 million Afghan children in school, 35% of them are girls. And you just have to stand back and think about that what that really means not only for today and access to education but what that means for Afghanistan's future. It is phenomenal and assuming we can remain on track these kids coming out of school it's going to be revolutionary. It's going to be revolutionary for the next generation of women in Afghan society and it's going to be revolutionary on Afghanistan's ability to get its economy to where it should be. Another remarkable story that is not as told about the education story is the healthcare story. Last December the international community released something called the Afghan and the Afghan government released something called the Afghan mortality survey. This was really in many ways the first comprehensive look at Afghan health statistics and it also gave us a means by which to compare to previous surveys that had been done in previous years. And we learned a couple of things that were remarkable that stunned us by increasing access from about 6% of the population to 60 some percent of the population and giving them this basic package of health services which is this path that we went down instead of trying to build a lot of very expensive fancy care that would serve few Afghans we decided to use low cost strategies to expand access as quickly and dramatically as possible things that literally for pennies can save the lives of women in childbirth and children under five. And the impact has been equally amazing. Afghanistan's life expectancy has gone up 15 to 20 years in one decade which is I believe probably the single largest increase at least in that last decade of anywhere in the world. Now again you are starting from an incredibly low baseline one of the lowest life expectancy rates in the world you were starting from one of the lowest the worst infant mortality and maternal mortality rates in the world but these have plummeted now they're still at alarming levels in terms of the long-term health of Afghan society but that difference that we were able to make and the critical thing to understand about the health care system is that we did this by co-investing in the Afghan government. The Ministry of Public Health was one of our first what we call on budget programs where we said you know what we're not going to only pay NGOs and for-profit companies to do this work we're going to use them as partners but we're going to work through the Afghan government so that they can set the national policies and they can build their capacity and the results have been unmistakable and remarkable and I should say they have been accountable. There have not been concerns about those funds going into the Afghan government because we set a very high bar in the beginning for making those sure those funds were going into the right place. Mobile phones is this other amazing story. Afghanistan goes from very few connections to an enormous amount of connections. 85% of Afghans today live in an area that's accessible to a mobile phone. 60 some percent actually directly access the mobile network this has revolutionized communications in Afghanistan and it is starting to impact other things as well. We are looking at it as a public health information delivery device in a place like Afghanistan where people are not on the internet. We are working on mobile banking. Three percent of Afghans have a bank account that means that first of all Afghans aren't saving and second of all they are not participating in the formal economy. If you were to do with banking what happened with communications and giving all of those Afghans access to a bank account through their mobile phone you would revolutionize financial access in the ways that we have done for education and communications and healthcare. We are working together with the major telecommunications companies in Afghanistan to make that a reality. It exists today but it has to scale up dramatically. The other thing that I really want to underscore is that at the end of the day we are in Afghanistan is our largest mission in the world and we are in Afghanistan because we believe as a government that our assistance efforts are deeply tied to our overall national security efforts. The link between the economic and political health of Afghanistan and the security transition and the drawdown of our forces is very, very strong. To flip that over the link between a rapid or dramatic decline in our ability to work with the Afghan government to grow the economy and provide services will be destabilizing through the transition and so we really believe that it is our mission to make this transition successful by not only maintaining these great gains that we have made over the last decade but by increasing them and the ways in which we believe that they will be increased our threefold and these are our priorities going forward and I'll end here with a great quote from the president. Economic growth, getting people working, getting Afghanistan trading with its neighbors instead of having conflict with its neighbors and getting more revenues into the government of Afghanistan's coffers is really in many ways our principal objective going forward. The Afghan economy needs to continue growing. It has grown at 8 to 10 percent over the last decade which is terrific but we need to keep that going and we need to mitigate the consequences of the economic drawdown. As part of that agriculture and particularly a focus on food security is going to be essential. Afghanistan is one of the most food insecure countries on earth and as we saw this year drought continues to plague it but we know how to address those issues. Focusing on food security is also going to get more people working because it's 75 percent of employment is in the agriculture sector. It's also going to get more people trading because Afghanistan's chief exports historically have been agricultural and even though we are hopeful in the future that other small industries and the extractive industries will be a major source of trade for Afghanistan today and through the next few years it's really going to focus on agriculture. The second area is in governance. Afghanistan has to continue its progress towards successful and accountable democratic governance. We have an election coming in 2014 at the same time as the transition which is going to be absolutely essential for stability. We also have other growing institutions like the parliament, human rights commission, high office of accountability. All of these mechanisms that we know from our experience are essential to maintain the checks and balances that will make good government work but Afghanistan's government also needs to to be vertical. Afghanistan has a great subnational governance plan and is working with the provincial governors in particular to make that a reality. If you know Afghanistan you know that the action is really at the local level and Afghanistan's government at the local level really needs to be there in a robust way for security, economic and political reasons going forward. And the third area is really Afghanistan's people what we're ultimately there for and continuing to invest in human capital development both to keep and maintain these investments in health and education that have been so critical but also looking at things like workforce development. Afghanistan can't have the economy at once with the level of education and literacy and skills that its people currently have. We need to enable them to build those skill sets so that they can increasingly grow and make these promises of their economic future a reality. So I want to end there. Thank you all again for coming today and I just want to reiterate that maybe it's where I come from but we really encourage and ask for an open dialogue because I think that's the only way that we collectively can both understand properly what's going on but to ultimately maintain a commitment to all of the critical work that we've been able to do together. So thank you. Thank you very much Alex. Abigail Friedman. Thank you very much. I'm delighted to be here and honored to follow these two excellent speakers. Ambassador Hakimi it's wonderful to see you again. Alex Tier. I want to thank you for all the hard work you're doing. I know how hard it is and your commitment. And Bob thank you so much for bringing us all together to talk about what is truly one of the most important issues we have going forward. I just want to highlight a few things. I think we've had some excellent discussions and I know that you have questions. My remarks will focus on Afghan perceptions and then also a little bit about what the Asia Foundation has learned in its long time working in and with Afghanistan. The Asia Foundation has been in Afghanistan since 1954. In 1979 during the Soviet invasion the Asia Foundation moved its offices to Peshawar where it worked with refugees, focused a lot on education issues, continued to work and then in 2002 came back to Afghanistan to continue doing the work that it began in 1954. So let's start with what the Afghans themselves are saying about their situation, how they assess development efforts. Many of you here I know have already seen the Afghan survey, have heard of it. This is a survey that is done by the Asia Foundation. It's been done since 2004. It's kind of heavy so I only brought this one but it's available online and there are some summaries in the back later if you have questions. What I wanted to tease out though is how is Afghan perceptions of development in 2011. The bottom line is that while they perceive Afghans who have responded to the survey, I should add that the survey is about a little over 6,000 Afghans surveyed across all 34 provinces and the survey took place summer of 2011. The bottom line is that while Afghans perceive security as their biggest problem, satisfaction is increasing regarding access to education, clean drinking water, health services and a growing confidence in the role of Afghan institutions. The majority reported satisfaction with the availability of most basic services including education for children 73%, water for drinking 70%, mobility and availability of clinics and hospitals at 57%. Nearly half were satisfied with the availability of water for irrigation. Least satisfaction was regarding the availability of jobs 70%, not satisfied and electricity supply at 65% which tracks a little with where we see we need to work in the days ahead. In 2011 more people reported an annual improvement across all areas of economic well-being than in previous years except for electricity. Let me touch on women. The problems what were perceived as major problems for women are education and illiteracy and at the same time 85% of respondents support equal educational opportunities for women. Support for women being able to work outside the home fell over the past five years with 35% of respondents believing that women should not be able to work outside the home at all. Another interesting result returned from the survey is respondents demonstrated or revealed a growing confidence in their own institutions. 67% expressed confidence in their provincial government and 62% in their parliament. I just want to end this part by saying of course to reiterate that the big issue for Afghans is security and Ambassador Hakimi mentioned this at the outset as well. When asked what the biggest problem was in Afghanistan over one third site insecurity followed by unemployment, corruption and then poverty, poor the economy and lack of education. The next thing I want to touch on is what has the Asia Foundation learned since these years that we have been working in Afghanistan. What I'd like to do is sort of go to principles. So I would I just ticked off some of the principles that that I think are most important for everyone to be aware of. First is to be in it for the long haul. This is not quick work, pick and shovel work. Small scale is good. Don't exceed capacity either your own as an NGO or the local environment. The risks of exceeding your own capacity is that you won't be able to monitor results and you won't be able to see when adjustments need to be made and the risks of exceeding capacity of the local environment are many and one of which is sustainability. Go local. Align with local priorities and with local partners. The Asia Foundation like many NGOs I have to say this isn't just a plug here about the Asia Foundation this is drawing on our experience but really work with local partners. The Asia Foundation does work with local partners on just about every one of its projects and programs. This too is key to sustainability. The number of civil society local Afghan NGOs in Afghanistan is soaring. It's a wonderful thing. More and more when in Afghanistan you hear Afghan civil society speaking up, not the international civil society representative speaking up. That is a great growth. In fact I just wanted to say I was at another conference a while back and I was talking to an Afghan and I said oh it's wonderful to see all this Afghan civil society and he turned to me. He was an Afghan and he said Afghan civil society has always been there. The difference is that you are now here with us and I thought that was a really important thing to keep in mind. Be aware of all stakeholders recognize the links between security development and the political landscape. Another way of phrasing this is inclusiveness. It's often easy to just work with the stakeholders that one has a connection with or that one feels is most receptive but for sustainability, for success, for really empowering the people who, Afghans who are going to lead this and are leading this, one really has to be aware of all the stakeholders and work with all of them, seek to mitigate those who are not supportive of efforts. Another one is bottom up, married with top down. One needs to work with the national institutions, IDLG, the Asia Foundation has worked very closely in support of the IDLG's efforts. One also has to work at the local level. That means, for example, helping provincial governors, there is the provincial based governors fund is an example of helping governors have money for operational expenses and to do community works. If it is only the international community that has money to do good works in a province, you are not helping build a sustainable state structure. To have a small amount of money for provincial governors to be able to assist with local community projects is a classic example of how one begins to help Afghans connect with their government. I think I said this, but I will say it again, take the local context as the starting point. I want to refer back to the Busan high level forum on aid effectiveness, because that was one of the key points that came out of Busan. Even as we who have been working on Afghanistan focus on Afghanistan, it is important to note that the international aid community is also growing and learning and setting out and learning from places like Afghanistan from where work is being done around the world to see what is effective and what isn't. Working within the local context, aligning one's efforts with local priorities is key. That is pretty much it. My last one is do no harm and then I put in parentheses try, because if we didn't go out of the starting gate unless we were 100% sure we would do no harm, it would be like parenting, no one would have kids. It is just something that one has to do one's best at. That is pretty much it. Thank you. Thank you very much, Abigail. One of the things that is nice about the USAID report is exactly as Alex said, it has the data there that shows the progress that has been made. It is very easy to forget when we start thinking about the level of development in Afghanistan and the level of capability of Afghan government that 10 years ago the place was basically medieval theocracy. If there is one principle that comes out when you read the literature and research worldwide on development of governance institutions is that they take a really, really long time. In 2003 Afghanistan's GDP per capita was something along the lines of what the United States GDP per capita was in 1700 and what the UK's was in around 1500. To go from 2003 to where we are today the GDP per capita is still low but we can't expect it is going to get anywhere near what we believe it should be today. One of the things that you hear when you read about Afghanistan is about the corruption of the government, the corruption of well any aspect of society in Afghanistan. You hear about four billion dollars leaving the Kabul airport last year and eight billion dollars leaving by foot in car. These are the sorts of things that makes it easy for a lot of Americans to get a bit cynical about the prospects over the next few years in the transition. If you have a government that can function the way we think it should function, if you have that level of corruption in a society who's basically expatriating money rather than circulating it within it, how can we be hopeful that Afghanistan will stabilize as international forces and resources draw down? I say this partly because I want to reiterate the point that Alex made that progress has been made in Afghanistan. The increases in the numbers are pretty steep but Afghanistan was starting from a really low point and there's no way that we can really expect that in the next two years even if we do everything perfectly that Afghanistan is going to function the way we think it should function. One of the questions that I'd like to pose to both of you before we turn it over to the audience is given that the government's not going to have all of its accountability mechanisms in place, it's not going to be able to battle corruption, the independent director for local governance is not going to fully implement the subnational governance policy. These things aren't going to happen according to the current plans. The Kabul commitments from a year and a half ago so few of them have actually been achieved that I think it's unrealistic for us to expect that the government's really going to be able to maybe carry all of the water we expect it to. Both of you know this, I've talked with you about this, but there's still a need to do this work and so what I want to ask both of you is how do you overcome those challenges? The plans that we have in place might not go as well as we think they're going to go. What effect can we actually expect that to have? Is it reasonably large? Is it large enough? Is it small? Does it matter if it's only small? Would you care to comment on that very general question? Yeah, just a few comments. One of the things that comes out of the survey that is so interesting is the first that over half of the respondents of the Afghan survey this past year said that corruption is a problem. More find it a problem, perceive it as a problem at the national level than at the local level. But the more interesting thing for me is how these numbers have stayed stable for the last four or five years which suggests how difficult a problem it is to root out. Corruption is not perceived as getting worse, it's not perceived as getting better, it's just there. The good news for a place like the Asia Foundation is that that gives us the time we need to just keep working at this. Ultimately, corruption is going to be addressed, overcome by the Afghans and that's going to require civil society that can insist on more transparency. That's going to require work from the Afghan government but it's going to be a long haul. Just in January and February, USAID did what we bureaucratically call a portfolio review. But what that means in reality is that we examined every single project that we have in Afghanistan through a few lenses. Is it cost effective? Is it sustainable? Is it producing results? Is it aligned with the Afghan government's priorities? I think the answer to your question is that we really need to be very realistic both about what is accomplishable and what our resources are going to be and who our partners are going to be. Because the good news story is that when we have good partners and we have a reasonable program with some time horizon, we can do great things. One of the things I loved about Abigail's principles is that trying to do things that you can't accomplish both makes you fail but then it also makes people believe that you can't succeed. It's critical that we don't set ourselves up in that way. Afghanistan has made great progress but it's great progress for one of the poorest countries on earth that has gone through decades of conflict. The reality is that if I had to grind down to one little tiny nub what we need to be doing in Afghanistan, it is basically sustaining the gains that we have made over the next decade through the next challenging few years of transition. Congress has not always been friendly to USAID and they might not be in the years to come. Do you fear that your budget might be cut too far to be able to do any good? That's question one. Question two, going back to the issue of doing development in a place where violence is a real issue with private security companies being transitioned into the Afghan public protection force and open questions about whether the protection force will actually be able to function. Make it an open question as to what might come of the development efforts. You know obviously the special investigator for Afghan reconstruction has recently said that a lot of USAID projects are at risk for exactly this reason. I know you were fired upon this morning by the House on questions related to this so I'd like you to comment on this. So you raised two different I think very important issues. I believe that Afghanistan requires strategic patience. I believe that our civilian investment in Afghanistan is critical for the success of transition and this would not be the time to diminish that drastically. And as I said on the flip side of that I believe that if you were to do so you have to do so understanding that that is going to increase the fragility of the transition. So if that's the decision that's made that you will it will make things more fragile. To the second question I think the really good news story about the transition from private security contractors to the APPF is that when this process started 18 months ago when President Karzai issued the decree we set about examining our program and seeing how we could diminish reliance on armed guards period whether they're private contractors or provided by the Afghan government that it's expensive which takes money it gives it to security instead of to the development purposes that we want every possible dollar to go to. And it's you know it has brought on so many different types of challenges that if we can reduce our overall reliance that should be one of the first things that we're doing and we've made dramatic gains in the last 18 months in terms of the number of projects that we fund that require the services of armed guards. So that is a really important change. For those that continue to require armed guards we have been working day and night with the Afghan government with NATO and with our partners to make sure that there would not be disruptions to what we believe are our critical services. And what I'm happy to say is that as of today of the 32 projects that USAID funds that require that have said that they require APPF because that's the decision of the implementing partners 23 of those have contracts and are utilizing the APPF and nine of them are in negotiations. And so as of today there is not a single project that we have that that our partners anticipate shutting down as a result of this transition. I can't predict the future but I can say that it has gone a hell of a lot better than we thought it was going to go six months ago. Thanks. I didn't say hell in front of the Congress. You probably thought just in case you're worried mom. Abigail you listed a number of principles that are certainly sound when it comes to doing development work in these sorts of environments. And of course as you also well know you know people have been shouting that we need to be following these sorts of principles for for years and needs to be local ownership needs to be sustainable. You know you need to marry top down with bottom up. The obviously a lot of frustration among those who study the effects of civilian assistance because the outcome is almost always well. We need to do more of this sort of thing. I wanted to ask you two questions as well. One what's your understanding of the source of that repeated failure by so many international civilian agencies to actually follow that the mandates to to actually let Afghans lead to actually let Afghans do things their way as opposed to coming in and sort of burying them with money and burying them with projects that have not been designed by Afghans and and so on and so forth. But then the other question has to do with your your issue of the focus on the local. The as I said earlier the the progress on on on governance is is slow anywhere including in Afghanistan. It doesn't seem to me that we can be particularly confident that that local government in Afghanistan is really going to be capable enough to to oversee development projects to to bring in the resources to to pay for them and so on. Local politics in all likelihood is going to continue to be dominated by local strong men and power brokers and all the names that we we put on people like that. Given that those sorts of of people are not likely to disappear anytime soon what does that imply for for our ability to work at the local level and improve development outcomes? Thanks. Well for the first question I mean boy there are a lot of challenges one of which is that there are just so many actors that go into a place like Afghanistan which has where the needs are so great and where the the desire by the Afghans for help is great that how you coordinate all the different kinds of actors and then you might have one group that specialty is in one aspect of health care. So are you going to say well no actually don't come in yet because we don't have this other stuff done or are you going to say well okay that's needed let's let's work on that. So there is no the reality of development as in diplomacy defense all three of these things that work together is that there is not one agent that controls the whole thing. So I think that's one of the challenges. I think that what what the international community and the developing countries are trying to do if I understand correctly from Busan is first for the international community to donors to strive to work together as best as possible and then also with the countries that are recipients to identify priorities so that donors can come in and have a sense of what the priorities are. It's an imperfect process. The other question you had on the if I understood correctly the reality that a lot of the local institutions are not where they need to be yet and so how do we handle that? I think that things are there's a lot going on in Afghanistan as Alex was saying. There are a lot of success stories there and one of them is the national solidarity program which was something that was organized by the MRRD I believe the ministry for rural rehabilitation and development and basically went to each community and said to the community you all identify as a community what development project your local community needs and we will provide you with the resources to achieve that and you all are going to build it take care of it do whatever you need. That was a great success so that's an indication that we are not dealing with a country that cannot do anything that does not have institutions that can that has institutions that are effective that most importantly has one of the things that was most striking in my year when I was living in Afghanistan is the natural democracy that one sees at the local level in Afghanistan. It took me completely by surprise to show up at Ashura and you hear every opinion under the sun articulated in a small village has an issue to address and very strong differing opinions are expressed out loud in a small community group this is not I had expected a much more intimidated feel so you have a natural democracy at the local level you have some institutions and some programs that have been able to succeed the challenge is how do you scale up and that is a big challenge that with the national solidarity program one found that very quickly you could get local communities to identify projects to work on when one went to the next level of trying to get a region or several communities together it was a lot harder I'm giving you a long answer to your question but basically this is a lot more complex than a yes no answer good bad. Thanks very much let's open up for some questions I'm going to take three questions please state your name ask a single question and please keep it very brief thank you wait for the microphone but please identify yourself yeah my name is kemi but I'm with the Pakistani spectator and honestly I feel proud of how my dollar tax dollar is working in Afghanistan to educate children and I appreciate that you guys have devoted your lives for this but was not only us but I feel proud of India as well that is investing billion of dollar in infrastructure but my question is about let's call it a Joe Biden theory that somehow we are destroying Pakistan in order to make Afghanistan and so much for our manipulation that you know people average Pakistani think that USAID is nothing but a bribe to give it to these Pakistani corrupted generals but Mr 10 percent and all the people who are ruling that country and we are as a taxpayer I feel really very sad and that my taxpayer is going to these idiot corrupt Pakistanis and it's coming right back I could tell I mean I don't have time sir but I can tell you the name of the people retired general and bureaucrat Pakistanis who are buying big properties here so I mean okay my question is is Joe Biden Joe Biden right that we are making a 180 million people I'm exaggerating letter but in my question we are making 180 million people Pakistani our enemy just to build Afghanistan thank you very much second question let's go the woman in the back there please thank you for your presentation I guess this would be for I'm sorry could you identify oh sorry Elise lab it with CNN thanks um this question is for Alex but maybe Abigail wants to jump in you talk a lot about sustainability um and about the Afghan government but I'm wondering just in general terms about the actual capacity of the Afghans to sustain these programs once you leave you know for instance you've built a lot of roads you've built a lot of schools you've built a lot of health clinics do you have the human capacity in Afghanistan to be able to sustain this and the training once the US starts to draw down its civilian presence I know you'll have a civilian presence there for a long time but I mean certainly it won't be at the level that the Afghans need over the long term thank you thank you very much and final question here in the front thank you my name is Hassan from the embassy of afghanistan I have a very quick point and a quick question when we are talking about the aid effectiveness the key component is direct support to afghan budget while in principle the commitment is there on the part of the international community but practically speaking most of our donors called for improved capacity before they released fund to our line ministries while we do recognize a shortage of capacity in our ministries we believe that it's very difficult to improve capacity without utilizing the afghan systems so we hope that our key donors will increasingly recognize this fact in the future my question is on the aid predictability as ambassador akimi explained earlier we are now planning to present our key national priority programs to the tokyo conference and as you know most of these programs are multi-year programs and it's very difficult to count on one-year commitments on the part of key donors in terms of programming apart from international funds that are being created now my question is to alex as an expert dealing with international assistance to afghanistan what do you think what would be the best modality or mechanism to to be put in place to address this problem in the future thank you thank you sir how about alex and have a go sure thanks for the easy questions on on pakistan i just want to step back because i think that one of the most important things to say in this arena as always is that pakistan and afghanistan will not be stable if their relationship is not stable and if each other is not stable pakistan is absolutely essential to afghanistan's development as its primary trading partner as its partner in so many things on finding a way to transition that relationship to be primarily based on positive aspects of the relationship i think is one of the most important things we can do over the next couple of years so increasing trade increasing exchanges at the practical level working on border security so that there is mutual security in terms of the border and what goes on in and around the border all of these things are essential i think that afghanistan's our ability to get to a ultimate political settlement in afghanistan a peaceful resolution of that conflict is also very heavily dependent on the positive participation of pakistan the united states is very concerned and very involved and we can have a different session to talk about our our work in pakistan but one of the things that i just want to say because it's so important in 2013 pakistan has or by early 2013 pakistan has its first ever opportunity to make a transition from a democratic civilian government to a democratic civilian government in 2014 afghanistan has its first ever possibility to make a peaceful transition of power from a democratic government to a democratic government i believe that both of those transitions are fundamental to getting at some of the issues that you're that your question raised um elise this question of capacity which also came up in the statement from my friend and colleague mr sarush is is absolutely fundamental um and the answer to your question is that capacity has grown tremendously when i look at where the ministry of public health where the ministry of rural rehabilitation and development that runs the nsp where the the afghan energy utility have come just in the last few years it gives me enormous hope that the afghans are going to be able to sustain some of these investments but that does not cut across all areas um at the moment i remain very concerned about roads we have invested heavily in roads but there is not yet an independent fully capacitated afghan authority to maintain those roads with a revenue source that will also allow them to maintain those roads so there's still work to be done but but i am very buoyed by the fact that we have some real models of success um and i think that we've learned a lot about how to build those which brings me to mr sarush's question he's exactly right you can't say build the capacity in the abstract and when you have it will come and work with it creating that capacity is actually a process of working through it and so one of the best things that we have done in my opinion and this comes back in part to the national solidarity program but not only the afghan reconstruction trust fund is a trust fund that was established that is co-managed by the afghan government and the world bank and it does several things first of all it creates a pool of funds for the afghan government to do development work and in some ways deals with part of the challenge of aid predictability because it creates a little bit of a longer term horizon on funding which is essential for development it also has very stringent accountability mechanisms because it's a dual key system and billions of dollars have gone through this that have gone through afghan government channels they're very heavily audited and it has not raised concerns but it has also allowed us a vehicle by which to invest directly through the afghan government so that they have the practical experience of budgeting and budget execution which at the end of the day is what government does on a practical level and so that mechanism has been tremendously successful in helping us to understand how to both build capacity as we go along but also to keep our cobble conference commitments and at the same time make sure that we're accountable to us taxpayers for where those funds go so I think that there's a good model and we need to continue to apply that to the other areas that still require that capacity to be developed that I want to end with that by saying that you know there is only one path to success in afghanistan and it is afghan sovereignty that is the only way that all of us and all of this investment is going to succeed in the long term and I am gratified frankly by transition and the fact that it is finally focused us the afghans the international community on the need to make this sustainable in the long term thanks Alex Abigail I'm actually good I don't have anything else to do that one so I'm happy to answer questions afterwards okay great well um Alex and Abigail thank you so much for your time I'd like to thank Ambassador Hakimi although I know he had to leave um and I'd also like to thank the Asia Foundation for for co-hosting the event today and finally thanks to all of you for coming and we hope to see you in future events thanks