 Good morning everybody, thanks for being here. I'm Steve Call, the president of the New America Foundation. I'd like to welcome you to this morning's program. It's really an honor to have Alex with us, and I think this is going to be a very meaty session this morning. Just a couple of housekeeping notes. Our friends from C-SPAN are here at taping, so consider yourself live and on television when we get to your questions. Please wait for our microphones speak succinctly and appropriately for television audiences. And we will hear from Alex for a little while this morning. And just for 10 minutes or so to introduce us, then he and I will sit down and have a little conversation. I just returned from Afghanistan, so I'm a little more up to date than I might otherwise be. And then we'll open the floor to your questions and get you out of here at the time advertised. Alex has really been one of the most influential voices in Washington about Afghanistan over the last 10 years. He's come and gone. And just before he went into government to become the assistant to the administrator at the office for Afghanistan and Pakistan, he was at USIP and part of the relatively small group of area specialists who organized visitors and conversation and kept all of the right questions alive, I thought, as the Obama administration came to office. And I think part of the reason he's been so effective is that he has a long exposure to Afghanistan as both professionally and personally. He was there in the battle days in the 1990s and really understands how far Afghanistan has come in some respects from the nadir that it approached in the mid and late 1990s. And he also has extensive professional and academic expertise at the very difficult subjects that he works on now, which is trying to reconstruct a state from the ashes of 30 years of war in Afghanistan. He has worked, in fact, as a director on the project on failed states at Stanford's Center for Democracy. He has a JD in law from Stanford and a master's degree from the Fletcher School as well. And he lives here in Washington, DC. And it's just a great pleasure to have him. And please, Alex, come to the podium and we'll listen to you. And then we'll have a conversation. Please, applause. And because C-SPAN does not have a laugh track as far as I know, you should also laugh at the appropriate moments in the remarks. Thank you so much, Steve. It's an honor to be here. And it's been an honor to know, Steve, if I'm sure everybody here has read Ghost Wars. But I was somewhat scared off of ever writing a book because I knew that anything I ever write could never remotely approach the mastery. After years and years of working on Afghanistan, I still learned so much from that. So it's an honor, Steve, to be here with you. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to run through a couple of remarks. But I really want this to be a conversation between Steve and I and then all of you. The first thing is that I just came back from the Bonn 2 conference this week. And for me, and I think for all of us, it's a great moment to reflect on not only the last 10 years, but even the period before that and the coming 10 years. Nearly 20 years ago, I arrived in Afghanistan as the Civil War was literally dismantling every vestige of a functioning state that had been built gradually over the five previous decades. A third of the population of Afghanistan were refugees at that time, and more were leaving or trying to leave. Another third of the Afghan population was dependent for their survival on international food aid. Half of the population, it's women, were about to go from destitution wrought from the previous decade of war into a period of other darkness under the Taliban. And all the while, and I remember having these thoughts and debates in Afghanistan in the 1990, a major international intervention, like what we were seeing happen in Bosnia, was absolutely unimaginable at the time. The world had well and truly abandoned Afghanistan. So in December of 2001, when Afghan political and militiam leaders met in Bonn to chart a future for the devastated nation, an interim government was established, a two and a half year timeline leading to a constitution and elections. ISAF was created, and billions of dollars were pledged just months later to rebuild the country. And that was meant to be Afghanistan's birth, rebirth into the family of nations and its post-conflict peace building period. And I want to talk for a minute about some of the really phenomenal progress that has been made over those 10 years. Because while we fret today about where Afghanistan is and is going, and those are legitimate concerns I'll talk about in a minute, one thing I wanted to remind people of is truly how much progress has been made over those last 10 years. In the field of education, more than 8 million children are in school today in Afghanistan, some 35 to 40% of them girls. In 2001, you had less than a million children in Afghanistan in education, and almost none of them were girls. Healthcare is in some ways an even more remarkable story. And if you didn't grab this little fact sheet, I encourage you to on the way out. Because just last week, we introduced or launched, the Afghan government launched something called the Afghan Mortality Survey. And it has some really astonishing findings. In the last 10 years, access to healthcare among Afghans has gone from about 6%. I mean, basically, the health care system had disappeared to over 60%. And in particular, there was targeting on high value or low cost, high impact interventions, particularly towards women and children. In other words, tackling diseases or minor maladies that ended up killing women and children in childbirth that were easily and cheaply preventable. As a result, these lines are actually reversed. This should be the red line. The under five infant mortality rate in Afghanistan has gone from 256 per 1,000. That's over 25% of all children dying under the age of five to under 100 today. That's another infant mortality line. Similarly, although this slope doesn't quite really demonstrate the magnitude, Afghanistan had the worst maternal mortality statistics in the world in 2002, according to research that was done at that time. And that has gone down by more than 300%. And again, this is because people didn't have access to the most basic treatments. Now, the reason I believe that this story is a success is not only the literally tens of thousands of Afghan lives that exist today that wouldn't have existed under the Taliban regime if these changes hadn't been made, but the way the health care system was re-established was done with Afghan leadership. It was done with a lot of on-budget financing, budget going actually through the Afghan government so that they would own the leadership, they would own the management of the system, and in the long term it would be much more sustainable. Finally, that's just demonstrating that prenatal care went up dramatically. The third piece I'll talk about before I get to the challenges is really in the field of agriculture. 70% of Afghans make their daily living from agriculture. Afghanistan is one of the most food insecure nations on earth. And after a drought around 2008, we worked on an intensive improved seed distribution and implements and credit program that increased wheat yields in a two-year period, 50 to 70%. And the reason, again, that things like that are possible in Afghanistan is certainly that the baseline is exceedingly low. But the other point is that by using simple practices that are again relatively low cost and high impact, you can actually make a significant development gain in Afghanistan. And I really emphasize that because I think that the narrative overall has become, conventional wisdom has become somewhat different than that. But that said, let me talk about the fragility of those gains. Because enormous challenges remain for Afghanistan if we are going to be able to achieve sustainable stability there. One of the first and overriding challenges that I think we see reflected in the fact of the ongoing insurgency and unrest there is that the first bond settlement never led to an enduring political settlement, either with the Taliban or with the entities that fought during the Civil War period. And as such, there is still a fundamental degree of political unrest in Afghanistan. Now you combine that obviously with insecurity. What this graph shows you is this is just USAID implementing partners which include our direct partners, NGOs, as well as government officials that we work with directly. And this graphic tells a devastating story of the numbers of people killed and wounded and the rise in monthly incidents. Again, this is just about assistance programs because what I'm talking about today is the challenge of trying to do this work in the environment that Afghanistan presents. The good news story, however, this black line I should say, whoops, this black line is not meant to be misleading because the annual figures are not yet in and this is an annual line. So it's only probably about half as high as it might be because the figures are only through June. But this figure is a monthly average. And so violence levels are decreasing but at the same time, one of the most devastating things that we've seen in this period, particularly over the last two or three years is a rise in targeted assassinations. Again, so-called soft targets, which basically means us, our implementing partners and the Afghan officials that we partner with. Another critical thing, and this is something that we spent an enormous amount of time talking about at bond, is the fiscal sustainability of Afghanistan. We have done an enormous amount, as I've detailed, to build up the education system which includes both building schools and training teachers. It includes building a roads network. All of those things require the capacity and the funding to be able to maintain these, to consolidate these gains going forward. But the reality for Afghanistan is quite a problematic one. In 2011 and 2010, this doesn't mean, this aid I should note also just so that this slide is not misleading. This includes security aid, which certainly makes up the bulk of this bar. But the point is that external resource flows into Afghanistan are roughly equivalent to the country's GDP, about $15 billion going in from external resources, again, largely towards security, but about a third of that, probably going into non-security spending. And that's roughly equivalent to Afghanistan's gross domestic product. Needless to say, that is an unsustainable state of affairs. Afghanistan will have to be able to sustain its government. It will have to be able to sustain its infrastructure. It will have to be able to pay salaries. It will have to be able to critically pay salaries of the security forces going forward. But we know over the next number of years, there will be a decline in external resource flows. And so that is a critical problem that is going to have to be managed. Before I get to that, let me just say one word about governance as well. Governance gains in Afghanistan have been significant from where they were in 2001. But that said, weak governance issues of corruption and capacity do still plague the Afghan government. And that is something that we and even President Karzai acknowledged in his speech at Bonn are critical things that need to be addressed. He called for, for instance, the creation of an apolitical civil service, which I roundly applaud. He called for a re-intensification of anti-corruption efforts. And I think these are things that we in the international community strongly agree with and need to find ways to support. So let me briefly just say something about the way forward and then I'll stop. So again, a little bit of good news on the horizon. This is Afghanistan's domestic revenues, revenues that they collect for themselves. And while this figure here at the 1.5 to 2 billion mark, which is where we're heading right now, is considerably lower than what Afghanistan requires by 2015 to be able to pay for all of these things, this curve is pretty remarkable. And all signs show that it will continue to rise. The Afghan government, particularly the Ministry of Finance, has done a tremendous job of both gathering the revenue sources that it has available to it through things like customs, through things like mobile licensing. And they have both captured those resources that are available and they're also looking at new ways to do that. Obviously increases in external trade flows and transit trade are going to be a critical part of that equation going forward. The next thing is something that's interesting. There's a lot of talk, particularly in least developed countries, about a very strong correlation between GDP and energy production. And Afghanistan's experience over the last five years demonstrates that in a remarkable way. Afghanistan's GDP has increased eight to 10% over the last five years. And annual energy production, of which USAID is a considerable investor, has increased almost at exactly the same pace. Now it's not necessarily always a direct causal effect, but this is a remarkable degree of correlation. And the important point here is first of all that Afghanistan is gaining the capacity, is gaining the infrastructure to fuel economic growth, which is fundamentally what's going to lift Afghanistan and its ability to raise revenues. But the second point here is another success story. The Afghan utility, which has been established in the last couple of years, has shown remarkable out-of-the-gate progress. They're not only technically capable of maintaining most of their energy system, but in the last two years they have gone from a $140 million subsidy to a $40 million subsidy. In other words, they are approaching break even because they are collecting money from customers. And they are looking at interesting and innovative ways to do that through smart meters and mobile payments, some things that we're only starting to do today in the United States. The final thing I want to say, and I think that this is fundamental, is about our commitment and the Afghan government commitment. From the USAID perspective, and I think that this was really the great success at Bonn, is that what you heard from the US government and the whole of the international community is a long-term commitment to Afghanistan's development. And I think that given the initiation of the drawdown, given the length of the engagement, this was a critical message for the Afghan people, the Afghan government, and the region to hear. And if there is one thing that came out of Bonn, it was a unified voice that the international community is not abandoning Afghanistan, that assistance flows, that support for the security sector may be going down post-2014, but that we are approaching this with a long-term perspective. So we have demonstrated that commitment by creating a program of what we call foundational investments, several of the things I've already outlined. It's focused strongly on economic growth with an emphasis on developing some of Afghanistan's infrastructure further, but really looking at agriculture, which is what in the next few years is going to continue to drive income growth and the Afghan economy, as well as helping Afghanistan to overcome its chronic food insecurity. And the other is really about human capacity development, continuing to invest in the Afghan people so that they will have the potential to build on that future. The final piece of that, and this is really where the Afghan government carries a heavy burden, is on creating an enabling environment for economic growth and investment. And that is ultimately in many ways about good governance. One of the best things that the Afghan government did at Bonn was to come up with three measures that it is going to try and achieve over the next several years. The first is corruption. As many of you know, Afghanistan is 180 of 182 countries on the Transparency International Corruption Index. Pretty much at the bottom. I'm not sure who the other two are, but it's probably quibbling at that point. They committed to move their score 25 places up over the next three years. Similarly, the World Bank doing business report also just came out. Afghanistan ranks 160 out of 183 countries. Now the good news is that they moved up seven spaces just in the last year. The better news is that they've committed to moving up another 15 places over the next three years. And third in Human Development Index, Afghanistan is 172 of 179 countries. And you can't really talk about trying to trump other countries in that context, but they've announced that they're going to try to increase their score by 25% over the next three years. The other critical issue on the horizon is governance indicators in terms of a good election in 2014, in terms of increasing the parliamentary and judicial independence so that there will truly be checks and balances and continuing to go down the road of improving subnational governance, which as many of you know for Afghanistan is in many ways where it is at. Because a lot of the decisions, I mean people really live at the provincial level in Afghanistan and I don't just mean that in the sense that it's a truism, I mean that in the sense that in a country like Afghanistan where local problems really drive realities, it's critical that increasingly governance is able to respond to those sorts of challenges. So at the end of the day, what we are fundamentally talking about is a strategy that is going to make Afghanistan more resilient through the process of transition and beyond. These challenges that I've outlined are going to remain. Even once Afghanistan becomes post-conflict, it will still have a degree of fragility that will require a high amount of attention to these issues. But at the same time, I believe with a level of commitment and frankly learning from some of the great successes that we have had over the last 10 years, if we're able to continue to reinforce those gains, then we will be able to continue making progress in Afghanistan. The reason this map up here is because I like maps, but also because one of the things we might talk about is the regional context and how critical that's going to be for Afghanistan's future development. Thank you. I'm supposed to sit over there. And I want to flip back through your slide. Oh, great. So first, let me just start a little bit with some questions about your really clear presentation. And I guess I wanted to start here with this question of sustainability. If aid, including security aid is about 15 billion and we're spending 100 billion a year on the totality of our military intervention, so is it correct then that the training, the support for the ANSF is in that 15 billion? And so about a third, you said about five billion is what we would think of as non-security aid. Yeah, I think roughly that's right. And so what do you think as a banded range is a sustainable aid budget, external aid budget, including security for Afghanistan post 2014? Well, this was discussed very heavily at Bonn and I don't think that we have a clear answer to that yet. I highly recommend if you haven't seen it, the World Bank has come out with a study on fiscal sustainability for Afghanistan and it's just, it's the best baseline, it's the best thinking that anybody has done on this question, probably in the 10 years, but certainly recently. The Afghans at Bonn asked for something like a $10 billion commitment over time and I have no ability to say whether that's realistic. I think roughly divided into five billion for security spending and five billion for non-security spending. I think the reality is that Afghanistan can and will have to manage with less and the question is the slope of that. Obviously they will continue to increase their component of it, but over time those costs will lessen, we know that. Our assistance is already going down, US assistance is going down and I'm sure that over time it will from others as well. I think that the critical analysis that we need to do to answer your question is to really identify which of those things are going to have, which of those declines are going to have the greatest impact and have a specific strategy to mitigate that. By focusing on things like employment that will keep young Afghan men busy even as some of these changes take place. That's sort of astonishing to note on the left hand side of that axis that total US assistance to Afghanistan between 2001 and 2005 was never more than a billion, a billion six or a billion seven, looks like even by 2005. Yeah, that's right, I hope that this includes, there was some significant spending in counter-narcotics and so on, not sure that all of that is included but certainly in those first couple of years, I think that the ANSF spending was something in the neighborhood initially of something like 300 million dollars and in fact, I won't name the official but there was a senior US official who I once went to visit and he had a candy bar sitting on his desk and it said Afghan National Army and he had it there because he joked that he was selling chocolate bars to fund the Afghan National Army and as you see basically in this, when we got to 2007 and beyond, there was finally I think a fundamental realization that the funding was inadequate and we ended up putting resources on the civilian and on the non-civilian side, on the security side that I think matched the challenge. The question now is that how do you then scale back down while maintaining what's been built with that funding? So another intriguing slide and you pointed out how striking it is is this one which is the slope of revenue. So what are the elements of that increase? Is Afghanistan collecting taxes? Is it experiencing greater transit trade that's taxing at the same rate that it was before or collecting at the same rate? What is this about? There are a couple of factors, a big one here at the first inflection point is that Afghanistan as part of this gets considerable customs revenues. The revenue points in the west in Herat, in the east outside of Kandahar and outside of Jalalabad were essentially controlled by people who were not turning those revenues over to the central government or taking an undue share for themselves and that really changed around this inflection point and most of the money started going directly into Afghan government coffers. The other phenomenal story in Afghanistan is the rise of mobile phones. The Afghan government licenses and had a very fair and open process for its mobile phone licenses and now 85% of the Afghan population is covered by mobile phones and roughly 60% have a mobile phone which is just a communications revolution and all that mobile phone use is taxed and the Afghan government has gotten really considerable revenues from it. Now, so there's $2 billion a year in revenue and when in our previous slide we were at 15 and you mentioned the Afghans asked for 10 so a sustainable Afghan state needs to find an equilibrium someplace between two and 10 billion and if that slope keeps going up then maybe between three and 10 billion and the question is how much external aid on top of let's say two and a half that they collect themselves is available after 2014. Sorry, so that's at least we've surrounded the question of sustainability in fiscal terms and then to dig into the kind of qualitative aspect the actual lives that are at issue and that you started out with with your survey of education and health in particular. I wondered considering that we don't have access to the maps that the United States intelligence agencies create each year showing which areas of the country under Taliban influence and which are not but we know that a substantial part of the map that you put up there reflects de facto Taliban control in rural areas and in fact humanitarian organizations providing inoculations and other health services you have to negotiate with the Taliban shadow state to move and to provide some delivery of services and I guess my question is if I were an Afghan I would anticipate that there's going to be some substantial areas of rural Afghanistan at a minimum that are going to remain under Taliban influence in the post 2014 world. It's really not even NATO policy to eradicate all vestiges of Taliban influence and control. So compared to the 1990s what is the shadow Taliban's attitude toward the delivery of improvements in education and health services to Afghans of the sort that you documented on a national basis what's actually going on in their territory in these critical areas of the human development index? You know I think it's a somewhat mixed picture. One of the things that I have found most interesting over the last couple of years is where services, let's take schools for example because the Taliban started burning a lot of schools in 2007 to 2009 period. And we learned two things. One is that there's this great program in Afghanistan called the National Solidarity Program which is one of the most successful development programs that has been undertaken in Afghanistan. And basically what it does is it gives kind of a grant to communities but the communities are forced to create these community development councils that are elected that have women's representation on them and the community is the one that decides what project it wants, what it wants to do with that funding and they have to contribute from their own resources. And it turns out that the schools that were built through those processes do not get burned. And it's not because the Taliban likes those villages better or likes education in those villages better, it's because people feel ownership over the things that happen in their community and they are actually the ones who tend to negotiate with the Taliban. I think it's less that the implementing partners are doing it than the communities that are doing it. And the communities who feel ownership, who see gains, tend to tell the Taliban you've got to leave this stuff alone. And we've seen that the Taliban have been responsive to those community demands. So it's not some aid organization sitting in Kabul negotiating with the Taliban, it's really the communities. And those communities I think that are most vulnerable or more overwhelmed have been less well-abled to do it. And so at the end of the day, I think it really, the answer to your question is most about how invested those communities feel in the progress that they've seen or the failure to see progress. Because there are certainly some of the most far-flung communities in Afghanistan that haven't seen the same types of gains and therefore are less invested in that path. And on health issues, I mean the dramatic gains in child mortality that you documented, those are obviously connected to women's health substantially and have the Taliban's attitude toward the delivery of health services to women changed since the 1990s under community pressure in a similar way or otherwise or have they not? The only evidence I have of that is the reality of what's reflected in these statistics. There are not an enormous amount of attacks on health care facilities even in provinces where the insurgency is very active and these statistics are national statistics. Certainly they vary by province but it doesn't reflect only gains in safe areas. Right. And then just to talk a little bit about the corruption subject that you raised. Let's see, where was that slide? I guess just to put us back with the sheer size of the resource flows that are coming into a highly insecure state whose elites have known nothing but uncertainty for 30 or 40 years. Of course it's not at a baseline surprising that those elites would skim off these temporary surges and external flows in order to provide security for themselves and their kind of patrons. But when you talk about improvements that the government is committed to in terms of the transparency indexes and other kinds of indexes, external measures of corruption, what is it about the structure of corruption that you think it's realistic to change in Afghanistan given the hugely, as you point out, sort of distorting effect of external resource flows that are 100% of nominal GDP? What can actually change that the government will attack in some effective way? Well, I think that there are really fundamentally two drivers that work to bring down corruption. One is the rule of law, the threat of punishment. Are there institutions that are actually, I mean, we have corruption, I'm from Pennsylvania, there was recently a major, major corruption case in Pennsylvania with judges selling kids into juvenile detention centers. So corruption exists, really bad corruption exists everywhere. The question is whether you punish it or not, I think, is the first thing. And the second thing is about leadership. Let me give you a good example. We do a lot of work with the Ministry of Mines. Everybody talks a lot about, and if you go to the revenue slide, what you don't see yet on here are the promised gains from the extractive industry in Afghanistan. There's enormous potential for domestic revenues over time, not in the near term, to be generated to Afghanistan. But Afghanistan is also a classic country for resource curse because of governance and corruption issues. And so we don't work on mining per se, but we are intensely focused on working with the Ministry of Mines to get them to sign up to the extractive industry's transparency initiative and other things that will build a web of safeguards, essentially, around the extractive industry so that it doesn't become a source of grand corruption. And the good news is that the current Minister of Mines in Afghanistan, I believe, and evidence has shown from the tenders that have happened under his watch, is really believes in this and has put his leadership on the line, has made it clear to those in the Ministry that corruption would not be tolerated, and the bids thus far, the major ones like we've seen of the Hadjigak mine, but also more minor ones, have been far, far more transparent than the ones that came before him. And now he's even threatening to reopen a lot of the bids, relatively small stuff, that happened under previous ministers. There's no substitute for leadership if you are going to combat corruption. And I think that the combination of those two things, I mean, even as corruption continues, you have seen glimmers of institutions in Afghanistan that do take their role seriously. I think a fantastic example is what happened with the Independent Election Commission during the last election. They stood up under unbelievable pressure to air the problems of fraud in that election. And when you start to have individuals in positions who say, you know what, this is my job. I'm going to stand up for it, even against the risks. I think that that has the potential to create a more positive cycle in dealing with corruption. And you said earlier, I meant to ask you about the mines subject. And you said that going forward, agriculture is going to remain the heart of the Afghan economy. And when you were just talking about the mining sector, you said it's not a near-term prospect. What is your analysis of the realistic potential with taking note of your concerns about the resource curse, but the realistic potential for Afghanistan to join Mongolia as a sort of 21st century resource-based economy for industrializing neighbors like China? Well, that's certainly a viable path. I'm not yet sure if they'll achieve it. You know, people talk about the enormous mineral wealth that's in Afghanistan. And I remind them that there's a reason that it's all still in the ground. There are significant challenges. There are infrastructure challenges, which is why, frankly, the process of getting the major things that are already up there, the copper, the iron. Getting those going, it's capital-intensive. It's infrastructure-intensive. And so it's going to take a decade, I think, before those revenues are really felt within the Afghan economy. The good news about that is, is that there's time along the way to improve governance. The other good news is that, perhaps as or even more importantly than the direct revenues into the Afghan budget, the industries that are springing up around the creation of extractives themselves will be major generators of economic activity. Employment. So mining itself is not always the most employment-intensive activity. But building roads or railroads and the businesses to support the mines and security and all those things, that will create a lot of economic activity in Afghanistan over the next decade, even before those revenues reach the budget. Just one more question on the corruption subject. When I was on this last trip, I went down to Kandahar and I went out to visit the latest developments in Idomina. Have you been to this massive housing complex outside of Kandahar that the Karzai family has built? It's sort of a gated community. And it stretches to the horizon. I mean, many tens of millions of dollars in investment, mansions, and so forth. And it has this kind of slightly outsized feel. And I guess what it sort of signals is that in Afghan perceptions, I think, the corruption that bothers them most and that seems the most cancerous in the body politic in the state is this kind of grand patronage network in which ministers or important national personalities have, through their families and clans and other identity networks, just pushed enormous sums into favored pockets. And this manifests itself in these cut-de-voire-like gargantuan building projects and other examples like the Kabul Bank and so forth. And as you approach the 2014 election and you think about the candidates that are going to emerge and the enormous turning point that election will represent for the stability of Afghanistan and the coherence of Afghanistan, where will technocratic candidates or other coalitions come from that are not already located in these patronage networks that have been globbing onto large chunks of these external flows and sort of pocketing them for themselves. How can we imagine leadership in the next phase of Afghanistan's capital that is starting to rise above this kind of rent-seeking pattern that I think concerns most of the Afghans that I talk to, whether they're from the north or the south, because it really crosses all of the other lines that Afghanistan presents? You know, I think that one of the most important things that needs to happen in the next stage of Afghanistan's development is a much more inclusive politics. Afghanistan, because of its diversity geographically, socially, ethnically, is one of the worst candidates for a winner-take-all system. There needs to be a perception among different groups that they have a future in Afghanistan. And I'm not just talking about that they get so many seats in the parliament. I mean, just going back again, you know, in Afghanistan 15 years ago, it was Somalia. It was a state rent into factional armies that were fighting each other. And many of them see the risks of going back to that sort of state. And the people in those regions see the risk of going back to that sort of state. And the way around that is that those groups need to see a way in which they are going to be part of the firmament going forward. I think one of the most important things that will happen on a national level is the real growth of a political party system that actually represents interests and not just personalities. And I think going back is this question of subnational governance. The Afghans have taken some critical steps in the last couple of years to increase and to begin increasing the say that people have at the local level in how their budgets are spent, in how they're represented. And that needs to continue. Because at the end of the day, what people are going to need to see is that they have representation. And that the spoils, we call them spoils in war, but the money that's coming, whether it's from customs revenue or extractives or whatever, is being distributed in a reasonably equitable fashion and not being stolen by illicit power brokers. And I think that the best path in that direction is some aspects of the system that will create a more inclusive politics. Because ultimately, people are going to fight for their own interests. And if they have a mechanism to do that, then I think that that will all get divided more evenly. Well, as you know, President Karzai has resisted the formation of political parties of the sort that you would find in many other democratic systems and I guess still does. There are political parties like Jamaat and others that have historical roots. And there's also talk of coalitions and other things that sort of sound like political party coalitions, even though they may not have formal party structures. What is USAID's policy and strategy for promoting that kind of inclusive politics that you've just identified as important, especially since the clock is ticking and there's really only a couple more years before the next coalitions are going to form to contest both the presidential and other elections in 2014. USAID and others in the international community have invested heavily, I think, in two things. One is since 2005 in the parliament and getting the parliament, I mean, literally from scratch into a body that actually has some capacity, that has a professional staff. I work with the Hill sometimes. I can't imagine it functioning without a professional staff. And the Afghan parliament very much needs the same. They need some basic capacity. I think that as they have capacity, and as we've seen over the last couple of years, I mean, they're not lying down and taking presidential pronouncements about which minister should serve or who doesn't get to sit in the parliament because of problems with the elections. And as they've started to both have the capacity and to see what their legitimate role is, I think that that grows. And that also includes political party development. Political parties are legal in Afghanistan and there are many political parties. The problem is that the electoral system doesn't promote a political party system. And there are ways of round that within the current. You're not permitted to run a party slate, correct? I mean, all the members of parliament are themselves independents in some technical sense. Is that right? They can have party affiliation but they all run as individuals. Yeah, and the system for, it's in many ways about the system for electing them because it's a system that causes people to vote for individuals as opposed to being able to vote for parties in any way. And just as we finish up, to go back to your map, you talked about provincial structures, governance, and then just the experience of ordinary Afghans being as it has long been shaped by their diverse local environments. Take us a little bit around this map. I mean, we all know that if you map the security incidents, they'd be right along this band here, mostly in the South and East, although there's certainly been a spread of violence to the North over the last couple of years. We also know that in terms of your human development index and the state of Afghans at the bottom of the global tables, the worst historical poverty has been there in the center of the country where things are peaceful. But where are the success stories and where are the really troubled areas in terms of the delivery of these changes, the lumpiness of those aggregate changes in education and health indicators that you described at the beginning? Let me give you two stories from two recent trips. I was just in Herat in Western Afghanistan a few weeks ago. And if any of you have been to Herat, when you, upon arriving in Herat, you say to yourself, wow, if the rest of Afghanistan could look like this in 10 years, we would be doing great. Herat is booming. It is a center for trade. It has tensions like all other places, but they are managing them. They are also doing some interesting and innovative things. So I went to an industrial park that USAID helped to fund. It's across the street from the airport. Herat is trying to make itself into an international airport. They have consolidated businesses in the industrial park to be able to do things why we have industrial parks everywhere so they can share electricity and water and security, proximity to the airport and all these sorts of things. And so Herat represents tremendous, I visited with a marble manufacturer and between Herat and Chakjeran on this sort of not really road that goes through the center of Afghanistan, there's this great marble mine, some of the best marble in the world and they are now directly exporting that marble to Italy. So- Did you drive that road? What's that? Did you drive down this road? I did not. I've been a couple of kilometers down that road but I've- A couple of kilometers. Yes. But I've never been all the way. But the interesting part of that story is that the marble guy was also complaining about the fact that he bought the best, most updated marble manufacturing, marble cutting equipment in the world. But that even though he was supposed to be getting an allocation of energy, they weren't getting as much as they were supposed to. And as a result, he was having to pay huge amounts to pay for diesel to run his own generators and he was losing a lot of the money. So there are some really good sort of, Herat is an amazing potential resource corridor. It's got a lot of things going for it but at the same time, some of the same sorts of challenges of capacity and corruption even affect those sorts of issues. Then I was in the East in Jalalabad and I met someone who I like to refer to as the Eggman of Jalalabad. He is the single largest producer of eggs. I was told not only by him in Afghanistan and also he sells an enormous amount of poultry. And he told me that he could sell more cheaply frozen chickens imported from Brazil and Argentina than he could raise them in Afghanistan with its minute labor costs and all of those other things. And so it's a good story because this guy is literally importing chickens from halfway around the world has sufficient energy supply to get them frozen and to sell them before they rot. But the business environment for him was not sufficiently conducive to do that homegrown which is obviously what Afghanistan needs import substitution. They need to stop importing so much particularly food but a lot of little stuff and manufacture it themselves. And it's not that it's that hard to do but it's hard to get a sufficient level of investment giving challenges with energy, giving challenges with land tenure and giving challenges with corruption. And so some, you know, you don't have to fix everything but some tweaks along the lines of this sort of doing business survey would really help Afghanistan enormously in those specific areas. You mentioned in your remarks in describing the commitments made at Bonn that the Afghan government committed to improvements not just in its corruption indexes but in the World Bank doing business index. And we often focus on corruption in the West because it's sort of our tax dollars in part that are at issue as well as concerns about the durability of the Afghan state. But this doing business thing is really striking when you travel in Afghanistan talking to Afghans. It sounds remarkably difficult to do ordinary business. Almost sounds like the Maghreb, you know, Egypt or the frustrations that built up in Tunisia in that the regulatory environment, the climate for certainty that even small businesses in the agricultural sector require is just not there. And so my question is why? Is it just about petty corruption and having to pay off people to get approvals or why is there even such a thick regulatory regime in the first place given the historical weakness of the Afghan state? Yeah, well I think that they're both internal and external challenges. The internal challenges, corruption is part of it but it's only part of it. I mean obviously infrastructure is hugely problematic. I'll give you an example of pomegranates in Kandahar. We just did for the second time ever this huge air shipment of Kandahari pomegranates to Dubai. And so you've got one problem in that, you know, flying pomegranates around is probably not the, is not the most cost-effective way to export them. The second problem is that you couldn't even do that previously, you couldn't aggregate enough produce in Afghanistan because you didn't have a cold, you didn't have cold storage. There's a big Indian built cold storage facility next to the airport. Exactly. So though, and then for cold storage you need energy. And so there are a lot of just impediments in terms of the infrastructure. But part of it is also this not corruption base but it's just kind of problematic to do businesses. One of the things that the World Bank does is that it looks at the numbers of steps that you need to take to get a business license in every country. And often, and worst of all in countries like Afghanistan where the regulatory regime is weak the number of steps are the highest. I mean you literally often have to go through like 60 steps and so a little bit of that's about corruption but it's also about ineffective and efficient bureaucracy. Now let's go externally because Afghanistan is landlocked and it is in a tough neighborhood. It's in a tough neighborhood from a political perspective and it's in a tough neighborhood from an economic perspective. This is probably about the least economically integrated region in the world or at least among them. And it's not that you need to build up Afghanistan's economy through aid but you need to unblock some of the pipes as it were or to build some of the pipes in the case of bringing in things like energy into Afghanistan. The problem is that a lot of these countries don't cooperate especially well with each other either in terms of trade regimes. And if you could improve the regulatory environment for trade, one of the big things that we did last year which was a huge deal was assisting the Afghans and the Pakistanis to renew their transit trade agreement. And it still hasn't really fully taken effect but if it does Afghanistan could make almost instantaneous gains in trade. Hamid Karzai has said that he wants Afghanistan to become the roundabout of South and Central Asia and what he means by that is that you see this ring road here, this brown line that goes around. Afghanistan's strategic position has historically been because there's an impenetrable mountain range going between these two continents that were smushed together many years ago and it's really tough to get around it. And if you could get through it, Afghanistan would make tremendous gains. There are infrastructure problems with that but there are also regulatory problems that would really be helped by better cooperation with the neighbors. So one last question and then I'll open it to the audience just to follow up on that. I mean, it's a tough neighborhood and I'm sure you could tell stories about all of Afghanistan's neighbors in that respect but Pakistan obviously is the neighbor that has figured most closely in Afghanistan's struggles over the last 20 or 30 years and right now relations between Afghanistan and Pakistan seem shaky and between Pakistan and United States even shakier in terms of the areas that you work in, trade and economic growth and the access of Afghans to health, social and education services. What is Pakistan's role in the life of the country? Is it attempting to stabilize Afghanistan through constructive change such as through the transit trade agreement? Is it blocking that potential in the same way that we see a little bit on the military side? What's your assessment? Well, I won't speak about Pakistan as a monolith but there are some interesting trends I think that are going on. One of the things that we have seen and this was really prominent in the negotiations between the Afghans and the Pakistanis about the transit trade agreement is about the role of transit trade across Pakistan to India and this year has actually, you never wanna be overly optimistic but this year has actually seen some potential breakthroughs in India, Pakistan trade which would be obviously fundamental for Pakistan. I mean it would be revolutionary for their economy and it would also be very, very valuable for Afghanistan's economy. From an infrastructure perspective, all of the roads and potential for rail, all of that is improving across the board. Now again, baselines were low but if you look at transit trade here in the north and now potentially newly in the kind of the central area, there is infrastructure going in, there's infrastructure going in in FATA that is going to allow for trade to flow. Now ultimately, that is more of a political question in the long term but you can't do it without the infrastructure. So the question is, can some of these projects like some of the energy projects proposed coming down from Central Asia, whether those can actually get underway? I believe this last trip where I was there about a month and a half ago, I went from Harat to Kabul to Islamabad to Lahore kind of right across and it was a very economically focused trip and I met with business people all along the way and I believe that there is a growing constituency both in Afghanistan and in Pakistan of people who see the long-term future as one of economic integration that is going to continue to roll this boulder forward. Good, so thank you very much for taking all my questions. Let's take some from the audience. There's a young woman with a microphone there and there's a hand up to your left. Hi, I'm Shohini Sarkar from CHF International. We have had some USAID after-funded projects in Afghanistan. My question was, you mentioned in the beginning you highlighted the NSP project and you talked about how the schools which were built under the NSP and the civil society was part of the creation were less attacked as opposed to schools which came up so generous and then later on you were talking about the need for inclusive governance and then you focused on the need to build the capacity of the parliamentarians and the political parties and NDI and IFS and all those guys are doing it. But what do you see USAID's role in terms of building the capacity of the civil society in addition to the economic livelihoods generation and economic development stuff which often builds personal capacity but that's different from building the capacity of civil society whereas from what you are saying I kind of feel the subtext is that it is very important to have a very strong civil society because even if you build the capacity of the parliamentarians and I have worked in Afghanistan even the regular people don't necessarily trust the people who they have sent to the parliament they kind of do it because they are the power brokers within their region. So how do you plan moving forward building the capacity of the civil society to act as a monitoring force and shaping the destiny of the country? I couldn't agree more strongly with the premise of the question. Afghanistan absolutely requires a robust civil society if it's going to go through and that is an essential part of strengthening this fabric so that civil society is more resilient. By far the best part of Bonn for me was meeting with the civil society folks as they did 10 years ago there was a large civil society conference that brought civil society actors, women's groups, others and I met with all of them while I was there and Afghan civil society if again maybe a popular misconception Afghan civil society overall is not as strong as it could be but Afghanistan civil society actors are an amazing group of people who long before 2001 have been struggling mightily against many of the trends that have so affected Afghanistan over the last three decades. In fact it always thrills me to see that in the 90s civil society such as it was a lot of the folks who were working on media things but usually in Pakistan and Peshawar people who were working for NGOs people who were organizing peace conferences in the darkest days. Many of those people became ministers and deputy ministers in the new government. They are, they became in many ways people from Afghan civil society became the sort of technocratic engine of the Afghan government. Now not enough of them I think ended up in the government but the important thing is that they are there those voices are there both outside and inside the government. Women's groups in particular I mean if you have not met with Afghans women's groups if they many of their representatives do come through Washington it's worth going because this image of Afghan women as victims will disappear from your mind when you engage with Afghan women civil society actors. Now that's not to say that women don't face these enormous challenges and are sometimes victimized by odious practices but it is to say that women do have a very powerful voice and a very powerful role and if you look again at where women have come politically in the last 10 years I mean you do have over 25% of the parliament is women, you have three ministers in the Afghan government who are women a rising number I believe it's 20% of the Afghan civil service are women and so again these are down from exceedingly low baseline but it is critical for us to continue to support those currents within Afghan society because no society I don't believe succeeds either without a strong civil society or without a strong role for women. Just to follow up a little bit I mean we use this phrase civil society now in Washington it's almost you know devoid of meaning because it's just such a catch-all that covers so many subjects and it's such a kind of shibboleth in a way but civil society in Afghanistan faces the same problem of sustainability and durability that the rest of the political economy faces and so some of these groups have risen and played perhaps important roles built capacity with external aid that's going to decline and then some of them are indigenous and have started to develop their own momentum and I wonder what is Afghan civil society in a self-sustaining way now do you think? I mean the media obviously would be one potential answer to that question. Women's groups might well be another. There's a human rights community that seems to have some confidence. It's a very young society what do you see going on with youth but we don't have the natural beds of self-sustaining movements like say environmental movements in China or labor unions in the Maghreb or other kind of large self-sustaining institutions so what is it realistic to concentrate on looking out to 2020 in Afghanistan? Yeah, well I mean I think continuing to build on the phenomenal success of development of Afghanistan's media I mean it's not without its problems but again going from zero to a pretty robust media environment with something like 50 independent television stations and 150 independent radio stations Afghans are it turns out very avid consumers of media as it seems to be the case everywhere fortunately for you and I think continuing that is critical but I think deepening it so that you have citizen engagement at the local level is really the way forward because it doesn't just happen through better information people actually have to get involved one of the interesting discussions that I had in bond particularly with the Afghan women's network is that they want to set up a monitoring organization for the reintegration process and at the same time they also want to have something like a national dialogue around peace and reconciliation to make sure that a broader degree of voices are heard and so what they've started to do is that because the official Afghan peace and reconciliation program has now established provincial offices they want to make sure that there is a provincial civil society group in every province that does some of the watchdog function that is so critical and I really do think it's about bringing those things locally and I want to say because I think it's so important when we talk about declining resource flows as somebody who used to work in Afghanistan where there was very little money there a lot of these things are not terribly expensive but they do require people to feel as though they can safely engage in these sorts of activities and so I think that the political emphasis on civil society in many ways is going to be as important as the funding going forward this is a woman there by the camera sorry, behind you, I think, straight behind you oh, sorry thanks very much Bridget Moykes with the Friends Committee on National Legislation I'm not an Afghanistan or a development expert so this has been very educational for me what we do know is that war and violent conflict obviously undermine development and can sort of throw aside the best laid plans and we know from the experience in Afghanistan and elsewhere that the military is not very good at doing development even when it's part of a coin strategy or something where they're not trying to do good development but it can leave bad results and undermine longer term processes for development so my question is twofold first, in terms of the military's role and it's in doing development between now and 2014 what's the plans or what's the status, I guess, of that and of USAID really being able to take the full leadership of saying this is how we're gonna do development and this is the way it's gonna go forward without the military continuing to do undermining projects and then on the political side in terms of how do you mitigate or have contingency plans or have a strategy that's flexible to deal with possible political realities of conflict a peace and reconciliation process I guess how does your USAID strategy relate to a peace process and to ensure that the development plans can continue even if that process goes different directions I hope that was... Yeah, understood. You know, I think that sometimes people draw a false dichotomy between stabilization and development when you're working in an environment like Afghanistan activities fall along a continuum if you're building a school in Bamiyan where it's relatively secure and you're building a school in Helmand where it's less secure both of those activities have a stabilizing impact in the communities and both of them have a development impact I think that USAID is very proud of the work that it has done together with the military in trying to work in communities that have been so affected by conflict and the goal is not to just... It's not to support the military per se the goal is to support those communities in being able to come out of conflict and to be able to consolidate the gains and the security because I do believe that there is a critical relationship between insecurity and lack of development You know, in answer to the broader question it really goes back to this question of building resilience I believe that Afghanistan because of its history over the last 30 years reconciliation in Afghanistan peace in Afghanistan does not just hinge upon talks with one group or another group it hinges upon a broader social process and that requires having a more inclusive political process it requires a sharing of the development around the country it includes providing people with a sufficient vision of a better future that they become invested in it either literally, you know, it's remarkable so much Afghan money leaves the country and so you don't necessarily need to attract major foreign investors into Afghanistan although that would certainly be good but you also need to get Afghans investing in their own country more it's building that level of confidence that I think is going to create a conducive environment over the long term for peace and reconciliation in Afghanistan however that plays out to the gentleman in the very back and then we'll come up front thank you my name is Larry Cohen I'm gonna speak on behalf of the largest US private sector investor in Afghanistan I'd like to start out but I don't mean to reign on your parade Alex but unfortunately what you've described does not seem to be the reality on the ground that this particular investor faces for example, you talked about the AFPAC agreement the trade agreement the trade agreement has turned out to be an unmitigated disaster and it appears that in all likelihood it will have to be renegotiated the issue you brought up of your poultry and egg producer in Jalalabad the question that I would raise is can you possibly expect Afghan producers to be able to produce these products at a price that would be affordable to the Afghan consumer that they could produce it without subsidies high subsidies import substitution is a great economic practice but I don't think Afghanistan is anywhere near ready for that also in the experience of this particular investor the corruption is actually getting worse can I interrupt you for a second do you want to identify this investor or who are you speaking on behalf of I'll speak on the name of the company is Summit Associates and they are the only milk producer commercial dairy in Afghanistan and they also at one time had up to 70% of the frozen poultry market which is mostly US frozen poultry not Brazilian the point here is that it was a successful enterprise and over the last few years over corruption, trade issues, bureaucratic issues the business climate has actually worsened and not improved I have a whole list of things here I'm not gonna go over it but frankly can I ask a question of that prelude I mean what can you ask can you ask a question of Alex please no I think that rather than ask a question I think I just would ask that we do a reality check here and look at Afghanistan not as being favorable to possible FDI and possible investment but actually we've been backtracking over the last few years it's actually gotten much worse for the private sector and I don't think in our experience with this businessman and his investment in Afghanistan I think we're actually moving in the opposite direction and we're talking an investment I understand your comment why don't we let Alex react to that well you know if you heard sugarcoating it certainly doesn't come from me I mean as I say there are enormous challenges in Afghanistan I pointed out the rising insecurity and other things that have made made doing business in Afghanistan made doing assistance in Afghanistan enormously challenging but at the same time we do have to recognize the ways in which Afghan people and Afghan government had made progress it's not a all good or all bad story and my message if I have one is that there have been successes and what we need to do for those of us who care about the long term trajectory of Afghanistan is to focus on and reinforce those areas where we do find success and to be realistic about the how we address the very striking challenges that Afghanistan continues to have could you talk about the transit trade agreement I mean one of his points was that he didn't really see that as a a success story at all and suggested even that it might be renegotiated what's your audit of the transit trade agreement in response to his comment so as I noted it is definitely a mixed story I think that there was great progress made on renegotiating an agreement with which if implemented according to the agreement will have great impact for Afghanistan the challenge as with all of these things comes in the implementation the implementation has not yet been fruitful and it's going to be critical that implementation but what is it about the implementation that hasn't worked you know there are a lot of mechanisms that need to be put into place in terms of I mean it's both very practical things in terms of making the border crossings better more effective widening the roads putting in some of the allowing for instance you know there's continues to be a dispute over whether trucks Afghan trucks can go into Pakistan to you know which is obviously much more economical it's advantageous to the Afghans if they can do that there are a lot of details like any trade agreement that actually need to be worked through and implemented nobody that I know or work with who works on these things every day has given up hope but we certainly see obstacles to implementation that need to be overcome great this gentleman right here and then there and then there and we'll wrap it up Richard O'Hara from the British Embassy I wanted to raise counter narcotics which I mean a few years ago was an issue that seemed to get an awful lot of attention particularly with the international community and particularly obviously the UK and yet even though it's still a problem on the ground it seems to sort of dropped off the agenda quite a lot so sort of where do you see the narcotics piece going in Afghanistan sort of post-2014 you know I think that our approach to the narcotics problem is a long term one that is borne out by the experiences in places like Thailand and Pakistan that at the end of the day you best deal with that most effectively by the creation of reasonable economic alternatives that doesn't mean finding a silver bullet that is going to be more valuable than poppy that's never the way but it's by increasing the opportunities that are available to people to be able to safely grow and sell and market their goods combined with a modicum of improved law enforcement that imposes a penalty so you're just trying to adjust the costs and I think that that's a long term strategy one that's frankly as we all know Helmand where the British government and the US government share a heavy partnership and burden is the single largest producer of opium anywhere in the world and that the economic and agricultural prospects of Helmand are significant but is yet unrealized and if we're able to improve security to the extent that some of that is realized through improving irrigation then I think that there's a great chance that we will have an impact on that but the more aggressive I think eradication-led approach that existed earlier on in the Afghan engagement is no longer what our primary approach is let me just collect the last two questions here there's a gentleman there did you still want to ask a question? oh, okay so the two in the front it will collect those two questions and then we'll wrap up I'm Bob Hershey, I'm a consultant what can be done using the internet to get more transparency and more local participation in the funding of things and get the various people involved to know what's going on and overcome the corruption problem and then to your right there's a woman with a question I'm Alice Day, a concerned citizen I want to pick up on what you said about food security and I wondered in the light of the COP17 meeting whether Afghanistan is going to be subjected to climate change in ways that will affect its agricultural production and if that is being taken into account in the planning of what's going to happen in the post-conflict era thanks for both of those questions on food security USAID, one of our lead strategies over the next five years is on agriculture and it's really intended to do two things it's to address the food security challenge in Afghanistan by dramatically increasing wheat yields and increasing irrigation which is part of increasing wheat yields and also focusing on high value crops that Afghanistan used to export so successfully like almonds and raisins and pistachios but on the food security side Afghanistan has chronic food insecurity in part due to drought and I don't know the future of climate change in Afghanistan but what I do know is that there are things that we really can do to enhance food security in Afghanistan and that really is about making it so that Afghanistan relies less on annual rainfall for its really dramatic wheat production swings and is able to rely more heavily on irrigation and water storage systems so that it can mitigate some of those challenges and we're very focused on that problem because every few years there's a drought in Afghanistan and I think that that has a broader impact on peace and security issues on the transparency question and I thank you for asking that because one of my personal jihads since joining the government 18 months ago has been to increase the transparency of the work that we do. I think that too often it's not that anybody tries to hide it but the information really needs to be out there about what we're doing for everybody to see and how much it costs and what's working and what's not working. We're doing that by both trying to dramatically increase our own web presence in terms of staying what's done. We've also supported the Afghans in building up a system where they report what aid flows are and the critical thing there is that they need the information. We worked very heavily with the World Bank in this process of examining fiscal sustainability so that they would have all of the assistance data which they felt they were having a hard time getting but there's also another side to your question that I want to address. One of the things that we did a year ago, I came in to this position and I very quickly got a briefing from an entity that looks at where aid goes in Afghanistan and I was very concerned about reports that came out that aid flows may be either being misallocated towards corruption or going into the hands of the insurgency or both. And we put a mechanism in place that we call A-Cubed or the Afghan Accountable Assistance for Afghanistan initiative. And that does a couple of fundamental things. First, what it does is it addresses what we, I consider to be the subcontracting problem. People have complained repeatedly that so much of the assistance goes from subcontractor to subcontractor and that A, we lose sight of it and B, that lessens the amount of assistance that actually gets directly to the Afghan people and we've lessened the amount of allowed subcontracting and increased our oversight over subcontractors. Another thing that we've done is put a vetting mechanism in place so that all of our funding when it goes into non-U.S. subcontractors is getting much more heavily vetted and that vetting process has been really successful in eliminating a number of providers that would have otherwise gotten funding that popped up on various databases as being problematic. And another thing that we've done is we are increasingly working to put more of our funding directly through the Afghan government and through mechanisms like the Afghan Reconstruction Trust Fund that's run by the World Bank because we think we have much greater visibility over those funds than we do otherwise and a lot more of the money ends up hitting the Afghan economy than it might do otherwise. At the end of the day, I can't claim that all of the work that we do is going to be perfect but by building essentially a number of layers of accountability that didn't exist or strengthening those layers that weren't in place even 18 months ago, I think that our transparency, our impact and our accountability have really gone up which at the end of the day is a core responsibility that we have to taxpayers for this assistance money. So Alex, thank you so much for joining us today and for being so forthcoming in your remarks and thank you all for your patience and great questions. Sorry we didn't get to everybody's question but please join me in thanking Alex. We'll get around to it. Thank you.