 Good afternoon everybody. While our next star-studded panel is getting settled into their seats, we have another poll question for you. So go ahead and find your clickers if you would. In March 2017, so roughly a year from now, how many US troops will be operating on the ground in Syria? And take note, it's how many do you think will be operating, not how many do you think should be operating. So go ahead and find your clickers. And the results? So clearly an escalation. It's a difficult question. We're asking you to essentially predict the course of the current campaign, which if you're like me you find a bit unpredictable at times. But we will see, we will see. So as I said, a star-studded panel, unique in that we're not discussing how we plan or think about the conduct of conflict but how we resolve conflict, how we end wars. Here to help us work through this, as I alluded to, is an exceptionally array of experience and expertise, not just from Syria, but globally. Many of them have been introduced already before. I'll start on the extreme left. Rania Abouzade, an award-winning journalist and also a fellow at New America now writing a book on Syria. Janine Giovanni is the Middle East editor at Newsweek. Her book was already plugged by Anne-Marie, but she's also got an incredible amount of experience in Syria. Nia Rosen, a special advisor with the Center for Humanitarian Dialogue, been in Syria for about five years now on the ground. And last but not least, Michael Semple, former deputy EU special representative on Afghanistan and also a professor at Queens University in Belfast, one of your lesser-known affiliations given your expertise. And I'd like to start by just asking them to kind of make some brief opening remarks on something that we maybe take for granted. And that is, when we think about conflict resolution and we think about political processes to enable peace process, how important is it in how we define the conflict itself? How should we think about how we even frame the conflict before we start enough? We'll just start with you, Rania. With regard to Syria, for example, I think that although with time it is increasingly taken on a sectarian hue, the root causes are still primarily political rather than sectarian in the sense that the majority Sunni rebels, for example, will not hesitate to kill or imprison Sunni soldiers who are fighting with the regime. And in the same way, the regime soldiers will not hesitate to kill or imprison minorities. So I think that we have to be careful in terms of the narrative that we allow ourselves to believe in terms of what's really happening. And of course, with regard to Syria, it's not just about the Syrians, it's a proxy battlefield. And we have foreign fighters on all sides. We also have foreign political players on all sides. So I think it's important to understand the root causes and the principal drivers in terms of before we can talk about resolution. Janine? As I mentioned earlier, I've been reporting war for 25 years, so nearly 20 conflicts. So it's always very tempting for me to try to put war and ending war conflict resolution in terms of a template. When I began covering Syria in 2012, but of course in my 20 years working in the Middle East I had been there before, I started to begin to compare it to Bosnia and the end of the war in Bosnia. Now we know that the date and peace accords brokered by Richard Holbrook ended the war, ended the killing. 20 years on in Bosnia there are still grave problems. Mainly that it froze the front lines, it rewarded the perpetrators of violence and of war crimes. And in a sense it really exasperated any kind of ethnic tension. So my initial feelings of that I could compare the two wars, I began to see that I could not. They were very, very different. I think one of the gravest mistakes and we'll go into it in more depth I hope in terms of the Syrian peace process and the attempts to end the war in Syria have been the absolute lack of people like Nier on the ground that could identify the proper stakeholders and analyze them. And this is something that they really failed to do, leaving a huge disconnect between what's happening today in Geneva, Vienna and also Geneva 1 and Geneva 2, the frameworks with which they're trying to end the war. So there's a real mistake of diplomats and policy makers not to have enough identification from the ground, clarity from the ground. And I think it's basically one of the reasons why we've had such a protracted conflict and why we're having such difficulty getting the right people at the table because they haven't even begun to analyze who the characters are that need to talk, need to engage in dialogue, need to open up and really to understand them. So I think this is in my view one of the gravest errors that's been made so far in the peace process. Nier, Jeanine suggests that we don't even define the structure of the stakeholders and of the conflict itself correctly. Do you agree? Is that part of the problem? Yeah, but we've also, there's a total lack of knowledge of what's happening in Syria and in Iraq to a lesser extent, but it's still a problem. But even of the phase in which we're in, that you've asked me to discuss how the wars end, I don't think they're going to end in the foreseeable future. I think we're in the beginning of a new age, it's like the end of the ice age. If I could identify the moments, that would be 2003 when the invasion was like the asteroid that killed the dinosaurs. It changed the entire ecosystem of the Middle East and created new identities and destroyed all identities. New species came into existence including a species called the Sunni Arab which hadn't existed as an identity really before, but suddenly became one. And the interventions, whether peace negotiations or military interventions in a way are kind of the continuous biological metaphor, they're halting a Darwinian process which may be essential and it would lead to winners and losers emerging much the way they did in Europe before modern Europe was established. So what we're going to see, however, I think is an evolution to a new reality, not any settlements, not any Dayton type agreements, but a gradual evolution in Syria and Iraq and Yemen and the region that I sort of work in to a reality of less war but constant instability where there is a strong central government that has authority in the capital, but the farther away you go, the less authority it has. This exists already in Pakistan and Mexico and Nigeria and elsewhere and that's the future of Syria, Iraq, Yemen, Libya, maybe even Egypt and parts of Tunisia and on and on in the Middle East. So Sykes-Picot won't disappear. The borders will remain the same, but the authority of governments in those borders will be far less and you'll have areas that will be under control of former insurgents turned collaborators with the central governments that can see that in Syria and then areas that will be totally out of control for many years to come until there's a gradual reintegration and this creature that was created from this sort of American asteroid that hit the Middle East in 2003, this new thing called Sunnis who think of themselves as Sunnis primarily, it's part of a very worrying trend which is going to be with us for a long time because more and more to be Sunni means to be Salafi or to be Wahhabi and that's a problem that's occurring from Mali all the way to Indonesia and the legacy of, it started with Iraq, but the legacy of this and specifically of the wars in Syria and Iraq are you going to have millions and millions of displaced people who happen to be Sunni Arab, their cities are destroyed probably forever, nobody's going to have the money to restore the Ramadi Mosul eventually, parts of Aleppo and on and on, every major Sunni city is almost destroyed and you're going to have a permanent population perhaps similar to the Palestinian refugee population in Jordan, Turkey, Lebanon, not to mention Europe, so longing to return and yet unable to. If I can end on a positive note though, the one nice thing I see is that the U.S. has at least finally embraced a policy of de-escalation as opposed to up until quite recently a policy of more violence, the whole approach was we're going to use more violence for cheap political change, all that did was worsen the conflicts, introduced foreign actors with a Russia or Iran, at least now there's a realization that our interventions, whether in Syria or Libya or elsewhere, have made things much, much worse and we should pursue a way to reduce the conflict as fast as possible. Thanks Nero, Michael. The conflict in Afghanistan, is this an insurgency in the classic sense or is this a proxy war imposed from externally? Well, the thing about ending it though is it's like giving up smoking, that they say it's easy to give up smoking, I've done it lots of times. And since 1989 we've ended the war in Afghanistan about six times, on average the war in Afghanistan ends every five years. And of course in the different processes where it has seemed to end, we've tried international agreements, national agreements, agreements which were implemented, agreements which fell dead on the first day without being implemented, we've even tried military victory a couple of times, we've had Taliban military victory, US military victory, all these things. And of course what happens is that there are some underlying drivers which have driven the violent conflict to resume quite soon. And yet each time there is a, there's a reconfiguration of the actors and of the conflict and that's why this is, I don't give you a straight answer to your question immediately because insurgency and proxy war, those are elements which have operated slightly different in the successive phases of the conflict. And where we are today is of course not quite where we hoped we would be. But today, it's 2016, we should be celebrating the 15th anniversary of the short military intervention to end a long war. And of course what we were meant to be celebrating was the, in the wake of that short military intervention, the consolidation of a sort of a, the Afghan equivalent of the liberal order. And we would be celebrating it and having cultural exchanges with them and feeling good. And of course it didn't happen. And if we want to understand, unpick the elements of insurgency and elements of proxy war and try and think about how next time it's going to end, we'd be looking at, okay, what were they factors and they're good, six or seven factors to be able to unpick. I'm not going to go through the list now because you won't let me. As to why those factors undid this plan, this idea of having a consolidated order in the wake of a short and very effective military intervention. And I think if we get into the discussion now and on other days, why it might be relevant to how wars end or indeed, as Nir is saying, how they drag on elsewhere. It's because of the six or seven factors that you can find which defeated the attempts to stabilize Afghanistan over the past decade and a half, they are likely to be present in many of the other conflict theaters that we look at. And certainly, you know, there's an awful lot of cross-fertilization between the conflict in Afghanistan and conflict in Syria. Well, let's go back to Syria. And in the, today's panel is timely, obviously, next week in Geneva, there's an expectation that talks on Syria will resume for our experts there. And you can pick a conflict because similarly, there's developing news in the other direction that talks or the outlook for talks in Afghanistan coming from the quadrilateral there are not as optimistic given the Taliban's posture. But how optimistic should we be about the course of these peace talks and what could be done to improve that outlook or that prospect? Renia, would you like to start? I mean, help us make sense of what we're about to see over the next couple of weeks. I haven't given much talk to the peace talks, to be honest, because they exist on a universe which is completely disassociated from what's happening on the ground. The regime is one thing, but when it comes to the various rebel groups, for example, the people who are in Geneva or wherever it might be who claim to speak for the anti-assad opposition generally speak for themselves, completely disconnected from the reality of what's happening on the ground. And the other thing is that, of course, the various spectrum of anti-assad groups, they just don't have a fixed address. They don't have the one sort of power, the one person, the one organization that can speak for all of them and that can influence them. Beyond the fact that they want to see the end of Assad, they differ in terms of what happens next. So that's one thing that doesn't sort of bode well for the talks, like who can implement on the ground whatever is decided in the peace talks. And if we were to talk about the current cessation of hostilities, for example, if you were to point that out and say, well, look, they listened to that, I think there was more about battle fatigue and fatigue on the ground than it is about listening to people who claim to speak for the political opposition in exile. Janine there, do you agree or disagree? See it differently? Yeah, I mean, I spent six months following Stefan de Mistura, the current special envoy around and he generously gave me time to observe how the peace process was working. And while I think I'll start off by saying I think he's got a disastrous job, Mission Impossible, and he has worked very hard, I think all three envoys, first Kofi Annan, Brahimi, and now de Mistura, have not really, in a sense, grasped what the concept is, nor have they been able to penetrate in any way, which seems to me any kind of long-term solution. And I think part of it is that, well, they're hampered by the fact that they're working with a UN mandate. That's the first thing. And I think that's very difficult. There's people that de Mistura cannot talk to. And I was talking to you earlier about how I've just finished a thesis at Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy on creative diplomacy in terms of Syria. So what lessons can we learn from the past? You know, we don't have a Holbrook type figure, a Richard Holbrook figure who was so instrumental in Bosnia because, basically, he was a bully. He was a bully that got things done. He made Milosevic and Izabegovic sit down together in Dayton. He held proximity talks. He made them see each other every day at breakfast, lunch, and dinner when they loathed each other. And eventually he got the deal closed at the 9th hour at the moment when he was about to write back to Washington and say, we can't do it. The war is going to continue. But there isn't a Holbrook-like character who has that kind of force or the United States behind him completely. It's in the hands right now of the UN. And I think that there's been a lot of mistakes made, but the biggest one has been, as Rainia said, they have not clearly identified the people that they should be talking to. That and Geneva 1 and Geneva 2 communicates, which basically set out the terms of the transition. I heard de Mistura saying yesterday, we're beginning to discuss this week in Geneva how the elections will take place. And the elections, they're still fighting. I mean, there has been this cessation of hostilities, but there still was 135 people killed in the first week alone. So it seems that there's this delusion, this delusional sense in Geneva or Vienna when they all came out high-flying each other, thinking they had ended the war. What the diplomats see from Europe is not at all what is happening on the ground. And I think until they address that, and that is something that Holbrook grasped that they don't seem to, I think they will never get any further. We might have as protracted wars. Lebanon, I hope not, but it doesn't seem that they're making any progress. And this is the third envoy, dedicated diplomats, who have been unable in any way to move it forward. Okay, good, thank you. My one concern is that having shocked everybody by adhering to the cessation for the most part, all the various players, the Russians, the regime, insurgents, et cetera, a hastier resumption of political talks may be the worst thing we can do right now because we might raise the issues that are provocative and result in some element saying to hell with this, I'm going to go back to fighting because I'm not going to get what I want. So I would have preferred that people enjoy a period of normalization for a few months before being confronted with the choice of go back to fighting or accept that you might not get what you want. However, what we have seen is that the insurgents have been remarkably coherent in their adherence to the terms and that also quite a surprise is the fact that the US was able to get them to do that given that the US has limited influence over the insurgents and limited influence over Saudi Arabia and Turkey. But what perhaps it can't be said exactly is that we are now conforming in part to the Russian dictates and if the US feels like it's a partner with the Russians, it's a bit more like the kid who's sitting on your lap in a car driving who thinks he's driving. But the terms of the conflict or the resolution have largely been defined by the Russian intervention which has removed issues of regime change from the table. That was a primary demand of many of the insurgents, of course, and certainly of Saudi Arabia. So bringing these issues up again so soon may be provocative. However, it also seems like the international players have largely accepted the Russian vision of what's going to happen in Syria and so perhaps we'll at least see a continued de-escalation but like I said, no actual settlement or end to the war. Let me change the question a little bit for you, Michael. Jeanine mentioned that sometimes we're not talking to the right people. How do we think about irreconcilables in a reconciliation process? How do we determine who the right people are to speak with? In the Syria context, we have Al Nusrah, which is outside the normal mental construct of kind of a two-dimensional fight. These are multi-dimensional where the enemy of our enemy is not necessarily our friend. In Afghanistan, the Haqqanis are part of the Taliban, but they've been designated a foreign terrorist organization. So how do we think about who to talk to and who's reconcilable and irreconcilable? Big challenges and I thought that the more degrees of freedom that we can provide to the people who are tasked with the diplomatic work, the better. In other words, it really sounds like a recipe for disaster to take somebody like Stefan de Mosura in charge of, okay, here are the ones you can talk to, here are the ones you can't talk to, please get the solution. Because if you want to stop the fighting, ultimately you have to get a critical mass of the fighters have got to be on board with your settlement, otherwise it's going to be fictitious. It's going to be like we've had several of those settlements previously in Afghanistan. I mean, they're signed and they're never implemented or they fall apart quickly. I actually hear it from some of the Taliban who I've had the privilege to talk to almost turned upside down. It's well known in sort of political practice that quite often movements use the process of negotiations of trying to boost their cohesiveness. The greatest proponent of this, or at least the practiser of this who I'm aware with was Muhammad Ali Jinnah, who in the negotiations helped me lead to partition of British India and the founding of Pakistan. He set himself up as the soul spokesman. You're going to talk with Muslims, you're going to talk with me. Nobody else has the right to represent him. He managed to leverage the run-up to partition to consolidate his hold, build the Muslim League and ultimately make Pakistan a reality. When you find a situation like Afghanistan where we're in the current leadership of the Taliban, they're going for military victory. They see a relatively weak and dysfunctional government which is what's left of what we hoped for of the Afghan liberal order. They are prepared to wait and fight them out and they have emerged as the soul interlocutor for all our engagement over the past few years, even from the time of your previous incarnation. A lot of the people in the movement who have reached different conclusions from the people, those who are holding onto the leadership who believe that a perpetual conflict doesn't actually count as a victory for us. We can do better than that. They're frozen out when your engagement is essentially with a single address. I think that it's important to look for creative approaches in the engagement where you go for your workout. We know that we have to carry with us the main body of fighters but we also don't want to freeze out of the political process. We have to look for creative ways of bringing them in. Those who might be part of a process of change in the way that the actual fighting organization does business, creative thought there, and then there's a different part of the dilemma which is around the Afghan equivalent of the Syrian problem of those who are never going to sign up to any kind of deal and for the sake of argument in the other Afghanistan, we've got the al-Qaeda, we've got the Daesh, we rest assured there is a list of those who see the continuation of conflict as a political opportunity because they're like what used to be the Trotskyites in my days at university, you always had to have a protest about something so that you could organize and mobilize and build your ranks. These people are not going to be about part of some kind of consensus solution. And of course one has to understand them and probably one has to seek, one needs the discrete interaction with other parts of the armed people on that side where they have moved from a position of being in alliance with the irreconcilables to deciding that their future best interest may actually be disassociated from them, so we're hoping to marginalize them and being part of an emerging pro-peace coalition. So we've got to deal with the hardliners in power, we've got to deal with the piece-nicks who aren't in power but can still be useful and we've got to understand, but ultimately marginalize the irreconcilables. Before we, I'd like to give the audience a chance and while the microphones are getting ready, and going back to where we started, this question of how we see the conflict. I mean, when you look at this group, the one thing that strikes you, it certainly struck me, is the level of expertise you have not just overall but in the field, on the ground. These are people who watch the conflicts, see the conflicts firsthand, don't just read about them in capital. So how much of a gulf do you see between how we see these conflicts from capitals through the media versus what you see kind of firsthand on the ground? And how big of a gulf and how big of a problem is that? Janine? Well, I want to, I can address it, but I also want to ask Michael something. Do you feel we could get historical lessons from the Good Friday Agreement because, you know, as we know, John Major had said, it turns my stomach to think that we will ever speak to killers and murderers. And in terms of, and as we know, Jonathan Powell and others, Tony Blair, then went on and did talk to the IRA and made agreements with them. And historically, there's always been this repugnance about we can never speak to terrorists, we can't speak to killers, governments if people are held hostage. I'm French and American by nationality. I always carry my French passport because I know the French will pay for me if I'm kidnapped. Whereas the Americans or the Brits will not. So how do you draw the line? I mean, at some point, and I've been researching this, we, people do talk to Nusrah and ISIS perhaps might not be, it might not be ripe yet. It might not be the ripeness isn't there, the moment to negotiate or at least talk. But what about just opening up dialogue? And do you think we can learn from what happened in Stormont in those days and how it did eventually lead to the Good Friday Agreement? Which as, you know, I grew up in England in those times before and there was, it was like living in, people felt that it was a terrorist war. I mean, do we talk to terrorists as Jonathan Powell would put it? Terrorists who are designated by the State Department or the UN list. But these are the people, these are the very people we need to open dialogue with. So how do we get around that? Well, I mean, Secretary Clinton, obviously when she announced the U.S. policy on reconciliation with the Taliban tried to soften the blow by saying, well, you have to understand, in conflict you don't come to the table with your friends, you come to the table with your enemies. But in these multi-dimensional conflicts it clearly is not so simple, right? But let's, if you want to offer thoughts on the kind of the ground perspective versus the media perspective in terms of how we see the conflict and then let's go to the audience and get some questions. Nir? I used to be a journalist before I began this mediation thing. So I worked in Iraq, Afghanistan, elsewhere and I've never seen a conflict so poorly reported and the reality on the ground, the Syrian conflict rather. I mean, Iraq was very terribly reported the issues of the embedded reporters and of lack of access and lack of Arabic experts or that lack of area experts in general. But in Syria even more so because Syria was kind of almost a black hole in terms of media and academia before the crisis began and then there was lack of access issues because the government was issuing visas or because it was too dangerous for most people and because of the Arab Spring euphoria where there was a sense that there was good guys and bad guys and this beautiful amazing thing is happening it's the best thing that ever happened and freedom is going to ring throughout the Arab world and so the complex narrative of Syria never emerged and it was immediately a good versus evil and also a simplistic sectarian narrative where it's an Alawite dictator oppressing a Sunni majority population which isn't true in Syria and we'd also simplified the sectarian narrative in Iraq. So it's been, it's obviously affected policy because most policy is based on information coming from open source as is most intelligence and people have no idea what's going on in Syria within the nature of the insurgency the nature of the militia's affiliate with the regime the regime's intentions and that's even when it comes to the Russians we've had to like go back to our Cold War experts on the Soviet Union to try to understand the Russians and so we've demonized them and everything they do must be bad because it's the Russians doing it even if we happen to actually, we can't say it but be allied quite closely with the Russians and even with the Iranians and Hezbollah in these conflicts to maintain this good guy, bad guy kind of narrative. Rene any thoughts before we go to the audience? No, I mean I agree with a lot of what Nier said but just to add to it Egypt was always more than Tahrir Square but the people through which the story was told was so small that it was focused on a particular part of the country which wasn't really representative of what was happening in much of the rest of the country and it's the same thing across the Middle East this idea of who are the good guys and who are the bad guys good people do bad things and bad people can do good things and you have to consider that spectrum and the world is completely grey and we have to approach it as such in our reporting, in our writing, in our discourse. Well let's open up this incredible group of expertise to the audience. Okay go ahead and then we'll go to the audience Michael. I think it was very relevant the question you're asking about the field knowledge versus what's been thought far away because in Afghanistan my understanding of what's happened is that one reason that attempts at intervention particularly from the US have been sort of thwarted and they've achieved outcomes different from what people anticipated was because many of the actors on the ground in Afghanistan are absolutely superb at disinformation, at manipulating relationships and when people talk about on a strategic level but when people talk about a proxy war they refer to evil powers paying their proxies to do things for them whereas my understanding it always works the other way round it's very clever, well informed, astute Afghan actors who are thinking this is what I want to achieve against such a person, they're more powerful than me who can I enlist unwittingly preferably to support me in overcoming my local rival and that's how they dealt with the Soviets and how they played their civil wars that's how they have duped Pakistan and that's how they're gaming the US and what they play upon is indeed this asymmetry of information they're superbly well informed and we are superbly badly informed Ending wars is a matter of propaganda war so let's go to the audience please if you could state your affiliation, your name and please use the microphones Pete App, Simon Global Affairs columnist at Reuters I mean who in government should own this because I'm really struck by the fact it's a fact people like Janine really know how these wars work but there's no counterpart in Whitehall or Washington I mean maybe Michael was in Afghanistan but by and large if you go to a Roman building in Washington everyone's talking about ISIS no one has that kind of granular knowledge of Syria or even Afghanistan so where in government should own this expertise? by this you mean the political process of who in government should be the person who actually knows what these groups want who realizes they're being played by some local warlord in a town they've never heard of Anybody want to take a stab at recommendations to the governments? Well that should be the role of intelligence and State Department for our ministry however the fact that they can't do that is further evidence that we shouldn't play these games in the first place that these interventions lead to secondary and tertiary consequences that are totally out of our imagination out of our control as at least as Western institutions so don't do it because there's nobody in the government who can do it especially in democracy where people are rotating constantly so the advantage of authoritarian states is that at least they have longevity of people in charge of these files and you see that in the way that the Syrians or the Iranians and other states in the Middle East are able to handle these conflicts a bit more long term when they're thinking because it's the same people who are in charge for so long the West just can't do it Janine? I was having this discussion with a group of diplomats a few weeks ago and the days of the old-fashioned British Arabists working for the Foreign Office are over in a sense and once there was a time when they would have experts and put them in the field and information gathering was much more robust and I think now one of the things I've certainly noticed following the UN process is that the people involved in the back offices don't have any interest in Syria or Afghanistan or Yemen or Libya they're trying to move their pay grades up and they're locked in their own bureaucracy that there really isn't the kind of desire I think and that feeds into the whole political will so I mean I think that we've lost the kind of specialization and the expertise and a bit of if you want to link it to the media in a sense the Arab Spring was this jubilant time when there was a lot of optimism but it drew a lot of reporters who had never not only reported conflict before but the Middle East and because of what Rania was saying about our shrinking business and resources and freelancers are used more now who are brave and will go into Syria or Libya or wherever but they don't have the context of putting it into the whole geopolitical scenario they don't know about the first Intifada or the second Intifada or what actually happened in Yemen or the background of Saddam so we live in times because of shrinking resources where we're less reliant on experts and on people who really know what they're doing from the ground and that's why I'm very happy to be with this panel because everyone here has really done their time in the field and I think policy makers should listen to us more because you're not ready to go into government yourself I might I might be So you've enlisted one Any other thoughts? Back here this gentleman with the glasses and the red tie My name is Joseph Schneider and the question I have we know there's a lot of constraints and a lot of bad experiences in our attempts and not much success so what do you think our objectives should be in these sort of situations to establish a cordon sanitaire and let everyone just go at it and just make sure it doesn't spill over or should we have more direct objectives and then find ways to actually influence events on the ground What's the objective? First of all there's no common objective not even for the West the UK, France, Germany, the US all have very different interests in the region who have their own interests when it comes to Syria or Iraq or likewise I'm sure in Afghanistan we don't have the same objectives but it's also the question seems to imply that we're just minding our business sitting at home watching TV and oh my god this war started in Syria or Iraq but we're deeply implicated certainly in Iraq but even in Syria both because it's the legacy of Iraq but also because we've thrown plenty of fuel as America on that fire so there's a sense of responsibility and a continued involvement the objective should be from a moral point of view and from a security point of view to reduce conflict, not to escalate conflict the policy has been certainly in the last few years it's not the last few decades or centuries to escalate conflict by intervention, by removing states and in my experience as it is in Iraq, Libya Yemen, Syria the intervention whatever the intentions are how well-intentioned we may be leads to further conflict so the primary goal should be on reducing violence both from a humanitarian point of view and from a point of view of protecting Western security interests and preventing refugee flows and all that others? Michael? I think that it is a legitimate and appropriate objective for great powers like the United States to promote peace and of course there can always be other objectives as well but there are lots of positive spin-offs from peace and we all know that peace is far more than just the absence of violent conflict it's a legitimate objective if you build that in as one of your important objectives you're also with as much understanding of what works and what doesn't work and Mia is throwing lots of warnings of recent experience of what doesn't work but also if you accept peace as an objective you also have to accept the timeline that goes with it because something which has defeated many international projects over the years is the attempt to get things done in completely unrealistic time tables which may have some relevance to local political cycles but not to what can be done so promote peace and be prepared to try for a long time to create the conditions so that eventually you succeed okay let's try to get more questions in here please let's go back to the audience back here in the corner Matt? Matt Frankel getting back to the subject of the Topicalities Wars of the Future and if you accept the premise that Iraq, Syria, Yemen is going to become Libya it's going to become more the norm of how small conflicts are fought in other words multi-parties with conflicting means and external intervention how do we solve these problems we've come a long way from the old insurgency template of the U.S. on one side the Soviets on the other side we get the two parties to the table and work it out or one side as near possibly maybe just fight it out but conflicts are now multi-party thank you can you do that briefly a model for resolving 21st century conflict again you know I'm often drawn back to the Bosnia but I don't think in this case again I don't think that Syria fits into the template of Bosnia I mean I'm tempted to say and in hindsight it is absolutely no use that Syria could have had we had more long-term strategic insight into ending it it could have been prevented but I could say the same thing about Bosnia in 1993 there were chances all along where the war could have been ended, halted thousands of lives could have been saved and 2013 in Syria right after Ghouta and the red line might have been an opportunity when the war certainly could have been cut short but then as we know what happened with Cameroon and Parliament and then Obama's decision I think the whole policy of nonchalance has been deadly and it's had serious repercussions not just in Syria but throughout the region in terms of the Russian involvement purely from a civilian point of view since September 30th since they began their airstrikes there's been more civilian casualties that will tell me that they're more frightened of the Russian airstrikes than they were before from the Assad strike so I don't know actually I think that a lot of this could have been preventive examining the conflict early on and seeing what steps could have been taken to shorten it and to contain it perhaps but I think now I have a very gloomy outlook and I'm not gloomy by nature Anyone like to have the last word? Renia? Final closing thought If we look at the failures and the barriers to progress across these new conflicts the failures are primarily political and the military piece has been there but it just hasn't been able to deliver if it's not supported by effective political action so I think one of the approaches for dealing with these multi-actor uncertain timeline difficult conflicts is rebalancing our effort between the military and the political ensuring that any military action if it is required is backed up by effective political action which is up to the complexity of the environment in which it operates so that despite the complaints we had about lack of expertise and so on we acquire that and we have multiple channels for engaging multiple addresses that we use and we get creative the kind of actions that we can use drying up the finance doesn't just mean bombing facilities there are other ways of drying up finance I always felt that the act of getting over 100,000 troops onto the other side of the world and being supplied with water was such beyond huma... when you think of all the challenges involved it's absolutely massive so anybody who says what we're talking about is a political challenge of these conflicts it's nothing compared with supplying water for 100,000 troops on the other side of the world let's get serious and do it so the military deserves to be complemented by effective political action commensurate with the complexity of the conflict that we're dealing with inspirational insights from an experienced group thank you very much please join me in thanking this great panel