 Ladies and gentlemen, we're going to start here in about one minute. Before we do, just a quick announcement, we're running two defense-related programs this morning. So if you're here for the China defense budget discussion, that's next door. But if you're here for the IMET discussion, you're exactly in the right place. Okay, good morning, everyone. My name is Ernie Bauer. I'm the chair of the Southeast Asia program here at CSIS, and this morning we have a real treat. One of the things we have been thinking about at CSIS is how do we do the pivot and at the same time work through the sequester and the budget cuts that are coming, particularly on the military side of the fence. One of the programs that could be most vulnerable in that situation is called the IMET program, or the International Military Education and Training Program, IMET. IMET was actually created in 1961 with Foreign Assistance Act, and we have provided IMET funds. We're going to be looking at Asia and specifically Southeast Asia here, although the speakers are welcome to refer to a broader region than that if they like. But if we look at Southeast Asia, IMET funds have been primarily targeted at our two treaty allies, the Philippines and Thailand. Between 2000 and 2009, those countries used between a million and a half and two and a half million dollars each. IMET funds have also gone to other ASEAN countries, namely Cambodia, East Timor, Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, and Vietnam. We don't have IMET programs with Singapore, Brunei, or Myanmar, or Burma. Today, the way we organized our discussion was to have input from two fantastic experts and people with perspective on this question. And I think it will probably result in a good discussion, I don't know about a debate, but I think a discussion with points of view is always a good way to suss out some of the policy prescriptions for an issue. First, I'll introduce, I'll introduce both speakers and then we'll start with Lieutenant General Chip Gregson. Chip, as many of you know, was Assistant Secretary of Defense for Asian and Pacific Security Affairs. And before that, he served as a Chief Operating Officer for the United States Olympic Committee. Chip knows a little something about IMET in terms of hands-on experience. He was commanding general of the Marine Corps Forces in the Asia Pacific at the Marine Corps Central Command, where he led and managed over 70,000 Marines and sailors in the Middle East, Afghanistan, East Asia, Africa, and Asia. And from 2001 to 2003, he was commanding general of all the Marine Corps Forces in Japan. Prior to that, he was Director of Asia Pacific Policy in the Office of the Secretary of Defense from 1998 to 2000, graduated of the U.S. Naval Academy and holds a couple of master's degrees. John Sifton is the Asia Advocacy Director of Human Rights Wash. His portfolio there includes South and Southeast Asia, a region he knows quite a bit about. Before joining Human Rights Wash for the second time, he was the Director of One World Research, which is a public interest and investigation firm. He started his at Human Rights Wash as a director, I'm sorry, as a researcher in the Asia Division focusing on Afghanistan and Pakistan. John has a lot of experience in South Asia, lived in Afghanistan and Pakistan and worked on those areas. He holds a law degree from New York University and a bachelor's degree from St. John's College in Annapolis. So I guess you guys share some experience in Annapolis and in Afghanistan. And let's see if you share anything else. So I'd like to kick off this morning. Chip, I will give you first a shot at it and then we'll turn to John and then I will moderate in discussion, please. Thank you, Ernie, and I'm not happy to be here. The Southeast Asia program has really taken off under your guidance and I think it's very valuable and even about time that we started paying some attention to it. Let me try and set a perspective or a framework on this by talking a little bit about the overall purpose of our forces overseas and our defense engagement or our national engagement programs with the defense establishments of various other countries. It's really far broader and more constructive than just simply waiting for military action. Along our active presence as well as our engagement, including IMET and the many other programs of foreign military assistance with other countries, helps promote security, dampen sources of instability, deter conflict and give substance to U.S. security guarantees and commitments and ensure U.S. access. It multiplies our diplomatic impact and demonstrates professional military ethics in a democratic society. IMET, like all the other forms of military engagement, can be used to reward countries that do U.S. bidding. It's also can be used as a stick. It's refusal or it's withdrawal can be used as punishment against countries that have irritated the United States at one point or another. It can also become a very large issue when political or tactical exigencies override our objections to abuses in one country or another. We lavish military aid on Pakistan, yet we restrict it to Vietnam. One could also add Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan and Turkmenistan as other countries where we provide aid that we would otherwise refuse where we're not involved in Afghanistan and Central Asia. IMET is designed to strengthen foreign militaries through skill training and exposure to values supporting a civilian controlled, apolitical and professional military. It's also an instrument of influence. Relationship building with exposure at an early career stage is one of the benefits cross-culturally of the IMET and other programs. And in this regard, I think a strong argument can be made that Americans benefit as much or more from this as our foreign guests do. Everybody in this room is no doubt noticed. We sometimes tend to have an attitude that it's all about us. And when you have to learn to get along with people who speak a different language, do things differently than you do and have a different tradition and a different view of history and a different view of America when you're a captain, say, as a junior officer, it's often a very instructive experience and one you wouldn't have otherwise. Stronger relations and enhanced mutual understanding of the perspectives of others than is one of the benefits of IMET as we go through this. In part to address some of the perceived difficulties with the IMET program as it was begun in the beginning, we created EIMET or expanded IMET in 1990. This opened up the IMET program to civilian officials of other governments and it was specifically an attempt to decrease the abuses. The types of training that were designed under the EIMET were English language training, flying training, observation on-the-job training, professional military education, meaning exchanges between students at command and staff colleges and the like, technical training, military justice training, civil military relations, defense resource management and so on, not exactly what one would refer to as training with close combat and hand-to-hand and bayonet fighting. The process begins at our embassies, includes careful vetting and screening, the ambassador in each of our countries therefore has oversight of this. Some programs are funded by the Defense Departments, many by the Department of State, so they have oversight and Congress has the ability and exercises it fairly frequently to provide oversight. See, for example, Senator Leahy and his efforts with Indonesian. As a Shepo perhaps or as a concluding remark regarding the overall context for EIMET, a recent study out of this very institution here stated in part, forward presence and engagement are not simply helpful to shaping the environment and setting the stage for effective responses to contingencies, they are indispensable for minimizing the likelihood of larger conflicts. And with that, I'll conclude. Thank you Chip, that was great. John, what's your perspective? I'll try to keep this somewhat brief. I'd like to go to questions because I think that's a good context in which to talk, but I'm gonna start my comments by discussing Indonesia. I'd like to start with Indonesia because I think it's important to begin a discussion about EIMET in Asia by acknowledging that there is indeed a debate about its utilities and consequences and countries like Indonesia bring that debate into pretty sharp focus. Indonesia's military has in the past committed some pretty major human rights abuses and it continues to have a problematic record with a lack of justice for those past abuses and even some impunity for current abuses. But in July 2010, the last remaining restrictions that were really being put on that military via the efforts of Senator Leahy was removed. And Secretary Gates stood in Jakarta and with the Defense Minister of Indonesia and the last restrictions on Kapasas, the unit that was engaged in some of the worst abuses were removed. Now that moment when that happened, obviously human rights watch disagreed with that. That goes without saying, but that moment represents I think for the United States and the EIMET program, essentially the crystallization of what is perceived as the purpose of EIMET, which is to improve these militaries and also meet certain exigencies and desires of the US government. It was decided at the Pentagon and the White House level that this was the right thing to do. And the reason was the arguments to usually go back and forth that by standing on the outside and yelling at the Indonesian military, we will accomplish nothing. It's better to talk to them, engage with them and this will ultimately improve the right situation and make them more rights respecting military. I guess to be perfectly blunt, the human rights watch position, the position of a lot of human rights groups are, there are some units and persons and even governments which, governments, not countries, which are not redeemable. And this is a real challenge for the EIMET program. I don't think that's the norm. It's definitely not the norm worldwide, but it's unfortunately all too common in Asia for there to be institutions and governments which are not redeemable. I wanna be clear, I'm not talking about people and people may or may not be redeemable. That's a theological matter, I suppose. But whether an institution is redeemable and in what circumstances, I mean this is essentially the big policy question looming in the background. It's funny because of course, as a human rights group, we're considered to be progressive in the sorts like criminal defense attorneys who often try to explain things away and say you're a bad person because of your background and your upbringing and whatever. But in reality, human rights groups are much more conservative. They often consider people to be unredeemable and it is the Pentagon that is saying things like, well, you have to understand the context. We need to engage with them and understand where they're coming from. So we're often juxtaposed in a kind of funny way. But anyway, the real question is whether institutions are redeemable and I guess the US government is of the opinion that they are and human rights groups are often of the opinion that they're not. Indonesia provides a snapshot of how the US views that question of redemption. The US government ostensibly believes the Indonesian military has reformed adequately. We disagree. There's still some abuses in Papua and other places which are going on. But again, how do we get to this moment? Asia is a fertile ground for redemption, I suppose. You see throughout the region several other governments with rights-abusing militaries, ones which have been engaged in various abuses. In Thailand, for instance, the military in the South is engaged in a lot of abuses in the context of the insurgency in the South. The Philippines has a very long record of implications for the military and the paramilitary groups in extrajudicial executions. But I think the country that probably crystallizes the biggest problem for IMAT, human rights, in Asia, Southeast Asia is Cambodia. First of all, the program is very large per capita. It's a million dollars of military assistance for a country of about 14 million people. And you have a military which is dominated, or rather you have a military which dominates the political scene. The RCAF, the Royal Cambodian Armed Forces, Commander-in-Chief, the Deputy Commander-in-Chief, the Army Commander, they're all in the permanent committee of the Cambodian People Party, the ruling party, the Minister of Defense, the Chief of the Navy, the Commanders of the Army, Army Region Number One, Number Two, Number Three, Number Four, and you go on and on and on, they're all on the Central Committee of the Cambodian People's Party. It's not a political military by any stretch of the imagination. So you ask yourself, right off the bat, why are we working with this military? And then you consider the fact that the RCAF Commander-in-Chief and the Deputy Commander-in-Chief are Khmer Rouge veterans. Another issue from the 70s that hangs over them. And then finally, the vetting issue. Is it really possible to screen the Cambodian military when there is such a large record of abuse spanning all the way back to the 1970s? And even for the young officers, are we really up to the task? Our experience at Human Rights Watch is that problems with transliteration, poor data collection, some other problems, you see again and again and again, officers being considered, nominated who are implicated in some very serious abuses now. Land grabbing, the military is very implicated in basically being sponsored by corporate entities to grab land. But even beyond lehi, meta-lehi, you see a large number of young officers who would pass lehi vetting, they're clean in terms of gross human rights abuses, but they are the sons of senior CPP cronies of Hun Sen, the prime minister. And so you say to yourself, well, they're not involved in gross human rights abuses, but this guy's a 24-year-old colonel, or this guy's a 27-year-old brigadier general, 29-year-old three-star generals. They're the sons of various high-level CPP officials. You ask yourself, what's really going on here and is it in the best interests of the human rights of the Cambodian people that we are training them? Now I could go on and on about this, but I won't. What I'd like to conclude with is that this panel is quite well-timed because on Friday, the White House released a new policy. It's called the U.S. Security Sector Assistance Policy, and it attempts to deal with some of the underlying problems that I'm getting to, which is how do you reconcile these different aims, the U.S. aim to engage and to improve these governments, the exigencies that are being considered. Number three in that policy, policy goals are to help partner nations build sustainable capacity, promote partner support for U.S. interests, that's the exigencies. Number three is promote universal values, such as good governance, transparent and accountable oversight for security forces, rule of law, transparency, accountability, delivery of fair and effective justice, and respect for human rights. I guess what Human Rights Watch would submit is that that isn't possible with some militaries. Literally, it's not possible. You cannot give security sector assistance to certain militaries. They may pass vetting, but you shouldn't do it if you are attempting to do those things. And I could explain more about why, but I won't go on and on. I think it would be better to do a Q&A. Okay, thank you very much. I really appreciate the opening positions, just to clarify, Chip, you're saying there's value and good return on investment for IMIT, is that correct? Yes, along with our other security assistance, activities. Okay, and John, your position is IMIT is, what is your position? Would you use IMIT in some countries? Yeah, I mean. And not in others. The issue decidedly is not, is IMIT a good thing or not? Obviously, it plays its role in certain countries and there's some militaries which don't appear to have very serious rights abuse records. I guess the problem is you have certain countries where you cannot simultaneously promote rule of law, good governance and democracy, and find officers who are suitable for training because either the military is so politicized like Cambodia's or it's so hard to vet also like Cambodia's or third, the whole unit distinction, the notion that there are individuals whose hands have blood on them and that there are others who are not is so difficult to untangle because the entire military has such a poor record of accountability that you're better off just not doing it. Now, you could limit it, you talked about rule of law training, JAGs and trying to train a military to have a better accountability mechanism, train them to have a better military justice system, train them to have accountability mechanisms, train them to have inspector generals, you could do that and that could be the limit to your IMAT program and maybe we would have fewer objections in a situation like that, but when you look through the reports to Congress about all the IMAT, yeah, there's stuff like that in there but oftentimes it's counter-terrorism training, jungle warfare, maritime security, some of it's innocuous, humanitarian aid but you don't see a huge amount of that type of training so we would submit, don't do it, pull the plug. Okay, let's open it up for questions. I add a note for Mr. Sifton, thank you. First, I just wanted to comment that actually there is no IMAT going to co-pass us right now. The Robert Gates announcement was for a sort of limited DOD engagement but not through the IMAT program such as it is. And then the second question, when we consider our IMAT programs at the State Department the main thrust of the program is to allow rising leaders to come to the United States and participate in usually residential programs, professional military education like the war college or something, it's classroom-based sort of graduate degree type things versus operational or technical training. So I was wondering whether from your point of view you can make a differentiation between the value of that type of thing and then very operational training, marksmanship and stuff like that. What I'm really trying to get at is that there are certain contexts and I don't think this is the norm or this is true all through Asia but there are certain contexts where you can't find people who that type of training would benefit. You have militaries which are so politicized, so corrupt, so involved in criminal activity that no matter who you find is going to have an overlord who is more important to them and their career than pleasing the U.S. or being friends with it or becoming professional. Again, it's not the norm but I think there are certain militaries like that. I don't mean to stick on Cambodia. So I just want to do a follow-up question, John. So in a case where you have an unredeemable, a set of unredeemable institutions what would your view be on making progress? Do you just walk away from them and let it fester and get worse? Or how do you, what's the prescription when you get to that situation? Yeah, in a nutshell, what I would submit to both OSD and state is that the focus, if there must be engagement with a country that bad, solely on accountability mechanisms. Say we're going to help you create Inspector General slash civilian complaints review board slash the military component of your Human Rights Commission, whatever it is in a country which has the oversight of the security forces. Help you train that entity and try to make your military more accountable and transparent. You could just do that. Or you could just threaten them as certain countries have, just threaten them with a full withdrawal of military assistance and then lay down the exact roadmap for how to get it back. Those are essentially the two options. Quick follow up here, because this is a point that I wanted to raise in our discussion. We've been tracking this very closely. China has been starting to mimic US military, Milton Mill engagement strategies in Southeast Asia and actually doing their own version of IMET which doesn't really look a lot like American IMET but they're pulling larger numbers than we are from regional militaries. And I wondered if maybe Chip and John you would comment on that are we leaving states open to assistance that might not have the values based approach that the US has? Well, that question gets to one of the core dilemmas on IMET decisions and not just IMET but the other 14 different programs we have to aid other people's militaries. Is it better to engage or not engage? And anecdotal evidence and pardon the anecdotes but Ronald Reagan once said that two anecdotes constitute the data. But in Indonesia in the early 2000s in the days of the full lehi restrictions on training we were allowed to travel to Indonesia to do training on non-lethal weapons and we used that to go there frequently. One of the mandatory things we had to do on the training was to start with a class on militaries in a democratic society in the military justice system. And of course the Pentagon God bless the Pentagon created the class for us. And it was 28 mind numbing slides all to be given with a lot of detail on them and everything. But nevertheless the sessions especially with the Indonesian junior officers always turned out to be very exciting. These were captains that were fluent in English or at least competent, most fluent and they'd done their homework. We could not get through the class in the allotted time without all these captains bringing up incidents from the American past that we would prefer not to talk about or not even think about. It shows that they were thinking and people that are past a certain age Lieutenant Colonel, Colonel probably not gonna reach them. They're vested in the current system, they have that senior officer tendency to say we've always done it this way, that's the way I'd like to continue doing it, that type of thing. But being able to get into these countries and work at the captain level with the junior officers and start shaping attitudes or at least raising questions I submit is far better than just cutting everything off and saying that you guys only have one choice and it's us, square yourselves away or we're never gonna talk to you again. I don't think that that's quite the best way. The other anecdote, the Trisakti University riots in 1998, Indonesian military with one exception got a really black eye out of it because of the way they treated the students. The one exception was the Indonesian Marines and quite by accident I happened to be in Indonesia not more than a few weeks after the Trisakti riots and I was out in Surabaya with the Marines and was talking about the Trisakti riots and things and I asked this group of senior officers, how is it you came off out of the riots with reputation enhanced and the army did so badly? And this one colonel smiled at me and said it's very simple, we didn't consider the students the enemy. We went in there and civilian closed ahead of time, we negotiated the rules of engagement so that when it came time for us to do what we needed to do, the students understood what was going on, they understood that we had their best interest at heart and we didn't disagree with them doing this and so I said okay, Leavenworth or Quantico and he said Leavenworth and that's where he went to school. So small incidents but yes, there are problems with IMET, there are problems with various governments, there are problems with certain sections of the militaries but the point comes down to is it better to try or is it better to withdraw, kind of like you do with your kids, go sit in a corner until I feel better. Yeah, I guess we're certainly not saying, every time a military is implicated in abuse just withdraw, don't do any business with them whatsoever but this issue of finding the redeemable folks and again, people are redeemable and even institutions are, is very difficult and I guess what I'm saying is I'm not confident the US government can figure it out. The lehi problem, the vetting problem is just one component but making wise decisions about who deserves to be brought for course training and what kind of training and when some good decisions get made and some very bad ones do as well and interestingly the age thing doesn't always work out the way you'd expect intuitively, the young officers are kind of promising and the old guard is old guard and after all, the person who's driving the reform in Burma is not a young officer, it's a very old one. With the TNI, it's very interesting what's going on. I mean maybe the Pentagon is right, maybe things have gotten better. Recently eight Indonesian soldiers in Papa were killed by the local insurgency there which is very small and very innocuous in many respects but still has some lethal capacities and we expected the TNI to go nuts because that's what they've done in the past but they didn't and it's not clear why and the jury's still out but as I said to some folks at OSD a few weeks ago I don't think that one can say that it's a sure thing that they ever formed. There's evidence, we have evidence that there's a lot of impunity still there and that if things get bloody enough in Papua there could be more abuses but neither of us really has the evidence to say we are right and the other's wrong and so we're both sort of arguing with each other with anecdotes and we don't have a lot to go with but then there are other places like Sri Lanka and Afghanistan and Cambodia where I know we're right and the Pentagon has a big problem. There's nobody to be, you can find a couple of Navy units, couple of young officers who aren't involved in any political activities and you can train them in maritime security or something, maybe although there's no maritime security in Afghanistan but for the most part you have the whole entities just messed up to the core and there's really little, there's very little to do and so that's the question, what do you do then with those countries and I guess what I'd suggest to them is either cut them off or be very tough with them and that's what we're suggesting with Cambodia and Sri Lanka, be very, very tough. Give them a roadmap like we're doing with Burma already which has shown itself willing to reform. As Congress is done with the Philippines, give them a roadmap, this is what you gotta do, exactly what you need to do and things will get better for you. Jonathan Bother from Congressional Quarterly. I don't know whether we're including Central Asia in this discussion but if we are, can both of you talk about the strategic imperatives of IMET in some of the Stan country, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, those places and human rights concerns, the conflict between the two. Central Asia touches on what I was trying to indicate with the tactical and political exigencies. We have something called the Northern Distribution Network that goes through Central Asia that is vital and might become even more vital if that's possible, if we lose the lines of communication through Pakistan for the retrograde out of Afghanistan. We've been on and off of a basing relationship with Uzbekistan because of our concerns with Uzbekistan's human rights record. We have a base in Kyrgyzstan that is problematic from a human rights record but we can't operate in Afghanistan without support from, pardon me, it's not a base. It's a transit center specifically designed with those words, sorry, take base out of the record. Okay, strike that. Yeah, I'm not allowed in the Pentagon now. I'd probably be shot if I watched the parking lot on that. But to be serious and not flip, Manas has been a problem because of the very, of the compelling contingencies of being, exigencies of being able to operate in Afghanistan versus what we would like to see happen in Central Asia with the human rights. It's not a clean thing. And I would add it's not just IMET, it's a number of all the other programs that we have going on too. And for example, Global Peace Operations Initiative or Mine Action or Disaster Response or Drug Interdiction or the 1206 program which recently out of Central Asia but in back in an Asian context was key to cleaning up the terrorist transit routes among Indonesia, Malaysia and the Philippines in that triangle where they bound one C. The bad guys were doing something in one country and fleeing to the other country and we didn't have the proper surveillance means to do it. Now we've got the surface search radars established with US money that serves all three countries so that they can cooperate to clean this up. Does that, that could constitute showing favoritism to a country that where we still have human rights concerns but it seems to serve a purpose. I used the example of the military aid that we lavish on Pakistan yet we deny the same aid to Vietnam. Well Vietnam doesn't have the same impact on us with our operations in Afghanistan that Pakistan does at the moment and Pakistan's got other things that concern us as well. And for example, their weapons program. So it's not at all a clean decision. I met and all the other aid programs on the DOD and state side are mixed in with this reality and one makes decisions in what one hopes is for the greater good overall. And as John said, sometimes they work out, sometimes you end up with low back. John, Central Asian? Yeah I mean it sort of goes without saying that most of the Central Asian republics have human rights problems. I mean that's a well known fact. I think the Pentagon knows that the White House certainly does and they've made a decision to go forward because of the necessity. What's baffling about some of the countries in Southeast Asia is that the necessity is not there. I mean can you think of a country in Southeast Asia that is less strategically important than Cambodia? I mean it's just sitting there, it's got this little coastline, I mean no offense to Cambodia but seriously, geostrategically, why is it an important country? Doesn't border China, it's got this short coastline and yet we lavish a lot of assistance. When you look at it per capita it's probably the leader in the region because it's only 14 million people. The Navy's only got 4,000 people in it. So it's got these huge programs and yet we don't seem to have any need to pull back on it and I would submit that it's because the Pentagon and the State Department and the White House just don't realize how bad the human rights situation is and I guess that's our fault. Okay, this is Ravi Balaram from Georgetown University. For every good anecdote there's a bad anecdote and that's part of the problem, maybe two is data, maybe three is data and I think that's the biggest issue with IMET. For example in Indonesia, President Yudhoyono is a four time IMET graduate, spent two years in the United States, has led a lot of the democratization, increased transparency, civilian control of the TNI. But that's just an anecdote, right? So I've just recently completed a study at Georgetown looking at the long term benefits of IMET and Burma in Myanmar. We had the program from 80 to 88. We trained 175 people and there are currently 13 of those individuals in the government of Myanmar at this time to include the vice president, several members of parliament. But I think the issue that we need to do or what we need to focus on is gathering the data in every country, good stories and bad stories. My list of IMET graduates, I double checked or cross-referenced that with the OFAC special designated nations list. I cross-referenced it with NGO sources out there to see if there was any evidence that these IMET graduates convicted, I mean were associated with human rights abuses or had any activities, any behaviors that would be deemed illegal or immoral according to US policy. And I didn't find any. But this is something that I think we need to do. But let me just ask a question though. And that's, I guess in my research I found that the positions of prominence which is our main metric is not sufficient. It's necessary but not sufficient. We look at these people at the top levels and as the general suggested that maybe that's not enough. We need the junior officers, we need the mid-grade officers in order to have true organizational reform shouldn't we be looking across the board and tracking officers across the board and to see if they take positions as instructors or training and doctrine commanders and look for knowledge transfer. Do they publish? Do they write white papers and try to become better? Thanks, I'd like to see that report by the way. Don't leave without talking to me. But any comments on that? Reactions on Myanmar and the study in general? I mean let me just say it at the outset that the fact that you didn't find anything doesn't mean anything. I don't mean to be insulting but Burma is a black box and the office of the secretary of defense is the first office that would agree with it. The intelligence file in the country and it's leadership and it's military leadership is thin, it's sparse. And it's sparse not because there isn't information out there in a vitcustinian sense it's because it's not written down and it's not in the invest lehi vetting database, it's not in the intelligence community's database. It's literally just not there. It doesn't mean that Commander So-and-So who happened to be here in 1986 didn't lead a unit in Kachin and slaughter a bunch of people. It just means nobody wrote it down and that's the problem you see again and again and again. Less so in Indonesia and Thailand and Pakistan but definitely more so in Burma and Cambodia and a lot of other places where there just isn't a lot of hard written down evidence of what the history is. Then you add on top of that transliteration problems with the data that does exist and you have a recipe for a lot of misplaced assumptions. You just, you don't know what you're dealing with. Do you have what Donald Grumsfeld would call a lot of unknown unknowns? George Nicholson, a policy consultant for special operations. One of my favorite quotes was in the search for the absolute the best it's possible is destroyed and the longing for perfection is akin to madness. I think using a litmus test of who we're gonna give aid to or not and I think that General Greggs and you can talk to this. Many of the events I've been to representatives have said we created tremendous problems for ourselves in Pakistan into the church amendment. Where not only did we shut down everything prior sales that we had authorized to them kicking their students out of our military schools and there is a huge void there that the relationships that were developed before that with Pakistani officers who are now senior Pakistani officers we can carry on that dialogue with the junior officers who grew up during that void they are extremely distrust of us. And again, I think General Greggs and if you can talk to that. Pakistan's unique in a number of ways. While I was in office, we knocked ourselves out to be of aid to Pakistan in the floods. We sent forces there right away to help the Pakistanis to recover from the floods. The we pushed helicopters to them all these types of things are senior military representative in Pakistan at the time said don't think this is going to change public opinion polls a bit. We've been into that relief effort with about a 15% public opinion poll rating and we came out with an 11% public opinion poll rating. We've had in my opinion, our relationship with Pakistan over the decades has been a bit schizophrenic. They go from Gallant ally to pariah and then we bring them back instantly to be Gallant ally again. And then so there's suspicion that we're changeable that we use them. I don't believe it, but from their perspective it's well ingrained and thoroughly believed. That's one case, drawing a straight line or linear projection from the Pakistan case to other countries may provide some illumination but I'd be very careful of applying everything that we think we observed or the lessons that we think we learned out of Pakistan directly to other countries. Very quickly, I mean the question is causality and I think it's always very difficult to figure out. What's going on causally? You don't train them, they go off, commit abuses, hate us, hate the US, excuse me. You do train them, that doesn't happen maybe? It's very difficult to tell. I mean we've lavished a lot of assistance on Malaysia but a lot of Malaysian politicians say horrible things about the United States. Lavish military assistance on Cambodia and it still writes abusing. So the causality, I don't say human rights watch isn't gonna say we have the answers to all the causal information but we certainly have enough data to poke a lot of holes in the causal arguments, the causality arguments the Pentagon makes and that's why I say it's not really that we're right and they're wrong. It's more like neither of us really know a lot about this causality issue. What affects, what gets, what outcome. And I think it would be good if there was an acknowledgement and I think there is. I have to say by the way that Assistant Secretary Mark Lippert and Deputy Assistant Secretary Vikram Shah as Vikram Singh are aware of this. They understand that the causality continuum is not well known but we don't really know what's going on and that's good because profession of ignorance is a step in the right direction. So I think one of the issues we have to address at some point is if we don't know, do we engage or do we not engage? That's a question. Right here in the center. Hi, my name is Rebecca. I'm from Chevron and just wondering if we could weave in the private sector component to this. We have quite a significant footprint in the money of these countries in Southeast Asia and for us sort of the intersection of security and human rights issues is extremely important and something that we are obviously concerned with. We are members of the voluntary principles on security and human rights which is an effort to work with governments and NGOs to sort of find local, we address some of these issues working alongside some of these public security forces but one of the biggest challenges is not always having the buy-in from the top of these in these countries with the military institutions and then necessarily being able to work with whether it's the US military or in the case of Southeast Asia, the Australian military for instance. So I'm wondering if you have any thoughts on whether if it's not IMET but some of these other mechanisms to address some issues related to security and human rights. I think private, thank you for the question. Private sectors also stuck on that interface of varying interpretations of contract law too and all the things that are covered by the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act and things which makes you an arm of the or a powerful component of the whole American values message and corporate involvement, the private sector involvement is exceedingly important in all this. If it's just the government working with something then it's not all that compelling. Chevron's efforts, other major companies and even minor companies, the private sector involvement means things that directly affect the lifestyles and the earning power of everybody there. So yeah, it's exceedingly important and exceedingly important that the private sector continue to I think forward or promote the U.S. human rights brand which I think is one of the strongest components we have. I think the differences between John and I are about the implementation of that message, not the value of it. Speaking of that, we've been banging on Cambodia a bit but America's got a moral obligation in this area too. We have a moral obligation to Vietnam, we were there for quite a long time. The spillover of that war into Cambodia and to include the U.S. incursions into Cambodia had a lot to do with setting the conditions for the rise of the Khmer Rouge and the rest of the denomination of this whole thing. I was struck on a visit to Cambodia about the extensive efforts that the U.N. was putting in there to teach young women the facts of life about motherhood. The Khmer Rouge depredations had broken the chain from grandmother to mother, et cetera, that did all this in a traditional society but it was, at the time I visited, it was really broken and the efforts of the international community, the efforts of the private sector as well as government efforts to start from basics and work Cambodia back up to a functioning society, a functioning country within the Cambodian cultural norms, not going in there like Americans do and saying we wanna create an American-style stock exchange and things which we've done before but doing it in a manner supported by the international institutions and one that was appropriate in the context where we were trying to do it works. Now, I understand the human rights objections to the Cambodian military but again, we're back to differences of view on implementation. How do we fix this? How do we get to the right ending that we want? Last point on that, I would think that we should have learned on 9-11 that chaos in any part of the world can create a threat in many other parts of the world and we can't fix governance in every place at the same time but we can do what we're able to do on the political side, the diplomatic side, the private sector side, the business side to rebuild places that are tending toward chaos so we don't end up realizing a bigger problem somewhere down the line. Yeah, on private sector stuff, first, I think the two biggest problems are implicated is one, you have certain militaries like Burma's and Cambodia's and Thailand's which you have subunits or even the whole enchilada are involved in their own revenue creation. They're in business. A lot of local commanders in Cambodia are essentially, I mean, the prime minister has announced there's corporate sponsorship for military units and so when there's a land concession and the people have to be moved off the land and security needs to be called in to do that, the local military commanders are called in but they're not called in as government officers, they're called in for pay, almost guards for hire so that's one thing. The revenue transparency is a big problem with Burma and we've always, we've said to Derrick Mitchell and Rangoon, we've said to Kurt Campbell a million times, you gotta push the military not just on the abuses but on the revenue transparency and then the issue of them just being involved in private business needs to be pushed. The idea that it is not appropriate for a military to be in business needs to be pushed again, we're all for dialogue, it's not about cutting them off, it's about telling them what's up and what they need to do to change things. About this moral, I just have to respond to this moral very quickly about this moral issue in Cambodia. Human Rights Watch obviously agrees there's a moral obligation in Cambodia. The Paris peace agreements of 1991 were a party, US is a party to those agreements and those agreements obligate all the signatories to promote human rights and democracy in Cambodia. It's just our position is when you have somebody who's been in power for 27 years for 10,000 days plus who himself was involved with the Khmer Rouge in 1975 and some of the genocidal acts that were carried out in the Eastern zone and the RCAF commander-in-chief was a Khmer Rouge commander and so on and so forth and you have all these millions of Cambodians who are living in this one party state without democracy, you have an obligation to try to fix that and it's precisely by using things like the pressure of conditionality in the Appropriations Act or the Pentagon talking tough about what needs to happen or the ambassador saying, hey guys, if you don't, it's been 27 years, it's been 21 years since the Paris peace agreements, if you guys don't shape up one day, we're not gonna be there for you. Talking tough is a necessity here and that is consistent with having the moral obligations that you referred to. John, I think just one question on that. Some people see there's a new sort of geostrategic balance and if you allow a country to, you give the country those choices, you basically push them completely into the hands of a very welcoming China. How do you guys think about that issue? Well, in the new context, what I'd say is, Burma was pushed into the arms of the China and it didn't really like it and that's probably one of the causal factors that led them to realize that they should open up to the United States and everybody else. So our position, if we're being so friendly with Hun Sen and he's still carrying China's water like he did during the ASEAN summit last year, then why don't you just push them all the way into China's orbit and see how they like it because I don't think they will and maybe that'll make him a little bit more amenable to doing business with the U.S. But he's kind of a special case because I think the solution to Hun Sen is only tough talk. There's no diplomacy to be had there. Okay, I'm gonna give each contestant each. There will be a prize at the end of this. I'm reverting to my natural state as game show host. Yeah, what's the price that's right? Only Murray knows. But a chance for each of you to make a short final statement that's been a great discussion. Chip, you wanna start? The questions were all very good. The, I'm glad that Ernie limited us to 10 minutes apiece because it's always much more interesting to hear comments and respond than it is for us to graze around the landscape trying to find an idea while we're talking. The, in the days now when we're talking about when we're becoming more inward looking, when we're questioning what we're doing overseas, these are the right things to talk about. We need to make sure that we preserve our ability to shape the environment, to reassure allies and friends, to promote those values that the United States likes to aspire to, and to influence friends and allies in those directions. There's no shortage of evil out there, both wholesale and retail. And to the extent that we can try and affect some of this is the right thing to do. The question was posed about measures of effectiveness on this and that's a easy concept to grasp, but a very, very difficult one to get under control and but that's the way we need to go to make sure that in our differing views of what we need to do with assistance to other countries that we're promoting in the end what we wanna promote and making sure that as John just said that we're delivering the right message with people who espouse views that we do not support. Sorry, I would just close by saying the debate isn't about whether IMET should exist. It does exist. It has consequences. The debate is really about what those consequences are, good or bad, and whether their decisions the government can make to promote the good consequences, mitigate the bad ones. And what that would mean in practice is basically three things. You could either do more of the same, just keep running IMET and the IMET and everything else the way it is, just keep doing it the way it's going. Nobody actually thinks that should be done. Number two, which is what I think the White House announced last Friday is try to improve. Keep doing IMET and the other programs and INCL and everything else, but try to improve the substance in the process. Better courses, better substance to the courses, picking better people to attend as opposed to cronies and unmitigatable people. Better lehi vetting, understanding that the databases that exist are insufficient. And then last, if you really wanna improve everything, it's just rethink everything and recognize that although in many cases nothing is wrong, seriously wrong with the program, there are some countries where everything is wrong. And the administration of IMET and analogous programs are a total disaster and should be scrapped. And I'm not suggesting everything's wrong with IMET worldwide, but it should, there are certain places in context in which everything is wrong and we need to rethink everything and we need to be willing to cut or threatened to cut the assistance as appropriate. John Sifton, Chip Gregson, thank you very much. I think this discussion really goes a long way towards helping us think about important institution and engagement and how we use these things. So I thank you very much and hopefully we can carry this discussion on further. Thank you all for joining us today at CSI.