 Let's go ahead and get going. I want to once again welcome all you brave souls, possibly masochists who are coming back for day two of our conference on state strengthening in Afghanistan. For me personally, this next session is one of the most important ones we're having on understanding the political economy of state building interventions because I think this is one of the areas where we're actually very bad overall, certainly in terms of the U.S. policy in Afghanistan, but also more broadly internationally of overlooking the political economy. And even in yesterday's session, several times the whole issue of incentive structures came out in the discussions, both incentive structures, I think back in Afghanistan, which over time I think we've understood better, although our policies haven't always reflected that. But in some ways, more importantly, the incentive structures back in Washington. And having done quite a bit of research in Afghanistan on political economy related issues and the relationship between aid and security and things like that, I ultimately concluded that the real research project actually needed to be back in this town in terms of incentive structures. And I think it's a daunting challenge because we've fought two international wars, spent hundreds of billions, not trillions of dollars, tremendous cost in terms of blood and treasure and yet not necessarily a lot of evidence that's changed incentive structures and bureaucracies here in Washington. So ultimately, I think that is one of the most important challenges. So we're very fortunate to have Barney Rubin with us today to speak to that issue. And for this audience, Barney needs no introduction. He is one of the handful of U.S. experts on Afghanistan who was an expert before it became a growth industry following 2001, started his career more in academia, or maybe didn't start. He started as a practitioner, then went into academia, but was brave enough to step out of the ivory towers to enter back into government and try to put some of his thoughts into practice. However, he's now escaped back into a more semi-academic role, but still very engaged in the issues. So we're very fortunate to have Barney with us. He's currently the director of Afghanistan Regional Project and a fellow at the Center for International Cooperation at New York University. From 2009 to 2013, he served as a senior advisor to the special representative for Afghanistan Pakistan. He was also an advisor to the UN, SRSG, Lakhdar Brahimi at the bond process. So really involved at many critical junctures in the whole state-building effort in Afghanistan. So with that, I'd like to welcome Barney to talk to the issue of understanding the political economy of state-building intervention. Thank you, Barney. All right. Thanks, Andrew. I really appreciate having this opportunity, but I'm not sure exactly how I will be able to exploit it. But first, I have to say that it's very pleasant and an honor to be a guest here at something organized by some of my very old friends. I guess Michael Keating, I tried to calculate, I've known for 27 years. The other is somewhat less. And an issue that all of us have also discussed over these many years, and that is actually a big challenge for me because last night, Reena Amiri, whom I worked in Yunama, although I wasn't actually employed by Yunama as she was, challenged me to say something that she hadn't heard before. And looking at this audience and thinking how many of you I have already spoken to about these issues, it will be very difficult. So please bear with me to say something that you haven't heard before. Then I talked to Ali Jalali about it this morning, and he said, well, you can be provocative and criticize us. But looking at the audience, I see so many people I've already provoked and criticized. I'm just not sure I have that much that you haven't heard to say that you haven't heard. But I will try my best to say a few things that might be interesting and perhaps a little provocative. So first thing is, I want to say, as I sort of started to say yesterday in questions that in a way, I think we should reframe the question that we're asking in the conference. Is it about how to improve state-building interventions? Because as we discussed, I said this, Nader said this, many people said this. Really the intervention in Afghanistan was not a state-building intervention. And those of us who were involved at the beginning know perfectly well how hard we had to struggle to get state-building on the agenda. And we never succeeded very much, it got on the agenda. But it was never the core. And we have to understand that, not complain about it, but understand it. It was a counter-terrorism operation. And when I say that, I don't just mean that there was a conflict between, I'm sorry, I'm talking about the issue you're supposed to talk about at lunchtime, between counter-terrorism and counter-insurgency and state-building or humanitarian goals. It's not just that there was different goals that had to be reconciled. There was one goal that was the reason the United States was there and the reason that it had so much money allocated to the operation by the Congress and the reason that the troops were there. And the other goal was secondary and was justified within the high levels of government insofar as it helped to achieve the primary goal. And in my experience inside government and observing it outside government, but especially my experience inside government, I found that when there was a conflict between the counter-terrorist agenda and anything else, the counter-terrorist agenda won out. So that is not because of our inadequate understanding of state-building operations, although no doubt our understandings are inadequate. But that's not the main reason. The main reason is that's not what it was about. You don't go to the situation room and say we should do such and such and such because it will help build a stronger Afghan state. And I will give you later the formula that we had to use in policymaking to justify whatever. Well, here it is, right here in front of me. So I might as well read it. Okay. So when I was in the government, there was one criterion that we always had to keep in mind. This is during the Obama administration. I don't know exactly how they phrased it in the Bush administration. They often complained they didn't have a clear goal. But it was so-called a, quote, clear and focused goal to disrupt this mantle and defeat al-Qaida in Pakistan and Afghanistan and to prevent their return to either country in the future. That was, that's a quotation. It appears in many government documents. That was the goal. It doesn't say, and to build strong state structures so it will be more difficult for them to return. It says to, they're the 3Ds, disrupt this mantle and defeat and prevent their return. Now, many things follow from that. But let me say something about how that played out in the very formulation of the policy and effect on what we judge to be a success by our goals, which is something different for most of us here from what it says in that formulation. There's a lot of research now on peace building, state building, so on operations that talks about the importance of political settlements. This has been especially supported by DFID, the British Aid Agency. And of course there's a lot of debate naturally about what is a political settlement which I'm not going to go over. But let's say that the bond agreement was a partial political settlement of Afghanistan. It was a political settlement between those groups that were associated with the old regime and part of the former Mujahideen, which also managed to bring back some of the western technocrats, usually under the umbrella of the former monarchist. And something which often isn't recognized. It was also a political settlement between the United States and Iran, because U.S.-Iranian cooperation was actually the very important foundation of the bond agreement, as Jim Dobbins talked about yesterday, and of its continued implementation, if only because what Iran didn't do, namely it didn't do what Pakistan did. Even though it saw U.S. presence as something of a threat, it did not try to disrupt and destabilize Afghanistan, because overall it judged, even during the worst days of Ahmadinejad and Bush, it judged that overall it preferred this government to the alternatives. Now, however, there's research in this political settlements literature about what makes for success, defined generally as the non-recurrence of conflict, which again, that's not the definition of success we used in the U.S. government for this operation. That was what I just said. But if you're defining the goal as peace and stability, then a non-recurrence of conflict in a specific period of time is the metric that you use. And the research showed that one of the strongest predictors of non-recurrence of conflict is the inclusiveness of political settlements, meaning, well, you can understand it kind of intuitively, you know, how to operationalize it. It's a challenge. But that in itself goes a long way to explain why this operation did not succeed in stabilizing Afghanistan, because it was from the very beginning defined as an exclusive political settlement. That is, as President Bush said in his address to Congress, I'm not saying he was wrong. I'm just explaining what he actually said. What he said was, those who harbor the terrorists will meet the same fate as the terrorists themselves. Therefore, even those Taliban leaders who surrendered to General Dostoum or who were talking to President Karzai or who entered into a truce agreement with President Karzai on the day after the bond agreement was signed were not allowed to join in the mechanism that the bond agreement had for including them, which was the emergency Lloyd Jerga. Instead, as someone said yesterday, they were, you know, I guess maybe it was Weiss was talking about it. You know, people said at that time most of the leaders have gone back to their villages and they're waiting to see, well, President Karzai told me this story when I talked to him in November 2008, which is at that time he received a letter from Mullah Baradar saying, I've gone back to my village and I recognize you as President of Afghanistan or something like that. You know, he didn't say it's legitimate and I made a horrible mistake, but he said, you know, okay, next chapter. However, soon after that, special forces came to Mullah Baradar's home and tried to capture him. And he ran away to Pakistan and engaged in Jihad. So he thinks it's Jihad anyway. Anyway, so it's not that he chose to go to Pakistan. I don't know what would have happened otherwise. I'm not saying it would have come out right or the Taliban all would have joined the bond process. I don't know, but they didn't have that opportunity. So they weren't choosing between the alternative of peacefully joining the democratic process and going away to fight. They didn't have the opportunity to join the peaceful democratic process because of the way that the war on terror defined the limits of the political settlement. And I think if we look at various cases, interventions structured through the war on terror do not bring peace and stability. Maybe they, whether they bring counterterrorism or not, it's a separate question. But they don't bring peace and stability and that is not what they're aimed to do. Okay, so they won't. Now, let me tell you a little story about the political economy of aid. And as Andrew said quite rightly, we have to understand how things work in this town because it's not like we are international actors trying to bring peace and the Afghans have politics. No, we have politics too. Okay, so the, and as I said yesterday, the biggest budget in Afghanistan is the international budget, not the Afghan budget. So the most important or relevant politics for understanding how it works is the politics here. So now, because that's the politics that determines that budget. By the way, that puts very severe limits on how much you can call Afghanistan a democracy because the parliament has absolutely no oversight over the security forces. Okay, the parliament doesn't pass the budget of the security forces. The U.S. Congress passes the budget of the security forces. So, you know, it's a it's a little misleading to refer to it as a democracy, even though people are elected. Now, in when Richard Holbrook was the special representative, and I was his senior advisor, by the way, there are no junior advisors. And also, I still haven't met anyone in the U.S. government whose title is advisee. So it's a kind of ill-defined position. But anyway, I was the I was one of the senior reader. You're also a senior advisor. I'm sure we have many ex senior advisors in the room, so you can all understand what I'm talking about. So he used to invite, for the very reason that I mentioned, members of Congress to come and have breakfast, and I'm sure members of Congress to come and have breakfast with us from time to time, and I'll talk to them and point them with what I was doing, explain to them how Rena was related to the King of Afghanistan and wrote the Constitution, or the bond agreement, I forget which. And on September 16, 2009, we met with Representative Nita Lowy, Democrat of New York, who at that time, this was before the 2010 Congressional elections, was the chair of the State and Foreign Operations Appropriations Subcommittee of the House Appropriations Committee, and also the representative of Secretary Clinton's home district in New York. Now, as chair of this subcommittee, I believe she's now the ranking member on that subcommittee. She was the most important person in the United States Congress for getting us the money to carry out our policies on the civilian side, not the defense and intelligence side, but on the civilian side. And at this meeting, my former boss from the Council on Foreign Relations, Les Gelb, he was in the room, he was writing a profile of Secretary Clinton for Parade Magazine. And therefore, Holbrooke declared that the meeting was on the record, I have that in my notes, so therefore I'm allowed to talk about it. And before, so I'll tell you a little bit about what happened. Before Representative Lowy arrived, Holbrooke told us, according to my notes, this may not be verbatim quote from, she gives us the money. Okay, that's what I wrote in my notes. When she got there, Representative Lowy said, there needs all over the world, and here at home, and at that time, we were still suffering from the worst part of the fiscal crisis and unemployment was still growing at that time. And there are many needs at home. And a rising course of influential members of Congress was questioning why we are spending so much money in Afghanistan. The Women's Caucus and others were up in arms, I'm reading this because it's from my notes, about the lack of progress on women's rights and fighting against corruption. Recall, this was in September 2009, so the delay in settling the presidential election in 2009, the allegations of fraud and so on were very troubling. And Holbrooke responded, according to my notes, transforming Afghan society is not our mission. Girls' education is a big issue in many places. We are in Afghanistan because of our national security interests. Then toward the end of the meeting, Holbrooke would go around the room and introduce the various members of his team and have them talk about what they were doing. And I was engaged in exploratory work about the possibility of negotiations with the Taliban and so on, so I assumed he wasn't going to call on me. However, at the end, he became so pleased with how the meeting was going that he decided to ruin it. And he called on me and asked me to say a little bit about what I was doing. So I said a few words and I said that I noted that reconciliation or a political settlement with the Taliban would be possible only if the Taliban would ultimately agree to separate themselves from al-Qaida and international terrorism. And then Representative Lowy gave me such a look and said, if you're telling me that the Taliban are separate from al-Qaida, you are not going to get a cent from this Congress. That is what she said. And Secretary Clinton, therefore, hastened to add, of course we know that Taliban and al-Qaida are joined at the hip. Now, this means, well, I think you can figure out what it means. It's an inclusive political settlement and inclusive doesn't just mean including liberals. I mean, this is something Shadi Hamid has written about. Inclusive political settlement means including people who don't believe in democracy because they're part of the political system. And that's very tricky and difficult to do. I don't want to underestimate it and I'm not saying it would have worked. But the alternative generally is they go into armed struggle, especially if they have a sanctuary. So we made the decision based on other criteria. Now, the intervention, as we also, we mentioned this yesterday, it began with covert action. I think I'm going to talk, I believe this part is talking about corruption a bit. Yes. Ban with covert action. And if you read the memoirs of the, I forget his name, the guy who had first in. Yeah, no, not Grenier, the other guy. Anyway, Grenier was doing, we're working in the south. This is the guy who went into Panjshir. Anyway, the first thing he did was handed Faheim a knapsack with $500,000 in cash. The second thing he did was he gave Faheim a cardboard box with $1 million in cash and told him there's a lot more coming. Then he had a little office in Panjshir, which the walls were lined with cardboard boxes full of $100 bills, okay, which he was giving away. Now, about the same time I was in a meeting in the State Department, David, I can't remember if you were there on September 24th, I don't know if anyone was there, which was about, you know, should we, we already decided to do the military operation, but they were undecided as to whether whether there would be any political follow-up or not, and Colin Powell and Richard Haas thought there should be, so they convened this meeting to, you know, get some arguments about it. And at that meeting, first they discussed some questions about Zahir Shah's political office in Rome, and one of his representatives was there at the time. For that part of the meeting, then he left, and we had American's only discussion. And during that time, the desk officer from the State Department was hectoring him about the fact that they had not accounted fully for the $800,000 that the U.S. government had given them for the operation of Zahir Shah's political office. Now, this kind of gives us an idea of where the discussion about corruption is and why I think it is misleading. I should mention that, you know, we discussed this with Representative Lowey also, and she talked about money being misused, like the money for Zahir Shah's office, and she and Holbrook talked about the need for oversight of how the money was sent. But in the meeting with Representative Lowey, we did not discuss oversight of covert action funds, or SERP funds, or contracting with private security contractors, or cement providers, and so on and so forth. We talked about operations like giving money to a civilian organization and making sure that the money was not stolen. But in fact, most of the money that went into Afghanistan, and I would remind you that there is one absolutely indispensable ingredient for corruption. And that is money. Okay, so you will find corruption where the money is. If the Taliban weren't corrupt, one of the major reasons is they had no money. Okay, if you gave them money, maybe we could have given them a billion dollars of U.S. ID assistance, and their government would have collapsed. I don't know. But the operation started with a covert action payroll. And that's why President, and it continued with contracting and so on. And just the operations of the military on the ground were a much bigger source of money than our aid programs. And that is why President Karzai used to accuse us of weakening the government and financing his opponents. Now, he was wrong about one big thing. He thought we were doing it intentionally and that we knew what we were doing. But nonetheless, we didn't. Nonetheless, we were doing it. Okay, and that's what they mean when they talk about parallel structures. And I'll just give you an example of how I heard about it. And I like to, in November 2009, no, sorry, 2008, November 2008, before the, after the election, but before the inauguration, President Obama, I was invited to Fort Bragg in Fayetteville, North Carolina to, for a day of training of the 82nd Airborne Leadership before they were redeployed to Afghanistan. I think they'd been there before. I know they were, because some of them were talking about their previous deployments. And on, by the way, on that trip, I transited through the Charlotte Airport Nuts where I got a phone call from Richard Holbrook asking me to work for him, warning me that it was going to be leaked to the press at any minute. Anyway, so at lunch, I was sitting with some officers and we, and one of them told me he'd been at Balgrom previously. And then he was saying, you know, at Balgrom, the perimeter security, I haven't verified this. This is what this guy told me. I can't remember the perimeter security is assured by a security company that belongs to one of the big local commanders, he said. And we need, we do a lot of construction, Balgrom, we need cement. And his brother owns a cement factory. So we procure the cement from his brother. So basically, he said, this guy is the power in that district, not the district governor. The district governor cannot compete with that guy, because of all the money that he had initially for covert action, and then for, from the contracting. And no number of capacity building programs or rule of law programs is going to make up for the fact that one guy has millions of dollars in cash that he can use however he wants, and the other person is a district governor. So again, when we talk about U.S. programs in the country and what succeeds and out, we cannot just talk about the civilian aid programs as if they are separate from the military and other programs. They're both operating in this on the same ground. If we talk about local subnational governments yesterday, the most important part of the subnational government in that part of Kapisa province was Balgrom Air Base. That was the biggest funder of local power holders, not the Afghan government. So that, again, not intentional, but the footprint assures that that is what is going to happen. Now, in order to counter corruption, we, meaning this administration, I had nothing to do with it, the administration started a threat finance cell. And I must say, which was specialist from justice and treasury, they did a superb job. They really investigated what was going on. And their first mandate was to look at drug trafficking money and its relationship to the Taliban, because we hadn't heard it from the previous administration the belief that turned out to be wrong, that the Taliban are mainly funded by drug money. So they started doing this investigation of money laundering and so on, and it led them to, as the New York Times reported, here I have a quote, since otherwise I couldn't talk about it, it led them to the new Ansari Havala. But the more they started looking into the new Ansari Havala, the more the investigation broadened beyond drug trafficking and support for the Taliban. I believe you are sitting next to me at this meeting, yes. And the New York Times reported, the new Ansari Havala is suspected of moving billions of dollars out of the country for Afghan politicians, drug traffickers, and insurgents. Kabul Bank used the firm, whose dealings are nearly impossible to track, to transfer at least 60 billion dollars out of the country, a bank shareholder said. Now, and someone mentioned this yesterday, the first arrest resulting from this investigation was Mohammad Zia Salehi, the chief of administration in the president's office. And as Dexter Filkins wrote in the New York Times, an unclassified open source, Mr. Salehi often acts as a courier of money to other Afghans, according to an Afghan politician, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he feared retaliation. He was soon released under pressure from at least President Karzai, and Salehi, by the way, had been an interpreter for General Dostoum, at the time that General Dostoum was receiving aid from special forces in CIA in the north. And then again, according to Dexter Filkins, Mr. Salehi, quote, was being paid by the Central Intelligence Agency, according to Afghan and American officials. And soon after that, Senator John Kerry went to Kabul, expressed concern about Mr. Salehi's ties to the American government. And it said, Mr. Kerry appeared to allude to the CIA, though he did not mention it. Now, there's no hint that the CIA intervened to get Salehi released. I'm not making that charge. And I'm not saying the CIA was carrying out some separate. They were carrying out the national policy. That was their job. And by the way, intelligence operations are not meant to uphold the rule of law. Intelligence operations, by design, violate the laws of the country where they are carried out. That is why they are covert among other reasons. So if you undertake covert action and then also put your best investigative efforts on uncovering threats to the rule of law in the same country, you are going to have a problem. And you have to decide, de-conflict these things, decide what is the priority. Of course, we have, you know, someone an American official said, you know, if you only, he didn't say Jeffersonian Democrats, he came up with a new formulation. He said, if you want intelligence in a war zone, you're not going to get it from Mother Teresa or Mary Poppins. That's true. But note, he is defining the area as a war zone, not as a state strengthening or peace building operation. Okay. And different rules apply. So corruption in the sense of carrying out, giving people illegal amounts of cash in order to carry out activities that are illegal in Afghanistan was a very important part of our operation. So this is why President Karzai says, said that the United States brought corruption to Afghanistan. It doesn't mean Afghans never had corruption before, but we brought a lot more money. And part of our operation was based on paying Afghans to do things that were illegal under Afghan law. Now, another aspect. Corruption, however, it doesn't only waste money in a sense, but also certain types of corruption can make it impossible for the government to operate. I'm over at 945. Is that right? Okay. And recently, there's a letter from Sigar, I don't know, Candace, if you wrote this, to several of our military commanders, noting that the customs revenue declined seriously in the past year. Probably because they estimated half of it was stolen for various reasons. Okay. So, and the taxes on international transactions account for about between a quarter and a third of the Afghan budget, and the rest for aid. Now, the Sigar report attributes much of that to the fact that our oversight missions at the customs houses were pulled back. Of course, now President Ghani as former finance minister and author of fixing failed states and so on, will certainly try to clean that up, fix that. But let's just think what that involves. The customs posts under consideration are in Heraton in Balgh, Torkham in Nangarhar, Spinboldak in Kandahar, and Islam Qala in Herat province. Now, as the Taliban go on the offensive, who is it that we're counting on to fight them in Spinboldak, Torkham, Heraton, and Islam Qala? And who's going to take the risk of firing or pissing those people off? Okay, excuse me, excuse the expression. It's a very difficult question, but that is the way we have structured. We didn't choose the heads of the border police in those areas because they were mother poppins or Mary Teresa, to quote the anonymous official, you know. And that's why there's, and so read the human rights watch report and you'll see what I'm talking about, even if even if it contains errors, as I'm sure it does. So that's the final point, which is a dependence in the peace process. So as you all know and as we discussed, Afghan government is basically, it's on, it's one of my Afghan colleagues put it, is on life support in the sense that it can't breathe or operate without a constant flow of external assistance, right? Two-thirds of the government budget is paid for by aid. All of the security forces are paid for by aid. We talked about what that amount of money was. And bear in mind what representative Lowey said. So there's a billion of, billions of dollars per year in a gap. Now, interesting, when Najibullah encountered the same problem or similar problem after 1989, he had a temporary fix, which is he could print money. And he printed money by the container full. That was actually the unit of currency that they used at the time, the container. They didn't even open them. They just, you know, so, and he would give these containers to commanders. The result of course was hyperinflation, okay? Food prices went out of sight. How did he deal with that? He got food from Soviet Union, from what is today Kazakhstan mostly, and he distributed it through a system, a socialist type system of permits and tickets depending on where you worked and so on. Now, we can't do any of those things. The central bank is independent. Central bank law prohibits deficit financing of the government so they can't print money. And we can't give out free food because it violates the precepts of the free market. So, it means we don't have, the government has no wiggle room for trying to finance its operations through deficit financing, even a little bit. It absolutely requires that aid unless they change those regulations. But the reason, and that is because, now I think what we mentioned yesterday that when they're working on the health sector, they had so much money and they were building it up quickly. So once they did get the money, you know, the state building issues are important and it's not just a counter-terrorism, counter insurgency operation, but why did they have so much money? The only reason they had so much money was because it was a counter-terrorism, counter-insurgency operation and therefore, and not just to give an example, and here Carl, I'm sorry to bring up some bad memories. But the generators in Kandahar, you know, there was a, the military commanders in 2010 wanted to electrify Kandahar and they wanted to put in place all these diesel generators for close hundreds of millions of dollars to pay for the fuel. And certain civilian officials said that's not sustainable. I could read you, we're already out of time so I won't read you all of Rajiv Chandrasekharan's excellent reporting on that. But I will just come to the main point. Finally, those generators are there now and now they're having a lot of trouble getting the money to pay for them. But Rajiv interviewed, let's see if I can find this. Okay, yes, he interviewed a military commander and he said, a U.S. military official at NATO headquarters in Kandahar who said, this is not about development. It's about counterinsurgency. Therefore, sustainability was not an issue. The campaign plan was the issue, not sustainability. Now, of course, within our government there was quite a struggle over this. But not surprisingly, it was the counterinsurgency plan that won, not the development, state building, sustainability plan. Then problems with Kajaki security again. So now basically coming to the end, there are two business models for Afghanistan's future. One business model is keep the troops, keep fighting, keep the money coming. And there are some people in Afghanistan whose livelihood depends on this business model. And there are people in the United States whose livelihood depends on this business model. Ultimately, it's not going to be sustainable. But there's no future, there's no choices we can make that have certain outcomes. Someone would criticize reconciliation in some articles saying it's a high risk policy, which I certainly agree with. I just was waiting for him to tell me what the no-risk policy was. So since Afghanistan, so basically what President Ghani is doing, as I understand it, is trying to solve this problem. That's why he has moved so quickly to try to repair relations with Pakistan, prepare the ground for a peace settlement which will make it possible to reduce seriously the cost of the security forces and make possible the economic connectivity of Afghanistan to its neighbors because Afghanistan is a landlocked country and often we do not take that into account sufficiently when we are talking about trying to build a sovereign state because an aid, there's no way U.S. can get aid to Afghanistan except through Pakistan, Iran, or Central Asia and the Central Asian countries are also all landlocked. So then you have to go through Russia. So unless Newt Gingrich becomes president and we get a base on the moon, we are going to have to have decent relations with one of those countries and Afghanistan will have to have decent relations with those countries in order to be connected to the international market. So that is what he is trying to do and he's trying to do it fast. The other day he, I believe he called for holding a conference for the full implementation of TAPI, Turkmenistan, Afghanistan, Pakistan, India pipeline within four years which is quite challenging because he knows, he believes he has to bring new revenue streams online before the aid money runs out. That's the race against time and it's not just when I say run out I don't mean good to zero. You know, if you're getting six million, if your security forces are dependent on four to six billion dollars a year we can still feel very generous if we give two billion. That's a lot of money. Okay, but it's not enough to keep those forces running. So there is a real danger of a contraction of the economy and of the security forces unless they win this race against time to get a peace settlement which as I mentioned the earlier rationale for the whole operation prevented and economic connectivity that brings new sources of revenue online. And I think just finally that's why this visit that is coming up in the next week is so extremely important both addressing Congress and trying to impress on all of our government the need for and this is almost impossible to do urgent action about middle to long-term problems. Okay, which is not our usual modus operandi but that's what I will be listening for and looking for in the upcoming visit.