 I'm thankful Thank you to everyone I'd actually mean it. It's customary to say it before but I can just imagine it, if we were in this period of the ramp up of conflict with the problem we walked into a discussion of reconciliation in the room where empty. It is gratifying that we've come here to try and work out."Is it possible that something gallwch chi'n gobeithio'n oedd ychydig arall yn y cyfrych sy'n cymryd. Roeddwn i'n gwybod, byddwn i'r cyfrannu rai'r cyfrannu rai'r cyfrannu rai'r cyfrannu. Wrth gwrs, mae'n gwybod, mae'n gwybod yw'r cyfrannu cyfrannu. Ond rydw i'n gwybod, mae'n gwybod i'r cyfrannu cyfrannu, sydd yn rhoi'r cyfrannu i'r cyfrannu sy'n ei ddiddordeb yr ysgrifennu ac mae'r gwybod i'r cyfrannu. Ac rydyn ni'n goffio ar eich falch gilydd. Ond, rydyn ni'n gwybod i'ch casg hynny a Yn Llywodraeth Tyllen, I ddweud ddim, fel i'n gwybod i'r Fyemddio, felly fyddol dw i'r colledau, i'n gwybod i'r fywch, i'r llyfodraeth at ddech yn rhan, oedd arwtiau i gyd. And one of them that certainly, you know, I remember when I think about just the importance of actually finding the negotiated solution. The reconciliation was jumping back to the first few days of September 2001, you know, pre-11th, .. producing of the lowest ebs of the conflict in Afghanistan... .. that phase of the conflict. There have been, of course, many phases. And I remember walking through the hills of central Afghanistan... .. minutes after a few thousand feet... ..where even in the first week of September you get a frost. You are out of the hills you got to wash from a bucket in the morning and... .. you have to break the ice and then sprinkle the load of it. I was looking at the position of people who had been displaced by the latest round of conflict, which in that part in Central Afghanistan meant basically Taliban pursuing a scorched earth policy as they settled down for the winter by trying to put a nice space between them and the enemy in the field. So they were using matches and bulldozers. And I was dealing with the people who had been displaced by that who were sitting up what should be summer pastures, but they had nowhere to go back for the winter. And the task was to work out what on earth can they do and can we do with them to get through another difficult winter. And I came across a settlement where there was a whole community had gathered. They had a few tents. A lot of people were out in improvised shelters with no, not even canvas over the roof, but they'd all gathered in and around one tent. This kind of community has got no particular concept of purda. Men and women, children running around on the outside. And the mula was sitting, was reciting, and everybody was intensely following it. Somehow they'd detached themselves from the absolute immediate crisis like how do we get through the night. And someone, as I got there, they invited me into the tent and I sat down with them. And the mula came to pause and someone asked him, Mullisab, what does the Quran say about refugees? And he came out, I can't remember the exact quote, but what he came out with sounded straight out of the Gospel of Matthew saying, blessed are the refugees for they will inherit the earth. And I mean it was very moving to see these people in the most dire of predicaments that you could imagine. And I went, of course, family grouping by family grouping documenting those dire predicaments. They found some solace, they kept hopeful of what was alive. And they did not know that in the tragedy that would be visited upon people in this country only a few days later, somehow a new kind of hope for a joint resolution and joint moving forward might be created. Because when we think about the legitimacy of the intervention and the military forces that the West sent there, although of course it was the Al Qaeda sanctuary and the involvement of the Taliban in providing that sanctuary, which led the UN to justify a Chapter 7 intervention, of course these people were victims of the same Al Qaeda sanctuary because there were Al Qaeda forces were strengthening the Taliban, enabling them to burn these people's villages. And in them the response to the attacks of 9-11 also gave them a hope for the future. And of course now so many years later it's still in the balance as to whether it will be sustainable. Although those people are now back in their villages and they have rebuilt their villages and they have a modicum of security, they are now all wondering, you know, can we pull it off? Can we make it last? So in the sense that the non-intellectual reason why we're here and trying to work out what is the reconciliation strategy, which will make such gains as there have been since 2001 in Afghanistan, make them stick. Although that was moving, I mean we all go through rather more cynical experiences in life and I remember one of the cynical experiences I have was listening to my wife as she came back from a brief venture as a Syrvanese internationally paid consultants. She went off on some if-ad mission wandering around the Tarparker desert in Sind where they were to come up with ideas and what you can do for sustainable development and livelihoods in a semi-arid environment. And she was horrified halfway through the mission when one of the real professionals can find, look, it probably won't work, but we have to give something to Rome and we have to design this project, just keep quiet. And she was horrified, my wife is a very principled woman, she did not like to be told that perhaps what she was doing was meaningless. I mean Alex said that they, I'm sorry, Dr Solomon said that the military commanders, they've got a strategy, they've got a vision, they are committed to creating some space for the political solution, which we know is the only way forward really. But this morning before I came over here, and if I had you on tenterhooks as why is Michael Mott arriving at half an hour before the event, of course I was taking calls from friends back in Afghanistan and basically Afghan friends have been through all the multiple phases of conflict, we're just ringing up to describe the later stage of the military operations. And of course those who have been following, we've been through the rationale, we know how it relates to surge, relates to creating space, relates to shaping the environment, relates to keeping people on the move before the elections and so on. However, what the Afghans are not perhaps in tune with the rationale, with the big write-ups that the commanders have said to explain the rationale of their interventions, they're saying look, on the ground the Afghans don't believe that the operations can deliver what they're supposed to, because none of the Afghans in the areas where the forces have now moved into believe in the capacity and intent of the Afghan government and U.S. are forces to stay there, that they don't believe that they're going to be there long enough to guarantee that Taliban don't come back and cut off the heads of people who have been involved in collaborating with us, they don't believe that the promises of the community development infrastructure work and so on, which have been hinted at in the early Shuras, which have been conducted in the immediate wake of the operations, that they're going to be delivered on, and they're not confident that they're ever going to see an end to the abuse of side of military operations. However much we put spin on them, nobody likes a military operation conducted in their area. If you have a conducted military operation somewhere in the U.S., nobody actually likes it there. Sometimes they want the benefits of it, the security, but they don't actually like to be at the rough end. The hope is that it doesn't turn out to be something like what the IFED pros were about. We had to do something so this is it. Finally before I get completely intellectual, go slightly intellectual, just a reflection. I mean, you know, I got caught out for talking to Taliban, and I did. Men aren't very good at saying sorry, but if trying a little bit to promote reconciliation peace, if it be a sin, mea culpa, I'm a sinner and I'm a repeat sinner. One of my latest conversations with a commander who's very much involved on the other side in the insurgency, and is still risking his life and persuading young men to risk their lives to fight against NATO forces. When you sit down and actually open up, however much you get inside his soul, that particular group of fighters, they have a conception of what they're fighting as national resistance. They have a conception that they are fighting to remove foreign forces. They have got very little conception of end state in terms of institutions or how Afghanistan will run as being terribly different from what they expect to be done. They haven't thought that through. They didn't have any particular political ambition to say, aha, this is a power grab. They have some idea of wanting to go home and live normally after it's over. Of course, any of us have done the kind of negotiating that Alex mentioned, I've done over the years. We used to tactical play, used to trying to guess what they're at, and we know it's Afghanistan. There's a dialogue inside a dialogue inside a dialogue, but when you manage to sit someone down by the riverbank and you're drinking lots of cups of tea and you've got a long-term relationship, you can get little glimpses inside the soul. That wasn't tactical. Of course, now I've been able to say, but you sort of hint back to the story of the families in the tents and what was the rationale of the Chapter 7 intervention and saying, look, nobody wants to occupy your land. President Obama has made it clear, if you need it more clear again in the Cairo speech, do you realise that you are persuading young men to go out and give their lives fighting for something that basically everybody on the other side is already committed to and vice versa? Before we get on to the minor intellectual part of it, I find it deeply emotionally troubling that we haven't got an effective political and reconciliation process when if you go by the non-tricky accounts of what people are fighting for, there's major convergence in the aspiration of the different sides. Everybody claims to be wanting peace and stability in Afghanistan with the security of Afghanistan maintained by Afghan forces who are subject to the rule of law. Everybody on every side says they want it, so where's the political process to deliver it? There are a few points in the book. It's about a dozen points. Let me just quickly run through it and read the book if you've got time to get more of the detail. Just after my experience of the Mullah explaining that the refugees will inherit the earth, we had the bond process which was supposed to have reconciliation built into it. The architecture actually looks quite good. It's certainly not about occupation. It's about an agreement amongst Afranes after a protracted period of civil war, not just the fight of us versus the Taliban in which you have agreed institutions, you have a process to strengthen those institutions and over time, and you have a principle of inclusivity where those who may be excluded at the start actually are able to come inside and there are specific references to reconciliation and acknowledgement that reconciliation is necessary. It all looks good. We shouldn't be sitting here today because bond might have been able to fix it. Of course the reality was that we know that the bond agreement was done in haste and it had to be done in haste partly because we weren't ready. We hadn't moved, guess what? We'd been tardy on the political side of things post September 11th and lots of resources thrown into the military side and actually the military did their job much faster than any of the civilians ever thought they'd be able to. So you had this whole thing of facts were rapidly being created on the ground because one faction had been more assisted by the United States. Anybody who watches their school by football, there's always a certain kind of people who don't do an awful lot of running around. They managed to hang around quite close to the goal and somebody else puts the ball fairly towards that and they can avoid an offside rule. Anyway, a faction had got themselves into Kabul on that basis. They were creating facts on the ground by putting in an institution, a temporary administration which looked awfully as if they would like to sit there and essentially reignite another round of civil war because it was not a broad nationally represented administration. Bond had to create a legal basis for an international presence in Afghanistan and the basis of a process which could redress the political imbalance that this temporary administration could have been created. It had to be done fast. So it meant that although there was a principle of inclusion over time, inclusion was not delivered in the interim administration that was signed off in Bond where basically everybody who got to the talks got to say ministry for you, ministry for you, ministry for you and make sure that the key security ministries go to the faction which had grabbed Kabul because otherwise how could you persuade them to sign off on the deal? It's sort of a gambit but there's an inherent logic to that gambit but it had to be backed up by subsequent political work making sure that the others really did come on board. And if you look at the political process that the Bond agreement was followed by this provision for Lloyd Jurga six months later, the constitution making subsequently through to the elections, there were opportunities for those people without whose participation you could not say there was a balance in sustainable administration. There were opportunities to bring them on board. We didn't manage. It's not that somehow there was this great exclusion that somehow anti-terrorist clauses or something prevented us from bringing the missing parts of the Pashtun political universe into the process. There was provision, we didn't manage to do it. We got few ideas on why that didn't happen in the book but other people will no doubt have to investigate it further. I propose in the book just one little indicator as to how little progress we made on it which was 12 out of 142. It's nice to know that these days you have to have metrics particularly if you're here. Thank goodness I got away without a PowerPoint today. This is a metric that one can use which I think there are 142 names on the UN 1267 sanctions list which are basically designating the big people of the Taliban. The nearest thing you can get to an objective statement of who are recognised as the ruling elite from the regime which had just been toppled. 12 of those have been brought in to the process subsequently. 12 out of 142. If you're talking about a stabilisation process which manages to keep the displaced side on board if not in power, 12 out of 142 is treading on pretty thin ice. There's been little inclusion of the previous regime which was part of the Pashtoom political universe. Anyway, we didn't manage to get them on board. If you look at what happened apart from the fact that in the Lloyd's Yergo we only had two or three of the Pashtooms coming on subsequently of the Taliban Pashtooms coming on subsequently in the election process, some participation, not much. Other things were going on in a sense underneath the radar separate from the major political processes which were of course the process of alienation and insider-outsider dealing. This is something which of course there's no commitment to it written down in Bonn but the reality was what happened was that as we put in all the money, put in the forces put in the support to an Afghan administration which was of course again the Bonn logic we were doing that on top of a legacy of multiple complex conflicts which were all overlapping and of course not all of which we understood some of which many of us have struggled hard to understand and of course conflict actors positioned themselves relative to the new political setup and many of the people who had been part of this of the ruling elite at the time that the Taliban came to power who were the Taliban had taken on and displaced that the new administration brought them back into positions of power they used those positions of power to prosecute their old conflicts but this time they were able to use a terminology which we provided to them particularly they used the great terrorist terminology one of the wonderful linguistic coincidences rather than something that you could explain using Chomsky is that to roar the Persian words to kill, murder is rather close to terror and so when the word terrorist has got a certain resonance people in a sense Afghans already understand it reflecting to roar, to roar, to roar so basically that the parts of the new establishment had an opportunity to label their rivals as terrorists and cut a long story short in the period of late 2001 2002 many of those who had survived from the old regime the Taliban regime who had expected to be able to stay on in Afghanistan and join the new setup basically they expect to be able to go home Taliban regime it's over there's a new Afghanistan we'll be part of it as well we've always done that we always know how to switch sides we're highly pragmatic they go home instead they end up being labeled as terrorists some of us are looking for terrorists thank goodness we found some because this helpful man here has brought some terrorists to us we raid their houses anyway we drive many of them to Pakistan we sow the seeds of a future insurgency because when you document how the insurgency originated many of the specific fronts places where specific groups of fighters came together they were initiated around a little pearl that had been formed of alienated former fighters who had tried to accommodate themselves to the new setup but were rejected and were driven out and it's something to remember that sometimes when people talk somewhat laxly about how we got here in the conflict in Afghanistan we sort of think of the fight today as a direct continuity of the fight of October and November 2001 that's not the case although maybe there's been no month when there's been complete peace inside Afghanistan you have to go back and periodise the conflict so there's a tough fight during October and November you can date it up to December you can perhaps take it through to February 2002 with the battle in Shahiqot under Operation Anaconda but then for the rest of 2002 essentially the confrontation with Al Qaeda Taliban is to all intents and purposes is over it's finished of course there's a bit of mopping up going on but there's no major organised resistance coming from their side and actually the conflict during 2002 was a different conflict entirely there are 12 major armed clashes which I've documented during that period all of them were, I forget how the colours are green, blue and blue, what do you call them? it's our friends versus our friends in just about all of those dozen conflicts in 2002 Marshall Faheim then the defence minister and soon to become vice president perhaps he was arming both sides it was not surprising that we should be through that there were policy measured responses to that I certainly was as a UN officer I would have been woken up early in the morning there's a commise after going to jump on a plane with Acef de Lawer and various people to go and do little bits of firefighting and then there was strategic work which was done as a shift over to SSR, DDR that the finance minister, Ashrafani he was extremely decisive in his intervention in trying to cut off the financing of the people who were running these militias and actually I think there was a, if I'm not wrong Wazir Saab, there was this showdown between Marshall Faheim and Ashrafani where basically came to it, it's either him or it's me because Marshall Saab was committed to he was doing political patronage building up a constituency trying to make sure that he was a force in the new Afghanistan at the cost of sustaining conflict and finance minister Ashrafani was committed to reining in the financing of that and using a strategic approach to removing the basis for continuing conflict and so in a sense, we have, actually there are good bits of the story that sometimes people forget we went through a different conflict during 2002 and actually it was solved and that's gone over anyway but subsequently in 2003 you get a new conflict going again which is the reemergence of the new Taliban movement, a confrontation against the the new Afghan government, the western support of that and in their recruiting strategy they of course they fed upon the mistake, our mistakes that they, our failure to see through the anticipated inclusiveness in the post bond set up and our failure to rein in the alienating practices of people in the middle level of the new establishment anyway although those are the frustrating parts when you start to look at the emergence of the new conflict there are bits of hope when you look at what happened post 2001 10 minutes, I can manage about 10 minutes some things went right which give you ideas of where to go to now that I gave you the figure of 12 people from the old elite who were brought on board when you start to look at significant figures who have been involved with the Taliban and the insurgency who have rejected continuing violence and have been incorporated into the new set up one of the little findings I got as I was doing this is that the big people haven't really come in through organized institutionalized programs the kind of thing for which you write a project concept note and budget it and structure it they've come in through much more informal and Afghan processes with political patronage being the most obvious one that they've come in that the big people have come on board when there's been an influential insider well placed in the regime there's a capacity to get things done inside the new set up when there's a problem they can pick up the phone and they can talk to somebody in the interior ministry and say this has happened to somebody, somebody's brother has been picked up they really ought to be inside and so on and where these insiders have had some kind of network link a bond of comradeship tribal link with the excluded members from the Taliban those are the links that they otherwise confidence have invoked to be because they're guaranteed a hearing that they know that that person can't ditch them can't throw them out so drawing on the social fabric of Afghan society gives you the most chance of making concrete progress and reconciliation they but when you do start to look at laying the groundwork for what's to be done now we had that joke earlier on in the year but we need to open an institute of Taliban studies anything which is going to use a political approach to address the current conflict has got to be based on an understanding of the actors and what's happening in the conflict so there's a lot and it's remarkable how thin the knowledge is one of the insights which I've suggested which should be driving approach to reconciliation is drop any idea of somehow this grand Leninist organisation that is the Taliban it's a coincidence of history that most of the insurgents are labelled as Taliban at the moment the anthropologists might say they're not real Taliban but that label was applied because who happened to control Kabul and Kandahar just before this thing got going there's a segmented insurgency on multiple networks which have got their own bonds of comradeship reasons that people have clustered around a charismatic or powerful commander and they've all linked up like this and then somebody applied the label Taliban to them so this is the kind of insight that you're going to have to do you're going to come up ultimately with a political approach to addressing this you've got to build this kind of insight into your strategy what you're going to do some of the interesting stuff I did in this was just looking at typologies of approaches which have been tried because quite obviously a lot of things have been tried since 2001 one of the things I've looked at is the terms of the bargain which is being offered and I think that I saw in the party's notes as well so she's just going to elaborate on it that they assumption when people inside the current regime and from our side when they started trying to come up with formal approaches to reconciliation so the idea was that look history is with us basically we've stabilised Afghanistan they're just a bit more mopping up that has to be done what we're doing is the idea of reconciliation is just to complete that mopping up so we offered something which is called basic co-option they've done wrong but fortunately they've come in and said I'm sorry we've laid down our arms, swear allegiance to the new setup and they will be allowed to go home and they won't get locked up so that's the formal programme that has been based upon that what I've been suggesting is simply it's no major reconciliation reconciliation has been affected by this and the current ground reality in terms of the relationship between the Karzai Government our allies and the non-state actors which are challenging them have changed in such a way that there's very limited mileage to be had from this kind of co-option one of the things has got to be you've got to move towards an accommodation now accommodation doesn't just mean getting weak in the context of where I say with the roots of the insurgency that many of the people who have been driven driven into the insurgency actually have a set of grievances which in a sense it's not that it's out of weakness we'd want to address those out of pursuit of social justice it's part of our core mission to adjust those so there's a very legitimate case to be made for inducing an accommodation process where the terms of a bargain are not just come in lay down your arms, say sorry but actually work out what went wrong to drive those people into the conflict in the first place and if it really is, for example, a wayward district governor who is deliberately trying to drive the other tribe out you know, address that with minds to your ten minutes I've got five, I'm going to be there I mean a quick little note, Pakistan can help that's what I said in my speaking point that so far one of the main things that all the things that international community or the US have been asking Pakistan to do in this post have basically been asked, I mean obviously been asking for concrete security cooperation, facilitate access for various kinds of military forces, arrest people don't make too much trouble when we kill people broadly that's the cooperation which has been looked at for Pakistan as it happens that there's been an interesting there has, even before there was much talk of reconciliation on the international side some of the Pakistani actors had been saying what more can be done to push ahead with the inclusiveness you said you were going to do, get those people who are currently involved in the insurgency actually politically incorporated in the new setup inside Afghanistan concretely there is cooperation which Pakistan can be requested to supply on that which may be more palatable than the thing which they've always been very effective at dodging which is in the sense that the major arrests because we know the history that they there have been a lot of arrests of al-Qaida inside Pakistan that the track record on moves against the Taliban have been much more limited it's not the time to go into all the details the mechanics of what can be done on reconciliation from our side but at least one can say that there must be continuing robust international support which means in terms of whatever is going to be done on reconciliation international actors are going to have to fund it we need to put resources behind it when you think of the vast resources which are committed to the military side an appropriate allocation towards reconciliation as long as we're doing the right thing makes sense but also there I argue and it's a hint of controversy in it that there is a scope for the international side to be involved in dialogue actually doing some of the reconciliation dialogue because hitherto the doctrine in reconciliation has been that the Afghan government must directly lead all reconciliation efforts and all the international community do was help when asked that one of the things that I propose is that the reality is as the conflict's transformed through 2001, 2002, 2003 we became confirmed in our status as a belligerant we're not just the neutral observers but even small reconciliation only makes sense if it is seen as one component in the overall strategy and unless you've got the investment in institutions unless you've got other work towards delivering justice the small reconciliation achieves nothing and I mean as somebody who has worked on justice in small ways over the years I find it deeply upsetting that the notion that one of the issues around which the insurgents are able to mobilize is actually absence of justice and when you think of how vilified the Taliban are here in this part of the world this notion that they are actually able in some places to be able to recruit people or try and justify themselves that they are the ones who deliver justice whereas our allies don't it's deeply upsetting when you think of the moral certainty with which we approached this back in 2001 that's a dilemma that we shouldn't have today but we do so just at the end I'd say that where this book takes us to is at this point that at least small reconciliation can be done which is that at least through approaches going about it systematically, strategically, sensibly with the grain of Afghan society many of the component networks who are currently mobilized inside the insurgency can actually be broadly brought inside the current setup that that will not end conflict in Afghanistan but it may have a strategically significant impact on the conflict basically reduce the number of people who are prepared to be on the battlefield that although this is not intended as a counterinsurgency argument obviously the counterinsurgency is great that makes it easy for us to go after the rest of them that's probably the current realistic pragmatic position but I think that there is an onus on all of those all of us who are inspired with this desire that surely piece is attainable if there is significant overlap between the aspirations of those on all sides we shouldn't take this as good enough we also have to look forward we have to see is it possible to do more than what I've said is doable in this book and what can be done to create the conditions in which something a bit more like a grand bargain can be achieved in which actually you do get to a political engagement which aspires to put an end to the major the national conflict of Afghanistan of course there will be multiple local conflicts that will be dealt with over time what has to be done to lay the ground that that can happen because I mean you know even if it's just another place in a forgotten part of the world God forsaken 30 years of conflict on top of multiple conflict even then it's not good enough to say oh well that's what they were born to but particularly given the way in which this country, my country, all of our countries have intervened there over so many years we are also morally bound to strive that bit further to come up with a reconciliation strategy which goes beyond the little things in this which delivers something bigger which delivers a political settlement in which we can get back to what it seemed for a while after the last months of 2001 that we would be doing which would be part of this rebirth of Afghan society a peaceful country building its institutions and escaping from 30 years of conflict