 First of all, welcome to USIP. My name is Andrew Wilder. I'm a member of our Asia team here at the US Institute of Peace. I'd also like to welcome those of you who are joining us online. It's good to see so much interest in our topic today. We were actually scheduled to have this in a smaller room, but we got so many RSVPs. Just about an hour ago, we decided to shift it into a larger auditorium. The only downside is that you can't bring your coffee in here, so we'll be reliant on our panelists to keep us awake. No pressure. For those of you not familiar with USIP, we were founded in 1984 by Congress. As an independent national institute, dedicated the proposition that peace is possible, practical, and essential for US and global security. We pursue our mission by providing people, organizations, and governments with the tools, knowledge, and training to help manage conflict so it doesn't become violent, or to help resolve it when it does. The institute has been deeply involved in Afghanistan since 2002 with a range of activities, working with civil society organizations, governments, but also part of our mission is to do events like this, back here in Washington, to raise more public awareness about the issues in countries in conflict, including in Afghanistan today, and also to help inform US policy makers on issues in terms of managing violent conflict in the context like Afghanistan. We are excited to be hosting this significant event on the Afghanistan peace process today. It comes at an important moment in the efforts to reduce violence levels and achieve a negotiated nonviolent end to the conflict in Afghanistan. Today's announcement by President Ghani on an Eid ceasefire makes today's discussion even more timely. I hope the Taliban see this as an opportunity to respond in kind and to signal that they are also interested in a peaceful resolution to the conflict as they claimed in a letter to the American people earlier this year. The ceasefire announcement follows President Ghani's forward remaining offer to the Taliban in February at the Kabul peace conference to find a solution to the conflict. This offer was backed a month later in the Tashkent conference which further consolidated international support for peace process. The US has also stated that one of the key objectives of the Afghanistan and South Asia strategy is a politically negotiated end to the Taliban-led insurgency. Just today, Secretary Pompeo reiterated US support for an Afghan-led peace process and last week in a press conference, General Nicholson led off by stating categorically that the objective of the military campaign against the Taliban was to achieve a political settlement not to win the war. So I also wanted to highlight the key constituency of course, wanting peace, is the Afghan people themselves, the strongest supporters. In recent months, we are beginning to see widespread desire for peace on the ground taking form in remarkable movements such as the peace tent movement and the march to Kabul which I think should be arriving in Kabul in the next day or two. They're also supported by religious leaders and other representatives of civil society. These remarkable individuals are risking their lives to help build a more peaceful future for their families, their community, and their country. Presently, current peace efforts approach this promising yet delicate topic from two angles. First, top-down efforts or efforts building towards a broad political settlement involving the Afghan government and Taliban leadership and secondly, bottom-up efforts which involve the reintegration of individual fighters, demobilization of armed units, and local accommodations among belligerents. Our first panel today will focus on the top-down efforts and the second panel will highlight some of the bottom-up efforts. As the title for today's event suggests, the search for peace in Afghanistan will be long and difficult. There is lots of room for skepticism about whether or not peace efforts will succeed. However, as I've noted in previous events like this here at USIP on peace efforts, while there is plenty of room for skepticism about a successful peace process, I remain even more skeptical that there is a military solution to this conflict. So I think it's important to keep that in mind. I also think there's a risk of being so skeptical that we miss out on opportunities. So I'm hoping that today's discussion also focuses amongst our panelists on trying to identify opportunities to move the peace process forward and not just dwell on analyzing the problems about why it won't work. Our tagline here at USIP is that peace is possible, and for the reasons I've just noted, I firmly believe that while difficult, peace is possible in Afghanistan. We are very fortunate today to be able to book end our event by senior representatives of the U.S. government and the Afghan government. Currently, Ambassador Mohib is on a plane we've just received notification that his flight is a little bit late. So we are hoping he will be here in time to make the closing remarks. That is the plan. But now it is my distinct pleasure to welcome to the podium Lisa Curtis, the Deputy Assistant to the President and Senior Director for South and Central Asia at the National Security Council. Lisa was a good friend and partner of USIP during her long and illustrious career at the Heritage Foundation and has remained a valued partner since moving to the White House last year. So with that, welcome Lisa. Right, thank you very much for coming today, and thank you to the United States Institute of Peace for inviting me to talk. And special thanks to Andrew Wilder, who as he said has been a long time friend and colleague, and especially congratulations on organizing such a timely meeting today, conference, and on an issue that's so critical to US national security. In fact, the United States Institute of Peace has done extraordinary work through private talks, track two dialogues, and public events like today's that promote dialogue and generate policy ideas. So last year I spoke at USIP on a panel with colleagues from the State Department and Defense Department sort of outlining the broad contours of the US-South Asia strategy which was announced last August. Now today I will drill down on the most important aspect of that strategy, achieving a peace settlement. I'd like to begin by commending the national unity government of President Ghani and Chief Executive Abdullah for their courageous initiative announced earlier today to offer a temporary halt to offensive operations against the Taliban. This is a clear demonstration of the Afghan government's good faith desire for a genuine peace process. US Commander in Afghanistan General Nicholson has directed US forces to honor the ceasefire with the Taliban, though I would emphasize that operations against ISIS-K and al-Qaeda will continue. For too long, various peace efforts have focused on either conceptual frameworks or theoretical paths forward. This step, on the other hand, represents a significant tangible initiative with the real potential to reduce violence. We hope, as Andrew Wilder said, that the Taliban accepts the Afghan government's gesture and ceases attacks during this period. Doing so would represent an unprecedented step forward in the peace process. However, even if the Taliban does not reciprocate, this demonstration of the Afghan government's seriousness about a peace process will illustrate to all stakeholders which party bears primary responsibility for perpetuating this war. This ceasefire will also continue the momentum started at the Kabul Process Conference in February. At that conference, President Ghani presented a clear vision for peace. He emphasized that the Afghan government is ready to start a peace process without preconditions. He further expressed an openness to discuss constitutional amendments, a ceasefire, and recognition of the Taliban that are willing to participate in the process as political players. So President Ghani's remarks at the Kabul Process Conference, combined with today's announcement of the ceasefire initiative, demonstrate the Afghan government's willingness to undertake difficult steps toward a political settlement. The onus of responsibility is now in the Taliban to respond positively. So a peace process begins with all sides sitting down at the table. The United States is ready to participate in the discussion, but we cannot serve as a substitute for the Afghan government and the Afghan people. A political settlement must be negotiated through a process that is Afghan-led and Afghan-owned. Unfortunately, the Taliban's spring offensive announcement and wave of heinous attacks, especially those we've seen in Kabul, call into question the Taliban's interest in a peace process. The Taliban must understand that it can only achieve its goals at the negotiating table. And let me assure you that the U.S. for its part prioritizes the pursuit of a peace process. Toward this end, we are following multiple lines of effort. Let me take just a few minutes to describe them. Regional engagement is central to our efforts. We must ensure Afghanistan's near and far neighbors all agree that Afghanistan should be stable and peaceful. This means obtaining buy-in from key regional stakeholders through engagements like the Kabul Process Conference, the Tashkent Conference, as well as other diplomatic efforts that we are pursuing on a bilateral basis. The concluding statement of the Kabul Process Conference made clear the international community's support for a practical plan for peace and reconciliation. Our second line of effort focuses on encouraging grassroots peace initiatives. This means working closely with the Afghan government to ensure that there are ways for Taliban fighters who are ready to stop fighting to return to civil society. This does not mean that we intend to recreate earlier efforts that were largely unsuccessful. One of these included the Afghanistan Peace and Reintegration Program, which serves as a cautionary tale about the dangers of graft. Effective reintegration initiatives must not take a one-size-fits-all approach. In some areas, that will mean addressing local grievances and large local factions to support the Taliban. We will have to be creative and flexible in helping to foster local conditions that reduce incentives for continuing violence. Now, I want to emphasize that these local efforts must be driven by the Afghan government. The history of this conflict is littered with examples of well-meaning plans conceived in Western capitals that failed because we lacked the contextual understanding of the tribal dynamics or the local grievances that contributed to the violence. So we will support the Afghan government's efforts. We will not try to replace them. But we also recognize that in addition to supporting grassroots and local efforts for peace, that ultimately the Afghan government and the Taliban must come to a peace agreement. The U.S. continues to work with international partners and to explore all possible avenues to help get such a dialogue off the ground. Another important component to catalyzing a peace process is ensuring that Pakistan plays a constructive role. The fact is that the Afghan Taliban, including the Haqqani network, has enjoyed sanctuary in Pakistan throughout the past 16 years of conflict. We have asked for Pakistan's assistance in facilitating a peace process, and we have sought to understand Pakistan's own core security concerns and ensure that its interests are taken into account in any peace process. However, we have to be clear that Pakistan's interests are not served by a Taliban resurgence in Afghanistan. Pakistan has a fundamental responsibility to address the use of its territory by these malign actors. One can acknowledge Pakistan's complex security calculus without absolving it of its responsibility to do something about these malign actors. The last line of effort is encouraging better relations between the governments of Afghanistan and Pakistan, and we have certainly been encouraged by the reinvigorated dialogue between Kabul and Islamabad that has happened in recent months. So let me just end by acknowledging that as Andrew Wilder stated, no one believes that there is a military solution to this conflict. But we do acknowledge that military force plays a role in helping to set conditions for an ultimate peace settlement. And we also believe that the Taliban will have to accept that they cannot achieve their own objectives on the battlefield. Of course, we recognize the scope of the challenge with which we are faced. And I think one positive point that we can look at today is the consensus within the Afghan government on the necessity for a peace process. Given the sheer brutality of this conflict and attacks by the Taliban and Hekani network, including those that have recently taken place in Kabul, a natural reaction would be to pull back from talking about peace. However, as we saw in today's courageous ceasefire announcement, our Afghan partners are sustaining their focus and pursuing with persistence the goal of a peaceful solution. Thank you very much. First of all, thank you very much to Lisa Curtis for your remarks. It was very illuminating, Lisa's performing admirable service to her country and to Afghanistan at the NSC. I'd say for maybe an average of 18, 19 hours a day. Managing the administration's policy for all of South Asia, so we're very grateful to you for taking the time to be here. I'm Johnny Walsh. I'm a senior expert on Afghanistan here at US Institute of Peace, focused on the peace process. Prior to that, I was a state for 10 years, most of that time working on the peace process in different capacities. I think this was already an interesting time for the peace process in light of President Ghani's offer, the series of conferences that have consolidated support for it, and especially the peace marches, the really remarkable phenomenon that's spread around the country. And now we have a particularly interesting day for a conversation like this in light of the ceasefire announcement. So there's a lot to discuss here. We will be grappling with the many obstacles to starting a peace process, I'm sure. But in addition to that, I'm hopeful that this panel can offer some new insight on the actual substance of a potential peace arrangement, you know, if talks ever do get going. I think that is crucially important, even if talks haven't started yet, and it maybe has gotten less attention on all sides, and we have an excellent panel of experts to start exploring that. Briefly, Steve Brooking, I think you have biographies, but is currently heading the UN's efforts on the Afghan peace process as the Director for Peace and Reconciliation at Unama. He's previously a British diplomat, as plugged into all parties to the conflict as anyone currently working out there. Rahmatullah Amiri, who I think is on Skype. Yes, there we go, okay. Yes, I think that's appropriate. He is an expert on the peace process and the Taliban at the Liaison Office, which is one of Afghanistan's most respected think tanks. He is coming to us at circa 10 p.m. from Kabul, so we're very grateful to you for staying up. I met him in Kabul, he really blew me away with his special level of insight into this topic, and for that matter, into the Taliban. And if you care to Google him later, you'll see he's a true profiling courage who has suffered more for what he's achieved than many of us ever have to. Laurel Miller, once my boss. Senior political scientist at Rand. Recently, the acting SRAP responsible for the US government's peace efforts. And Barney Rubin, possibly this country's leading scholar of Afghanistan, I'd say, but much more than that, long-time policymaker, holder of many titles and positions that we couldn't even fit into the written bio. And a regular visitor at the many world capitals involved in this process in track two dialogues going back decades now. So thank you everyone for being here. I wonder if we could start with remarks from the Kabbalis. So Steve, if you'd be amenable. Certainly. Firstly, I'd like also to say how pleased the United Nations is to see the offer or the, you know, the offer exactly, the imposition of a unilateral ceasefire or cessation of hostilities from President Ghani. I think that's very welcome. And obviously we hope that that will lead to a peaceful lead for all the people of Afghanistan. And also very much welcome the fact that the US military has agreed also to observe the same ceasefire. I think that's a good start. Also secondly, perhaps a disclaimer that I am, although I'm working the United Nations, nothing I say should be taken as the policy of the United Nations. This is my sort of more, my personal views having worked in Afghanistan for most of the last 17, 18 years. One of the questions which was touched upon is whether now is the right time for peace. To which I suppose the short answer is, well, it's always the time to be looking to achieve a peace deal because the suffering that is going on is not getting any better. You know, civilian casualties have been high in the first part of this year. They were slightly down last year and previous years, but overall they've been going up year after year after year. It's the ordinary Afghans on both sides who are facing the problems. We have raised this with the Taliban. We pointed out that they claim this is a war against the foreign occupation, but actually if you look at the statistics, the vast majority, 99. something percent of the casualties are Afghans. You know, on both sides, Taliban fighters, Afghan National Security Forces and the innocent civilians stuck in the middle. So, you know, there's never a wrong time to be trying to push a peace process. I think if you look at what the academics would normally regard as the key issues to do with the ripeness of the conflict, I think we have the mutually hurting stalemate. It's quite clear and statements from everybody are that there can be no military solution to this conflict. I'm glad to hear the same statements repeated by the two speakers just now. Even the Taliban Political Commission and others say there can be no military solution. There has to be a political solution. Unfortunately, there remain people, and I was told yesterday, even in Washington, but obviously not Lisa or Andrew, who still don't fully subscribe to this and there are people on all sides who think that a war can be won. And there are also people who perhaps seek to spoil issues by making lots of money out of the current war, and that applies to both members of the Afghan government and also, or ex-members of the Afghan government, and also members of the Taliban. And both sides would also say that. So I think we are at the mutually hurting stalemate. Do the sides think they have the ability to get from the negotiating table, you know, what they're fighting for? That is slightly more problematic, but I do think that President Ghan is open offer to the Taliban that anything you want to be can be on the table for the talks, including the question of the future presence of foreign troops, I think was a very generous, open, and genuine offer. And so I think that should go some way to providing an element of reassurance to the Taliban that anything they want to discuss is up for discussion. And I think that's a very positive move by President Ghani, so I think that is a positive. More problematic perhaps is the third condition of strong, united leadership on both sides of the conflict. President Ghani is slightly handicapped by the fact he faces re-election or elections in May, April-May 2019. Therefore, you can question why would anybody make a deal with the government under current circumstances? The answer is I think you need to start the discussions about making a deal, and then obviously these things do take a long time. Look at the example of Colombia and others. So it's not a reason not to start discussions about the peace process, just because there may be a change in government. If you get the basic building blocks of a peace process right, it should not matter who is actually in government. Similarly, on the Taliban side, and maybe others will talk about this later, there is an issue as to how united the current Taliban leadership is under Haibatullah. There has been discussion of whether he needs another assembly of elders and senior Taliban leadership in order to firm him up in his leadership. That's been mooted and discussed. So I think that one is slightly more questionable, but again, it doesn't mean that people shouldn't be pushing for a peaceful solution. I think one thing on what would a peace deal look like, which Johnny's asked us to sort of talk about, from the top down approach, I think most Afghans would agree on the basic issues, which is that Afghanistan should be an Islamic country with a constitution. People can argue about exactly what that constitution should look like, and President Ghani's offer for peace included the idea of a constitutional review, that it should be secure within its own borders, that it was not going to be a threat to neighbors, to countries in the region, or even to the wider world, and that it is a unitary country, not ethnically or geographically divided up. Now, that doesn't exclude some element of a more federal system if that's what people decide they want. So, I think, if you like, there's a general agreement amongst all Afghans on that, whether they're supporters of the Taliban or supporters of the current government. So, the major problem it seems to us in a number of ways is actually getting the two sides into a room to talk about it, because there will be a lot of things they can agree on in the broad brush sort of elements of it. In more detail then, you have to go into the constitution. We know that the political commission having the past debated the current African constitution. Some of the pugwash conferences that have been held have also discussed the current constitution, and there, the reasonable suggestion came from a couple of participants that, well, if the Taliban don't like 80% of the current constitution, maybe we need to start from scratch, but if they only don't like 20 or 30%, then actually we should get the scholars in the room and we should just rewrite the articles they don't like. So I think that is not an issue. A role for the Taliban in local government, that is clearly something that in areas where they have a strong influence they should get, whether through direct elections or how it works through local juggers is another issue. The question of power sharing at the central level, whether they get ministries, deputy ministerships and such like in Kabul is again something that will be up to an agreement to make. I think a much more interesting and difficult area, and this has improved another peace negotiations and peace deals and hopefully something that panelists in the second panel discuss is how you do the security sector reform that would have to come about. The Afghan National Defence and Security Forces have basically set up to counter the Taliban threat. So how you do, as they had to in Northern Ireland, they're going to have to in Colombia, Russia of the Afghan National Security Forces to become more representative to bring Taliban fighters and people into the security apparatus or into some form of local police militias and something is perhaps, I will leave to Erica and Kate Clark perhaps later on. I would just say that also the language of the discussion sometimes gets a bit confusing and a bit awkward. I mean reintegration to us in the UN under our series of theories is really, reintegration reconciliation are both seen as events that happen after a top level down peace deal. So reintegration is the case of reintegrating former fighters and such like back into society into jobs, giving them alternative livelihoods and such like. It happened to a slight extent that we are progress in Afghanistan from 2002-2003 onwards for a while but that was dealing only with the Afghan militia forces, the old Northern Alliance forces trying to give them a way of disarming and becoming peaceful citizens working in different jobs. Reconciliation is normally seen as a longer term process and involves issue to do with transitional justice or the South African style truth and reconciliation and all being accepted back into society and fear of recrimination and such like. So I think some of the terminology we need to be careful how we use it. In terms of lessons learned from the past Lisa briefly mentioned the Afghan peace and reconciliation program $220 million, 11,000 fighters allegedly reintegrated half of whom probably weren't originally fighters some of whom only took six months off and had zero effect on the actual insurgency and levels of violence in the country so I do think you need to look very carefully at this idea that you can buy off fighters and also certainly one of the problems with APRP was NATO's involvement and the fact therefore that this was seen as a very hostile program designed to weaken the insurgency and was therefore heavily resisted by the Taliban because they saw it as a deliberate attempt to lure away bribe and fracture their movement and I think any peace initiative working from the bottom up has to be seen to be not involved in NATO not seen as a NATO NATO getting involved with it will be negative similarly even the government getting overtly involved with it has to be very carefully handled. We have found out peace initiatives at a lower level, lower level accommodations we have seen in Helm and Zabel accommodations on health and education and such like between Taliban and government officials and deals being struck and those seem to work so long as they are not highlighted too heavily or the spotlight is turned upon them we've had a temporary ceasefire before in Baglan province where again it worked until too much attention was paid to it and then the government suddenly decided that they didn't need to ceasefire anymore and went for it so I think that the fact that you are after top down on reconciliation doesn't mean that there is no chance of local accommodations but what I would say is that bottom up reconciliation is probably not going to lead to an overall peace deal it is as somebody else put it would you rather deal with one bear or a thousand snakes ideally you're not dealing with either if you deal with one bear and you can solve the whole problem also does not mean you're going to get peace across Afghanistan lots of these issues are as Lisa has mentioned quite local in nature one size doesn't fit all even if you've got the quite assurer to agree a peace deal you would still need to do a lot of work at the local level but I think that one of the things that concerns me about a bottom up peace process is that firstly too often in the past it's been seen as money as finance based and it's seen as rent seeking opportunities have been many advantages of distinctly so I'm naturally cautious against a repeat of a program like that also I see an absolute lack of official capacity at the local level in order to reintegrate people it is not words in the past we also see the Afghan National Security Defence Force has been unable to give security guarantees that is perhaps one area where NATO will be important to be helpful is giving you know quiet you know under the counter security guarantees they won't strike on certain areas or certain individuals involved in you know coming across to the government but I don't see that the government has been capable at the local level of doing things like creating jobs providing security for people the idea of peace zones you know zones where there's a peace dividend good governance more support more aid more help for people who come to the peace process you know is not a bad idea but there's been plenty of places in the country which has been quite peaceful recently and yet they still have failed to get good governance aid and proper development and jobs so I'm not sure how well that was going to work so that's just getting my retaliation in first against you know the second panel is I'm afraid I won't be here for that so maybe maybe I'll just leave it on that note I mean I'm not optimistic in the short term about an overarching peace deal these things take a long time but the fact they take a long time it's important to start and that's what we've been saying to the Taliban and our official talks with the political commission is you know you are also saying there's no military solutions so let's get us let's start let's let's start talking and also we accept the fact you know you always say you want to talk to the Americans fine but also you do need to talk to the authorities in Kabul who control a large percentage of the country and a large percentage of the resources of the country so you know our message is still you know please get started informally however you want to do it but please start because it's the Afghan people that are suffering thank you very much Steve perhaps we could go out to Kabul to Mr. Mary and if you can't tell from your screen there you're about 25 feet tall in this auditorium just for your information we still muted I think thank you thank you so much for having me on this great panel so I mean with regards to this is one of the most important discussions in Afghanistan for the last let's say 30 years 30 years or 40 years since 1979 or especially since 1987 but let me give you a brief overview from the Taliban point of view I mean it's clear to a lot of people I mean what Taliban won when it comes to peace the first is they withdraw from Afghanistan I think when they come to the peace negotiations they would hold the ground when it comes to this point why because most of their recruitment and resources comes through this propaganda that the international troops are president in Afghanistan the second one is recognition one of the main thing the Taliban wants is actually recognitions they say the Afghan government says let's talk to Pakistan and discuss it to discuss bringing Taliban to peace this actually further distance Taliban from the fiesta Taliban will seek to literally lead any peace deal Taliban unlike 1998 the Geneva Accord which was signed between the Pakistan and the Afghan government of that time because I mean that is a precedent for the Taliban that they do not want to negotiate any peace deal through Pakistan on or any third party besides recognitions Taliban also wants to remove from the sanction list which is quite well known which as Artur mentioned many times and another point so far that we did research of work on the ground is a great emphasis on Afghanistan being an Islamic state one of the main source of Taliban legitimacy comes from religious scholars so I don't think I think they would come with this very strongly like a greater emphasis being at Islamic state in fact they want more role of Ulamas in state which appears in policy because I think even I believe that even their negotiators would be mostly from religious scholars when they come to any peace deal the third is amendment to the current constitution I mean I think the constitution does need some adjustment irrespective of peace talks so I mean that's a pretty agreeable point between the Afghan government or the international community Afghan government and the Taliban and many changes already demanded and Taliban's ideas can be negotiated and added I think most of their demands when they talk I think they're already other Afghans also I think pretty much ask for the same changes and the other point is that the release of prisoners when it comes to peace negotiations they would come to if there's any peace negotiations or peace talks one of the main point would be release of prisoners this is a very serious issue because there are thousands and thousands of Taliban in prisons how would the question is that how the Afghan government and international community will come to some sort of mechanism for this and another important point for the peace deal for the Taliban which Taliban themselves are quite struggling with is okay if they talk if they discuss a peace deal with the Afghan government I mean the accommodation for the Taliban commanders and their soldier what would be their role what would be the role of their commanders what would be the role of their foot soldiers would be basically replacing the police basically these soldiers and commander becoming police and the Afghan national army and you know that be it this is another key and important point and then so these are some of the general demands but then coming to compromises I mean we always talk about you know hypothesis and we always talk what can happen so here are some of the points that Taliban are pretty much willing to compromise on it one of them is human rights one of the main things that the international community especially worries is human rights I think Taliban have come to that point and have realized not just last year but for the last 6-7 years in fact ever since they were overthrown from power in 2001 that one of the main area that they have to compromise which I think they're willing to compromise on human rights which includes from human rights I think women rights and minority rights if you look to all their statements from 1994 from their regime time up to 2018 I think there's a clear signal that they want to they want to for example have minority and rights respected and also women rights another key I mean with regards to Taliban one of the main problem with the Taliban is they lack capacity to handle issues especially technical issues like human rights I mean they do talk about these things but I mean honestly some of them hardly literally when you break it to them down they're like oh they have that issue there another does Taliban willing to compromise I think like I said yes they do I think they do realize that the importance of engaging international community engagement with international community does require to take a big step towards human rights especially from women rights into girls education so that brings me to another point is education especially girls education I think Taliban when it comes to peace talks when they come to tables and the international community one things that the international community will say okay girls education I think they are pretty much there to compromise girl education they already to some extent in some provinces are willing to allow girl education they are there as media media is a big discussion I think to some extent they will be fine but I don't think immediately they would allow because they still have some reservation because most of their support comes from conservative societies which supports them and you know if they just automatically agrees to some of like the TV stations and things that would literally they would lose a lot of constituency and another important is their foreign policy one things that the Taliban has realized from the last 18 years is their foreign policy they do realize that lack of engagement from 1994 to 2001 with the international community was one of the reasons that they paid the big price you know losing the whole territory and government you know and coming to the current situation and you know having said so one other things which what would Taliban not seek a lot of people think that Taliban are you know power hungry and I don't think Taliban would power they would seek power sharing on the district or provincial level national level like for example power sharing from my point of view is like for example like Hezbollah kind of like I have my own territory I would not allow the central government you know I don't think that we have like I so far the research that we have done we haven't come across such thing that you know that they are going to ask like to control certain areas if there is a peace deal it would be a very comprehensive peace deal they would yes they would come in and they would take part in this in this government but they would not be like literally power sharing boundaries that kind of power sharing and then the other thing is I don't think Taliban will ask for solo monopoly I mean this is like the Taliban would not seek that and then the other important thing is that one of the panelists talked about is reconciliation I don't think Taliban would seek reconciliation in fact they hate such terms so I mean the word reconciliation integration you know no they say well we were fighting you know we're coming back we will just take let's make a government and then they will play as the political elites will play a side role and now I'm going to talk about challenges one of the main challenges for the peace talk but they have coming peace especially for the substance is that the commanders as you know Taliban is an embryo of commanders basically an embryo of Mahas France so in 1994 to 2001 when you read their history when they were negotiating with the with the north in the lines one of their main problem was what was that the political elite would come up with one idea the commanders would come with another idea so this would be a big challenge for the Taliban themselves a big portion of these commanders are level commanders who are mostly field commanders play important role they will have to be convinced to follow the line with peace agreement and need to be offered incentive by the Taliban incentive by the Taliban not by the international community yes the international community can work with the with the with the process and then that's I mean if we talk about changes in so far in Taliban is one of the positive changes for peace I'm not saying just for peace is that Taliban from 2014 2014 and 2015 they brought this very interesting change into their structure the change in Taliban structure before the structure of the title were more gorilla type now the Taliban has more farmer structure which resemble more like an army structure because the gorilla type it's very hard to go after each one to literally talk these changes has started from 2014 especially when Mansoor Tokor he brought this so this is actually a positive change for the general peace dialogue because at least there is much more line of order if right now to some extent in the Taliban lines so this is I think this is all from my side I think overall there are some good points are good that the Afghan government international community can build on to bring Taliban to peace and I think Taliban do realize that they have to compromise on many some of the problems which in the past they did not think were important thank you they don't have microphones by their hands but they're all clapping for you thank you Mr. Mary can we go to Laurel thanks Johnny I'm going to focus on the US role in catalyzing and sustaining a peace process and first a brief comment on the relationship between the top down negotiation of a peace agreement with the Taliban as an organization and bottom up peace building in local communities and I'm using that term very purposefully bottom up peace building in local communities which is the way that the organizers of this event framed the concept of bottom up and I think it's very good to frame it and think of it in that way because there does appear to be some confusion at least in Washington about what bottom up means or realistically could mean I'd like to subscribe wholeheartedly to all of Steve's comments about right reintegration efforts and the the concerns that he flagged and you know the nomenclature concerns that he raised I think are not merely a technical point but they do speak to some conceptual confusion about what we're talking about here as framed as bottom as community level peace building I think there could well be complementarity between the two approaches to peacemaking and certainly when it comes to the implementation phase of any top down peace deal if there is such a deal then community level peace building is going to be needed to achieve anything like stability I don't know anyone who thinks that a top down peace deal even those who are most committed to that idea conceptually I don't know anyone who thinks that that's going to end all violence and create peace throughout Afghanistan it's part of in my view what is needed and a critical part but that community level peace building is going to be crucial as well that's not the same thing as reintegration one of the challenges in formalized top down peacemaking will be how to create space for that ground level peace building to occur in an organic fashion top down peacemaking is not organic but something that occurs at the community level if it's going to really take hold is going to have to be more organic it's very difficult in my view to see community level peace building as being the main vector for significant reductions in violence and an end to the insurgency as such there are multiple reasons for that some of which Steve's comments allude to which is that depending on how you conceive of that effort it could actually provoke some counter reactions but I'll focus on one reason why I don't see the ground level peacemaking as being the main vector and that is that the United States is one of the protagonists in the war and it has to be one of the protagonists in peacemaking if there's actually going to be any peacemaking there is little if any realistic role for the United States government in bottom up efforts or ground level community based peace building those kinds of efforts in order to be truly organic and take hold and be meaningful well and truly have to be Afghan the US is not and cannot be a meaningful player at the community level in Afghanistan even if there might be some ways to support and encourage the American people this brings me to my second point I think it's important to consider the ways in which process and substance are linked in efforts to push forward peacemaking in general but specifically in this case and this particularly applies to the US role in peacemaking in Afghanistan until the United States government fully grapples with and answers the very difficult what it envisions as the end result of a peace process and what it is willing to put on the table at least as matters for negotiation American claims of support for a negotiated settlement are not likely to be viewed as credible enough to get a process going to be even more blunt about it the United States invaded Afghanistan it overthrew the Taliban a considerable part in deciding who was going to be included in and who was going to be excluded from politics in Afghanistan it pays the lion's share of the costs of Afghan security forces and it's kept troops in the country for going on 17 years in light of those circumstances to claim that ending the war predominantly requires Afghans talking to Afghans while remaining silent about the question whether the US is prepared to negotiate the terms of a phase out of its military activities in the country flies in the face of the reality that a crucial element of the conflict dynamics is the American military role in Afghanistan if the US is prepared to put on the table the topic of its military presence in Afghanistan is a matter for negotiation then it's long past the time for being coy about that being clear on this substantive point will be needed if the US is genuinely committed to catalyzing a peace process and I do believe that the United States needs to be a catalyst in this process President Ghani's outreach to the Taliban at the Kabul conference in February in subsequent steps has certainly been positive but the mistrust of and the lack of clarity about US intentions with regard to peace making on the part of the Taliban and also on the part of countries in the region is such that it's hard to see a process gaining momentum without a much more assertive US role a more assertive US role would entail as I said being clearer about the substantive issues that the US envisions being negotiable and that it's prepared to negotiate it also entails making at the highest level political backing for the initiative more evident than it currently is. If and when a negotiation takes off I could imagine there being issues for negotiation that are separated into those that are primarily for resolution among Afghans for instance some of the constitutional questions that other speakers have mentioned and then on the other hand issues that implicate US commitments but let's be realistic after all the blood and treasure the US has poured into Afghanistan and I have to say knowing how the US government works if a piece of negotiation gets that far so that these issues are really being negotiated US is not likely to self limit its role in shaping the substance of an agreement. Afghans should prepare for that and the United States should prepare for that reality too. It's not apparent to me that any of the sides yet and that includes the Taliban as well have yet ready themselves to delve into the substance of peacemaking. I do believe that at this stage doing that really getting into the substance at least privately on each side could give a boost to the process and on the part of the US publicly being clear about what it's prepared to negotiate could give a very significant boost to the process. A final point I would note that the need to negotiate the American military role in Afghanistan as part of a peace process is not only a challenge it's also an opportunity. Careful crafting of the terms for and benchmarking of a change in the US military role could provide very important leverage over implementation of an agreement. That leverage would be valuable not only for the United States in ensuring that its security interests are protected but it would also be valuable for Afghans who will very rightly I think be concerned about the uncertainties of implementation of any deal. Thank you. This panel is crashing it. Barney. Thank you very much. I'm sorry Lisa just walked out because I was going to say that one reason for optimism is that we opened the session with a speech by Lisa Curtis who works for John Bolton and she gave a talk that was much more forward leaning on the peace process than anything that Hillary Clinton would have allowed me to say eight years ago. So it shows that something structural has changed. And also that of course President Ghani's initiative today is extremely welcome. Anything that has the potential to lessen the bloodshed is welcome. It's in the spirit of the Hellman peace march and I'm sure of the Afghan people. But I'm going to talk about what we addressed at that kind of political level. Because in my view the war is not the result of a dispute between the Afghan government and the Taliban and it cannot be resolved by negotiations between the Afghan government and the Taliban. In fact, war has been going on in Afghanistan since 1978 and every time it's been over a variety of issues. And every time those issues are resolved the war continues on a different basis. First it was against a position of communism and Soviet invasion. Soviet troops left communist government fell. The war continued on a different basis. Then it was about the division of the country. Taliban came almost unified the country by force but it just led to the continuation of war on a different basis. Then the United States came created the security situation which was possible to build the current government with the help of the international community. But it didn't create peace, it just led to war again on a different basis. Therefore we should think why is this happen over and over again. Here's my explanation. The UK is not a natural phenomenon. The word Afghanistan has meant many different things. This particular territory that we now call Afghanistan which was demarcated by the British and Russian empires was demarcated to be a weak state that could not support itself that would play a certain role in international security. It was part of a security architecture of the late 19th century which a buffer state supported would create a separation between the British and Russian empires which were in a roughly rough balance of power militarily. I'm going to give a kind of realist in the international relations explanation of this. Now that security architecture eroded in many ways over time. There was the Bolshevik revolution, the independence and partition of India and so on the environment changed for a while. Afghanistan was stable by kind of agreement as a sovereign state but with a balanced aid coming from the two main forces in the international community the US alliance system including Pakistan and the Soviet led alliance system and that was based on certain rules of the game. Those rules broke down in 1978 and it has never been and they have not been reestablished. It's much more complex because dealing with Pakistan and India is different from dealing with just India or the British empire in India. Dealing with revolutionary Iran is different from dealing with an Iran that is divided into British and Russian spheres of influence. Dealing with a former Soviet Union former Russian empire that consists of multiple independent states plus Russia is different from dealing with China and then India which are the fastest growing economies in the world and the largest economies in the world and which are investing rapidly in infrastructure all over that region is very different not only from the 19th century it's different from what it was like in 1989 when China and India were still both very inward looking. Now, so the problem that is actually presented to us is what is the security architecture and the architecture of the relationship between Afghanistan and the rest of the international system that will make it possible for Afghans to have peace that will support a state that will not provoke that will not threaten the neighbors in such a way that they try to destabilize it. Now let's look what's on the table right now we talk about Pakistan supporting the Taliban providing them with resources as being a source of destabilization well that is true but it's not only the Taliban who are supported by foreign powers in Afghanistan it is also the government so what we are putting on the table as our position is an Afghan government which is paid for by the United States and Afghan security forces which are paid for by the United States by the US in support of a US defined counter-terrorism agenda in the middle of Central and South Asia now that is a proposal for a security architecture which only works if all the other countries in the region accept it because they can subvert it if they consider it to be a threat to them and they do consider it to be a threat to them so therefore the Taliban are under very weak pressure to come to some kind of an agreement because they have diplomatic relations of a sort with Russia with Iran of course with Pakistan with more than diplomatic with China and so on and while none of those countries want the Taliban to take power over al-Qaeda they also for them stabilizing Afghanistan as it exists now is stabilizing an American military base in the heart of their region and that they see as a threat to them just as much as it's not more than the threat of al-Qaeda and ISIS so therefore the basis for some future stability and peacemaking in Afghanistan has to be an internationally accepted framework for providing financial and economic support to the Afghan state for it to have adequate security forces and those security forces will be less if there is a non-threatening environment so there has to be kind of understanding of the countries around Afghanistan which means at a minimum India, Pakistan, Iran, Russia and China, Central Asia coming in as well with the United States about what the dispensation is to be there so they don't feel threatened by it now that would address the more underlying problem which means what is the role of the United States and that puts the question of the American troops in a different perspective I think because it's not just that some Afghans, Taliban and others want the troops to leave and other Afghans want the troops to stay because of what they stand for and because we want them there for counter-terrorism reasons it's that we want the region to take ownership of the peace process in a sense they have by showing that they don't support a peace process that leads to an American dominated region as they see it so the most I think the most important thing the United States could do for a peace process one, dealing with Afghanistan itself is offered to discuss the troop presence with the Taliban and the Afghans and that means the bilateral security agreement probably on the table as well which is one of the Taliban's demands but more than that and more important is discussing it with the other countries in the region and unfortunately at the moment our relations I won't go into it in any detail I don't need to but the relationship that the United States has with Pakistan Iran, Russia and China are not conducive to having that kind of environment so even though we are talking about a peace process in Afghanistan I'm afraid that the rest of our foreign policy at the moment makes that almost impossible I say almost because I never want to give up hope and there are some things that we can do and I'll just say that there is nonetheless I'm not being negative there's a very positive dynamic precisely because of the tremendous investments in infrastructure that are taking place by China India, Russia and Iran for instance in the last few months President Xi Jinping of China and Prime Minister Modi of India met in Wuhan China and they reached agreement on among other things how China and India might on the principle not on how but China and India cooperation in Afghanistan including cooperation that Chinese tell me on building some infrastructure leaking Central Asia through Afghanistan to Iran Prime Minister Zarif of Iran has been to India and they are working on how to get around the fact that the US has pulled out of the JCPOA and has imposed new sanctions in order to keep the connectivity of Afghanistan to India through Iran open Prime Minister Modi met with President Putin as well and they talked about North South Carter and cooperation on Afghanistan so these building blocks are there and in the future if Afghanistan doesn't become stabilized it will be stabilized not as a separator as it was in the 19th century but as a connector as what the Afghans call around about of these connectivity projects but for the US to play a positive role it has to engage positively with these connectivity projects and see a positive some game in the growth of that region not just see it as a threat of rising powers and see that as the main long term and see the building of stronger states and stronger economies in that region as the main bulwark against terrorism rather than drones and a small military presence that creates more opposition. Thank you. Thank you very much to Barney and all our panelists. I'm fiercely resolved to keep this panel on time in preparation for the next one but maybe I will ask a first few questions to follow up on what you've all said and then turn things over to the audience. Maybe a first question is on the issue of the US troops and or their role in a peace process so virtually every stakeholder has some view on where this issue has to land in the context of a peace deal. The region maybe we could broadly summarize he's a US presence as acceptable in the short term in the interest of stability but at least potentially a long term threat. The Taliban demand this timetable of some kind at an early stage in negotiations the US has refused to grant that to date and probably is not going to grant something along the lines of the Taliban are demanding but you can't help but notice some flexibility in the statements that each side puts forward. The US will say things like we won't necessarily need troops if the country is peaceful and there's no terrorism threat. The Taliban once made a complete withdrawal the precondition to any sort of discussions and now we'll say things like give us a multi-year window that may or may not end in a total withdrawal so the question I'd be interested in anyone here's take maybe we could start with Laurel is there a potential compromise between these two positions that's at least imaginable and can you imagine a sequence of near term steps to kind of start that discussion? I mean I think it's imaginable but it will have to be tested vigorously in the course of a negotiation. I think the most important near term step is for the United States to clarify whether it even sees the issue, the topic as a matter for negotiation and I don't see any reason why any of the other parties at the moment would believe that the United States has made it evident that it sees that as a topic for negotiation. Doesn't mean that it has to be negotiated up front but just to be but to send that signal very clearly I think would be quite helpful but you know beyond that I mean the whether you could end up with whether you could end up with a compromise requires I think a lot more work on the at least on the American side if not on the others in determining what its actual position is and I'm not certain that the United States or I'm fairly certain the United States has not reached a point of clarity about what its actual position is on this issue. Certainly and Barney may want to comment on this I don't think that it's evident to the other countries in the region that the United States has reached a point of clarity. Well first we're talking about negotiations I think there's a question of can we reach agreement as a matter of principle that one of our goals is Afghanistan without foreign troops at a track two meeting in Chantilly France a few years ago maybe more than a few years ago by now the Taliban said that troops have to leave now the other Afghans say no we need them now but they reached agreement on the principle that the goal was in Afghanistan without foreign troops recently I asked the US official if the Afghan government and the Taliban came to complete agreement on a political settlement would the US be willing to withdraw its troops and the official said we don't know and the reason for that is there's a legitimate reason for that. The reason for that is the troops are there because we were attacked by al-Qaeda not because of civil dispute in Afghanistan so the troop presence depends on a political settlement but it also depends on adequate counter-terrorist measures being in place so those counter-terrorist measures also have to be part of any negotiation and of course since we're the ones who have to be satisfied with them we have to be part of that negotiation I would just say that the Taliban have said to us that they don't rule out a future presence of foreign troops however it would have to be renegotiated by the new legitimate government which presumably is the one they have played a part in forming Rahman Salah, would you have anything to add on that? Yeah, I would like to add a few points on this. I mean one thing when it comes to the al-Qaeda there's a clear line up Taliban they would now be willing to take any responsibility for these foreign fighters. I think this should be part of the peace deal any peace negotiation anything that comes forward it has to these foreign troops because right now there are hundreds of them right now inside Afghanistan this has to be because this is considered a big threat to the United States and other countries so I think that can play a potential role in this peace deal that's it. I mean maybe that segues to a closely related terrorism question I mean presumably presumably the United States needs to see more from the Taliban than simply a verbal renunciation of terrorist groups for an agreement to stick so I'd be interested in any of the panel's discussion on what does it mean or what should it mean for the Taliban to cut ties with international terrorist groups in specific and is there a way to maintain a counter-terrorism presence that sort of ensures that safety from terrorism that is acceptable to insurgent groups entering a peace agreement or for that matter to the region that is concerned about what else any presence might be used for. Well I see David Sidney there so he knows perfectly well that very well that in 2011 we actually sent the Taliban a note describing what that meant and that if they had not broken off talks with us we would have proceeded to discuss it further but I would say the most important thing would be to clarify the most important thing would be to clarify that if they join a political settlement there would be unity of the national security forces that they would support those national security forces the international community would support those national security forces and there wouldn't be any safe areas in Afghanistan where those terrorist groups could organize which is why by the way that any idea of a peace agreement based on giving certain regions of the country to the Taliban or something like that is a complete non-starter because it is a not only is it against Afghan national principles it is also against our counter-terrorism interests but from our side and though I think we have to understand, recognize eventually the U.S. counter-terrorism policy cannot be that we will continually forever kill terrorists in every country wherever they are we eventually have to form partnerships with governments in those countries so what we would be looking for and realize that we are not going to have 100% guarantee against it and the more efficient way is to strengthen our homeland and our defense so I think we reach an understanding on unity of the security forces unity of power on cooperation against certain groups and then we keep watching and just as we would with any other country we wouldn't need to have our own troops there necessarily forever in order to be satisfied that our basic counter-terrorism needs were met I'll add something I'll fire off I think you get most definitive rhetorical commitment that you can in writing and sign like with any peace agreement and then you seek to enforce it a lot is going to lie more generally in the implementation measures and this is why I said negotiating the American military presence and some kind of phased modification of that is an opportunity for implementation because presumably some of the benchmarks to observable steps taken to break any financial or material ties with other groups I mean ideally you would get to the point where you can work with common purpose and collaboration against terrorist groups that would remain in the region and the greatest opportunity for that could be against ISKP and perhaps you could even bake into a peace agreement with some kind of invitation to the United States or to NATO to cooperate with the newly reconstituted Afghan government in that endeavor Maybe I'll ask one more and then I'll turn it over and you all have admirably fulfilled my wish for discussions about what the settlement might look like the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow so this is a more way forward near-term and it's that there's a very long-standing impasse that I would consider the primary impediment to a serious process breaking out which is that the Taliban want to talk to the U.S. and not to their government or not to the Afghan government everyone else wants them to talk to Kabul so are there creative ways to get around this impasse that maybe haven't been given full consideration sometimes we hear about a third party mediator we hear about a track two process that can explore things informally perhaps the answer is if you're in your U.S. policy or Afghan policymaker hat to just wait the Taliban out on this question what's the way to handle this impasse maybe well, if we want creativity we should ask the audience I think the more minds to think about it the better I mean various things have been tried clearly the Afghan government does not like track two and hasn't done for some time ever since President Karzai threw his teddy out of the pram after the Shansili process and objected to track twos because they see track twos as a way of the Taliban refusing to engage in track one I don't believe that's entirely true I think there's utility in some track twos some track 1.5s third party mediation has been suggested trying to some extent and still not been accepted because as you say the other thing is it comes down to recognition of the Islamic Emirates and how to engage in a process that acknowledges them as a very important part of any solution but without recognizing them as the Islamic Emirates people have suggested just turning up no name plates, no even name cards various suggestions but so far there hasn't been a willingness to engage you know by the Taliban with the government whereas as you say everyone else believes that all parties to the conflict including the Americans need to be in the room to ensure there is no repeat of Bonn where a major part of the potential conflict was excluded so any all bright ideas welcome I would say when it comes to this I think all three sides are so dug in on this issue that simply waiting is unproductive and not likely to produce any results but in my view introducing a new factor into this could be a way out of that box and I don't personally believe that third party facilitation or mediation has been seriously tried and I think introducing that could shake up this very static situation by introducing a new dynamic into it moreover you have to consider why is it that each side is a question of what's the shape of the table and what's the format it's because it's a process issue that relates to substantive positions and it's because the Taliban wants to reinforce its position that it is a legitimate negotiating party and reinforce its position that the real power is the United States and that the Afghan government is simply a puppet master of Afghanistan and that the United States and the Afghan government are dug in on their position because they want to reinforce their view that the Afghan government is sovereign and that the United States is not a puppet master of Afghanistan and so one reason why having a neutral facilitator of a process could be helpful is because that is a deal with the parties in a proximity talk format where you are dealing with them in an even handed way that could potentially I mean none of this has high probability of working but potentially could create a face saving opportunity for each of the parties so that they are not having to be seen as compromising on these substantive positions that they're trying to reinforce and so basically I think though it comes down to the joke about how many psychiatrist does it take to change a light bulb and the answer is only one but the light bulb really has to want to change you'll leave it there problems all reference to anything to add on that yeah I mean I would like to add a point on this one the question that always is asked when you go to communities and you know talk to these people they say well how would we discuss how we would negotiate with the government which is challenged daily by its own people so the problem is here is that the Taliban are one of the reason is that Taliban are now coming to negotiations is that the Afghan government is on daily basis challenged by the world in Kabul city and the provinces you know and so I mean this gives me that it cannot control the people within its own control territory how can they we can negotiate with such thing the second is that I mean as some of the panelists talk about is that the money comes from the international community so most of the police are loyal to warlords we have the example so this actually further distance Taliban from coming to a negotiating table with the Afghan with the Afghan government well is there any alternative way I think there is a coordination first is lack of coordination between international community and the Afghan government and the the other problem is that the current situation in women in Kabul like for example all the embassies all the international donors they are literally dictating everything to the Afghan government you know and it's open secret the third thing is we don't have any national interest the definition of national interest so these are some of the challenges that actually further week put the Afghan government on weaker position when it comes to negotiations so I think it's if there's proper coordination if the government takes the leads the most important thing here I believe is that the Afghan government doesn't take the lead when it comes to many of the peace activities in Afghanistan that's it okay thank you everyone very happy to turn it over to questions from the audience now maybe in the interest of getting as many people as we possibly can I will take three at a time and then we can handle these as we see fit maybe we could go with you sir and David and in the middle thank you come run Buhari center for global policy this is a question for everybody but I would love to hear Ramitala's views and Barney's views so it seems like we have two extreme positions one is the Taliban goal or of an envisioned polity that for lack of better term can be called an Islamic state on the other hand the Afghan government in the international community would want to absorb the Taliban into the current state with some modifications it doesn't seem like anybody's going to get their ideal position so is there a middle ground where the state can be rejiggered to have a power sharing mechanism I know Ramitala said that they don't want a power sharing mechanism but I'm just trying to understand this issue better thank you and then could you pass the mic right next to David Sedney here and if we have a second mic he would go over here thank you very much David Sedney senior associate with the center for strategic and international studies I'd like to second your kudos Johnny to Ramitala and Mary nobody in this audience can understand the suffering that he has undergone and the fact that he is a voice for peace after what has happened to him is an amazing testament to the human spirit so I wanted to thank you for that and my question is for you Mr. Ramitala and Mary given all the difficulties everybody has laid out what do you think are the prospects that Johnny's announced ceasefire today do you think the Taliban will respond and if they do respond how do you think they might respond I see that the Taliban spokesman has announced that he has to consult with senior leaders so it shows that there's at least some discussion there thank you hello Phil Schrafer I live in the neighborhood and I enjoy the coffee I go to a lot of these meetings and first of all I wanted to give kudos to USAIP it's incredible how you show the inside of this story having Amiri here Skype you have many surveys you point out there are warlords and so on so kudos to you going to some of the other organizations in town I found out that this is an extremely conservative military oriented perspective which sees that if we don't keep our army in there all of these people are going to do an al-Qaeda attack on us they lump the Taliban in with al-Qaeda with ISIS and so on I really don't see our country playing a very good role I agree with Mr. Rubin that you've got to have other India China Iran all these countries got to make the move and sort of budge us out of the picture thank you okay well I guess two people directed their comments squarely to Kabul so maybe we could start with you Rafmatullah and then anyone next to me can take whatever piece they like thank you so much for it's glad to see Dr. David Sidney I mean he's an inspiration to me he's I mean when I was injured at the American University of Afghanistan he was the one who helped me a lot and I've learned so much from him thank you sir and glad to see you and with regards to the questions about the power sharing the thing is that the Taliban does not want power sharing I mean that they do not want to have like control certain areas but they do want to take part in the government they do want to play a role in the government but how that how that would be the Taliban has not come up with the with the planning or they still do not have the idea how they would want to continue if there is some sort of power sharing that would look like for example, Musakala, Northern Helmand for example let's say or Helmand as a whole where they are the strong they will control Helmand but they would not want like okay this is our church we would not want the government no I think they would want the government to play a role they would want they would respect the central government if there is a peace deal if there is a government as one of their panellists says that yes they would negotiate they would come to some after a new government after the government that they take part in it so that's with regards to the power sharing with regards to Dr. Snedi Sidney questions I think the Taliban are pretty much under pressure because this is the second biggest announcement of this year that President Eisenhower has taken has come up with the courage to take I mean the President has asked an open you know open you know negotiation without any conditions and secondly he now comes up for a ceasefire why is this important because we have precedents for example for Gulbuddin Hikmater today one of the main critics of Gulbuddin is Dr. Najib offered him many peace deals but he didn't take it and he now realized that many actors were behind that that he was not able to take that so the Taliban has a good precedent to look and take advantage of now the question is whether they will take advantage whether they will come up with I think it's a matter of I mean it's a broader issue because Afghanistan is contextual each area has its own social dynamics it needs a variety engagement for example in North and Afghanistan Taliban has one kind of system and South Afghanistan Taliban has another kind of system in Southeast where Pakhtia Khos is the Taliban has another system the Haqqani network is there you know Haqqani network is in the US list you know terrorist list how would that play you know like it's a big you know I think it needs some time for the Taliban to come up but I do think that they are pretty much under pressure that's it just very quickly you could think for example the Taliban following the Iranian model might like to see themselves having some sort of guardianship council to make sure that things in line with you know Sharia and Islamic law I'm not recommending that I'm just saying it's a possibility unfortunately I will have to run out of here after I make but briefly first of all we don't know if after the attempt to hold elections in 2019 there will still be a constitutional a functioning constitutional order in Afghanistan which is something that should put a lot of pressure on us to get a peace settlement second they're not going to be formal power sharing with the Taliban but you can have informal power sharing for instance today in Afghanistan you might say there's informal power sharing with Jamiat because they have certain governorships but there's no formal agreement there could be something like that with the Taliban as well the most difficult issue will be the most difficult issue inside Afghanistan will be the same most difficult issue about the international region which is who controls the guns because you know the Taliban won't want to rely for their security on security forces that they think are organized and led by their enemies and vice versa those who spent their life is resisting the Taliban are not going to be happy with arms Taliban possibly being in the security forces in areas where they live there could be some agreement about that and I would predict that if we ever guide help us get to that stage that will be the most difficult issue add one thing on the ceasefire I think everyone who has an interest in Afghanistan matters would hope that this would have an effect but I think it's important to recognize that ceasefires generally are fragile and are vulnerable to to spoiling they create an opportunity for spoilers and a ceasefire that was not negotiated but was declared by one side is perhaps especially creates an opportunity for spoilers and so I think it will be important to not read too much too definitively into what happens over the coming days with the ceasefire thank you very much I know there are other questions with my profound apologies I'm going to cut it off here because multiple panelists have to fan across the earth within the hour so before we break we're going to do about a 15 minute coffee break we'll come back at let's say 320 and an important warning is that we do not allow food or drink in this auditorium look at the lovely carpet underneath you it would not look as nice if we did so we'll see you then thank you so much to our panelists how are you? We're ready to begin the second panel. My name is Scott Worden. I am the director of Afghanistan and Central Asia Programs here at the US Institute of Peace. As you heard at the beginning of the session, the idea of this event is to look at the peace process from two angles. We've just heard about top-down approaches, the diplomatic, the international, the regional, and this panel really will focus on the bottom-up or what is happening outside of the capital, what is happening in the provinces, what is happening among communities. All of our researchers, and I'll give a brief introduction of our speakers, have an extensive background researching, living in, being, talking to Afghans. And particularly outside of the capital. So this is a contrast and a different perspective from the views that were presented in the first panel. Let me, you have bios available outside, so I just want to give a brief introduction. We'll hear from the panelists. I'll ask a few questions similar to the format of the first panel, and then open it up to the audience. And then, as mentioned, the Afghan ambassador to the US is en route, and so unless there is a flight delay, then he will be delivering closing remarks. I'll introduce in the order that the speakers will be talking. First on my far left is Michael Semple. He is a professor at Queen's University in Belfast, doing research at the Institute for the Study of Conflict Transformation and Social Justice. He has practiced and written on humanitarian assistance and conflict resolution in Afghanistan in the region for decades. He has held official positions as a special advisor or an advisor to the special representative of the European Union and the deputy of that office as an official of the UN and also as an NGO worker and a humanitarian worker over years in Afghanistan. We will hear next from Erica Gaston to my immediate left. She is a non-resident fellow with the Global Public Policy Institute, GPPI in Berlin. She's also a PhD candidate at the University of Cambridge. Before joining GPPI and embarking on her academic studies, she is also an alum of USIP. She worked here as a senior program officer on rule of law issues in Afghanistan and Yemen, and she also founded the Regional Policy Initiative at the Open Society Institute. To my right is Kate Clark. She is director of the Afghan Analyst Network. Her involvement in Afghanistan goes back to 1999 when she was a correspondent for the BBC there. She has covered the wars over time from many angles, and she is also a frequent author and commentator including on the AN website, which is one of the great resources that we have on information about Afghanistan. And then last but far from not least, Nila Farsaki. She is a lecturer at George Mason University. She is the founder and former executive director of Women Activities and Social Services Association, or WASA, which she founded in Herat in 2002. She was also former country director of the Open Society of Afghanistan branch of the Open Society Institute, and has had many civil society leadership positions. So without further ado, let me turn over to Michael and hear from your views. Thanks, Scott. I'm really delighted to see a good crowd today. I hope we have a crowd on the internet as well. It's great that you're here. I think it's a positive sign that people are taking an interest in Afghanistan after this stage of the war has dragged on for so many years. It still counts. It still matters. It can still go right or wrong. And I'm sure that your interest will make a difference. I'm confident that with the best efforts of some of the people who are working for a positive outcome in Afghanistan, it'll come right that Afghans who desire a peaceful and normal future, that they'll get it, and that there'll be a day perhaps not so long where USIP almost has a department of lessons from the Afghan peace process that you'll have a fair share of well-qualified Afghans, like jet-setting around the world and hosting visits to Afghanistan, explaining how they got where they got to. This is possible, and the doubters will be, well, say, happily dismayed. I reach this stage of optimism partly by the highly effective and committed Afghans who I have a privilege to interact with who are well steeped and confident in their culture and heritage, but also well used to playing their part in the role in the world. I certainly would think of Karim Khalili, the current head of the High Peace Council in Afghanistan, who I've seen do amazing things over the years as an officer of the United Nations. I've had a chance to be with him in the mountains and talk practical human rights and how to overcome abuses in very nasty stages of war. And now I see him sitting at the top of a high peace council working long hours every day to help bring this war to an end, confident that he will succeed. I think even of some of the people who've been through Guantanamo, you know all this stuff you get in the press about how somehow you lock people up and that they end up with dreadful grievances. I actually see the contrary story that men who've been involved in war, seen many of their comrades killed, and got a chance even to actually know some people from the US and come away more reflective and more committed to seeing an end to this war. And I know that some of them are working to achieve that end. I know brave people of the Afghan security forces, manning isolated security posts with difficult logistics coming under attack, motivating their men, fighting the war because the war is still going on, and waiting for those who are doing the politics to help bring it to an end. I'm sure that all those people who are working for a peaceful end to this conflict will prevail. Of those who are involved, they are a strong majority. I'm going to give you a couple of minutes on this issue of bottom up versus top down. Now, I sort of could have, I actually could have sat on either panel because guess what? The two actually operate closely connected. I myself as a student researcher of what's going on in Afghanistan and as an advisor to some of the players, yes, I do some work bottom up and I do some work top down. They have to go together. A little plea on, well, a little comment on any attempt to try to deal with these in isolation. The reality is that our top down processes at the moment are blocked. We've tried engaging with the Taliban political commission in Qatar. We can send as many people over there to talk as we like, but that engagement hasn't generated a meaningful peace process. It hasn't stopped anyone being killed. We've tried our regional engagement and tried to get Pakistan to play the role that many people desire of bringing the Taliban to the table. Many rounds of talks. It hasn't yet delivered in the Taliban coming to the table in a meaningful way. We've had a couple of token visits. It's important to do these things, but waiting for a peace process, waiting for the guns to go silent on the basis of that by itself could be a long wait. On the issue of bottom up, this idea of engaging with the Taliban at a subnational level, Taliban in a particular province or in a particular district, this can be an integral part of a political process, which ultimately has a goal, a peaceful Afghanistan, but as it's mode of operation for certain parts of it, engagement at the local. That's not some kind of separate community initiative to keep a few people busy for the moment. That's a way of moving forward when other things are blocked. There's a critical design principle in here, which is around notion of critical path. I know that there are some importance of students and teachers of strategy here. If you are trying to come up with a winning strategy, you do not want to set up a strategy which has got a single critical path which can easily be blocked by a single spoiler. That's where we've got at the moment at our attempts to trigger the top-down process. The advantage of the local is there is not a single critical path. Afghanistan has 34 provinces, it's got 400 districts. As long as you have opportunity to go forward in one or several of those, there is an opportunity to go forward. Afghanistan is networked. We deal with Taliban at the provincial and the district level, demonstrate success there, build relationships there. You have a chance to spread that out across the country because like the story of Facebook, ultimately every Taliban connect back to the leadership by one or two friendships. There is an opportunity to move from the local to the national. In dealing with people on both sides of the divide, of the two major sides of the divide, inside Afghanistan, I'm frequently impressed, dismayed by the number who express a sense of disempowerment, a sense that they are not able to move forward in the positive direction that they want. That counts on the government side and on the Taliban side. If you are able to demonstrate that in a local initiative that this is possible, you have a chance to overcome that sense of disempowerment. Now, I know that the Afghan president quite rightly has worried about issues of fragmentation, that the one thing I know that he does not want to see is efforts to peel off, to get little bits and fragments of the Taliban because he's worried that you end up basically with twice as many groups, three times as many groups as you had for the example of the multiple snakes via the bear. But there are opportunities for designing local initiatives which are not fragmentation but actually offering an alternative vision of the future for movement as a whole, particularly at a point when even inside the leadership of the Taliban, they have a sense that they're blocked, they aren't coming up with the ideas and political vision, the sense to offer a better way forward, that a concentrated effort to achieve success at a local level has a chance to influence the leadership rather than just a chance to try and aggressively split off from them. So I think an effective vision of bottom up contributing to a top down process is one that demonstrates it is possible to achieve a peace dividend and play to the positive aspect of the Afghan dispute is that it's not really a zero sum game. It's that ultimately the Taliban movement is a movement of Afghans that they, although the official position of the movement is restoration of an Islamic Emirate to the exclusion of any other political forces in the country, I think a majority of those Taliban I have a chance to interact with realize that that is not attainable and that they will have to move away from that position. Demonstrating an opportunity for ultimately Afghans to work together in local peace initiatives, Taliban, non-Taliban is a chance of demonstrating the way away from this demand for restoration of the Islamic Emirate. The worst thing that we could do at such an opportunity is sit back and simply say it can't happen that they, nothing has worked in Afghanistan that I had a part in a recent publication, we reviewed a series of small scale initiatives which actually have operated, that I have sat through dialogue between senior people, from the High Peace Council and members of the Taliban who have demonstrated that it is possible to link local initiatives with ideas of an eventual national settlement in Afghanistan. The best time to start that is now. Thanks very much, Erica. Thank you. So for the last year and a half, Kate and I have been engaged in a project where we've been looking at militias and local forces, sort of their role and their impact, its comparative projects, so both in Afghanistan and Iraq. And while that might seem a little bit distinct or sort of tangential from our topic today, a lot of what we've been finding on the ground I think has a lot of bearing for what might be the prospects for peace from the bottom up or for different reintegration or these sort of larger questions afterwards. So that's what I wanna focus on today. And I think it's important because as many obstacles as there are to a top down political settlement, I think the even harder challenge is going to be getting that deal to stick. And critical among that is going to be this question of what you do with all of the different fighters, how do you demobilize, reintegrate them, or otherwise deal with them in a way to get the peace deal to be sustainable? And when we talk about disarming, reintegrating or sort of otherwise rationalizing different fighters, what I would argue is important is to not just think about what happens with the Taliban fighters, but also to think about what should happen with all of the different fighters and factions and groups that are currently aligned within the pro-government forces within the Afghan government itself. The last few years has seen a cycle of increasing fragmentation and proliferation of armed groups from a trend towards militias and decentralization of control on the Afghan government side or the pro-government side to the multiple different Taliban factions and divisions on that side. And for any peace deal to be sustainable and to put the Afghan government on a more solid path in terms of being able to control and manage conflict, something has to be done with this multiplicity of actors on both sides. To address that issue, I wanna very briefly revisit some of the post-bond issues, that sort of bottom-up process that came after that, and then kind of talk about three larger challenges that might happen for trying to deal with these different armed groups should a peace deal be concluded. So the initial bond agreement cobbled together a transitional government by bringing all the different factions, political stakeholders, warlords and other parties into power. The overall strategy was one of addressing political conflict through accommodation by giving everyone a piece of the Afghan government apparatus. And there was a bottom-up component to that too, in that in addition to incorporating a lot of these key political actors or stakeholders on the top, they got to bring in all of their different fighting forces or militias into the Afghan government through security forces from the bottom up. In many cases, there was a wholesale incorporation of commanders and their different factions into the early Afghan security forces. I think Kate's gonna talk a little bit more about this, so I'm not gonna get into it fully. One other point that I think is important for my subsequent comments is that an additional factor, in addition to this sort of early incorporation of all of these different militias and factions, was that you had a continuing trend since 2001 of not only development according to the Afghan security forces, but also a range of different privatized forces of force, different local militias or other sort of quasi-state organs that continually provided a way to get around different demobilization and disarmament and also allowed a lot of these larger political stakeholders keep their own security forces and factions. One of the ways that this has happened, it's been a focus of our study, is we've been looking at how the initiatives that started from 2009 on that were largely international military forces driven of promoting local forces, so local community defense forces, the largest of which has been the Afghanistan local police. So, and which now extends across Afghanistan. The local force models like the ALP certainly did not create the sort of market for violence or the logic of sort of securitized authority that is a problem right now in Afghanistan, but they certainly did reinforce those dynamics and they gave a lot of these regional or local power brokers an opportunity to put their men on the payroll an option to have local authority and legitimacy and they sort of reinforced some of these larger cycles that were already ongoing, that were sort of present in the environment. The end result of all of these trends has been that the pro-government side of the house is incredibly divided, fragmented, fractionalized and though these trends have been ongoing since 2001 and to some extent proceeded before this, they do appear to be reaching a crisis point. You can see this both at a high level with the crises in the past year over at Tendostem, but you can also see it at a very local community level with an increasing number of communities falling out of the Afghan government orbit and not necessarily because they're going over to the Taliban, but simply because they're dominated by these local interests or local power brokers who are acting in their own interests and not in the interest of Kabul or the Afghan government. So, I would argue that any future political process will have to give attention to bringing in this range of fragmented, self-interested and divided forces that exist on the pro-government side and the Afghan anti-government side into the tent. And then it's going to have to do that not only from a top down level, but also from a bottom up. And this makes any discussion about reintegration or demobilization, one that, you know, that certainly has to be part of it, but what we're also talking about is a larger rationalization of the security apparatus in Afghanistan, which starts to look a lot more like how do we address the issues of security sector reform and SSR, which have been a perennial frustration as part of the state strengthening or state building project since 2001. There's not enough time here to impact that entire strategy and what that would look like. So, I just want to talk about three challenges that would have to be addressed or that will come up, should a peace deal be concluded. Two of them tend a little bit more towards a sort of pessimistic or negative, but I will conclude with a somewhat optimistic point, reinforcing some of Michael's about bottom up initiatives. The first will be that the challenge to actually disarm and bring the numbers down because this will likely go against the interest of everyone that's at the bargaining table. So, a key component of a successful peace strategy or hopefully a key outcome will be that conflict is reduced, which means that you don't need as many security forces because you have a greater prevalence of peace in Afghanistan. So, in theory, this means that we should be moving towards a lower number of security forces. However, this will be challenging because it will go against the grain of the larger logic and approach to political negotiations since 2001. Since 2001, ongoing operating principle has been keeping all parties on side through this policy of accommodation. If you're gonna put it in the sense of business and negotiation frameworks, it would be expanding the pie, which has largely involved, you know, put all of my militias and my cousin on the payroll. This pressure will tend to increase rather than decrease in the future. We've already discussed this trend happening on the pro-government side and all of those different factions and political stakeholders will be equally dug in to have their share of security forces to keep them, possibly even to increase them. We're also likely to see that on the Taliban side, particularly for these sort of local force models and for force numbers with that. Where past peace deals have been attempted, whether that's at a very local level, peace compact or whether, say, the 2016 deal with Hasbi Islami, a frequent expectation of the forces has been that they will get some security positions. So you can certainly expect that. Michael might be able to touch on this more, but I think because of the commander model within the Taliban and because some of the statements they've indicated, it's more likely that they would want, if any security position, something along the lines of the sort of local force model like the ALP rather than being integrated into the larger Afghan security force structure. As a result, the tenants and the logic of this accommodation strategy would likely be to increase rather than decrease the number of positions, particularly among these local forces. Another final factor is that you might see the same pressures driving from the international military strategy. So even if a peace deal was concluded, you would expect that there will be significant outstanding security concerns, one, because we expect it to be a little bit fragile at the beginning, and there's not complete command and control on the anti-government side, but also we can certain actors won't be brought into the fold like ISK. And so they're unlikely to be reconciled and will pose persistent threats. So for this first one, you have this fundamental tension between a larger need to reduce forces and to demobilize, but the fact that all parties at the table will have an interest in expanding the forces that are out there. Second, the type of forces that are likely to be most in demand as the sort of reintegrative forces or as bargaining chips on the table are those local forces, which have tended to have a mixed record in terms of producing stability, or at least have not proven to be the right solution in all areas. We've been looking at this issue of where does this local force model work and where does it not? And there's a lot of competing sort of, it depends a little bit on how you judge what's working or not. But one common estimation that's been made by international military working with these forces has been, if you take the ALP, that they work well in a third of the places, they're outright counterproductive in another third and at another third or somewhere in between. So given that, say in two thirds of the country, this is a force model that's tended to exacerbate local conflict, to increase divisions, to not cohere towards greater Afghan state control, that's a problem if that is also the primary model that allows you to try and integrate different fighters. A final challenge, and I've gotten already my clue that I have to stop soon, but this is it and this is the slightly more positive. A final challenge will be the actual prospects of making that reconciliation happen within communities given the charged local violence of the last few years. So one of the consequences that we've noted as a result of some of the local force mobilization has been that this sort of localization of the conflict, this mobilizing and arming and militarizing communities and sort of weaponizing their local knowledge and relationships has resulted in a much uglier and much bloodier type of violence that it sort of transgressed a lot of Afghan norms and restraints of conflict and it's led for a lot more sort of tit for tat and revenge attacks and would be an issue in terms of the sustainability of peace for the future. This will pose a certain challenge, but interestingly in some of our research, we've also seen that notwithstanding that it got to this bloodier and sort of more dangerous level, that there was still even in the worst communities where you had the worst levels of violence, some possibility to turn a new leaf, to sort of move forward and do peace. And interesting, a lot of that has come from the Taliban side or some of the more interesting examples. So for example, although our research has demonstrated and AAN has a forthcoming piece coming out soon on this, that initially the Taliban looked at the ALP and the local forces as enemy number one and were incredibly brutal, that from 2014 on they increasingly pursued a strategy of co-option and cooperating. There's a couple examples that the New Peaceful Document and Andar, but you've also had this in Kunduz, with areas that were retaken by the Taliban kind of going up to the local ALP and saying, hey, if the elders vouch for you, we'll allow you ALP to integrate into our Taliban controlled community. So it is interesting that that is coming happening on the Taliban side and it's happening in a lot of these very divided communities. And I think it does suggest that there is still room for pragmatism and reconciliation at a local level. And this is my final point, I promise. This has largely happened where communities were left to their own devices and able to sort things out on a local level. As Steve mentioned earlier, and I think as Michael did too, there have been a lot of these local peace deals and accommodation of fighters. The issue so far has been that they haven't been very sustainable and that's in part because they weren't backed with the sort of the backbone of a larger peace deal. So there's lots of spoilers and it was easy for them to fray and fall apart. So I will conclude with saying that this does offer a point of optimism which is where I'll leave this, that if a top level accord was struck, it does provide an opening for these local peace deals to gain some more traction. So with that all. Thank you for a good optimistic endpoint that I want to come back to. Thanks Erica. I was in Kabul in April and Brussels in May and I was struck in both locations how much peace is in the air at least on the international side. That's both military and civilian. At least people are talking about peace on the sort of international supporters or donors or great powers side. They're wondering how they can help. In the absence of a peace process of course that's actually quite difficult. There seems to be a singling out of reintegration. I've kept hearing this term. Now I know it's slightly problematic as Steve was talking about. Reintegrating armed men into civilian society is what's being discussed and in particular at the moment of course the Taliban. Now as Eric has pointed out who's Taliban and who's not is actually often not as clear as it ought to be. And we've seen since 2001 that armed men and militias have been surprisingly persistent. They've often been rehatted. They've often been called something different but you find that they tend to carry on and emerge in a different guise. And one of the problems that I'm, one of the issues I'm a bit worried about at the moment is that in the absence of anything serious happening putting in money into reintegration is poison. You might as well destroy any hopes of a peace process at the onset. You add money into the mix and people start to follow the money and you don't get a resolution of the conflict. You get, as we've seen in the last 17 years you get corruption, you actually get a sort of a greater militarization and you often get a consolidation of the strongest commanders at the expense of the weaker. And actually those who give up their weapons end up being weaker. So strangely DDR often ends up promoting military forces in Afghanistan. So just briefly we've had four programs, four formal programs of DDR which I'll call it. So we've had two end at pro-government forces which was the Afghanistan New Beginnings Program and the A&BP and the Disbandment of a Legal Armed Groups Program, DAI-AG. We've had two dealing with the Taliban program Taqeem Sula, PTS, and then the continuing one of the Afghanistan Peace and Reintegration Program, A&BP. I'm rightly thinking that UNDP has been involved in all of them and often you have the same personnel both on the UN side and on the Afghan side also being involved. So people like Masoum Stanakzai was involved in DAI-AG for example. So with the initial attempts to scale back the large numbers of men who were supposedly fighting the Taliban in 2001, estimates went up to 800,000 which frankly if they had been fighting the Taliban they wouldn't have been, the Taliban would not gain 90% of the territory. But anyway that was brought down to I think it was over 200,000. Probably there were about 80,000 actually fighting. So immediately you get money involved, you get an expansion of the payroll. Whether that's actual people or just people who can get a salary on someone else's behalf. What you found was, so these are all the forces that came under the nominal control of the Ministry of Defence in 2001, 2002. You found that people with the strongest links went with their men into the Afghan police. You had others who joined the Taliban when they were DDR'd. You had others who became guards for the foreign military. So that was the, you know, poor Afghan people. They thought that when ISAF expanded, ISAF would protect them from the various commanders and militia leaders who were abusing them. But no, ISAF actually chose them to guard their bases and work with them as partners for force protection. So again, you had the militias being rehatted as guards for ISAF. Those who did, were disarmed came out at a disadvantage. So that was the first attempt at DDR. Diag, which was supposedly looking at the remains of those forces, unfortunately came up against two things. One, ISAF expansion into the south. So a fresh need for militias to guard bases and to guard transports. And the expansion of the insurgency. So you had a disarming and you had a re-arming. And in both times, the international military protected its people. It protected the militias that it wanted to stay functioning. And you found that at a senior level, on the Afghan power broker side, you also had them managing to protect their own people. Since then, we've had two attempts to reintegrate the Taliban. The PTS claimed to have reintegrated 800,000. When I looked at there, they showed me a list of their senior people that they'd brought over. There were 12, and none of them were senior people. So then that was followed by, you probably remember the peace jerker that Karzai ran in 2010. When he set up the high peace council, he created, I think it was 70 posts at that point. And this was in response to, again, a demand for peace at the time, which I think was referred to in the earlier session. This was Karzai's response to set up the high peace council and the Afghanistan peace and reconciliation programme. And many of us at the time just thought it was a sham. It was a sham organisation designed to funnel international money into the pockets of various people. So it's a great way for former President Karzai to fund part of his patronage network. With 70, mainly, jihadi commanders there. It hasn't done anything. It's done very, very little. It's supposedly reintegrated 10,000 fighters. Most of them weren't Taliban. Most of them were friends and relations of people who were getting benefits of the packages. Mainly in the North and the West. I think it worked out at $18,000 per reintegry. So even if they'd all been Taliban, it would have been a very, very, very costly process. And at the moment, UNDP is, again, looking for more money to extend the programme, the AMBP. Steve Brooking also spoke about the joint secretary of the High Peace Council has been trying to get money in Kabul. There was a lovely paragraph in the later SEGA report about this. So if you have a look at the UNDP website, it's full of the achievements of the Afghanistan peace and reintegration programme. But apparently in the briefing note to the donors, including State Department, so UNDP wrote that the new project would be informed by lessons learned from the previous APRP programme, which it described as overly ambitious, assumption laden, structurally unsustainable, lacking accountability and producing no satisfactory results. And then you're asking for $30 million more. And you couldn't make it up. You really couldn't make it up. SEGA said State Department had reported that the donors, the funding note had been well received by donors. You can see why I'm worried, because if you are to have a genuine peace process, it needs to be genuine. You don't want to have money being siphoned off, I'm sorry to say, ahead of an election, into people's pockets. It needs to be seen to be genuine. And this is not the beast. Just one last thing before we finish, or a couple of things. Lessons from this, putting money in is dangerous. Money incentivizes the continuation of armed groups and militias in Afghanistan. Also, it doesn't incentivize Taliban at least to put down their arms. I mean, there's been a lot of assertions that the Taliban fight for money. At least they don't put down their arms for money. So that's one thing. Secondly, the international powers have been completely incompetent at following the money. They've been continually exploited by Afghan politicians and commanders. And what you've had is these programs of fuel corruption. And they fueled inequality. They fueled, I'd say, a privileging of armed men and the leaders of armed men. So, again, really bad for civilians and women in particular. Thirdly, for this sort of thing to work, you need a genuine peace process. Otherwise, just don't start it. And fourthly, I'd say, and this is a really sort of general remark, keep development and incentivizing security separate. Once you start having the military funding development as a means to try and create peace, you end up with lots of wasted money, lots of graft, and it doesn't really help poor Afghans. So that's the last point I'd make. So we know what hasn't worked in terms of the last 17 years, in terms of trying to reduce violence by trying to reduce the number of armed men. And I feel I'm going to pass on to you now, Nilifo. Because I think you're going to talk about what has worked. Is that correct? I don't know. Is that a good segue? Yeah, I'm a very optimistic person, so I give opportunities. Good. Well, thank you very much, Kat. Shall I start as well? Please. All right. Good afternoon or evening, everyone. I would like to start with a very positive note of being in the peace building from last at least 15, 16 years, both academically and as a practitioner. I would like to say that I'm very optimist about peace process in Afghanistan. Why? Because of looking at the civil movement in various provinces from last, at least a couple of years, we have seen that people are craving for peace and people have taken their own steps now and decided to step in. For me, I would see peace not as a political settlement. It's not a deal. It's a process, organic, as mentioned in the very first session. So it has its challenges and we are in the middle of those challenges right now. I hope we, as Afghans, will be able to deal with it because this is our process and we own it and it's our peace. So we have to be very much into the process. I would focus on reintegration and peace, particularly, colleagues here has already mentioned the background and processes. I'm going to put some opportunities which already worked on it and have potentials to rather prevent people to join Taliban or help reintegration process further if it's going to start again or if we have a process in the future. I think a fundamental peace process has been through two major stages. I mean, as a whole, if I categorize it, it's reintegration and reconciliation. The reintegration initiative soon is started in 2003, mentioned by KEDA also through DDR, followed by DIAG, and then the establishment of al-Baki forces which have been marked partially a success as the number has been already highlighted here, was a top-down approach. I mean, it's accepted that it should be a top-down approach where the central government strategize the national plan and execute it at prevention and local level through inline ministries. On the other side, the reconciliation process also which involved transitional justice, negotiation with Taliban representative, and regional diplomacy have also re-meant a top-level approach for peace. So all these processes are considered top-level approaches. Though the elite-based local initiative, particularly local commanders, strongmen and some religiously active and known individuals were consulted and involved throughout these stages, but society in large with its multiple sectors have been who could help the reintegration and peace processes has been excluded from the process. Or their role has been symbolic. Let's put it that way if they were even included. So overall, I think that reintegration efforts and peace process efforts in Afghanistan which we are talking about the bottom top consist of a certain set of activities with minimal involvement of people from all walks of life with lack of comprehensive plan to monitor and evaluate reintegrated cases afterwards. No doubt the program had their impact to integrate some but could not ensure full reintegration of illegal armed groups due to lack of inclusiveness of key stakeholder where it resulted in another set of hurdles in peace process. For instance, DDR has further strengthened the local commanders and defeating their rivals and securing governmental and parliamentary positions. DIAC has opened up the government institutions for criminals and tax. So that was kind of another result of both the processes which has been through the stages. Now here's the question who are Taliban, who could be and who can be reintegrated and what are the opportunities exist at local level now and could be created in order to reintegrate or prevent local communities to join them. Based on the evidence, there are two categories of Taliban. The first category is Taliban allied militias largely recruited by local strongmen and second category is those regular fighters directly under the control of military commissions. Now I think it would be challenging to reintegrate those the second category of Taliban who are multinationals and possibly recruited from outside and are under the command of military commissions. It's difficult to reintegrate them and talk about their reintegration at the local level, especially when we are talking. However, the first category of Taliban who are locally recruited reside locally and are part of social networks of either a village, district or province in Afghanistan can be reintegrated in society but certainly with some structural changes within the program and local level. What those structural reform or changes should look like, it's again based on the series of experiences that we have been through reintegration processes. First of all, reintegration of Taliban should be administered and managed locally, not nationally. Why I'm saying that because every province in Afghanistan has its own social and political interpretation of war and peace as our friend from Afghanistan has mentioned very clearly even in some non-Pashtun provinces like Badakshan and Badqis the war with Taliban is not considered a war between armed group insurgents or the government of Afghanistan, rather an epic conflict between Pashtun and non-Pashtun. Similarly, they have their own interpretation of what peace is, what peace and reconciliation is. Peace for some provinces doesn't mean really a political settlement or power balance but for them, they mean yes, more minorities included in the government position for some provinces it means more provision of services and especially economic services to the underdeveloped provinces. So the interpretation of war and peace in provinces it makes think about some structural changes required for overall peace processes especially reintegration to think locally the platform should decide what strategy and what activities should be designed and they should submit to the national government for execution. Now therefore, designing one national plan for reintegration and executing it nationally did not work effectively or I believe will not work effectively throughout the country because it will not buy in people's interest and confidence and people will not trust the process based on my recent interviews with some in Kandahar and Herat most of the people believe that reintegration has been a symbolic efforts of national peace process they don't believe that it was really a genuine organic process so until people do not own the process and trust it they will not cooperate with the process also that's why the conceptual framework of reintegration should remain as a guideline for all the provinces but the implementation consists of assessment of target population to be involved role of local government directorate offices, role of security, private security firms and national security kinds of services or incentive that has to be provided, information dissemination mechanism role of moderate religious group and certainly civil society engagement all these points needs to be decide locally and developed locally local provincial network and local initiative that is already developed by the way by our high peace council and by many many NGOs around the country but they don't have they are fund based they are project based they operate whenever they have funds they don't operate whenever there is no funds so they should be mobilized and empowered I'm not sure about the location of money how it's going to work or not but these consuls or this SHURA could be a platform to further engage more stakeholders in the province at the provincial level and by inclusion over here I mean the people from businesses, the NGOs community centers, Islamic consuls education institution this should be all part of these platforms to make a strategy for reintegration and reconciliation the second aspect which I see would help the process the reintegration process is a negotiating strategy or pact with village and tribal elders at each province level could be helpful and reintegration of armed opposition back in the community and now who should be there in charge at the community level especially when we are talking about villages or district should elect their own representatives to lead the reintegration process a person should not come from the province from the local directorate and lead them they should decide and they should elect about who should be in charge of the reintegration process the other aspect which is attached to it is the deterioration of security overall it has in many, many provinces I traveled recently has damaged the government reputation and building peace and reintegration efforts most of the villages controlled by local strongmen now have a strong justification of illegal armed group controlling their village or district as they believe government cannot secure them anymore therefore building trust and confidence of people in government should be another objective of peace and reintegration process I think it is important to mobilize people at local level and have them cooperate with the process this could certainly happen through maintaining some level of security which is recently offered by President Kaniya this fire could have been an effective strategy but I hope it will go to work still didn't work but until then people will not see any change and decline in violence they probably don't trust any peace and reintegration processes especially during my research as well which is not highlighted in peace and reintegration this is the economic element there is an economic interest at local level that has direct relation with both insurgency and reintegration narcotic trade illegal mining and illegal selling of public lands are three major economic interests the Taliban have in terms of their economic gains from where they generate resources to sustain the fight and also have control of the reputation in almost every province so they pay communities to join them to force them and to sell their lands and they also grab the lands in many cases so it should be an agenda to discuss with them at local level to discuss with community elders at local level how to tackle this especially if they are reintegrating people last but not the least I have seen throughout this time entirely in the peace process that the radicalization of society has also an impact on the entire peace making and peace building initiative I have seen this element an important factor for people joining Taliban and also justifying Taliban cause the religious leaders and scholars have had prominent role an impact on people's opinion and their objectives about Taliban and Taliban objectives so that can those elements of people should be encouraged should be worked on at the local level to dismantle the forces who are encouraging Taliban who are encouraging to join Taliban so this forces has to be supporting and expanding and to conclude I would like to say that Taliban insurgencies in Afghanistan is extremely disorganized and this disorganization is due to lack of consensus mostly among Taliban leadership starting from Kuwait Ashura to Rasulshura we have seen that how disorganized their messages were their disorganization and lack of consensus on some of the movement that they had in Afghanistan so therefore supporting local governance building through building local initiatives in all 34 provinces with focus on people's participation for developing a strategy of reintegration and negotiation could help prevent joining insurgency and Taliban at the local level this is a long-term process I think it will require longer time both the no doubt the organization and institutionalization of such approach at local level but it's important to put more efforts on them at this time especially when our friend Michael Semper said that at the top now everything seems to be blocked so good to put more effort at the local level because it can at least if nothing else at least it could create more confidence and trust and government from people's side thank you great thank you all really a rich set of comments I want to make a couple observations ask a question and then I'll open it up to the audience I mean one thing that I think is striking to me that in the first panel we focused I mean by design on the geopolitical on the ideological on the kind of national political motivations for the conflict but when you look at it and what you hear what I hear from in various ways is that at the more local level there are a lot of practical considerations that are driving this it's armed for security forces militias as protection against others that when you don't believe that you're safe either from the government or from your rivals it's as income and employment for your largely young men but your people and then it's also as a a chip if you will for political inclusion in a system that doesn't necessarily guarantee that otherwise and it's interesting to think about those elements of armed force and conflict as drivers in addition to the kind of larger and vexing geopolitical issues you know Michael you said this explicitly but I want to give the other panelists a chance to weigh in on what I think is a current discussion in Kabul as part of at least a military strategy being to apply pressure on the Taliban through various means militarily pressure on Pakistan and so forth in order to increase the cost of fighting so that they will then leave the fight and I think you said fragmentation makes it more difficult to negotiate I'm just curious from the other panelists perspectives and what you've said as this pressure let's assume increases on the Taliban what are actual incentives to give up the fight at the local level and you've answered Kate that providing money is not the answer but are there things at the community level that could be done or is the fragmentation approach you know not the right one who wants to lead on that well in general this war will continue until one side loses its backing I can't see any other way unless there's a peace process so I can't see the war finishing in any other way because there's too many drivers to conflict and they're not really ideological I would say it's more the economy of the war and the way that it's somehow the default position in Afghanistan from both Afghans and its backers so actually making peace is a much braver and more courageous and more difficult thing than just carrying on fighting or just carrying on funding or supporting the war so one of the problems with that let's take from the American point of view the fear would be if you don't carry on supporting the government then the government collapses and you have a civil war and then you have a more destabilized area which is more conducive to group-cycle Qaeda and ISKP operating I'd say that's the reason why the Americans are still involved in Afghanistan along with nuclear armed Pakistan next door if you stop the support then the because the state is highly dependent on foreign aid I think it's about 45% of GDP is foreign aid and the armed forces can't operate without the foreign support it's basically you're allowing the war to continue but it also means that the elites at the center don't actually have to take really full responsibility for the country they don't have to generate the income for the people they don't have to run the country properly because of the foreign support so I think it's a bit of a bind really as to what you do as a country that wants Afghanistan to prosper and doesn't want to see total state collapse as we saw in 1992 with the withdrawal of Soviet funds now I would say after 2016 the territory being lost to the Taliban and the Afghan government really showing no ability to sort of galvanize its own resources or its own armed forces to protect people to protect its own people and protect territory then either the US government had to either cut its losses or support if you're supporting then there has to be an end game you can't support the current Afghanistan and you can't support it forever because there isn't a way out of this it's a status quo that carries on as war so I would say that on a sort of general theme if you're supporting the war you have to also be looking at ways to support the peace otherwise there's no point whether you walk away now or you walk away in 10 years time it sort of doesn't matter you can't find a way out of the impasse whereby the foreign support also enables the government to be not very good at what it does and to not be inclusive and you know for the elites to bicker over appointments while they're losing territory in the sticks I would say at the moment I would say the US military in Kabul anyway gets this I think they've turned a corner and said Lisa Curtis yeah Lisa was the normal bland sort of government statements that we tend to get it was actually very interesting in terms of putting peace at the front of what's happening to move on to actually something practical is more difficult but I think you do have to have both or you shouldn't actually have either military without serious support for a peace process won't win the war but also it won't lead to peace by itself thanks any other comments on that yeah no no let me go I'll follow I think there's I believe there should be another approach to peace process you're right Kat I mean at some point it will not be any money even now the money has shrunk to many many efforts in Afghanistan and that's why the peace initiative that I mentioned at local level I have direct interaction with many of them most of them stop their work even most of them stop working with people with communities and there are less peace initiatives right now at the community level because there is no donor funding anymore so I think the entire peace process in Afghanistan unfortunately has been treated as a project as a donor funded project nor as a process that could rely that could take on without even funding it has developed a strategize based on that particular funding that was available to it so I think that has to be taken out that approach has to be taken out and it's still early it's still at good stages if we take the whole peace process out of this blob of funding international funding scenario that's why local initiative over here work very well because until and unless people will not see that's their process and it's only based on certain amount of fund if they reach they will never cooperate with the process and they will never think about having a genuine role in the processes and at the back of my mind there's always something as an Afghan also that's something really I mean worry me about unless and until Afghanistan is weak both military wise and economic wise as an Afghan I don't really see a prospect of peace I don't see as Barney has mentioned the war the decades of war maybe tomorrow we will not have Taliban we will have another entity fighting so Afghanistan needs I think it should be an element of peace process strengthening economy and strengthening military should be an element and a component of peace process I think this too can lead us to sustainable peace process I mean sustainable means that not a particular dealer or political settlement for timely matter but something that could lay a framework for future for future progress of Afghanistan the basic question you asked is what is the local deal well the thing about the local deal in Afghanistan it's very simple it's we don't kill you you don't kill us that's the essence of the local deal it's an armistice now it may sound very crude and simple but at a time when actually many many have come to question the conflict I mean that is that is the first deal that people need that they that's what that's what we hear from civilian population they desire and those in the Taliban who have sort of moved beyond the stage of in sense the the earnest desire for martyrdom that's what they're concerned about and in terms of design of approaches to the the drivers of conflict having a very simple first move is very attractive if you ask me as to what are the contents of the the settlement in Afghanistan which will deliver sustainable peace I mean it's got lots of chapters we're talking about property rights we're talking about the role of Islam in the constitution we're talking about the reconstitution of the security forces yeah this is an impressive list we heard some references to it earlier on in the first panel but that's going to take an awful long time to reach the confidence which is required to reach agreement on say the 10 chapters required for the broad bay settlement that does not exist it is impossible to achieve it you cannot get the compromise required because people don't trust each other to you know to be a bit flexible on one on the other the chapter which matters for us so that you get the chapter that matters for you so the local deal which is we don't kill you you don't kill us it's incredibly simple it is actually doable and it brings another component to it which can be explicit or implicit which is a re-establishment of relationships an agreement to deal with each other which is required of course the process of building the confidence that you require to work through all those chapters which are involved in the real settlement in Afghanistan and when it comes down to the thinking about timelines and optimism looking around there's some veterans here, I'm looking at Marvin here Marvin can sit here and he can envisage you can think through the four decades of conflict already because you've witnessed every single one of them and I'm so glad to see you here today able to study them offer wisdom to those who do not have that depth of engagement it's realistic that you and I Marvin will live to see a decline in violence I'm not going to bet on either or both of us being around to see the great to hold the golden grail of the sustainable peace settlement but the first bit is important the first bit is important it can turn the trend around it can restore hope it can move people it doesn't give you the sustainable peace but it can give you the peace process so that's the importance of the bottom up it's doable it delivers a dividend it can restore hope it's a situation where there's a real crisis of confidence that anything works a botched international intervention that generated so much hope maybe unrealistic in 2001 it's a source of cynicism when it comes down to 2018 so a bottom up process which delivers on one very simple fundamental thing which brings down violence and the fear that Afghans have of being killed of their children not coming home alive in the evening that's what's required to get a peace process underway can I just say one thing it's not in isolation you need the top level buy-in and we've seen this with various peace deals that have been done in Helmand 2006 and 2010 where locals actually got really good deals between Taliban, local Taliban and local elders and they were sabotaged either by bits of the international military bombing the peacemakers or by very cynical people at provincial and central government level who did not want these deals to happen for sort of petty political reasons so don't underestimate the ability of the big powers whether that's provincial or central government or the international military to actually sabotage bottom up peacemaking and I do think at least I think the situation now in Kabul both on the military and certainly on the military side is much better it's more aware of these things I stick my neck out there are of course people who still think the main name is killing Taliban but generally I'd say you need the top you need the top down support for these otherwise they end up being sabotaged and you end up with increased violence I'm going to get audience next I'll just circle back to your original question which I think was getting at whether as a sort of military strategy you can use the bottom up to get to the top down either by military pressure or by trying to appeal them away to a reintegrative process and I would just say the takeaway I think from all our different contributions on this panel is that maybe that's not the right way to conceive the bottom up either because the military pressure just didn't work at the height of power will it work this territory control like Kate said there's often been inadvertent consequences in terms of that military pressure inadvertently scuppering local peace deals and then also like Kate brought up this attempt to peel off when you don't have this top level trust has been sort of fake reintegrative efforts it hasn't been the actual fighters so I think that is not the way strategy or way to think about it okay let me see a show of hands let me get the lady in the middle then you and then at the end and then we'll go for a second round hi I just want to say real quickly thank you for taking time out of your busy schedules and thank you also for clarifying what this reintegration would look like what the local forces and local Taliban but I feel like that phase is a two part question after we do conclude a peace compromise and if I included U.S. military pulling out how can we secure implementation and security especially if all local factions have a piece of this government or if that is possibly could not allowing all factions into the forces in effect cause another civil crisis in Afghanistan or even worse an election that could be rigged or threatened and I know Mr. Simple did say that we don't kill you and you won't kill us but as you can see history does show that is not always true and there is a lot of Afghan blood on Afghanistan's hands so I was wondering what you think would be the best part of this reintegration Axie can you hand the microphone to one of you Thank you. Unfortunately this may be more of a comment than a question but there is a question in it I have worked in areas where people have agreed that they are not going to kill you and you are not going to kill me then there is no way to support themselves they have no opportunity to work to support their families there has got to be the economic component that allows people to support their livelihood if any piece of this is going to be sustained I don't hear enough of that in this conversation Thanks I promise the gentleman over there if we can get a microphone to him Thank you very much. My name is Mouheb Jabarkhel I was a former Fulbright and now leading Afghans for Afghanistan's development organization I would start with a quote from my father who is a veteran of the anti-Soviet war and he says that in Afghanistan's context peace cannot be brought by force nor by begging it can be forced it can be brought by begging you have to find the root causes address those root causes and then peace will prevail it seems in the Afghan context for a very long time those two things have been happening either it has been forced in or there is a sort of a begin for it that somehow peace will prevail now what are the root causes and what are the root causes I think there are three major things that still does not seem to be targeted first, what Nilofra also mentioned economic under development in Afghanistan Afghanistan economy has become a war economy people will have incentive to grow poppy if there isn't an alternative there has not been any significant focus on a viable alternative economic development that can bring in people second, governance I think the governance structure that is there and overall the way it functions is not effective, it's significantly ineffective even in the elections one party won and we couldn't resolve it the resolution was not to stick to the rules of the game but to create a coalition government that continues to contribute to a very ineffective approach of governance and finally those destructive regional politics regional players play a very significant role in the Afghan quagmire there has not been any approach in dealing with all those three things so my question is do you agree that there has not been a holistic plan to address all those three things economic under development governance issues and of course regional politics thank you let me go down the row and just get reactions to what you'd like economic element which is where my heart goes a lot in peace processes I agree with you I mean yes I don't remember exactly which year but BBC released once a report serving people in Kandahar, Helmand and some other provinces, I don't recall now it was I think in 2004 or five somewhere they had interviewed with people joining Taliban and I remember they recall those interviews most of the interviewees were saying that they were joining Taliban was paying them $300 and government of Afghanistan was paying them $50 as a permanent salary so the economic element that you have highlighted has a lot to do with insurgency in Afghanistan, has a lot to do with Taliban and community people joining Taliban insurgency people don't have food to eat they don't have shelter to live they don't have food for their children so that aspect is specifically yes missing from the peace processes there's a lot of talk about it there's a lot of media around the country from last more than a decade now that really focus on this particular element to prevent people joining Taliban insurgency as my friend over here mentioned a lot as well and yeah there has been a lack of comprehensive plans I mean that could really focus particularly on this economic element and this is not that surprising now I remember in 2002 we have raised at Kabul level group of us have raised this element a lot that Afghanistan needs mega economic project to fight with insurgency and that was an issue with so many of us from civil society from government from education institution we have raised at the palace also that a lot to the international community to USA the State Department we went and we knocked every door most of us under the comprehensive plan of peace because the context is very weak economically and if you don't take care of this issue people will join insurgency very very quickly so yes my answer is there hasn't been a comprehensive plan on this when was the BBC report? I think it was 2004 I don't recall 2004 I think it's wrong if you look at all the academic and non-academic research on why the insurgency started certainly why it started it was to do with predatory government and predatory US special forces and not only singling out Taliban who'd surrendered defeated and gone home but Afghan rivals of Afghan power holders very very very clear that this was to do with people's feelings of injustice no I don't think you can say that's the reason for the insurgency now but that was how it started and certainly 2004 I don't think it was to do with money and if it's to do with money God forbid we are stuck because Afghanistan is a poor country and the recent figures are that most people are getting poorer I think the absolute poverty rates is now 56% of people living in absolute poverty it's gone up we've had lots and lots of money spent on development some people have got very rich but a large number of people have not benefited from the intervention and there's greater inequality so if you know if poverty was what was driving people to fight then we're finished we're finished I think all of the the evidence is that other things at least at least the economy does not work in terms of persuading people to not fight and I think you've seen that repeatedly over the last 17 years I think the war economy is important but it doesn't benefit ordinary people it benefits a few people at the elite level whether it's narcotics or illegal mining that's one thing but it's also contracts in the security ministries ghost soldiers ghost police a couple of things that I think were really telling for me when I was looking at the Ministry of Interior and why that continues not to function properly one of the issues was when you have a little check post in the middle of nowhere the people on it are really really vulnerable to Taliban attack plus it doesn't actually protect people and it doesn't protect territory so from a military point of view it doesn't work and it puts the people on the check post at greater risk so Resolute Support noticed this they noticed the really high casualty rates of soldiers and police on these little check posts and said we need to have a different way of trying to protect territory and it's better if you have mobile units and they had pushed back from some of the Governors and some of the Generals who were pocketing money from people on check posts extorting money from travellers and the money goes up the chain so you have the people in leadership positions who would rather that their people were vulnerable to Taliban attack than their income source and this is the sort of I mean I think this is the sort of economic issues that we should be looking at it's not that it's poverty poverty is not the driver of the insurgency per se but it's the way that people can make money out of the war and in ways that don't actually affect them and just one quickly one thing quickly that Ashraf Ghani said before the election which I think is really true is that it's poor people who pay for this war it's poor people who join up they haven't got other advantages but they're not the people who benefit and he was talking about the ANSF they're not the people that benefit and the people that benefit aren't really suffering so let me get quick reactions from the other two panelists and then thanks to the benefits of a very smooth transportation system the Ambassador has joined us so I want to give him 10 minutes at the end I'll see my time to Michael and the Ambassador just for short Yes on the issue of livelihoods and the conflict Kate presented very codently that's that's how it is this was driven primarily by justice concerns but then of course there is a conflict economy which has taken hold over the or it has developed over the 18 years of the current phase of the conflict I absolutely agree that livelihoods would be fundamental in moving towards a sustainable peace while also remembering Kate's appropriate warnings that just throwing money at any promising local initiative is likely to poison it at source so you have to get a balance there now part of that balance is that the big picture is that we've moved beyond this idea of somehow a messy insurgency and a formal system of government which is being rebelled against Afghanistan is now in a system which is basically a state of dualism whereby as far as as far as the lived reality of many people in the country they're living the reality of the Taliban's Islamic Emirates, they didn't choose it that's just the reality that they experience maybe many people because in Afghanistan as a country where people move around people have relationships over long distances in a sense they experience both the Taliban's Islamic Emirates system and the system of Kabul Government and they have to sort of to navigate the two now if you're talking about prospects of economic development having two competing authorities with a claim over people and territory makes it really difficult to proceed with economic development and to take advantage of all the opportunities to which there are there inside Afghanistan you're talking about overcoming the dualism when I talked about the second part of the deal for bottom-up initiatives beyond you don't kill us, we don't kill you is a restoration of initiatives opening opportunities whereby that dualism is sort of broken down so you're increasing opportunity for trade and investment and service delivery basically that's got to be the hope of course there has to be a dividend it's the more that it's possible to generate this kind of sense of organic dividend the economy works more to the benefit of the citizens that's likely to be a more durable one and one which is catching than just adding a few incentive payments for fake former Taliban however there is an important incentive incentive system here that the choice for senior members of Taliban in going along with the peace process is actually going to be part of in a sense which patronage system that they're involved in because being a Taliban commander for many of them is not about being the radicalized individual who is dedicated his life at the price of being prepared to go to heaven more quickly than the rest of us it's about being a key figure in a patronage system where he has relationships with people from other families in his area who entrust their young men to him on the basis that they will look after him so that you basically he in a in the local peace deal you have to give him access to some of that patronage without killing people you know what he becomes more of an uncle than a commander so the deal so you have to have you have to redirect the patronage system pro-peace and you create opportunities for overcoming the current dualism then local peace deals can help build the basis of a sustainable peace Scott just to add one point briefly in terms of economic lens I think I was not clear I didn't mean to say that poverty is the only driver of conflict in Afghanistan but I would again want to stress that poverty is one of the major components of drivers of conflict and if the government has had to be considered from the beginning under the plan of peace and reconciliation I think some of the problems that we can see right now and people and community joining at local level I think that could resolve some of those problems but I never said that's the only the only drivers of conflict with apologies to those that still had questions I want to end this panel with closing remarks from the ambassador who I will introduce in a minute but first let me ask for a round of applause and thank you to all of our panelists and then as our speakers leave the stage and I'll invite you to head over to the left let me welcome ambassador Hamdullah Mahib who's the Afghan ambassador to the US he's served in that role very capably for the last several years through presidential transition here and this is a strategy that has seen sustained US support both civilian and military for the Afghan government which I think as we've heard here earlier today is badly needed and it's a strong partnership that certainly we on the stage hope that endures we've heard today I think a lot of challenges for the peace process and for the nationalism that there are new things happening Ambassador earlier there were remarks about the two offers that the President Ghani has made both at the Kabul process and then also today announcing a unilateral ceasefire and so there are discussions of peace there perhaps opportunities although it won't come easily and so with that as the stage let me invite you up here to take a look at the remarks Good afternoon I think one of the advantages of arriving late in not having heard all the remarks means that I will stick to my script so colleagues in distinguished guests thank you all for being here today to Nancy, Andrew, Scott, Johnny and all of our friends at USIP thank you for hosting today's event thank you also to all the panelists I would also like to thank Stephen Hadley who is a dear friend of Afghanistan USIP is one of the most important places in Washington to have a public discussion about peace in Afghanistan so I thank you for your commitment to this issue I would like to close today's event by expanding on two areas of a complex and multi-layered concept of peace first what achieving a sustainable peace in Afghanistan entails and second what the Afghan Government put on the table and what we are doing to pursue peace sustainable peace will not be delivered in a negotiations on and a political settlement with the Taliban alone a political settlement is but one part of a complicated and layered process of achieving sustainable peace what matters equally is the peace building work that precedes a peace deal and the maintenance works that follows it is dealing with multiple issues which have manifested over the decades as a legacy of violence warlordism impunity corruption injustice insurgency international terrorism a drug mafia that continues to respond to a growing global demand all this and we are still a very young democracy grappling with providing services to our people ensuring the integrity of democracy and building our institutions with this context there are six core building blocks which must be considered in peace building process one we must focus on those reconcilable Afghan elements of the Taliban who have legitimate grievances this is our target audience for a peace deal we must address the legitimate grievances of those Afghans who have taken up arms against their government we must answer those difficult questions logistical, practical and emotional of how a nation forgives how an insurgent is reintegrated in what drove him to the gun in the first place to make sure he is not driven to the gun again the government's successful deal with Hizbi Islami over a year ago gives us experience on how to structure a deal in what questions need to be addressed two we must create a regional consensus on peace, stability and economic growth the region can either be divided by conflict or united by shared economic benefit there is a regional component to the conflict playing in Afghanistan which the United States administration and the Afghan government are both taking very seriously so this element cannot be overlooked three we will maintain political stability in democratic integrity through elections which will hold in October and again in 2019 this is not easy to do in the current security situation but we will and we must the Afghan people are proud of their right to vote and they are risking their lives to claim that right by casting a vote we as a nation are marking our commitment to democracy so that peace will be maintained through the ballot not bullet four the government with the support from the international community must continue to earnestly and diligently implement President Ghani's rigorous comprehensive reform agenda which is articulated in Afghanistan's national peace and development framework we will present our progress on reforms and emphasize their centrality in Geneva Ministerial Conference in November through reforms we are improving governance excuse me through reforms we are improving governance, rule of law and service delivery thus rebuilding the bruised and battered social contract between the Afghan government and the Afghan people the goal is to reform institutions to serve the Afghan people to create citizens focused governance and trust building I'd like to thank your colleague here Bill Byrd for being one of the only analysts in Washington or anywhere to scrutinize some of the those very important reforms they are critical part of sustaining peace I want to emphasize rule of law justice and anti-corruption here which are hugely underestimated components of peace society and warlordism come from a legacy of violence that may, that my generation is grappling with there are groups of individuals who have gotten very wealthy from this war and continue to there are warlords and strongmen who continue to terrorize the Afghan people and perpetuate a culture of impunity and corruption such criminals also include the drug mafia who perpetuate the conflict and corruption the drug trade and the transnational the transnational criminal networks are responding to a global demand and thus the issue requires a global response we cannot overlook these issues it's not easy and it takes time to bring systematic and sustainable changes but we are seeing progress already from the government's anti-corruption and justice sector reforms efforts and we are pushing forward with support from the international community in short we must confront impunity terror violence in all its forms 5. we must continue to build the afghan national defense and security forces to ensure strong defense of citizens and our nation we will continue to pursue a military campaign against those combatants who simply are not reconcilable and have no place in afghan society or politics with aish al qaeda elements and other foreign fighters 6. we must create economic opportunities especially for those marginalized including youth women and those living in poverty you've seen the numbers and we just spoke about it a few minutes ago almost half of children in afghanistan remain out of school because of conflict and the number of those living in poverty increased since 2012 we will continue to invest in our people's welfare with education healthcare and economic prospects so that any peace deal will reach that we reach will not be in jeopardy these are the essential elements and the government is proceeding on each front simultaneously in terms of a peace deal what we have the afghan government and people put on the table earlier this week the heist peace council convened a gathering of over 3000 islamic scholars from across afghanistan they issued a fatwa against suicide attacks and terrorism and called for a ceasefire today president ghani showed the government strong support for that unprecedented fatwa by ordering a ceasefire against the afghan taliban from the 27th of ramadan until the fifth day of edil fitr we will continue against daish al-qaeda in all other transnational terrorist groups the ayn dsf will take action if attacked and will continue to protect civilians however we will not target afghan taliban during the ceasefire president ghani's decision to declare ceasefire is rooted in the government's firm commitment to peace and is an act of support for the fatwa issued by the olama this follows president ghani's unconditional offer of peace to the taliban at the kabel process conference in february this year there is now a national and also international consensus for peace in may indonesia hosted a conference of islamic scholars from afghanistan pakistan and indonesia in support of the afghan peace process similar gatherings will follow to maintain the momentum gathered by the international community in working for peace the afghan people are also absolutely fed up with being caught in the ceasefire i am 34 years old and i have never seen a day of peace in my country in my entire life my generation is absolutely fed up with this and we are deeply invested in peace it unites us peaceful civilian protests in cities around the country have emerged from helman kandahar, nangarhar, herat and kabel a group of young men marching to kabel one of them on crutches from helman to kabel to protest violence will reach the capital city in the next few weeks they will be warmly welcomed by young peace activists and all citizens of kabel city afghans want peace in my generation are taking risks to stand for it these afghans in our security forces are our heroes and we must say what has the taliban put on the table further death and destruction since january they have pursued a brutal new strategy of directly targeting civilians in crowded urban spaces killing hundreds of innocent afghans shortly after the afghan olama issued a fatwa against terrorism this week they were attacked taliban have attacked hospitals schools children sport games, civil society organizations media and journalists and citizens registering to vote moving forward we must stay the course of building our security forces in maintaining pressure on the taliban while we keep the door open for peace talks at the same time we must continue to earnestly implement our reforms agenda to deal head on with corruption in our government to deliver services and to offer economic opportunities we must repair the social contract between the afghan people and the government peace building is an interconnected process that is at once urgent yet at the same time complex and multi-layered if we ignore any part of this puzzle we risk compromising its legitimacy and sustainability we are looking now to other countries that have dealt with same issues such as columbia i'll also take this opportunity to make a request to my distinguished colleagues here today your knowledge on afghanistan is perhaps unrivaled in the united states so please use your expertise to also examine and think about these building blocks of peace and continue to contribute in a constructive way to the afghan-led peace building efforts i thank you all once again for your contribution to this important issue and usip for organising this in many other conferences in support of the afghan-led peace initiative thank you very much thank you very much ambassador mohib for those very powerful closing remarks i was sitting there thinking we should have probably named this thing a long discussion about the long search for peace in afghanistan so thank you all very much for sticking with us bearing with us today for this important discussion again a special thanks to lisa kurtis for joining us this morning taking time out of her busy schedule and for ambassador mohib for coming here straight from the airport thanks to our panelists very much for your very interesting and important remarks certainly highlighting many of the challenges but also talking about some of the prospects for peace moving forward i'd like to thank all of you and those who joined us online and leave you again with usip's tagline that peace is possible again let's not be so skeptical about the challenges that we forget so thank you once again for joining us today