 Senior National Security Studies Fellow here at New America Foundation, formally the Senior Insurgency Advisor in RCE in 2010 and into the early part of this year. So I've been asked to moderate here today for our session on when the protectors become the problem on the problems of human rights abuses or alleged abuses. In Afghanistan, I would ask everyone here, we are being webcast, so again please turn off your cell phones, you know, there'll be one of you who doesn't do that and that's the person whose cell phone is gonna, you know, who's gonna get a call at 1 o'clock today. But please turn those off so we're not interrupted by someone trying to get you during this event. So with me today, we have two people who have written on this recently. To my right is Matthew Akin. He's currently a graduate fellow at New York University's Capcom Kvorkian Center for Near Eastern Studies. He's reported from Afghanistan, Iran and Pakistan. He's an independent journalist. He's received a long list of journalist awards, splits his time between New York and Kabul, and received a Bachelor of Arts in Political Studies at Queen's University. His piece is not the one that's on the cover, but is in the Atlantic this month on the massacre in Afghanistan. And we welcome him here today. Thank you. To my left, your right is Rachel Reed. She's currently the Senior Regional Advisor for the Open Society Foundation, supervising their policy work in Afghanistan and Pakistan. But her most recent report came from her last job as the Afghan Analyst at Human Rights Watch, having spent three of the last four years living in Afghanistan, where she's written on a range of issues including militias, Afghan local police, reconciliation, reintegration, and human rights. She's a former BBC reporter, and she graduated from Oxford University with a degree in Politics, Philosophy, and Economics. What we'll do today is I'll give each of them 10 to 15 minutes. We'll start with Matthew and then go to Rachel. I'll ask them a few questions and then we'll turn it over to the audience for the instant interaction, and I'll give rules at that point. So without further ado, Matthew. Thanks. Well, over the last month has been sort of an unprecedented series of reports about human rights violations that are ongoing in Afghanistan, committed by Afghan security forces, allied with the government, and with the U.S. and international military forces there. You're probably familiar with most of them, there's, of course, Rachel's excellent, amazing report on abuses by militias, most notably the Afghan local police program. There is a report by the Open Society Institute on Night Raid. There's a UN report that came out on Monday about systematic torture in Afghan prisons run by the intelligence service and the police. Julius Cavendish, a reporter in Afghanistan, had a piece out in time last week about commander Azizullah, who is a really important ASG, sort of a militia commander in Paktia, I forget, and he has been committing atrocious human rights violations. And then, of course, in The Atlantic, I've written this piece about General Abdul Razik, who is one of the most important Afghan military commanders in the south, a very key U.S. ally who's had an ongoing campaign of human rights violations. So, one of the reasons why we're pleased to have this event is because we think it's the time to have a conversation about human rights abuses in Afghanistan, because people are sort of, they do have one eye on the door towards transition, and a leverage there in terms of the amount of people we have, the amount of money we're spending, is only going to be declining over the coming years. So it's really a crucial moment in terms of how do we want to shape the institutions that will be our legacy in Afghanistan, right? And right now, as these reports have demonstrated, I believe, we've been building them in a way that leaves almost absolute impunity for the powerful to torture, abuse, rape the powerless. So, obviously, that's something that needs to be changed. And I think Rachel will do a much better job of getting into the bigger picture and talking about recommendations. I'm a journalist, so I don't deal with recommendations or solutions to problems. But I thought, it might be interesting to hear a bit about the specifics of the case that I reported on. So, as background general, Abdul Razik is sort of this typical rags to riches story that in many ways characterizes the post-2001 period in Afghanistan, where you've had many of these warlords who are in exile in Pakistan who have been driven out by the Taliban rise again. So in Razik's case, he's rather young for a general, he's 33, but his uncle and his sort of patriarchal family is related to this notorious commander named Esmat Muslim. And another one of his uncles was hung from the barrel of a tank in Takhtiful in Kandahar by the Taliban, one of the first notorious scumbag commanders that the Taliban killed quite publicly and established their reputation as these Avengers and this force for very harsh justice. So Razik's return in many ways was symbolic of what the new order would be like. And since then, he's gone from being a border police commander in this key border crossing of Spinboldak to one of the most important military commanders in the south and certainly in Kandahar. And he, in May, was appointed the acting chief of police for Kandahar province after his predecessor Han Muhammad was assassinated. So Razik in 2006 was involved in a massacre of civilians, basically a tribal enemy of his Shin Norzai. He managed to lure to a house in Kabul where him and his 15 companions were drugged and they were kidnapped and taken by vehicle south to Kandahar to Spinboldak. They were taken out to the desert, executed in a dry gully. And then it was framed in such a way, because the killing of these men was too big to hide, it was framed in such a way as to present them as Taliban infiltrators. I mean, Razik announced in the AP the next day that he had gone down there and fought a battle with Mullah Shin and his Taliban companions. The reason we know about this is because rather unusually at the time, there was actually a proper police investigation done by the criminal investigative department of the Ministry of Interior, partly on the intervention of the European Union official Michael Semple, who was the deputy head of the EU at the time. And so they collected a very thorough dossier of photos which you can find in the report, shell casings. I mean, they established conclusively through witness testimony and forensic evidence that Razik committed this massacre. Now this evidence was presented to Karzai in Kabul and it was well known in a number of embassies. And I think, you know, if there was a high water mark of when there was real accountability for these sorts of human rights abuses in Afghanistan, this might have been in 2006, there was some other things going on with the police reform. But anyhow it broke. The report was suppressed. Razik was soon back in command of the border. And he's going on to have quite a remarkable career for a 33-year-old Brigadier General. Now the other aspect of the story, which again I deal with in the article I think is quite important, is that at the time the United States Embassy was aware of the allegations of the massacre. In fact, they reported it where rather the Bureau of Democracy, Rights and Labor in the State Department reported in their country report, which they do for every country in the world every year. But in 2006, for Afghanistan, they reported Commander Abdul Razik was alleged to have killed 16 rivals on the pretext they were Taliban. So to my mind, you don't print something in your country human rights report unless it's credible. So these are credible allegations of a gross violation of human rights committed by Abdul Razik, which is precisely the language that's specified in the 1997 law known as the Leahy Amendment that passed named after its most vocal advocate, Senator Patrick Leahy. It was passed in response to abuses by Colombian paramilitary units during the war on drugs. But essentially prohibits by law the training or funding of foreign military units where there's credible allegations of gross violations of human rights by that unit. And the reason it targets the units is because it was intended to be a more granular tool than previous human rights languages which sort of required a blanket cutoff of aid and actually never got applied because you couldn't end a strategic relationship with some country because of human rights violations. It was too imperative. So these actually target specific units. So the question is why if the State Department knew for the past five years that Razik has been involved in a massacre, have we been training and funding Abdul Razik? And it suggests, and this is important because, yes, it's on the table now. ISAF, you may have heard, especially in response to the UN report, is taking corrective measures to stop certain detainee transfers and is quite shocked and appalled to hear about torture that's been going on for the last 10 years. But I think the case of Abdul Razik shows that whatever mechanisms we're supposed to have to ensure accountability for our legal obligations towards human rights and never mind our moral obligations are effectively broken. And that might account for one of the reasons why there's been torture going on under our noses in Afghan detention facilities for 10 years. It took a single UN human rights team to explain that to us. Anyhow, I'm sure we'll talk more about this as we go on. I just wanted to sort of explain some of the upshots of this particular case. And I'll turn it over to Rachel now. Thank you. Well, first of all, I'd all recommend that you all read Matt's report in the Atlantic. It's a fantastic bit of reporting. And having tried to look into some of the abuses of Razik last year, I know how hard he worked to pin it down. He did a great service for all of us in laying it out. So clearly in two pieces he's done. I'll talk a little bit about the work that I did for Human Rights Watch on militias and this new sort of experiment in a kind of local community force or local militia called the Afghan local police. And tried to respond to Matt's suggestion that I might have some solutions. I think you should be wary of anyone who thinks they have solutions for Afghanistan, but at least some recommendations perhaps. So I started working on, I mean, I've been interested in the question of militias for several years. They, I mean, since around 2005, 2006, well, in fact earlier than that, but practically for the whole of the last 10 years, there have been experiments in using local militia forces, private security forces, irregular armed forces of various kinds. And the international community has backed various of these, you know, every year or 18 months or so since I've been working in Afghanistan, which I first went there in 2006. There's been one of these on the table. This, and it's not just the Afghan government, I mean the National Intelligence Services in Afghanistan have started reactivating a number of militias in recent years. So what we've seen increasingly is a proliferation of armed groups. And, you know, they've got various characteristics and various levels of abuse. And the US, which has been involved in trying to set up this local police force for the past year, has recognized that there have been problems with these groups and has tried to put in place a series of measures to guard against potential abuse to try and ensure there is some vetting with limited, well, with varying degrees of success, I would say. But there are bigger questions really to be asked, I think, about whether this is the appropriate response to the instability in Afghanistan and whether you risk basically exacerbating instability rather than reducing it. So just briefly to run through some of the kinds of abuses that we found with this local Afghan local police force, which is purely set up by the special forces with the Ministry of Interior, but it's very much driven by US special forces. There are various people in the Afghan government who basically said that this was sort of rammed down their throat. Although various others have profited from it and I think that was part of the reason for the Afghan government's concern is that they saw that this would create yet another competition for resources. So special forces go into villages, they're spending a lot of time there, they're also doing a whole range of other measures. They have these things called village stability platforms and they're meant to be doing a much more of a 360 look at what the local needs are in terms of development and security and the whole gamut of needs. But central to it is this local police force. We found incidents involving murder, rape, land grabbing, taking a bushel which is basically a kind of informal taxation. And various incidents where the local police force overstepped their role in terms of their rules of engagement by doing things like raids, detentions, sometimes basically playing out local conflicts with local rivals, but now wearing a police uniform and having the backing potentially of US special forces. Sometimes the problems that we were looking at had an ethnic dimension based on a tribal dimension where it basically exacerbated or polarised further local conflict. If you imagine a situation where you've got a series of competing factions and suddenly you come in and you give one group in a district maybe 200 armed men and you put them under a command of one commander, you've dramatically altered the balance of power in that area. This often leads to retaliation and more conflict. It was an example in Baglan where just at the end of August the largely Pashtun local police force got into conflict with the largely Andorabi or Tajik national police force that resulted in a series of firefights and numerous deaths. You also saw a similar situation in Urazgan where again there were ethnic divisions between the local police and the national police that again resulted in detentions and at least one death. Those are some of the areas where it seems to be most destabilising whether these pre-existing conflicts which frankly is true of so many parts of the country whether it's ethnic or political or tribal or inter-tribal. So that's a consistent problem that came up and frankly some of this may have happened anyway but the point is that this was happening in uniforms and it may very well have been exacerbated by this kind of introduction of additional power and resources that was granted. And we see similarly in the north where the intelligence services have been most active as opposed to the US special forces is in the north and it's very much along the lines of old kind of commander networks particularly Jamiat networks that have gained most control or used the militia tool most often. And there's been such a proliferation of militias there are hundreds potentially because sometimes I'm using the word militia at the Afghan Centre for Arbaki and it can be a very small group of people those of you who grew up in villages you imagine a group of eight armed men can basically hold a village to ransom and that's certainly what I saw there was a I was in Kundi's last year and visiting looking into the case of a gang rape where for instance a local Mullah had taken a shine to two sisters in the local area he'd been harassing them one of the women dared to challenge him publicly he then got the local militia and they went and gang raped the two sisters four of them and there was no justice Matt indicated this is a major part of the problem it's the impunity within which these things are taking place that is most pernicious there is nothing you can do if you're a nobody and this happens to you and I think sometimes particularly from the US the international military there can be a rather black and white view of the landscape in Afghanistan they talk often about good guys which tend to usually mean our guys rather than actually a better side of a conflict because I think if you're an Afghan it often doesn't look like that and there are people you talk to in a place like Kundi's who would frankly rather be living under de facto Taliban control where at least there is some kind of law and order albeit brutal rather than live under these anarchic militias against whom nobody has to have any power because the way they work is that they generally have networks that extend into the heart of government so the various political factions have their power blocks within government and they'll get protection from the local police chief or the local governor or whoever is their local ally which precludes any form of accountability and when these militias or local police forces are also associated with special forces that also acts on the base of our research as a significant barrier to accountability and when we would talk to national police about why they haven't tried to arrest anyone in well-known cases I'll say rape or murder the answer would often be we can't be the special forces guys and you know it's not clear always whether this is unwilling or unable sometimes they may not want to take on the fight but certainly in all my years of working in Afghanistan this is a consistent feature of impunity when these groups I mean it's pretty obvious really if you're associated with the most powerful military force in the country you're perceived to have a considerable degree of protection so in terms of the kind of the bigger picture I mean as Matt said there's a kind of short termism in here you know somebody like Razik is regarded as a good fighting force I think the Razik story is very comparable to the kind of lower level smaller guys that I was looking at he's regarded as being a good fighting force and too useful an ally to give up even though they've known full well what he's been up to for many years and similarly in many of these militias it's known that they're they were originally criminal gangs or former husbandry people or a whole ragtag of not terribly reputable people but there's not very much effort to look for the most abusive in these groups and sideline them and that I think can be done because I think it's a mistake to think that the kind of temporary calm that you might sometimes be able to gain from using these kinds of groups is doing anything other than storing up trouble in the long run we've seen with previous experiments in community militias, community defence forces that sometimes communities have been so abused and outraged by the crimes of these groups that they've actually turned to the Taliban for help and you know these drivers of the insurgency should not be forgotten as much about these local predations by local security people and local government officials whether it's torture in NDS facilities or arbitrary detention by local police or these kinds of rapes and murders and killings that I'm talking about by local militias some of them in uniforms these are the kinds of things that consistently have been shown in interviews and research about drivers of the insurgency as some of the things that have pushed people into the hands of the Taliban even those commanders who after the fall of the Taliban said that they were ready to come and work with the government again so it really can't be understated how important these long-term assessments about what stabilisation requires are one other really important contact point I mean as Matt says we've got we've got transition on the horizon withdrawal that's not just going to mean a reduction a massive reduction of tens of thousands of international military which leaves potentially a security vacuum into which these groups can expand it also withdraws a huge amount of money ISAF at present it makes up more than double the Afghan GDP in terms of their overall expenditure logistics, transportation all of this so the potential for a real economic downturn or crash even there's also growing ethnic tension the murder of Rabbani recently has stalled the idea of peace talks for some time it's led to even more belligerent statements coming from the northern leaders so these fissures in Afghan society are even more exposed so the idea that by decentralising violence which is what I think these militias effectively do you stabilise within this context I think is wrong-headed I think it probably makes civil war more likely if we're not already in a civil war it was very interesting this New American Foundation report that came out I think this week by Christian Deniz showed that in Kandahar and Helmand something like 35 or 40% of people described what was happening in Afghanistan as a civil war already so you have to keep that in mind when you think about the appropriateness of adding large more numbers of poorly trained, poorly commanded armed men so just very briefly on a few kind of recommendations I mean with the level of interest in DC for what's happening in Afghanistan is plummeting so rapidly it's quite hard to get policy makers interested in a lot of these issues they want out and I think we all understand the reasons for that I think we actually get to a stage where you say do no harm and that's the kind of calculation you ought to be making when you look at adding more potentially unruly or destabilising irregular forces I think what's been a consistent pattern over the last few years is that the international military usually wanted to expend its political capital by putting pressure on the government to do the kinds of things that I think are necessary to reduce some of the drivers of the conflict and reduce some of the predatory behaviour of the government officials involved I think we should be looking at decentralising power more than decentralising violence and that means putting pressure on the government for genuine political reform reducing the power of the presidency bringing in some accountability mechanisms putting pressure to ensure that some of the most abusive officials are actually removed and held account it was interesting looking at the government's response to the pretty damning UN report on torture in the NDS facilities they dismissed one NDS chief and they moved to others and that's the general pattern I wouldn't be surprised if the one that they dismissed pops up somewhere else again in a couple of months when they think that the pressure is off I mean as Matt says lay he really should have been invoked a long time ago for several of these forces I suspect because the abuses have long been known about people have been raising problems with Razik and Mathieu Ler and Adizah Ler for many years now and people have known about NDS torture forever the kind of feigned surprise and response to the UN report is ridiculous human rights groups like Human Rights Watch and Amnesty and others have been reporting on it for many years so my suggestion is primarily to refocus on the political reforms that are necessary to make the withdrawal and the economic withdrawal phase and slow and to slow down massively if not stop the emphasis, the reliance on creating more and more armed groups as a response to an already very toxic and potentially explosive situation things can really get a lot worse in Afghanistan we're already seeing an extraordinary run of high-level political assassination it's a very tender box at the moment so yeah, it's a do no harm position thank you very much as I listened to your talks today I detect at least some small tension in your position or internally in yours I think both of you in Vocal Ligia Amendment calling which essentially would prevent the United States from giving any training to these forces which by its very nature would really prevent any U.S. oversight of these forces at the same time you're talking about you're explicitly talking about I think you implicitly about better U.S. oversight of some of these forces with the ALP program has notably featured a surge of special forces and other associated units to be with them and provide at least normally supervision of the ALP program so can first you and then Matthew talk about your impression of the supervision of these programs what are they doing, what are they not doing are there enough, are there too many what should they be doing that they're not what are they doing that they shouldn't be yeah I mean the oversight is there and they've invested a lot of human resources into that oversight you know this is very labour intensive work with special forces but it's not necessarily a lack of oversight it's the decision making process it's do they decide that this notorious human rights abuser is essential to their perception of what brings greater security which is certainly the decision that they've come to with with Razik they know about the allegations about him they have done for a long time they've been representations about this for a long time they know that somebody in Bahrain where they've who's the commander of a local ALP force has, is notorious for a range of abuses and there are lots of people in that community who are very hostile to him but they've decided that he's very useful and in that incident he's a former head of the commander so it was part of the effort at reintegrating people and there that's almost like a political trump car they're far more likely to turn the blind eye to the human rights record they think it's politically expedient to get them on side so it's not so much an absence of oversight it's actually the decisions and the waiting of how that works and as for Lehi I mean the way Lehi works you can take money away from individual brigades or units it doesn't stop all US funding so for instance it was used in Pakistan last year where there'd been some extra judicial executions by the Pakistan army and money was withdrawn from that one unit the same could be done in Afghanistan it doesn't necessarily have to pull the plug on all US funding for all Afghan security forces because clearly I think it's one of the most useful things the international military is doing there is building up the Afghan army and police and I would much rather that there was more focus on building up a high quality army and police rather than trying to expand it's one of the hangovers of the counterinsurgency doctrine that said you needed a particular size of security forces Afghan police, army and these irregular groups in order to defeat the insurgency and while I think many people and maybe Doug can say a word on this later would question whether the coin actually can succeed in Afghanistan and certainly we've seen a shift away from counterinsurgency doctrine towards more of a counterterrorism doctrine this mathematics is sort of still lingers and there's still the sense that they need to pump up the size of the security forces in order for them to work and I would much rather there was more emphasis on them being a good quality security force and not predatory than focus on the numbers it's a bit of a sausage factory response to creating or building an army and police force well I think Rachel addressed the sort of policy aspects pretty well and I would agree with everything she said I would just add that this term a climate of impunity I think is an important one and in many ways it's a false choice to say I'm not saying to present that to us it's a false choice to say that you have to choose between working with the Afghan security forces that you have or just letting them be and in the case of Razik I think he's a good example of how human rights or respect for human rights and an interest in the human rights respect for human rights of our Afghan partners has not been a constraint on US decision making neither has corruption for that matter and Razik is a really interesting paradigmatic case I think because he's been notorious for a long time I wrote a long article about him in 2009 about his drug trafficking and corruption that was widely circulated there were decisions basically at the height of US anti-corruption efforts in early 2010 about whether to sort of cut off funding to him or even push the central government to go after him and a choice was made that ahead of the surge in Kandahar the similar decision was made about Ahmad Wali Karzai but that ahead of the surge in Kandahar the military imperatives were such that you had all these brigades coming in you needed to work with the power brokers in the area and that meant not going after them for corruption or human rights so McChrystal flew down to Spindboldak and met with Razik Ikenberry met with Razik Petraeus met with Razik and especially in Afghanistan meeting someone flying to meet someone is a very strong show of support and respect for them that's how it's interpreted Razik was then sort of placed at the spear point of the offensive west of Kandahar city he was mentored by U.S. Special Forces he was his men a border police force theoretically under Afghan law restricted to operate as a police force within 50 kilometers the border were used as this sort of shock shock troops that would go in ahead of U.S. military forces in Panjwai and many of these Nurezai areas where there's these tribal issues that I won't get into but in any case he became of Hamkari of the offensive west of Kandahar city and it's astonishing to me in retrospect when you think about how successfully that military campaign went that it was so that it was a smart trade off to all ourselves of this drug militia and this thug who abuses human rights was necessary for military success west of Kandahar city it seemed to me like an extremely poor decision and one that could only be made in the absence of any real and grained strategic calculations about human rights or governance so I think that and that was essential to Razik's promotion to Brigadier General in January he was promoted after that after cooperating with U.S. military forces he became acting police chief so we've been proactively supporting him in building him up and you have to when you look at that process of decisions and the consequences of it the consequences as I show in this report that his forces are actively torturing people as we speak in Kandahar city you have to feel that we need to change a climate of impunity both for Afghan security forces and for U.S. officials who are operating the region without regard for the human rights abuses committed by their Afghan partner I've got to say that in response to the first question on the other side in response to the report that human rights was published the U.S. military has launched an investigation into these allegations 15-6 investigation and you know they've got quite a big team of people involved in assessing the credibility of the allegations that I've made in this report which is obviously very welcome but it is not I mean it's unlikely to be made public it's not actually going to result in what's really required which is an Afghan investigation into these allegations and some accountability for them but it is at least a sign that they are taking them reasonably seriously although this may actually just be partly related to anxiety about whether lehi could be triggered by this and similarly there's anxiety about whether lehi could be triggered by the UN report into NDS abuse torture of allegations we were talking before this event about I have sitting on my desk Stephen Pinker's new book The Better Angels of Our Nature talking about the reduction of violence worldwide and when you get into his argument it's a very complex argument but two of the major streams in that are that the decline in violence that we've seen worldwide is largely caused by one the rise of the central administrative state which maintains a monopoly on violence and therefore gets people used to not being violent because the state maintains that and second the rise of literacy which allows people to put themselves in the mind of someone else put themselves in that situation whether they're Oliver Twist or Uncle Tom quite literally a marriage a character that allowed you to imagine what it's like to be someone else and be in the shoes of someone else and establish sympathy with other human beings given that Afghanistan lacks both the centralized state and any literacy should we be surprised that there's this culture of impunity that violence is accepted on a day-to-day basis aside from us and the victims no one seems too upset about this I think it's wrong to think that no one's upset about it I think Afghans consistently in all the opinion surveys express huge concern about the impunity and injustice that they face in fact I think the international community is focused on corruption in the last year or two I mean it's a matter of issue for Afghans but I think the focus should really have been on justice and accountability the priority because I think corruption was the extent expected or at least seen as part of the landscape so I think Afghans desperately want greater justice is it inevitable that this is kind of level of violence I think it's in the absence of a centralized state and I'm not sure what factor literacy plays in this I think certainly when you're giving enormous support to these localized groups it's very hard to keep them in order the ALP is being rolled out in areas that are by their very nature beyond the reach of the central government so the idea that the central government can somehow exercise control over them and command and control over them is flawed from the start so to me there was an inevitability that these militias would result in more violence but it's not clear necessarily but I think it had more been done and I think much more could have been done early on to sideline some of the big warlords who were very notorious to not work with these criminals mafia like gangs then you might see quite a different picture I don't think it's inevitable that we see the lawlessness that we see currently in Afghanistan there were windows of opportunity at various steps along the line to sideline some of the worst of the worst there were several years when the UN for instance was playing quite a part in trying to vet nominations of senior police in particular and did sideline some of the most abusive people and there wasn't a huge backlash this did happen and you did see a reduction in abuse and arbitrage detention, extraditional executions in some of those places so it's not impossible often the response you get from policymakers is well you know where are the good guys, they're all corrupt they're all warlords, they're all war criminals which is I think is deeply offensive to a lot of Afghans there have been choices made and there have been shortcuts taken at just about every step of the line I respect Pinker's work as a psychologist and I think he makes a lot of thought provoking points and gathers some interesting data I disagree with the sort of general line of analysis which is basically to plot on one on one axis this sort of decline in violence and another this very this very problematic aggregate modernity which is sort of a wig version of history that is self-justificatory in the end but in the case of Afghanistan I would say that this idea of Afghanistan being this sort of pre-modern Hobbesian anarchy sort of come to 10 years ago and it's really unfortunate how violent and irrational they are I think it's really based on a very problematic separation of the periphery and the core and if you look at the history of Afghanistan it should illustrate how much what's happened there has been influenced by modern states by tremendous inputs of resources violence of political manipulation that has totally transformed the character and nature of violence in Afghanistan of people's subjective experiences of their own humiliation and lack of you know social solidarity and the country was nothing like it was 30 years ago the rise of all these commander networks these warlords the opium economy all of these things are very deeply embedded in Afghanistan's national relations that go all the way back into these modern states and maybe that's a bit abstract but I'm really worried and you've kind of seen it in the last three years as things have really gone pear shaped and we've realized that our brilliant technocratic solutions are not working out that we're re-essentializing Afghan violence and saying that well you know what it was never going to work anyways because Afghans are corrupt essentially never mind that people are almost entirely violent present there and that they're violent essentially never mind that you know violent we're arming militias to fight a group of Islamist rebels that we had armed in the 1980s thanks alright I'm going to ask one big picture question and then we'll come to the audience I don't think it's any secret that the ISAF strategy in the big hand wave is let's stand up Afghan security forces use the ALP to kind of fill in where we can't get them and meanwhile we use the special forces to take out senior levels of the Taliban and associated groups to create a problem set that these nascent Afghan forces can deal with your reports individually just critique one part but if you take your report essentially the ALP are doing more harm than good that's a big hand wave you're much more nuanced than that and your report that says there are huge problems with the security forces that are being stood up and we need to look hard at are they doing more harm and good and then Erica Gaston's OSI report she's not on the stage but she documents that the special forces may be doing more harm than good what have you left ISAF with and should they just declare defeat or harm I should say Erica's in the audience here with open society foundations had a great report last month which assessed the changes in guidance on night raids she's done previous work drawing attention to the extent to which night raids are again potentially more destabilizing than they are stabilizing because they cause such outrage they get along people sometimes they result in violence and civilian casualties and she makes quite a subtle assessment of how these tactical guidance have changed and what's improved and what hasn't and finds that despite there is the reduction in civilian casualties the net has been broadened more and more people are being detained consequently the conflict has brought into more and more Afghan homes right into more and more communities and more civilians are being detained so again the backlash is if anything growing it's reached critical levels with the government and you have Karzai saying basically stop all night raids even when you get a talib there counterproductive so the shift from counterinsurgency to this fairly aggressive counterterrorism model of taking out trying to detain or kiddle capture Taliban commanders it's still not doesn't by many estimates seem to be necessarily working in terms of reducing violence and can be inflaming a lot of tensions and it's still basically looking at society the Afghan society in a fairly two dimensional way of those that are for or against the government it's much more complex than that and then similarly if you look at reconciliation efforts such that they are I mean rather they're rather abandoned at the moment given the Rabbani killing but in those in the way that reconciliation is being addressed again the government is left out of this picture it's not really being seen as a party to the conflict which clearly it is so in terms of where this leaves US strategy which is divided anyway because they're in a bit of a muddle about where they stand on the military strategy and the diplomatic and reconciliation strategy with the Pentagon still basically thinking they can win it in the State Department I think increasingly thinking they probably can't so they better settle where it leads it I think is a need for a far more defensive position a focus on training quality police and army a significant reduction I think of these these tactics of intense levels of night raids and detention we see a huge population a really huge increase in the detention detainee population in the US detention facility in Parwan and growing Afghan anger about that so I think they need to basically reduce the number of people that they're conducting night raids against and detaining particularly when it's civilians clearly very unjustified use of military force and focus much more on training and as I say use their political weight to push for political reforms you know we had in 2010 the claim that the Kandahar operation was going to be led by you know good governance there was always stuff about governance in a box and a lot of focus on what could be done to try and rebalance or redistribute power in Kandahar and they just they failed really and now we have Razzak with Ahmad Wali Karzai's death Razzak is now the king and you basically got one side of a of a very complex civil war like conflict in the south all powerful so there's a limit to how much they can do when that's their partner so they need to reassess who their partners are, step away from some of these very abusive notorious characters sever their relationships with abusive officials whether it's intelligence officers police chiefs Afghan local police forces clean up their acts so that they have some moral legitimacy when they try and push for a political reform because at the minute they've got a very limited amount of legitimacy and you have downscaled their military efforts because you know as we've seen recently this is as much about Pakistan as it is about some of these local Afghan disputes as well well I don't have much to add that Rachel's very well formulated solutions like I said in the media we don't have anything constructive to offer but the the only thing I would say is that if you look back like the decision to partner with Raziq and Hamqari was that really necessary couldn't we have found some other ANA battalion to do it and maybe we would have taken over more casualties but we would have made a huge sea change for impunity in Kandahar why are we making these decisions if we do scale back if we have a more limited vision of what military success would entail in Afghanistan we do scale back our ambitions to totally transform the country and its institutions and create a modern state there then maybe we can just relax a little bit and make more principal decisions and not worry about whether or not we're going to win but really start caring about whether what we do reflects a real commitment to human rights unfortunately I think as long as we continue or rather the Pentagon and Kabul continues to espouse this notion of a coin victory then we're going to have a tough time making those kinds of calculations thick alright thank you we'll now turn to the audience do we have a microphone? we do have a microphone so please I'll call on you wait for the microphone identify yourself and do a relevant affiliation if you could and we would ask that you please while everyone's entitled to a sentence or two of set up that you then end in the form of a question that someone here on stage could answer let's do it right in front of you here hi I'm Taylor Johnson from the Institute for the Study of War thank you both for coming and speaking to us today my question is about actually directed to Ms. Reed one of the points you brought up is that the you think that the security should be more centralized less decentralized if one of the drivers of insurgency is the central government's challenge with delivering services to rural areas and providing security in rural areas how do you empower local areas or local villages to defend themselves or to take care of themselves when the centralized government can't do it without running into these ALP situations where the reverse happens I wouldn't say that I think security needs to be centralized but the point I was making is is more of the that I feel that this move towards militias is creating large numbers of competing armed forces so that's that decentralization of violence and while it might break down the Taliban's monopoly on violence in certain areas which might actually result in a temporary appearance of calm if what it does is create or exacerbate a new set of conflicts which certainly is what's been happening in some of the provinces then I think that that's counterproductive but I take your point that there are certainly quite a number of communities who are desperate for more security and are very disappointed in their government's inability to provide that security but that comes back to a range of reasons there have been problems recruiting Christians for instance to the National Police Force so that's one of the many reasons why there are discredited force there's been the amount of reporting there's been on where mistakes have been made in building up the National Police there's a lot out there so I don't need to go into too much detail on that but the fact that we've still got this very predatory force that the majority of people see as not trustworthy that engages in theft and robbery and all of this is a huge problem but actually a surprising although we did find some communities that said they would want a local police force like this many of them said but not these guys these are criminals these are bad people we don't want them which may have been because they weren't their people and they just want their people to do it or it may have been because they're a bunch of criminals or both so it may be in some areas that it works but I basically feel that one of the fundamental command and control problems with this force is it's not really a police force it was called a police force because to satisfy the anxieties of the international community particularly the UN and the other embassies there but was very anti the idea of these local police force having seen the failures of the previous ones so it's called a police force for political reasons and then you get Ministry of Interior control over it but often that just doesn't work because for instance you'll have a district where you've got 200 local police that maybe are of one particular faction and then a national police force with 40 officers maybe from another faction so you've got an inherent tension in that so it may have been better to have worked along models in some areas maybe you would have need localised units of a national police force rather than creating this separate chain of command effectively and in other areas Afghans have set up their own community defence forces I mean I was one senior American official remarked to me at one point honestly who are we kidding why do we need to teach Afghans how to defend themselves you know this is something to know how to do pretty well themselves so in some areas there is some kind of a need that is being addressed but the report doesn't say this force shouldn't exist it just highlights many of the flaws I think that are built into the recruitment of betting processes and looks at ways that could be done better and looks at the absence of accountability mechanisms but I think short of those kinds of safeguards I think in this environment of impunity creating more militias with weak command and weak level of training and professionalism where you've got these very divided communities is probably going to just make matters worse Can I just add that like you said the notion of Afghans defending themselves is not necessarily an inherently flawed idea whatever you're hearing from friends in the Argendab Valley in Kandahar province is that there the militia program is going relatively well and it does enjoy local support so on a case by case basis in the southeast for example where you have a long-standing tradition of Arba case local militias I think it's been working there the VSO early experiments with special forces where they were doing these very long-term, detailed, intensive militia programs seem to have worked pretty well the problem is I think in mid-2010 the trade decided to expand it on an industrial scale and that's when you see it starting to get caught up in these larger commander networks these Jamiyates kind of mobilized in the north and that's when you start to unleash some of these more centrifugal dynamics when you scale it up and have it flowing more from the top than from the bottom in a place like Argendab it's more tribally uniform for instance and may work together so it may work better I don't want to be very crude and say don't do it in ethnically or tribally mixed places and do it in others but that's one of the significant factors in how do you stabilize in this I think up front here I heard him from the U.S. Institute of Peace thanks for a great presentation and Matthew thanks in particular for that great piece of reporting which I think put into the light something that a lot of us knew already or had heard rumor of but maybe kind of incontrovertible which I think is really important I've heard a couple things from the presentation that imply that at this point in time COIN is dead and I guess my question is was it ever really alive and the reason I ask that my rudimentary understanding of COIN is that it's population centric it's about winning hearts and minds or however you phrase that and as Rachel said as I've seen in Afghanistan one of the issues at the forefront of people's hearts and minds is justice and impunity and the kinds of abuse that all these different reports are bringing into light and yet that was never either put into the metric COIN is working in what priorities do we assess or it couldn't be accurately measured and that's my theory and I guess that's my question to you is how do you have a strategy that says okay well we're going to work for improved governance more generally but also addressing the needs of Afghan people as a way to fight insurgency and yet consciously overlook in all these different facets the kinds of use that one living in Afghanistan says is a primary concern where's the breakdown there probably Doug would be the best person to talk about COIN in Afghanistan I'm not an expert on COIN at all but I would I guess I would answer by the point we talked about earlier which was that you look at McChrystal's assessment in 2009 where he identified to equal mission critical issues governance and insurgency right it was kind of it was the introduction of COIN because governance was now equal and important to defeat the Taliban the problem was the implemented solution contained an inherent tension between them so on one hand you needed to bring in more troops to defeat the Taliban no brainer but on the other hand bringing in those troops meant that you surged an incredible amount of money through these private security companies like Ruhollah and Watan who are running wild SERP went from like 200 million to a billion dollars in two years and you had all these trade-offs where you had to accept the local strongmen because you need to get like two brigades into this province you know in the next three months like Roz so while we did kill a lot of Halas and clear a lot of ground I don't think we paid enough attention to the way that we even you sort of turbo-charged this economy of conflict and in many ways more deeply ingrained some of the root problem of governance that COIN doctor itself would argue is really important here I would agree but I do think it would be interesting to hear from Dodd if you're allowed to step out of your chairing role and really briefly I'm not going to give a full answer because I'm still writing on this and frankly I'm trying to write but I think you have to look very hard at the mandate ISAF stands for the international security assistance force they have a mandate to help provide security the government of Afghanistan is sovereign at least officially and it's a sovereign government now they are perfectly happy to let ISAF go to a certain point and do a certain degree ISAF has a lot of flexibility to go do that sovereign governments are notoriously averse to having people look inside and tell them they're not doing their job very well that's not just Afghanistan the same problem happened on a lesser scale in Iraq and for that matter any other sovereign government would be really offended at having that happen the second point that I try to remind people all the time is that militaries don't do subtlety well you know militaries are blunt instruments and they're really good at crushing things that's what they do so think of them as a hammer that's what they do now you can tell this guy with a hammer I want you to fix my computer and he'll be as careful as he can and he'll tap on it as gently as he can but he's still wielding a hammer he's the wrong tool for that type of operation and ISAF is still the soldiers and they're really good at killing things they have worked really hard over the last decade to develop some other skill sets but that's not what they do that's not their core competency it's not what they're trained for personality diplomats don't join armies they join diplomatic course so I think you have to accept the limitations of what any military and I think this the story of the transformation of the American army in particular other services and countries armies around that is fairly impressive but at the end of the day it's still an army very good hello my name is Nox Tames I'm from the US commission on international religious freedom a question for the entire panel if you're talking about respecting human rights security is key but also accountability and I'd be interested in your thoughts on the emphasis that's been placed on the informal justice system many of the arguments are the same that you've expressed that have been made for the local police the writ of the state doesn't extend everywhere the local court the real court system doesn't work so let's use this informal justice system that exists and try to inculcate them with some human rights standards give them some money and hope that they'll remove local grievances and we'll win U.S. aid support of this military my commission has criticized it because it would tell out on human rights perhaps allow the implementation of religious law Seema Samar in Afghanistan has criticized it as a diversion of resources how do you have any oversight curious on your thoughts on this question and how it fits into the larger discussion about local police and these militia it's a slightly controversial policy the push towards informal justice not least because it's the original push from the international community came from the hammer wielders unfortunately so you know they recognize that one of the things that they kept being told was that the Taliban were stepping into the justice vacuum and delivering quick justice where the government was failing so miserably so they looked around and thought okay these juggers let's help them it wasn't ever quite clear to me what men in uniforms could be doing foreigners in these kinds of you know village very complex local environments to try and improve upon those juggers in the first on the one hand and then as you say on the other hand I had lots of friends I was doing a lot of work on women's rights at the time of this kind of push towards informal justice I had lots of friends in the human rights community African women in particular who were appalled by this idea because they felt that it would as you say Sima Samar make point divert resources from trying to extend the formal justice system and in effect give more credibility to some quite outdated and often very practices that were contrary to human rights for instance using girls or women as compensation for crimes by giving them away in marriage Scott in the front from USIP and others tried to approach this with a slightly more subtle view and tried to look at ways in which some of these informal mechanisms could be connected to the central government and there could be some oversight of them to try and have some kind of positive influence on the use of some of these more offensive practices or illegal practices it's not clear to me that it was particularly effective but really for some of the reasons and Scott may disagree with that but really for some of the reasons that we've been hearing elsewhere which is that sometimes money was thrown into it which is very corrupting there's a question about if it's not broken already what can foreigners do to try and fix it so personally I would rather there have been more emphasis placed on doing more to improve the formal justice system for instance there's no oversight of appointments of the judiciary the training and quality of the judges themselves is very poor you could have had for instance more focus on trying to move away from the sense that you prosecute crimes by forcing confessions out of people the majority of crimes are when they end up in court there's been some kind of forced confession often under some kind of direct often including torture so there's a lot that could have been done to focus and Scott touched on this point in his question about COIN from the very beginning the real miss from the international community has been a focus on justice and more of law so had that been more of a priority from the beginning I think we've been a different place now so personally I share some of my human rights friends concerned about the focus on informal justice here on the aisle in the blue hi I'm Ahmad from the foundation for Afghanistan I have two very quick questions number one I think some of us mentioned here that the ALP has really been ineffective and I mean they've had growth violations of human rights and other things but how effective if at all have they been in their actual initially stated objective of sort of preventing the Taliban from infiltrating into these formerly peaceful areas have they been effective if at all or it's so how much and number two is do you see any reason for hope in Afghanistan and if so how much that much so on the question about ALP and security I mean I I didn't set out to really do a security assessment of the impact of ALP partly because it was too soon you know the ALP has only been going for a year and I think one of the big questions will be how effective it is when special forces leave and these guys are left on their own because at the moment they're still being fairly closely monitored certainly in some areas we have seen some decrease in violence or some greater movement on roads in some areas in others there's been an increase in conflict you know I mentioned this incident in Balran and other in Orozgan recently in Gizab actually so they have it's a mixed picture I think and I think one that will need to be assessed when they've withdrawn and you know it also depends on your well it also depends on how you're defining kind of greater stability and if greater human rights abuse is a part of that supposedly secure environment there is ostensibly better security in Kandahar now as a result of Razik's domination of the area nightletters are down assassinations are down so the Taliban have been pushed out to an extent but when he is conducting intimidation, extracial execution, you know that you're building up trouble for the future so to me that's not actually stability so similarly if in one of these ALP sites you've got a local commander who is notorious for arbitrary detention or throwing boiling water on somebody's genitals if the Taliban has been pushed out of that area is that improved security or is that just a different set of insecurities so it's a mixed picture I would say but certainly in some areas you get fewer Taliban but I would say at a cost I would agree that there's been most notably on the road to Kandahar north out of Kabul some very dramatic improvements part tied to the militia program and part tied to much larger U.S. military presence in the north very active campaign of assassinations and night raids and the sort of thing but you know not to stress the analogy but in the latter period of the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan and certainly Najibullah's government there was a dramatic decline in violence and a lot of it was done through militia programs or buying off insurgent groups but in trench dynamics it ultimately led to one of the most violent and unpleasant periods in Afghanistan's history Do you have hope for Afghanistan? I don't think it's up to us to have hope for Afghanistan it's up to us to do right by Afghanistan we've become deeply involved in the country we've made a lot of very serious mistakes and we have a responsibility to the Afghan people to do right by them and if we fail to do that I don't think history will judge us kindly it's not really about whether we have hope for Afghanistan should answer that question for themselves Yeah, I would agree Your hope question I think that's right it's not so much hope it's about making sure that when withdrawal happens it doesn't leave behind insecurity potentially civil war it's jaw dropping sometimes speaking to people in DC, policy makers about prospects for civil war post withdrawal where the question is more or less why should America care if Afghanistan has a civil war and I hope I would hardly need to tell you why America should care if Afghanistan has a civil war not least because it would be appalling saying upon American foreign policy to have been so actively involved in Afghanistan for this length of time and leave behind a situation of extreme conflict corruption and high level of abuse and a government that is discredited and abusive and it would be a tragedy so I think there is still a window of opportunity particularly now the rush for reconciliation is gone I think one of the greatest dangers for Afghanistan is about the impatience here my greatest fear about the push towards reconciliation you actually had senior diplomats saying that they were going to try and get a deal by December of this year because there happened to be this 10 year anniversary a big conference in Bonn that was actually a target to try and cut a deal a dodgy handshake that's not how peace processes happen particularly in a country where so many countries are involved in the conflict and with such a long history of conflict this is really a kind of conflict that's been going on in its very permutations for so many years it's not going to be wrapped up by December so that they can send a postcard back home saying job done we're coming back so rather than hope I want patience from the international and I want a sense of continued responsibility to try and leave behind something that leaves Afghans with some hope and right behind him Mexico a center for complex operations at National Defense University Rachel I wanted to ask you with regard to the ALP actually sorry just before I ask my question Matt I just wanted to thank you for the reporting on now General Rezik I presume you're aware but actually our arguably misguided use of Rezik and his troops goes back actually all the way to 2006 and the Canadians in fact escalating crucially in 2007 somewhat contrary to the perspective that both of you presented on the issue of troop density and counterinsurgency theory the reason for using Rezik's troops was that at the time there was a grand total of 800 infantry for an entire province and Rezik's troops were the only way to even disrupt Taliban networks outside of basically 10 miles from Kandahar city so a misguided choice but one that was driven largely by troop levels but Rachel sorry my question on the ALP is the inferior at least in the doctrine around those stability operations in ALP the individuals who make up the ALP are supposed to be vetted and nominated well sorry nominated and vetted by a local Shura in order and that Shura is supposed to have been stood up for some time and to have been created in a way that is as inclusive of different communities within a group of villages as possible and having been vetted by the local elders, the local Shura it's then supposed to be approved by the district chief of police on paper this would be the mechanism or one of the mechanisms to prevent the impunity and to impose a level of social constraint on the way that these forces work where is it breaking down in the areas that you studied it breaks down in a number of ways and that's the point you say on paper they've done a lot to try and guard against exactly the kind of abuses that I was describing they really have, they recognize the potential problems particularly the problem of recruiting groups rather than individuals where you bring in a group that already has its own set of loyalties to its commander so they got it in theory but the ground realities don't necessarily always allow for that for a number of reasons one of the things we saw in several provinces that we looked at was forced recruitment which cuts against entirely the idea that this is something that the local community wants actively wants and is demanding so in Urazgan for instance where the local community had lost a lot of people to the police having come under pressure to give their sons to the police when they came under pressure by a former talib actually Nader Muhammad to send their sons into ALP they said no one minister of interior official described these kinds of forces to me as shields of meat these are the guys that get picked off most easily really by the Taliban you know they're not very well defended they don't have barracks they're in the front line often so they got arrested in Shindand we saw people it was really political bribery when the community wrote to the minister of interior saying no we don't want this we want more national police we want the army they were kind of bought in Wardak for a previous incarnation of a kind of community defense force AP3 they were all brought to the NDF headquarters the intelligence headquarters and despite lots of people saying no we don't want this they were basically intimidated into signing up to it so that's I mean that's one problem that's huge is that there is a political pressure to have this happen even if communities don't want it other areas where it breaks down I mentioned that there's a problem sometimes when you've got reintegration happening so special forces are often trying to flip is the word they use but you know get people to change sides and join the government if you look at the way in which reintegration is happening so far it's mostly not reintegrating combatants or Talibs or Hizbiz army or other insurgent groups it's often just being abused and bringing in for the benefit of local political networks it's mostly happening in the north and that's sometimes a trump so you'll get for instance in Jalrez there's a guy who got a far bigger force than he should have done on paper he got all of his own guys because it was a reintegration effort so you see that in a number of areas as well where the muddling of APRP the African Peace and Reintegration Program and ALP means that you've got a kind of political trump card that means all these nice rules go out the window in terms of insurers I mean a lot of communities respect that you know would like that to be sure approval and engagement but there's been a mushrooming of insurers, various international agencies and government entities creating insurers of various levels of quality and credibility around the country so it's not always a good insurer it's not always ethnically, politically, factually representative so sometimes and those insurers are subject to hijacking as well so you know when I would go and talk to special forces about some of the problems that I was seeing they would often say but you know we've got the assurance from the insurer that's our kind of guarantee which you know just is a bit naive really because they're just as vulnerable to these the hijacking by local power brokers as anything else but you know in essence they've got a lot of decent stuff there on paper it's just that when it comes to it they don't necessarily follow it and I think the more checks and balances you put in in terms of effective local community endorsement and setting as well as checks and balances with central government so that it reduces the extent to which local groups can hijack it if there's some central government oversight you know it needs it requires a range of these kinds of mechanisms and you know I've pointed out as well the problem between this localised police force and the kind of disjointed relationship with the Ministry of Interior as well so there's a number of I talked for far too long in the report so I'm not sure about sure if you can read it Can I just say that we're running at a time here but for me that was the most important thing about Rachel's report not the horrible accounts of atrocities we knew that was going to happen we knew that was happening but that these accountability mechanisms the way that the program had designed was repeatedly breaking down and failing to occur and you know how many times have we seen this in Afghanistan on paper that can be defended on paper it can't be translated into reality and maybe that's a call for more checks and balances or maybe it's not actually possible to institute these sort of plans and we should be more modest about the transformative forces we want to unleash on Afghanistan's side Other questions up front here by the door Question about the training I'm Mohammad Ataf I'm with the Voice of the Managers who do television broadcasts to Pakistan but Afghan forces training of Afghan forces we know we've been giving them crash courses of education of the military crash courses and all that do you think that this policy is going to work eventually in building up a reliable security force that not only protects it's all local citizens but it respects their rights and which is the core issue here the issue of human rights abuse as I say I think one of the fundamental problems has been the push for numbers rather than quality you've seen the duration of training coming down as the ambition for numbers has gone up the professionalism of the forces that are being turned out at the other end is lower and it's difficult because the majority of recruits are illiterate you're starting from a very difficult position in building credible forces so I think emphasis on quality I think more thought to the politicisation of these forces there's a very interesting report by the ICG last year on the army and the degree to which it was actually factionalised and ran through some of these commander networks of old which is troubling particularly for those Afghans who are concerned about the prospect of civil war and then much more focus on the accountability mechanisms as we're saying there's a range of recommendations in the back of my report some of which are frankly never going to happen but one of the more realistic I think recommendations is a call for an external accountability mechanism external complaints body for police which would apply to both the Raziks of the national police and the kind of guys I was looking at in the local police because at the moment the president himself has extraordinary power to point intervene on appointments up to one star level there's a lot of one star police commanders he's very involved it's very politicised I think you need to kind of de-politicise that get some civilian oversight in there and try through those kinds of mechanisms to actually make an example of some of the most abusive characters you're never going to clean up entirely I don't think I'm unrealistic about that and a signal that these kind of days of impunity are not going to go on forever I think one of the issues in standing up a police force in any of these post-conflict less developed environments is that you don't have a rule of law system so yes we have issues with police abuses but let's look at it from those perspectives of the police you know you're a policeman you're trying to do the right thing you know arrest someone for doing what they're supposed to do and you put him into the justice system you know let's pretend that there's a judge let's pretend that there's a prosecutor let's pretend that there's a defense attorney once he gets through that he may or may not get to a prison from which he can probably bribe himself out and be back in the community a few weeks later notably upset at the policeman who arrested him in the first place you know absent a functioning rule of law system and it's easy to see why the policeman would decide that maybe I should do something other than what the Americans or UPOL or whoever else taught me to do and push him into this non-existent, non-functioning rule of law system maybe I should try something else to make sure that he doesn't show up back in my community a month later really really upset at me which is not to excuse human rights abuses but as to point out the incredible moral ambiguity that these police forces are put in absent a truly functioning rule of law system and given the time that it takes to set something like that up you know we should not be surprised with where we're at I mean that comes back again to the point about how the international community has really failed to engage with the needs of building a justice system focusing on rule of law because if you only have a police force which frankly gets used as a paramilitary force to fight counter-insurgency campaigns rather than actually the law enforcement civilian force you've only, it's just the process isn't there people are not being arrested for crimes or if they are they're then being tortured for them and abused in jails rather than actually going through a legitimate process where people can see that justice is being done so it's only you know it's not even half of the of the system that's needed because even the police bit isn't really police it's paramilitary this was the most common justification for rosic, for defensive rosic that I heard and he certainly has the defenders among afghans maybe one of the tragedies of someone like rosic who is by all accounts a very charismatic ambitious capable young man is that had there been stronger guidelines of accountability he might have never gotten into the sort of abuses that he's done he might have been able to develop into someone who could you know genuinely represent a future for afghan security forces great do we have any other questions but then with that we'll close this meeting again on behalf of Steve Cole the new America president and Peter Bergen the director of the national security studies program we want to thank both Rachel and Matthew for being here thank you all for coming it's been a pleasure and we look forward to seeing you at our next event thank you