 Again, my name is Robert Lamb, Director of the Program on Crisis Conflict and Cooperation here at CSIS. Thank you all for coming so far today. The morning panel is about to begin, so if you could please take your conversations out into the lobby or fill in the seats in the front here, that would be great. Thanks very much. A lot of the work that we do in the stabilization and reconstruction field involves projects and efforts that sometimes look a lot like regular development work, and there seems to be a lot of confusions oftentimes between development and stabilization and reconstruction and transitions. One of the purposes of this panel would be to clear up the distinction between the longer term development efforts and what stabilization and reconstruction efforts are. We're doing it through the lens of Colombia and Liberia, and I can think of no better colleague of mine than Joanna Mendelssohn-Forman to lead this panel. Joanna and I had the pleasure of working together in Colombia in former FARC held zones to evaluate USAID's transitions programs in Colombia, and we've been working together pretty closely for the past few years. Joanna, some years ago, was one of the co-directors of the program that is now the Crisis Conflict Cooperation back then, was called the Post-Conflict Reconstruction Project, and her full bio is in your program. I encourage you to take a look at her very impressive life's work. I would like to turn it over to Joanna to lead the panel. Thanks, Joanna. Thank you, Bob. I'm really pleased to be leading off this first discussion first because we have a really distinguished group of participants who can speak not only as expert practitioners, but individuals who've served in the capacities as civilian leaders in this field. So thank you all for joining us today. I feel in some ways like the Madrina or Garb mother of this field because one that started, and I think Ambassador Ayalday can say this, we really in the U.S. government were not clear where these transition offices would go. In fact, just as a little piece of history, when we were first asked to write a transition plan for Haiti, we were told, do it in six months because regular normal development will take over. We know what we were doing then, and we all learn by doing. I see people in this room who were there with me from the start, and we learn over the period of time that this is, A, not easy, that there are many lessons that we've learned, some that we haven't applied, perhaps many, and I think one of the most dramatic changes in these two cases of Columbia and Liberia point to it is that we have now achieved what is the nexus of security and development, something that when this field began, many in the development community had their doubts about. But if anything has happened over the course of the last 20 years, it is precisely a much more seamless, I would say, integration of the primacy of security when things are hot and in a conflict of state and the relevance of development, not only after things have quieted down, but also sometimes when things have not. And I think the case of Columbia provides a very good example of a situation where development has been going on simultaneously with a hot war, but also at a time when a transition was also taking place. I am not going to take up my panelist's time, I could say a lot of things, but let me also mention the comparison with Liberia, and we will talk a little bit more about this later. We're going to start the panel with Ambassador Liliana Allende and Juan Pablo Franco, both of whom have extensive experience in Columbia, and although their biographies are in the book, I must say that it is Ambassador Allende when she was the mission director in Columbia that really saw the opportunity at the time when Columbia was perhaps in one of its darkest moments of history and really on the brink of disaster in terms of state failure, that the USAID mission came up with one of the most creative plans working with the government of Columbia to begin consolidation of those zones that had been retaken by the military with great support from the U.S. in terms of Planned Columbia, and I think it's that experience specifically that provided a model for dealing with transitions during an actual hot war but simultaneously creating an enabling environment for development that to this day has become in many ways both an example of a light footprint by the U.S. government but also an important way in which to deal with local populations. Both our speakers, we're going to start with Columbia, and I believe that both Juan Pablo and Ambassador Allende have some comments to make first about how they see the U.S. support for transition, and then I'd like to pose a few questions to you. Then we'll follow with our panelists, and I will introduce them, but of course there's Ambassador John Belaney, who was our ambassador to Liberia, Sean McFade, who was a distinguished professor and an experienced person now at TD International, and of course my old friend Franklin Moore, an assistant administrator of USAID in the Africa Bureau, but has played many, many roles in my experience there. So Ambassador Allende, if you'd like to start. Thank you, Johanna, and thank you for inviting me to share some of my perspectives in this very important forum. There are many lessons learned from the experience in Columbia and the success of its transformation, but what I wanted to do is focus precisely on the model or the experience in Macarena, which is what Johanna was referring to, and maybe pull out of it some principles that many of us that work there at the time, jointly with the Colombians, of course, a very talented and a very dynamic team, we've been able to pull out, because at the time we were going through this, we didn't really realize how it was going to have an impact in the work in the future. So what I'd like to do is just pull out some of 10 basic principles that I think you can continue to think about and maybe use in other similar experiences. And this is out of the integrated consolidation plan for the Macarena, which is also referred to as PCIM, which was a small pilot in this area, which is the heart of FARC country. It's with high production rates of up to six harvests of coca a year, totally overtaken by the FARC and very little presence of the state. So some of the lessons that we were able to pull out is that a minimal level of security over time is fundamental to consolidation, rural development and land restitution. It sort of seems obvious, but you can't imagine how many times this was overlooked. And there was the assumption that development would bring security. And so recognizing that there is this basic requirement of minimal security is key in for success. Lesson number two, that host country ownership and political will is essential for restoring security, legitimacy and generating developments. The in Columbia, what we found and was what was actually very energizing and as a mission director was the ownership at all levels at the national level at the at the government, civil society and business. People just were fed up and with what had been going on and they were they wanted to do something. So taking advantage of that avalanche of ownership was just very, very energizing for all of us. So that's very key. Lesson number three was that US government assistance is a catalyst, not a replacement for the state. Sometimes there's assumption you go in, you implement programs, but there's nothing like finding those, those areas, those niches where US government assistance can actually be the turnkey, can actually be a response to community needs, whether it's through budget or infusion of some technical support that can act as a catalyst. And it and we found that in some areas we were at the beginning, 85% of the support. But as time went on, the government assumed more and more, because we were, we were very strategic in what we did. Lesson number four, light foot, be a light footprint branding. That's always something that, you know, we do and we got to get our brand out there. Well, sometimes we have to think twice about that. And is it strategic? It's, what we did in Columbia was make sure that the, the, the, the branding was the government's. And so finding ways of assuring that whatever success was the government's success. And so that's the way you gain confidence, that the population gains confidence in its institutions. They see whether it's the municipality, the Ministry of Health, the Ministry of Education, whatever. Those are the institutions that need to be up front. And, and we are in the behind supporting with the necessary tools, experiences, and sometimes obviously the funding to be able to make, make the population gain more confidence in its institutions. Lesson five is act in a short term with a vision for the long term. Although the quick immediate high response projects are critical to signal a change, you have to always keep the longer term in mind. You know, how are these activities actually going to be absorbed in the long time, in the long term? And in the case of the Macarena, we found that a new economic growth program was essential for a long term consolidation of the region. So it's, it's essential to, to balance the two, to always keep in mind that you're doing something. But in the long, in very short term vision, but you need that long term view. The lesson number six is the integration and the sequencing of all the tools. We had to, the challenge of being able to coordinate, of having to coordinate US government resources, the whole of government was very much a theme. It was difficult, but it required that internal coordination as well as alongside with the, with the Colombians and their leadership was critical. There was what they called a CCAI, which was a Center for Coordination, which pulled together all the government resources and was able to calibrate sequencing, prioritizing, strategically focusing, and that was critical at all levels, at the national level and all the way to the local level. Lesson number seven, risk taking. There is a certain amount of risk. And I think I noticed that within AID, some of the officers, you had to look for those officers that were willing to take the risk. It's very easy to be comfortable. You know, we don't want to go into the conflict areas. Those are insecure. We, you know, that's, it's not going to work. But you have to take some risks in these kinds of settings. It's got to be a hands-on. You've got to be on top of the field work with the, with the partners and it's, it's that calibration. Of course, not overtaking this risk, but there is a certain amount of risk that you have to take. Lesson number eight, evidence-based approach. We dedicated a lot of resources into evaluating what we were doing and so that we could constantly redirect what we, what we had anticipated. And the data was critical in order to ensure results. Action research. And I must say that what I'm talking about relies a lot about OT from OTI's experience in, in the Macarena. And their operational approach to support action research was very much a part of, of their success. Their ability to re-evaluate and retarget when necessary, have that flexibility to, to move. And, you know, in our bureaucracy, sometimes flexibility is not something that characterizes us. Critical, and lesson number 10, and I'll end with this, is the, the need to identify the change agents. And at the, at the community and, and, and different levels and, and invest in those, whether it's in the local area, at the local level, make sure they have the tools, maybe some leadership training, give them the mechanisms to actually be, be successful. So that, that in general, I'd like to sort of end here, and those were kind of principles, and that my colleagues and myself saw as, because at the time we were doing this, we were so intensely engaged in the activities, we had to take a step back and see what contributed to the success. So I hope those are useful. Not only were they useful, but I think they set a challenge for all of us to see if other programs followed a similar type of experience. But let me ask you, Juan Pablo, you have some remarks, but I wanted to remind people that thus far we haven't talked about the humanitarian dimensions of all of these conflicts. We've been talking a lot about the socio-economic and political components. But one of the things I know that has been a challenge in Colombia, as in Liberia, is that people are the ultimate detritus of war. They're the people who are the victims, and I know that IRD has been doing a great deal with them displaced, as well as other international, as well as US government agencies. And I was hoping you would mention some of those things as well, Juan Pablo, because we can't forget that humanitarian aid is the other side of this, and they can't be isolated. Thank you. Thank you. I think I'll say something about the humanitarian issues at the end. Well, first of all, thank you for inviting me, thanks to IRD, A Command, CSIS, and all of you participating here. My reflections are from the standpoint of being in government for almost seven years, in what some people call a transition, but we don't use that word in Colombia that much. And now, as part of an international NGO, I want to share my reflections on three things. The idea of stabilization, the implementation of stabilization, and innovation. First of all, the idea of stabilization. So I tried to find the definition of stabilization, and I found the OECD definition 2008, actions undertaken by international actors to reach determination of hostilities and consolidate peace understood as the absence of armed conflict. So is that in Colombia? I don't know. Then I saw the US Army counter-insurgency manual, stability operations are defined as an overarching term encompassing various military missions, tasks, and activities conducted outside the United States in coordination with other instruments of national power to maintain and re-establish a safe and secure environment, provide essential government services, emergency infrastructure reconstruction, and humanitarian relief. I'm probably the best one I found is USAID Civilian Military Cooperation Policy. There is no universal agreement on the definition of stabilization. So what I was trying to think about is that in many cases stabilization is a foreign idea. It's, as a foreign idea, it is challenged by other ideas at the local level that are dominant. And even in some cases, if these local ideas that are dominant, if they are hollow and they don't have a deep meaning, it doesn't matter. It will contest the idea of stabilization. If you look at the case of Colombia, we have what we call the National Development Plans, four-year government plans, and it's a it's a very successful planning tool in Colombia. It's been working since the 1960s. And I took a view of the National Development Plan since 1986, and no plan made an explicit reference to stabilization. Neither transitions. Yet we are speaking about stabilization in Colombia and the example of transitions in Colombia. There are similar ideas. In 1986, what was, in a way, the experience that led to the CCAI, we had the rehabilitation idea. So Colombia had a national rehabilitation plan, and it was a plan to create development opportunities for households, communities and economic activities in regions affected by lack of coexistence and absence of the state, which is close to what we all think is stabilization. Then in 2002, there was another idea. It was a good slogan, Democratic Security, which is, I would say, what Liliana is closest to. The idea of Democratic Security emerged as an integral policy to strengthen the dissociative capacities of the state against terrorist activities, as well as social services in conflict zones. The idea, and it was very easy to communicate, is that you need trust, investment and growth. But security provides the conditions for investments and it allows to meet social goals. And it was even said that Democratic Security was even part of eradication, of poverty eradication policies. Today, we speak about consolidation, what the PCIM started, fostered in some cases, and today we have a plan for territorial consolidation to generate the necessary institutional capacities to guarantee access and protection of people's fundamental rights in territories historically affected by armed conflict and illicit crops. So you had similar ideas, but these ideas were thought from the practitioner standpoint. It was as in government that came up with these ideas, or in some cases, well, even the president who spoke about Democratic Security a lot. But you had different idea for similar problems, which is okay. But the biggest question was, what would people say to you in a town, in Macarena, when they are demanding goods and services? Would they ask for stability? They don't. They ask, would they ask for Democratic Security? Would they ask for rehabilitation? Usually they ask for things that are more simple. So these ideas that we create at the end will be challenged by the difference between what people expect and the difference between what we define as practitioners. And if you don't realize that the governance of your idea will not be there. So the most important thing is to get to know the local ideas. Even if state capacity is low, choose the best way to adapt your ideas to the local context. At the end, ideas are important because they also define the instruments, which is the second point that I want to make. In transition and stabilization scenarios, you need to have massive large-scale instruments. Transitions usually happen in large geographic areas. The last panel talked about size. That's right. Geography is mostly fragmented and dispersed. Difficult climates, although not as hot as humid as they see today. Large populations, large number of factors, different interest resources, ideas, languages. So what we needed in government and what other transition scenarios need is large-scale organizational capacity. If you want to deliver public goods like security, justice, health and roads, you need large-scale organizational capacity. Scarce resources are sometimes allocated to very small projects and if they are not thought in a way that can be scaled up and can become massive, then it will not be such a good investment. You need to have ideas that can be ambitious to be expanded. Two examples from Colombia. The government still does implement projects for the 3 million IDPs that we have on income generation, but it's projects that are working just for 2,000 people. So you're not allocating resources correctly. Or the Families Guardejovsky Program, which was one of the most successful ones for illicit property eradication, but it just came up as high as 50,000 families when you needed it for 200,000 families. I want to finish with innovation. What is the role of international organizations and GOs if you need large-scale organizational capacity, which is mostly found in government or state structures? Well, what we can do in international organizations, NGOs, and donors is to spark innovation. Innovation is very hard in bureaucracies and in government. You don't have any room to maneuver. You do what you are told to do by law. You don't have additional resources to invest in innovations. You have rigid planning horizons. It's hard to plan for multiple years, but mainly you have high penalties for failures. If you're failing government, you've got even personal consequences and you may go to Jake. So when I was in government, I always asked you, say, to help me innovate. You can do it. You have the flexibility. That's what we're doing, for example, in IRD. We're working, going after humanitarian assistance. We're doing a pilot on community rehabilitation, and mainly what we did was found this very good idea in government. They didn't have the operational capacity to test it, so we provided the operational capacity so they would learn from us. To conclude, in transitions, ideas are important to define the shared goals and expectations. If there are dominant local ideas that are legitimate and shared, donors and international NGOs should adapt their own ideas of stabilization and development to them. You need ideas adapted to the local context. Ideas also define the instruments needed for implementation, but for success to be achieved, design and implementation should always consider the need for large-scale organizational capacity. You need big and ambitious ideas. Finally, donors and NGOs have a significant role to spur innovations that will lead to this large-scale implementation. You need new ideas in transitions with the potential to be big. Thank you. Thank you. I'd like to have a little more in-depth discussion now that both of you have laid out, Ambassador Agaldi, the 10 lessons that we've learned out of Colombia and also the points that you raised about how to bring things to scale in a way that often governments can't do. Would you both be able to, following the conversation we had earlier this morning with Ambassador Dobbins, declare Colombia a success story? And if so, what are the elements of success? Because it's repeated time and again that this is an example of a U.S. partnership with the government of Colombia that took over a part of the country, 40 percent of the country at one point was completely stateless and held by a non-state actor, the FARC, and then of course it was a center for drug trafficking. Talk to us about how both, through both your lenses in the AID mission and then you and the government, would define what would make this a success and how this element of this would be a model and whomever wants to start. Well, I think there are many perspectives through which you gauge the success. The freedom to travel, I know when I first got to Colombia, it was impossible to go from point A and by road and then we did, we were able to travel without problems and that's one, the freedom to be able to travel. And you look at that through the different indicators in terms of kidnappings and homicides and the violence and those numbers, I don't have them at the recent numbers, but those are significantly reduced. The other is that, Juan Pablo, you might help me on the number of mayors that were absent from their municipalities. More than 200. And at one point, it was such a significant out of the whole that people were running governments from the capital city. Whereas now, I understand that everyone's back in their municipalities, still with some issues. That's not perfect, but they're in their communities and being able to govern. That for me is critical. If you are able to manage in an elected position and actually there, but I'm sure there are others and maybe Juan Pablo, you can add to that. Well, this is a very difficult question to ask a Colombian because it's hard for us to step back and analyze what we've done and to see even what some people call a success model. I would say that there is significant progress in much of the country, but there's still many issues left unsolved in an area close to La Macarena. It's called San Vicente. One famous because it was the area of the peace negotiations with the FARC in 2000. I remember that we started nine years ago the CCAI program in San Vicente and now I'm working in San Vicente with IRD and I feel sometimes that nothing changed. You still have the FARC influence in the rural areas. You have policemen that are getting killed in the urban area. You have displacement every week. There's 20 families that are arriving to the urban area. So what I would say is that there's some throughout the country things improved. They improved really fast in some parts, but in some areas it has not improved and it's starting to get worse. So I would say that we would define success when we have peace and that's hope that's what we're hoping for. But even if we have peace, success is hard to achieve in the sense that it could be the geography or it could be the lack of the large-scale organizational capacity that I was telling you about. The challenge will be there to implement in the field what the idea is that you're hoping for in stabilization. Even if the government has very good ideas to implement them way outside of what that will be a challenge and that's where everyone can play a role. Thank you. I guess I should have been clear and said that there are tactical levels of success and strategic success and it would be ridiculous for us not to acknowledge that Colombia is in a very serious peace process that is ongoing and hopefully will have a successful outcome and if then if we take what Ambassador Dobbins says there'll even be a greater chance of many of the lessons that we've described being consolidated. But one of the fascinating parts that I've always thought in the Colombian experience is that now Colombia is a security exporter. Its police are training not only the police in Colombia but they are also training people in Mexico and even in Japan. I mean there's an international organization's section of the police when you go visit them and I wanted perhaps both of you to think about this in terms of U.S. assistance policy and how a light footprint in many ways helped to legitimize an institution that at one point was considered a much more negative force in the country. Yes actually I was thinking about that didn't say it because that's at a different level and certainly the success for us in the U.S. government it's it's been tremendous tremendous help to have the Colombians now providing this technical assistance. I work the Caribbean, I work Central America and the Central Americans ask for the Colombians to come in General Naranjo who was a very instrumental in the whole process is now an advisor officially for the Mexicans working closely with the Sentals. There is such a plus in having them provide this technical assistance. My worry is you know they're going to be taking out all these officers, mid-level officers and what about back home because it is a process as Juan Pablo well said that it continues to be challenging and you do continue to be to need to have those resources that know how at home but yes we are using it not only in the hemisphere but also around the world. I would just add that policies in Colombia is you perceive policies as a different type of police than in other countries because of the military role that they've had to play in controlling several areas of the of the of Colombia but one of the biggest challenges that we still face with police is controlling and policing rural areas because of the geography that it's so hard so hard to cover but what we had to learn from the civilian side of government is that along with police and military decisions we learn to make security decisions in our in the social investments that we had to to make and that was one of the things that made the CCAI model so interesting because we were trying to make decisions not just based on the development goals that we had or the social services goal but we also had to know that even we we couldn't be so naive to think that if we deliver those services people would be better off sometimes even providing those services put them at risk so maybe that that would be is something that the police of Colombia can also export how we learned that well it's hard to switch over to another part of the world and another continent but we have three speakers who've been patiently waiting to provide some insights about another case the interventions in Liberia the U.S. support for the transitions and we have excellent people to comment on that the difference I would just point out is that in Liberia there was and still is a united nations operation that was a partner with U.S. assistance in ensuring particularly in the security sector a transition from war to peace and I know several of the people on the panel have experiences with that and I would like to go and ask of starting with Ambassador Blaney who was our ambassador to Liberia and then followed by Sean McFade and Franklin Moore to talk a little bit about how the case of U.S. support for the transition there since you had two civil wars to deal with not one worked thank you well well thank you and and hello everybody um in this short space of time I thought the best I could do for you would be to just give you a little bit of my thinking towards Liberia on ending the war and and and winning the peace because I was an architect and implement our U.S. strategy during that the critical time of 2002-2005 as was said earlier it's very important for this group generally to keep in mind that there's no one recipe for every single country I want to reiterate that because everything is different case by case there's a million variables involved however I think that you can take some lessons away from Liberia that are at least worthy to think about and so I offer them to you and one of the things I also wanted to say that was said in another context and reiterate was that as as the ambassador as a policymaker it was not a linear experience all right in other words you had issues coming at you from all sides crises armed conflicts but you didn't do things seriatim you didn't do things step by step if you did you would fail and don't try it is my first recommendation while we were under fire we were worrying about how to get the humanitarian assistance in how to revive a dead economy you see what I'm saying and not just about the security piece first and then we'll worry about something next that doesn't work you've got to think across the board spectrum nor were the problems that we faced particularly ones that that stayed solved I remember solving the same problem three or four times or it would morph into something else that I didn't expect at all now having said all these relativistic points I now want to offer my list of lessons learned and with some similarity and some overlap I just want to offer the first one which is in general and in most cases try to make complex situations less complex in other words simplify now it doesn't apply in all cases because sometimes you need complicated answers to complicated situations but you can you can parse it and try to make it more simple let's let's go to the library 2003 all right 14 years civil war hundreds of thousands dead it was a total train wreck all right and but one thing was very clear to me and to many others is that there was not going to be peace in Liberia without the exit of Charles Taylor who was the then warlord and president of Liberia so once he he he left it was a little bit like the old game of pickup sticks does anybody remember that I see some blank stares here okay for you computer generation people pick up steps sticks is you this is game is piles a mess of sticks and you pick up one at a time without move jostling the pile and the winner simplifies right until you have everything removed now it's not the same because I said you can't do things seriatum so it's not a very good analogy you have to do everything it wants to move those sticks but we're going to use it anyway um and once we got the that out of the way then I was able to take a group to go make a ceasefire that stuck we went out on the battlefield made a ceasefire we weren't able to do that at the peace negotiations in another country okay another stick comes off right then that allowed us to separate the warring armies a little bit and inject a very small vanguard of west african peacekeepers not un peacekeepers they came later west african peacekeepers called echo mill and permissively in between the warring sides see the sticks coming out see how it's getting simpler okay when the un did arrive months months later they did picked up many of those sticks perhaps most dramatically I would say in the disarmament of over a hundred thousand combatants from three different armies sticks come off well I think you got the point simplify if you can the next one I would offer to you is to internationalize the problem I spent a lot of time on this and what I tried to do with others many others was to create kind of a multi-level web of peace um this web of peace provided resilience against backsliding to war and also kept helped us keep the momentum in the library of forward and moving what what am I talking about well as was mentioned we had the un there we had a peacekeeping but they were they were a lead element but we also had a lot of other groups working simultaneously at on maintaining the peace and making the process move forward the international contact group for Liberia many nations we had general abubakar who is the head of the peace process and chief negotiator the peace of the comprehensive peace accord we had the world bank working on economic issues of varying sorts we had Western leaders we had African leaders we had many NGOs some of their representatives here in this audience working on the problem Liberians themselves were part of this web of peace that we were creating you can see it right okay um and here's the point really this is my opinion I think the United States would have failed to save Liberia if we attempted to do it unilaterally okay um and relatedly make sure the international mandate is the appropriate one you know I spent some time at the UN Security Council and the the the resolutions that we passed in these situations usually where either articles was called article six agreements or article seven agreements there's a huge difference between them and what you can do and what you can't do if you get the wrong one on a situation you've got major problems so having the right international mandate to operate is critical similarly having a decent peace agreement if there is one in a situation that you deal with is is also critical uh I've seen peace agreements that are well written that kind of have the architecture have a path for countries and groups to move along towards stability normalization peace and I've seen other peace agreements that I don't know maybe they got tired or something uh it just it there's just missing pieces it it's it really doesn't do the job and there it really makes it very difficult for implementers on the ground to move forward so having a good peace agreement that's the that's the next one and also worry about the threat of legitimacy this is something I worry about a lot uh when Charles Taylor stepped down I pressed very hard against opposition to have then vice president Moses blah succeed him as president of Liberia why because it was supposed to be that way under the constitution of Liberia even though Moses blah was a Taylor guy once he stepped down he stepped down in favor of the interim leader as specified under the comprehensive peace agreement you see it so we had the that leader the interim leader he was in his post and then as per the comprehensive peace agreement that leader then stepped aside for the election of 2005 which brought to power Ellen Johnson Sirleaf a democratically elected president now the point here is that nobody questions today who is the legitimate leader of the state of Liberia nobody and that is very important next suggestion is keep tempo on your side or momentum or whatever you want to call it it you know this is one of the things that people almost never discuss but it's absolutely critical in on the ground in these operations um I can say one example uh that comes to mind which is that uh I pressed the United Nations and it's very able leader Jack Klein uh of unmill to begin disarmament negotiations in December 2003 now there was a riot at that time it was a major riot and there was criticism from the pundits in new york and washington uh about moving so quickly with so few people on the ground to start the disarmament process okay tactically it was very very difficult strategically it was the right thing to do why because it kept tempo on our side it kept all these combatant groups three different armies focused on what our next step was on disarmament and so we move forward on the peace process we didn't go back to war there are other points in the puzzle uh disarmament uh demobilization reintegration security sector reform i'm going to let dr mcthake talk ably about that as he always does uh but one other point i want to mention is is on the economic side don't forget about it long term short term and don't forget about financing i spent so much time trying to secure financing for whatever strategy i had it is extremely difficult my question to you is show me the money or my remark to you is show me the money or you don't have a strategy at all all right you have to have the money on the economic side my my uh emphasis was the uh was jobs one thing we don't think about enough is jobs so what we did in liberia was to create kind of a civilian conservation corps uh like the roosevelt administration did in the thirties and we hire the ex combatants to do things thousands of them from all different sides to go fix the bridges they just blown up go go go fix the the clinics they just burned down so uh so but it gave them a future and it was very important toward moving forward and stability uh don't forget about rule of law and corruption um it's really the plague of all stabilization efforts we can get into that uh later on but um you it's very hard to achieve a national identity or normalize in the midst of hypervenal governance um so um let me just conclude by making a plea for uh having solid us and other leadership on the ground and then listening to them carefully uh woody allen once said 90 of life is showing up and uh it really is once you get there on the ground you're going to understand it much better than you ever can talking about it anywhere else as many of you know and implementation is every bit as important as the strategy you build so my plea is to send in solid creative trained interdisciplinary leaders on the ground and let them play a strong role in strategy creation and in implementation and then listen to them carefully and don't interfere unduly and i think i'm looking at some of those future leaders right now thank you very much thank you for those uh really excellent words and uh send off for a lot of people in this room who want to follow in your footsteps um i'd like to turn it over to shon mcfaite who has a wide range of experience in many transitional societies but has a particular expertise on the security sector reform that took place in liberia i know you'll address that and other issues so go ahead shon thank you thank you gina um and thank you and good morning to everybody i worked with ambassador blaney during that time frame uh in liberia and one of the key problems especially in a post-conflict state is what do you do with the military uh especially it was complicit in human rights violations and other issues or the police force um as many people know in this room there's two programs that work in conjunction one's called ddr which is disarmament demobilization and reintegration the second is called ssr which has many names but it's what is it no security sector just everybody's awake okay good thanks um um ssr and without going into the details is to what that looks like i would look to say one thing about it um building partnership capacity amongst our allies uh or future allies especially in the defense sectors is a gateway capacity is a gateway capacity that leads from stabilization to development because security and development are linked this is the security development nexus that joanna started doing work on many years ago and so several others and uh in the case of liberia for the military for the you know the reformation of trans transformation the military that task did not fall to the u.s army or to the un it fell to a private company called dinecore international i was there not as a usg official i was there as a contractor and this offers an interesting parallel case study or miniature case study as to stability ops and development and i want to talk a little bit about that today briefly and just to also note that i think it may be the first time in 150 years that one sovereign nation hired a company to raise another sovereign nations armed forces it's interesting and and the military today is still considered a um uh a a relative success with a lot of asterisks and caveats that go along with that uh but compared to what's going on in iraq afghanistan i think that case could be made uh it's a much smaller military but the the the techniques and methods of ssr and ddr are pretty much the same they just differ in scale and scope so when you privatize a function like this there's there's benefits and there's risks um the benefits in this case of working for a company is that the company is not beholden to bureaucratic turf wars back at the headquarters we were not do d where we're not usa'd we're not state we was a state department contract but we work with all three all three d's um and so we didn't have the institutional perspectives and perhaps uh biases as well um and that cuts both ways the second thing is innovative approaches we were able to do um interesting things that if you if i was a do d i was in the army before this i was a basically a paratrooper so there's no way as a paratrooper i would say i really want to have a good strong human rights vetting program modeled off of ngos that just would not have probably gone down very well in my opinion um but in in working for a company like well working for a company you can come up with innovative approaches and we indeed created a very robust human rights vetting program we would never dream of putting a cop on the streets of dc without a thorough background check but it happens all the time in post conflict or conflict affected countries because it's hard to do in countries that have no public records but there are ways to do it and we find out those ways and we were able to do it we also used a human security approach in the design of the military i won't get too much into detail on this but it's it's very different than a traditional national security approach um we're also third many ways more efficient if we needed an expert somebody who knew something very well and we only needed them for three weeks we could find that person and pull them out of you know a think tank and institution for three weeks and put them on the ground and then and then you know that's it we didn't have to go through the machinations of a bureaucracy to find a gs-15 and get them moved there so we had a lot more flexibility um and that played well for efficiencies now there are also some risks as well and i'm not implying that uh the company i work for are engaged in these risks this is more of a generalized observation first of all this profit motive right profit motive so a company could be motivated to elongate and expand the contract for profit why would that how could they do this well it wouldn't be hard um if you're in a very complex environment as ambassador blaney just outlined and you have an overburdened embassy and i don't know how many people in the embassy was it like 13 or i don't know it's like small not many yeah i'm very very a lot to do and still bitter over here and uh not enough um uh but you know if if you have an overworked uh foreign service officer who's in charge of managing your 400 person multi-million dollar program who doesn't have the expertise to know technically about ssr or ddr well who are they going to go to to ask for critical information they're going to go to the contractor so the contractor may have a conflict of interest about providing information that skews the contract in different ways to elongate the profit motive to up profit um and there's other and they exploit asymmetry of information principal uh agent issues etc and lastly when it comes to privatizing these functions we have to really step back and ask ourselves at the policy level do we really want to create a market for building armies in foreign countries right because that's sort of what we're doing and we've seen that in the last 10 years with private security companies and so forth where we've created a market for force and the question is what happens when we lose control of that market what happens when when afghan companies start to model that you know warlords now we're warlords ink and they they use uh you know we have columbians now in in you know we have i mean we have these no other companies that are they're an indigenous uh these private security companies are indigenous um i haven't seen this in Liberia but we see this elsewhere especially in the gulf states right now so what could you know last is so what could go wrong there's too many things to name so i think the first lesson that we've all experienced this from his humility um there's two things i want to hit one is is that all institutions must rise together we had a problem in Liberia where we we had this amazing life that i was involved in the creation of it an amazing program uh and we produced uh after the first basic training class ended um we couldn't pay them and the last thing you want in a conflict effect to say that are unpaid soldiers right um and the reason we couldn't pay them because the ministry of finance was not ready it had no capacity and the reason they didn't is because of our own interagency problems um our our sort of do d and we our defense sector reform was at a much stronger pace than our sort of finance sector reform um and so making all institutions rise together is very difficult very difficult and the second is that you know one doesn't want to become a paradigm prisoner um there we all believe strongly that security and justice must be linked and they should be linked but they can't always be linked for example what if the only way you can get x combatants to come in to demobilize is by promising them amnesty that gives you more security but less justice perhaps or what happens when we in in Liberia we the vetting team for the new basic recruits had the best records in the company uh i mean in the country on you know who did what before the war and during the war like war atrocities but those those evidence was given to the team on conditions of anonymity and if the truth and reconciliation commission comes over and says hand it all over to us now do you say no which would be bad for justice or do you say you know you know our security so do you say yes so there's a lot of uh dilemmas uh on the ground that don't that brief well in in dc and new york and geneva but on the ground are much more difficult so in conclusion as we come you know ten years of many of these same questions have been asked answered and asked again um i think what would would really would help at this point is a systemic analysis of why we fail to learn there's a lot of theories out there from bureaucracy to incentive structures in organizations but uh an overall or an overall comprehensive approach looking at these different theories applying it to different case studies and trying to figure out how do institutions learn how do they go forward how do we capture lessons or don't just learn lessons but we capture them thank you i think you achieved your goal shone of waking people up uh even though it's the morning session and i'd like to come back to some of the things you brought up because i think they're absolutely crucial to the question of the topic of this panel the u.s. support to transitions in these two countries and i think it's extremely good timing that we have franklin more who is at u.s.a.i.d and has seen the course of these uh efforts in particularly in the africa region move forward because perhaps you can also inform us about where you see this trajectory where it's been and where it's going so thank you franklin thank you joanna um and let me thank the organizers for inviting me it's been a wonderful chance for me to see a number of people who i haven't seen in quite some time since i've been away for a couple of years and i've only been back for six months let me say a couple of general things before i dive into Liberia specifically my first one would be on the discussion of development and its relationship to humanitarian assistance and stabilization and reconstruction we have a little course at a i d it's called a i d one oh one and it is for those who are going to interact with the agency like new congressional staff or new staff at other agencies and i do a little piece at the beginning on the history of a i d my view and this will tell you some of my thinking of the relationship between these is that one of the first engagements with stabilization and reconstruction as an army was leaving that the united states engaged in was the marshal plan and in fact if you look at the marshal plan one of the unique and wonderful things about it that makes it so American is that much of the marshal plan followed some examples that were laid out for the government by the cooperative for american relief in europe i.e care and it was an institution that was in existence and took on europe as the united states was figuring out how it would take on europe and i think that if you look at those things you realize that often for us civil society and the government march in the same direction influencing each other greatly and how one moves but there is a sequencing and layering of humanitarian assistance stabilization and development that is critically important so i do not look at it as you have this period of stabilization and reconstruction and that lasts for some period of time on a calendar and then suddenly you have development in fact you see that those three things interact with each other and with humanitarian assistance all along the way second as we look at stabilization and reconstruction and look at the activities two critical questions to answer one what was it that caused the destabilization in the first place now and the case of Liberia ultimately a war but there were things that caused the war and it's the things that caused the war that caused the destabilization not necessarily the war so to repair some of that one has to get back before the war and look at some of the conditions on the ground that led to the war because that's what led to the destabilization and the second question i think is even more critical than the first and that is if you're engaged in stabilization and reconstruction is a return to what existed before actually stable and in most cases the answer to that is no which is why there's such a link between the stabilization and the development that needs to take place so generally as one engages in stabilization and reconstruction what one is seeking is something that is greater better than what had existed at the point of destabilization and is looking for how one layers and sequences a variety of activities that are development activities to those humanitarian and those reconstruction and stabilization activities now the two speakers have concentrated on two of the biggest things that took place in Liberia one the demobilization and movement of troops we can call them troops from three warring factions and the importance of that we've heard a discussion of co-opting competing movements the importance of that in co-opting competing movements so we've heard something about that we've also heard something about the consolidation of a new democracy and the ability in a stabilization period to look more to the long term and to look at how we get to a legitimate government in Liberia some of the other things that came online that were also critically important and the statement of everything should move together I'm not sure it needs to move together but you certainly need to have some idea of how you're moving those pieces because if you move one of them too far ahead of the others your structure is going to crumble so there were some other things that were taking place that were critically important and let me highlight a couple of them one of them was what does one do with internally displaced people and how does one move internally displaced people probably back to the area that they fled and back into a set of activities that allow them to stabilize, be productive and move forward in something that one actually can say is development and change so that was a significant activity which was one of the early activities another was the learning agenda now of course we're talking about a society that's been at war for 14 years and I can tell you there wasn't much schooling going on during that period of time so suddenly you have a society with a backlog in things as simple as literacy and numeracy and the need to take several generations and move them forward and literacy and numeracy became a critical piece so one of the things that took place was a huge training of trainers for people who would go in to educate populations a couple of other things yes it is true that in general external funds should be giving way to internal funds that means there has to be a marshalling of internal funds so another of the important things was working on financial management systems to increase the capacity of a legitimate government to actually raise revenue so that the nation state could begin to move on its own legs last thing I'll talk about other than general economic and social reintegration was some things that actually brought normalcy to various parts of Liberia and society so there was a strong push early to reengage the electricity service in the capital and importantly as a symbol to get the streetlights back on in the capital because that allowed a large portion very decisive portion of the population to begin to think that life is returning to normal and there are other things we can look to that are going to lead us on this pathway that returns us to where we need to be now have we finished with stabilization and reconstruction much less development in Liberia no it is very much a work in progress there is much progress taking place and I'll close with a little story that is interesting last year I spent time in Liberia three times and I happened to always go to Liberia with people who had not spent time there so the last time I was in Liberia I was there I was gone for four months I was back I was gone for five months and I came back the third time and I had taken a number of diplomats from Rome from Food and Agriculture Organization and World Food Program to Liberia so we landed at the airport and where if you've been to Monrovia you know Robertsfield is some distance outside of Monrovia so we're driving from Robertsfield into Monrovia and we're passing the landscape and myself and one of my guests are both looking out the car window and going wow wow wow we get two blocks from Monrovia and she turns to me and she goes wow I can't believe how many burned out buildings there are and I jerk back in my seat and I turn to her and I say that was not why I was going wow I was going wow because in nine months I can't believe how many burned out buildings have been replaced with something that is operating and functional so it just lets you know that when you come into an area subjected to reconstruction stabilization and again to a path of development it's very interesting what you recognize and you don't recognize as change and what is important and not important for change I'll stop there so Franklin the lesson is reconstruction is in the eye of the beholder and I think we have heard this from different speakers in different contexts but I'd like to pose some questions to our Liberia part of the panel before we go to a broader conversation with the audience and I'd like to start Ambassador Blaney you talked about the lessons you learned working with the United Nations getting the right resolution and making sure things would happen but if you contrast that I mean getting the UN involved was probably an easier lift for Liberia whereas in Colombia you could have never had a UN resolution because of basically US interests in the region and I think that's an important political or geopolitical discussion especially as we look forward to transitions which we face in the Middle East and the challenges of working with the United Nations because of the different conflicts among the P5 maybe you could talk a little bit about how that enabled the fact that Liberia was not in the strategic lens in the United States but was an important partner historically because of its origins that made a UN operation consistent with US interests possible and maybe you want to challenge me on that question but I think there is an interesting contrast one thing that you might all recall is that this crisis of Liberia and trying to end the war and the exit of Charles Taylor from Liberia all took place during the Iraq situation and there was not one of the things Washington has trouble doing is having binocular vision sometimes or there was not at all times you know a central focus on Liberia and there was division in Washington about what to do about Liberia and I credit then Secretary Colin Powell as having my back here in Washington and being a strong voice for helping me to put together an overall approach toward Liberia that included a UN peacekeeping mission but the reason I say this is that I don't think you can assume that it was anything like an automatic step that the United States took at all and in fact the steps we took thereafter were very much debated so I'm not in a position to say you know weigh the relative interests between Liberia and Columbia certainly there is a there is a deep historical relationship with Liberia but I think that getting together an approach that included the peacekeepers and as I said before even before they were there the African peacekeepers who were really the vanguard in this situation was a complex highly political maneuver that that that took a lot of effort and so there was nothing automatic about it Thank you Sean do you mention something at the very end of your talk as to why we fail to learn lessons and I think that's a you know you said it casually but I think there's a much deeper answer to that and if you were to identify what those lessons are if you could what are the ones you think we fail to learn in situations such as Liberia where we have heavy contractor involvement and they are doing important work because of the limitations of U.S. resources in a country where you need additional personnel but perhaps you could identify those because it was provocative enough I think to think this through a little bit more Thank you John that's where we pay for the sins of being provocative I get the answer I think there are there are many lessons learned and looking at this room there's a lot of familiar faces and for 10 years we've been going to lessons learned meetings right and so what two things one is that I can speak to my small patch if you will which is sort of the contracting element I think you know contracting is not a necessarily evil thing it shouldn't be categorically banned I think it's but I think the lessons learned is is the United States didn't take the time it didn't take the time to sort of set up the market in a way that promotes the benefits and mitigates the risk and now I think the market now has expanded beyond U.S. control and we're starting to see these companies appear all over the world and so I think there was a missed opportunity and things sort of unfolded in an ad hocracy but a larger question is is why do we fail to learn and that's beyond the scope of my limited time here but I think that would be a good project for example for a CSIS or another organization to take on like what are the theories of institutional learning and how does it apply to last 10 years and what can we learn sorry going forward about how to do this well I think that you suggest a good project and I think when we get to the audience's time they may have some observations on this as well but I also wanted to get back to some of the things you said Franklin in the comparison that you have seen over time in Liberia because I think there is a success story in many cases there I mean transitions are transitions they're dynamic and your experience with your other donor colleagues when you went back you know implies the eye of the beholder but there's something more I think in the trajectory of assistance that we miss and that is patience and humility that these are not going to happen overnight but maybe you'd like to comment since you've had a great experience at aid also in the environment issue in climate areas which impact on the vulnerability of states well I think that patience is critically important you've talked about looking at the environment climate change etc etc for some of that for me it gets at the two questions I asked one is can you only return to where you were and the fact is no you have to go much further than that and do you have to consider those things that may have had a very destabilizing element and you have to do something about those and certainly if you look at the case of Liberia interestingly enough while you had three warring factions you had a lot of the finance of those three warring factions illegal logging in a forest and that you know Liberia has one of the primary remaining tropical forested pieces of West Africa of what used to be a much larger contiguous forest it highlighted that there had always been problems with forest land tenure and it allowed that to be one of the things that a Liberian government could begin to look at the whole concept of how communities related to their forest and tenure because it was going to have an effect on their environment on their biodiversity on climate change as well as importantly on income and it became one of the things that if you look at a Liberia now it has gone much further than it was before there was conflict so it's one of the things that because it got caught up in financing the conflict it sort of highlighted it as a problem that people needed to move beyond and they've successfully moved beyond that and that's a good thing yeah I think that's all true I just want to make it clear though that the highly patrimonial system that and an extremely venal system that was in Liberia in the post-Taylor period was not handled by the indigenous people there in the first case what happened was that the international donor community at times led by us created a system an external auditing system we actually put people in the finance ministry in the central bank so that it called GMAP I've got the title here which is the oh you guys figure it out well I talk but the governance economic management assistance program or something like that that's it really okay and what we did was was to help them detox this system and in fact when Ellen Johnson Sirly took over years later I was expecting the GMAP system to be abandoned but she kept it because she knew I think she knew that the people of Liberia many of them during the previous administrations had been trained to be venal that's how they made their living I once went into the Department of Commerce the Ministry of Commerce in Liberia during the early years and I asked an official when's the last time you got paid and he told me two years ago and I said why are you here and he just gave me a smile it was a systematic patrimonial venal system that we had to break down on logging it didn't start with with the Liberian government that was elected it started with another international commission that cancelled all the logging concessions Tabla Rasa so you know I need to set the record straight here a little bit and by the way and as long as we're doing that nobody got amnesty in Liberia all right that I would never do that and and quite rightly the education thing as Franklin pointed out was very important and that was the number one when people would come in combatants usually quite young to surrender their literally surrender their AK-47s and take them the number one thing we would ask them is what do you want to do now that the war is over and they would say to me or other people I want to go to school that was the number one answer well I think that that is you know a universal cry and I will add one lesson learned Sean to your issue about paying the former soldiers and I think we learned this even before Liberia in Haiti I was responsible for getting the pay out to the former Vod the former military and the first day we were going to pay these former soldiers in the different venues we got an emergency call I remember I was sitting in the OTI office that one of our employees a young Spaniards had his arm broken before the pay had even gotten there and another young guy had been beat silly and had to be hospitalized and that was when we began to learn the lesson that when you were going to pay soldiers first you had to pay them and do it in a timely fashion because otherwise they would know where the guns were and how to get back to them but more important that it had a very symbolic value in living up to commitments and creating legitimacy for both the transition and the new governments and I think that is a lesson that has been positively learned by the United States and other governments in terms of making a transition work you cannot neglect the people who once were fighters I think you have all been a wonderful audience and there's so much expertise that I see out here and I'm sure many questions that we want to turn this part of the program over to you I know there are people with microphones that are walking around if you'll identify yourselves I will start on this side of the room and I will work my way across there's a person young man in the back yes right next to you and would you please identify yourself by name and organization if you wish thank you thank you I'm Leon Wanchub University of Wisconsin Performing of State Department I have a question for Mr. McFate you mentioned as one of the advantages excuse me of being a contractor is more innovation unless type of bureaucracy you gave the example of human rights that thing of people to be in a reformed security force or police force in the absence of any records I'm wondering this is something I had to work with frequently I'm wondering what what you do if you could expand on that a little bit I think I'm going to take two more questions and then let's go to the middle of the room there are two people right here and then we'll go over to the other side thank you thank you my name is Max Kellan with Booz Allen Hamilton two questions the first great discussion and this is both of these questions have been touched on during the discussion the first is that often in these situations you have even if you have top-level investment or by a host nation government trying to emerge from conflict these governments aren't monolithic they often have competing interests within them and those interests are often tied to the previous patterns of economic marginalization or corruption etc again all of this has been alluded to my question is how do we do a better job of engaging with those governments and strengthening those who are genuine partners and not allowing them to either be marginalized or overthrowing by the more venal parts of the government or delegitimized by the very support we're giving them and then the other question is building off to something that Mr. Moore said talking about the electricity in Monrovia again another challenge that we have is we tend to take very technical approaches to needs assessments and we end up with very long lists of what these countries need and have a hard time prioritizing along those and because we're trying to achieve political effects symbol symbolism matters you alluded to the importance of of the symbolism of turning the electricity on and the message that that sent and I'd be interested to hear more from other panelists about how you go about identifying the particular areas that have symbolic importance in these conflicts to signal a return to stability thank you and there's one more question I think Assistant Secretary Sheer had his hand up but if you can get a microphone over to him thank you very much Jim Sheer formerly DOD and thanks to all the panelists for a very enlightening discussion a question for both sides of the panel how do we in terms of developing this web of peace as one of you mentioned how do we work with diasporas in a way that helps I'm thinking in Colombia you walk down the halls of the bureaucracy you see a lot of Colombians who are educated overseas they're back younger generation trying to be change agents notwithstanding that you fly to La Macarena you can do it in one hour but it takes 15 days to drive by truck going back so maybe physical infrastructures an issue too but and in Liberia Johnson Surly diasporas can be part of the solution or as we've seen in Iraq and in parts of the Balkans part of the problem so I'd be interested to hear your perspectives on that thank you okay we've got three hot questions and then I'll come back to people who haven't the hands up and taken another round but who would like to start sure I'll start with that but invite others to chime in yes the diaspora was very important in the Liberia situation as a matter of fact it part of the diaspora helped fund the rebel movement in Liberia the LERD and others so it's very important my answer is that there needs to be efforts made as part of the workout of building national identity and there needs to be there needs to be efforts to reduce tribalism conferences to try to reduce that and and ask the question of who is a Liberian you know am I a Liberian and and over being a member of such and such a tribe now earlier there were so many problems involved just stopping the war keeping it stopped which is and doing the rest the economic the political the everything workout but if I had to point to one area today and by the way I think that what compared to when I was in Liberia and where it is today it's a miracle nothing I agree with you Franklin that is it's amazing but there's still work to do important work and undone work and part of that is right in the area that you ask about which is getting the diaspora and the people to achieve a kind of a national identity which supersedes that which divides them whether it's their their tribe their ethnic group their religion and so conferences what Nelson Mandela deli's called in Dabba's in South Africa need to be held I think President John Sirleaf has this in mind already but it comes none too early I mean I think it should come soon so that we don't have something like that undercut what has been a success story there was a Franklin go ahead I would just add one piece to that I think that diaspora is a potentially very good thing because it brings back experience innovation and often a lot of cash to a country I do think that you have to be careful that the diaspora you bring back are tied to the new vision of the country not the old vision of the country they left and I think that that's critically important many times you can have diaspora come back who are sometimes not valued by other citizens in the country who didn't leave and who sometimes left because there were some things they believed about the country that have changed and they would like to change them back so while I think by and large they are a huge potential every now and then there can be some problems created by diaspora I think in the case of Columbia I'm not up to date as to today but we probably didn't use the Colombian diaspora enough but that said I think what what what we did do is capitalize on the private sector and we've not talked about public-private partnerships as a way of consolidating and providing some sustainability to some of the efforts in the case of Columbia that has worked and there are some that are more mature than others and there you can bring in and pull in the diaspora as well so with the connection with the private sector so I don't have anything to say on the diaspora so I'll speak about the government question that you and of course I was in government so it's a it's a special perspective you always have these stereotypes on government officials and I've always found out that you'd be surprised on the talent that you find in local governments way in the at the municipality level especially and even in some ministries there's always very very good people or maybe we're just lucky in Colombia but and if you can't find them you're not looking hard enough hard enough it's just that that you should expect from them the same thing that you would expect them to expect of you um people don't necessarily behave the way that you are expecting and chances are that you will find a lot of people that are very good they are committed they came back they wanted to work for their country and they just need motivation and need to be pushed and recognized for their job let's go and if you have no more comments there are some hands up there was a woman here in the front if we could get a microphone up front then we'll go over to the side and I see Doug waving his hand back there so let's take those three and we'll go to you too let's Julie Werbel from USAID thank you very much for your comments today you've done a really excellent job describing the complexities of the operating environments that that we face the challenge is that the resources that we have to engage are significantly constrained to give you an example I was asked to design a DDR program in a country emerging from transition and given $150,000 to do it so my question to you is how do we take some of these lessons learned and apply them in a strategic way to be catalytic we really can't be comprehensive but perhaps we can take some of these this innovation and be the source of that innovation David Throop John Hopkins Seitz and CSIS and formerly of the British Foreign Office I was deeply involved in Sierra Leone so not very different from Liberia and it struck me that there is a complex contradiction really in the short attention span of the international community to long-term engagements in places like Liberia and Sierra Leone the need to stick the state back together as quickly as possible and Franklin Moore's observation that it is a serious error to rush in and try to reconstruct the state as it was before it collapsed because there was something fundamentally rotten with state institutions and their relationship with society so my view in Sierra Leone is probably the Brits rushed in far too quickly to stick back together what had been there before and it does seem to me virtually everywhere that that is a fundamental tendency of the international community when it has to deal with the devastation of places like Liberia or Afghanistan that there are existing patronage networks which we heard in the first session in a sense have to be co-opted and yet are also fundamentally rotten to the core and a problem of state cohesion so how do we square that and my second question is DDR it struck me that DDR is very rapidly captured by those patronage networks so in southern province of Sierra Leone 25,000 went through the rehabilitation and job training program but I would say 24,950 of those were government guys either from the militia or from the army and probably the Revolutionary United Front guys got 50 of the 25,000 training programs so that is a problem and then you have the problem of the fundamental distortion of the local economy by the international presence could you ask your question well the question is how do how do you resolve the problem of the international communities distorting effects on the economy you've got all these UN guys all this international aid pouring in which in the short term transforms local job opportunities but is not sustainable and secondly you have the problem of the patronage networks determining who actually gains the benefits of DDR which is also fundamentally distorting can I take part one and four yeah well and I do want to because we're running short of time and I know Ambassador Alialde has another commitment at state let me get Doug Brooks the microphone and then we'll take these very provocative questions and let you all have a chance to respond Doug Brooks I'm a consultant formerly with the international stability operations association I'll start with part 16 of my question first no my question is on the security issue I think one of the unifying factors of both these success stories is that there was a certain amount of security that allowed the NGOs and the contractors to actually function in a successful way and I just wonder were there specific signs that you can cite that were signs of the security reached a point where these NGOs or were the contractors or you guys were essentially able to do what you wanted to do or needed to do let me take parts of these questions first of all I think that the resource question that was asked is very important and I don't think that given the budgetary situation that the United States and other countries under that we can expect expect much improvement on on that for countries that tend to as was made in another question fall out of mind a little bit once the immediate crisis is clear by the way on that falling out of out of consciousness that's a real problem and that's one of the reasons you need that that web of peace and allies and as many people as you can because it helps keep the domestic consciousness in of the parliaments and of the the congress and others higher than it would be does it solve the problem no but if you have a lot of people involved it helps you keep the level of consciousness and the and the appropriations up so that's my contribution to that but I'd say that on on getting more money one thing that as you move forward on the economic advancement you can look at partnerships with the private sector other ways to draw in private capital when I was out there I was just trying to get the private sector not to leave completely and abandon Liberia but now it's to the point where I think it's the second or third highest drawing direct investment target in Africa so there's lots of ways to maybe creatively combine those tough objectives with with with broader programs and and real capital for for partnerships with the private sectors and others I think that are worth looking into to try to multiply what you what you do have because I don't think you're going to get more if if I can add to the resource question because I I know we're you're sitting and I was in a similar situation in Paraguay as ambassador and we had a growing insurgency group in the north and there were there were no resources and and so what I found myself doing is really using the interagency much more strategically so let's say the department of defense had their humanitarian program I would say okay let's go let's all go to the north let's all go to the north and trying to be very strategic also about trying to get the private sector to open their eyes and look at that region it takes more time it takes more of trying to hone in on what you can leverage and eventually we had a program that maybe wasn't robust but as you as government we were able to contribute with with with the with the paraguayans to try to address it better so the interagency is is I think using that a bit more strategic first one just quickly this morning when Robert talked he talked about a body of data and the assimilation of data and the use of data I actually think that as one looks at everyone who has the ability to marshal some resources on countries that as the data flows better and as the data gets better one finds that there is greater interest in participation I believe that that's true domestically in terms of the interagency and that it is data that has brought other institutions of the U.S. government to the table but I also think that's very true internationally and that increasingly one begins if you go from a Sierra Leone and a Liberia and you compare that to a Niger and a Mali you see that that donors already now sit down to share data on a Niger and a Mali and it has in fact attracted other donors it has attracted some private sector and it has attracted some civil service organizations and that is because there is a greater understanding of some of the relationships because of the data that's being amassed quickly to talk quickly about DDR of Julie and David's question my concern about a catalytic I think it's a great idea to have a comprehensive version one of the problems though is I wonder if it's better to have no DDR program than a halfway done one if that's grammically even correct because you don't want some groups to be armed and other groups to be unarmed and then become a predator and prey it's a new dynamic to the conflict regarding capture of DDR that's a very difficult question that captures always an issue as Dr. Thrip as you know for anything particularly with DDR one of the things that we tried to do in Liberia is we use cell phone technology to load people's up with money rather than giving it to people and then they get shut down for the money after they get through the DDR process so maybe there's a technological options that we can look into as well and regarding Doug's question about security one of the advantages that we had in Liberia versus say Iraq, Afghanistan is that there was security provided by UNMIL the other in my opinion another factor is that I think there's genuine war fatigue in Liberia after 14 years of war there's always spoilers and managing spoilers and Ambassador Blaney can address that far better than I and lastly there's a question from the first round of questions about human rights vetting and how we did it without public records I can talk to you afterward but basically I wrote an article for military review in 2007 that sort of lays it out one of the things that we did that was very successful something called public vetting so you take people's the candidates agreed to this they take pictures of them you make Facebooks and you have the gnomes de guerre or their names and you put them in IDP camps and cities and you say there's any reason any of these people should not represent you in the future military of Liberia please contact this number or this email this office it could do anonymously and we of course we got a lot of false positives but we also got a lot of good information as well thank you lastly on the UN effects question yes it was a huge positive effect initially and it still is very important and it is distorting but now the Liberian economy is much stronger and the UN forces withdrawing gradually so yes it's distorting the economy but that distortion factor is reducing and the broader economy as the broader Liberian economy expands let's take there were a couple of more hands that I'd like to take please microphone on the right side and I saw a gentleman on the other side they're in the tour Pat and I see Pat again so let's get those three questions on the floor and anybody else who has a question if you can make a quick please let's take them all and let the panel have their course because we have to stop on time to keep up with the schedule so please Juliana Pilan I teach a reconstruction at the Institute of World Politics and 10 years ago please put your microphone I was vice president programs at IFAS listening to all these panels one gets a sense that what is being reconstructed and stabilized are is stuff but the human beings involved as well and one of the problems in all of these traumatized areas is that the population needs to get up and go in Sierra Leone is a very good example actually of where the population has appears not to be quite able to get up and go so the simple the narrow question is what would you say the United States and generally the international community has been able to do to change to not only reconstruct the infrastructure but the human fiber next question okay Bob I think I'm Bob Hershey I'm a consultant are there opportunities to use the internet and cell phones to get people together and get funding for projects and get transparency thank you and if we'll go to the left side of the room there are two or three more people quickly David said me I was up until about a month ago I was a colleague of Jim's at DOD we were both deputies and secretaries I did Afghanistan and Pakistan as I listened to the panel and going back to your original question about lessons learned I have to say frankly what I hear are lessons learned about Columbia and lessons learned about Liberia rather than generalized lessons for dealing with transitions and in fact I'm almost worried that a search for those generalized lessons might be a dangerous search given the particularities so my question for the panel is do you think your experience is generalizable or is it really just particular to the countries involved Patricia Fagan Georgetown University I my question is based on my own comparative research on integration of post-conflict populations in Columbia and Liberia the Macarena initiative is positive to my mind largely on one of the reasons is positive is because it was regional in scope and included both urban and rural areas now the gist of my question which applies to both Liberia and Columbia is on that theme would you with the panelists distinguish between stabilization initiatives in rural areas and urban areas I think there is a distinction to be made and I'd point out on Franklin Moore's comment about the IDPs the IDPs began as a rural population they many they are now largely an urban population and therefore stabilization of the IDPs has become an urban problem I think that's emblematic not only in Liberia but in other countries as well and I'd appreciate your observations thank you and I think there's a gentleman in the back who had his hand up and then I think we will turn this over to the panelists to both respond to these excellent questions and to any other wrap up remarks that they have so we can finish on time and all of you have been patient can go and have a nice lunch and prepare for the next session so next question sir thank you my name is Joe Foley I'm with the National Federation of Creation Americans and I've got another region-based question for the panel in Bosnia and Herzgavena the current and future fate of the Croatian Bosnians we believe is possibly the glue that might keep Bosnia together the Croatian Bosnians continue to be discriminated against in a politically economic manner and the Dayton Peace Accords has established them as the smallest constituent peoples there and it may be the glue that keeps the country together as separatist tendencies continue to go forward since the Dayton Peace Accords has been signed this is a Latin American Liberian legacy panel but what other than continuing to push Bosnia toward multilateral Western organizations which they've achieved very little success to date what role can the international development community play as these post-conflict arenas such as Bosnia and the later larger extent the Balkans what do you have to contribute to possible help there in the Balkans as it's continued to be needed since we you know why don't we go down the line I think and maybe you can respond to these questions Frank let's start with you Franklin and then go to Sean and Ambassador Blaney and then Juan Pablo you'll have the last word a couple of quick things I think that there are elements of what we talked about that are generalizable and I think there are lessons that one learns that are general lessons similar to the to the 10 steps now obviously they need to once you get to a particular country in particular circumstance move them around so that they relate to that circumstance but I think there are some things that are generalizable let me say what I know about IDPs in Liberia I think that it is true that there are a fair number of IDPs that have gone to urban areas I'm not sure that it's a higher number than the general migration of the population to urban areas so I'm not sure that I think that IDPs have diverted to urban areas at a time when the general rural population was very happy being the rural population and I think that there are many cases of IDPs in Liberia that actually left where they lived and went to live with other people of their same ethnic group as extended family both in Liberia and some of them actually were refugees in Ivory Coast and lived with what are recognizably members of their ethnic group some of those have returned to their original areas some of them have not but I don't think that it's wholesale a IDP issue that went from rural to urban and my last comment on Sierra Leone and up and running I think that from a human point of view there have been some just amazing things that have taken place in Sierra Leone and I would highlight there is a group of women who spent time in India being trained on solar technology and they have a name I'm trying to remember what the name of them is now that they're back in Sierra Leone they've been very successful at installing solar technology around the country and in fact Mono River Union is making use of them to help train women in the other states of Cote d'Ivoire, Guinea and Liberia because it is such a successful transformation so I think that there are some cases that are very human that have looked at pockets of the population in Sierra Leone and said here's a group that we think we can make some progress with they've been very successful and many of them have either been trained in country or come back to the country and have lives that are quite different than the lives they had before that's it for me just very briefly to the question of human fiber one of the things that we did in Liberia is an example of this is that the first basic training modules that we went through we spent more time on teaching civics than being on the rifle range because everybody agreed at the time that Liberians knew how to fire a rifle but what is a question right so we spent a lot of time we worked with the ICRC and the curriculum was developed by Liberians not by the company and later on tragically that was taken from the basic training well curriculum is a strong word but you know what I'm saying because of budget issues and that was the way we tried to I guess humanize that part of the training regarding generalizable that's a good observation I would say that there are for example the size of the military of Liberia was determined not by the number of troops would take to defend the territorial boundaries and borders of the state but what's the capacity of the government to pay them on time you know we find that places and that's not just Liberia a lot of unstable countries there's a bigger threat of instability from unpaid soldiers than there are from an invading nation-state so that's an example thanks okay so we did recap human fiber right okay let me talk about some of the others that weren't touched upon a little bit on generalizable I hope I had hoped that some of my remarks on the non-linear nature and following legitimacy on on the importance of of having finance for your strategy tempo and some of these other things I didn't mean those as like Liberia specific but rather lessons that might be applied to and and other things that I said to other situations so I hope you got something there from that the internet cell phones I think that's that's open for business so that one I would say is very important you know before even Liberia was up and running economically these cell phones started have started appearing and today more than ever it's it's not only an economic piece but it's also a stability piece I mean from Brazil to Egypt right we're going through an era of hyperconnectivity so that the the failings of governments the wrongdoings of governments are known now instantly and more broadly than ever and so I think that that you know that that's an excellent reason why for for instance we have to concentrate on the rule of law and on transparency and government more than ever for the sake of stability because now there's instant connectivity and the population knows and they don't want to be saddled with with with predatory governments on the Bosnia first of all I would say right up front I'm not a Bosnia expert but I would say that one of the things that has been done in in in that area and but needs to continue to be done is the same thing that I pointed to in Liberia at the very end which is the search for national identity and that includes some sort of equal opportunity or more equal opportunity economic opportunity than exists which is usually a big part of the problem and my understanding of the situation is that you know you've got to reduce that that level of distrust of hatred in some cases you've got to talk about it and and you know Nelson Mandela's and Daba formula it's done did wonderful things talk about them but also look at what the real situation is in terms of forging that national identity and equalizing opportunity and that might be something that actually is is good for to think about in a lot of places okay I'll finish with with the urban rural question and some comments on the rehabilitation the human fiber question I guess what what we've learned or I've learned in Colombia is that even though of course they are different the rural and the urban settings people find common ground on the symbolic value of property so if somebody goes to to an urban area they would seek to own their house they can't own the land they don't have the same relationship we have a word in Spanish that's arraigo it's like the sense of belonging to a plot of land you don't have that in an urban area but they would they look for it in a house and of course massive housing projects are very hard to to finance and implement so that's the biggest challenge I would say in the urban area and in the rural area it goes once again to the property and owning that that piece of land or having possession over that piece of land but property is what can help and the symbolic value of property can't restore the trust of communities if if that is done in a way that you don't face their situation as a pathology as as if you were sick of course there's people that have been literally traumatized by word and they need to be intervened clinically but that's that's a minority that's I would say I remember an IOM expert said that's only five percent of people what people need to speak about is what they feel from from after violence they need to go back to doing what they used to do before they were intimidated killed or subject to violence they have to think about what they were thinking at the time that violence took place the stereotypes and the prejudices that they had and in some way allowed for that violence to happen and they have to remember what they what happened but remember it in a way that they give new meaning to the things that they are living now this is being implemented in a small project in Colombia but I it's the biggest innovation that the government has in the last year and for from my experience if I had been able to do that in government I would go massively with this massively with this because it's very very efficient well we could go on for a long time and there are so many more good things that await us but I'd like to ask you to give a round of applause to our excellent panel