 Leanne, and audience, thank you very much. I'm Dan Benjamin, currently resident in Northern New England, and happy to be back, and really thankful to Resolve for bringing together so many former colleagues and friends of mine, and I hadn't expected to have so many reunions, but it's wonderful to be here, and I really applaud the work that Resolve is doing. Let me begin by introducing our panelists. To my near left is General Mike Nagata, an old friend for many years in the government. To his left, he was Lieutenant General, and I guess most recently, Director of Strategic Planning at NCTC. Did they drop the O at some point? No, it's still there. It's still there, okay. Director of Strategic Operational Planning, which I always felt was one of the hardest jobs in the government, actually. To his left is Robert Foshe, who is the Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary of the Bureau of Conflict and Stabilization Operations. He's a career Foreign Service Officer and serves in many bureaus and in many embassies. To his left is Mr. Runyon, Christopher Runyon, who is Senior Official at USAID working on Africa now, and has also had a long and impressive career in the government working in the development field. And to my far left, physically, if not politically, is my old friend Daniel Kimmich, who had the pleasure of working with for many years in government, and is the man who, if there's something to know about strategic communications, he's the person you want to ask. And he is currently the Deputy Coordinator, is that the correct title? Principal Deputy Coordinator for the Global Engagement Center. So by way of a brief introduction of myself, I was a Coordinator for Counterterrorism and set up the first CVE unit in the State Department. And I thought that I would kick this off by venturing a few observations on what has happened in the field, in the policy world since I was sworn in in May of 2009. And I would, actually I do have to make one apology before that I just remembered. So in the Academy today, I'm at Dartmouth, we all have to sign statements that say we will never be on man-ells, all-male panels. And so I want to apologize on behalf of USIP for this one and simply point out the important fact that several of these men work for women who declined or could not be president. So I think it's an important point. I feel like we should now play the Dance of the Dinosaurs too. But okay, so moving right along, I wanted to just venture a few observations and then throw it open to our panelists to see if they agree. Number one is that the first seven or eight years, at least maybe 10 years after 9-11, the discussion about C and now PCVE was largely characterized by endless definitional fights. Those definitional fights I am hoping have receded somewhat. And if they haven't, then I will just start weeping now. Number two, when I came into office, my view was that there was a real paucity of good social science on which to base CVE programs. That seems to have changed dramatically in part because of organizations like Resolve and the many members of the Resolve network. So there's a lot more social science out there than the question that remains is, is that social science being read and utilized by policy makers? So there are a number of sort of sub-questions there. Is the social science being presented in a way that policy makers with very limited time can understand? Is it being crowded out by what, I think many who have served in government would understand as the tyranny of the classified? In other words, if it's classified, you read it. If it isn't, it doesn't matter. And then I guess the concomitant question is when the problems with getting CVE going was that there were all these different audiences that you had to talk to. Senior officials who would all in tone, as we heard earlier this morning, we're not gonna shoot our way out of this problem and then would immediately say, no, of course I'm not gonna allocate $15 million for your cockamamie idea. Because they knew that they could never get the metrics or the support on Capitol Hill. And because they fundamentally thought that social science was kind of squishy and would never deliver the kind of dramatic results that a good drone strike would. So I am interested to know whether, to what extent that has changed. And I'm throwing too much out there. I'll stop with this one. Our partners in this world, we tried hard in the Obama administration put CVE on the international agenda through things like the creation of the GCTF and G-SERF and it seems to me that our partners have really embraced that and are perhaps less nervous about countering violent extremism or preventing violent extremism. Maybe even less squeamish about the notion of the therapeutic as having a role in countering terrorism and violence extremism. And that we're still a little bit going in circles and that is why we don't have the funding that we might like. But I put a lot on the table and I'm happy to entertain all your thoughts on that and then give you 10 more principles or observations. So Mike, you're retired now, right? As of a month and a half ago. Well, mausoleum. And so that means you can speak more freely than our other panelists at some peril. But please have that. Well, these days the only person I'm worried about getting in trouble with is my wife. But first of all, thank you to USIP, the sponsor of this forum for allowing me to be here today. I'm gonna react to three of the things you just said. I regret to report our definitional debates have not abated. They may not be as numerous or as vociferous as they once were, but there is too much time still being wasted on quite literally dancing on the head of these rhetorical pins. And we really need to stop it because there's more productive things we could be doing with that time and energy. But unfortunately, a lot of our definitional debates are driven by a sustained and pernicious degree of ignorance about what it is we are talking about or what it is we are trying to achieve. Which gets to the next thing I'll react to. You've talked about social science research. I would certainly stipulate that whether it's social science or other forms of scientific pursuit that the body of research that has grown, I'll just use the arbitrary date of 9-11, it's not arbitrary for Americans but it is utterly arbitrary for everybody else in the world. It is inarguably larger than it once was, but I think my personal opinion is that's the wrong measurement to take satisfaction that the volume of research is larger than it once was because the scale of terrorism today is much larger than it once was. So I would argue that the gap between the research we need for an ever-growing and diversifying problem versus the scale of what we have, that delta continues to grow. We are not keeping up with the need for research. We are falling behind the need for research because the scale of the problem keeps growing. Now, why is that so? Well, you've already in many ways described it. It's an absence of policy seriousness. For some of those of you in the room who know my background, I'm a special forces officer. By background, I have literally spent 20 years of my life utilizing physical violence to deal with terrorists. And after 20 years of not seeing my family for more than half that time, I regret to report there are more terrorists now than when I started. So I've lived the dream, or the nightmare, of realizing that while I would certainly argue that when lives were on the line or a hostage need to be rescued, that the use of violence was necessary, but it is strategically and clearly inadequate to solving the problem we have because we've got more terrorists now, despite all the strengths we've developed in the use of physical force. The third thing I'll just react to is really just the reverse side of the coin I've just described. What would it take? I do not believe it would take the kind of resourcing or manpower that, whether it is military forces or intelligence agencies have been lavished with, particularly inside the United States since 9-11, I don't think the absorptive capacity exists in the terrorism prevention and CVE world. But most importantly, because of this absence of research and insufficient research, I should say, I want to give credit where credit is due. There are incredibly courageous researchers all over the world trying their best to do this. But what they really suffer from is inconsistent or non-existent policy support. It is very popular, and to a degree necessary, that politicians everywhere speak strongly, consistently, and then match their rhetoric with legislative or policy action to support the use of kinetic forms of counter-terrorism. If you try to do a count of what the volume is of similar kinds of political rhetoric to support things like counter-messaging or terrorism prevention or CVE or what have you, it is a tiny fraction of what you see in the other realm of counter-terrorism. Thanks. Okay, I'm going to try to pick myself off the floor now. And Robert, what would you like to comment among that smorgasbord of different observations? Well, again, thank you and thank USIP for organizing this conference. And I do apologize. I know my assistant secretary wishes she were here. I know you regret that I'm not the assistant secretary, but please know I regret I'm not the assistant secretary too. I have to say, I would agree with those comments for the most part, but I think in CSO we are working hard to provide policy support in this field and to develop what I believe are some of the most important ideas of how we apply the research that is out there. There is a lot of research and our team is looking at it, bringing it together and trying to figure out what's the best way to apply this to the local situations that we're confronting. Now, we're a small organization and there's not a lot we can do, but we're looking at specific models, specific places to see are there things we can do by establishing our baseline studies on this situation. They're looking for indicators and then advising or helping to devise locally some kinds of strategies to address violent extremism. And I think that is really the future of this field in terms of the work we're going to be doing. There is no kinetic solution, as you said. It cannot be. It has to be a political solution and it has to be locally driven and locally supported where it will fail. And that is what we are focused on at CSO, trying to find those opportunities, trying to try different approaches in different places and learning from those lessons and doing this through a whole of government approach. It is not just the State Department. It's the State Department working with our colleagues at DOD, at USAID in the field on these problems and partnering with the local authorities to see if we can come up with solutions that they think will approach or will address the threat that they're facing from violent extremism. So I think that is for us the way forward. It doesn't take a lot of money, but it does take support on the Hill and other places to understand that this is a long, slow process. It is not a quick solution, but it's one that you have to sustain and move forward on in order to be able to claim any kind of success. We're now at 18 years since 9-11, 18 years from now I think we could be in a much better place if we continue with this process and expand it and broaden it to other parts of the world. So that's encouraging. Thank you. Can I just press you a little and you can make this sign if you don't like it, but can I press you a little on the... since CSO is at the center of this world now of the nexus with social science and the policy world? I'm sorry, you're... The nexus of social science with the policy world. Do you feel that the U.S. government is getting the social science it needs, able to digest it and to turn it into effective policy? I would say to an extent yes, that we are getting the research we need, but there's always a need for more. And as a consumer, we will always want more. Are we able to turn it into effective policy is the real question. And that is what we're doing with our various projects, but not on a large enough scale is what I would argue. We need more resources, especially personnel, to be able to do that. And we are working at the same time on how do we evaluate the effectiveness of these programs and those kind of indicators of effectiveness, can they have more of a universal application than just in specific locales and that sort of thing. And again, I think as we do more of this work and develop these concepts more broadly and deeply, we'll find the lessons that we'll have in the future and more universal application. Christopher. Thanks. I think you threw out at least six questions. I will try to address five of them and the last I will not for personal employment reasons. But I just wanted to say, in this room we've got a lot of research heroes who have done some amazing and pioneering work that I know that USAID and the rest of the US government has taken advantage of. We also have some policy heroes. So I did just want to give a shout out to both Dan and to Mike. When I was at State Department, I really admired Dan's amazing work at CT during a tough time. And then with General Nagata, I witnessed you in the situation room in the White House do some pretty brave things to stand up for smart strategy and good policy. So just a shout out to those guys. You'll notice we're both out of government now. Sorry. On definitional fights, yeah, but I do think that that's better. I really do. And perhaps an example of that is the fact that we're in our second, perhaps third iteration of policy even within USAID, which meant we had to settle on taxonomy and we had to look and talk with a lot of people to make sure we were using that stuff. And I would just say on policy, in 2011 we put a policy out, the development response to extremism and insurgency, which was a pretty important document for us that shaped a lot of our thinking and it really came out of a lot of the Iraq and Afghanistan experiences. That's now being adjusted to be more direct in that it is more geographically oriented to places that we know are of specific CVE vulnerability or direct threat. It's more focused and more CVE specific as opposed to the concerns that we all had about attribution and sort of saying, well, a program's got this connection, but there wasn't the data behind it. There wasn't the research behind it. And the third component of that is a measurability and making sure that there is data that backs it up. Our taxpayers deserve it. Congress is asking for it. Our leadership is the new administration presently is asking for that. And so we're using a more tailored definition of our response to extremism and how we know that our programming is working. And then the last is one that I think is really about self-reliance and about local capacity. We're trying to make that more a centerpiece of our strategy and our approach and measuring that to make sure that it's not just that the problem went away, well, maybe the problem went away temporarily, but is the local capacity there to keep that in a sustainable situation going forward? And just one plug, our hope is that that strategy is available for public comment on the USAID website in a week or so. So especially for all the folks in the room who are either practitioners or researchers, we'd love to get your feedback on that when it does come out. Are we using the research? Absolutely. Not only are we funding it, including, I'm proud to say, my bureau in Africa helping to support Resolve, but we're using those publications, whether that's, you know, the governance nexus pub out of Resolve, which has been very helpful, the secondary source research, and a lot of our programming has also conducted research as either a prequel to actual on-the-ground activities or have tried to embed research components in the activities while we go along. That said, boy, do I wish that we had a deployable battalion of PhD candidates who could embed with a lot of our implementing partners to be able to real-time pick up data while at the same time we're trying out and experimenting with activities. So I think that's probably about it. Classification, yeah. Still a challenge. You know, when you have to walk down hallways to get into safes to pick out hard drives to boot up computers, you're just not going to have people connected the way the interagency probably does need to be connected on this, let alone with research, especially when that's funded perhaps by, you know, intelligence community organizations or others where it's even further siloed. And then on resources, yeah, we're still struggling with resources. We've tried this 1207, we've seen CTPF, we've seen there are all these others out there. We know we've got some support, but somehow we have not been able to do that. Thanks. Daniel. So the virtue of going last is I've now forgotten all the questions, but we seem to be starting with a bit of a baseline exercise in telling about positives and negatives. So I'll start with what I think are some positive developments and move on to some that are a little less positive. I would definitely flag as a positive that on the definitional side, I recall 10 to 15 years ago a huge amount of energy was put into this polemics over monocausal explanations. It's ideology, it's poverty, it's grievances, and those seem to have subsided. There are some outliers out there still advocating these, but largely thanks to the efforts of the research community, we have come to an acceptance that there are much more complicated factors in human behavior. This leads to a bit of a negative because it would have been had there been a monocausal explanation, we would design programming around it, we would be well on our way to solving the problem, but since we're dealing with people in the infinite number of motivations they have, we've come to this very complex place. So that leads me to the second development which is the genuine profusion of research and I think that here other panelists have discussed this. We confront at the Global Engagement Center what I think is a good problem to have but still a problem in that it is challenging to simply follow all of the research. We have someone in our office who follows this full time, she's constantly sending around summaries of the research, but we struggle to make sure that this is integrated into our programs. That said, this is a much better place to be in than we were in 10 years ago. On the issue of research I sense, and I'd actually be curious to hear from some of the folks here, that we still face the problem that Mark Sageman outlined in a very famous paper where he said government has reams and reams of information that it keeps to itself but tends to exploit only to uncover new plots and look for threats. And he characterized this as government knows everything but understands nothing. The research community he said has all of the intellectual firepower and the time to really understand what's going on but it lacks this more granular information that's locked away in government vaults. He characterized this somewhat uncharitably as the research community understands everything but knows nothing. And we I think have really not made as much progress as we should in bringing this together and making more information available. I'm hoping as time goes by and there are now decades separating us from the inception that more of this will come out and become part of the public realm. Lastly I would flag as an uncertain development that we're having this conversation in a vastly different policy context than we did when counterterrorism was unquestionably at the top of the agenda. Now if you just look at the headlines there are issues of geopolitical competition that have really superseded counterterrorism. Counterterrorism hasn't gone away but it is one of several competing priorities and it's unclear to me what effect that will have on the current levels of activity. My hope obviously is that we don't lose momentum that we have built up particularly on the research side and the interaction of that research with some of the programmatic so that's my preliminary balance sheet. Well very good so that's all very helpful. One issue I want to revert to which General Nogata brought up underscores kind of a big paradox in the situation which is that we don't have a global census of violent extremists but we know that there are a lot more of them and there were not too long ago and yet that has not really dramatically moved the needle on government interest, US government interest in the social science in CVE, PVE approaches to violent extremism and it would seem like the obvious answer is because the kinetic approach did a good enough job in dealing with the imminent so let the urgent just languish. Do any of your current former masters and I won't ask you to name them have a consciousness of this growth in numbers and how the environment seems to be changing? Some do but I would argue it is an insufficient number of senior policy makers not just in our own government but around the world who recognize or have been able to grasp the reality that the use of physical force against terrorism, necessary though it may be, as I indicated earlier when lives are on the line, it is strategically insufficient for the simple reason that you've already cited. I mentioned when I made my remarks there were inarguably more terrorists now than there were 18 years ago. Not just more but the diversification of terrorism is extraordinary but why? Why has it failed to grasp sufficient policy maker attention so that we can make what I would argue are the necessary investments and frankly the necessary priority shifts towards methods of combating terrorism that don't involve force. I think a lot of the explanation is well known to this audience I think you and I have even talked about this on one or two occasions when we were still in government that particularly in the kinds of governments we have, the political event horizon of any particular policy maker is measured in a few short years. Well, the use of violence can deliver satisfaction for a few short years until of course the phenomenon we're struggling at morphs in a direction that we didn't expect and rebounds. One need look no farther than the fact that we thought we won against al-Qaeda in Iraq only to have it morph into a much more virulent form of terrorism we now call the Islamic State but for the policy makers at the time they drew enormous satisfaction from the notion that we have strategically defeated the AKI you know roll out the brass band have the victory parade it's all over what we didn't realize is it wasn't over there were some people telling us it wasn't over but we didn't listen so that's one reason the only other reason I think worth mentioning is at the risk of sounding like I'm venturing into arenas I have no expertise I've read over the years several different versions of old psychological truth people hate uncertainty they love certainty matter of fact I've even heard one psychologist say people will choose a unpleasant certainty before they choose complete uncertainty now why am I mentioning that because there is nothing more uncertain today than how to prevent large numbers of people from becoming terrorists the journey from reasonably normal citizen to some day becoming a violent extremism the solutions for that are very uncertain right now dropping a 500 pound bomb delivers nothing but certainty you know you killed that person or you didn't which is why just as a matter of human nature people tend to gravitate towards what they can tangibly measure, see and feel vice the uncertainty of how do you prevent someone from becoming an extremist anyone else want to comment on it I'll venture something this paradox here I think even as we have deepened our understanding of what I would describe as the very local dynamics of terrorism down to the personal dynamics of groups there has been a phenomenon in the broader context that is in the exact opposite direction which is terrorist organizations latching on sort of lamprey-like to insurgencies which are large and public and the tools that we use to counter recruitment and radicalization at the local level informed by research those are entirely different from the tools that you use to counter an insurgency which takes root in a political context that requires a completely different set of policy solutions different parts of government deal with that it is often intractively difficult it's embedded in regional and geostrategic contexts that are extremely tough to get at so I think this has been one of the conundrums we've grappled with over the last decade is that even as we've deepened our understanding of what I describe as the micro level of terrorism at the macro level it is now intertwined with insurgencies in a number of theaters that require a much different and more complex toolbox to deal with so I would I think it's a really important point I would contend that it's always been intertwined with insurgencies whether in the caucuses or cashmere or where I have you what is different is that there are just so many more now and so many states teetering on failure or failed and so on and so forth Christopher I know you are holding your mic and so you want to say something so I want to ask you to answer this question but also another question which I think is good for Robert as well and that is we have heard a lot today of really interesting and impressive work that points to the need for hugely specific localized knowledge and the understanding that every context is radically different the US government is one of the world's largest organizations and by definition has a hard time with that and I am curious to hear if you think that we are nonetheless evolving new ways of dealing with those kind of radical specificities and are you optimistic about continued progress in that direction as well? Thank you so for the earlier questions yeah we are stretched the number of context that we are working in we weren't having these conversations about Mozambique ten years ago we weren't talking about Tanzania the way we are talking about Tanzania and I really like Dan's point I just wanted to build off of that I mean just today I was reading a little bit more about 30 people in the Middle East go to the Philippines whip up in alignment what was your analogy there but leech on to the local insurgency yeah lamprey right and next thing you know we have a thousand people if that's ISIS 3.0 we have a whole different set of cross disciplinary things that need to fuse quite quickly and I think resource needs are going to be very different for that type of a fight on complexity I think that's another really really important point we are leaning into complexity our new strategy will embrace that and on hyper localization that is absolutely critical as you can imagine the transaction costs for hyper localization are a lot higher when you're doing a large portfolio of activities then if you just walk in the room and say there's the problem go fix that one driver or go fix that one problem so we are wrestling with that but the good news is at least for me culturally coming from a development organization I mean it's malpractice in our business if you aren't using extremely local information and you get out there and you find out what's going on in that village not that village not that village that village and the differences between those are so terribly important on terrain and understanding that terrain and turning that into good project designs and good interventions that try to have a cv impact one other thing I did want to say was you know we started to allude to like the terrorist criminal nexus that haunts my dreams a bit because of the shifting loyalties and allegiances and the commercial aspect of things we'd love more and more research on that and I right now I'm finally getting into the Kilcullen book which talks about the out of the mountains book which is talks about competitive control and I think there's a whole thing there that I think would be very useful for researchers to read just as a construct for how we try to respond to the challenges of governance in the absence or the presence of state and how that becomes a rational choice for local people we talked about that during counter-insurgency work somehow we need to go back and read that chapter again now in a terrorism or extremism mindset and then one other thing I would just plug would be I think there are some mega trends here and if we're going to skate to where the puck is going to be a little bit more you know what is a continued rapid urbanization going to bring us what our climate change is going to do with regards to people's state society relationships what are some of the water scarcity or scarcity problems going to do what is 5G terrorism going to look like and I think for a development organization trying desperately to take the long view in a sort of gradual but deliberate and sustained response those are the things that I think are particularly important for us both for researchers and then certainly on the practitioner side well I was going to say I'm an optimist but after hearing that I know it was a buzzer you know that what I would say though I would agree with those comments especially the idea that we have to have kind of the local connection I was familiar with the resolved curriculum and how you're trying to do capacity building of researchers at the local level this is hugely important this will pay the kind of dividends and provide the kind of research that we really need and that we can try to get access to this is the most important sort of kind of projects that we're pursuing right now but at the same time I would say within the government approach and what we're looking at for the United States government and why I do have somewhat of a cause for optimism I see policy development here that's responding to this in a way that's not kinetic that is saying there are aspects to the violent extremism problem that we have to address in different manners and in different ways we have the stabilization and assistance review looking at how we can do stabilization better as a whole of government approach but at the local level and try different things we have 11 countries right now that we're focused on we're going to see what's going to happen there and learn the lessons from that and apply it in other places we have the LAV cell atrocity genocide and prevention act and essentially under that we are going to be identifying those strategies that are at risk or even sub regions at risk for atrocity and try to come up with strategies to address the risks that are there those strategies just as they are in the SAR will have CVE elements they have to have that and address CVE aspects we have the women peace and security act and the strategy that we're implementing now that completely integrates women and women's issues and peace and security issues into CVE to make sure that we have real progress again at all levels and recognizing that without WPS being addressed or CVE being addressed as part of WPS there will be no real progress and lastly let me just mention fragility which seems to be one of the big themes of the day right now we are working with USIP on a fragility project in Burkina Faso just a pilot project to see how we can identify the indicators and come up with strategies to address fragility that might give grounds to violent extremism this is a small project but it's a pilot project to try to figure out lessons again that will have greater application this is important because we fully anticipate the Global Fragility Act will be passed and we need to know how we're going to respond to that that is a $1.15 billion over the next five years on fragility and that is really about addressing the CVE indicators as an aspect of our fragility approaches and all of this put together shows that we have a lot of different approaches to the CVE problems filtering through or integrated into various policy approaches and program approaches by state, by USAID and DOD okay now I'm going to ask a question that may make those still in office squirm a bit and so I'll focus it more on Mike and anyone else who wants to can chime in so being fully candid, it was my understanding back when I was in government that localization was hugely important but there was also a really important dimension at the highest level of government to government interaction and there was a discussion earlier today about dealing with bad partners you know we have countries that we are that we have serious relationships with that either do really bad things in the name of counterterrorism or he used to always feign that kind of thing in the situation room too it took us forever or that simply can't be bothered for example to deal with the very legitimate grievances having to do with lack of provision of justice and those sorts of things which are a major driver I think we all agree and I guess the question is from those of us who just read the newspaper it would seem like there isn't a lot going on at that level of government at the moment in bilateral relations or multilateral fora but there is a huge government below that that does work on issues like this and I'm curious if you think that the torch is still lit it is there are still extraordinary people in all the agencies of the government that I used to work with that are striving mightily and in some cases courageously because they're potentially putting their own careers at risk to make the case to make the argument that we have to shift our policy formulations and our strategic thinking towards those things that are more likely to lead to long term strategic success as opposed to short term I feel better because this guy is now dead or in jail and I have complete confidence that that mass of people from junior officials all the way to pretty senior officials will continue to strive in that direction but at the top layer of the policy and I won't restrict this to the United States government I see this in many governments at the top levels of many of the governments that I've interacted with over the years there is a reluctance to follow that course there are exceptions to this there are some very senior policymakers I know both in the United States and around the world who are also striving in this direction but there's an insufficient mass of them they are outnumbered by those who are either oblivious of the need to make this change or are very reluctant highly resistant in some cases to make this change now having said that it should beg the question why this one reason is because of what I've already mentioned it's the ways in which we can successfully employ these other instruments these other instrumentalities fill these decision makers with uncertainty whereas they know they can watch the IRS our feet of a kinetic strike that's nothing but certainty but there are other reasons as well one of them is that we've got some very unfortunate habits my colleague just mentioned the billion and a half dollars I think it was will be invested over several years I'm glad that's going to happen I'm delighted that's going to happen but as soon as I heard that I thought about the fact that my office for my last three years I was charged with doing an empirical analysis of how the United States Government spends counterterrorism money annually that's actually a perennial requirement of the National Counterterrorism Center I won't quote any specific numbers here because the report is classified but I doubt it will shock any of you to know that we spend tens multiple tens of billions of dollars each year on kinetic counterterrorism now I'm not saying we should throw that kind of money at CVE or counter messaging I don't think they have the absorptive capacity and money isn't necessarily the solution but when I examined the enormous disparity between how we resource kinetic CT, vice everything else that can't possibly be the right answer but that's not part of our policy budgetary formulation habit our habit, it's almost on autopilot is to throw the lion share of the checkbook at people like I used to be who go on raids who use physical force or who arrest people but as everyone here knows nothing is harder than changing your habits but if you never start you never finish I would just say two things to that there are many people in our political leadership who believe that every time they face these problems the kinetic solution or there's a solution of just throwing money and we're whiplashed back and forth between these two all the time I think what we're trying to do now is just develop a smarter approach and it means yes there is times when you have to have a violent solution and there are times when doing something much softer is much better for a longer term solution we're smart about that and helping our political leadership understand why this is a better approach in this circumstance at this time is really the challenge for all of us and that's what we're trying to do can I riff off of that I I have even lower expectations um it's a race to the bottom here I would just I dream of just not continuing to do stupid things um and so if you look at some of the research you know I think for us there were some ripples that went through the policy world at least in my circles when the UNDP report the road to extremism came out which cited how approximately 71% of those who made the tipping point from anger to taking acts of physical violence in Africa did so because of negative interactions with security forces of their host country government I think that we've got to start there in a lot of ways you know some of these grievances are very legitimate and fuel the problem and I think sometimes in our rush to quote unquote partner we get ourselves into mortgages that are quite difficult to get out of and I think it creates risk and association problems for the United States later down the road and I say that because often it is later when we are asked to help fix the situation and it is one of structural violence that has impacted the community I did a good chunk of my graduate research in Uzbekistan thinking about this but Uzbekistan came to my mind because here is another situation where you had a legacy of repressive terrible governance then it flipped and we are still dealing with that after shock and we will be for quite a while the trauma issue that had come up earlier in the earlier sessions I think that wrestling with that we should have known better that to be in relationships with governments that were structurally repressive was going to have after effects which would impact foreign fighting and other kinds of problems like that and then the last just because it is not classified we attribute approximately 85 sometimes north of 100, 120 million or so dollars per year over the last three or four years to what we would call CVE level of investment when you compare that with some of the other agency thanks Daniel I have a question specifically for you when when I was in government I was always troubled by the extent to which some of my superiors in various buildings were convinced that if we just got the messaging right we would crack this nut open and I wasn't really persuaded but somehow I got involved in doing an awful lot of work on messaging and I think that the message if you will that we got throughout a lot of today was that messages on the airwaves from distant unknown sources of dubious provenance are not going to solve this for us but the question for you is I'm pretty sure you think that are we going to still continue to always have that decision maker who thinks if god damn if I just hired the right people to get that message right is that going to be our fate forever well I don't want to fall into a paroxysm of pessimism here so I'm going to say no I don't think so you know there is this you can call it the abracadabra solution or I think of it the war game solution where the bad tweets are rising on this side of the screen the good tweets will rise to meet them and somehow the problem will be solved in a couple of pixelated bursts in the middle you know that's pretty obviously nonsense what I think I'm not you know I'm preaching to the converted here I think we all understand this I would actually attribute some of this to an early spate of obsessive focus on the messaging genius of al-qaeda we saw we've all forgotten about this because the most recent obsessive focus was on the messaging genius of ISIS as compared to zohari you know stodgy sitting in a cave still but you know if you read some of the analyses from 2004 those resonated with senior policy makers more than many of us realized at the time and there was this sense that wow these guys have really cracked a code on a magic way you know I once was giving a presentation and joked about you know the al-qaeda website with the button to donate and you know the person I was briefing said wow you know we've got to stop that you know I mean there was some very simplified understandings of how this work what I would say in closing on this we have really moved away from looking at this through a messaging prism we have moved away from looking at the solution through messaging we very rarely use the term I'm using it here because that's how you framed the question but this is not about messaging it is about influence it is about behavior and messaging is one component it is often the most visible component it is often the one that attracts the most attention because it's something that is relatively easy to talk about you can see it it often intertwines with technology we're a technology obsessed society we love talking about the latest platforms but those of us who have done very in-depth research on this realize it is simply one component I would say broadly we at the global engagement center recognize that it's simply one component and we've moved very considerably away from the idea of messaging in the core and we constantly push back at the idea that we are a messaging shop or that you're going to have this problem and let's bring in the messaging guys at the end that's just not how it works see I knew we'd find something reassuring so I want to throw it open now and just ask if there are any trends any developments from our partners we cooperate closely with quite a lot of countries on PCVE on influence on a lot of different things if there are any noteworthy trends that you would want to call out right now for those of us in the veil of ignorance that is the private sector it would be enlightening but in one there's a personal opinion I suppose some people in the audience may think I'm full of crap here but I think a global trend is a a very rapidly to one degree changing to another degree deteriorating relationship between populations everywhere and their governments the range is necessary and beneficial a lot of it though is a loss of confidence everywhere I've been for the last particularly the last 20 years but really over my whole entire career I've seen this I didn't always recognize it I've only come to recognize it perhaps in the last decade but rather obviously I'm going to focus before I finish on the deterioration aspect of this not all of it is deterioration but a big chunk of it is this relationship is deteriorating and I do believe it is a global trend so it's consistent with your question this creates everywhere I look is translates into a rich growth medium for violent extremism which is why I think this is a very large part of the explanation why as I stipulate at the outset there are more terrorists now than there have ever been anyone else maybe just parochial to my world but I think that amongst the development people who have been asked to rise to this challenge there's a fairly high degree of consensus across countries so the donor coordination angle of this is easier and it's led to a lot of blended funding co-designed projects shared data and other things like that that I think are very valuable so that I think it's just something I wanted to point out let me just reinforce that here at USIP earlier this year we had a meeting of the communications working group in the counter ISIS coalition and one of the few silver linings to the dark cloud that was ISIS is the degree of international cooperation around the issue and that continues I think it's in a much better place than it was 10 years ago I know that we interact with many more countries and we benefit from their kind of shared experience in this area if I could just one thing I would agree there is concern about this deterioration of this disconnection of people from the government it really is troubling at the same time I think back to one of our projects in Kenya and I don't know if Dr. Nathalia talked about this earlier but we took an approach after the Westlake mall terrorism attack where we saw that seemed to drive people towards more violent extremist kind of opinion and attitude of working in a different area in Kenya with the local government to improve the relationship between the local population and the security forces that were there and this came about after about five and a half years there was another attack it was the Ducitu attack and what we saw after that was what I thought was progress in the sense that while people were appalled by the attack you didn't have the same kind of reaction of people moving towards a more extreme approach looking towards violence as the way to resolve this the security forces didn't kind of engender that and I think it's an important model for us all to look at and what I found especially interesting on this case was that our international partners were looking at it the same way and looking saying this is something we can draw from and learn from and we seem to be having much more conversation and dialogue along those lines so sticking with the issue of our partners Daniel made an important point that we are shifting paradigms and focusing more on great power and near pure competition and so we may see a dialing back of resources both on the kinetic side but also on the softer side and so I guess the question is is that detectable among our partners especially those in Europe who have really put out quite a lot of money for P and CVE work you know I don't know that it's immediately a detectable I can't speak to the budget figures we're definitely having a more complex conversation we're having and this is particularly apparent at the Global Engagement Center because Congress specifically broadened our mission in 2017 to deal with propaganda and disinformation by state and non-state actors so what had been a focus on non-state actors Al Qaeda and ISIS very quickly became a focus on Russia, China, Iran I would flag one potential benefit to the CVE effort from the renewed focus on nation states and great power competition if you look at the history of our cold war standoff you know there was an enormous you know component of it that consisted of the information space and that was because the cost of direct military confrontation was so astronomically high that we were forced to operate much more in the realm of propaganda, counter propaganda and we made very considerable investments in those areas our hands were much less tied in the counter-terrorism sphere and we unfolded in areas where we could do things that you cannot do against a nation state now that we are looking once again at competition between nation states you know nuclear powers a lot of this is once again going to unfold in the information space and I think that that could lead to I think you know if you just look at some of the recent congressional legislation in you know countering Russian malign influence you know compared to some of the things we were talking about in the CVE space so I think that you know we are going to be working at a larger scale and certainly we're dealing with actors that are working at a large scale paradoxically I think that could end up benefiting the CVE community down the line I would at some point like to have a discussion about how do we transfer some of the lessons we learned from CVE in the last 10-15 years to these more recent areas of kind of great power competition I think that there's more interplay between this and we're just starting to explore it I'll take a shot I brought so much sunshine to this panel with my optimism but if you looked at a if you look at you know gray warfare and perhaps some of these new rules of the game as part of great power competition it's hard for me not to believe that great powers will use proxies and great powers will arm those proxies and those proxies will use violence and some of those proxies will look different than the types of groups that we're typical in engaging and I think a violent extremist organizations are absolutely within the food groups that they will look at to take advantage of or to distract or to consume any nation's resources that they're going up against so for me and based on what Dania just said not only the knowledge management from all of that prior work but to be honest break out the microfiche from the Cold War and take a look at some of that because I think we will be dealing with some of those types of issues going forward but they will be nastier and perhaps more lethal I would just say not just the microfiche I would recommend to everyone the miniseries Carlos which is a great depiction of the Soviet Union's involvement with some of the terrorist groups in the Cold War era I want to express my dubiousness at the idea we're going to pivot away from counterterrorism and I'm not just saying that because I spent my career doing it I've seen us try to quote pivot away from terrorism on multiple occasions We're still pivoting towards the Far East we've been doing that for about five years Actually when I was on the joint staff the joke was our pivot to Asia was a 360 degree pivot we ended right back where we started but I think there are good there are important reasons why policymakers can't take their eye off this ball one is because of the political harm terrorism does there's nothing more finely tuned than a politician's ability to sense unfavorable changes in his political fortunes as you know very well terrorism is the use of violence to cause political change but more importantly I think a better characterization is we clearly are going to have to increase our effectiveness against peer competitors and the like but partially for the reasons it was just described groups, non-state actors that somebody is going to call a terrorist group are going to be increasingly attractive proxies for everybody including the United States so that's one reason why terrorism is going to go away but I think the most important reason is because when an act of violence occurs that is political reverberations which again is the goal of any terrorist it becomes politically untenable for any government that is suffering the consequences of it not to throw resources at it. I mean I remember before Benghazi we were in the special operations where we were pulling people out of North Africa until Benghazi happened and then everybody had to turn around and go right back there's still air in large measure so it's not really not a pivot it's never going to be a pivot we do have to increase our efforts against these other problems but we're never going to pivot away from terrorism Christopher can I just follow up maybe I don't know if you're up to speed on this stuff but are your colleagues your opposite numbers in the world's leading agencies sticking with the CVE mission or as defense budgets are going up around the world are they moving are governments moving resources in that direction do you have a sense of which way the wind is blowing yeah I think again this has been a hard fought consensus and I think for a lot of other political reasons over the last 15-20 years it's been hard for some countries to get on board with where this was going and as we talked about before some quibble over terminology more than others hey we can sign up for PVE but we don't want a thing to do with CVE what are the difference between those again but I think at the end of the day when we start talking about what effects we're trying to have on the ground and what we're trying to prevent from happening there's a fairly good consensus there I also believe that the tent has gotten bigger in some sense on other countries contributions certainly from the donor kind of food group because I think it again it's more palatable for them to make contributions to that and we're a little bit further away from some of the stigmas of Iraq and other things like that and ISIS I think has shocked the system a little bit and created a new motivation to get behind that and now if anything I feel like we're seeing more leadership and I think for this audience hopefully they will be nodding but more research that are coming from whether it's European or other centers that are producing things that are quite helpful and informative for our approaches so I do think that that has gotten bigger there is a bit more of a coalition and in some cases there are more resources available to work on it that resource I'm sorry research issue not resources we're going back to research a question from the audience that will modify a little any tips for scholars on what to do to get in front of a policy maker get your ideas in front of a policy maker and how to make those ideas user friendly I'll start just two very simple things put the bottom line up front and don't be afraid to be critical and to be directly critical when I first arrived in government one of my colleagues said you'll be amazed at how quickly offices take notice when someone mentions them directly and that is definitely true you might not see the ripples but people in government do read and take notes I would just take those two things put the bottom line really up front because particularly senior people in organizations don't have time to read academic papers they will not read to the end they don't build to a conclusion they want to know in a summary paragraph up front and if you have a critical comment and you frame it specifically you will definitely get the attention if you ever put in that comment if I can just add to that I liked the par presentation earlier to sort of remind folks you don't have to have spent the first three years of your graduate life figuring out your research question and then go out and solve the answer to just that probably come work with us and others and figure it out as you go just commit the time and the level of effort and then I think a more iterative approach is a smarter approach for us I think the fallacy of us knowing what the solutions were going to be or what the problem was that we needed to research immediately way ahead of time is just not there I saved this code I wanted to read this but we received a very good piece of research recently it was 161 pages long but it was good and the response from one of our senior leaders on the email chain was excellent to have this kind of analysis now how to incorporate this into our programming and I think that that last little step from research conclusions to action ability I beg that that research especially those like you who are steeped in field work just stagger a couple of guesses about where you would take this make some suggestions about action ability not just you know here's what the regression tells us but what would you actually think about doing as a result of this or what would you try to avoid that type of stuff I think is very interesting it helps us to kick start the policy conversation internally as to how we would start developing interventions around it I would just agree with all that I would add one other thing for where I've been working at the State Department watching it over the years nothing gets attention more than if a congressman says I read this report can you please you know why aren't you acting on this having that kind of political reach and just even a question will get such an immediate response it's incredible I had one other thing I was going to say which was I would encourage our academic partners especially to follow policy read the documents that are coming out that are provocative towards policy so you know USIP in partnership with this you know congressional task force congressional mandated task force put out the the extremism in fragile environments publication it's a pretty provocative piece it's got an annex with proposed legislation I mean it's out there these are the types of debates that we're having internally in the policy world and I think the more you understand those it will help you craft the sort of last few pages of some of your research to really be responsive to some of those challenges what if you can quantify what percentage of the research that does get a response that does get people's attention comes in the form of not the monograph but the the four pager that has been boiled down by a place like USIP or the many resolve partners I mean is that a word to the wise should you hook up with a policy institute to get it into the right format or yeah yeah the center certainly does I'm going to give you a yes but answer for reasons that have just been described shorter is better than longer if you want to get a policymaker or even the staff of a policymaker to read it because their staffs are often even busier than the senior person is but there is peril here as well it's not an unmitigated good to brevity is not an unmitigated good brevity can you can lose the context of the research you can lose important details that's one form of peril another one I say with some trepidation because I know there are researches in the audience here it is not my intent to offend you if I do offend I apologize up front there is a problem some of the shorter pieces that I see come across that purport themselves to be research if you ask for the original documents and examine them sometimes they do not exist an even more dangerous case is when you actually get to some of the source materials there are no there's no footnotes there's no empiricism to the analysis nobody's ever tried to repeat the experiment and gotten the same results and so I came to the conclusion that some of the stuff that gets tossed at policymakers whether they be congressional members or people in government or people in the executive branch frankly it's just personal opinion or anecdote tarted up as research and when it comes across as a really short piece it's very hard to detect that unless you dive unless you challenge where is the source material for this so on the bureaucratics of the interface between the research community and the government I got to the state department and I had a lot of people reading classified intelligence I didn't have anyone reading research so I went out and I hired Will McCants and that took care of it for a while I don't know about the government that much Daniel you said you have someone in your office who's just reading the research what are the other organizations doing I can't speak for other organizations there are people who are well plugged into the research community I laughed when you mentioned Will because he was one of the people who brought me into government and then promptly left about a month later I don't know if I'm a real friend we've benefited very much in our organization and you can't just have a person who sits and reads research and that's not how I want to characterize our approach to this you have to push it to the people doing the work you have to make sure they read it she does the great work of going and interacting with the research community and following things with the members of our teams and this also is a very important function of leadership leadership needs to hold people accountable make it clear that we care not just that you're following classified analysis but that we expect that you will be looking at academic research we expect you will be interacting with researchers we expect when you present your programs one of the pillars of justification will be citations of research and that's something that has to come from management so I would say it's much more I think it's actually dangerous in some ways to assign some person and think you've checked a box you need to integrate it and that has to come from the top down also I would love to see going ahead a little bit more interaction between the practitioner community and researchers just so that we can talk to each other it's not always apparent from the outside what is and is not possible in government it is sometimes rather idiosyncratic internally what is and is not possible in government and you can't assume that people understand this there has to be dialogue about it so I'd love to see you know you could create some review board of practitioners who could look at papers and say what's actionable or not but more ways that we can interact with each other can I just at CSO I have to say it's an impressive bureau it's impressive group of people and I think per capita wise we have more PhDs on our staff than any other bureau at the department and that's a deliberate kind of approach we are recruiting from the people out there who are doing the research bringing them in and asking them now apply it so it forces a dialogue it forces a conversation that is constantly being renewed by the intake of the workers that we're bringing in and what happens in the big five-sided building on this on these issues in terms of the intake of research well I doubt it will surprise you to know that the most eager consumption in the military whether it's the Pentagon or elsewhere of research materials are those about weapons platforms mobility platforms you know the next generation radar or what have you I'm not suggesting that there aren't parts of the military that whose mission their mission is central to either information operations or influence activities or messaging or even things like CVE but but they suffer from the same the same problems that I would argue everybody else suffers from if this is not a priority for the most senior people in the joint staff or OSD or the service chiefs it's hard to get attention so there's often a ceiling effect that very energetic very very talented people just can't get beyond perhaps more importantly though the you know there is an attitude to some degree it's it's a reasonable attitude to come to some degree it's a bad attitude that that the research that is most relevant to dealing with the topics that we've come here to discuss there's a bad attitude in the military that's not our job we don't care which is ridiculous given how many senior military commanders I've heard in Afghanistan or Iraq or wherever I've been saying well damn it we went in there and we killed all the terrorists but now they've come back who's preventing the next crew from arising and coming back where are the fill in the blank civilians without recognizing well you failed to pay attention to this up until now oh now it's goring your ox so now you care reminds me of that really famous Rumsfeld snowflake are they regenerating faster than we can kill them the answer is yes you know one of the one of the secrets at least from a few years ago in the government was that DOD was often a surreptitious sort of funder of a lot of CVE that was going on at state and DOD was a great partner and a lot of three stars and four stars got it and wanted to help out the State Department it will be interesting to see if that persists as there's some reorientation of priorities the I would argue it's in the long term strategic interest of the U.S. military to become a stronger advocate of the civilian practitioners both government and non-governmental that do the kind of work we're talking about here today but at the end of the day no amount of enthusiasm or even advocacy from the United States military is going to get this community to where it needs to be the kinds of resourcing and policy support that I would argue everybody on this panel that are still I'm the only one not in government now of your panelists what they need to truly strategically succeed cannot be funneled through the Department of Defense the Department of Defense is never going to care enough about this to make that successful without policymakers of all stripes becoming greater enthusiasts for this kind of work which in many ways is more difficult and more complex than anything I've had to do we're never going to get there okay well I think blood sugar levels are plunging people are thinking about what else they'd like to be doing this evening so I just wanted to ask if our panelists had any final thoughts on this eternally challenging set of problems that we've discussed it's again it's one of those problems of democracy how do you get people to focus on the long term how do you get to them to fund things that are uncertain how do you convince them that we can develop greater knowledge we have done it in the past in other cases if anyone has any closing thoughts on their own and you can anonymize your discussions on your own interactions with the hill on this I would be eager to hear them because ultimately that institution is going to play that part of our branch of our government is going to play a really big role in all this yeah I think because this is being recorded there will be little anonymization but no I mean I think at least for me I sort of feel like a counter terrorist in a candy store to have an audience like this and people working on so many different issues that directly impact the way that we use in many cases your money and I think that the one thing I was going to say earlier that was I think a positive point here is that the fundamentals of the CVE-PVE space that we're working in have stayed they've had durability through changes of administration and that's good that's good for all of us if it had been even more of a policy 180 we would have a lot of real problems and I think we'd be that many more years behind so because those fundamentals are there I think we are making some progress and I think we're doing it in a much more sophisticated way than we had previously cadre wise we still need to grow you know it was a pretty lonely conference room in the early days and it is bigger but you know that handful of people unfortunately several of whom are in the room here I don't all want writing on the same public transportation at the same time just for fear of lobotomization of our capacity but I do think that there's also just extraordinary growth that still needs to happen in how we much more rapidly communicate because if the threat is going to be changing this dynamically going forward we need actionable research much quicker and I think that that's true in the development space I think it's probably true in the diplomacy space and I know that it's true on the security as well let me just pick up from there because I would agree with that and I would say in the interactions we've been having on the hill especially there's a recognition that this is a field that is here to stay and it has a future and it has a value and a worth that people are projecting to the future so I believe there will be waxing and waning of support through the years but overall this is now an area that people say this is something we have to pay attention to and support politically and that's the message we're getting from the hill and in general as I mentioned before we're seeing the policy space in this area expand and broaden in ways that going into different fields and taking different approaches to the CVE problems but with generally bipartisan support and support both from the hill and from the administration in ways that I still find sometimes astonishing in the current climate let me just offer my heartfelt thanks to the people in this room I think that and all the other researchers out there I think that much of the positive progress that has been made in this field much more of it than is generally recognized is really directly attributable to your insights your field work it's something that I think we see just in the fact that this form is taking place that resolve exists that we're having this kind of an interchange I think it's a good model to build on and I hope we build on it more well I wasn't quite sure how I would end this on a positive note but somehow it happened and given all the other elements of the discussion I'm quite pleased with myself so on that note let me thank you all for your continued attention let me in particular thank our panelists for an enlivening and informative discussion and with that I'll turn it back to Leanne