 Good morning everyone. I'm Raymond Gilpin and I lead USIP's work on sustainable economies. Thank you very much for joining us for this morning's discussion which will be focused around USAID's Community Stabilization Program in Iraq. This program has two broad aims, creating employment and raising incomes on the one hand and reaching out to youth on the other. And these are two critical elements of any socioeconomic recovery program. And being able to understand and analyze economic recovery programs in challenging environments is something that has challenged the writers of minds and the best-intentioned professionals for quite a while. Last month USIP partnered with Columbia University in organizing a seminar on peace through economic reconstruction. And this event focused on smart ways to use economic levels to ensure that once violence abates in a challenging environment, we could do all that we can to bring economic outcomes and economic reconstruction projects to communities as quickly and efficiently as possible. Speaking as the event, the director of the Center for Capitalism and Society at Columbia University, who also happened to be the 2006 Nobel winner in economics, Professor Ed Fells, highlighted the importance of effective economic efforts shortly after the cessation of hostilities in order to deliver tangible peace dividends. Earth Institute director Jeffrey Sachs also echoed this sentiment and described the immediate post-violence era as quote-unquote the early development phase. He described this phase as a phase that is an orphan in international development because there is no one institution or no one policy framework that focuses specifically on the immediate post-violence era in countries and communities. Not coincidentally, this immediate post-violence phase is very similar to the hold phase in counter-insurgency because those of you familiar with counter-insurgency strategy will recognize the clear hold and build. And in the hold phase, you have two competing objectives, delivering tangible peace dividends as quickly as you could, but also doing all you could to prevent those communities or those areas from sliding back into violence. And in many ways, the CSP as a counter-insurgency tool was designed against that background. This morning, we have a very capable panel who would help us analyze these issues and potential tensions and answer questions like how effective was the CSP in Iraq? Is this a model we should be thinking about in other conflict-affected countries? Should development initiatives have military objectives? And how do we measure success when we have dual objectives, both development and security? I'm very, very happy that I will not be the one who will be tackling these very challenging questions, but we have a number of very informed and capable speakers. You have their bios, so I wouldn't go into excruciating detail. I'll just introduce them in the manner in which they would speak, in the order in which they would speak. I'd like to start by introducing our main presenter, Jean Pryor, who is Deputy Director of the Office of Iraq Reconstruction at USAID. I know some of you might be a tad confused, because you may have received emails saying Office of Iraq Reconstruction at the Department of States. And for the record, Mia Culper, who is our mistake, and she is and always has been with USAID. I thank you very much to Jean for presenting, and she will talk us through the CSP, what they found, and their assessment of progress on the ground. Following that, we would have four discussants, Randall Rahim, one of ours, a former Vandal Jenning Senior Fellow at USIP, but currently Executive Director of the Iraq Foundation, and former Representative of Iraq United States. She will be followed by Lieutenant Colonel Sean Benabi, who is Director of Academic Operations at the U.S. Army Command and Staff General School. Thank you very much. He has a lot of in-country experience with the CSP, which we look forward to benefiting from. Then we have Dr. Heather Hansen, who is Director of Public Affairs at Mercy Corps, an NGO with a lot of experience in Iraq, but one that did not participate in the CSP. So we're looking, we would appreciate her comments from her vantage point. And the fourth discussant would be Dr. Nabil Al-Tikriti, also a former USIP Fellow, but currently Assistant Professor of Middle Eastern History at the University of Mary Washington. Following the four discussants, we will have brief remarks by Dr. Arthur B. Keyes, President and CEO of International Relief and Development. Thank you very much for coming in at the very last moment, Dr. Keyes. And his organization was an implementing agent of the CSP in Iraq, and we look forward to your remarks. Our aim is to keep the discussion as focused and as brief as possible, so we'll have an opportunity to interact with the panelists. And so without much more ado, I'd invite Jean Prior to the podium. But before she takes the podium, I'd like to appeal to all owners of cell phones, pages, if it beeps, squeaks or squawks, please turn it off, because it does interfere with our PA system and also out of respect to our panelists as they prepare. So once more, Jean Prior. Okay, let's see. Can everybody hear me okay? Okay, I'd like to thank Raymond and USIP for providing us this opportunity to discuss the evaluation of the Community Stabilization Program and the role that development assistance can play in counterinsurgency efforts. The evaluation offered us internally in aid a number of really interesting issues and sparked a lot of debate. This is a very novel, innovative approach for USAID. While the Community Stabilization Program does use traditional development assistance activities and approaches, you know, job creation, training, community development, what makes it different for USAID is the close collaboration we had with the U.S. military and how we were targeting communities with the specific purpose of helping the military stabilize them. Raymond did an excellent job describing the counterinsurgency strategy of clear-hold build and how the Community Stabilization Program relates to that, so I will go on to the next slide. CSP was a three-year $650 million program implemented by IRD. The scale of this is unusual for USAID. Now $650 million is oftentimes the appropriation for an entire continent in USAID's portfolio, let alone one program in three years. At its height, it was dispersing about $1 million a day and frankly we're starting to feel like the Defense Department with that kind of money. There are a number of aid countries that only get $1 million a year. As it notes up here, CSP is a non-lethal counterinsurgency program that reduces the incentives for participation and violent conflict through creating employment and engaging youth. There are four components to CSP. The first one, especially right in the aftermath of kinetic operations, is community infrastructure and essential services. It has two purposes. It provides activities for young men, keep them busy, gets cash into the economy, as well as jumpstart essential services in the community and give them some hope of a better future. There's also vocational training and apprenticeship component that's very important. Many of the people in these communities lack necessary skills to be able to get long-term jobs. Following that, the business development program issued microgrants to businesses so that they could either rebuild in the aftermath of a suicide bomber or start up a business or expand their business. Finally, also the youth activities. Again, I'm a parent of an adolescent and again it's all about keeping them busy so they don't get into trouble. The activities range from leadership development to art projects and to lots of sports activities. This kind of lays out how it was all supposed to link together, starting off with the community infrastructure, moving to vocational training, business development, and youth activities all along the way. The next slide. I love this picture. It says it all on what the community stabilization program has done in Iraq in these violence-prone areas. And the next. In looking at the results of this program, I think they're substantial. There's 10,300 new businesses. There were 339,000 young people engaging in different kinds of activities. Ten and a half million dollar, ten and a half million man days of employment critical in that immediate aftermath of a kinetic operation. Again, build that infrastructure back up, get cash into the economy. And it was broadened that it operated in 18 different locations. However, you know, these are all outputs. And ultimately what really makes the difference is what is the outcome. You know, it's nice that you can create a lot of man days of labor and train a lot of people but so what. And one of the purposes of the evaluation was to help us see what was the so what. Did we have a larger impact? This evaluation is an independent evaluation that was done by IBTCI and it reflects their findings and their recommendations. You say neither endorses nor rejects them. But it is food for thought for all of us. You know, the most important question is, was the community stabilization program effective? Is it a viable model for counterinsurgency programming elsewhere? What are the lessons learned? What are the best practices that we can take forward as we look at counterinsurgency programming in other country contexts? And as this is largely uncharted territory for you say, we felt it was important to try and document it and get these lessons learned as best as possible. What the evaluation did find was, bottom line, it worked. And all four components worked. Polling data in addition to the outputs that have been measured reported that beneficiaries did notice a positive impact in their community. There's some analysis that's going on now that is trying to see the correlation between CSP work and incidents of violence in those neighborhoods. But I don't think we have that data just yet, but it'll be very interesting when it does come out. The evaluation team did recommend that it be replicated elsewhere. Of course, you know, Tweet for the specific country context and also, you know, adapting some of the lessons learned that came out of the evaluation. Now, there's something like 20 some recommendations in the evaluations, in the evaluation, and all are interesting. And I highly recommend you read the evaluation if you haven't already. You can find it on the USAID website under the deck. Most of the evaluations are good common sense and definitely practices we will want to embrace in future programming. But some of the evaluations really got us thinking about some difficult issues. CSP was designed with stabilization in mind, not necessarily long-term sustainable development. However, as the program unfolded, you know, we and IRD were encountering that, okay, that's great, we're doing these trash campaigns. Who's going to do it after this program ends? This is a three-year program. Okay, vocational training, getting lots of people trained. Who's going to carry it on after it ends? And there's just an inevitable tension between balancing stabilization priorities as well as development priorities. How do you work those in? It's all well and good to say, okay, we're going to transition trash off to the Iraqi government at some point in time. But if you're setting this program up in a kinetic operation, who are you working with? What are the issues that are involved? It makes for planning to be very, very challenging. And as development practitioners know, the ownership of a program from the beginning is really key. But CSP is operating oftentimes not so much in post-kinetic environments, but in the thick of it. Monitoring and oversight in insecure environments. To say that it is a challenge to monitor in insecure environments is an understatement in a place like Iraq where the violence could be so severe. US government security regimen just did not allow us to go out and monitor our programs the way we would traditionally do so. You have the added impact that, you know, if an American shows up at a project site, it can put any Iraqi who is working with that project at risk. So how do you make sure the work is getting done like it's supposed to, the funds are being used appropriately? No, USAID has employed a number of different techniques to try and do that monitoring evaluation and oversight. And IOD has as well, and Arthur can speak to those. We have three sets of auditors who review our programs. USAID's own Inspector General is based right in our aid compound in Baghdad doing concurrent audits with us. We also rely our PRT representatives who can get out a little bit more easily than our staff in the green zone to be able to also go out and monitor. But again, you know, there's still restrictions. We have to be mindful of the security of the Iraqis who are working on these projects. We also tried something innovative. We had set up a project specifically for this purpose, monitoring and evaluation. And the implementers, IBTCI, who also did this evaluation, and their staff was overwhelmingly Iraqi and they had the freedom of movement to be able to put, you know, eyes on to our projects. So they had access to thousands of CSP activities and could get a sense of whether or not they were happening and what the impact was. But, you know, for example, even our auditors have challenges going out. You know, all of our auditors, the GAO, the SIGIR and the IG, all are U.S. government personnel and as such are subject to the same security restrictions. So it's not uncommon for us to have audits of our programs and the auditors haven't even seen those programs ourselves. So this independent mechanism for project monitoring turned out to be very important. Because CSP is innovative and new and risky, we subjected it to more than the norm in terms of evaluations and audits. I think we did a total of 16 different evaluations on the program and I think it's about four or five audits over the life of the program. Mind you, this is a three-year program. So that's a lot of monitoring. Metrics. Again, that question. How do we know that we've been successful? And in a coin environment, there are a number of different actors. It's just not you, it's not just you say, you have the military, you have the State Department and their political engagement in these communities. You have Iraqi security forces and local Iraqi leaders, whether they're government officials or civil society or the private sector. And how do we determine which intervention was most successful? I'd like to think that it's probably the combination of all of us, but it's hard to tease out what we at A could take credit for with this program. And A, in terms of measuring success in our other programs, we're always looking for what specifically can we attribute to our programming. And then how do you define success? Obviously we have a lot of numbers in terms of people trained and then you have the overarching goal of increased stability in a neighborhood. What's the in between so that we can measure our progress along the way to know that we're having the appropriate impact in that community? So we are looking for all ideas in terms of what kind of metrics could be used. The evaluation also made the point of doing a better job of getting baselines. And we actually questioned the team quite a bit on this. In our view, how do you get a baseline in Ramadi when the surge was starting up? What kind of baseline are you going to get anyway in the midst of a conflict? The market's not functional. Is that the baseline? Is that really an accurate baseline? So we still struggle with what is the starting point for us in which we will base the measures of success. All right, now for the real controversial issue. What is the acceptable level of risk? And there are two components to that. Physical risk to staff and also financial risk. We can have all kinds of discussions and debates on how we can better implement and better monitor these kinds of programs, especially in insecure settings. But at the end of all those discussions is a life. There is someone who is putting themselves in harm's way to implement it. And some numbers I want to share to kind of put it all in perspective. On USAID programs alone, amongst our implementing partner staff, 122 have been killed. This is just a rock. 112 have been wounded. 50 have been kidnapped. And that doesn't include all the threats and intimidations and assassination attempts. We just lose count of those. So anything that we decide has to be balanced against the risk we are putting people in. And overwhelmingly, these are Iraqis who are at risk because they're the ones who can best reach out to these communities. And that also ties in with monetary risk. Many developing countries have a culture in which patronage is an accepted practice. And we here in the West consider that corruption. And it's one thing to be able to say to a local staff, it's not okay to hire your brother. It's not okay to just give a contract to your cousin. We consider that corruption. But in a conflict environment like CSP operates, it's a little different factor. The issue can also then become you have a CSP employee getting ready to issue a construction contract who's approached by a gentleman who says, you know, I have a construction company and I would like to win this contract. Oh, by the way, my cousin heads up the local militia. So there becomes a new level of risk for employees. It also then in turn puts monetary risk on the program. You know, I wish I could say that, you know, every single penny would be properly accounted for. But in an insecure environment, I don't think we can realistically do that. We do our absolute best trying to prevent fraud and abuse in these kinds of programs. And over the life of CSP, USAID and IRD worked very closely together along with our auditors to continue to refine the different checks and balances and processes to help make sure that taxpayer dollars are used for the purposes intended and used wisely. But again, you know, if you're overlaying a war on an assistance program, how do we ensure that? Is it realistic to ensure that? Also, you know, as I talk about the physical risk, there are many NGOs operating in Iraq with a very low security profile. I think Mercy Corps will probably talk much more about the need for humanitarian space and how they face security issues, what is the appropriate liaison between, you know, working with the military in a counterinsurgency environment and protecting NGO staff. How do we have that balance? And then finally, coordination, which is always an issue. I have to say in my career, I've never been so coordinated in my life as I have been on Iraq. With that said, you know, the lessons learned of programming are that, you know, we still are capable of stepping on each other when we are out in the field. One of the things that was found throughout the life of the program is, you know, certain activities could be doing one thing and then CSP could be starting to replicate it, or perhaps they're going in different directions, or perhaps the military is aware of a contractor who has a dubious background, but maybe the civilians are not aware. There are a number of competing issues on the ground, and how do you best coordinate that? Again, IRD was implemented, had primarily Iraqi staff implementing this program. So for them to go to a PRT, very risky. And so how do you create that coordinating mechanism so that everyone is safe, and yet we don't step on each other? Also, one of the interesting issues that were raised here in the evaluation is competing institutional objectives. As development workers, our goal is capacity development. We want to pass off activities to beneficiaries, the communities, their leaders to assume responsibility for as quickly as possible. So, for example, in CSP, CSP was doing a large amount of Baghdad trash collection, and it was time then to transition that back to Iraqi authorities to assume responsibility for that, and IRD worked very hard to bring that about, and we declared it a success. I think we even referenced this in Ambassador Crocker's testimony a year or so ago, as a success story that we had transitioned trash collection back to Iraqi authorities. A few months ago, I was briefing a group of military colleagues who were about to deploy out to Baghdad, and one of them happened to mention a SERP activity that was under consideration that was doing, or proposing to do, trash collection in Baghdad. So, I looked at her and just dismayed. I thought, oh, no, this is, you know, undermining what we've worked so hard to do. It's important that the Iraqis do these things for themselves, but you had a very good point. IEDs are hidden in the trash. So, you have two equally important but competing objectives, and how do you reconcile those two? And then, when you add in also Iraqis, they may have a different perspective than we do. You know, we want to get into a new neighborhood and get it up and running and move on. They have to live there. So, their approach may be very different from ours, and we have to figure out how best to reconcile those two. And I think we'll close it there so we can move on to other panelists and hear their perspective. Well, now we'll invite brief remarks from our discussants, starting off with Rehnda. Can I just stand up there, or can we do it from... Your choice. I'm going to stay seated. Okay. Jean, thank you very much. Of course, I have no way of assessing the success of the CSP, and I can only speak in general terms from the information that is out there in the public domain. But I want to make some, a few remarks, not just about CSP, but also about the entire approach that I think CSP kind of embodies. And I do have some experience as a subcontractor on USCID projects, so it's a combination between CSP and my own experience. First of all, Reh started very well by saying that usually these projects, the stabilization projects, are launched in a post-violence era. In other words, once violence ceases, once fighting ceases, then you start the stabilization. CSP obviously started at the worst time in the era of fighting in Iraq. In 2006, where it was launched, this was the height of the sectarian fighting, and although it was launched in all of Iraq, it certainly had to operate in some of the worst areas like Baghdad and Diyala and so on. So obviously CSP had a problem from the start because it had to operate essentially in a war zone. So the post-violence model was not exactly fitted to where CSP was going. That presented, I think, probably some of the challenges that Jean spoke about. The most salient challenge is the issue of how do you deal with not only personal security, but also financial security in an environment which has a lot of insurgents, they are working underground, they're working through the social fabric, and yet you have to utilize that very social fabric in order to funnel out money and so on. So how do you know the good guys from the bad guys? And it seems to me, if I am not wrong, that this is one of the challenges that CSP had to confront. Naturally, most humanitarian organizations and NGOs do not like to work with the military. They like to keep a distance between themselves and the military in a combat zone. And yet a project like CSP going into a combat zone and working in an environment that has a lot of unknowns and that has a lot of traps and pitfalls related to security has no alternative but to work very closely with the military because that's where the intelligence comes in. CSP, I imagine, and IRD generally would not have intelligence information. The only way they can get it is through the military. And this is really a question that confronts humanitarian organizations. Are they willing to have such a close association with the military in a war zone? This is something that each organization has to decide for itself. But in the CSP context, going into a fighting zone where there are lots of unknowns or lots of bad guys and the possibility of the bad guys taking advantage of the program is very high. I think that choice had to be very clear. So coordinating with other U.S. actors, including the military, is essential in that kind of environment. The other issue that I wanted to sort of bring up is the sheer magnitude of this project and the desire by USAID, and excuse me, Jean, if I say this, to generate numbers as quickly as possible. And I have to say that as a subcontractor to USAID some time ago, we suffered from this, that the focus was on output, output, output. And it's summarized by the term burn rate, which I find absolutely deplorable, I must say, because what is important is not the numbers that you generate, it is the quality of what you generate and the outcome that you generate. For example, one of the numbers that I did pick up on CSP is that CSP trains something like 207, over 207,000 youth in educational programs that were focused on conflict mitigation. Really 207,000 in three years, really under three years when you think about it, because there's a start-up period, there's a close-out period, 207,000 youth in less than three years, and that was just one part of the program. What is the quality of that training when you insist on numbers, when you insist on spending a million dollars a day? And I truly question the value of a project which insists so emphatically on numbers, on output, output, output, without the notion that you have to not only generate hundreds of thousands, you really need to scale down because what is important is that what you're delivering sticks, that there's a legacy there, rather than something that is going to dissipate as soon as these kids walk out the door. This is, I think, one of my major, one of the things that I sort of really hold against this type of project because in the end, what is left? What is the residual value of what is being done? The Make Work programs is another aspect of this sort of output-output mentality. Fine, we do trash cleaning in Baghdad and so on, but trash cleaning in Baghdad is good just for the day that a person is working. You're not providing any value added. You're not providing the sustainability element. You are perhaps occupying those youth for the time that they are working for your project. In other words, for those eight hours, they're not out there fighting, they're in the garbage collection team, but essentially, if they don't come tomorrow, nothing very much happens. There is no subsidiary activity, there's no economic trickle-down, there's no creation of associated jobs, there is no sense that this job has a tomorrow, has an improved prospect, and so on. And I think that this type of over-emphasis, let's put it this way, over-emphasis on this type of Make Work is perhaps not so desirable, and again, in my view, it would be better to scale down and focus more on things that have a multiplier effect for the economy and represent a real future for those people who are employed. A third thing is the coordination with local authorities. Really, it's very difficult to run a program such as this and to have any hope of sustainability unless you're working hand in glove with local authorities. And I don't know to what extent I gather that there was some coordination with local authorities, but I don't know to what extent that was, and I think this is an essential component. And in addition to working with local authorities, a program like this, which is so vast and covers the entire country, requires local partners. And I don't mean just local employees. It really requires... Iraq is full of NGOs. And it seems to me that one of the ways to avoid the problems that CSP confronted is to work through local entities, not just individuals, but local groups who have penetration in their community, who understand the community, who can tell the good guys from the bad guys and who are comfortable moving around. And the advantage of that is that these local partners, whether they are district councils, whether they are local NGOs, can actually continue the work once IRD and the program is gone. They have... This is what I call the residual value of the work that you're putting in. And finally, this is the important thing, is continuity. It seems that spending $644 million on a program, I, as a taxpayer, would like to know, what is carried over into the future? Is there something that's going to be left behind? What is the legacy of the program? Do we have a means of measuring what has happened at the end of the program? Not immediately at the end, but say in a year's time. Are we able to go back and say, okay, these are the people that we did vocational training for, this is what they're doing, how they're working, where they're working. These are the people that we gave medium and small grants to. They have started businesses. These businesses are continuing. This kind of retrospective evaluation I think is very important in a program like this. And I would like to comment. Thank you very much. All right, well, good morning or good afternoon, I guess, now. I think what my comments will do is serve to validate what we've heard already with some specific examples based on my experience. First, as a way of introduction, I am an infantry officer 17 years of service of deploy to a variety of places, including two trips to Iraq. This last rotation, I was a part of the 4th Brigade 3rd Infantry Division based at Favkalsu in North Babel Province. I'm accompanied today by Major Kim Peoples. She was the engineer officer and also the deputy team leader for the embedded provincial reconstruction team for our brigade. So she spent a lot of time working the details on CSP and other development initiatives in our area. So where I fault run any details, Kim can certainly back me up. Some operational context. As we came into Iraq in November 2007, Babel Province was a very different place than it is now. In fact, it was the home of a very distinct Shiasuni fault line, especially in North Babel Province. There were places coalition forces and local security forces just did not go at that time, especially in the Euphrates River Valley on the outskirts of Iskandaria and even over to the east in the Tiger River Valley. And so our rotation really started out with a focus, a military focus on kinetic operations, on clearing, deliberately clearing al-Qaeda from those areas and re-establishing that freedom of movement for not only our forces, but for all the local security forces. Over the course of 14 months, our brigade partnered with a lot of entities to include PRTs and the EPRT, to include CSP directors, local ISF, local government officials. Through that 14 months, we saw tremendous improvement in the province. And towards the end of the rotation, I guess it was October of 2008, the province actually declared provincial Iraqi control and really the local leaders took charge of their own futures and again a much better day in Babel than it was when we arrived. My primary task today is to evaluate CSP from a military perspective and ask for the question, is CSP an effective counter-insurgency tool? And I'll tell you, my bottom line up front is I don't really know. For a lot of the reasons already cited here today, it's difficult to tell. My gut tells me it is the kind of tool that I would like to have in my toolbox as a military commander going into an area like Babel in 2007. But the reality is I don't have any specific proof of the effectiveness of the program. I think everybody here would agree that Iraq, like any place post-conflict, is a complex adaptive system with a lot of interdependent variables and isolating the effect of one input to that system is difficult. In fact, nearly impossible. Our brigade with all of its partners saw dramatic success, but the success was due to a variety of factors, including not only combined operations to kill and capture insurgents and the development of an effective ISF, but also the emplacement of sons of Iraq throughout the area to take away al-Qaeda's freedom of maneuver and then to take away their base of support. And then also the application of money from a variety of sources including CERP, ISERP, QRF, IRAP, to provide those jobs to boost local economy and to improve the infrastructure in the area. Towards the end of our rotation, Mr. Mike Maxey, our USAID expert, put together a study where he tried to define a causal link between money spent and the reductions in violence. And a valiant effort on his part, something that we all really wanted to do, but when we started to study that, we realized that there is no causal link. At best, you can establish some correlation, but we found ourselves quickly in that chicken and egg discussion. Did the drop in violence happen because of the money we spent? Or was money spent because violence dropped due to other factors at play in the area? So it's difficult, if not impossible, to establish that link. If you look at a specific case in our area, the city of Iskandaria. Iskandaria is an industrial city, the home of the Iskandaria industrial complex, just outside the Euphrates River Valley. It's set also right on that Sunni Shia fault line I mentioned before. And it also sits on the gateway to Baghdad, to South Baghdad. So the thought was the Iskandaria area was feeding a lot of the insurgent efforts going on in the city of Baghdad itself. So naturally, Iskandaria became a focal point for CSP. So during our rotation, CSP conducted a variety of programs, all the things that we've talked about already. The employment and training programs at the Iskandaria Votech, soccer tournaments throughout the area to get the youth occupied and to establish some measure of normalcy. T-wall painting projects, again, not only to get some folks active, but also to improve the appearance of the area. Microgram programs, school reconstruction, water projects, concerts, art festivals, the whole gamut of programs in Iskandaria itself and then in all the neighboring and along the outskirts of the town. But in addition to those programs, our brigade also did all those things that I mentioned before, the combined operations to clear al-Qaeda from the outskirts of the city. We have placed hundreds of SOIs on dozens of checkpoints to take away al-Qaeda's freedom of maneuver. We partnered an entire U.S. infantry battalion with all the key leaders of security forces, government officials, industrial complex officials within the city itself. So a lot of military combat power focused on improving that area. And of course, naturally, as security improved, it targets some key segments of the population that are susceptible to insurgent influence. Perhaps most attractive to me is the fact that it's managed by somebody else. And not only is it managed by somebody else, but it's managed by some experts, some people who are truly trained to do those kind of programs the right way the first time. And then it's designed to be more sustainable than what the military has at its immediate call. It's designed to be more sustainable than SERP, certainly. And it's designed to be more sustainable than some of the other programs that I mentioned. It may not be as sustainable as we want, and I'm sure we'll talk about that here later today. But for all those reasons, CSP is attractive to me. So even without definitive proof of its effectiveness, I would say as a military man, that's something I would like to see for future operations, whether that be Afghanistan or some other theater. Several friction points, of course, with any program of this magnitude. We mentioned a lot of them already. At the outset of our operation, I'll tell you that my brigade knew very little about CSP. Certainly didn't know about the program. We definitely didn't know what specific CSP projects were ongoing as we came into the area. We knew the EEPRT and PRT folks had some tabs on it, but it was evident right up front that there had not been any kind of focused effort, a focused campaign to employ CSP and target it at specific areas in conjunction with ongoing operations in other areas. The program directors reported to Baghdad, and so they had little interaction with a lot of the local authorities, and had little interaction really with our local EEPRT and PRT. Classification issues hampered true collaboration. I mean, it's one of the things we as a military have to become more comfortable with. We probably over-classify, and there's a middle ground there, definitely. Certainly hampered collaboration in a variety of forms. Project Fratricide was common, and we've talked about it already. The poor Iraqi sitting in Escondaria was probably approached three or four different times by different people. One guy wearing a green suit saying, how can I help? Give me your prioritized list of projects. Next day by a CSP rep saying, how can I help? Give me your prioritized list of projects. And on and on. And it doesn't take too long for that individual person to become frustrated, and in some cases, some of the locals took advantage of that Fratricide among all the different entities. And then finally, on the military side, our commanders I think got frustrated just because they saw a long lead time in getting some of these things going and on the tail end, on the heels of kinetic action, that's one of the things that our military guys are looking for is that immediate shift to development. And again, there are limitations on the tools at immediate hand. So knowing that our goal today is to talk about how to improve these kind of programs, I'll offer a few recommendations. I think the number one thing that we must do is achieve unity of effort, easier said than done. A big part of that is establishing relationships between all the key players before we get into an environment, a post-conflict type environment. A lot of ways to do that, and I can talk about those later in detail. On the military side, we have to educate our folks on CSP and all those other types of initiatives out there. I think it's critical that we link CSP to the EPRTs and the PRTs. I think the PRT model is a good model. I think we saw a lot of success in Iraq, and I think they're seeing the same success in Afghanistan with that model. I think by linking CSP more directly with those entities, I think we can achieve a better unity of effort. Achieve unity of command by clearly defining who's in the lead at different phases. There are definitely times when it's appropriate for the military entities to be in the lead. And then there has to be a transition at some point. That transition may be different in the different geographic areas. And then finally, I think there has to be a direct link between CSP and the more immediate programs like SERP. I'll end it there. I look forward to the discussions and probably more importantly, I look forward to exchanging business cards with some of the folks here to make that initial bridge of the gap and make those initial relationships. So thank you very much. Thank you. Thanks everyone for coming this morning to this discussion. It is. It's great to see so many people here because this really is an issue that's at the core of U.S. foreign assistance strategies and the relationship between the civilian arms of the U.S. government and the military as we move forward in an environment where the number of weakened failed and failing states is growing and in theaters like Afghanistan our policymakers have very important decisions to be made. So I'm glad to see the interest in this particular topic. I'm the Director of Public Affairs at Mercy Corps and Mercy Corps works in 38 countries all over the world. Most of them are pretty high on the list of weakened failing states because we've defined our area of work as being transitional environments. We believe that at moments of chaos and crisis there's also profound opportunities for transformation that can build more productive just and stable societies. Our methods are really based on our vision for change which involves accountability, participation and peaceful change and involves public sector, private sector and civil society actors. Our approach is based on goals related to the challenges of building successful development programs in transitional environments and we see these places as fertile ground for implementing what we call complex development. Some people have talked about humanitarian agencies and I want to emphasize that in these environments it's usually not just about providing humanitarian life saving assistance and yet the institutional structures that need to be in place for effective long term development to move forward are not yet there. And I think it is that area between emergency humanitarian assistance and stability which would allow for long term development efforts to take place that provide such tremendous challenges to US policy makers and implementers. Mercy Corps believes that the activities involved in counterinsurgency and complex development resemble each other closely in some settings like Iraq and Afghanistan. But the end goals and the interim methodologies of these two different approaches are not the same and we should not confuse them. We also believe that when successfully implemented complex development programs yield results in terms of stability that are similar to the results of successful counterinsurgency programs. However we're also convinced that for complex development programs to be successful they must be successfully differentiated from counterinsurgency programs. We work in a lot of tough operating environments where the only people on the ground will be the US military, humanitarian agencies, maybe a couple of journalists and so we're used to coordinating closely with the US military. We've coordinated closely with them in developing the guidelines that USIP helped to develop for interactions between NGOs and militaries. But we also believe that the effectiveness of complex development hinges on our ability to maintain independence and to have clear program goals that are not military goals. Today I'm going to share a little bit of historical background of Mercy Corps programs in Iraq and I'm also going to present some preliminary findings from research that we're now completing in Iraq and Afghanistan examining how community-led approaches to complex development are contributing or not to increased stability in those settings. Mercy Corps began working in Iraq right after the 2003 invasion and at that time we considered applying for many of the programs available USAID is a very valued partner of Mercy Corps not just in Iraq but in many other settings and we essentially decided not to apply for the CSP program but to apply for another program called the Community Action Program which we've been implementing since then with several other partners who I'll name in a minute. I won't go into it too much but basically the decision to not apply for CSP funding hinged on two factors for Mercy Corps and the first was we felt the scope of the program, the magnitude of the program went beyond our ability and capacity on the ground to implement it with a high degree of accountability and really program success and the second was that we felt it would tie us much too closely to US military goals in Iraq and not allow the degree of independence that we'd like to have when we implement development programs. We have implemented the CAP program with IRD, CHF, TDI VOCA as valued partners and this program is now in the third round of funding and it's had substantial impacts in all the governance of Iraq. In the first phase of CAP, Mercy Corps alone completed 557 community projects worth over $38 million so it's not a small program either, it's just not a million dollar a day program as well as successfully obtaining matching funds from local community and government sources worth about 20% of that are all funding so right from the inception we were looking for communities and local governments to match the funding provided by CAP programs. We assisted 188 communities reaching over 3 million beneficiaries created over 21,000 short term jobs, 695 long term jobs. During the second phase of CAP which was 2007-2008 I'm sorry I'm going through this rather fast it's just to give some background but I have some questions for discussion that I want to get to. Counting the activities of all the implementing partners I just mentioned 1,673 community projects were completed over $5.5 million of matching funds were secured from Iraqi sources to support these projects and more importantly the community action groups that we formed as part of project methodology all over the country were involved in training programs, 207 community action groups, received training in conflict resolution 396 in how to effectively engage local Iraqi government officials and provincial government officials in order to secure funding for projects that were the priority in their communities and a total of 477 community action groups were engaged with government officials to solve community problems 470 of those groups had leveraged government funding for their activities. Also during CAP 3 7,500 individuals received job training over 60,000 short term jobs and about 17,000 long term jobs were created. Now I ran through all those stats relatively quickly because just like any other US funded program we really do try to keep track of the activities that were implementing in the CAP program but I wanted to put some numbers out there to make the case that the CAP program is essentially a program like CSP but working under a different model and I want to put that out there because I think sometimes in these insecure environments the idea that we come into this with is that the only way to do these programs is in close collaboration with the US military and Mercy Corps believes that while we can coordinate and should coordinate at all times with US military forces in the area there are ways to seek out a more independent road forward that's more focused specifically on the goals of community-led development. A lot of times we do talk about the differences in terms of our security protocols and procedures and how we work I'm not going to go into that today because what I really want to focus on is sort of the effectiveness measures for these programs. I think the presentations today have shown that both CSP models and CAP models can produce real impact and real positive changes on the ground but at Mercy Corps we believe that the CAP example also shows that these efforts can be coordinated but also have a level of independence. We believe that while the security benefits of the different models are likely similar the long-term benefits to be had from more independent civilian-led complex development activities are too often overlooked in Washington. So in recent years we've been undertaking a series of studies to try to measure some of these results and I wanted to just mention two of those briefly today. The first is what we call the Sustainability Study with USAID funding, Mercy Corps implemented several large-scale multi-year community-led development transitional community recovery programs in Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan. After these programs ended we decided one to five years later depending on whether or not they were staged programs the evaluation was all done at once one to five years after they ended we went back to interview people to see if any of the results had stuck and we were really amazed by the findings. In 93% of the community survey the projects completed were still being actively used and maintained by community members. We also found real increases in terms of community participation members of community action groups reported unprompted that people were now more willing to participate in actions aimed at the benefit of the entire community. Roughly half of all those interviewed said that they had attended at least one community member in the last year and 73% of them said it was more easy for their local community groups to work with local government officials. 68% said that local government officials were now paying closer attention to the needs that community members felt. So with this background we decided to conduct an additional research in Afghanistan and Iraq and this has actually been pretty difficult. Anyone who's done research in conflict settings knows that. We've been working with GlobeScan an internationally renowned research firm and locally contracted firms in Afghanistan and Iraq to conduct qualitative and quantitative research in both settings looking at the value add of community led development models and more rapid stabilization. And we're just having initial findings right now. Our full findings should be launched in January. My time's almost up so I just wanted to touch on a couple things. According to focus group participants in Afghanistan they think development programs are effective when there's a large sense of ownership and also a sense of trust with implementing organizations. But our quantitative research showed that in terms of levels of trust those actors that are most well trusted are the Shura international NGOs and religious leaders while those least trusted are international military forces. In Iraq we've only begun to analyze the quantitative data but the findings from our qualitative data suggest that the involvement and level of involvement of community members and leaders in ways consistent with local customs and traditions is really very highly rated as essential to program success. So I think what's clear from that is the process of involving people and charting their own futures is essential both for complex development and I would argue also for counterinsurgency efforts. However a lot of essential questions remain unanswered and I just want to pose a couple in closing my presentation. The first is what do we really gain by pulling the mission of USAID ever more closely to military goals. There may be things that we do gain but I think it's important that we pose that question and on the other hand what do we lose in terms of the long term sustainability of program efforts when our development mission takes on a shorter term set of goals and more immediate military objectives. The other is how to gauge success and many have talked about this I find it heartening that burn rate is being suggested that burn rate should no longer be the indicator of success it's definitely at odds with building the sustainability of projects and finally many of you probably have heard Andrew Wilder's presentations these days his research on does aid win hearts and minds in Afghanistan and I mean I think his essential answer is that no it doesn't and that less is often more but I just want to pose the question a little differently and that is I think we need to look much more closely and ask under what conditions with what kind of end goals with what kind of implementation methodologies and with what kind of organizations carrying out the work can we expect the most positive impacts from our aid dollars thanks. Thank you, now I would invite Nabeel for the force and hopefully the briefest intervention. Thank you very much for inviting me I think in my case I might be playing the role here and meant to play the role of the wild-eyed academic and if that's the case then I'll gladly step into it but just a bit of background within this discussion you can categorize there are several categories of perspective to go from and I'll just say that there's first of all military versus civilian within the civilian you've got NGOs and US government within the NGOs you have relief versus development and within the relief agencies I would say that you have a US NGO approach and often a European or sometimes it's characterized as a French NGO approach and in a sense that's the perspective I'm largely coming from just because of my own career background and I should also add that my career has almost completely followed a bellwether change in the relationship of the military to relief and NGO activity in conflict zones because I started in 1991 in Iraq with Catholic Relief Services right after the 1990-91 Gulf conflict and I've watched it change over time and I'll come back to that at the end of my comments basically I've got three sets of comments to make one on accountability another one on corruption patronage if you want to consider it patronage and then the other on military NGO cooperation which is the strongest set of points I want to make on accountability vis-a-vis the CSP program which by the way I'm completely an outsider that's another thing to clarify I've got no involvement with this program at all but from what I can see the measurables appear to be process oriented as opposed to impact oriented in other words they're somewhat internal to the process of the project itself the measurables that are being used for monitoring and evaluation and in a sense the quantifiable aspect of it that RENT pointed out I think coincides quite nicely with what I'm seeing in the educational sector whereby in higher education they're trying to get us to quantify everything that we do in outcomes assessment and I just completely concur with what RENT pointed out there and say that it's even larger than just this theater another point that has already been raised is do we have primarily here a counter insurgency goal or a development goal and actually the two are not the same at all and they're sometimes contradictory although I tried to think of a completely different point just now but they are often contradictory and I think if you did think about it you will find cases alright another point is whom are we throwing money at and this is effectively a managed cash drop of sorts is my take on it and it reminds me of something I saw in Somalia in 1992 interestingly where an OFDA official at the height of the period when Somali militias were hijacking let's just flood the market with grain and that will inevitably change the dynamic that was tried and if I remember correctly it worked reasonably well although the glass is half full on that one but this is a similar idea I think only with an added dynamic that we're a direct party to the conflict that's different than Somalia was so asking that I would suggest that folks look at Peter Moore's work on Iraq's political economy he has a lot to say about the way that Iraq's political economy actually works and the effect of the U.S. intervention broadly wrought wide has done has affected the Iraqi political economy so can money buy friendship in cooperation I'm highly skeptical of that and I also think the win hearts and minds idea I also think that the calming down of Iraq since roughly the time that this program was implemented has much more to do with factors that are external to this program and in effect much larger than this program and they're mostly internal to the Iraqi to the Iraqi public itself so as it's already been pointed out checking on the effect of this program is really difficult and really challenging and I just want to say that I recognize that difficulty and concur and I don't really know that you can defend any clear conclusion also there are occasions where I wonder whether what CSP is actually doing is throwing money after a situation of conflict and in some cases potentially even ethnic cleansing considering what has happened on Iraqi society itself and this example of painting T-walls really hit me as not necessarily a bad project in and of itself but in the broader context of there even being T-walls which is something Iraq had never seen prior to roughly 2005 2006 well 2003 if you want to take the green zone itself I suppose it's like finding something very good in something small surrounded by something absolutely horrific and that's just again external observation going on to the second category corruption and patronage at some level corruption is inevitable and it really is especially with a program the size of 640 million I believe it is 650 from accounts by some that I know in the field there have been hair-raising stories of corruption within the field and I don't want to get too specific because that could prove really problematic but they have to do with nationals requesting kickbacks on some of these projects and that's all I think I should say at this point and these are strong allegations but they're not really public and the kickbacks and the patronage and the corruption is itself international it's not necessarily only Iraqis that are corrupt and there are also cases where the Iraqis are effectively being corrupted by the program itself because it's redirecting resources to Iraqi society there's also a lot of problematic issues regarding trying to redirect what Iraqi youth do with their time and this has been pointed out in other parts of the literature that there is a machismo attached to being a security personnel and if you take away that gun and offer a job almost any job it's not likely to succeed if only because of the importance of carrying a security identity within that society that's enough for all those categories now for the issue of military NGO cooperation and first let me just sort of chart through what I've seen of the last 20 years of that relationship to me it really starts with operation provide comfort in 1991 and at the time the military simply did a drops and they were rather in retrospect comical or tragic comical because some of the pallets landed on those who are supposed to receive the eight drops that was the military's first intervention in humanitarian assistance later on in Somalia which I saw various military actors provided very valuable logistical assistance things like using a military bulldozer to cover up a line pit and they did provide security this is another intervention because they were providing security for humanitarian workers then fast forward to 1999 in both the Kosovo conflict and in the Istanbul earthquake I witnessed U.S. military getting involved in humanitarian assistance at a very basic level relief assistance and then again in the tsunami in the Pakistan earthquake later on the thing is though it's really gone up to a level that's far more extreme than any of those examples in say the last three to five years so much so that I have a friend who is a colleague who was teaching at a service academy and reports that there are now service academy students who are entering the military in the hopes of engaging of a peace core type career through AFRICOM and I find that highly problematic on many many levels and this is why and this will be the sort of stirring last point is that there is such a thing as humanitarian space and humanitarian space may not particularly matter to the interest of the U.S. military because their goals can be achieved effectively without humanitarian space the problem is it's not on effects for non-military actors in the field and I can say with complete confidence that in 1991 and 1993 in Somalia as a relief worker we were never ever targeted as relief workers there were those who were targeted because they became politicized there were others who might have been targeted because of direct personal corruption that could happen but just as a relief worker it was impossible to imagine in the early nineties now it's so routine that there are basically no go zones for humanitarian NGOs unless under the protection of the military which in turn identifies them with the military even further I could expand on that perhaps in the amount of time. Thank you very much to presenter and panelists I think what we have here is broad consensus around the importance of community stabilization programs in non permissive environments such as Iraq we also have broad agreement that these initiatives could be impactful if they're targeted and they are well implemented and executed in these areas and measures of that are the degree to which there is community buying the degree to which there is a sustainability element and the degree to which there is openness and transparency in the processes where we have some divergence is whether or not we have competing and probably contradictory objectives between the development and the military we also have some divergence around the issue of humanitarian space how important is it how critical is it to success and also when it comes to measuring progress in these areas these are issues I think that we would like to discuss a bit further and engage both you the audience and our esteemed panel we have time for a few questions and what we'll do is we have a microphone on this sign we would invite sets of four questions and then we'll have the panel respond but before we have our first question I'd like to invite we have two microphones excuse me so we'll have two on this side two on that side for the first round but before that I'd like to invite Dr. Keys to give very brief comments because we don't really have much time on IRD's experience thank you Dr. Gilpin I feel a little bit like a naked person here listening to all these comments here about CSP but I think that on balance I think they're very good and very constructive I would say that first thing I think I would say is in terms of is this appropriate for development agency to be involved counterinsurgency my view is it's not either or I was at the original ICAP communication program conference in June of 2003 along with the other agencies and IRD was first on the ground setting up our programs our staff since June of 2003 have been there in the red zone and we think that we agree with what was said here in terms of different ways of approaching development but I don't think it's either or I think the reality was that the reason why CSP was undertaken and why it was such a big program is because it was a big job to be done it was not a small job to be done and the comment was made that sometimes less is more I can agree with that it's less and I think that also has to be taken into account burn rate is one indicator it's certainly not the only indicator but it is an indicator of activity and I think CSP if I were to try to convey anything to you was how robust this program was at the beginning it was only in Baghdad but then it grew into 18 cities there were 1800 people involved as staff at one point all these projects were done with a very professional approach we used the same staff on our bidding and our procurement and our tendering on CSP that we used on the ICAP program and I can assure you there was nothing called a manage cash drop I welcome all of you to come to our records the warehouse that we have in Amman Jordan three stories high has all of the audited and auditable documents there and any of you who work with USAID knows they didn't change the standards they didn't change the regulations for CSP versus any other program in the world we might ask them to but they haven't done that so and we have passed all audits and you talk about corruption you talk about all you want but I can tell you one thing everything has passed the smell test in terms of auditable standards you know monitoring evaluation is very important I think there are two things that can be easily said it is a team approach there are various factors that go together including which I thought was very important the overall diplomatic piece the overall geopolitical piece regional piece these are all very important but I think that if you do all the studies show that you go into the communities where CSP worked the people in the community say that the quality of life is better today after CSP and that the level of violence is significantly decreased those are very gratifying for those who are involved there are a lot of constraints one of the constraints was personnel not so much on the IRD side but particularly the US government and the military side the rotations often worked against transition and against stability and just in closing I would like to say that CSP was implemented primarily through local contractors I looked at the figures last night and of the $650 million $450 million and $500 million was all spent on local contractors local NGOs local personnel local businesses, local communities I was in a car wash in Baghdad where the man put up half of the he wanted new equipment there he had put up half of the money we came in with the other half of the money and he expanded his employment from 20 people in his car wash the most important thing maybe that was done here this was a tool just one tool of transitioning from a demand economy to a competitive market economy and I think that can't be underestimated as we move into the new Iraqi situation the programs in the vocational training were turned right over to the ministry of labor and to the Iraqi government was up front on all of these projects we had a couple GIs IRD has a project in Gulfport, Mississippi and we had a couple GIs come there as a post Katrina project they walked in, they were amazed they said I can't believe that IRD is here working in our community because we were so impressed with what you were doing out there in Anbar helping save lives and stabilize the situation in Iraq thank you thank you very much for those perspectives the mics are now open please identify yourselves and if you are directing your question to a particular panelist please let us know who it is hello my name is Marisa Lino and I work for Northrop Grumman Corporation I wonder if you and this is really for anyone who wants to comment on it I realize the program that you've all discussed but Iraq's economy prior to 2003 was oil, agriculture and some small manufacturing and I wonder whether working with the Iraqi government in creating the programs and looking at the possibilities for jobs whether you had any discussions about the long-term sustainability of these jobs fitting into what was once the Iraqi economy thank you we'll have another question on this side thank you, my name is Henry Clark I was head of the Office of Provincial Affairs in Embassy Baghdad in 2007 for a number of months when this program was being expanded around to most of the PRTs that I supervised and I just want to say that I don't think we should strain too much in trying to evaluate what this program accomplished solely by itself or as separate from all the rest of the U.S. government programs that were going on at the same time the way it was explained to me this was a program to serve overall U.S. goals that there could be no counter-insurgency without an effective economic program and it was good to have a program flexible enough to move from the initial trash collection to the longer-term development goals as the security situation improved my second point is we should really view this kind of work in counter-insurgency as a decentralized affair the USAID's approach on this was to use the PRTs to use NGOs who are established throughout Iraq and the Green Zone and it's at that provincial level where the coordination is really most important coordination not only among the U.S. actors but with the local authorities and I think this program was great the USAID folks that I worked with who are real team players and the success of the program is the U.S. government's success not a purely mathematical model for one part of the overall effort thank you very much any more questions? my name is Greg Rimasen and with the emerging markets group and I spent the last four years in Afghanistan and I have a very short question in what way do you think we can replicate the program and the lessons learned apply the lessons learned from the program in Iraq in Afghanistan I think we have three questions the first relates to long-term sustainability and how the projects that have been initiated under CSP would relate to Iraq's long-term economic prospects and whether or not there are any discussions on this even if we whether or not we know how do we how would you suggest that we go about ensuring that these synergies are made the second I think a couple of very good comments that CSP should be viewed within the context of broader efforts in Iraq and it's not a standalone and in evaluating or analyzing its components we should take what the efforts of other USG entities and other players in theater should be taken into account and the question also noted that counterinsurgency should be viewed as a decentralized effort and thirdly in terms of replication whether or not you agree or disagree what lessons do you think we could take from the CSP in relation to Afghanistan for instance I'm going to start with Ren because she has to leave so I'll give her the first the first any one of the three just very brief comments I do appreciate the comments of the lady from London Grumman I think first of all I absolutely appreciate your pointing out the issue of sustainability one really does need to have a continuity in these programs and know that something is going to be left behind that is permanent and that has a multiplier effect for the people and for the economy and perhaps one of the best ways as you mentioned is to look to work with the local government to work with the national government to look at their sort of strategic plan for economic development in a particular region this could be on a very local level it could be on a larger level looking at what a community sees economic future and working through that so that you're not out on left field doing something that is not really relevant to the overall picture I think this would help a great deal in that as for the taking a program like this into Afghanistan I think there's been a lot of discussion about the strengths and the weaknesses of this program and if in fact you've done this lessons learned and done an evaluation that is the best thing and I actually look forward to seeing that evaluation because I think that is really what one needs to look at in order to think of transferability and I apologize but I do I must excuse myself thank you very much we'll start at the other end of the table I'm just very brief comments on any one of the two questions regarding the sustainability issue and the prospects for the future I think my perspective on that is again look at the broader picture in that Iraq's economy as long as there is such a thing as oil which may end in 50 or 70 years or something as long as there is such a thing as an oil economy there's nothing to do with CSP as a legacy I think CSP's legacy in the long term is going to be very very light and that's what I think about that on Afghanistan here's the sort of point where you ask what do you do next and I unfortunately do not have the magic bullet from some kind of opposing view except to say that I do think that there should be a separation of the military and the civilian this is by the way not anti-military by any stretch and I think there are those within the military who would agree with this perspective that basically the military should sharpen their focus on security provision because once security provision is attained the rest becomes possible so that the more the military engages in humanitarian affairs the more like Microsoft they become and that's not a compliment so that basically they should concentrate on what they do best historically and that is security provision so for Afghanistan if there is a different idea it is that I think energy should be put in civilian relief and it should be need driven not counter-insurgency driven which will have its own knock-on effects on counter-insurgency and I think that it should be done through non-governmental partners to the extent possible and it's not always going to be easy to imagine that in any case and the main reason is because the more that humanitarian assistance becomes militarized the more the military gets into it not only does it be the waters for the military the military profession or military goals it also by squeezing out the humanitarian space makes it so that anyone involved in the theater in question is almost by definition identified with the military endeavor which just endangers everyone there whether or not they are in fact involved with the military endeavor Thank you Heather I have a question whether it should be replicated in Afghanistan and I think this is really a question of costs and benefits like most U.S. policy decisions there's no real silver bullet there's no magic to be done here and I just want to talk about a couple of the costs that we see in Afghanistan right now that are potentially emerging these are costs associated with and joint civil set of programs implemented by the U.S. government I think that in terms of security I would agree with what Nabil has just said when the civilian and military missions are not separate it does sometimes jeopardize the security of civilians that rely on community acceptance strategies in order to accomplish their goals but at the same time it creates an environment where accompaniment is always needed military accompaniment is always needed and that's a very expensive option for U.S. foreign policy makers I think as soon as an environment becomes permissive we need to think about staging down the levels of military accompaniment both because in our survey work we've seen that local community members really want security to be consistent with the risk but also because of cost considerations but the other thing I would say about the big spend totally merged joint civil model is that it's raised several questions for us which we don't have the answers to but which we ask ourselves every day in terms of sustainability and in terms of effectiveness in some areas where it's easier for local government officials to get money from PRTs than it is to get money from the Afghan government one of the questions it raises for us is does this model have the potential to create parallel governance structures and thereby not encourage the growth of the institutionality that we'd want to see in those environments we have similar questions on the civil society level some of the civil society groups that we work with that are required to actually have very active participation, take ownership for projects, maintain projects and also contribute community levels of funding and actually feel like these other pots of money that come from the U.S. government are a better deal because they don't require as much accountability and they're bigger pots of money and so does that create perverse incentive that's another question that we have Thanks First to the initial question on sustainability in Iskandariyah one of the things we struggle with, the Iskandariyah industrial complex was a military complex that would create weapons and munitions obviously that was not going to be the role for Iskandariyah in the future so one of the big discussions we had is what will Iskandariyah become what are those industries we can start up that are sustainable given the skill sets that were in the area from the previous industry you looked at building civilian buses other vehicles, tractors as they dug into they realized that where they thought there were some skills resident in the area a lot of folks with those skills had since departed and found other lines of work one of the industries we did find some sustainability was in agriculture agriculture was not going away Babel province was rich with an agricultural history and so towards the end of our tour there we did focus on that sector trying to find those things looking to the Afghanistan issue while I would love to separate the military from all the development initiatives I just don't think we have that luxury I think the reality is there are so many points of interdependence between all the different entities working in development and between the counter-insurgency efforts that are typically led by the military we just can't wish that away and try to stay separate so the reality is we have to find ways to work that together I mentioned a unity of effort that unity of effort needs to happen at all levels and one of the key pieces to that is bringing all those stakeholders together to define the way ahead and then to routinely come back and look at that plan and adjust as the situation changes and to redefine which of those entities is in the lead in particular areas given this scenario there are definitely cases where those non-government organizations or other government organizations need to take the lead and need to go out without military security accompanying them on the military side we need to be humble enough to say that's absolutely the case tell us what we can do to support you but we're going to back off and let you take the lead in other cases it's more probably more beneficial for the military to be more directly involved but again I just don't think we have the luxury of creating that divide and saying that we're going to work on two separate sides of that equation thanks okay alright in terms of the long term jobs you have touched on an issue near and dear to you say it's hard in Iraq and we hope that it will be a stronger focus in our program in the coming years I think CSP really did an excellent job of trying to focus on long term jobs we had a political imperative we had the surge going on we had these communities under great stress so there was enormous pressure to generate short term employment again for the reasons that I had mentioned getting cash into the economy keeping young men engaged but there was a very strong component in CSP that looked for that long term that the business business grants I believe the evaluation found that the majority of those businesses were still in existence a year later so I think that is a good example of how this program can be sustainable over time vocational training is always a challenge it's a challenge the world over to make sure that what you're training people in is actually the skill sets needed in the local economy but the CSP program really emphasized some very practical traits plumbing, masonry, electricity IT so and then there was also an apprenticeship program that was intended to help people transition into permanent long term jobs but CSP really isn't the only economic growth program that USAID has we do have some longer term economic growth programs oil is inevitably going to be a source of revenue that's not going to change anytime soon it is not a source for jobs agriculture and agribusiness is an underutilized sector that has great potential to generate many more long term jobs we have a strong agribusiness program that looks at the whole value chain of farm to market what products does Iraq have a comparative advantage in how do you build in value added such as food processing and more income how do you make sure it gets to the market and then it is sold in the market we also have a private sector development program that has established microfinance institutions in all 18 governments for international NGOs work in this program but more importantly 7 Iraqi NGOs are running microfinance institutions in Iraq we have also just recently transitioned into expanding credit for small and medium enterprises using a consortium of Iraqi private banks and we like to build on all of these programs and expand them in the future to get at the issue that you raised in terms of replication we share the evaluation with our Afghanistan colleagues they participated in the discussion actually one of our former staff in this program in Baghdad is now in our aid mission in Afghanistan so we are having a lot of lessons learned exchanged I do think it is relevant in Afghanistan but it must take into account the Afghan context in Iraq this is targeted to urban areas and Afghanistan is really going to need to focus on the rural areas and that is going to require a different approach probably other than small businesses the focus will probably have to be more on microbusinesses or agriculture so there will have to be adjustments to be made it is also an opportunity to think about some of the lessons learned that have come out of it you know IRD did an excellent job in terms of working with local communities in implementing this program is there a way to deepen that in Afghanistan and how do you work out the issues of humanitarian space so I think Afghanistan could be a next step for us in testing these different theories and programs out thank you we have actually overrun but I am going to use my prerogative to go for another six to seven minutes and that will give us just enough time to take two brief questions from the right and from the Director of Iraq programs on the left Hi my name is Damon Taylor I am an affiliate a question that was sparked by Lieutenant Colonel Burnaby when he was talking about some of the frictions one of which was the slow lead time in the unfolding of the development effort a question relates to process planning and process how was the CSP project or program affected by pre-kinetic operation planning it seems to me that AID, DoD, other various agencies are all part of the larger tool belt when we implement various policies so my first question is planning could we have just one please sure just curious about pre-kinetic operation discussion and planning and how it was impacted by or how it impacted the CSP operation thank you Rusty Barber with USIP I was wondering if you could just answer a very basic question it's probably a reflection of my own ignorance but the difference between the CAP program and the CSP program the community action program I remember I was confused about this when I was at the time in Iraq with USIP and if perhaps it's a question for Dr. Hansen since you chose that program over CSP in large part because it gave you some distance from military operation so if these were both it struck me at the time that they were doing very similar activities and if they had similar objectives what were the difference in approaches and has anybody done if they are that similar has anybody done any type of comparison analysis between them very brief responses from Colonel Barnaby Dr. Hansen brief word from you as we began kinetic operations in late 2007-2008 there really was no planning that incorporated CSP because again we didn't really know what CSP was up to we hadn't made all the connections with the key players that all didn't happen until probably six months, four to six months down the road so we launched into kinetic operations with the tools that are immediate disturb type tools that we knew how to use and could implement with our own resources within the brigade combat team much better would have been having all those key players, those key stakeholders together planning that operation with its kinetic and non-kinetic pieces from start to finish. Never got there again over the course of the months we were able to connect the dots with all the key players and achieve a little bit better synchronization unity of effort but we were beyond the kinetic predominantly kinetic pieces of our operation by then. So again looking to Afghanistan I think that's where we can improve the model if we're still conducting those types of operations where all those stakeholders in right up front and develop a plan that's a lot further out than just beyond the end of lethal operations. Thanks. Maybe we could have this bilaterally very briefly please. Since we haven't done the CSP program I don't know in as detailed a way what the goals and objectives of that program are so I'm not really qualified to fully answer the question posed but I do want to say I think it would be extremely interesting and useful for US polishing makers to conduct a sort of more thorough but comparative review of the different monetary authorities used in counterinsurgency and complex development settings because there's been really no work that compares SERP funding, 1207 funding, QSP funding CAT funding those programs compares the goals and the objectives and the outcomes of those various programs I think that that would be a really important step to take because we have a lot of tools in our toolbox and I think the approach in Washington tends to be well we can't get rid of any of our tools because they're all great and necessary but in fact as taxpayers I think you know we have the right to demand that the US government take a careful look and keep only those tools that are helping us to reach our foreign policy goals Thanks Okay You could see the tension in the conversation military says slowly time for CSP but there are others that argue it moved too fast and hence you're missing out on quality and thorough true community development this is the tension we're wrestling with in these kinds of programs and there's no good answer, no right answer but all opinions are welcome to help think this one through and as Arthur has pointed out although CSP was a unique program in a very complex environment it was subject to all the rules and regulations regarding procurement and financial management and oversight that a standard development program in Tanzania has to follow so inevitably that's going to slow us down just because you know you have to honor those rules we want to account for every one of your tax dollars and make sure that you get good value for your money so bureaucracy how do you balance that with that imperative to move quickly in terms of the pre-kinetic operations planning I think Arthur can correct me if I'm wrong but a lot of that was really happening and bagged at I know there was very close coordination between the aid mission where CSP would expand next you say didn't just randomly choose which city to go to the military said look we're doing the search, bagged at and on our highest priorities please deploy there first and that is what IRD did they sent staff out to set up offices and look at programming options I think over time the program overall got better about coordinating more at that local level but you know it gets back to Heather's issue of the humanitarian space and finding that right balance between NGO staff and engagement with the military and I think that's it well I think it just remains for me to thank you all for being part of this discussion and ask you to join me in thanking our excellent panel