 Hi, and welcome to today's international law discussion. I'm Major Chris Kosnitsky, a military professor here at the Stockton Center for International Law at the US Naval War College in Newport, Rhode Island. Today's discussion is on Afghanistan 2021, specifically the international legal implications following the withdrawal of US forces in the fall. And then today we're going to actually, for this panel, drill down into two areas, the first being the rule of law and the second being humanitarian assistance. Of course, we'll touch on a few other areas. This discussion follows a workshop we held here at the US Naval War College. For the workshop, we invited approximately 25 experts from across the field and academia. We had representatives from across the Department of Defense, Department of State, NATO, the UN, the International Committee for the Right Cross, and international law academics from numerous institutions. The workshop was held under the Chatham House non-attribution policy. So today we'll be talking about some of the discussion points, but we're not going to be assigning them to any particular individual. And I should remind everyone today that our participants are speaking in their personal capacity, so anything they say should not be attributed to their organization. Today's moderator is Captain Tom Leary. Captain Leary is the Staff Judge Advocate for US Central Command. He's had a 23-year career as a national security law practitioner serving at the strategic, operational, and tactical level. He has deployed 11 times to Afghanistan, Iraq, and Etsy. Captain Leary, thank you for being here today. The floor is yours. Thanks, Chris. I appreciate that warm welcome. I'm privileged to be joined today on this distinguished panel by two folks who, in military parlance, we might say, have deployed extensively in their own rights, not just distinguished practitioners, but folks who have been there and done that and have important stories to share with us all. And I hope we'll benefit from some of that discussion today. To my immediate left is Professor Eric Jensen, who currently teaches at the Stanford Law School and the Center on Democracy, Development, and Rule of Law for the past 35 years and visiting 40 developing countries. Professor Jensen has developed just a remarkable resume in support of rule of law initiatives worldwide and has a great deal, I think, to contribute to our discussion on Afghanistan, both retrospectively and perhaps also looking forward. To Professor Jensen's left is Ms. Natalie Wiseman, who currently serves at the UN Office for Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, herself a McGill, a product of McGill School of Law in Canada, but also decades of experience both in the field, including with the International Community of the Red Cross and other organizations. And so we'll have kind of a rule of law perspective from Eric and then a humanitarian assistance perspective from Natalie during our discussion today. And if I could, to both of you, just begin with a question sort of setting the conditions for the discussion. How do you assess the current state of play in Afghanistan, as of today, December 8th, first from the rule of law perspective for you, Eric, and then from the humanitarian assistance and affairs perspective for you, Natalie. Eric? Well, there's a rule in the social sciences that you should never make predictions. But I'm a lawyer, so I'm going to make a prediction. The conditions today are, I don't think it can be described in any way, but concerning. It's hard to know what will go on in the future. Most of the judges in Afghanistan actually come out of the Sharia School. So there's a chance that those judges may endure this regime change that we've just experienced. But how Islam is interpreted in the courts is really where the rubber meets the road. And there's a great debate within Islam about how the Quran should be interpreted. So we'll see. It looks like it's going to be interpreted in ways that I would say are un-Islamic and are more a result of customary law than Islamic law. But it's, I think, too early to tell how the courts, how rule of law institutions are going to function. And Natalie, from your perspective? To quote the Director of Operations of the ICRC, the International Committee of the Red Cross only, I think, weeks ago or days ago, he said that Afghanistan is on the precipice of a man-made catastrophe from a humanitarian point of view. After decades of war, two significant periods of drought, COVID-19, of course, and now an economic crisis that we're all reading about in the news, over 22 million people are facing acute levels, crisis or emergency levels of food insecurity. Thousands of health facilities are now unable to procure medicine, supplies, or pay their health staff. 13 million children are either out of school or at risk of dropping out. And in rural areas in particular that have seen that are facing drought, something more than 7 million people whose livelihoods depend on agriculture and livestock are suffering the effects of drought. So the combined effect of decades of conflict and what that has done to the country, plus drought, plus COVID-19, and now an economic crisis, triggered by this change of control is really, if not bringing the country to the precipice of catastrophe, perhaps already there. And picking up on that point then, let me ask, in the context of a discussion on law, international law, what can international law tell us about how to proceed in light of us finding ourselves, or the Afghans finding themselves on that precipice? Absolutely. So it turns out that international law does have quite a bit to say about helping people who are in exactly this kind of situation. And there are around 160 humanitarian organizations ranging from local NGOs, international NGOs, the ICRC, and movement components in the UN working hard to meet those needs. And as I said, humanitarian law, international humanitarian law, which applies in armed conflict and human rights law, both have a lot to say about ensuring that those needs are met. Now, given that even with the withdrawal of the United States from Afghanistan, there are still armed conflicts ongoing in Afghanistan, and it's reasonable to see a link between those conflicts and needs and impediments to humanitarian access. It's reasonable to say that IHL continues to apply to that in the country. And so this is where IHL, first of all, explicitly recognizes in any type of conflict that an impartial humanitarian body can offer its services to any party, state, non-state alike, without judging its status to bring assistance or other forms of humanitarian services to people in need, to those who are not fighting. That requires the consent of the state. And there's interesting debate over what happens when you don't get that consent. That doesn't seem to be the case right now, the issue right now. And then the most interesting and useful rule for humanitarians is the one that requires all parties, once there is that state consent. All parties, state and non-state alike, have to proactively allow and facilitate the passage of humanitarian relief for civilians in need without impediment. And so this is the key rule that humanitarians need and use as they engage with different parties to conflict to ensure that they gain access. There's also another rule that requires that all parties ensure freedom of movement of humanitarians. That being said, humanitarian law strikes a balance between military necessity and humanity. And this is where it also recognizes that a party may well have concerns relating to military necessity, relating to where the goods are going, what's in your consignment. And so IHL actually foresees quite explicitly that a party may impose technical arrangements, limitations to ensure that military operations don't interfere and vice versa, to ensure that the goods are what we claim they are, that they're going to where we say they should go, but again, not to the point of impeding. So, and Eric, I'll turn this question to you. The description that Natalie provides of an international legal regime that would govern the delivery of aid strikes me as something that would require some institutions within Afghanistan to provide sanction for failure to abide by those important provisions, or at least some legal infrastructure to apply. And I wonder if you could comment on your assessment the last 20 years or so of effort that's been put into building some of those institutions that the Taliban or whatever government comes together in the coming weeks or months might utilize of a mind to try to apply that international legal regime in a meaningful way for the people of Afghanistan. It's interesting, Tom, because so much of what Natalie talks about, it's very important international humanitarian law, but the extent to which all of this will work on the ground is highly contingent on a political arrangement. And without the consent of the regime, things become really, really difficult. Now, if the regime consents and is supportive, and it seems to its, if you're looking at perhaps 97% of poverty within the next coming months, if that's the case, the Taliban have an existential question that they need to answer politically. And if they answer it, as one would rationally answer it, that yes, we indeed need this humanitarian assistance in an urgent way for a sustained period of time, I'm confident that the legal institutions that are in place and the sort of clearances and the like that are necessary to actually implement the humanitarian assistance, that the legal institutions will fall in line. But without that political arrangement, I have no confidence that there'll be an even application of international humanitarian law. Fair enough. To that point, I wonder if you could talk a little bit about some of the challenges, some of the important lessons learned over a couple of decades worth of rule of law efforts that the United States and our international partners endeavored in Afghanistan. I think one central lesson that we learned is that you need a capable state. And rule of law is highly contingent upon a capable state. And that is a capable bureaucracy, a capable judiciary, capable police, the whole infrastructure. And without that capacity, it's extremely difficult. And we are put in a position, I think, where resources were available. But those resources were going to weak institutions with weak human resource capacity. And as a result, there was seepage and levels of corruption that we wouldn't like to see. So I think state capacity, having a capable state, is central to rule of law. The way we tried to build state capacity, there were a lot of worthwhile endeavors. And I'm not going to say this is all a failure. Certainly won't do that. But we relied too much on short-term training programs. And when you've got a judiciary that is poorly educated in the first place, that has been existing within an institution that doesn't incentivize performance, trying to change their habits within the context of a short-term training program, I think, is an ineffective intervention. And I think we did far too much of that. And that's one reason why I turned my focus to legal education, to make sure that there was a foundation of critical thinking among legal actors so that short-term training programs could become more effective. I also think that I come from a perspective where there are serious technical issues in development and designing programs. But there are also serious politics that surround these programs. So understanding the deep political economy within Afghanistan, the political actors, the ethnic divisions, divisions along all sorts of lines is essential to being able to craft a program that some of these divisive actors might sign on to. And I also think that donors also have a political economy. And there's a pressure to push funding when maybe funding shouldn't be pushed. And so while there are a number of things that I could talk about, but maybe that's enough for now. Well, I'd ask a very similar question to Natalie. Eric's laid out a number of the challenges that we face from a rule of law institution building perspective in Afghanistan. I wonder, are some of those challenges similar or different to the challenges that humanitarians would face in their important work in Afghanistan previously and or going forward? I mean, I think that what you said about legal education very much applies to how we ensure in the long term that IHL is understood and followed. And so there's a constant effort by a number of organizations to disseminate across academic institutions, of course, forces and groups, and even the public to ensure that it is understood so that when it needs to kick in, the people who matter apply it. But the challenges right now are very practical when it comes to humanitarian operations. They relate to outright interference with humanitarian movements and activities. Levy requests sort of taxation or informal taxation, for example, interference with staff recruitment with the involvement of women in humanitarian operations, also movement restrictions. You could well imagine road blockages, attacks that interrupt humanitarian movements. And so military operations in themselves can impede humanitarian activities. And of course, there's also continued violence and threats against humanitarian personnel and assets. That being said, if we look at the numbers, the figures since mid-August, the numbers are going down. These events are still happening, but they are going down. No doubt as a result of the change of the fact that there is much less fighting. There is still fighting, but perhaps less of it. And there's been a shift in control. And so that's where we have to kind of keep our eye on control. It is often, in other situations, when control shifts and new parties begin to control territory, that those challenges increase first because fighting is likely to increase, but also because that's when parties will get nervous about humanitarian assistance reaching areas where they do not have control and they get nervous about where that is going to go and how it's going to solidify even sort of mindsets and fuel the war. So this is where international humanitarian law often needs to kick in to support and underpin engagement with the parties to ensure that that passage can happen. But as I said, right now, the access difficulties from a pragmatic point of view are those that I described, and the figures are actually going down. So in the military domain, and the political military domain and diplomatic as well, we often find ourselves talking about Afghanistan from the standpoint of leverage. What leverage do we have over the Taliban? And right now, I think a lot of the dialogue is about their desire for legitimacy and their desire to sustain their population so that they don't lose it. Are there any other important levers that the humanitarian efforts on the ground would benefit from accessing? How does the humanitarian tend to think about leverage in that context? So we tend to depoliticize our activities knowing that there are, in an armed conflict, multiple sides and that if we are even perceived to be somehow aligned or favoring one side, that will block access by the other side, right? And jeopardize community acceptance of humanitarians who are there to bring help. So we try to depoliticize it. So leverage, say political leverage, is something we try and actually steer away from. But often get caught in because states are the ones also very much involved in the bigger picture and also trying to help us. They often are the ones financially supporting humanitarian operations. So it's a tricky balance. I think that the leverage is, ideally, the law to the extent that parties respond to it. A lot of public advocacy, private dialogue. And then there are, of course, the contrary of leverage. There are some other political impediments. And I don't know if I should get into those now or later. But there are some political impediments to humanitarian activities that we're trying hard to alleviate as well. I could. So this is what brings me to sanctions. And this is a big point of political leverage that states are using and often use in other contexts against the Taliban. But as they intersect with humanitarian operations, they do impede them. And so if you recall, pre-August of this year, humanitarian operations entailed a lot of payments, taxes, fees, permits, airport fees, electrical and utility bills, also direct payments to certain ministries, like the ministries of Ministry for Refugees or Foreign Affairs or Interior running prisons, to carry out necessary humanitarian operations. For humanitarian operations to continue, those payments need to continue. The difficulty now is that those ministries, those utility companies, airport, are all run by members of the Taliban who are on sanctions lists. And those sanctions, both at the US level and at the UN, prohibit payments to persons and groups who are listed. And so this is where humanitarians are stuck, because they've been making these payments for decades to ensure that these humanitarian operations can be carried out and now are realizing that those same payments cannot go to these persons because they're listed. And so this is where humanitarians have been advocating long before this situation, because it's a common situation across other conflicts where there are sanctions in place. But in particular here, since August 15th, humanitarians have been quite vocal and loudly so about the need to carve out exceptions for payments necessary for humanitarian operations, which would entail accepting that those payments may still be made to persons who are listed or entities that are listed under sanctions, but strictly for humanitarian operations and to meet basic human needs. The US has actually already issued certain authorizations for that purpose. It issued them in September, so not too long after the shift in control. And we're trying hard to advocate for the same thing at the UN level, because of course, UN sanctions apply across the planet. And so this is, as we speak, something that's being negotiated at the Security Council and I think would allow a lot of banks that process payments for humanitarians, donors that give money to humanitarians, and of course, humanitarian organizations. A lot of would alleviate a lot of the impediment and a lot of the worry about breaching sanctions. So fingers crossed. Please react. The UN rightly has to do its work in core functions without regard or favor to any political group. But it does strike me that you're right in the middle of a central political issue that needs resolving. So it's interesting the non-political compared to the deeply political issues that you're having to deal with. Yes, and it makes humanitarians nervous to even have to ask political entities for permission effectively authorization to carry out their activities, because they want to depoliticize it. So ideally, we would say when you are applying sanctions, don't even consider applying them where humanitarian transactions are required. But it doesn't happen that way. We need something more explicit and that is something we need to ask for. And to illustrate that tension right now at the Security Council, while a carve out is being envisaged, nothing is sure yet, the flip side of that is very probably going to be a very heavy reporting requirement by the 160 organizations to show how it's going and where those payments are going and show that it's an acceptable balance. These are my words, but that there's an acceptable balance. And the flip side of even being willing to consider a carve out is that it will be very likely, if it passes, for a rather short duration, because states want to see how it's going to go, because they are that nervous about payments going to listed entities. So it really is a tug of war in that sense. And the people caught in the middle, as well as the humanitarians. Eric, if I could turn the leverage, the incentive question to you from the rule of law perspective, where it seems to me that there would be a similar question associated with encouraging or incentivizing a population, a government to engage in institution building and rule of law building. And I would ask you to look at that both retrospectively, as well as prospectively. And again, I know we hate to try to predict the future, but whether there are sufficient kind of shoots of encouragement bursting from the ground that could potentially continue to grow from a rule of law perspective. I'll do the retrospective and then the prospective. The retrospective, I know that there is a great deal of disappointment about how it all ended in Afghanistan. And I've asked myself, and I'm sure that many others who have worked in Afghanistan, Americans over the last 20 years and international actors have asked themselves, was it worth it? And the things that I was involved in in building human resource capacity through legal education for a younger generation that's trying to imagine a different future for its country was really gratifying. We had an opening. We had space. We seized that space. We hope that these young leaders will, at some stage, play a very helpful role in the development of the country. A number of students from American University of Afghanistan are now out of the country. Some are still in. But those out of the country, 90% of those out of the country want to return to the country if the political situation is welcoming. So I think that's some hope retrospectively. We made a lot of mistakes, and maybe we'll talk about some of them later more mistakes. But retrospectively, trying to, you talk about sprouts that we've left and what might grow, the next generation gives me some hope and their performance in international moot courts and superb performance. And especially among women. Women are top notchers in the law faculty at American University of Afghanistan. And when the best oralist prizes, the best brief prizes, there's a lot of human potential in my worry. Even as I say that is, if you shackle half the population that is women in the country, I'm not very confident about its future development. Women have just far too much to offer. And then I look prospectively, again focused on women, not in an international law sense, but the Taliban are looking for international recognition. And I've advocated that that international recognition should be conditioned upon certain treatment of women that begins to meet some international standards of treatment of women. I know that that's difficult. I think that the great Beards and Doha who have negotiated the agreement with the previous administration say all the right things. But I also know that the commanders in the field in Afghanistan have different views on that issue. So I think that's a story yet to be told. But I really hope that the US on leveraging, getting back to your question, Tom, exercises its leverage to the fullest to try to make conditions as good as possible for that population. And of course, that was a great accomplishment over the last 20 years is when we came in in 2002 after the Taliban fell, there was very little education of girls going on. Last year, 40% of girls were enrolled in school. That's not a complete success, but it's really on its way to a success. So I really hope that the Taliban come around on education of women. I think it's critical for the future. And that includes rule of law institutions. There's a general human resource capacity deficit across institutions, including legal institutions. But denying half of the population that participation is just really shooting the regime in the foot, if you will. Fair enough. And you spoke of failures. I mean, why don't we talk about that a little bit now? Where are some of the failures that, or the military, we might not say failures so quickly. Areas where we can learn lessons, some of the things that we got right, some of the things that we got wrong in our effort to build rule of law institutions in Afghanistan. And in particular, I wonder if you could comment on the military's role in that. And your overall assessment of whether we were helpful, somewhat helpful, not helpful at all. Did we contribute to success, or were we equal parts contributing to success and failure as a uniform force on the ground? Yeah, I mean, you know much better than I that there were mixed signals and mixed military priorities over the 20 years. And that included military efforts to do development work. And I'm actually not convinced that the military doesn't have a role in development. I know it's a little bit outside the military's wheelhouse. But the PRTs were doing some interesting work trying to connect with communities. And they had sufficient security in ways that civilian groups did not have in certain parts of the country to carry out those development activities. So I'm not going to sit in judgment yet. I think that it's very healthy for- On behalf of DOD, I thank you for that. I think it's very healthy. We all have to, I think, critically retrospect on what we've done and what worked and what didn't. On the civilian side, I think there's a natural tendency to focus on resource-intensive activities, building courthouses, computerization, training. And I'm reminded of a story of a friend of mine, former ambassador to Afghanistan, who was out for a ribbon-cutting ceremony at a courthouse in a relatively rural area. And a missile flew over his head as the ribbon-cutting was going on. I'd suggest that building courthouses everywhere in the country is not a healthy intervention. I call it the field of dreams approach to rule of law, build a courthouse and people will come. And I think we didn't take adequate account of informal institutions, the jerga and the like, and what they do well and what they don't do well. And I think that deserves some critical examination, too. We went in and created a lot of formal institutions that cost a lot of money. And we knew that we weren't going to be there forever. And that's including legal institutions without looking at what jergas, what informal institutions might do well. We know that these jergas tend not to handle issues well where there is power asymmetry, where you've got a powerful person in the community and a weak person in the community economically. And we know that they don't work well on gender issues. So try to carve that out and try to think of another institutional arrangement so that you can mitigate the weaknesses of the informal institutions. But don't create formal institutions to just supplant the informality that is deeply embedded and deeply wired in Afghan society. That strikes me that your comment echoes something that General Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, testified to with respect to a lot of the work that the department did in terms of building the Afghan military. And he openly questioned whether we tried to build it too much in our own image rather than looking at what worked in Afghanistan as an organic structure and kind of building out from there. So that's an interesting observation and one that echoes, I think, or will echo for DOD. And I think that cuts across civil and military institutions that we tried to create. We need to do a better job next time. I would suggest, and I know that I'm an academic and I'm accused of creating research projects out of life. But baseline research is really important to figure out in the legal domain, where are people going, what informal institutions exist, where are people going to resolve their disputes, and what's their level of satisfaction with the dispute forum that they access? That's just basic baseline research that I think in many areas we failed to do. And I wonder, Natalie, from the humanitarian perspective, this discussion, this colloquy here, reminds me of an observation that I've heard with respect to sort of the nature of Afghanistan as a country in the sense that you've got the urban, Kabul, Kandahar, some of the other larger urban centers, which are very different culturally, and I would imagine rule of law-wise as well, than the hinterlands, than the rural areas that are much more isolated. I wonder from the humanitarian perspective, is that what you're seeing now, is that the needs are very different in the rural areas than they are in the urban areas, and are the challenges similar or different, depending on where the need is located? Excellent question, and I don't necessarily have a full answer, because I haven't looked into that level of detail. What I can say is that the novelty right now that has not been seen in the past is that acute levels of food insecurity are now being seen in Kabul, whereas it was typically not seen there, but in more rural areas. So it really is more than half of the country's population that are now facing acute levels of hunger in cities and in rural areas. Of course, areas that rely on agriculture and livestock where drought has a significant effect, those areas are significantly affected, but I was looking at a map yesterday of where humanitarian activities are being carried out across the country, and with different shades of blue, you can see where there is more intense activity or less. Now, I'm not familiar enough to know what was rural and what was not, but I can say that there were only maybe three or four white areas which suggested that there was no such activity for whatever reason, the rest was covered. So it really is a level of need that is across the country in terms of food needs, but also medicine, habitat, water and sanitation, education. It really is across the country. Eric, for you, let me just ask, some commentators have argued that state building is just not possible, be it by a military or by a combined effort, military and civilian. I'd ask you to respond to that comment. Yeah, I know that that's a popular debate in Washington these days, that we can't do state building. And at the outset, I want to distinguish between state building and nation building because those two terms are frequently conflated. State building is the creation of new institutions or the reformation of existing institutions to try to make a state work. Nation building is about developing a shared vision of the country, common values, historical memory and the like. That's quite different, and that's hard to do with international interventions. I'm not going to be so pretentious as to say we can create that common vision for any given country. But I think we can, if we do it right, contribute positively to the creation of new institutions or the reform of existing institutions if we do our homework. And I think in many ways, we didn't do our homework and we created a wide scope of state functions that are now reliant on a lot of funding to support public institutions. And I don't know where that money's going to come from in the future. Okay, thanks. I think maybe the last kind of round of questions here. Natalie, let me ask you, we have two somewhat disparate disciplines represented here on the panel, rule of law and humanitarian assistance. But I think they are not unrelated. And what I'd ask is, and you can answer this retrospectively or prospectively. If you had Eric Jensen sitting on the panel with you 20 years ago, 10 years ago, five years ago and were thinking about an Afghanistan humanitarian assistance requirement, what sorts of rule of law efforts or institutions would you be looking for to make sure that the humanitarian assistance might be delivered or deliverable in a meaningful way? And then I'll flip that question around to give you a second to think because I realize I'm just pulling it out of thin air. But I'll flip it around and Eric, I'd offer, thinking about humanitarian assistance and it as a potential ongoing requirement in a place like Afghanistan where there is certainly need. What sorts of rule of law initiatives might we have focused differently on or better on perhaps to ensure that need is made available? Natalie, thoughts on that? And you can also fight the premise of my question that they're- No, I think the premise is absolutely correct. And I think that in parallel to these very practical and urgent activities, a lot needs to be done and is done across all situations of conflict or even pre-conflict or post-conflict to ensure that the system incorporates international humanitarian law, also human rights law of course, but incorporates it. I mean states, all states are party to the four Geneva conventions and many are also party to the protocols. That means that it needs to be incorporated into legislation, into manuals, into education at all levels, even starting quite young. And then of course requires educating even those maybe not in the military but with say security functions, but also judges because what IHL also requires is of course the investigation and prosecution of war crimes. So we've been talking about narrow humanitarian activities but respect for IHL more generally can actually sort of preempt a lot of the need that we are answering. If fewer medical facilities had been harmed, we might not be facing such an extreme situation in or disruption of health care. If I mean I don't want to be accusing but you can imagine that respect for IHL in protecting food sources, livestock, fields, medical facilities, schools, all that if protected in line with IHL prevents a lot of the need that you see otherwise. And that's where I think building it into institutions, into education, into legislation, into training plays an enormous role. It's actually not an easy question to answer but I'll give her a shot. There are basic functions of state, right? Monopolizing violence is sort of at the core of it to have the security and that was the overall greatest challenge to doing good development work in Afghanistan. Raising revenue, some progress is made on that for a period of time. And then delivering public goods, just really stripping down the state to its functions. And on the delivery of public goods, and this is where humanitarian assistance comes into play, we did make some progress and let's not beat ourselves up excessively. Child and maternal mortality was halved during this period and life expectancy was increased by nine years. So there was some progress on health and on education. It's just these things take more time. And I think I mentioned yesterday that the World Bank has done a great empirical study of a few years ago where they concluded that conflict affected areas probably take about 30 years to normalize. That's looking at the history of conflict. And so I think we perhaps more than anything, if we're going to get into this, we've got to be prepared politically for a longer game and American politics isn't optimally set up for that longer game. But we shouldn't be surprised that a longer game is necessary to embed habits and the like. And then looking more specifically at the role of lawyers in development. I mean, all of these public agencies had legal officers. Some of them performed okay, but I think focusing on the nexus between legal officers and bureaucratic function is something that is needed to consciously pursue development objectives, understanding that lawyers are a necessary part of that process. Great point, great point and a plug for the community. Well, we're coming towards the end of our time together. So I'll offer the floor to you, Eric, for any final thoughts that you might have and then pass it to Natalie. Okay. I think what we've all been wondering about was was it worth it? And I think some activities were worth it. I hope that we learn lessons. And in my writing about this, I say lessons we may learn. I don't assume that the lessons are learned, but there were, for example, in 2011 or so, 2012, there was an idea about engaging informal institutions. But the design of it was rather incredible. It was informal institutions could function if they had state oversight. Well, local leaders are not going to like that sort of institutional arrangement. So my takeaway is that development and the military activity and the like really requires an interdisciplinary approach to be able to figure out what matters most and pursue objectives that we can actually achieve with more modest expectations than we ever had. It's been said that we didn't fight a 20-year war, we fought 21-year wars. The turnover and personnel, I can't have that. You've got to have an accretion of knowledge and you've got to have a lot of local knowledge to do, I think, good military work and good development work in countries like Afghanistan. Thank you. Natalie, final thoughts. For decades, humanitarian activities have been carried out in Afghanistan to meet very high needs. And the political shift that we've just seen should not really make a difference, practically speaking, even sort of as politics influence humanitarian activities should not make a difference going forward. As I said, it's very important to remove politics from everything humanitarian. And so there's a lot of talk about this shift and what it means. And I would like to argue that for humanitarian activities really it should not make a difference. I mean, we've seen needs actually rise in particular because of the economic crisis caused by this. But I guess, yeah, the main point is everything needs to be done to remove politics and remove the political leverage being exercised against the Taliban from humanitarian activities. And that's what IHL aims to do. It's also what you derive from human rights law when it comes to meeting basic needs. So I think it's important to look at humanitarian activities through that apolitical prism. Well, thank you. Eric Jensen from Stanford. Natalie Wiseman from the United Nations. Thank you very much for this candid discussion. And thanks to the Naval War College for hosting this discussion. And back to you, Chris. Thank you, sir. Well, on behalf of the Naval War College and the Stockings Center for International Law, I want to thank our panelists. There aren't many institutions where we can get together a Staffordage Advocate for a Combatant Command, a professor from Stanford, and a member of the United Nations. But I'm thankful that you took us up on the offer to have this very interesting discussion. We see here the discussion on the role of attorneys and on how international law is something that when it's applied, the facts on the ground really matter. And I think that came out today. If you'd like to learn more about what happened in the workshop, please tune in for our other panel featuring Colonel Chris Ford from First Special Forces Command. He has a conversation with Professor Lori Blank from Emory University. In that discussion, they talk about classification of conflict, rules of engagement, detainees, and non-combatant evacuation operations. That's it from the Naval War College. Thanks for watching.