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This is your boy Rich here on behalf of RichTVLive and I have some breaking news hot off the presses 59 minutes ago Namaste announces Q4 2018 quarterly financials Let's go Namaste is pleased to announce the filing of its unaudited quarterly financial statements management's discussion and analysis and certification of the quarterly filings for the fourth quarter of the fiscal 2018 The statements for the period can be accessed on the company Cedar profile on Cedar.com Namaste's net revenue for the three months ended August 31st 2018 was 3.9 million which is comparable to 3.9 million within the same same period in 2017 however on a year-over-year basis Namaste's net revenue for the 12 months ended August 31st 2018 was 18.6 million an increase of 7.6 million or 69% compared to the 12 months ended August 31st 2017 Wow The increase in net revenue during the 12 months ended August 31st 2018 was primarily due to organic growth within the key markets such as the United Kingdom Canada Brazil Germany and full 12 months of revenue from Australian vaporizers, which was acquired in March of 2017 here are the key financial highlights Q4 2018 revenue was consistent to Q4 2017 and 2018 despite divestiture of the US revenue without the impact of inventory provisions taken in Q4 2017 gross profit for Q4 2018 was an improvement of 631,000 comparing Q4 2018 against Q4 2017 this resulted from better cost controls during the quarter Australia Q4 2018 revenue increased by approximately 3% compared to Q4 2017 without the impact of foreign exchange revenue from Brazil increased by 151% Wow compared to Q4 2018 against Q4 2017 revenue from Canada increased by 196% compared to Q4 2018 against Q4 2017 the majority of the revenue was generated by several key markets for the three and twelve months ended August 31st 2018 the top five revenue earning countries generating 85 percent and 84 percent of revenue respectively for the 12 months ended August 31st 2017 the top five revenue earning countries generate 86 percent and 84 percent of revenue respectively for the 12 months ended August 31st 2018 Namaste showed an impressive growth of 364 percent in the Canadian market 261 percent in Germany 188% in Brazil and 98% in Australia 45% in the United Kingdom these changes are consistent with the masses long-term business strategy to expand in European and emerging markets with an increased focus in the Canadian Market look at this 1.1 million in Australia 1 million in the United Kingdom 562,000 Canada and you can see all the markets here listed This is unbelievable with the launch of Canmark the company anticipates increasing revenue through cannabis sales and in developing further Supply agreements with domestic license producers to expand its product offering the company will look to implement similar platforms in other markets Where the company maintains a strong presence on September 13th 2018 the company signed a binding Termsheet to acquire UK based licensing pharmaceutical Distribution company AF trading limited access fulfillment operates a 30,000 square foot distribution facility in the UK and holds a wholesale distribution authorization human license issued by the medicines and health care products regulatory agency MHRA which allows access fulfillment to distribute pharmaceutical products throughout the UK the company is working to close on The acquisition and is focused on launching medical cannabis sales through its platform in the UK Which represents a much larger customer base than that of its Canadian operations? What does Sean Dahlinger have to say about this news? Presidency of namaste comments We are pleased to have filed Q4 2018 financials with the completion of our bot deal financing 51 million and our current cash position the company is well positioned for future growth We are now focused on increasing revenue through Canmark and in launching medical cannabis sales in to the UK market How do you love them apples? Well, guess what Sean your boy rich is also taking his CBD company to the UK So we got to do some business. This is huge news breaking news. What do you think about this news comment down below? Smash that like button hit the subscribe button hit the bell for notifications So every time we have any news that's breaking 24 hours a day seven days a week. You can get it first Of course, you get all the winners from your boy first We bring all the winners first if you're not winning you're definitely not watching now Remember rich TV live is strictly for education entertainment purposes do your due diligence do your research before you invest in anything that we talk about here on rich TV live Thank you guys for watching. I love you guys. We just broke 17,000 subscribers. Let's hit 18,000 I love you guys. I love and I love namaste. Did I tell you guys that I love namaste? I Love all you haters How about you chew on this big money? 18.6 million for namaste a company up 700% in the last year and still there's people trying to come after this company. What are you coming after? You come in after a winner instead of shorting the stock and hating on them and litigating How about you buy the stock?  Thank you for watching. I'm a piece


Good morning. Thank you all for coming. My name is Bob Pareto. I'm the Director of the Center for Security Sector Governance here at USIP. This is a meeting that begins with some advanced nostalgia. This will be the last meeting of the SSR Working Group to be held in this building. The next time we have an event we'll be in our new headquarters over on 23rd and Constitution. Photographs of the new building are on the walls around here so you can see that we're actually moving up in the world. So it's a very exciting time ahead of us. This is the second time that the SSR Working Group has looked at the nexus between disarmament demobilization and rehabilitation, DDR and SSR Security Sector Reform. The first time we did this was almost a year ago in March. We co-sponsored a conference at the National Defense University with the Center for Complex Operations and we looked at this issue from a number of perspectives. The basic paper for that conference was written by Sean McFate, who some of you know, it's called the link between DDR and SSR in conflict affected countries. The paper is on the table outside and I recommend that you take a copy with you when you leave. The findings from this conference challenged what is the conventional wisdom on this topic, which is that DDR and SSR are not related, that they're done by separate folks on separate occasions and that they're linear.  The findings from that conference indicated that perhaps the conventional wisdom wasn't correct and so we decided to do a series of follow-on studies looking at specific cases and this is the first case that's been done and it will eventually within the next 60 days or something result in a new paper. The focus of this case study is on the experiences in Afghanistan with DDR and SSR in the period from 2002 to 2005. The paper that will emerge from this effort is being prepared by Professor Carolyn Hartzell, who is a USIP Jennings Randolph Senior Fellow this year and this meeting, the commentaries of the panel, the comments and questions from the audience will form and inform her research. In Afghanistan, if you recall, back in 2002, under the what was called the lead nation approach, responsibilities for DDR and SSR were divided up among a group of countries. Japan and the United Nations got DDR. The United States was tasked with rebuilding the new Afghan National Army and Germany was tasked with building the new Afghan National Police. In 2005, I was in Kabul and just by happenstance, I was in the UN headquarters when a press conference was held celebrating the successful completion of the DDR program. And as I sat there a little bit mystified as to how I got in the room at this time, but they were offering free food and drinks and so I thought this was a great opportunity. And listening to the congratulatory speeches, I thought it seemed somewhat out of sync with what I knew was going on in the rest of the country. And a few days later, when I was down in Jalalabad, sitting in the backseat of an armored Humvee and body armor looking up through the hole in the roof at the gunner who was manning a heavy machine gun, I thought, wait a minute, the, you know, the war didn't end, something's out of sync here. So perhaps in keeping with that thought that something was out of sync, I encourage Professor Hartzell to title her paper something like DDR in Afghanistan, did we disarm our friends? So anyway, we'll see. To discuss this and other related questions, we have put together an extremely distinguished group of experts this morning. And perhaps it's only fitting that in this sort of final event in this building, the panel has kind of a feeling of a family affair. Our first speaker this morning will be Professor Hartzell, who's with us this year, as a Jennings Randolph fellow and taking a year off from her day job where she's a professor of political science at Gettysburg College. Our second speaker will be Shama Mood-McHale, who is the director of the USIP office in Kabul. He is also a former deputy minister of the interior and during this period 2002, 2003, 2004, 2005. And Shama Mood doesn't remember me, but I was going through my card collection the other day and I came up with his card and I was one of the thousands of foreign visitors that filed through his office during the period when he was the deputy. But Shama Mood just got off a plane yesterday. He's actually participating in two conferences this morning, so we have him for a while, but if he gets up and leaves, it's because his schedule, which I've seen looks like a dentist's office schedule.  Our third speaker is Tom Donnelly, who is the director of the Center of Defensive Studies or Defense Studies. I'm sorry at the American Enterprise Institute. Tom is really a neighbor. He lives across the street or works across the street and he's invited me across for coffee on a number of occasions and this may be the first time I've ever reciprocated and invited you over. So I've been looking for an opportunity to do this and it's finally come. And finally, Mark Sedra, a senior fellow at the Center for International Governance Innovation and the Senior Research Scholar at the University of Waterloo in Canada. I've been up to visit Mark. He's been down to visit us. He's spoken here on numerous occasions. We always use him in the same way. He's always the guy that speaks last and criticizes everyone. But it's a gathering of old friends up here and I want to welcome you. And when we finish with the presentations by the panel, then we'll open the floor. I want to say one more thing about Mark and that Mark has just produced the most amazing new book, The Future of Security Sector Reform. It's available online. And so tomorrow, put in a plug for Mark, Mark is speaking and introducing his book at a rival think tank in town, which will not be named a course. But if you're in front of the Center for Strategic and International Studies, tomorrow morning at TED, go in and listen to a presentation on the book. Anyway, thank you very much. And we'll begin. Okay, thanks to Bob and the working group for inviting me to participate in this and to all of you for braving traffic and weather and whatnot to be here today. Let me just give you start by giving you a really brief outline of the remarks I'm going to make just by way of kind of a guideline here. I'm going to start very, very briefly by just outlining the objectives of the DDR program in Afghanistan. Speak also quite briefly about the challenges inherent in carrying out DDR in this particular environment and security sector reform. I'll also speak and limit my remarks again on about the process how DDR played out in Afghanistan. Talk a bit about the outcomes and then and briefly with what happened? How do how do we account for the types of outcomes we saw there? So let me start first just by saying word about the objectives of DDR in Afghanistan, right? DDR, which was a core part of Afghanistan's new beginnings program, which was a United Nations Development Program responsible for security sector reform, had three objectives in terms of how what it was supposed to achieve in Afghanistan. First was to break and I quote here the historic patriarchal chain of command and quote between former commanders and their troops in the country. Second to assist former armed members of the Afghan military forces, AMF, and I'll say a little bit more about that in a minute, to make the transition from military into civilian life. And again, here in particular, the goal was to equip them to find alternative sources of gainful employment other than at the point of a gun. And three, to collect, store and deactivate weapons in the possession of the AMF. More generally, achieving these three goals of DDR was an integral process, part of the process of enabling the Afghan government to establish a monopoly on the use of force, which is a critical step in terms of efforts to help protect citizens from threats and uphold the rule of law. A successful DDR program had the potential to contribute to this outcome in a variety of ways. One was obviously by breaking the linkages between commanders and militiamen. This could help to weaken the power of groups competing with the government for control of the state. Second, it could help to limit armed challenges to the state by providing non-state armed actors with incentives to enter civilian life. And finally, DDR could contribute to the reconstitution of statutory forces responsible for providing security as formally trained ex-combatants sought reintegration in the new security sector. And I'll also talk briefly about that and the extent to which that didn't did not happen in a little bit. All right, with those as the goals, and they're pretty clearly delineated goals, let me talk a little bit first about the very real challenges of carrying all of this out, trying to achieve these goals in an environment like Afghanistan. And there are many challenges we could talk about with respect to this. I'm going to limit my kind of summary of these to three main points. One is first that DDR is customarily undertaken in post-conflict environments. All right, so you end a civil war, now more generally you end a civil war. There's a DDR program. But the idea is the conflict has ended. And now you carry out DDR. I think we can probably all agree that the term post-conflict really didn't characterize Afghanistan at the time this program was undertaken. You had, obviously, especially in the southern part of the country, efforts still to ferret out and combat the Taliban. So again, I would just emphasize the difficulty of carrying out a program like this and something that is not strictly speaking a post-conflict environment. That would be one main point. The second is just to point out, perhaps the obvious, which is that 30 years of near continuous armed conflict with all that implies for the destruction of national institutions and increased reliance by communal groups on local authority structures for providing security and resources are also going to make this an exceedingly challenging task to carry out DDR. People now had not for years looked to the state to provide security. They had looked to these on militias. All right, not even just security, but also related to livelihood, welfare, etc. related to this 30 years of warfare to you also have issues of what is the capacity anymore to carry out a number of functions, etc. And the third point that I would emphasize is and I should say that this is particularly kind of my into this topic has to do with the nature of the key agreement that initially set out the new rules of the game for post-Taliban Afghanistan. Usually, again, when we're talking about these kinds of context, it's a peace settlement of some sort, right? So you bring the contending groups to the table, and you iron out a peace settlement. And part of that deals with DDR. But interestingly enough, the key document one wasn't strictly speaking a peace settlement. And I'm talking about the bond agreement, right? Because you bring selected actors to the table. Taliban are excluded, for example. You bring them to the table. It's not strictly speaking a peace settlement. And it didn't even mention DDR. All right, so the bond agreement, which again sets out these new rules of the game for post-Taliban Afghanistan doesn't even mention DDR. This to me as someone who studies peace settlements, and particularly my focus is on power sharing agreements as part of peace settlements, is utterly astounding in the sense that with the bond agreement, you did see other efforts made to balance power among groups through political power sharing in particular. And accounts of bond talk about all the wrangling and backroom dealing on, you know, let's even create new ministries, for example, so that we can give some of them to some of the other groups so that we can say we've kind of more equitably split up the number of political ministries, etc. So you see all that going on at bond, but you don't see the issue of DDR touched at all. The bond agreement seemingly willfully ignored or the fact that efforts to disarm and dismantle armed groups and to reconstitute the state security forces alter the balance of power among groups and states emerging from conflict. As such, the issue of DDR should have been on the table to begin with and should have been addressed along with other measures for the sharing of power, but it was not. So that's again some some sense of sort of the the context and then that we were looking at here in terms of carrying out DDR in Afghanistan and the challenges that context presents. A little bit then let me just say one other thing. So here I've laid on all these challenges and talked about the complexity of carrying out DDR in this environment. I do say at note at the beginning of the paper, though, that despite all these many challenges, there was seemingly a window for opportunity for following through on the goals of DDR for a couple of years after the signing of the bond agreement. Okay, among other things during this time, the security situation throughout much of the country was relatively calm, not totally calm. It's not again this post pure post conflict environment, but it's relatively calm. The population was still generally supportive of efforts to establish peace and the politicization politicization of the security sector that began to develop in the wake of the bond agreement was not yet entrenched. So you did maybe have a window of opportunity of a couple of years here to actually try to follow through on the goals laid out of DDR. Right. I'll talk about then what happened in a little bit process. I'm not going to spend too much time talking about the process here. What I would note is that the DDR program and security sector reform process developed in a series of fits and starts over a period of more than five years starting with the bond agreement. I'm really not going to spend too much time on this. Mark has written extensively on this. So the framework being, you know, from not addressing it initially at bond, then SSR starts to get some attention at the Geneva meeting of the G8 security donors meeting in the spring of 2002. There's more attention than in December of 2002 at a conference of foreign ministers. And there you get the Petersburg decree, which says, okay, we're going to establish an ethnically balanced Afghan National Army, and we're going to have a DDR program. And then so there's a series of steps that follow from there. And what I know is then an agreement to establish the AMPB was signed on in April 2003. And essentially what I know is that it took two years to get a framework for DDR in place. And so nearly two years after the collapse of the Taliban regime, you finally had a framework in place then for carrying out DDR. Okay. The DDR program in Afghanistan was voluntary in nature. It involved unilateral disarmament demobilization and reintegration of the professional and jihadi personnel that made up the AMF. Just a quick word on that. AMF was, for lack of a better word, the title given to the militias that had collaborated with the coalition forces in the fight against the Taliban and al-Qaeda. They became the formal military structure that would be subject to DDR. There were many, many other armed groups that were excluded from the AMF. These would later be declared illegal and later became subject to the DIAG process, the disbandment of illegal armed groups, which did not itself kick in until the latter half of 2005. So DDR was focused just then on these groups that were given the super-K of the AMF. It was initially established, AMPB, as a three-year program. The disarmament and demobilization process lasted from October 2003 to November 2005 when AMF forces were deemed to have been completely disbanded. Apparently this was a celebration you witnessed. The AMPB concluded the reintegration component on July 1st, 2006, and as it was proudly proclaimed, in time and within costs. That was sort of the big achievement that was signed off on with respect to that. In the paper, I talk at some length about what actually happened then with disarmament, with demobilization, and with reintegration. I'm not going to spend much time on that. Let me just single out a couple of points here. One was, it was kind of remarkable given the fact that one of the central objectives of DDR was to sever this historic patriarchal chain of command between commanders and their troops. That no effort was made to engage commanders in the DDR process initially. It wasn't until the end of 2004 that the senior commander's incentive program was initiated. The way it was initiated, the amount of resources dedicated to it. Essentially the response of a lot of the senior commanders was, you know, I make more money engaging in other types of activities. It really wasn't that attractive of a program and it was initiated quite late. A couple words about military, the military reintegration aspect. Afghanistan's DDR plan explicitly linked decommissioning of AMF units to the establishment of the new Afghan National Army. One of the reintegration options available to former members of the AMF was to enter into the ANA. Relatively few combatants actually took advantage of that option, however. So this is one of these links you typically see between SSR and DDR, but relatively few of them took advantage of the option. One reason was that U.S. plans for creation of the new national army allowed for only 10 to 20 percent of all recruits to come from the ranks of the DDR militias and this was because they didn't just want to relabel the AMF as the ANA. There were also issues with literacy levels, skills levels, all kinds of things as well. Stringent age requirements, you had to be 18 to 28 for recruits, also ruled out reintegration into ANA as an option for many individuals and finally war weariness actually discouraged a number of former combatants from seeking employment with the ANA. A number of them simply voluntarily disbanded. Problems surrounding military reintegration were more pronounced at the level of officers and employment in the ANA was the first choice for almost all professional officers. Very few of them were able to follow up on that option though. There were very very few slots. Only 898 officers were reintegrated into the ANA out of 7,530 who sought reintegration into the ANA and there were a lot of problems here as well around what to do with these officers, the packages that were offered to them, etc, which I talk about in the paper. Let me talk a little bit now about outcomes and then end with some a little bit of assessment here what happened. In terms of outcomes the asking then how successful was Afghanistan's DDR program in contributing to reform of the country's security sector. Some analysts have assessed it as you know somewhat successful and they tend to focus on outputs then when coming to that conclusion. So they would note for example that the disarmament process netted 106,510 weapons which sounds impressive except if you know something about the number of weapons floating around in Afghanistan. A number of heavy munitions and actually there there was it's concluded that there was pretty good success at getting a number of heavy munitions out of the hands of the militias, getting them to give them up. 63,380 ex combatants completed the disarmament process. 260 AMF units were formally decommissioned. So you could look at numbers like that. What I argue though is a more meaningful way to evaluate DDR would probably be to consider the extent to which it met its three objectives. So if it had those three goals that it laid out at the beginning how successful was it in terms of deactivating AMF weapons assisting AMF members to make the transition into civilian life and breaking the chain of command between militia leaders and their troops. And here I argue the success story doesn't look quite as positive. Okay. Four and one-half years after AMPB concluded the reintegration phase of DDR many of the goals associated with the program have yet to be achieved and some of the gains that were made have been undermined. Widespread rearmament has been taking place across the country. There is some evidence that faction leaders particularly the leaders of northern minorities who fear increased Taliban influence as a result of Karzai initiated reconciliation efforts with the Taliban have been seeking to revive disbanded militias. Interviews with ex-combatants suggest that rather than contracting many commander's power actually expanded in the wake of DDR. Taliban insurgents have been able to regroup and in some instances have seen their numbers grow as unemployed DDR ex-combatants join their ranks. So in terms of outcomes I would emphasize those points and let me just I think in terms of time conclude by looking at the question of what happened how did we end up at that point from the goals of the DDR program. Again I would emphasize that the failure initially to engage with the implications DDR has on actor security and the balance of power among groups in a country where power literally stemmed from control over men with guns was a contributing factor to this. So not grappling with that issue at the outset from the bond agreement for example was a contributing factor. I would argue that the international community had an opportunity to exercise some pressure at the point in Germany the point of negotiating the bond agreement but didn't fully leverage it. And so you saw outcomes such as all of the security related ministries ended up in the hands of the Sharia Nazar militia leaders. Another point I would emphasize is that the initial decision by the U.S. light coalition to operate with a light footprint led to inadequate levels of security being provided within the country. And that situation was exacerbated by the fact that the main organs of the security sector the ANA and the Afghan national police were being created from scratch almost simultaneously with DDR. So you ended up with a security vacuum and one effect of that was to reinforce the reliance by communities on militias who had been providing for their security and their safety in the past and that effectively in some ways you could say re-legitimated the role of commanders who provided that public good although they're you know it legitimated it re-legitimated in the sense of their they claim they were providing for security these commanders of course have a long history of being quite abusive of some of these communities as well. I would say the leaders of the militias who sought to consolidate their power took advantage of the security void that was in part a product of this light footprint and they used that to advance their own parochial interests and as you saw positions like the minister of defense minister of interior and the director the national director of security occupied by the Sharia Nazar militia members the security sector reform process came to be looked at growing mistrust by many afghans as it became increasingly politicized along communal lines. Okay I'll stop there actually. Thank you very much it's a great introduction and Chalmabud for you. Yeah thank you. Okay good morning and thank you both for organizing a very important topic you know on this meeting on a very important topic and also see our old friends Mark and also Tom and it was very good introduction but if we just go back to the history because we have to learn from that what we did good or bad achieve those objectives or not actually when I just see it we had a problem in the design of this program and also we had a problem in the implementations and also lack of political will because that is more important things for any program if you want to implement it if there is no political will we cannot achieve the objectives and that political well was missing is missing and might be missing for a long time you know for example if you just go to DDR what's happened in that time there was a millions of I don't know the exact numbers one million two million or three million collision curves or arms in Afghanistan what they achieved just 60,000 or 50,000 old arms they collected and each arm they collected in that time is cost about whatever 300, 400, 500 dollars but you could buy the new one in the market for 150 dollars so instead of that we go to the program and to the process if you just buying you know this things might be more cheaper easier than to really go through the process and then what has happened later on from central Asia after the Soviets collapse most of those arms were coming to the northern and that were transferring to the south to the Taliban side and from the south drug was going on on the same route to the north and from the north to southern Asia and all the way to the Europe so this become a very you know marriage of convenience for arm dealers and drug dealers you know in the same time it's happened and so instead of that to really strengthen this this armament demobilization and reintegrations instead they'd like professor Harzal just mentioned it is a strengthen the power of these people but inside the system of the government also it has a problem because when I say the lack of political will those 800 people officer who stay in the ANA the Afghan National Army they in charge for senior positions but more of the professional people who just had experience in the military they didn't get those jobs you know so that people become in charge there and the secondly those who were not integrated there like my former boss was saying you know they were just dumped on the minister of interior to just integrate them in the national upon national police so meaning we just brought it from there put them in the training course and just legitimize their powers and send them back to the same community where they come from so this created mistrust between the in the eyes of the people because police has to protect the people but unfortunately police in Afghanistan or because of this kind of a process of DDR even they don't protect the state they protect their own interests so now whatever national security forces we have in Afghanistan by quantity but that quantity is not protecting the states not protecting the people they protect their own interests and that is a big challenge you know because many times we just talk about one hundred seventy thousand one hundred thirty two thousands even one time in the interior ministry was just talking I was talking with the ministers and he was just saying okay if we dismantle all police in the country maybe there will be no differences in the security and people will be more protected more safe in the absence of these police which cannot protect the people you know so that was a reality on the ground there and still we have a problem but just go to the security sector in general it is not question how many people you disarmed how many of one national police you build or how many ANA you built but the question is how you reduce the threat level because if the threat level is not reduced the building of army or police is not that much mechanic differences but even I might be not agree with you because in term of when this DDR process was started in that time in the first three four years I found some was a post-conflict it was safe you can travel any part of the country there was no problem until the first emerging solider guy in 2002 there was no single shot against the ANA and others because even the national police and other was not existing and I was conducting election for emerging solider guy in four eastern provinces in nuristan and kamdish district which is very remote there when we enter to the village and people woman from the top of the roof they throw walnuts you know as gesture of goodwill because they were that much hopeful you know okay now the Taliban is gone because 30 years of war and so many you know things that now people just see some hope but unfortunately that hope is slowly because of the DDR because of the design of so many other programs we have it in the national army national police and others lack of political will but as part of the upon national institution national leaders there and also political leaders and also lack of willing by the international community also to sacrifice the roles of law for short-term stability and this argument was going on for the last 10 years okay if you just touch these things maybe we'll be more instability and that way is maybe not good you know but in fact roles of law is a big issue and as long as if you don't focus on that maybe according to the human rights people you know just maybe whatever crime has happened few years back if you ever forget that if somebody commit crime today and you are soft on that you cannot bring a stability to a country and the most important thing for the DDR was that it was not linked to the security governance and development things in the country because money was spent and who is in charge of the DDR for example the second vice president who was himself was a warlord who was part of this militia so he was the one who were doing the DDR and so that was the reason you cannot bring a stability to the country cannot implement the program in the right way how to design it who's implemented what is the political will these three or maybe more important things maybe we can discuss in the answer question session later on thank you thank you very much Tom okay very interesting well i know why bob invited me in the first place it's because uh i'm the neocon tribe the night from down the street and as such you need somebody to both simplify if not oversimplify and clarify what's obviously a complex picture i was struck in carolins presentation i and i recall because like sort of like everybody in washington i also made the pilgrim edge to cobble and uh in 2005 and 2006 visited the deputy minister who was the exemplar of a good guy in the afghan government at the time but carolins line about the ddr folks being very proud of being uh on time and under budget uh struck a very resonant chord for me because uh not only was it true of that program but i would say it's true even today of the entire american and western approach to the problems of afghanistan are driven by the desire to do it cheaply to do it on schedule and without very much reference to conditions on the ground analogies between afghanistan and vietnam are always kind of sketchy and not probably worth the effort but soldiers used to say that we didn't fight one war in vietnam for 12 years but the same one-year war 12 times over and maybe that's somewhat true about afghanistan and about the ddr program in the larger context and that's way what i want to begin to talk about carolins also quite rightly said that the goal of the program as the entire goal of the time was was to give the central government uh to make the central government uh the dominant to be able to control the means of violence nobody i don't think really expected to take every clashnikov away from every villager or every rpg or even every mortar but it was important to get the heavy weapons out of people's hands and i want to return to that but also this was part of a larger process in other words to weaken if not completely eliminate the forces that had been fighting previously to build afghan structures that could dominate the means of violence and begin to to bring the rule of law throughout the country and to do it through the vehicle of a central government and also to provide sufficient western uh security forces in the interim to enable that process in the forum this is also about the time that isaaf was stood up meaning that it was going to be not just an american led and dominated mission but that the burdens were going to be shared particularly among nato countries and in that context the labor was divvied up through the lead nation system in many ways all of those elements i mean there's a reasonable structure but none of those elements was either adequately resourced adequately structured or as we have seen in the interim period adequately carried through on and in to me they seem like elements of a whole rather than discrete pieces again if you wanted wanted to get from where we were in 2001 to where we hoped to be and where i think we still would like to be today all of those things have to take place not in the absolute sense or in and this is particularly true when it comes to the demobilization and reintegration elements of of ddr those were always going to be the most difficult challenges i hesitate to speak about the you know unchanging nature of afghan society but certainly where it was by the time that the Taliban was overthrown which was as everybody has said at the end of a long and very painful and violent period of war culminating in an even the ugliest period of all the civil war of the 1990s so the likelihood that the various warring parties factions in afghanistan were going to easily demobilize and be reintegrated into a common society was probably well outside the scope of this program as are inherently i think worthwhile still unnecessary goals but something that the ddr program did not have the resources to do and needed to be encompassed that was an important start to try to pick apart the former military structures that previously existed none of which including the romp of the afghan army was an adequate basis for building truly national forces on the other hand i do think that the stripping away of heavy weapons stocks was genuinely a success of the ddr program and something that was critical to do again one only has to look back to the nature of the conflict of the 1990s which is not you know characterized by you know great tank battles or anything like that but those heavy weapons were particularly useful for the siege of Kabul for example for being parked outside the city and shelling sort of indiscriminately cities held by and from time to time places like Kabul were shelled by multiple factions simultaneously so while you know afghan warfare was not necessarily characterized by great mobility or tremendous amounts of firepower it had an incredibly grinding quality and the heavy weaponry was essential for that so getting that out of the system you know is was a very good thing to do even if at the time was probably the case that many of the systems were not in great repair or even non-functional and that's something that will even under the worst case scenarios be of great benefit and provide a cushion even if things go very badly in the future so that is a real but unsung achievement is the one that was easiest to do the one that the ddr program is best structured to do but even allowing for that i think it's something that we should be very grateful for that said the the original goal of all the programs uh and and you know we'll see what general patrice and folks have to say when they testify before the congress in the coming months obviously remains very elusive and i would say even at this point we're sort of unsure of our commitment to the centralizing principle even when it comes to the question of who controls the means of violence you know if you if you're looking for local solutions in the provinces and still trying to build particularly the anna to begin with the anna but also carry it through to other elements of the security sector there may be some inherent contradictions that you will live to regret the anna has been uh a success story generally speaking but um it also has been a poorly resourced again we've taken an on deadline and under budget approach to that for which the united states i would say bears the principle and most direct blame and liability the idea that the anna can only be as large and as strong as afghan government budgets will allow has obviously been a again an application of the on deadline and under budget approach that's been counterproductive i believe that we seem or at least we appear to be on a direction to to break out of that but again to to conclude this whole prospect or whole project uh of deciding who controls the means of violence in afghanistan again not to expect that again every uh a villager will have to give up his rifle or his rpg or you know draw the line where you like but that when push comes to shove that the afghan government doesn't lose a firefight uh is still a principal um a goal that we should aspire to and it's it's tragic uh that we haven't gotten farther in that project uh in ten years than we ought to have done but by the same token uh i think we have an obligation uh to the afghans uh to continue on and ensure that uh that we we uh fulfill that promise and that and that goal not only to carry through in the promises of ddr but on security sector reform and to make sure that our commitment uh to ensure conditions uh under which that can happen not only uh the balance of power on the battlefield uh but to to push for representative political structures in the afghan government so the central government can in fact not only be the most powerful institution but an equally legitimate institution in other words powerful in the minds of the afghan people uh who's again ten years on uh as far as i can tell the desire of most afghans first desire for most afghans is still uh to be safe and secure to be able to rebuild their lives thanks thanks very much tom and uh very good mark i told mark that uh it's now appropriate for him to get into his his leftist socialist canadian tendencies here so the other side of the equation it's a problem when you're supposed to be the contrarian speaker and you agree with a lot of what's been said but uh i'll i'll see if i can add some some nuance um and a little bit more detail to a few of the the very good points that have been made um i think uh professor hartzler paper is is very good and it provides a very good overview of the immense challenges that ddr and ssr have faced in afghanistan and in fact i think the limited success of both projects i mean it's very difficult to think of a more complex and difficult environment for these types of initiatives than afghanistan i think first i want to say why why is it that these two projects are connected because we often talk about the nexus between ddr and ssr in fact i just attended a conference called the nexus between ddr and ssr and and we can see ddr as creating the security space for the development of security institutions and justice institutions for that for that matter through the breakdown of armed groups and the removal of weapons from society and ssr for its part can help give citizens and ex-combatants the confidence to relinquish their weapons in return to civilian life together these processes can transition former warring factions into united security forces and effective government bodies unfortunately in my view the opportunities presented by the natural synergies between these programs was not adequately exploited in afghanistan this partly reflects as i said the difficult environment in afghanistan where we saw high levels of insecurity although only after the first couple years of the post-conflict reconstruction process acute political instability and perhaps the most problematic factor a multiplicity of different actors foreign and local each with their own unique agendas and interests but it also reflects failures in policy and strategy as well as and i think shama mood hit the the nail on the head a lack of political will a lack of political will among donors and a lack of political will among local actors to see this these processes through now i think it has been said and i agree with this point that there was a window of opportunity to advance ddr and ssr in the first couple years of the post-conflict of i should say the bond agreement after all the security situation was relatively secure i myself was able to travel around the country into areas that i wouldn't go to today warlords had yet to re-establish their fiefdoms and were in fact many of them were sitting on the fence they were fearful of being hauled off to a tribunal or the hay they weren't sure what the position of the united states and the international community would be on past crimes and the population was genuinely war weary and eager to see a transition to peaceful politics of course um polls are always problematic in a place like afghanistan but every poll i saw from that period showed that people wanted to see the guns being taken away they they wanted to see the different militia groups disarmed so this confluence of factors created a very conducive environment for ddr and ssr which frankly was just not grasped so why wasn't it grasped the big question first of all poor planning any good ddr program pick up any publication that will tell you about ddr they'll say it's based on a good needs assessment good planning this was never undertaken in afghanistan i often joke that the first plan for the a and bp was was written on a cocktail napkin by a couple individuals who won't be named but it was there was no baseline data was collected the the initial strategies and approaches were built on hunches and guesswork not not solid um study this the ad hoc nature in which the program was advanced um was a product of this early beginning when you read professor hartzell's paper and i hope you do the various programs and sub programs that made up the a and bp almost seem as elements of a well-constructed and deeply integrated plan those of us who are on the ground know it wasn't this was again more of a trial and error approach where when they experience roadblocks they had to hastily establish new initiatives cancel old initiatives and so on the reality was very messy and convoluted with the program again largely advancing in an ad hoc fashion i think the biggest problem though and i could go on for a while on this was the lack of political will the u.s. for several years of course was arming subnational militias under the context of the war on terror to fight the taliban to root out al-qaeda the united states was not interested in disarmament at the time for that matter the afghan government particularly the northern alliance was not interested in disarmament even though president carzai delivered some beautiful speeches on the matter this was really for donor consumption shaman would mention the chairman of the demobilization reintegration commission was ranked by the afghan new beginnings program as the second largest militia commander in the country who was not disarming this was the individual supposed to lead the program set the example in fact i saw a private document which listed the top 10 iages as they were called illegal armed groups and about eight of them had high level positions within the government how what message does that send to the population was any pressure exerted on those individuals to disarm no so there was not the necessary political will and different actors were not willing to invest the type of political capital into this process to make it succeed the third reason was the failure to address mid-level commanders the high level commanders were already rich they were already taking part in the political process and the low level soldiers could now access benefits through the afghan new beginnings program but the mid-level actors felt in the cold the basic ddr packages were really not enough for them but they also didn't have the status and prestige to enter the political process or to make large amounts of money in the illicit economy so there was it was not until a couple years into the program that they really got serious about trying to address these commanders but perhaps it was too little too late they had already worked to subvert the program in many ways and have been very effectively been able to insulate their patronage-based networks and one of the big problems in the police is they took those networks into the police they're still there today at the local level local police are largely militia groups that have re-hatted and now put on police uniforms the fourth factor is the lack of focus on reintegration would you believe that there was never any labor market survey done to determine how to develop proper reintegration options the reintegration process was based on giving ex-combatants basic skills to enter the economy but there was very little effort made to actually find where they could actually access jobs in those in that economy an economy that of course is still suffering and has about 40 to 50% unemployment so there had to be more focus on reintegration now as was said there are a number of people and particularly those in the UN system who will say that this was a success story why? because the numbers look good and so often this is a numbers game right? 63,000 disarmed and demobilized 106,000 weapons collected including 12,000 heavy weapons and it's always good to take weapons out of circulation even though was a drop in the bucket as compared to the the larger number of illegal weapons circulating in the country and not to mention the fact that there's new weapons coming into the country every day so even if we overlook the fact that a good portion of those submitted weapons were largely useless as they were and then most of the heavy weapons although I agree it's an important step to get these out of circulation and it's important to adopt ball extent but most of them were also non-operational the program has largely failed to achieve as Professor Hartzler said it's central goal the breakdown of commander patronage networks those networks are not only still in operation today although many are concealed within the police but they're actually stronger we see now that the security situation is deteriorating that commanders are consolidating their networks we see weapons flows across the country intensifying as well people are seeing this current period as perhaps just an interlude between an interlude in the civil war so one issue that I think that has to be talked about is that issue of political will and I'm going to quote from Professor Hartzler here who makes the point and I quote politicization of the disarmament and demobilization processes clearly limited the extent to which linkages between militia commanders and their followers were broken and impeded the government's ability to establish a monopoly on the use of force I'm not sure if you've changed that sentence because there's been a number of which I think is a good is a good point but I think what I would say is we often and this is a lesson for any DDR an SSR program we often refer to the need to de-politicize the security force I see my friend Dean now in the back who is one of the main architects and worked on the DDR process in Afghanistan so I'll tone down my criticism but we often refer to the need to de-politicize the security forces in the context of SSR and we tend to treat DDR processes as technical exercises and in my view this is a mistake these processes regardless of their circumstances will always be political they can't be to de-politicized by their very nature as they involve the rebalancing of power relationships in society donors must accept this and engage these processes accordingly with political tools not just technical tools and in my view it was the unwillingness and I'm happy to go into this further in the question period was the unwillingness of states like the United States to invest political capital and take risks in this process that doomed demilitarization in Afghanistan DDR donors must accept that from the outset of the process these endeavors are as much political as technical and unless they express a willingness to invest those that political capital these processes are always going to fail regardless of how good the people you have on the ground regardless of how good or how much resources you're going to invest in the process better to invest that elsewhere if you aren't going to take those political risks I would also talk let me say a few words before I conclude about these connections this nexus between DDR and SSR in Afghanistan and I would say in fact it doesn't really exist in the Afghan context at least it hasn't been operationalized one of the most distinctive features of security sector programming in Afghanistan and maybe even I would believe I would say the entire state building process has been the lack of coordination among stakeholders local and international the lead nation approach has been mentioned and it's been a lot of ink has been spilled about that has compartmentalized SSR and actually created turf wars among donors and different stakeholders those natural synergies between DDR and SSR that I spoke about earlier were never adequately explored in the Afghan context whether it is in the area of security force vetting or weapons management they just never operationalized these areas of overlap and in fact when I spoke and I often have to stakeholders in the security sector about demilitarization in DDR they had very little to say they couldn't tell you how they were collaborating or working with these programs and I should say that during my that one of the heads of the AMBP also had a very difficult time explaining to me how their program factored in to the future of security sector reform so there were a lot of missed opportunities here so what are the lessons well I think Professor Hartzell's lessons from the Afghan case for other cases are sound integrate you have to integrate DDR initially in the peace settlement well it wasn't integrated in bond and bond wasn't a peace settlement anyways it was a victor's peace didn't have all of the actors to the conflict right at the table the Taliban weren't there you have to initiate it promptly was initiate fairly promptly in Afghanistan but there were delays you have to provide adequate resources and you have to avoid counterproductive practices like arming subnational militias like giving private security companies a mandate where they hire whole militia groups to provide security in essence rearming the same people that you're trying to disarm with the program happy to talk about that as well I'd merely add the following it is not enough to start these processes early they have to be done right because we often talk about windows of opportunity but we sometimes go a little bit too far if the program is poorly constructed it doesn't matter about the timing it's going to fail these programs have to be based on good assessments and baseline data they must be rooted to a sound strategy and most importantly they must be built on some sort of political consensus preferably as was stated in a peace agreement otherwise as I've said it's better not to invest in such programs at all because poorly devised or implemented DDR and SSR can do harm we can reignite conflict cycles and I would say that in fact in some areas of Afghanistan we have done harm I would also hasten to add just at the end here that what we haven't talked about with some of the successor programs to the DDR program and I'm at time like the DIAD program which has been a colossal failure and since I'm out of time we can discuss that in the question period if you wish but thank you very much for your patience thank you very much I want to thank the panel for four really excellent presentations from different and really engaging perspectives and now I want to open the floor for questions for those of you that have been here before and know the drill we invite you to step up to the microphones on the other side that way we can capture your comments for the television cameras that are in the room when we get to that point I want to ask you to identify yourself by name and by institution and hopefully we'll have more questions than commentary but first while people are moving to the microphones we are webcasting this event we have an audience out there that's larger than the room and I want to start with a question from the audience that's online from Jonathan who is from the Democratic Republic of the Congo and is a student in Indiana University School of Law clearly what we're talking about here has implications and applications and other conflicts this question is how do we ensure that people who go through the DDR then join the new national army have things really changed so the question really has to do with how do we to ensure that there is a linkage between DDR and SSR and how do we ensure that individuals involved in this process actually get to where we want them to go so anyone want to take a shot at that start professor I guess I would say there's an interesting study by Nick Sambanis that shows that in fact he claims that one of the the biggest impacts of DDR is actually it's important to have the follow-on integration into the new military forces that one of the biggest impacts this has on on helping to secure the peace is that it provides employment for these now demobilized soldiers so I guess speaking to that a lot of these peace agreements that deal with issues of the military and DDR and then integration into new military forces oftentimes purposefully inflate their militaries for a period of times afterward just as a means of providing employment for these now demobilized soldiers so that they are essentially they hope is that by giving them this form of employment they won't pray on others in other fashions so I guess I would just say that you know there is this interesting economic argument as to the importance of integrating them now that doesn't I mean I haven't even addressed retraining you know vetting for human rights abuses all kinds of other factors one has to look at but there is this interesting argument about the importance of fact for the for the stability of the peace of making sure that you do absorb large numbers of these once you've also addressed these other issues thanks very much we'll take our first question Richard Whites Hudson Institute the second speaker mentioned the linkages between the weapons flow into the country and the export drugs out are there are transnational linkages that we've seen between some of the groups I mean I know the IMU and a few other groups were based in Afghanistan before the American invasion I wasn't sure whether those are still functional and then I was and then the second question and these are for anybody wants to answer is the return of Russia is that going to affect the process because the Russians as we know trained and equipped much of the current factions as well as the the military and so if they're going to start re-engaging the military training so on can they assist this process thank you you want to start yeah okay look I would say there a couple of things I mean it's annoying but I think true that the military particulars do matter you know controlling the international flow of small arms and you know easy to transport weaponry is extremely difficult to do certainly some of the things that are you know most fretful in the current set equation in Afghanistan such as you know improvised explosive devices or either homemade or again to the degree that they involve imported know-how and technology again just fundamentally easily transported I don't think that anybody has seen a significant reintroduction of you know heavy weaponry that's mobile and Paxilana firepower so it depends on the circumstances and it depends upon you know again the quality of the weaponry that that you're talking about it would be very difficult I mean there would be a huge signature involved with re-introducing large-scale weapons we would have to be especially negligent although that may not be beyond our capacity you know to miss the reintroduction of heavy weaponry to the levels and of the type that were prevalent in Afghanistan you know in the 1990s or even after 2002 or 2003 actually just I want to the first question about the people who did you are you know if did you are only as effective from my personal point of view experience if in a country there is a group of people they fight against the government or state and then you just say okay just find somewhere for them how to reintegrate it but in the case of Afghanistan we were in the war for the last 32 years so everybody is involved in the war war or another you know so that was you cannot reintegrate 30 billion people in the system you know that is not possible so that was the reason is has to be linked to the security sector reform good governance and developments and come to be a comprehensive way we have to talk about that because if you just go back to the security sector reform I didn't talk about too much about that but in the one way we are trying to do DDR then the Diage is coming then is coming with auxiliary police then is coming with Afghan Public Protection Forces then we just come upon local police forces and some others so in one way we are trying to build an institution another way we are trying to undermine it you know some things so that was really is a big dilemma in Afghanistan things in terms of transnational it is transnational because the drug dealer billions of dollars money is drug is going on from south to the north from central Asia all the way to Europe is coming these are people are involving in different ways you know so it is a very big you become a war economy and then is so many other things is involving because those who are in charge why they should make stability because they will lose money you know they lose power and so many other things so that is things but in term of building military of course you should have what is the objective of the military to build because what is the military military doctrine you know for example if I just ask somebody I would like to build national police in Afghanistan is more important than to build the national army because whoever is in Afghanistan whatever regime is there they need a good police but the army you have to fight against the neighbors and other threats we cannot compute with our neighbors you know no matter whatever army we just built some things and so that was the reason is that we didn't focus on the police for example if you just see the actual money resources come to the police in 2006 so four years after the collapse of the Taliban even is especially even the U.S. government was not thinking that building police they were just thinking this is part of nation building so but they didn't see this is part of war on terror you know because if you just talk about counterinsurgency police is the man factor for that so there are so many other issues we didn't go on details on that but thank you very much can i add something very brief i want to take a couple more questions sure we can jump in wrestling returning part go ahead just you know the russian yes they wanted but russia just see what is going on in Afghanistan they just keep themself if things changing they say then we have an option you know we have a plan we have others this is all kind of not actively engage in Afghanistan because the russian only just gave a little bit money or something so on through the a and a but in fact they are not involving in the development in the last 10 years you know is not that much so they just keep what will happen Afghanistan and then have to play later on so in kaza is also playing for the same things you know the president in the same way what will happen so they're on deck but not in the game right okay that's it I want to take two questions now we'll take one question from this side one question from that side then we'll stop we'll ask the panel to respond please go ahead Stanley Kover with the Cato Institute I always like to evaluate current events through the prism of history so that's my question to you could you fill in the blanks in the following sentence what we are trying to do in Afghanistan with DDR and SSR is what X successfully did in Y back in Z please let's have the second question we'll start with you oh great hello my name is Dipali Mokopatia I am at the at Princeton University my question is maybe not so different in that I'm wondering if one possible lesson of the DDR experience in Afghanistan is that the international community and the certain elements in the Afghan government we're actually trying to fast forward a process that in other states when you look back historically took hundreds of years to establish a monopoly on the legitimate use of force and that in fact in the Afghan case there are many examples of negotiations and bargaining that has gone on over the last 10 years that show something not like the DDR goals that were set forth but the integration of commanders sub commanders and fighters into the political system in a way that has reduced violence and begun a process of political transformation in the country thank you thank you okay okay Mark well I mean to answer these questions I mean first of all one of the problems in this field is I'm not sure where the gentleman is that oh there you are I mean I'll okay I'll look through four people to you one of the problems in the field is there are few clear success stories when we're talking about DDR and SSR there's no one exempler I mean some people will refer to the former in terms of SSR the former states of Eastern Europe the former Soviet Union some would talk about South Africa post-apartheid South Africa but of course these are far removed from the cases like Afghanistan some of the failed states and conflict affected states we're talking about today there are elements of success in the Balkans and Kosovo and Bosnia there are elements of success in places like Liberia and Sierra Leone that you can draw on for DDR as well as SSR but there are a few clear success stories and we're still developing this doctrine and these ideas so part of this is I mean in terms of it this is sort of a developmental process for these concepts but even in the Afghan context even according to the basic policy prescriptions and frameworks and strategies that have been developed from experiences in some of those cases I've talked to they did not adhere to any of them in many respects that and there are a number of reasons for this I mean there are the events on the ground were so problematic the conditions were so difficult that it led to expedient thinking on certain cases also there was such a range of interests it's not like in Sierra Leone where there was one main donor the British or even in Iraq where there was the United States as one of the main donors there's a range of different donors the United States has taken a clear role now but this created huge coordination gaps and problems and discontinuities in the process at various stages in terms of looking at the historical dimension absolutely you can make that comment in terms of state building across the world we're compressing the state building process which evolved over hundreds of years in Europe into five and 10 year time spans and the problem with this in many respects is that we just one of the perhaps I would say is one of the biggest obstacles to state building is the fact that the short-termism of the international community in this process that because of the nature of our democratic electoral cycles we can't plan beyond five years Afghanistan of course in 10 years this is one of the poorest countries in the world that just emerged from 30 years of war and even under the best circumstances it would still be in a difficult position today I mean the fact that it was never going to be a Switzerland of Central Asia at this stage in time so it was always going to be problematic but the fact that we were and I think Tom's comment that 12 one-year wars absolutely fabulous I'm going to steal that I stole that one yeah yeah but I mean that's exactly how this has been planned I can tell you that every time I go to Afghanistan well once a year it's new rotations of people who are there for one year there for two years there's there's a few people who have been there for five six years and even longer they're the institutional memory who complain and so on but in terms of the people actually implementing the programs there are people who do their tours and leave and so there's no institutional memory there's no sort of consistent policy and I have seen and those of us at this panel who have seen and people in the crowd who have watched Afghanistan have seen some of the same ideas recycled several times over over this period they never they didn't work the first time and they're not working now so so it is a huge problem I don't know how we break out of that because that's as much the way we do business as the challenges on the ground okay thank you very much I want to take two more questions I'm Frato Ron from the global work source strategy I'm an organizational psychologist so I'm interested in this lack of coordination integration and the underlying reasons for it you have so many talented people deployed but it still doesn't happen so now what you just said now Mark really answers I think a big part of this question but I would like to turn to the other panelists I mean with all the experience that there has been before so what is it? Is it a lack of will? Is it a lack of doctrine? It's a lack of the will to put effort into it is it all together or other other thoughts and Mark you just mentioned about the inability or the unwillingness to take political risks could you elaborate a little bit more and what these political risks are that you would like to see? Sure okay Let's take this question you've been waiting patiently for a while Hi I'm Joshua Lee National Defense University my question is about the future for Afghanistan what we've learned what went wrong in the past but where do we go from here? Has President Obama's surge had a positive impact so far and will it in the future? How vital is Pakistan to the current conflict? Where do we go from here? Thank you Can I start? Okay thank you very much you know the I wrote a paper which was published by Mark last year and I just talked about design of the program and then as implementation and that is very important unfortunately Afghanistan if you just pick everything we had a problem in the design and also we have a problem in the implementations the reason is that again let's go back to the political well and the short-term objectives I just talk about that because yes always there is a short-term objective of mid-term and long-term but the question is what if what you do in the short-term has to fit into the long-term objectives but if it does not fit to that and just undermine the long-term objectives then we will have a problem for example like it is mentioned before is just CMY for example Minister of Interior in the last one years maybe restructure two or three times so every year just come with people and just put with new cover sheet and just say this is a new idea and really this is a big problem if you just go back those who have an institution memory and what has happened and we just look back okay why this program has failed what was the reason how it has succeeded or what is a positive story on that and then why it has failed let's improve that not to start everything from beginning again you know just to create a parallel organization and others so this is the issue question is what we will do in the future which is very difficult questions you know to answer still I don't see it the right way because still we don't our political objective is not quite clear we have a coin strategy but what is they have to meet the political objectives you know so that was the reason it is not linked to fit into the political objective and that still is missing and always I just somebody asked me question I just give a fair mystery of Lanna Sridine and he was riding on the donkey and somebody asked him Mullah said where are you going he said don't ask me ask the donkey where he is going you know because I'm just sitting on the donkey and so sometimes we don't know which direction you're going you know honestly yeah I would sort of like to give an answer that addresses I think the whole variety of questions beginning with the question about an improved DDR process I think it's actually a mistake to have lumped all these different disparate and qualitatively different kinds of efforts into the DDR program if you work backwards from the R to the second D to the first D I mean reintegration is not really a military task per se you know it's really a broad social task and even demobilization of militias but particularly Afghan militias is both a political and a social task and not a narrow military task so to have set the parameter so broadly for the program was kind of a recipe for recipe for failure but apropos of the question of the future of Afghanistan and to a further disappoint my brother from the Cato Institute I think really even now we're at the beginning of a long story of American engagement not only in Afghanistan but in South Asia broadly speaking it's too important a strategic issue for the United States and even though much of many of our efforts both saved in the Persian Gulf or even in Europe have been at least to my mind a fumbling around trial and error situation where we try all the bad answers before we find a solution I'm willing to bet anybody six pack that although not much more that over the course of time we stick with it again just because we can't afford to walk away I'm heartened by the progress that's you know the president Obama has learned some lessons he kind of didn't want to be here in the first place thought like the Bush administration before him that it was going to be a relatively low cost commitment but despite a lot of kicking and screaming he's both extended the duration of the commitment we've gone from a 2011 time horizon to the 2014 time horizon technically past his first term in office and of course the level of forces has been increased even in the last month I think to try to secure what the administration and the command in Afghanistan believes are genuine gains of the past fighting season I don't think this administration would have increased its bet if it doesn't think it was betting on a winner so it's good I think it'll be long it'll be hard but I think we'll also stick with it okay can we take two more questions over here my name is Arnold Zeitlin and I covered Afghanistan for the Associated Press between 1969 and 1973 which was a period of relative tranquility at that time I've just come back from eight years in China so I've missed a lot I was particularly struck by Mr. Donnelly's remark not only what he just said now but when he spoke earlier of a obligation to Afghanistan and I would appreciate if he could expand on that or explain what that obligation is and from where in Afghanistan it stems now you also just mentioned we can't walk away and I'd like to ask you if you could expand on that thought as well okay please next we'll just take the second question and then we'll go to you okay thank you yeah I'm Tony Drexler and I'm an international health consultant recently back from Kabul and I was I was really struck by what appears to be the first of all the total national focus of everything you're talking about and except for Shah Mahmood's comments or some of them lack of recognition of the of ethnicity the role of the northern alliance both in defense interior and in the police and ANA and how this affects DDRSSR and then leading from that what appears to be a growth of northern alliance cohesion strength independence at the present time which may dominate the future I appreciate some comments thanks thanks very much I'd like to start yeah um first of all just a plug Shah Mahmood mentioned his paper and I encourage you to look at it we we publish a number of papers of different Afghans as well as those who know Afghanistan well called the Afghanistan papers at www.cgonline.org so check it out the I would answer this question about what risks what what do I mean by political risks well one of the things is the United States early on was unwilling to engage or intervene in what they call green on green conflicts among their allies on the ground nor to put significant pressure on northern alliance and other important proxy actors on the ground who are allied and those were some of of the actors who were the the most blatant offenders in terms of rearming in terms of destabilizing the government that was one clear area where they could have taken a tough stand and put some because they had a lot of the leverage right on various levels leverage in terms of providing economic incentives and leverage in terms of threatening so I think that's the area where there could have been a lot more movement the Japanese at one stage refused to commit more funds and they were able to get the defense ministry to move in terms of making some appointments one of which brought Raheem Mordak into the the minister of defense portfolio while he was as deputy minister of defense and later to become minister of defense if the Japanese were able to do that on a very limited basis the United States had a lot more scope in order to to use some of that political leverage in terms of ethnicity yes you know in Afghanistan nobody can dominate one tribal group the country because we saw it in the during Taliban time we saw it with the Northern Alliance we saw it with the communist regime in that time you know this faction were existing these things the reason is that whatever is going on now they use ethnicity as a tool for their own political objectives you know for example if we just see I'm originally from Kunar province we had a problem not with was bugs there we had a problem with our own warlords with our own criminals in our own area you know if you just go for each this players they just suppress their own tribe more than they just did the other tribes you know and so that was the reason is that they just play as a game but of course it is more political when I just say political will and political issue is because you cannot find a government in the world if you are in the government you are against the government you know just I give you this example if minister talk with the ministers he's complaining about the government governor is complaining about the government sometime I just call it is like national international depressions you know everybody if you are in the government you are unhappy if you are outside of the government you are not happy if you are rich you are not happy if you are poor you are not happy international community is not happy the other ones is not happy this is kind of more political issue you know when we just say there is no military solution to Afghanistan so there is a political issue these are the political issues this gross happiness is missing you know I just mentioned my paper which is published for example when I see developments of Afghanistan yes Afghanistan is a poor underdeveloped it will stay for many years but still the with all these corruption with all these mismanagement with all these whatever you just call it war still the progress is happening in the country it has not happened in the history of that country in terms of schools built access to resources roads you know to education and so many other things has happened with even the 10 percent money is used in Afghanistan 90 percent went to whatever way but still it has happened but still people are not happy so the question is that we should design some things link the security governance and development together but now everything is going isolated from each other for example I just give you one practical example the districts where I am from it was very unstable two years ago and then the change of one police chief in their districts it's become a stable the same resources the same structure the same rules regulation laws and other why he just engaged the community there the elders and then in that way he brought the stability and he was just removed in order to do a good job you have to be removed from your place and so he was removed like months ago now our district has become unstable again you know so that is a political will how to engage people how to really people feel themselves if they just go to the police they should not afraid from that they should be part of the solution not part of the problem the same the government other actors in the government also or they should not be biased to one group in another group in the area so that is very important to play impartial agent role you know the government official if it is civilian military police and others I thought I'd speak to your point about ethnicities a little bit just with some data international stakeholders have tried to get the army to be constructed among more ethnically diverse lines but the you know despite some apparent successes in that area there is some interesting recent data that show that there are still problems of factionalism and patronage networks there so for example some data from exactly one year ago January 2010 found that Pashtuns represented 42.6 percent of the army Tajiks 40.98 percent Hazara 7.68 percent Uzbeks 4.05 percent other minorities 4.68 percent and the analysis concludes that while the presence of Pashtuns at all levels of the military corresponds to their proportion of the general population Tajiks continue to dominate the officer and NCO ranks so that there's some you know those types of disparities and northern versus southern but the pardon me northern versus south question is all the way right yeah yeah so it breaks even within the the ethnic you have you know these different patronage networks within them so there's the these various overlays of okay I have a another question I want to throw into this and then give you a chance to respond to that oh okay unless you I can wait I can wait you can wait I can wait all right sometimes these burning desires it's why I was there there was but you know there's a there's a there's a new DDR process that's underway right now and then is as a result of President Karzai's decision to get rid of private security companies there's been a move now to create something called the Afghan Public Protection Force which will be a force that will provide the same services that private security companies are provided and this force will be located under the direction of the ministry of the interior the number that's being discussed is 25,000 new people under arms clearly some of the people that are serving in private security firms now when those jobs go away we'll be wanting to transfer over into the new organization so I want to throw that into the equation here and ask the panel what they think about the creation of this new organization and how this works in the ministry and how this may or may not benefit from the experiences of the first DDR so Bob if I may address the prior question sure that was well pointed me so feel an obligation to answer the question about obligations it's very good of you I mean most people would duck it but okay well so I think the moral obligation is fairly straightforward and transparent nobody has had a larger hand in you know certainly initially creating the post-healthman experience or state than we have done but I also think this is a case where our strategic interests are all also deeply engaged not only in the narrow sense of securing the situation inside the borders of Afghanistan or even in the sort of global war on terror sense but as I suggested earlier as a part of the world that is extremely volatile was always important and with which we've always engaged but is only becoming more so I mean to statistics worth noting or the doubling of the Pakistani nuclear arsenal over the last several years and although it's not really a statistic but but the rise of India as a strategic partner of the United States and potentially a global great power is I think just important to the United States it's been ratified both beginning when the Clinton administration but continuing through the Bush administration and now again under President Obama so it's a it's something that the United States says has recognized as an increasingly important both partnership and a part of the world that which we care about and care about the geopolitical future of to have a comment on either the previous question or the current question which is what about the creation of this new organization which will provide guard services you know again is a go back to my analogy you know whatever short term objective has to fit into the long term goals you know how to build for example how much money we spend on the police reform billions of dollars why we should create something else you know and just to undermine that upon local police or whatever something like that way or for example this DDR again has happened this Taliban reintegration you know okay 10 people join and give some money and then 10 other will come you know and then we can link it to the employment and others 45 percent people are implied whatever 50 percent whatever is in the country okay if 1000 people just come back and you have provided incentive and others 1000 other will join with the insurgency you know so that was the reason you should have a comprehensive plan how to bring security stability to Afghanistan and link it to the good governance and also then the developments will happen the second things if that is not happen and just focus on seasonal you know or a year by year strategy and others it doesn't work because this this is an insurgency insurgency as a in one place it is a stable in the summer unstable in the winter and so many other things has happened like this way and also if you have a comprehensive plan you can explain it where you will to the people you know that is more important thanks now when I just give you this my story before in my level I don't understand what is going on you know because we cannot explain to the people of Afghanistan okay this is our objective this is our strategy this is a program we want to implement it in this way people will believe that you know so now we if people we cannot explain it very well then people believe rumors disinformation misinformation conspiracy theories and so many other things will happen to that even this reconciliation plan we cannot explain it where you will to the people really what we want to achieve you know how we want to achieve it some things and private security it is a big problem from the day one you know as a still is a problem there is no doubt in that but the question is how we can link the security really to strengthen the MOI and MOI should be functioned very well and now if you just go to all this recruitment MOI at the top police chief in the country is more than half of them is they are not professional still they are as a Mullahs there's the commanders and other they are in charge in different places if you just go police chief in Badakhshan is also Mullah police chief in Kunduz is also you know something this doesn't work like that way so you should have a really good you know system their good reward and punishment and then take you know cooperation from the people and just go back again is coming to the political well you know because in order to remove a bad person from the system need political well you know if that is not there always I just when we just I gave a resignation from the government I said even in that time you know when the engine is broken driver 20 times you cannot go anywhere you know so the engine we have to fix the system we have to fix some things then the resources is important but if you don't use the resources in the right way no matter how much money you throw in the country and how much money you just give you cannot bring stability just in short thank you thanks very much is I just wanted to Mark you know I talking about the creation of these local more informalized security forces I mean again getting back to the short-termism there I can list off there was the Afghan national auxiliary police the Afghan guard force the Afghan local police the Afghan public protection program and I could go on okay these have all been tried they failed for various reasons there was talent ban infiltration because of poor vetting mechanisms they weren't effective they weren't given proper training this is police light it's an attempt to meet a security vacuum quickly by arming local people it's often based on a misunderstanding of of of Afghan militia historical militia structures like the Arbaki and so on so and this really reflects both the poor understanding of the local context and and and also the short-termism this push to get results quickly so even though as Tom says we are there for the long-term at least I would hope but we keep planning in these short time cycles and each new rotation wants to make a big impact so they initiate these programs which have been tried they don't know the lessons and then unfortunately we failed the problem is it's not just a matter of wasting resources we do harm because we've armed some of these groups in this context we've given them guns okay so they we've re-armed these groups we've introduced new weapons into these areas so and also alienated local people because these these local police forces tend to be poorly trained abusive of the local population we alienate the professional police who said why did I go through police training and so on when I could have been a local police get paid the same amount for and only get two weeks of training I think these are bad signs if we consider even the formal police process we've act in recent months or in the last year they've reduced the actual training period for the formal police from eight to six weeks at the very time we say we need more professional police we're reducing the training now I questioned some people at the NATO training mission they said no no no but we make them we train them on weekends now as well so it's actually you know it's close to the same amount but this is this is the problem we're going for quantity over quality and I understand I'm not by the way I understand completely understand the pressures on our people on the ground and I don't necessarily blame them there's some bad policies being introduced but there's a lot of pressure to produce results quickly we have to introduce timelines President Obama and so on even though behind closed doors we know we're going to be there for a while but for public consumption for political reasons we have to say you know this is when we're going to reevaluate and although I think some governments like my own may rightly start to pull out a lot of our our investments which is is a bad sign but so we have to get over this short termism because that's one of the big problems here okay I think we're approaching the the hour when we're we're going to disperse I'd like to offer the panel an opportunity for one last comment and then we'll conclude do I want to begin? I just thought I would reemphasize the the theme of political will that came out across and everyone here that you know there's there's real agreement along the lines of the lack of political will both in terms of international actors and actors on the ground contributing to some of the very role failures involved with some of this thank you just you know in terms of in Afghanistan is there is no option be you know I just say this thing quite clearly because the option has to work meaning there should be a stability one way I'm not saying to build very you know model but at least there should be a stability otherwise this time we will have a more bigger problem because of the sophistication of the Al Qaeda and their networks in Afghanistan in the region it is very big and also we should plan for example if we have a like 2014 what is our planning political planning for that because we should not manage crisis after crisis you know now we are in that cycle one crisis finished we just start with another one how to fix that so we have to be a little bit proactive thank you I've said pretty much everything that I meant to say but just to sort of go back to the beginning and focusing narrowly on on the DDR program I would say it achieved the one thing that it was really capable of achieving and the failings of the program that even though they're well documented really ought to have their missions essentially that should have been done in other programs and in other places by other folks um so the lesson I would take is that we should not try to jam too large a set of ambitions into a narrowly designed program intended to take the the firepower and the mobility away from the malign actors that existed when the program began thank you Mark yeah last word okay I you know I think some of the we have to in a way rethink how we do these processes and as I said we are in the stage still of developing doctrine that's happening here in the U.S. government it's happening globally in in terms of how to work in these difficult environments and there's a lot of lessons that we can learn from the Afghan case I think initially we have to we tend to operate with templates so many of these environments I think there has to be a lot more of a focus on how you can improve the situation for people on the ground improve security improve governance that means working at the sub-national level that means investing the proper political resources and political capital into this process to actually succeed you know I think this is a long-term endeavor and I mean fundamentally I think to echo what Shama Mood says has just said I think that there is no plan B and I think we have to realize what are the consequences of failure in this context and the consequences of failure are pretty pretty drastic both for the interests of the international community but just as much for Afghans themselves so with that I'd also just like to to thank to thank Bob for organizing such a fantastic panel and for inviting me here to DC thank you very much I'd like to invite a round of applause to the panel I'd like to thank you all for coming and remind you of a couple of things one Professor Hartzell's paper will be online probably within 60 days the move will slow us down a bit but we we promise you that and secondly I want you all to watch out for the next invitation to the next SSR working group which will be in the new building and so we look forward to welcoming you there thanks a lot