Hello, everyone. A very warm welcome to USIP. My name is Andrew Wilder. I'm the vice president of the Asia Center here at USIP. I'd like to especially thank our speakers for joining us in person today. Steve Brookings, Christian Bergharpvicken, Chris Colenda, De Pauli Mukhopadhyay, Habiba Sarabi, and Tamanna Salikadine. Unfortunately, I assume Stanekzai could not join us in person, but I wanted to thank him for joining us from Australia, in particular because I believe it's 4 30 a.m. in the morning there, so thanks. As many of you know, USIP was founded nearly 40 years ago as an independent national, non-partisan institution, trying to prevent, mitigate, and resolve violent conflict around the world. USIP has been working in Afghanistan since 2002, and from 2008 until August 2021, we had an office in Kabul managing a wide range of programs, but we unfortunately had to close that. However, while policy attention in this town has rapidly and dramatically shifted away from Afghanistan, I wanted to emphasize that for USIP, Afghanistan is still a very high priority, witnessed in part by this conference today in our continuing investments and trying to support the cause of peace in Afghanistan, given the desperate need for an inclusive peace process which still remains in Afghanistan. One of our program priorities is to try to better understand the collective failure to achieve a political settlement during the past two decades in Afghanistan, so that these lessons can help contribute to more successful future efforts. Several lessons learned efforts focusing on the United States' 20-year intervention in Afghanistan have been undertaken or are currently being undertaken now, including by think tanks, USIP has done some in the past ourselves, the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction, or CIGAR, there are books and memoirs and studies by US War Colleges. Last year, Congress passed legislation establishing the Afghanistan War Commission, a 16-member bipartisan body that has a very broad mandate, quote, to examine the key strategic, diplomatic and operational decisions that pertain to the war in Afghanistan, and to develop a series of lessons learned and recommendations. Few of these lessons learned initiatives, however, are focused primarily on examining the negotiations to reach a political settlement. Memoirs published by former senior officials tell parts of the story, but there's little in the way of detailed analysis of key events, decisions and dynamics among the negotiating parties, and why the peace process ultimately failed. Last summer, USIP launched a lessons learned effort to help fill this gap. This project focuses on the failure by all parties to produce an inclusive and durable political settlement of the conflict. We have commissioned a number of papers on this topic which look at the peace process from multiple perspectives, including American, Afghan, international, military and civilian, men and women. It will take a long time to understand the many complex factors that contributed to the 20-year military intervention, the US loss of the war, the collapse of the Afghan Republic and security forces and the Taliban victory. The failure of the peace process itself, in part due to the US failure to prioritize it for so long, were critical to the tragic outcome in Afghanistan. Our goal for this conference and the papers you'll hear presented today is to help us collectively learn from these failures. Admittedly, we've called this conference lessons observed because too often lessons go unlearned, and one of the papers uniquely looks at why lessons remain unlearned and how we can mitigate that. We invite all of you to take part in today's discussion during the question and answer at the end of each panel. Those joining online can submit your questions using the chat box function located just below the video player on the USIP event page. We ask that you please include your name and specify from where you're joining us. For those joining us in person, my colleagues will pass along note cards for you to write your questions, which they will collect later in the discussion. You can also engage with us and with each other on Twitter throughout the event using today's hashtag Afghanistan USIP. That's hashtag Afghanistan USIP. I'd now like to hand the floor over to my colleague Kate Bateman, the moderator of the first panel. Kate joined us just over a year ago as a senior expert on our Afghanistan team. After many years, leading lessons learned initiatives at SEGAR and prior to that working at the State Department. Again, we thank everyone for joining us here today at USIP and over to you Kate. And our first panelist, welcome. Good afternoon. I echo Andrew's warm welcome to USIP. We have two panels this afternoon for you that collectively represent decades of investment in studying and working on and in Afghanistan over the years. Our first panel today is focused on the US government perspective, how and why the US pursued talks with the Taliban or did not over 20 years and US efforts to pursue a broader comprehensive political settlement of the conflict. Our panel brings together some of the most knowledgeable people on these issues. First to my left is Tamanna Saleh-Kurin, the director of South Asia programs at USIP. She trained USIP in 2018 after 12 years in the US government, focused on South Asia and conflict resolution. She was a senior advisor to the special representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan at the State Department where she led a team pursuing a peace process between the Taliban and the Afghan government. Ms. Saleh-Kurin represented the United States at the Murray talks in 2015 and participated in other high-level negotiations. From 2011 to 2013, she served as director for Afghanistan and Pakistan at the National Security Council, focusing on the Afghanistan peace process and US-Pakistan relations. Tamanna and I are co-writing a paper on US government efforts to talk with the Taliban and pursue a political settlement in Afghanistan from 2001 to 2021. And next to Tamanna's left is Chris Kalenda. He is an adjunct senior fellow at the Center for New American Security and the founder of the Strategic Leaders Academy. Chris is a retired colonel and has previously served as the senior advisor on Afghanistan and Pakistan to Department of Defense Senior Leadership and has served four tours of duty in Afghanistan. In 2010 to 2013, he was the Defense Department's senior representative in the US talks with Taliban. His most recent book, which is based on his PhD dissertation, is called Zero-Sum Victory, What We're Getting Wrong About War. Sounds like he is the right person to be here with us today. The paper Chris is writing for USIP's Lessons Learned Volume looks at whether the US war effort was aligned with the search for a political settlement. And finally, Dr. DiPalli Macpadaya is an associate professor in global policy at the Humphrey School of Public Affairs at the University of Minnesota. She also serves as a senior expert on Afghanistan here at USIP. And previously, DiPalli was on the faculty at Columbia University's School of International and Public Affairs for eight years. Her research focuses on relationships between political violence, state building and governance during and after war with a focus on Afghanistan and Syria. Dr. Macpadaya is author of Warlord, Strongman Governors and the State in Afghanistan and the co-author of a forthcoming book, Good Rebel Governance, Revolutionary Politics and Western Intervention in Syria. She's vice president of the American Institute of Afghanistan Studies. DiPalli and I are also co-writing a paper on the extent to which knowledge and research fed into the US policy making process on Afghanistan. In short, why did many lessons on military intervention, state building and peace building go unlearned? So to clarify for all of you, these papers are not yet published. We expect that they will be published in the spring of next year, 2023. And finally, before we get into substance, I just want to acknowledge that many people in this room and online watching have lost loved ones, friends and colleagues in this war. And many have devoted their lives to a vision of Afghanistan that is seriously under threat. And so discussing the failure to end a war sooner and on better terms may feel like a very abstract conversation. But that failure has come at an enormous cost, enormous human cost. So today we're trying to do important work of shedding light on missed opportunities and mistakes and to be honest about what went wrong, to avoid those mistakes in the future and prevent future human suffering. So first I'd like to turn to Tamana. Can you please walk us through how the US approach to talking to the Taliban and pursuing a political solution to the war changed and evolved over time, over 20 years, including what were some of the biggest obstacles that you saw in the US searching for a political settlement? Thanks very much. I hope everybody can hear me here. It's a pleasure to be with you all this afternoon. As Kate mentioned, she and I are writing a paper together where our research really led us to speak with former and current USG officials who worked on the peace process and broadly on Afghanistan during the Bush, Obama and Trump administrations in various roles, including at the White House, the National Security Council, State Department, DOD and the intelligence. We explored really how the concept policy and practice of seeking a political settlement in Afghanistan evolved over the last 20 years. And I, instead of going through it in detail over 20 years, which I think many of you in the audience know very well, I want to note several key factors that evolved over time and that we found in our research directly impacted how far and how much we were able to pursue a political settlement in Afghanistan. The first and foremost thing that we found in our research is that, you know, how the US government and policymakers perceived the battlefield and how we defined what a political process was and the interplay between these two factors. So really what people thought was actually happening on the battlefield shaped whether or not they were willing to, of course, even think about the idea of a political settlement. And from 2001 to 2021, we have a lot of people who are proponents, who are detractors, but we saw some trends during the Bush administration. There was a clear view that the US would be easily victorious in Afghanistan and beating the Taliban on the battlefield was sort of taken for granted. There were no considerations of the possibility of negotiating with the Taliban in those early days, 2001, 2002. As one person told us, those were the values of the period who did negotiate with the Taliban. Once the Taliban, the focus really after the Taliban has abandoned Kabul is building a new government. Who will be in the government? How do we build their legitimacy? It's not about worrying about the government, worrying about the Taliban. And even when senior Taliban leaders offer to surrender in exchange for amnesty, there's no space for consideration of it because we're winning. I mean, so we've heard many times, we would beat the terrorists on the battlefield. So no one expected that the Taliban would come back as a major threat and there was never any need for a political process. Now, often what is criticized is bond. Why don't we have the Taliban act bond? And we found that, you know, it wasn't very realistic. There was no one would have showed up and the need of the day was really to get a political consensus and a government in place. And so the real failure there was not to engage the Taliban after the Taliban. Once you had a government in place, once you had some modicum of an agreement, you know, the estimation though became that we can control the battlefield and we don't need to engage the Taliban. Even towards the Bush administration, 2006, 2007, when you have real violence, growing insurgency, internally we were fighting the U.S. government on how you understood or portrayed the battlefield. Do you measure success by how much land we control, how many people we control? And these sort of arguments were really worth the force that drove our talk about the battlefield and our considerations there. It didn't lead to any real consideration of a political process. By the time we get to the Obama period, there's a growing realization of the Taliban threat, of the weakness of the NSF, and the possibility that we might need a political settlement. But again, the main goal was to fight on the battlefield. So we developed this idea, U.S. government had to talk and fight, where fighting was preeminent and talking was seen as a contingency. The real policy debates were about counterterrorism versus counterinsurgency, how to get Pakistan to cooperate, and how to strengthen the Afghan government and the NSF. The political process was amazing and maybe even niche policy at times. You know, there were some people who were big advocates for it, many of them I see in the room today, but there were plenty of skeptics across the policy community. And reconciliation, even where it was accepted, was seen as a way to splinter the Taliban or a way to weaken the Taliban. Very, very few believed in it as a comprehensive political process. And then by the time we get to 2020 in the Trump administration, even the most skeptical understand that we're not going to get to a military victory, that there's not a military solution. And it's very interesting, we get to a point where we're eager to wash our hands of the war and this makes the peace process much more expedient. It's a way to get out, not really a way to get a settlement. And so we drop the pretense of having to have the Afghan government at the table and we negotiate directly with the Taliban. We use our biggest leverage, our true presence, and we get a deal with some counterterrorism assurances and a figment towards intra-Afghan talks. So in the end, what was this evolution? I think what we really see is that in the early stage, we don't test the theory of a political process. We don't test whether it's viable because we're overconfident on the battlefield. And by the time we become fully committed to a political process, the Taliban are ascended. We're clearly losing our credibility on the battlefield and our true presence is actually getting harder and harder for us in some ways to sustain. The next, the other thing I would note is how a peace process went from being absolutely taboo. In the Bush administration, you wouldn't even take a surrender. In the Obama administration, where it's very secret because there's a lot of antibodies to it, by the time you have the Master Khalilzad very publicly announcing talks, it's conventional wisdom. I think this is also a factor in how we perceive the battlefield. Was how this taboo went from something you couldn't even say out loud in a policy meeting? Another mic. Hopefully you can hear me now. It became a place where you couldn't even acknowledge it. So why was that the case? Why was it a taboo? One of the important lessons was that we saw from our research is that we had sold the American public this idea that the Taliban were the worst terrorists. They were three feet tall, they were the worst people on earth, and there's no way we could negotiate with them. How would we then politically acknowledge that we're going to talk to them? So additionally, there were some very public missteps that increased the antibodies to this process. So for example, the failed office opening in 2013. You faced a lot of political blowback for the administration, but even wins by peace process standards. One could argue that the Bo Bergdahl Guantanamo 5 exchange in 2014 was actually proof and concept that you could negotiate with the Taliban. A complex deal and get results. And yet politically in Washington it resulted in a congressional investigation and it was quite toxic to the process. Lastly, I would just note that the U.S. bureaucratic structure, and I believe other speakers will talk about this as well, was not set up to pursue a political settlement. If you worked in any of the agencies or departments responsible for Afghanistan, you had a role. If you were at DOD, your job was, you know, we need to win on the battlefield. We need to set up the NSF. If you worked in the intelligence community, you needed to collect intelligence, do counterterrorism, build up the NDS. And if you worked at the State Department in the South and Central Asia Bureau, your job is to man the embassy to build an Afghan government to partner with them. Now who was working on the political process? You know, there was an office established, special representative for Afghanistan, Pakistan, later special representative for Afghan reconciliation. But this is outside of the bureau system. It is breaking the process. And when you do that institutionally, we create a lot of antibodies. And that's what we saw in our research, that this, you didn't make a career in any of these outside of the bureau system special offices. This is where you went to do things that the rest of the building didn't want you to do. And so you had to break a lot of China and it was a great ingenuity. There was ingenuity. There was a lot of entrepreneurial work done in those offices. But the bigger institutions with all of their resources really fought against them for a long time until maybe it was too late to really pursue a political settlement. Very helpful. Over through these different conceptions about the Taliban and how that changed over time. Can you say a little more about how the U.S. defined the leadership and the movement, how that evolved, and how those very perceptions were shaping U.S. decisions about engaging the Taliban? Sure. That's a great question. I think first we have to acknowledge that the Taliban itself in reality changed over 20 years. They were not a static organization. They were not a monolithic organization. From a group in the Bush years where you heard rumors that they wanted to surrender to a growing insurgency, to much later a more centralized organization that had diversified income streams, that had a lot of experience shopping in cuttery malls, that engaged with international diplomats. I mean this was an organization that itself changed significantly over time. But also every different part of the organization had different priorities, had different ways of engagement, and had different views of the U.S. presence to a certain extent. And yet we engaged the Taliban in a way that was often monolithic and so we wanted its evolution to mirror our rhetoric. We either saw some Taliban as regressive, extremist, and backward, or we were looking for the liberal, progressive ones. But usually there are changes. We wanted this Taliban 2.0. So there might have been a Taliban 2.0. Sure they were younger and they were social media savvy, but it didn't line up with our conceptions of a more progressive Taliban. I think the most cynical Taliban might be willing to let girls go to school and yet still be the ones who are most lethal on the battlefield. So that was conundrum for all of us often dealing within the U.S. government. In Afghanistan many of the people we talked to admitted there was a failure to recognize that the Taliban had a real constituency and represented an important part of Afghanistan's national life. We failed to recognize that their views, their orientation, had some appeal, had roots in Afghan society. And I think the second part of this is a failure to understand popular support for the Taliban. And the lateness of the peace process partly stemmed from the U.S. government's view that the Taliban were these unrepentant barbarians as one of our interviewers called them. In contrast we touted the former Afghan government as secular modernizers. And so the policymaker deluded himself or herself into thinking that Kabul was somehow this beacon of moderation and progressive thought while the Taliban was just draconian and, you know, extremist punishment. And somehow we were okay overlooking the brutality by some of our CTE partners, et cetera, that actually pushed people in mainly rural areas towards Taliban. So over time I think we understood them better. We failed to repress them on the battlefield because we didn't understand where they were going, what they wanted. But I would argue from all of our research that it was really hard even if policymaker started to understand a Taliban that they interacted with better. It was hard at a policy level to understand the organization as a whole and how it was motivated, what its constituencies were and how best to use our U.S. leverage in negotiating with them. Okay, thank you. We're going to turn to Chris now. Chris, your paper, I'll give a preview of your paper's thesis to the audience, that your paper argues that a major reason the U.S. failed to achieve a favorable political settlement in Afghanistan by many definitions anyway was that the U.S. government has no organized way of thinking about war termination, about ending wars. Our bureaucracies, particularly defense and state, simply don't have the policies or strategies to apply our military leverage to a political goal or the goal of a negotiated peace. So can you go into some detail on describing those, the gaps that affected and constrained U.S. efforts to seek a political settlement in Afghanistan? Thanks, Kate. You're exactly right. The U.S. government lacks both the will and the skill to pursue a political settlement in Afghanistan. It was similar to Vietnam and Iraq. And you've got to have both. You've got to have both political will and you've got to have skill to be able to advance a political settlement or you're going to be unsuccessful. So the U.S. has no organized way of thinking about war termination beyond decisive zero-sum victory. So our implicit assumption when we go into these wars is we're going to achieve this decisive zero-sum victory where we gain all of our interests, the enemy gains none of theirs, and the idea of negotiations, of ending a war through a political settlement, through a negotiated outcome is just something we don't think about. We have no doctrine, no shared concepts for how we do that. There's no national security language with common sets of terms and concepts for how we interact with one another, how we communicate with one another. DoD's from Mars and States from Venus and you've got other planets in the solar system too, and they're all using terms to mean different things. So in general what happens, it happened in Afghanistan, it happened in Vietnam and Iraq as well, is we go into these wars with this presumption of decisive zero-sum victory. We kind of know where our start point is. We've got a pretty good idea what success looks like. In Afghanistan that is at peace with itself and its neighbors, no longer a haven for international terrorism to foment attacks on the homeland and follows a basic international declaration of human rights. That really never changed. We also know what failure looks like, kind of the opposite. And of course in between start point and success or failure is what we might call the fog of war. So we do what good planners do, we start with success and we reverse engineer success back to the start point. So we arrange all these milestones, constitution, build an army, build an economy, have elections, et cetera and so forth. And then we conduct the military intervention and we start getting after these milestones. Well once we intervene in the conflict, it changes the game inside the host country and government officials, local civilians, international actors, political opposition all react to that. And two critical factors begin to form. The first one is does an insurgency have sustainable internal or external sanctuary and indigenous support? In every conflict since at least the Second World War, an insurgency that has had external sanctuary and enough indigenous support to field a team has been successful every single time. By contrast, a host nation government that is unable to win the battle of legitimacy in insurgent controlled and contested areas has been unsuccessful every single time since at least the Second World War. Those critical factors tend to form early on and in Afghanistan we had both problems. We had an insurgency with external sanctuary and enough indigenous support and we had a government that was unable to win the battle of legitimacy and in fact got more predatory and corrupt over time so it got worse over time. And because those two factors are pointed in the wrong direction we start to drift. We start to drift towards failure even though we believe because we're achieving these milestones that we're actually being successful. And we have a hard time getting out of that drift because of things like bureaucratic silos. We have nobody functionally in charge of our wars. There is nobody on the ground in Kabul in charge of all U.S. efforts on the ground. They're all silos. They point to Washington D.C. and they're all doing their own things. So instead of being a fist that moves as one, we're like five fingers that we keep getting jammed. Second is we have all sorts of confirmation bias, status quo bias, other biases that prevent us from recognizing that we're in drift. And then third is manipulation by the host nation. Host nation governments becoming more dependent, more corrupt, burning legitimacy faster than any international efforts can build it. And we're paying penalties and public support along the way. And at some point when a president says, all right, we're done here, we're out of here in a certain amount of time and maybe we can negotiate our way out of this. Well, the insurgency knows that they're going to be stronger after we leave than they are while international forces are present. And so they're going to play for time. They might try to negotiate our withdrawal, but they're not going to be willing to negotiate an end to the conflict because the incentives are all wrong. And then the host nation government is going to do everything they can to try to keep us there, to try to keep us trapped, so they're not going to reform. Their biggest concern is internal division, not the insurgent threat. And so we wind up being unable to create the incentives for reforms that would be necessary for the host nation government to win a decisive victory or to negotiate successfully. And we're unable to get the insurgents to do that as well. And so we wind up getting stuck or we wind up leaving as we did. And if we had a framework for thinking about war termination, some wars end in decisive victory, those wars end in some sort of negotiated outcome. And we looked at those two critical factors. We would have been in a much better position in December of 2001 when the Taliban offered to surrender to take yes for an answer. We would have been in a much better position in 2010 when we had 140,000 troops on the ground, international forces, and building up to 350,000 Afghan forces to recognize that you're kind of at the peak of your leverage to take away the timelines and again take yes for an answer when the Taliban wanted to talk. And then finally in 2018 when we did start, when we took off the timelines, the Taliban said to me and Ambassador Rayfall and others, we don't want our country to become another Syria. We want to start talking. And then as soon as we started unilateral troop withdrawals and it became clear that the United States just wanted to get out, then the Taliban could play for time and play hardball. So we don't have an expert body of knowledge within the Department of Defense, within the Department of State, within the U.S. government for how we do these things. These are very complex efforts. And without that we're going to continue to flail. Thank you, Chris. Another set of powerful remarks. I want to ask you to a kind of two-part question. One is about our definition of a political settlement. I think sometimes in this conversation we get, we refer, we are referring sometimes to a U.S. Taliban deal to resolve the U.S., the issue of the U.S. presence in the country. And other times we're referring to a political settlement among, to involve and include Afghan power brokers and parties, political players. So with those two, with that distinction in mind, do you, would you say from your experience that after when the U.S. began to be seriously interested in talks with the Taliban, was the objective actually a comprehensive Afghan political settlement eventually that we would help to broker? Or was it more so, was it a much, a more simplistic notion of simply agreeing with the Taliban on the terms of U.S. troop departure? Yeah, it depends who you ask. And this is part of the problem. When you don't have a common set of terms and concepts within the U.S. government, people use the same words to mean different things. And so communication becomes almost impossible.  It meant to other people an effort to divide the Taliban and co-opt, you know, get the Taliban senior leaders to defect and co-opt them into the Afghan government. It meant to other folks an effort to get the Taliban to agree to sit down with the Afghan government. So again, we've got these silos and these were definitions within different agencies. So it wasn't that DOD had one view and state had another view. You had these different views within each of the departments. And so everybody's kind of pulling in a different direction. And there was no, you know, the military's got doctrine, of course, that covers everything from how you do a deliberate attack to how you do an aerosol operation, how you dig a field expedient latrine. There is no equivalent for how you organize a peace process. There is no equivalent for how you organize the elements of national power behind wartime negotiations. And it's a really complex effort and without that there's no accountability. There's no shared understanding and there's no way to get these different silos working together. Okay, thank you. I want to move to Diwali, but first I'm going to just put a question out there in the air for the panel to think about of it that I think this conversation points us to. And that is, do you think that as long as the US determined that it's in our strategic interest to have a CT, a counterterrorism presence in Afghanistan, was that decision, was that judgment compatible with the desire to reach a political settlement? And so now I'm going to turn to Diwali and we'll maybe come back to that issue, that question, but Diwali, so I think there's great, there are insights from Tamana and Chris that speak directly to our paper and your many years of work. And our paper focuses on this question of the existing knowledge and research pre-2001, of course, but also the research that was developed over 20 years on Afghanistan on the war. Why did that remain in many cases outside the orbit of policymaking and not seem to inform US policy? Can you explain some of the biggest reasons for those divisions? Yes, thank you, Kate. And I think a lot of what Chris just laid out really helps set the stage for what the findings of our paper. So this has been a puzzle for me for a long time as an academic first as a graduate student and then as a professor having been studying politics and actually Afghanistan before 9-11 that we knew that in the literature and political science, for example, that there was a good amount of understanding from the interventions dating far back, but even just immediately in the 1990s about, for example, the role that spoilers could play in derailing peace, the import of third party, often countries but peacekeeping forces and addressing security dilemmas, the risk of holding elections early, the perverse effects of aid, the salience of sanctuary and the success of insurgency. These were all pretty well established empirical findings and yet at every step of the way from 2001 onwards the lessons within those empirical findings seemed to have been ignored. And then there was all of the knowledge that was produced after 2001 by people like myself and many other people in the room that seemed to be largely irrelevant to the policy on the ground. So that's the puzzle that was sort of at the heart of our work. And I would say the first finding we had which was a very sobering one from both the scholars we spoke to but also the folks in the policy making process was that knowledge was really an irrelevant currency in the making of strategic decisions. That those decisions were made as a function of logics of vengeance, of logics of triumphalism, logics of political expediency and knowledge as something of import emerged really later as an attempt to do a couple of things. One, to try and clean up messes that had already been made by decisions that were locked in early on. Two, and Chris alluded to this, to kind of a firm asset or confirm or firm asset of biases that were driving the spending of money, the movement of troops, the unrolling of one doctrine versus another. And this lent itself to a particular kind of knowledge production which was sort of really focused at the most tactical level, at the super localized level in metrics that could be quantified, that could be measured, but that from a bigger picture really didn't reveal that much that was illuminating about the larger political dynamics on the ground but did feed into a kind of wartime information economy that kind of connected or blurred the line between monitoring and evaluation and intelligence collection and research in ways that privileged particular forms of information and often kind of enabled projects and programs and ideas that were maybe working in a very micro sense but weren't actually shifting the political facts on the ground in a meaningful way. And a lot of that knowledge also was conducted by organization and individuals who were not indigenous to Afghanistan were not deeply rooted in the, I think, more important political, social, historical, cultural understandings that often were less easy to operationalize but may actually have been quite telling. The other thing that we were told is that the structural dynamics and Tamanna alluded to a number of these of how policy gets made just didn't really lend themselves to deeper reflection that knowledge production tends to encourage. So that was everything from the ways in which personnel were signed and then rapidly moved out of the country to the ways in which force protection was privileged and embassies and organizations operated in a very insulated way but also to the way policy was made in Washington that it just wasn't really vulnerable to these deeper moments of reflection and questions like what if we have gotten some of these major ideas wrong? What if we have been wasting money or people have been dying unnecessarily in particular ways? The process doesn't lend itself to that kind of interrogation. And then the last thing I'll touch on is what I think a number of folks in both kind of communities describe to us as a kind of clash of civilizations between the worlds of the academy and the worlds of policymakers that a lot of academics talked to us about how they didn't really understand how they would even insert themselves into policy making conversations. And of course that for them was a way of describing policy making as not particularly hospitable to them but part of what we also discovered was the way that the academy works isn't at all lend itself for policy to policy making easy use either. For example the way our work is published is on timelines that don't at all correspond to the way policy gets made. The way decisions are made around hiring and around tenure and around what kind of research gets funded don't at all incentivize relevance or timeliness. On the contrary many academics kind of take pride in doing work that is quite removed from the day to day of politics. And in some cases see the work of government and in particular the work of war making as something that they don't want to be connected to that they have very strong critical views about. And so those kinds of differences in culture also make conversation difficult. Thank you it's a rather gloomy picture. My follow up question is to maybe point us to any exceptions that you that we found in our research to that overall picture. And then also this sounds like they're quite insurmountable and structural difficulties to getting these worlds to better and integrate and talk with one another. But can you give us some ideas of how we could at least chip away that problem and mitigate the risks of policy makers not benefiting from the really important research that is out there. Yeah I mean here I would just say we got quite a range of views on this. We got some examples from scholars who pointed to for example research that's been done on drone warfare research that was done on civilian casualties research that was done on contractors and the role of contractors that they described as from their perspectives having shifted the needle in the public conversation around these questions having shed light on and brought more visibility to concerns and created debates within institutions both in the military and on the civilian side that seemed productive and important. We also heard from some folks who said even if the knowledge itself isn't being used in a moment to moment way that there are models for example of red teaming, of doing counterfactual exercises, of thinking about centering channels of dissent in ways so borrowing from the ways the better ways in which the academy can sometimes work and using those as models including bringing scholars into the conversation early and thinking about ways to create incentives for the bureaucracy to do that. And on the other side I think there are conversations in the academy happening around hiring and tenure and how grant money is allocated and foundations fund different forms of research to really push scholars to think about the real world implications of their work. The last thing I would say though is I think even for those who argued that you know these are different worlds and a bit like oil and water maybe they don't mix as much as they could. The fact that they both exist in parallel with one another is in and of itself creates opportunities for the public to be exposed to truths and debates and conversations and maybe forms of accountability that otherwise wouldn't happen. Thank you. Thank you. I'd like to just shift a little to focus on the Doha talks for a moment of the intra-Afghan negotiations in 2020 to 2021. If we could have just imagined that the Biden administration had committed more time to allowing that process to proceed and not made the decision to fully withdraw in last year. What do you think would have been necessary for the Taliban and the Afghan Republic to have reached a negotiated settlement? In other words do you think there was still space for a potential settlement at that time when U.S. leverage at the time was so low and maybe you could speak a bit to the need for mediation and the fact the difficulty of the U.S. The U.S. as a party to the conflict was not the ideal, was not a mediator, should not have been a mediator for the intra-Afghan process itself and that was one obstacle. Any thoughts on that? I mean I think there's a lot, that's a great question. I think it's hard to argue the counterfactual and it would be very complicated. I think there are two things to note, whether it was at the period where you're asking during the Biden administration or even earlier, if we wanted intra-Afghan talks I would just note two things. One, we had to realize the true presence was not just our biggest leverage, it was the only leverage for the Afghan government. So if you really wanted intra-Afghan talks, if you wanted to be able to negotiate with the Taliban, the true presence, our U.S. troop presence had to be part of that negotiation. Separating them dooms the intra-Afghan talks to failure. Second, I think we often hid behind this idea of Afghan owned and Afghan led. It was very convenient for us to hide behind it when we didn't want to take, when the U.S. government didn't want to take a strong decision or push for something that was problematic. But other times when we probably should have let the Afghans lead, we enjoyed micromanaging very much. So I think in terms of intra-Afghan talks, there was a strong need for the U.S. to be involved, to lead, not necessarily be mediators, but they had to be a party of those talks. Separating them was I think the Taliban's demand from the very beginning because they realized that then Afghan polity and the representatives of different Afghan leaders had little leverage then once you separate the two. Yeah, I would. I'm straying here a bit away from the topic of our paper, but this is the subject of a new book project for me. So I just want to underscore Tamanna's point, which comes to the question, Kate, that you raised earlier, that we want kind of floating around, which is what is the relationship between a counter-terrorism campaign and a political settlement? And I think maybe I have a somewhat extreme view on this, but my view is that this was always about countering terrorism. And countering terrorism meant many different things at different moments to the United States. It continues, I think, to be the chapeau over which all of our engagement in that part of the world is unfolding, even if it's not coherent in our own minds. But fundamentally that means that all other efforts are subsidiary to and disposable within that larger chapeau. And I think for the Afghan government that placed them in an impossible position because it essentially demanded of them to engage as if they were a sovereign state when in fact they were a territory that was being used by the United States in the service of this war. And the Taliban understood that and, as Tamanna said, ultimately recognized that to isolate the question of the troop presence was then to make the question of a settlement one between the U.S. and the Taliban. And that completely marginalized by design, the Afghan government, and that marginality I think has been there actually from 2001 onwards even as the project was framed as one about state building. It really was only building a state that could serve the purpose of countering terror. And that's very different than a state that can monopolize control over its territory or that can peacefully govern a population. And so I think that distinction is a really central one for us to think about today. Right, thank you. I'd like to give the audience a chance to ask questions. So just a reminder that if you are watching online, then please put your questions in the comment box on the event page on USIP's website. If you are in the room, we have no cards for you. And as we're just pausing for those questions to come in, I can jump on that last question too. I think the Biden administration played a bad hand poorly, and it underscores the importance of this lack of doctrine. When we began self-sabotaging by undercutting our troop presence and putting timelines, the Taliban knew they could just play for time. So we undercut our own ability to negotiate. And without some sort of doctrine, you know, doctrine is not less straight jack, it's a basic playbook. Strategy is how you apply that in the real world. And leadership is what you need to execute. Without some sort of basic shared language and concepts for how you do wartime negotiations. How you get all of the elements of national power involved and at who's in charge of it, then we continue to flail. Can I add to that? I mean, I think this assumes that we wanted a political settlement, right? I agree completely with Chris's earlier point that there was, there were different conceptions. The word reconciliation hid many sins. You could argue anything under that word, and so some people saw it as let's splinter and weaken the Taliban. Some people saw it as an overall political settlement between us and the Taliban, a way for us to exit. And then there were a few who saw it as the big grand bargain where you have intra-Afghan talks. You've come to a larger Afghan political settlement. But I think the important thing is within policy circles we found counterterrorism still was the top priority. And I don't think anyone was shy about that. It's just the rhetoric that was sold about nation building, about counterinsurgency. There were many missions, but the peace process and political settlement was never at the top of those. I think we have to be very clear. It was used sometimes, it was advocated by a niche group of policy makers, but often it was seen as a solution to problems we were facing in our other realms, whether it was counterterrorism, counterinsurgency, a weak Afghan state. It was sort of seen as maybe if we get these talks going, we can solve our other problems. But it was never an end of itself as a policy. Yeah, and to my knowledge so far, I mean the Department of Defense was never directed to support a peace process. They were told to wail away on a Taliban, do transition. That's your job. What would that have even looked like if the President had had the foresight to know this may be the greatest military leverage we have. We only know that now in hindsight, but if the Obama administration had recognized that, what would it even look like to say DOD come up with a strategy that is in service of a political goal of negotiation? I mean this is the whole problem, or part of the major problem, because we have nobody in charge of our wars. So we're like this, DOD has its silo on the ground with the four star general, the state has its silo on the ground with the ambassador, US aid has its silo on the ground, the intelligence communities have their silos on the ground, and they all report to different people in Washington DC. So there's nobody functionally in charge of our wars below the President of the United States. There's nobody that the President of the United States can look in the eye, eye to eye, and say you are responsible and accountable for achieving these policy aims in Afghanistan. And I'm going to give you the resources and the latitude to do it. And that person would then take charge of all of the elements of national power within country and then be able to do things like make decisions about talks and how the different elements of national power are going to support that. But just telling each silo, here's what I really want you to do, but also do some of this too, which is what we did. It doesn't work. That's why the whole is, for us, because we're like this, the whole is less than the sum of its parts. Thank you. This ties into, this is right along the lines of one of our questions from the audience. Sorry, I don't have a name or location, but this discussion is framed around mistakes, but wasn't there an active hostility among many in the US government toward the idea of a political settlement? At the risk of kind of beating the Ted horse. I think that does the point is again to the political constraints. How much did this come down to the toxicity of the idea of negotiating with terrorists and a kind of political culture that we built over a decade and then too on the idea that you can't talk to bad people as if peace processes are ever about talking to your friends. I mean, is that oversimplifying the problem or is it goes to the Bergdahl and Guantanamo 5 deal, the political blowback from that? How much did the hills opposition to that constrain the White House's space? I mean, I think political constraints played a huge part, but I wouldn't say that it was the only part. I think what Chris is talking about was maybe structurally the biggest problem. A peace process or political settlement was never, the top of our agenda was never our priority, right? But on the same, at the same time, I think you cannot underestimate the rhetoric and the need for every agency to poly mention vengeance. We never talk about that, but that is never in a policy document, but it does color actions, especially after 9-11. Much of what we were doing while it might not be called that was a mirror of the need for vengeance. At least we saw in the intelligence community and other places, the failure of 9-11 was energized these organizations and institutions to lead that out. As I mentioned, and maybe my mic wasn't working then, but during the Bush administration, it was just not acceptable. You didn't talk to the Taliban, but even in the Obama administration, any mention of it, there were so many antibodies on the hill, it was politically poisonous, and you had to be very, very careful. I think it's remarkable that by the time you get to Ambassador Khalilzad, it's almost conventional wisdom in Washington. But I think that had less to do with the Taliban and how we perceive the Taliban. We still thought of them as the evil terrorists, but more to do with our hurry to get out. I'm going to go to another audience question from Jonathan Trotin, a long time defense and security analyst, including on Afghanistan. He asks, one of the major points of debate was whether the Taliban were negotiating in good faith, or whether they were just using talks to advance military aims. Do you believe they were sincere? I suppose at any point, whether that was. The answer is probably different for different time periods. Well, this is part of the reason why you've got to have some sort of playbook for how you do this. There are a couple of different ways to approach peace process. One is to try to get the big deal. Any other is to go step by step through confidence building, where you can do things like test sincerity, test command and control and those sorts of things. We started to do a little bit in the Obama administration in 2010 to 2012 talks. We did some confidence building measures, but we didn't have a bigger view of bringing the war to a successful conclusion. And I think part of it goes back to this problem of we have terrible metrics. And DePauly mentioned this. In an insurgency, two metrics matter. Does the insurgency have sustainable sanctuary and internal support? And is the host nation government able to win the battle of legitimacy and control the contested areas? If the answer to either one of those is no, your ability to gain a decisive zero sum victory statistically is zero. And so you've got to look for alternatives. If one of those two is pointed in the wrong direction, Afghanistan, we had both problems. And so, but because we don't have a good way of evaluating the likelihood of success, the likelihood of decisive victory versus negotiated outcome versus, can we transition our way out of this? That's another war termination idea. I don't know if it's ever been successful, but it's out there. We have no organized way of evaluating those, the validity of those, and then making smart policy choices. So we just get stuck in a status quo and all of this risk aversion. Can I just say to Jonathan's question, I guess I would, I would question the premise of the question, right? Which is what does it mean to be negotiating with sincerity? I think the Taliban was extremely clear, consistent. Let's use the word sincere in both its war fighting and the way in which it approached diplomacy. It sought the return of the emirate and the expulsion of the American troops. And it went after that in all ways possible and recognized in the inconsistency of the American approach and exploited that at every turn. And so to be sincere in a negotiation is sometimes not a smart negotiation tactic, right? The point is to know what you want and have aligned your position and your interests and then go after that ruthlessly and use whatever forms of leverage including sanctuary and foreign support that you might have. If I might add, I completely agree. I think it's the wrong question to ask if they were sincere. I mean, I think in our imagination sincerity means that they would accept the U.S. values and promote the legitimacy of the Afghan government. I mean, that's not sincerity. I think what we needed to do and what we didn't do long enough is test the viability of negotiating certain things that we want for certain things that they want. Can they deliver in a negotiation and can we deliver in a negotiation? By the time we're able to test that prospect, we ran out of time, right? You don't have any more time and you want to get out and I think that's the problem. Yeah, that's such an important point. We have this tendency, this implicit assumption that if you negotiate, it means you've failed. And so there's these natural antibodies toward negotiation when in reality, if you negotiate an outcome that protects your interests, that's a success. But we don't think about it that way because again, we don't have any organized way of thinking about how we end wars. Well, before a final question about kind of overall takeaways, lessons that we can, that we might identify for U.S. government efforts in this space more broadly internationally, a couple more questions from the audience. Carson in Virginia asks, should, let's see, I'll start with it. Are there any concrete ideas or proposals for how the USG might centralize and improve efforts to better steer war fighting with the achievement of political goals? Or relatedly, should the mission of the US Armed Forces be changed to fight and produce an acceptable end state through negotiations? That doesn't sound like the best recruitment bumper sticker. Join us to fight and produce an acceptable end state through negotiations. But seriously, what are the, like, what are implementable ideas to maybe to develop better strategic thinking, policy guidance around these issues? I'm happy to jump on that. There's a difference between war fighting and war waging. War fighting is what militaries do. War waging is what governments do. And the United States military is not competent to make decisions about going to war. It is not competent to make decisions about ending wars and how you end them. That is the job of people who are waging war, and that is the job of the United States government. I would also add that if the Department of Defense is given the mission to support a peace process, that's what the Department of Defense is going to do. I mean, one of the things that we do pretty well in DOD is follow orders. And you got to give the right orders. And without an expert, you know, a doctrine, we don't know what orders to give. And without an expert body of knowledge, we don't know how to implement that. Another question from the audience is, to what degree does the political or election cycle in the U.S. affect or reflect the strategy towards settlement? Does having a framework for war settlement mitigate this actuality? What would it take to create or realize this kind of framework? I think that's a really important question, looking at the cycle that we did see, and especially the Trump to Biden transition. What did that, maybe in your responses, if you could think about what that meant for U.S. relationship with the Afghan government, particularly, and our commitments to our partner? I mean, I'm not going to go too far down this rabbit hole. I think we can talk about it for a long time. But I would even, yes, to a certain extent, obviously, that different administrations face different political constraints, political imperatives, and how they manage the process was different. But I would argue that there was a lot more continuity, actually, across administrations, that counter-terrorism and counter-insurgency was always the top priority. Winning on the battlefield was always a top priority. We, you know, propping up the Afghan government and building moral hazard, to some extent, in Kabul, was throughout all of the administrations. And towards the end, I would argue, in the Obama administration, Trump and the Biden administration, it was the political status quo was tenable in the U.S. It was not making the front pages of the papers. Thankfully, we didn't have large U.S. casualties. So, keeping the war on sort of autopilot was politically acceptable. I think what changed was, you know, the push to get out of Afghanistan was a political change. But I don't think that it was real political realities that shaped the day-to-day war fighting in Afghanistan. Yeah, I just want to underscore this point to Manasmeet. I mean, she's actually worked in multiple administrations and so experienced it. But as an observer from the outside watching, the continuity is actually really quite striking. And between, you know, President Trump and Biden, for example, nearly on every other issue, one would expect them to be diametrically opposed on the ending of the war in Afghanistan. I think they were basically in the same place. And I think, for me, what that suggests, it comes back to these larger questions that we actually can think about in a war that lasted as long as this one did. About what kind of doctrines do we have, how do our bureaucracies function, and what kind of logics get unleashed by something like an attack like 9-11 that are really actually resilient to changes in politics, emergence of new knowledge, evidence that things are not working. You know, I would just come back to this sort of logic of vengeance that I referenced and the sense that there is an amorphous threat out there. But also the feeling that I think in American foreign policy we see all the time that we get tired of things that seemed really important and urgent to us. And to come back, Kate, to your introductory remarks, there are people whose lives and entire countries, whose economies and whose politics and whose societies are really at the mercy in those moments of a sense that we're done with this. And that seems to actually be a bipartisan sentiment that does a lot in shaping American foreign policy. That's reminding me actually of a project in grad school I was involved in where we looked at a comparative study of Cambodia of, I'm sorry, Vietnam and Laos versus Afghanistan and Iraq, and U.S. decision making in both, and the degree to which the U.S. government had more latitude in kind of the war that was in the shadow of the larger war. And I wonder if today if we can think about are there conflict affected states where U.S. interests are at stake, where we may have troops on the ground, we have development efforts, diplomatic activities, and how could you imagine that we should apply overarching lessons from Afghanistan to those kinds of contexts? If it's more, I'm thinking that for a conflict that's less in the news, that you have maybe more latitude to try different, to be innovative, try different things. Well, if you have somebody who's actually in charge on the ground, who's responsible and accountable to the president for achieving policy outcomes, it takes a lot of the, it takes a lot of that, it gives the president more latitude, if you will, because they've got somebody responsible and accountable on the ground that's saying, Mr. President, we need to pursue a peace process because, you know what, decisive zero-sum victory, not going to happen. Here's why. And transition, not going to happen because our partner is burning legitimacy faster than we can build it. So it gives the president some distance and a lot more flexibility. A question from Benjamin Petrini at the International Institute for Strategic Studies. Nation and peace building was a big part of the Afghan side. How and why did development, how and why were development interventions not leveraged for the resolution of settlement and for negotiation efforts? Well, I mean, I'll just come back to the earlier comment about how all of these efforts were, I think, subsidiaries, right, or designed at best to be in the service of, but if not disposable. So there were moments, for example, when you look at everything from building the Afghan security sector to thinking about how to extend the writ of the government at the subnational level, that at various moments were undermined by other Western efforts on the ground that were oriented toward countering terrorism. So what does it mean, for example, to be building a national army and a national police and simultaneously re-arming militias in the service of protecting your own forces or thinking about counterinsurgency? What does it mean to have individual American commanders spending enormous amounts of money at the district level and simultaneously trying to encourage a government to establish itself as an independent authority on the ground for the provision of goods and services? These activities are fundamentally at odds with each other, and it makes it very difficult, I think, again, to come back to Tamanna's point to make an argument that a political settlement or encouraging peace or even really building a sovereign government were actually the goals at hand when there was so much other activity going on that was undermining those efforts. But I also want to note, so what you're hearing and what Chris has said with his silos and all these different missions, that's fine, that's how we were experiencing it in the U.S. government. But imagine how the Afghan people, the Afghan government and all the regional actors and our allies were also experiencing it. So they were getting different messages from all different actors that they were engaging with, and they were seeing developments on the ground that were at cross purposes. And so on one hand you might have allies, NATO allies who just thought we're sort of lost in what we're doing. On the other hand, we had people in the region and regional players who really saw this as a U.S. that the U.S. had some long-term goal against various players. So we were sending messages without even thinking about the messages we were sending. And same for the Afghan people. Right. I mean, it's no wonder why President Karzai said, well, y'all are just actually trying to stay here. You're doing things to strengthen the Taliban so you can stay here. And I mean, because when you've got a silo problem, each individual silo does its own thing. DoD will talk about how many ANSF they trained and how many Taliban are killed and captured. State will talk about how many civil servants they trained. And the relationship with Karzai or President Ghani. The aid will talk about how many roads they built and schools they built.  Everybody patting themselves on the back about all the progress that we're making. And yet everybody sees things going downhill. So you know you've got a silo problem when everybody's bragging about progress, but things are going downhill. I have a great last question, and then I will close with one from the moderator's prerogative. How did the broad and vague authorization for the use of military force passed in the immediate wake of 9-11 play a role in the Afghanistan conflict? Could Congress play a role in steering course of the war or seeking to end it by revising the AUMF? That's a big question. It's a very important question. I'll let my colleagues talk about it in the Afghan context. I will only say that having studied the American effort in Syria, which was one of those conflicts that was in the shadows that wasn't being paid attention to, the ways in which American power has been deployed theoretically against the actors that attacked us on 9-11, even when those actors are enemies of the actors who attacked us on 9-11 is stunning. I think that the failure to revisit the AUMF is a reflection of an unwillingness on the part of American politicians to take responsibility for the war on terror, to think about what does it mean, and I think for us as citizens we also have to take responsibility for the fact that most of us were not fighting this war. It was a small number of Americans again and again making enormous sacrifices, and with other forms of technology like drone warfare and so on, a conversation about this as war fighting did not happen much after 2001, and that is a failure on all of our parts, and I think we are continuing to pay the consequences of that today. I'm going to ask one shift gears a bit and consider present-day Taliban run Afghanistan. It's difficult to apply, you know, to try to transfer such a different, the context of US presence for 20 years to what do we, you know, what does that say about US-Afghanistan relations today or how the United States should engage the Taliban government, with the wealth of your experience and expertise, and what do you think about what, you know, the missed opportunities and mistakes that we've seen over 20 years, what does that tell us about how we should, how we can avoid, I guess, how we can help Afghanistan take some steps towards an inclusive peace, a more positive peace, and what does that say about, what would you recommend in terms of US approach to the Taliban and Afghanistan? I can kick it off. I have a couple things that I would say. One, avoid artificial morality. We need to be clear-eyed about the limitations in dealing with the Taliban, but engaging with the Taliban is a reality. We cannot wish them away. We cannot change their nature overnight. So let's avoid the artificial morality. I think we just have to be clear-eyed. We have to understand our leverage and lack thereof. I think we're at a low point. We don't have troops, but we have to be very modest about what we want to accomplish. I think three, understand that we have lost significant credibility with the region. Not only that, but in our 20 years, we started in what you could argue was a unipolar world where we were on top economically and in a lot of other ways. We are ending this war in a multipolar world where there are a lot of other players in the region. I think we have to understand that in Afghanistan that we didn't gain any friends in the region by the way we ended the war. The other thing I would say is that given that we're not there, avoid the U.S. impulse, policy impulse to be proactive. We love to be like, we need to be proactive. I think we have to allow the Taliban to make their own mistakes. You know, sometimes when the other side has more to lose, let's just be reactive. Right now, we don't have policy tools to be the most proactive. And lastly, and I think most importantly, I would say, don't give up on the Afghan people. I'm seeing op-eds and other things that we don't owe the Afghans anything. I think the Afghan people didn't ask for this. They didn't wage this war. I think we have to be very careful in talking about the Afghan people and we have to find creative pathways and partners to remain engaged with them, both in rural and urban areas. Great. Thank you. Chris, would you like to comment? I would just maybe take it from a different direction and I think we need to ask ourselves why is it that the world's most powerful country with the world's most powerful military continues to get into these interventions that result in fiascos? Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Syria, Somalia, our track record is unenviable. And what's interesting is we tend to make the same policy and strategy errors over and over again. And there's zero accountability. You don't hear anybody from any senior leader from any political party talking about national security reform. You don't hear any generals talking about it, you don't hear diplomats talking about it, you don't hear anybody talking about it. And yet we do the same things over and over again. We're going to have an Afghan War Commission, I hope, and they'll say, well, we'll never do Afghanistan again. That's going to be the result. So until there is some will behind national security reform, I am not optimistic that we are going to make the changes that we need to show that we're better than this. I fully concur with both the past two comments and I would maybe say that this is a moment in which the communities that make policy and the communities that study it can have, I think, some reflection about the ways in which doing something, being proactive, as Tamana put it, is not always better than doing nothing and having a moment of humility and a moment of reckoning of the kind that Chris is speaking about, about what kind of catastrophic failure looks like. And the last thing I'll say, and this is a shameless plug for something we have coming out soon, that USIP and the American Institute of Afghan Studies will soon be launching a collection of reflective essays by young Afghans who lived through the fall of the Republic. And there's profound insight and reflection on their part about our mistakes and their mistakes and what the way forward might look like. And to Tamana's point about taking real responsibility for the decisions we've made as Americans, part of that I think means starting to listen to the voices of those who have a lot to teach us who weren't always included at the table. So we will disseminate the link to that which will appear in the American Institute of Afghan Studies website soon. But I think that's going to be an important set of reflections for us to consider as well. Such an important point. Thank you. Thank you to our excellent panelists. You've been wonderful. It's been a really rich discussion. Thank you to our audience in the room and to those of you online. For those of you in the room, we have tea and coffee for you outside online. Please bear with us and come back after 30 minutes. We will have a second panel which ends at 5 p.m. Thank you so much. Good afternoon everyone and welcome to the second panel of our Lessons Observed Conference about the failure to achieve a political settlement in Afghanistan. My name is Scott Worden and I am the director of the Afghanistan and Central Asia program here at the US Institute of Peace. The way that we've structured this conversation is that we first focused, as we might do based in Washington, on the US policymaking process. And so we heard a diverse panel of experts looking at the civilian, the military, and the academic view of how the US approached this fundamental issue of ending the Afghan war. But now we want to turn our attention to Afghan views and to international views. And I'll observe at the outset that the United States often has a myopic view of conflicts. We put ourselves at the center of the problem. And then in this case we focused on Afghanistan. And then to the extent that we moved beyond Afghanistan, we recognized that Pakistan had a central role in both supporting the Taliban but also affecting events on the ground in Afghanistan. And maybe after that it was the region. That has certainly evolved. And as Tamana made a point at the end of the last session, at the beginning of this conflict in 2001, the US was a unipolar actor, you could argue. We had much more economic leverage and political leverage than we find ourselves in now. And so as the war evolved and as we looked for a way to wind down our military engagement, the region loomed larger and Afghan views, I think, loomed a bit larger in our perspective. Well now we don't have troops on the ground. Afghans, as it was noted, have suffered the most in this war. And the region doesn't have, you could say, the luxury of choosing their neighbors. And so we're increasingly reliant on the region to address the risks that come from Afghanistan. And Afghans themselves rely on the region to hopefully provide a source of additional stability. So with that framing, I want to introduce our panelists and begin a discussion on this important other dimension of our engagement in Afghanistan. So first we have joining us on the screen, commentarily. There he is. Masoum Stanekzai. He is the former chief peace negotiator of the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan. Prior to that, he served as the chief of the National Directorate of Security, the NDS. He was acting minister of defense. He headed the joint secretariat of the High Peace Council. And he served as minister of telecommunications and information. But perhaps most importantly, he was a fellow of USIP back in 2008. Let me then turn to my left and introduce Dr. Habiba Sarabi. She is also a member of the Afghan Republic Negotiating Team. She served as the deputy chair of Afghanistan's High Peace Council and advisor to the chief executive officer of Dilla of Dilla on women and youth affairs. She was the governor of Bamiyan province and was the first female governor of any province in Afghanistan. She served as the minister of women's affairs and the minister of culture and education. And Dr. Sarabi has been influential in promoting women's rights and representation across Afghanistan for her entire career. To her left, Dr. Christian Berg Harfigen currently serves as the research professor at the Peace Research Institute of Oslo, Prio. He previously serves as the director of Prio. He's a sociologist with research interests in the dynamics of civil war, migration and transnational communities. He's a longtime scholar of Afghanistan and its neighborhood. He recently published A Rock Between Hard Places Afghanistan as an arena of regional insecurity. And hence his qualifications for this panel here. Co-author, excuse me, you're right. And finally, Steve Brooking. He was the first British official that was sent to Afghanistan after 9-11. He attended the Bonn Conference in 2001, was a political counselor in charge of affairs at interim at the British Embassy in Kabul from 2001 to 2004. He also served as the senior advisor to the Afghan government. And from 2015 until 2021, he was the United Nations Special Advisor on Peace and Reconciliation at UNAMA, who led UN efforts in engagements with the Taliban. So we have Afghan voices, we have international voices, and let's get that perspective. I want to start with you, Masoum, and note as I did in my introduction, you have been chasing this elusive goal of peace in Afghanistan for a long time. As an Afghan, but also in official positions with the High Peace Council and most lately as the leader of the negotiation team. I want to get your perspective on how do you see the goal of achieving a political settlement evolving over time, over successive both Afghan governments but also US governments? And where do you see there being opportunities that perhaps were missed? But where do you see key points that there might have been, but for an event or a decision, an opportunity to advance a political settlement before the end? I'm afraid we have mute. Can we get that fixed? Thank you very much, Scott. And I'm very much delighted to see a very good friend and also my colleague there. We must all be in the other friends. Let me just start with the previous panelist has mentioned Tamana and Kolinda and the other colleague. They talked about the issue of touch upon the legitimacy. They have talked about the century. They also talked about the different priorities of the US department, different departments, the policy and consistency. And I think I do agree with all of them, but on the other end, as an Afghan being in the government in a different position, I, in fact, I feel all those differences in how it impacted the situation in Afghanistan or in the policy and the situation that was evolving in the country. I think it's we in the politicians always reinventing the mustaches all the time. I think the very unique opportunity that was existed for the peace. I think it was 2001. And I think at that point, they went in the bone discussion. The Taliban was excluded from the discussion. And I think that was a strategic mistake. That was not only one mistake, but I think I must say that there were three major issues that can be considered at that time. The first was that the Taliban were not included in the in the in the bone agreement. Secondly, Pakistan was not fully on board. They have played their own game. And actually, from one side, they were supporting the war on terror. The other side supported the counter the efforts of the international community by supporting the Taliban and providing the sanctuary. And third, before in the war on terror was spread too thinly to in the war in Iraq. And that tension was diverted very quickly to Iraq before something that could be made in Afghanistan. So I think that was started from the beginning. Secondly, Afghanistan was also like a lab for for all the different kind of experience that that could be experiencing Afghanistan. State building is peacemaking, whether it was the development initiative, the security sector reform and all these things were experienced. But the disconnection between the different efforts has limited the impact of achieving a stable Afghanistan. So let me also say that what happened with the context for for for a successful peace efforts. I think the policy that the different countries has adopted over the Pakistan that also had a significant impact on the creation of a more violent radical elements in in the region and also in Afghanistan. Afghanistan was a very conservative society, but not a radical society. And so we have seen that in the first phase during the Cold War. In fact, the radicalization was supported in terms of the jihadi movement that to counter the Soviet occupation and to push the Soviet out of Afghanistan. And that was a support phase. And then there was a phase of ignorance because there was a time when the when the jihadi groups and the money volunteers who came to the region to fight alongside the mujahideen against the Soviet occupation. And I think they were left on their own. And and that has also created the new level of of extremist organization emerged such as al-Qaeda. And then the war on the terror was a kind of a reaction, a reaction to to to the excessive use of force. And and in that that reaction has generated a new a new generation of the radical elements, which is died. And all these these policies has has impacted that situation in Afghanistan. At the same time, I think Afghanistan has also faced three different, four different peacemaking agreements. We have seen the Geneva agreement, we have seen the Peshawar Accord, we have seen the Bon Agreement, we have seen the Doha agreement. You know, all these different agreements that I think two things were very identical. One, it was it was more imposed from outside and it was for a specific giving interest of from the foreign countries. And secondly, there were elements from inside that our Afghan divided leaders were not able to size the opportunity and benefit and move the country to stability. So that was also a macro fact. So at the time when when there was a bit of convergence of the policies, it was the 2010 because in 2007, as Tamara mentioned that talking about peace efforts, talking about reconciliation, it was like a toggle because there was a difference views of the different departments in the U.S. In fact, that's why why the Afghan government was putting that that kind of participation. Maybe many, many colleagues will remember that since 2000, 2003, President Kazai and then followed with the President that they they have consistently pursuing that yes, there is a need for a political engagement with the Taliban. But until 2013, 2012, I think that idea was not very much, very much supportive, supportive. And that was why the Afghan government in the eye of the public in the eye of the Taliban was seen as as a strip from its legitimacy because they were saying that the Afghan government has no power to make a decision on the critical strategic issues like the PCMR issues. So for that reason, the Taliban was consistently focusing and in arguing that they want to negotiate with the American first and then with the rest of the Afghans.  And I think one of at the time of the Doha agreement, I think that the way the agreement was structured, the way the agreement was organized and the kind of a bumpy situation that we faced since 2019, 2012, 2020 and 2021. I think there was so much conflicting messaging. There was, there was a situation where the region was very much divided. There was a huge competition between the local power surrounding Afghanistan. There was all the policies were mostly based on the election time table. I think we will last the unique opportunity for peace in 2010 and 2012, 13, because when you want to achieve peace, every side of the peace talks or the negotiating side want to enter from a position of relatively strict or to reach to a situation of a stalemate where both sides can agree that there is no way other than they to agree on it in a joint act to achieve a kind of a win-win situation. And I think that was a situation. But during that period, mostly the military was supporting a low-level reconciliation or reintegration where in the absence of a political agreement that is not possible to achieve. So we lost that opportunity. 2014 and 15 was also an opportunity that was missed by the Taliban because by that time, when the Taliban was arguing that there should be a time table for the withdrawal of the foreign forces, there should be an office that they can operate and they should not be chased and they can engage with the international community. And I think that was a very specific point that the dramatic opening and closing of the office was really a missed opportunity. But at the same time, the Taliban, they had their office there and officially they were operating there, they were engaged with the international community. And they had the privileges in their families, which after the fight with the Taliban was shifted there and their families were relocated there. So I think there was an opportunity that draw down at 2014 could be conditional to enter a direct negotiation between the key side of the conflict. In the 2018, when there was also a sense that the peace process got a momentum, it became a priority. Before that, it was not a kind of, it was a kind of a half-priority. But it became a priority, but the priority was moving it to different direction. One was the priority for the Afghan people and one was the priority for the U.S. and allies. The priority for the U.S. was withdrawal and the priority for the Afghan people was to end the war responsibly in the same time to achieve a stability and so that all Afghans can live in peace with each other and become proud. And finally in this case continues the cycle of war in Afghanistan. But unfortunately the mistake that was done in 2001 by excluding the Taliban from the talks or engaging in the negotiation. In 2018, I think the Afghan government was sun-lineded and excluded from the talks. In the way the agreement was structured, the precondition, the timeline that was very difficult to be implemented. I think all of that has reduced the legitimacy of the Afghan government in the eye of the vision, in the eye of the public and more importantly in the eye of the Taliban. Because they know that the U.S. is leaving and they were knowing that there is a division among the political leaders. They were knowing that there is division in the region and there are more kind of forceful actions from the regional countries for the withdrawal. Although some countries were feared about the withdrawal and the fear of the returning of so many different network of radical violence, radical organizations that emerged over all these years and they were fighting alongside the Taliban and against the Taliban as well because the Daesh was becoming a kind of a common enemy for the Afghan people because of their brutality, because of their very new vision. So all these had a very direct impact and reduced kind of a situation where in terms of the key players were Pakistan who were supporting the Taliban, the U.S. who were supporting the Afghan government, the Afghan government in the Taliban. They were the key players in the conflict and actually they had to play their roles and they have to be made accountable. I think they are dissapointed that the international community, the U.S., the Afghan people, everybody was knowing, even the Taliban was knowing that Pakistan is playing a double game and they are not after the stability in Afghanistan. They are after their own goal to have a strategic dip in Afghanistan, to use Afghanistan as a backyard, and pushed in 2014 when they pushed all the tourists, the extremist group, into inside Afghanistan in conducting this operation in the north-south of Uzbekistan. That was not, they could do that in 2012, 2013 rather than to do it in 2014 when most of the U.S. forces left Afghanistan. To be short, I think I will better to respond to further questions. I can talk a lot about the different reasons why the peace talks were failed and the military failures as well. But in a short, I would say that it is the military that creates the condition or shape the environment for the politics to succeed.  So I think the disconnect between the military and the political approach, I think that was one of the issues that has a very negative impact. Thank you. And finally, okay. Now one more point, sorry, I thought you were done. Okay, I'm done. I can talk. I want to come back to you on several of these points, but I want to make sure that we can get all the views on the table. And let me just turn next to Dr. Sarabi. You know, I think one element of your work in Afghanistan, the positions that you've held is that you are in a position of working with and trying to protect the most vulnerable. And unfortunately that includes women who are the majority of the country but are particularly vulnerable right now. But also being from the center of the country, a marginalized region. And I want to ask you not only for your thoughts about the broad question on what were some of the key opportunities that were missed for achieving a political settlement, but also where are the voices of what we sometimes refer to as ordinary Afghans. You know, the victims of the war, the ones that Tamana mentioned earlier did not ask for this conflict. How did you see those voices, those views being represented in the process, either through the Afghan government or internationally? Hello, everyone. Which of you all? Hello, everyone and a warm Salam to all. Thank you very much, Scott. It's very crucial point and very important, the voice of women, voice of victim and voice of people. So this is very, all of them, they are very important. So actually the peace process when we started, it was everybody knows that it was on base of the U.S. Taliban agreement. So however, the High Peace Council established in 2010 and a few women were the member of the High Peace Council, but they didn't have the NF opportunity to go to the provincial level to talk with the people, which is very crucial. And after that in 2015, the High Peace Council for some times it was suspended because they didn't have the authority to work due to some political issue that came from the President Palace. So when the High Peace Council got the authority to do it, and we started to the range of consultation with the people out of Kabul in the rural area and the remote area and the provincial level. We had the range of consultation with them and even not the High Peace Council, but with our partner, one of our friends from NATO is here and we went together with some of the provinces. And when the negotiation team set up and announced, and after that we started to have a range of consultation with different group of people including women. But unfortunately the process when the process started was a kind of hurry up to do everything very quickly. So the peace process wanted to be a kind of quick fix. I think the peace process when of course there is one political peace at the top, but to have the voice of the people from the community, from the ground, from a stretch that it needs a lot of time. Peace process cannot be a kind of quick fix things. So we have to work gradually with the people that the social peace, the peace building that people are doing at the local level with the community, it's very important, the social peace. So Afghanistan is a war and turn country. Of course it was called post-conflict, but even during this 40 years we were at the middle of conflict. So with this war turned conflict, so we needed the social peace, the people that they could work with their neighbors, with their families starting from the families and going to the neighbors and community. And especially the women that they are the peace builder in the community, unfortunately they were forgotten. They were ignored to their very strong peace builder at the community level. So, but anyway, within the time that the negotiation team announced and we had to have our plan, to make our strategic plan and to beside that there were so many training programs, so many work that to be prepared for the negotiation. But we started to have the range of consultation. So something that which was missed at the middle, there were so many Track 2 program in Afghanistan, in different phase and with different organizations, civil society organization, women activists, women group, and even it was a kind of Track 2 initiative in the region among the different country. For example, I have been with some of them and I was a member of or participated in some of them, the Track 2 regional between Pakistan, India and Afghanistan. But unfortunately, those efforts or those vice that or those study and analysts that have done with Track 2, it was not heard by the policymaker with the government, which was very important and that analyzed and that assessed should be taken seriously by the government of Afghanistan. I mean, when the negotiation started, there was initiative by some of the organization, they call it inclusive mechanism for peace. They wanted to build a bridge between the people, the civil society, the women's groups and even the elder at the community level in different area with the negotiation team. But they have initiated some activity and some progress made. But at the end, even the civil society wanted to bring a group of women in Doha to have the site event with the Taliban. The Taliban was not ready to listen to the voice of people and voice of women and the Qatari government didn't issue the visa for them and that site event didn't happen. Similar to that, so many other initiative and activity ignored. And of course, four of us, we tried our best to be the voice of women and gradually we had communication via Zoom and different online meetings with the people inside the country. Thanks for that. You know, we talked a lot in the first session about the complications of U.S. politics. We're politically divided, we have our election cycles that can affect policy and of course, Afghanistan is no different. I want to ask you and then come back to you and assume, you know, as you say, peace processes take a long time. The High Peace Council initially was set up in 2010 or surely thereafter. But it seems that attention to a peace process on the part of the Afghan government, the Afghan people has ebbed and flowed. And there's also, of course, divisions along a number of political fronts on what should be the approach. I'm curious, you know, what's your comment on why there was not a more continuous effort from that initial opportunity and assume that you pointed out as well starting in 2010 to build the groundwork for a negotiation that would have positively culminated in some kind of talks with the Taliban in 2021? May our friends, international friends, think that we are always blaming others. But the peace and war in Afghanistan is not only the matter of Afghan people. It is the matter of the international community and the Afghan people. And so, so many times, Afghan people were telling that in Afghanistan, the war is a proxy war. And when the, I mean, people, when the poor family sending their children to Pakistani madrasa to get education or to go to the madrasa to get the extremist education and to get training. So how we can get a kind of expectation that this process can be stopped? So from one side, we gradually feeding the war or fueling the war. From the other side, we are taking some initiative to do some work on the peace process. So it was a kind of combination from both sides, from the international community and Afghan leaders. So one of the big problems was kind of lack of consensus on the peace definition. For example, there were so many talks about the reduction of violence. So what does it mean, reduction of violence without any measurement mechanism? So from the others, for example, we have been in different part of the country. Peace in the central part of Afghanistan and the south part of Afghanistan and the north part of Afghanistan was a little bit different. The women in the south wanted that just stop the war. And women in the central part of Afghanistan saying that we want education, we want higher education, we want the human rights and women's rights. And the north, of course, they were affected by warlordism. So they wanted to stop the warlordism against the, to abuse their rights. So it was, of course, among the international community and also the Afghan leaders, it was the same. There was not a kind of clear definition of peace. It was better that the policymaker and the peace builder and especially wanted to bring peace, to make a kind of common denominator from the peace, the definition of peace, that what does that mean? It's all together, of course, we have to listen for that, but to make it a joint effort or a joint definition for peace. And in this case, it could be, I mean, functional and it could be work. Thank you for that. And Miss Im, let me ask you to respond on the same question, the relative motivation for the Afghan government and the Afghan people to achieve peace over time. And could something have been done to make that a more consistent priority to build up to an ultimate negotiation? Thank you very much. This is a very good question. And I think as the U.S. was divided on the idea of the peace and war, there was also division within the Afghan political elite and also our civil society and people in the rural community. There was also differences in terms of whether we have to succeed through militarily or we have to engage to unlimited reconciliation efforts for surrender or we have a genuinely approach, approach consistently to a political settlement. I think as I mentioned before that, yes, there was the division, but there was also systematic efforts in order to pursue the part of political reconciliation. But there was caveats, there was also obstacle that prevented the Afghan government to use its full sovereign rights in order to be able to pursue that consistent approach for peace in political settlement. I think there are a few examples to clarify that. For instance, in 2010, when for the first time there was a convergence between the policies that the political, military and development initiative were converged between the Afghan government policies and the U.S. policies, but that was undermined because of the timeline for the immediate announcing the surge, but at the same time announcing the withdrawal and talking about low level reconciliation, but political settlement was made with so many conditions or precondition based. So that was one of the issues that undermined the result or the end result. Secondly, we were always focused both the U.S. and the Afghan government on the peace process, not the end state that how we can achieve collectively the end state and what step has to be taken. In the last 20 years, at least the Afghan senior leaders had 25 to 30 high level engagement with the Pakistan government in order to find a solution and overcome the problem. In the beginning, every time, in many of these meetings, I was present, whether with the President Karzai or with President Lenny or bilaterally with delegations. And every time they would argue that whether we have the same policy with the U.S., whether the U.S. is really committed to a political settlement and at the same time they had their own game to play. And it was, every time there was a promise that it was never delivered. Every time there was, when there was some progress, there was an incident happen and we would return to the square one. So there were spoilers and the management of the spoilers was not handled properly, I think both by the Afghan government and also by the U.S. as well. So I think those had very, very much impacted. And I think Afghanistan has been trapped into six different traps that has limited its ability. First, it was the trap of the conflict and poverty so that people can be recruited. The second was the trap of the not-picking drug and natural resources that fueled the conflict. And thirdly, it was the bad neighborhood in Afghanistan as a landlocked country. And fourth, I think a bad government's corruption and divided political elite also contributed to this trap. Violent extremism, and I think that trap will continue for maybe 40 years future because the way we have dealt with the violent extremism was by military action. We didn't have a political action because as I mentioned in 2010 when we were there was a shift from kill, capture and clear to a strategy, military strategy of clear hold and develop. But in both cases, it happened in that case when it was a shift to clear hold and develop that there was backing a political approach that how to reconcile or a political approach was not part of that doctrine. So, I mean, and finally, we also being in the center of competing global and regional powers because the rivalries of the region in the global power competition has put us in a very vulnerable situation because any effort by the government, any sovereign effort by the government was kind of rejected by another power in the region or beyond the region. And I think that was the reason why we were not able to succeed in our effort. Thank you. And that's a perfect segue to asking a question to Christian, who's been studying the regional environment and the regional attitudes toward the Afghan conflict for many years. You know, it occurs to me a few things. One, as I mentioned, the region doesn't have a choice of choosing their neighbor and Afghanistan has been a source of instability for the region for a long time, unfortunately. So, I believe that the region was looking at US intervention, perhaps hopefully coming on the heels of a disastrous Taliban rule in the 90s, but with their own security and stability in mind. They were also, I believe, looking at the positioning of the US, who said to Pakistan, you're with us, you're against us. But overall, this was something that a global power was really insisting on. And the dynamics between the region and the US and understanding what the US and Europe wanted to do were also present in their mind. And so my question for you is, how do you see the region relating the Afghan conflict, a political settlement, that would achieve their interests to their much broader and more interconnected goals? Thank you, Scott, and thank you for inviting me into this project of very interesting reflections on what's happened in Afghanistan over the past 20 years, and not the least why it was that, and despite the flurry of peace initiatives, we are where we are. And I'm humbled by being on this panel with people who have both lived the developments of those initiatives and lived with the consequences of their failure in a very different manner than what I have. Now, Masoom referred to the failed neighborhood, and that was the third of his six points towards the end of his intervention. And I do much prefer the term neighborhood to the term region, which you use, Scott, for reasons that I think will soon become evident. At the very outset, I think we see both in the US government and in the Afghan government, sort of a fundamental understanding of Afghanistan as a possible connector of a wide region. And that is certainly a possible scenario, both in 2001 and in 2021 or 2022. But back then and now, it still remains more of a future dream than a current reality. The alternative vision is really one of Afghanistan as a thing apart, connecting that to Afghanistan's origin as a buffer state between the British and the Russian empires back at the end of the 1800s. Sort of as an aggregator of tensions within each of the three regions that surround Afghanistan. South Asia is a region that is on the verge of open conflict, virtually at any given time, with various fluctuations. And the dominant logic, of course, is the tensions between India and Pakistan. And we heard a lot about Pakistan already, but I would argue that in order to understand Pakistan's involvement in Afghanistan, we certainly have to understand Pakistan's relationships to India. And that that is the key. We could look at the Gulf dynamic, which is in this 20-year period very, very interesting. And historically, that's been very much about the rivalry between Saudi Arabia and Iran for projecting influence in the Islamic world at large and in the Gulf region more specifically. And then, of course, we have this little drama towards the end of the 20-year period that we're talking about, where the Gulf Cooperation Council, the organization that was established to stand against Iran, suddenly became driven by internal conflicts in its own right. And then we could also talk about Central Asia, which of course is a very different region in which the countries became independent when the Cold War ended. Characterized by very different dynamic, five countries which have been ultimately poorly capable of building any sort of a regional cooperative mechanism. And in this, I believe, lies the answer to why it is that neighboring countries held back. They each pursued their own objectives. And these objectives were largely informed by security objectives within their respective regions. So perhaps they say by security threats within their respective regions. So whereas there were very attractive economic and social prospects there on the sky that they could have pursued, the immediate threat was existential. And that was what, to a large extent, informed their relationship also to Afghanistan. And of course, if you do want to foster a regional concert in support of Afghan stability or Afghan peace, then your fundamental analysis does matter. But then, and here comes the Qa'iit, and this is, it seems to me that the more I work on this, the more I read the primary documents, the more I talk to people who have been in the heat of the action, the more I wonder about how much those analytical distinctions matter. Because it does seem to me that the sort of contrasting perspectives on Afghanistan's place in the larger neighboring context haven't really been all that instrumental informing policies. Or to say it differently, it seems to me like by the end of the day, much of what's been done in relation to Afghanistan's neighbors over the past 20 years with an intention to contribute to Afghanistan's good hasn't really been based in a fundamental strategic analysis whatsoever. If we go back to the Bonn process, many have talked about that, and it's immediate aftermath. There was enormous enthusiasm about the fact that several of the neighbors had been instrumental in brokering a deal, which of course was positive, but also overshadowed the fact that there wasn't really a regional mechanism or a regional commitment that came out of Bonn. It was sort of presumed that that was not necessary. If we go to the 2010 turnaround in U.S. policy and by extension, of course, Afghan government policy as well, to pursue some sort of a settlement with the Taliban, then the policy of the day became AFPAC. And whereas the SRAP, the American SRAP in particular Holbrook and one of the staff members, Barney Rubin, is in the room, they were eager to pursue a genuine regional engagement, but that was quite quickly left by the wayside, and a strategy for the neighborhood morphed into primarily be about preventing Pakistan from undermining the project in Afghanistan. So then we get to 2018, and of course the quite dramatic turnaround with the appointment of Salma Khalilzad as the special representative under President Donald Trump. And that was sort of the onset of the last stage with a clear commitment in the U.S. to a process with the Taliban. And this process, there is considerable unease, I'd argue, amongst the neighbors, almost all of whom actually want the United States out, but then almost all of whom also worry about the consequences, not the least the immediate consequences. And if you zoom in on that particular moment when countries in the neighborhood were worried and the U.S. wanted out and the talks between the U.S. and the Taliban started, one conspicuous observation is that despite all the ad hoc forums that had been established from 2001 up to then, the Istanbul process, Heart of Asia, Silk Road, you mentioned them, all those ad hoc forums were then considered quite irrelevant. I don't think anybody involved in real policymaking even considered those as useful instruments in backing the peace process between the U.S. and the Taliban, or for that matter the intra-Afghan process that we're to follow. Neither did the existing regional organizations prove particularly useful. So what one was left with, so a larger extent, was pursuing good old-fashioned bilateral diplomacy with those countries that one supposed mattered the most. So ultimately, to get back to your question, it doesn't seem to me that the U.S. really, consistently over time, ever pursued a regional concert in support of Afghan peace. And then you also asked for the regional countries and their positions, why was it that they didn't see the potential for them in a peaceful Afghanistan? Was the risk worth the reward? Why didn't they seem to see that the reward up there was really something worth to expose themselves to risk in order to pursue? And I think the answer to that is quite simple. The obstacles to getting to that objective, attractive as it was, seemed to them at the moment to be insurmountable, so therefore minimizing the risk would be the wise thing to do. And we are where we are with an Afghanistan that is dominated by the Taliban, where the next-door neighbor Pakistan, who definitely has been supporting the Taliban extensively over all these years, have been absolutely instrumental in their ability to return to power, find themselves caught in exactly the same old structures that Pakistan found itself in with regard to other regimes in Afghanistan. The Taliban are not obeying orders from Islamabad once they are in power. And in many ways we are back to square one, and it's very, very hard to see from the current vantage point that Afghanistan would develop into a connector between its surrounding neighborly areas. Thank you for that. Let me move to Steve. Steve, you've published a report already which is on the USIP website about missed opportunities on peace. So my question is similar to that which I asked, I assume. Where do you see on your reflection the opportunities and why and how were they missed? I want to add to that, you know, as with so many of the aspects of the complexity of Afghan conflict, it seems that there are many necessary but in themselves insufficient ingredients for achieving an objective. And that's mostly true in the peace process. You were with the UN at the center of the international community with all member states contributing. I wonder if also you can reflect on how difficult it was, how close did we get to getting different regional elements aligned as part of the overall strategy to achieve something like a political settlement. Thanks, Scott, and thanks very much indeed for inviting me on this panel with old friends. I mean, I agree with basically the, as I identified by paper, that the main points that are also being covered by other people this morning and the panels, firstly, Bonn was obviously a missed opportunity. What Lakhdar Brahimi refers to as the original sin in not inviting the Taliban to Bonn, although they were disorganized, running away, still fighting, depending on which part of the country. I think that the 2010 onwards opportunity under the Obama administration was a positive opportunity, but the announcement of the withdrawal of troops happening within 18 months at the same time as the announcement of the surge undermined that strategic advantage that the surge should have given as Chris Glenda referred to in the first panel. I also felt, and it was just a view of an outsider, that that was one of the few times, if you like, where the American administration was all together on the same page and that through Ambassador Holbrooke's office and through Doug Loops, that they were trying to bring all aspects of U.S. policy and all U.S. departments into one line, but it didn't last long and didn't work. And then I think the other opportunity was in the negotiations when Ambassador Khulzad set out the stall and saying there are four things we're trying to achieve in a peace process and nothing has agreed until everything has agreed. And then at some point, and I've yet to find out who went how, that linkage between, if you like, the U.S. negotiations and a successful intra-Afghan negotiation was broken by the American government and they signed the Doha agreement with the Taliban, which was basically just the U.S. withdrawal, or this one, the U.S. ambassador put it to surrender. So they did that. And then with some of the clauses in the Doha agreement, they sent the Republic negotiating team into the ring with one hand tied behind their back. And then President Biden's announcement to the withdrawal cut the legs off the negotiated team as well. After that failure was inevitable. It was always going to be difficult, but I think those were the three opportunities where there was still a chance of American pressure or whatever. I think in the first opportunity in 2001 and also in 2010, it was particularly the American military who were difficult. As was referred to in the first panel, the mood in the United States and United States politics was certainly no peace with the terrorists in the immediate aftermath of 9-11 and that caused issues around Bond and President Karzai's outreach in 2002 and three. I think in 2010 there were still the antibodies, as people referred to earlier, who were against talking to the Taliban. But let's not forget President Karzai himself also helped scupper initiatives in 2010 by claiming through his National Security Advisor, Dr. Spalter, that they hadn't been kept at all informed of what was being discussed, et cetera. So both President Karzai and President Ghani scuppered various initiatives for peace, particularly for their own interests. So I think there were a number of missed opportunities. On the region, one point, the then SRSG, Fincaison and myself were summoned to General Headquarters in Uralpindi by the Chief of the Pakistani Army who gave us a meeting with no tea or coffee, very unusually, and he and his Director General of Military Operations played sort of bad cop and worse cop. And we got shouted at and we were told, the United Nations has no power except that, which is given it by member states, and don't forget that. Because what we had done, we had tried to broker a meeting between Masoum Stanakzai and Sheikh Mohammed Abbas Stanakzai in China. The Chinese had promptly told the Pakistanis, who were very upset that they weren't involved or consulted, and so they shouted at us and basically threw us out. And then in fact, they did, with the Chinese, have their own meeting in Arumchi and that led to the Murray peace process because of course the Pakistanis wanted it to be associated with Murray and Pakistan, not with China and Arumchi. So that was an initiative which the UN had tried and the UN was to get no credit, at least it tried to move forward. I think the region generally, as has been alluded to, there was no regional grouping. You know, at Bond, it was quite clear what the Americans said, you're either with us or against us. And so everybody, particularly Pakistan, who was being threatened with being bombed, you know, decided they were with them. And then the Iraq war, as Masoum has mentioned, led to a massive distraction in a number of ways on development, on everything. And Pakistan used that opportunity of the United States being less interested in Afghanistan to then help rearm and support the Taliban coming back in. So, you know, I think Pakistan has been a problem. I mean, clear from reading, you know, about the counts of 2010, 2011 in the White House, that, you know, the American administration at a high level and their intelligence agencies were well aware of all the support that Pakistan was giving to the Taliban, but nothing was ever done. And one senior State Department official ambassador said to me, you know, this is a case of, you know, rather than a carrot and stick approach to Pakistan, it was, do you want a bigger carrot or a smaller carrot? There was no stick, actually. So I think that was a problem. And then I think towards the end, I think 2010 was also an opportunity because, of course, Obama in 2010 tried to reset the relationship with Russia. We had, if you can remember this, there was a brief interlude when Putin was the president, when MFDF was the president, and you know, Putin and President Obama tried to reset the relations with Russia. And that might have been helpful. But relations with a number of the regional world powers were disintegrating, you know, the Iraq invasion had upset some people. And then obviously under President Trump with a policy of making America great again and maybe looking more inwardly, upsetting Iran, upsetting China, upsetting Russia, you know, people were not prepared to, you know, work with the United States. Even when, you know, you've implied it was sometimes in their best interest perhaps to do so. The Iranian special envoy said, well, you know, America is trying to play nicely in the back garden, but at the same time they've just kicked in our front door and killed the head of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Council. You know, you can't have it both ways. And I think Ambassador Khaled had to be fair tried to warn the region that America was determined to leave and that this would be their problem unless they became involved, but they didn't leave them, because they wouldn't have left, if you like, perhaps. I mean, they saw the strategic importance in their eyes, Iranians, Russians, Chinese, of American bases in Afghanistan. They wanted the Americans to leave, but on the other hand the American presence was helping keep a lid on terrorism, drugs and various things, so they also didn't want the Americans to leave. I think it was only when the Americans abandoned background in the middle of the night that, that's what the senior Russian said to me, that's the first time he realized they were genuine about leaving. I mean, to me, Moscow came up with the Russians, especially when Khabilov came up with the best grouping. You know, he came up with the five countries he thought could put pressure both on the Taliban and on the Republic, and that was Russia, China, America, Pakistan and Iran. So the Troika Plus Plus, as we call it, would have been the best grouping, but Iran wasn't prepared to join unless the United Nations were present and the Russians were prepared to have the United Nations present. So I think that was the potential grouping. Everybody else always wanted to be in the room. The Turks were pushing, pushing at various times, but there was not the regional support for a peace process and discussing what the end of a process might look like, which perhaps would be the logical starting point. Thanks very much for that. I've got follow-up questions, but I want to get audience questions in here as well, and we've got one that came from someone in the room that is to you, at least initially, but I'm really interested in all of your responses. Building on what you just said, the question is your report, the one that's on USIP, speaks to allied countries growing mistrust of the U.S. over time. The question is, were there parallel tracks or efforts that played during U.S. efforts? And what was their net impact? And then specifically a question, could you speak to the United Kingdom General Nick Carter stocks of Pakistan involving Ghani and his close aides? So I'm interested in your response, to bring this up to the group. I mean, we talked about trust and confidence building measures within an intra-Afghan context, but of course there are trust issues within the international and the regional context. So I wonder if others could comment on that after you, Steve. Yeah, certainly. I think that whereas Ambassador Kalilzad was a very good choice for making a deal between the United States and the Taliban, because he obviously understood the language and that's alongside, I think he was perhaps a less good choice for building confidence amongst allies and even, according to some, amongst his own team. Certainly with the Afghan government, the Republic government, he was a poor choice because a lot of them had deep suspicions from age-old rivalries or concerns about his biases. So I think, you know, he should not have been involved once the US deal was done because then all he wanted to do was keep his own US deal going. Every time somebody, some country, tried an initiative, another country would move in to try to spoil it. Christian referred to the Gulf Cooperation Council issues. So the idea that talks should happen elsewhere, that maybe talks should rotate, was one thing that was discussed. But the Qataris were incredibly opposed to the talks moving out of Qatar. They put a lot of time, effort, money into the talks, and that's true. And they didn't want the talks to move anywhere else. They pushed Pakistan out. They got very upset with the Germans and Uzbeks and Emiratis for having to speak with them. And the Turks wanted in. So a lot of people wanted in, but the Americans, at least to start with, were not prepared to let go. The Qataris are not prepared to let go. And other initiatives were unwelcome. It appeared to the United States who seemed to be wanting to dominate to get what they wanted done. I think towards the end, when it was quite clear that this was going to be a complete disaster, certainly there was an attempt to push things on to the United Nations for mediation and to hold meetings in Turkey and other places in order to push the disaster away from the United States. But actually the United Nations did not want to be involved and basically refused because they could see it wasn't going to work and they didn't want to be left holding the dying baby. And the Russian initiative never really got off the ground. The Troika++ I thought was a good concept, but it didn't really work. So there were no real rivals to the main negotiations at Doha. Christian, can I put the trust question to you in a regional context? I mean, both amongst the region, as you say, there are different regional security zones that are interrelated. There's issues of India, Pakistan, but then of course there's the fraught relation that many had with the U.S. How do you see that playing out in terms of the peace opportunity? Well, I think if you ask about trust in the region, the question would be about whether one can trust the adversary or the other parties within one region to do what they say one would do. And I mean, these are conflictual relationships to begin with. These are not countries whose leaders believe that the other state within their respective region wants them well. So do you trust in the other one to pursue objectives that are colliding with your own objectives? That would be the trust question that applies here. But I'm not sure it's fundamentally about trust. And when it comes to the U.S., I don't think it's first and foremost about trust either. Certainly, it's imaginable that a different negotiator would have been conducting his affairs, his or her affairs differently. There are structural issues at stake here and let me take one example. We talked about Pakistan a lot. I tried to place our understanding of Pakistan in the context of its relationship towards India. Now, the U.S. is a superpower and being a superpower sometimes means that you have competing interests. You basically have interests anywhere in the world. And over the 20-year period we are talking about here, we have seen in China rise from being a major regional power to being a global power. Now the U.S., of course, has been cognizant of that throughout. So if we zoom back to the period from 2005 to 2008, one of the things that the Bush administration pursued was an agreement with India over its nuclear program, bending everything in the international disarmament regime and bending arms of all allies to accept that bending to the extreme. And of course Pakistan observed that too, knowing very well that it also was a country who possessed nuclear arms without being a member of nonproliferation regime and knowing very well that it would never get the type of concessions that India got. That, of course, was a process that had an immediate impact on both India's and Pakistan's relationship to Afghanistan and not least their mutual relationship over Afghanistan. No, it was a priority and you can understand why a U.S. administration would want to prioritize its relationship with India in a situation where you have an emergent China that it sees as a possible future adversary. But I don't see much traces in the underlying analysis of a knowledgement that this would come at a major cost for the operations in Afghanistan. So trust, yes, but ultimately you can't invent trust if the conflict is structural and fundamental. Thanks. Let me get views from Habiba as well as Masoum on this general question. And I'm interested in the motivations and the views of the Afghan negotiating team, both of you and your colleagues toward the region. But also, of course, there were famously and very visibly contentious relations between the U.S. negotiator, Ambassador Khalilzad and President Ghani. So what was your observation on how that affected the actual work of structuring a settlement if it was possible? First to you, Habiba. Okay. Thank you. First, I think, of course, President Ghani was someone that wanted to grab the power and didn't want to share something. Even the factor of the administrative or the governance, it was something that he didn't like to delegate the authority to others. There were so many committees that wanted to run himself. This is one of the biggest problems among his administration and with his, we cannot say partner, allies, Dr. Abdullah, and he had the same problem. But from the other side that we know all the Afghan money people in Afghanistan knows that there was a kind of tension between Khalilzad and President Ghani from long time. So this tension made the situation difficult to agree upon to some conclusion or to some common sense on the peace process. So it was really a big issue. Of course, there was an advantage from Khalilzad that he could speak on the Taliban language, but it was not the only matter that there were so many other things. But from the other side, of course, there were a lot of suspicion inside the country among the Khalilzad and President and also some other people inside the country. To be honest, I have heard from the people, from the community that maybe Khalilzad is supporting Taliban or allies from Taliban on the ethnic point of view. So this is something that, of course, in a state to build the trust, it was a kind of mistrust between the people and the community and with the U.S. envoy and also between the U.S. envoy and the government. Of course, coming back to the issue of selecting or choosing Qatar as a place, it was really not a good idea to select or to choose Qatar as a place that negotiations should take place over there because first of all, all days the Taliban had their residents, their family, there were a lot of opportunity for them for their motivation and they had their business. Whenever they were, I mean, free from their business, they announced that, okay, after the evening prayer, we are coming for negotiation. So this is really, it was a mistake that to be chosen Qatar. And from the other side, Qatar is not a kind of, doesn't have an open society. For example, when the women activists in civil society wanted to come to Qatar and to have the side event to be engaged with the Taliban, Qatar's authority didn't issue the visa. So it means that they didn't want, even for the media, for them, they made a lot of restriction for them. These were another, I mean, mistake that have been taken. Thanks, Masoum. Let's get your views on this. And let me add an additional question because you've brought it up. You partly answered Sadiq's question from online, which is what was the logic of the U.S. or the Afghan government or international community in allowing the Taliban to establish the office in Doha? So you've partly answered your views on that. Masoum, can you address the issue that we've been talking about in terms of the role of trust played amongst allies on the same side, but also maybe about this issue on Taliban having an office in Doha? Thank you very much. I think it's a very good question. When you look to the formation of the different group in support of the peace, the peace support group, which was the Germany, Norway, US, Qatar, Uzbekistan and also Indonesia. I think these were the peace support group, but the key player was lacking from this peace support group. Also UN was also part of that, but these peace support group, they didn't have and they did not have any kind of coordinator who would be leading the efforts of the peace support group. The same thing was the initiative for the Troika Plus. Yes, they were the relevant, but when it come to the participation of India, Pakistan was against that and they said that what India is doing with Afghanistan. When it come to the issue of Iran, they were not ready to participate because the presence of the US and they were saying that under these meetings chaired by the United Nations, they were not ready to participate there and there was a Kabul-based format where the rest of the countries were participating. At the same time, the EU member countries were two contributors and at the same time a development contributor to Afghanistan. They were somehow sidelined from the direct negotiation during the US-Baliber negotiations and at the same time after the discussion was ongoing in relation to withdrawal. So I mean those were very much the contradiction and at the same time I agree with the professor that the policies of the countries toward each other has directly impacted the situation in Afghanistan. When there was a relation between India and Pakistan there is something has been done because the South Asia policy which