Welcome. I think we'll go ahead and get started. We have several more, I think, on their way in as well. But my name is Andrew Wilder. I'm the vice president here at USIP for the Center for Asian Studies. Many of you are familiar faces, know about USIP. For those of you who don't or are joining us by webcast, USIP was founded in 1984 as an independent national institution dedicated the proposition that peace is possible, practical, and also essential for our national security, as well as global security interests. We were founded in 1984 as an independent national institute with our mission to help prevent, mitigate, and resolve violent conflicts by working actively in conflict zones, but also by providing analysis, education, training to people working for peace. And so events like this today are very important in terms of this informing role of how to inform policy, important issues. Our Afghanistan program is one of our most active and oldest programs. We've been working there since 2002 and have an active program in country, running programs, but also, again, back here, convening discussions and dialogues and debates on important issues. Today's topic is a very important one, one near and dear to my heart. Before coming to USIP, I was up at Tufts University and led a two-year study, looking very closely at the issue of the relationship between aid and security in Afghanistan. My findings came to somewhat different conclusions in today's study, so I'm particularly interested in hearing the results of this study. I guess I just printed out an op-ed that I wrote in 2009 with the title, A Weapon System Based on Wishful Thinking, which was going to summarize some of my views on the CERT program in particular, but also some of the other programming being funded in Afghanistan at massive scales with the objective of promoting stabilization and security objectives. Other studies have also come out with very interesting findings subsequently, and I think that I'm really looking forward to an interesting and sort of robust discussion on today's study and findings. And so I think with that, I'll turn it over to my colleague, Scott Warden. Scott is our director of Afghanistan and Central Asia programs here at USIP, and he will moderate today's discussion and introduce the panelists, and with that, I'll turn it over to you, Scott. Great, thank you, Andrew, and welcome, everyone. I will just do some brief introductions of our panel and hand it over to them. Our aim, I see from the audience, a lot of people that have worked on this, both in the past and currently, and quite well-informed, and we hope to have a good discussion of the report, both among the panelists and with you all in the audience. So I will keep my remarks brief. To my immediate left is Ambassador Charles Reece, Vice President International at the Rand Corporation. He's also a senior fellow who has a research focus on economics and development. He's spent three decades in the US Diplomatic Service with the State Department, and it includes an assignment as the coordinator for economic transition in Iraq at the US Embassy in Baghdad. He also served as US Ambassador to Greece. He will frame the study, and then next will be Daniel Egel. He is an economist at the Rand Corporation and also a professor at the Pardee Rand Graduate School. His research focuses on the effectiveness of development and stability programs, looking at qualitative and quantitative approaches to analyze that. He has focused particularly on programs involving special operations forces, and he has spent time embedding with them and also with other military units in Afghanistan. To next is John Acre. He's the director of the Office of Civil Military Cooperation at USAID. He has directed the stabilization program at USAID Afghanistan, I think in 2010 and 11, as well as developing strategies for the Office of Foreign Disaster Assistance and the Democracy and Governance Office for USAID. And so has a lot of field experience, both implementing these programs, but also looking at the policy side. And finally, Renard Sexton is a doctoral candidate at NYU. He focuses on interventions to reduce violence. He has a forthcoming paper, which will show his relevance to the panel, aid as a tool against insurgency. He was in Afghanistan for field work on this study in the first half of 2012 and has written several other pieces on the issue of stabilization and development. So without further ado, let me hand it over to you, Ambassador. Thank you very much, Scott. Thank you, Andrew. We are really very impressed by the wide interest in this program and special thanks to USIP for hosting us today. We were honored. We look forward to a very good discussion given the range and depth of the expertise assembled in this room. Now unlike many other components of counterinsurgency, the Commander's Emergency Response Fund program or CERP didn't emerge from careful study or policy development processes. As we describe in our book, CERP actually had its origin in the serendipitous discovery by one of the first units in Baghdad of some $900 million in cash. It had been stashed by one of Saddam Hussein's lieutenants in a bricked up shed behind a villa in Little Venice, the Little Venice section of Baghdad. A part of these funds, about $180 million at all, were made immediately available by Five Corps as a Commander's Discretionary Fund to be used by commanders to conduct reconstruction assistance in their areas of operation. The program was soon renamed CERP and considered by commanders to be so useful that the seized funds were supplemented in November of 2003 with appropriated funds. In all, in over 13 years, almost $8 billion was dedicated to CERP programs in Iraq and Afghanistan. Program guidance evolved over the history of the program but compared with many other assistance programs, authorized uses of CERP were really quite broad, ranging from damage repair and condolence payments to school and well construction. Often two units operating in the same area would use CERP funds in sharply different ways. We were asked by the Secretary of Defense's Office of Cost Assessment and Program Evaluation and the Office of Policy to take a careful look at the impact of CERP as used in the field in Afghanistan. It of course had been studied by others as Andrew mentioned with special emphasis on oversight, execution and effectiveness. Now given the range of uses for CERP in the field, we thought it would be important to understand first what the tactical operators, the military officers in the field that were undertaking the projects thought they were using it for and what their theory of change might be and what they thought of the program's impact. We then planned to compare these insights with quantitative data on the changes on the ground that may have resulted from the program. With the help of the Pentagon and the services, we were able to interview nearly 200 soldiers that had had direct experience in implementing CERP projects in a three year period in Afghanistan. We didn't cover Iraq because it had been too long since we had withdrawn our forces from Iraq and we thought that the memories would be too scant. This was not a random survey. The interviewees volunteered to discuss CERP and had headquarters approval to talk to us. The findings therefore may not be representative of the qualitative part of the survey. In our survey, we asked each respondent to describe in detail one CERP project that they considered successful, one that they considered not successful and one project that they considered interesting, whether successful or not. We were able to match the interviewees' recollections to projects in the database so we were able to have detailed locational information on each project described. From the interviews, we learned that implementers had actually very diverse objectives and varying experiences with CERP. It seemed to us that the softer outcomes like local rapport were more important to them than project completion and development impact. They had a number of implementation challenges relating to paperwork, moving money in a combat zone and other combat circumstances that affected project success. Implementers considered more training was needed and lamented the difficulty of in turning over CERP projects and relationships between rapidly rotating units in the field. In general, they thought smaller projects were more likely to achieve their objectives than larger projects. With due regard to our sample limitations, a majority of respondents, including 90 of the Army interviewees, 80%, 90% of the Army interviewees, 80% of the SOF interviewees and 60% of the Marine interviewees thought that it had a positive overall view towards CERP and its value in supporting operations. And in most cases, those who thought that CERP was ineffective thought it could be a useful tool if it used appropriately and almost every respondent thought that improvements could be made. So at this point, let me turn it over to Daniel Eagle to describe how we perform the quantitative analysis and our overall results and conclusions.  So if you want to make your way up, please do so. Good morning, I have some slides that will hopefully appear here momentarily. And I apologize for turning your head to the left. I want to show you very briefly how our quantitative approach worked because it's an innovative part of our study and it was based on some support from CERP office, a lot of the folks here in the audience. We're just gonna illustrate very briefly using Helmand Kandahar, a scenario that's very familiar to most of the people in this room. It also had a lot of CERP activity. So focusing on just this area, Helmand Kandahar, what we did and what's a little bit different, again, our focus is tactical. We want to understand from the tactical level is CERP working. And so we look within districts and we're looking at the amount of CERP activity in each little, and we break up Afghanistan into square kilometer grids. And so we're gonna look within districts, looking at little areas that had lots of CERP projects to places without CERP projects. So this is for this part of Helmand and Kandahar. These are the number of CERP projects per square kilometer. We're then gonna link that to a variety of quantitative outcome data because we wanna make sure that we have the best quantitative, objective, defensible evidence here. This particular data, this is just illustrative. This is a measure of changes in economic activity that you can measure from satellites. This is night illumination. This is the amount of illumination at approximately 7 to 9 p.m. Changes this over time. So we look at how much CERP activity and then how much change in economic activity. And we do that within districts because we understand that units were deployed at the district level. There's local officials at the district level that can mediate both CERP and the military environment. So we're gonna look very locally. Okay and we look, so we break up and I'll shift. So that was our methodology. I wanna shift in terms of talking about what our key results are from the quantitative research. We break up the quantitative research into two parts. The first are what we call population focused outcomes. I show you one which was change in night lights which we use as an overall change in economic activity. We use change in population. This is where people are moving. So the idea that people are gonna migrate to places where there's improvements in conditions and then changes in vegetation which is a proxy for agricultural activity. And so the key, the first key finding from our study is that CERP is associated with improvements in all of these factors over a four year period. So we see improvements in night lights so increases in economic activity. We see people migrating to places where CERP is being spent. So that's our first key finding is that CERP is associated with improvements in population focused outcomes. The second part of our analysis looks at what we call coalition focused outcomes. These are CIGACs and I apologize for folks that are not familiar with Afghanistan. CIGACs is significant activities. It's a measure of the number of enemy engagements between coalition forces and believed to be enemy forces. So that's the number of military engagements and vehicular speed by U.S. military vehicles. So how quickly can they drive along major roads when you can think sort of IED threats over all security environment and then also our intelligence reporting. So I should be explicit that CERP could not be used in a quick pro quo relationship for intelligence. That said, one of the things from our qualitative research was a lot of folks said as they built that local rapport they would often get information on where enemy locations were where there might be a cache of local weapons. So we look at these three measures and again what we find is that CERP is associated with enhanced coalition focused outcomes. More intelligence activity. People drove faster along roads which again we sort of improvements in security environments and long-term reductions in enemy engagements. So those are two key findings. And then we'll move away from these slides. We come away with four recommendations. So there's sort of this at the back end of this research there's a general observation that CERP will be used again in some form. And so what we try to do is provide recommendations for what that might look like. The first is that CERP should be small dollar value. CERP range as Charlie said from projects that were $300 up to projects that were in the million dollar range. Both the quantitative and the qualitative research show that smaller projects are better. So limiting the dollar amount has to be an important thing for the next part of CERP. Second thing is that the transition process across units is very, very weak. And so there needs to be a built-in structure for one unit to transition the project. When you have a nine month deployment on the ground or even a six month as in recent time six month deployment on the ground there needs to be a process for transferring that. That was very weak. You need to provide training. You need to provide training that is appropriate and useful. One of the things we heard from almost all of our respondents is they had no training. So some guys did a very good job but it was because of them not because of their training. I mean the last thing which is the reason we're here today at least in my mind is across the board folks thought that a stronger relationship with USAID was imperative. USAID needs to be involved in project design, project oversight and the whole process. I mean we saw a lot of the good news stories in terms of CERP being used effectively was where those partnerships were very strong. And I'll close there. Okay, thank you and thank you for having me. If you were expecting Stephen Lennon he had a bit of an emergency last night and he assured me everything's okay. On the good side I'm better looking than he is. On the bad side he's a pretty smart fellow and I'll try to contribute to the conversation best I can. Stephen is the director of OTI. I'm the director of the office of civilian military cooperation where sister offices within the age bureau of democracy, conflict, humanitarian assistance. Some context that hopefully can contribute to the discussion. I was on the original Iraq DART team in 2003. DART is disaster assistance response team. We have been planning for a humanitarian disaster in Iraq for quite a long time. The DART went in early. We were based in Hela and experienced pretty much at real time the discovery of all these cash, container, suitcases, lockers and the understanding of what to do with those and what not to do with those and that was the precursor of SERP. And then we remained and we were there when SERP started happening. And I think the key point of that time in 2003 was the E in SERP, emergency. The DART was there and we did a lot of work and we did a lot of reporting and assessments but there was not a humanitarian crisis after the initial months of the liberation of Iraq. And so the DART kind of turned into an OTI program, Office of Transition Initiatives which was more of a stabilizing type program. And as Daniel, was it Daniel? Yes, just mentioned, thank you that. I think the OTI SME piece to advise and be a part of SERP spending was a big part of some of the success in the early days when they were trying to figure out what to do before long-term development could take hold and sustainable development programs could be designed and implemented. Then you jump forward to 2010, 2011, I was the director of the Office of Stabilization in Kabul during pretty much the height of the search. We had at that time a portfolio just in that office of a total of $1.6 billion in stabilization activities over years span periods of time and contract length. So we had sufficient funding and we also had SERP. But we had structures, we had PRTs, we had DSTs, we had FOPs in which we were embedded in the concept of having that SME with the SERP spenders and with available stabilization design programs, I think was a fairly well-grounded theory and concept and it worked in some places, it did not work in others. Some of the lessons learned, I think, from the OTI perspective that we can take away to perhaps feed into future SERP-like activities. Again, I'll mention this, SMEs, subject matter experts, whether they be long-term development folks who understand health, education, livelihoods, et cetera, or if it's in a phase of activity that is not quite sustainable or the environment is not quite capable of handling long-term civilians where you have perhaps the OTI local grant activities, at least an OTI type person or a civilian expert who can help guide the design and the management of SERP funds. Secondly, I would concur the larger SERP programs, I think were sometimes unwieldy and I think you can certainly criticize them for not having the appropriate accountability and measurement and monitoring and evaluation of the impact of that. So short, shorter term, lesser dollar values, I think would probably be something to look at. And then finally, I think a strong recommendation from the OTI perspective that perhaps Steven would agree with is that when it did work in particularly in Kandahar and Hellman where you had the ability with cash to start something, to initiate an activity with the understanding that a follow-up was right behind you, perhaps with an OTI activity, a grant with a local NGO or organization so you could start the fire, if I may, start the activity with SERP, bring in the OTI program designed to follow that up and establish a better networks, better relationship with the community, longer standing connections with perhaps a local or even provisional or district government and then follow that perhaps with additional SERP monies to keep it going to expand it and then again follow with an additional OTI grant to perhaps do what we used to call leopard spotting which was create success in one community and spread that to following communities using that as a case study and as an example of how it might work for a different place. And so I've read Alan's stuff we've been on panels before and I think that the answers are not quite there yet. Stabilization is now a term that's risen its head again within the community, within OSD, within state, at DOD and within USAID and we're trying to determine what that means outside of the Iraq and the Afghanistan context. So this type of study is welcomed. We're not quite there yet, we don't have all the answers but it certainly can be a tool if you use it correctly, if you are trained and if the political will particularly of the government or at least local leaders are there with you to work with you as a partner. Thank you. Thanks a lot for having me here. I think I bring a little bit of more the outside perspective perhaps. So I did spend about seven months doing field research on this topic in 2012 and 2013 but I've never implemented a cert project and so definitely can comment less on the sort of operational elements of coordination and things. Obviously the authors should be commended, this is a great contribution and the sort of short comments that we're making here don't necessarily do justice to the full document which I think is really worth reading. With regard to the quantitative parts, I'm happy to in the Q and A talk about some of the decisions that they made in terms of how to carry out the assessment and I'm happy to talk about that from a more econometric perspective if anybody's interested in that but my guess is that we're more of a policy crowd here so I'll focus on that. So I'd like to give three main comments and they kind of stem from the, I think what I've heard is kind of the takeaway message here which is that CERP works in some places and not others and try and talk a little bit about how to interpret what the authors here have found within the context of the larger literature on the broader research that's been done on this topic and so there's two pieces to this. One is how do we interpret what we find here and how does it generalize to the other cases we may encounter in the world because we're not gonna be fighting the same war again and we're not going to be doing the same thing over again and I think so the first point I wanted to make on this is to understand a bit more about the strategic context and one of the really great contributions that this report has done is to talk to implementers and learn from them how they perceived CERP projects themselves so whether it was success, whether it was a failure and so on but I think one of the key things that often gets lost in some of the when you get into the nitty gritty is the sort of larger strategic context and so I'll talk about that very briefly. Insurgents are very smart, they're strategic actors, they respond to incentives just like anyone does and as a result they're sometimes our perverse responses to what otherwise seems like a really positive intervention and so when you carry out a program that's intended to undermine the position of an insurgent organization they should be expected to resist such a program and not just let it go forward and a set of results from Afghanistan, from the Philippines, from other places including historical work from Algeria, Vietnam and other counterinsurgency environments has shown that when you do hearts and minds work, when you do local level development where they have the capability insurgents will actually using violent and nonviolent means attack projects and undermine projects and so I wanted to flag kind of two important results, one from the Philippines and one from Afghanistan I'll just plug my own who work here that suggests that in controlled areas that is places that are controlled by in this case coalition forces but pro-government forces you do find these kind of stabilization projects reducing violence and improving other outcomes that we care about like economic development but when these kinds of projects are carried out in places that are contested that is places where there is not preexisting control from coalition forces we actually see increases in violence and that's something that is new to this literature in the sense that in the work in the past on Serpent Iraq we hadn't seen that and so I think the key takeaway message there is that it appears that Serp indeed works when there is preexisting control from US military forces both from a perspective of force protection reducing attacks against coalition forces but also by use independent data that looks at violence by insurgents against Afghan targets and we find a similar effect so the important thing on that is that within Afghanistan at least in my own work about 60% of Serp completed Serp projects were carried out in contested areas whereas 40% were carried out in controlled areas and what that means is that a majority were actually carried out in these places in which Serp projects were sort of ahead of pro-government control thus attracting violence and potentially having these perverse incentives so that means even if a project was successful from the perspective of completing its objectives insurgents responding very strategically to that incursion if you will respond with violence and then finally I wanted to just mention that a key next step I think to this research is really understanding the mechanisms by which we think this stabilization spending works and there have been a number of different proposed mechanisms and I think the authors here have done a nice job of trying to both lay them out in a sort of theoretical context and start to kind of dig into them but it's a question of whether locals are informing whether there's actual changes in terms of hearts and minds whether there's economic growth beyond just you do spending and by nature there's economic activity but instead whether increased security then fosters investment and sort of higher discount rates in terms of risk and I think that that's a really important element to where it is that we think that this kind of spending will work so I'll stop there and say just reiterate kind of the three points first is understanding that strategic context that it's not just coalition forces that are deciding what to do but also that insurgents are gonna respond strategically attack the places that are weak attack the projects that are more vulnerable and that puts bounds on where where we think it will work and where we think it won't work and we should think really carefully about going forward where you know, so spending should be done and then finally let's think really serious about the mechanisms going forward where and indeed collect evidence about which of those mechanisms is functioning in these different contexts. So thanks a lot. Well, fantastic. Thank you all both for incisive comments and also no moderator duties in terms of keeping time. This is a very concise panel. We're afraid. It worked. So we'll open up to questions. We have the privilege of an hour for a question and answer discussion. I wanna take the moderator's prerogative and ask one question to begin that'll give people time to think about their questions but I also wanna establish some ground rules. We have microphones up at the front. We have mic runners. So please while they're answering my question you know and throughout raise your hand I will call on you. I think I'm expecting there will be a lot of questions. So let me take two or three at a time and then give the panelists a chance to respond. Please do you wait for the microphone because this is being recorded and please identify yourself for your affiliation before you ask the question. With that said, one of the things that I think from emails when we sent out the announcement this is a hot topic for people to follow Afghanistan and stabilization more generally and there are controversial views on this or the issue is controversial. I think one of the things that the report does very well is defines the parameters of your study. And I think SERP and stabilization become catchwords for a larger set of issues in how do we do post-conflict work and stabilization and development. And you've I think in the report and here described what SERP is. I should also point out the report says what it is not. SERP is not a development program as it was designed and understood if you agree. And so and you've also highlighted the need for it to be handed over to other entities to do more longer term, more sustainable, more institution building work. That all leads me to the question which you highlight is kind of further research in the summary which is that there should be a study on kind of the whole of government approach. How does SERP and DODs work with SERP fit into the larger context? I'm just wondering do you have any thoughts even though that wasn't a direct object of the study in terms of how you see this fitting into that larger question of what are all the pieces of U.S. government agencies of U.S. national power that need to complement this in order to sustain the positive effects that you saw? Shall I start? Well, I mean that's good questions, Scott. And certainly that's an area of inquiry that we do need to work on. I don't think we totally understand it. I think what I tried to stress in my opening comments is that SERP wasn't designed as part of a suite of programs as part of an integrated strategy. It was forces ran into more problems than they expected. There was this big pile of money. Maybe if we gave the commanders some money they could use it to ease their transition into communities and that that would be a good thing. And by the time I got to Baghdad the SERP had become a big enterprise but we also had a very large civilian assistance program actually two civilian assistance programs, the original Iraq Stabilization Fund and then a USAID program that came in a major way in 2006. We had major coordination problems and challenges kind of on the civilian side and then between the civilian and the military and clearly anybody I think that has served in a war zone would feel that a better interaction between all the players that are doing comparable things is useful. And we need to understand better how to make that happen when you have these different colors of money, flavors of money, implementers, expertise and so forth. One point I'd just like to add on Reynard's point I think you're quite right that to the extent that we can see SERP does work better in controlled areas than contested areas and we heard that in the interview and the qualitative interview is very clearly. It is important though to understand that a significant use of SERP in contested areas was related to the security situation. It was they were condolence payments and there was damage repair. And those kind of go with hot combat situations. And certainly from the standpoint of forces and the acceptability of the forces, a force that is able to quickly make repairs is a force that actually even encounter insurgency where the insurgents are smart and responsive has a tool that they wouldn't have had else wise and didn't have in other conflicts. But so Scott, I would say 100% I'm with you on we need more research and we need particularly more research on sort of whole government approaches to the whole sort of, if you will, non-violent or non-kinetic aspects of counterinsurgency and how it works together and what are best practices for managing it. So Scott, if you will, just I want three very brief anecdotes on that. On the whole of government, number one, I think when CERP was really, really effective was when we achieved whole government in Afghanistan which was rare, but a particular anecdote was sort of West that had USCID people sitting right next to the battalion commander. They thought it was wonderful. It was a great relationship. I think that that was success. That was very rare, very rare. The second thing, and this speaks to Reynard's point, CERP was sometimes used in support of direct action style missions, counterterrorism missions. One thing we heard from lots of folks is it does not work there. Whether it's contests or not, I don't think our research can speak to it, but one thing folks said is you need to have Americans on the ground in some capacity to benefit from CERP. So you can't just show up, spend some money and disappear. You need to have a persistent presence. So that's number two. The third is that Reynard, so this is through me and a variety of colleagues, we've put out several proposals about whole government because I think that this is actually the next stage and I'll do a little plug. I have a joint proposal out with General Cleveland, who's the retired USISAC commander, who came out of USISAC and said that this is exactly the challenge I faced, was I was not having whole government success as we think about the new problems of the 21st century, the problems in Eastern Europe, the problems elsewhere, we need to move this forward. So I certainly look forward to have that conversation. There's other folks that are interested in pushing that forward. I think that's where we need to be. Okay, let me start in the front row, let me call on. I'll give Andrew the privilege and then next to him and then I'll go further. Yeah, Andrew Wilder again from USIP.  But again, congratulations, it really is good. I have to say, I've only still read the executive summary, but that was brilliant and very interesting. And just a few comments. I absolutely, I mean, what your findings did resonate with mine in terms of, again, less money, less is more. And that the smaller amounts of money tended to achieve the effect of what you described as that softer building a relationship or rapport effect. And so I think that was one of my findings. I guess my question is though, the rapport was often built with the local power brokers which was part of the intent was to form a relationship with the local influentials, who unfortunately often proved to be incredibly corrupt and predatory actors. And so I guess one of my questions is the short, by focusing on a short-term tactical, I mean, in theory, tactical is meant to link up achieving some of your strategic objectives. And so absolutely there were examples of where this bought a relationship basically in terms of essentially a bribe to get some intel, even if it wasn't formally intended for that, or some short-term benefits. But the vast amounts of money not just from cert, but through other programs as well, put into these insecure areas with the weak institutions, fueled the corruption that delegitimized the government that perhaps fueled the insurgency. And so whether the short-term, even tactical successes undermined the longer-term strategic effect. And then I guess the other question is by only talking to the implementers, which I think is the interesting aspect of this study because I think that's many of us who did work and often talked more onto the Afghans, but I think you risk getting one side of the story. It's like, who wouldn't want the slush fund essentially, where you can spend money often with not high amounts of accountability? And although I know they were complaining about it being bureaucratic, there was a lot less bureaucratic than other sources of funding. And so as an implementer, I would have also loved to have that kind of money at my disposal to send. But I think without talking to Afghans who actually knew the political context and cultural context, again, no, again, those kind of effects, was it indeed achieving some of these tactical benefits, I think would be the second question I'd have. So I'll leave it at that. Thank you. Hi, Doug Brooks with the Afghan American Chamber of Commerce, also the International Stability Operations Association. I think this question's for Dr. Sexton, but anybody can answer it. I guess the question is whether you all mentioned that security was important to make CERP more successful. Has a comparison been made to places where it's just had security as opposed to security plus CERP to see if there's a significant difference? And there's an example I might offer that you would find interesting, which would be Mozambique during its civil war where security was provided along the power lines going to South Africa by GERCAs, and those power lines became areas of economic growth. And that's without any CERP program or anything else to simply because there was security, there was a lot of growth. And so I'd just be curious if there's been a comparison made. So thank you, but fascinating discussion. Let's take those two here and then I'll go. Let me answer very quickly. I mean, I certainly agree with Andrew's point about corruption and we heard this from the implementers too. The implementers were upset at corruption and one of the reasons that they talked about smaller being better is that it was less corrupt. And I think from our standpoint, what seemed to come out and implementers themselves said, we need better training. We need training to understand the impact, the things that can go wrong. They didn't have really the, you had a young captain or major who sort of gets an area of operations and $100,000 of CERP money to spend. He doesn't necessarily start with the idea. I have to understand if I support Abdul what Muhammad's gonna think. And so part of it is training, role-playing and all those other kinds of things would improve things. Part of it is radically reducing the amount of money, top line that they can do. And of course, insurgents like anyone going into combat any time always wants all the tools they can possibly have. But I would also point out that the insurgents have money too. The insurgents actually have a lot of money because we're talking about narcotics regions and they use it as well. And if we were to operate in a circumstance where you didn't have money to make a condolence payment and the bad guys did, that would be actually make the counterinsurgency somewhat more difficult. Mr. Brooks's comments, I mean, my time in Baghdad, General Pacheas always would tell me that we're doing this big whole government thing and economics is really important way of winning the surge, et cetera, et cetera. And so he viewed economics as a way to improve security. And I always pushed back against them. I said, General Pacheas, the best way to improve the economy of Iraq is security. That in village after city we have seen when security comes, regardless of anything else we do, the markets restart, the stuff happens, people start improving things. And I completely agree with that as a proposition and anybody involved in economic development in a counterinsurgency knows that security is the most important precondition for economic growth and development. And that's why, as Daniel interprets, as we interpreted the quantitative data, we can't disentangle, sir, from the other impact of coalition forces. So if coalition forces are somewhere, we are seeing enhanced economic growth and activity and people moving in there. But we can't, the data just won't let us at a quantitative side determine what the marginal impact of SERP is in that. And the evidence is places where coalition forces are, there is economic growth. Places where coalitions forces are plus SERP, we think we see a little bit more, but it's very, very marginal. Okay, so two, John, one, as Charlie indicated, the issue of corruption was highlighted across the interviews. And you saw in Afghanistan some brigade commanders towards the end of the conflict pushing back at the amount of money they received. And it was very controversial. One of the CG sort of commander said, I don't want more. And I think it was more than five million because they were pushing 50 million, 100 million on the brigade commanders. So there was a recognition from their perspective, from the tactical perspective, it was coming from Washington. It was coming from the four stars, coming from the co-com commanders. But again, so this is where we think less is more. It's less is more, not just at the unit level, but at the program level. And in terms of, did they like SERP? I think if you asked me, I said in probably, we did 197 interviews, I participate in probably 75. Almost every interview I sat in on, the first thing that someone said when we explained we were here to do SERP, they had an expletive followed by the word SERP because they did not remember it fondly. They did not remember the joy that was spending money. These are military officers.  There was an expectation from the four star, from the two star, from their brigade commanders. So I think it's an interesting question. I don't know the answer to that. The one, and speaking to your question, we try to look, we have in our data, the amount of time the coalition forces are in an area. And we find more coalition forces is more economic activity. So we have some evidence suggestive of that. But as Charlie indicated, the thing that we can't separate out, we don't know the coalition force guys that were really coin focused, they really got it. They really got the right training. So we don't, that part's a little bit difficult to disentangle. We're not able to be able to speak to it I think in other context. Yeah, I mean, just to briefly, sorry, we're jumping over you. Just on the specific question of the relationship between security and economic development. I mean, at a theoretical level, it's clear that people don't make investments when there's not security. And that's the number one precursor to actually having economic growth. From a empirical perspective, it's actually very difficult to look at the relationship between security and economic growth because forces tend to be based in more urban areas. You're gonna tend to see more economic growth in those areas. I didn't have the pleasure of having the blue forces tracker. And so it was using a much less fine grain measure, but I didn't find an independent relationship in that way. But again, that's probably because it's both confounded and difficult to measure. I just wanted to mention one other point related to what Ambassador Rios mentioned earlier, regarding the contested areas. I think we're very much in agreement. I found that humanitarian and condolence payments in contested areas was the one type of projects that did not increase violence, but instead it was the other kinds of projects. So you're more infrastructure, you're more sort of longer term projects in these contested areas. So I think that's an important thing. Just quickly on the corruption piece, what Andrew talked about and what might be added to that is the question of what comes after. I think in any future SERP thinking, the design has to be in place before the commitment of funds. In Iraq, there were times, and I was there at the table where the commander would ask me the question. I'm about to run out of money, which I've been using for the last month to pay salaries for X, Y, and Z. And I don't have a solution, and I didn't have the money to do that either. And they could see what was coming if those commander's funds disappeared. In Afghanistan, again, we had a much more structured system to use it to our benefits. Even stabilization was cut short, in my opinion. Like I said, we had a lot of money. In 2010, that year, the StabU office had over $500 million of activities. And in one word, that went down to about $236 million, and the word was transition. And when the administration said we're leaving, and the word got out, it was, I think, June or July of 2014, that date created a panic among the Afghanistan implementing partners too. And so then the concept was, get what you can take. Grab everything because the money's leaving. Get what you can take. And so, again, what comes after that? What is designed? What's in place? What is promised or not promised is really key to the impact, whether it be negative or positive, on the initial investment in a SERP activity. Thanks. I saw a cluster of hands here. I'm gonna take a group of three. So, Dan in the front row, second, number one. Hi, Dan Weglund. I'm with Cigar. This question is for Dr. Eggl. So building on Reynard's question about mechanisms, and given that you've worked now both on the SERP and on the USAID side, I guess one of the things that I was left wanting from the report was you lay out a lot of different theories of change, which would have different causal pathways and different points to observe, but that wasn't really explained. And I was wondering if maybe that was contained in the interviews or if you have some hints now of what type of performance indicators that would manifest along these causal pathways that allow you to not only train people, but observe in the moment, whether it's training the right direction or not, given these various theories of change. Thank you. And then behind Dan on the end. My name is Serge. I was working and living in Afghanistan and Iraq and a little bit in Somalia during the last five years. My question is, before this I was a member of, I was leading a community and humanitarian assistance program which was funded by state and USAID 50-50. It was designed to help former Soviet Union countries after the collapse of Soviet Union. So my question is, and it was very, very successful. So we have a ratio of one to 25 budget. For example, we spent one million budget, but we deliver 25 million of assets to the former Soviet Union in order to calm down the situation. So my question is, does anybody actually learn this program and take some good goods from this program and try to replicate it in Afghanistan? Because I know that it would work. Because for example, we were delivering access, military access property from a military basis, mostly in Germany from around the world. And it was a great impact when you show people, okay, you know, see this property was stored in order to use against you. Now we distribute it to you. And it was a great feature to prove the trust from the recipients, from beneficiaries. So that's my question is, anybody looked into these programs, I mean, not just this one, but any other programs? Thank you. And it was civil military, because it was like linked to Department of Defense and Humanitarian Assistance Program, Department of Defense was involved also. Thank you. And the gentleman on the ends. Hi, yeah. Hi, I'm Will Embry from Dyncorp International, but I have a background in peacekeeping and DDR. On the ground, Afghanistan, the three major agencies have different goals, you know, the DOD is trying to stop fighting, AIDS trying to do development and stabilization and stays trying to preserve a relationship with the folks on the ground. But I'm really interested if you talk a little bit about the things going in Washington, in my own view, the whole of government approaches is aspirational and there are the authorities and the goals of each of the agencies in Washington differs. And that's what's driving the difference of approaches in the field. I'd be interested to hear about sort of the view of the interagency in Washington. I can try to address that a little bit. In fact, the effort within AID, particularly on the sieve mail piece, which we finally refer to as the 3D's Development Defense Diplomacy is reactivated. It is alive. Recently, the aid administrator Gail Smith met with the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff a couple of weeks ago, discussing the importance of this relationship, the sieve mail relationship. We are working with OSD, state, CSO and DOD on a joint stabilization document, which we can all kind of agree to for moving forward in the future on the definition of stabilization. What does that mean? What does that mean for DOD? What does that mean for state? What does that mean for USAID? We don't have those answers yet. Again, the word has come back up. It was a dirty word for a while, as were my words, that's my opinion, and it kind of went away. It's back because there's still a gap. There is still a gap in a lot of these countries where we do not have active kinetic US military activities, yet these states are vulnerable, they're at high risk, they're at high risk for conflict. The term gray zones is now being thrown about about what do we do when we have a gap between a humanitarian assistance response or a humanitarian complex crisis and what's next? And that's the question that this word stabilization is now starting to fill in. And so at least on that piece, in terms of the whole of government, interagency, 3Ds, however you wanna define it, I think the realization, whether it be from lessons learned in Iraq or Afghanistan or just the current global nature of trans-regional threats that have impacts, longstanding aid programs or longstanding diplomacy efforts is very apparent, and I think just by the force of the reality of today, it's certainly improved and hopefully will provide these bridges needed to work better together. That's my experience today, at least on the civ mill part. Well, I'll speak to Daniel's question. So there's a question about the mechanisms for SERP, what some folks in USAID might call the theory of change, which was a really important part of our structured quality of interviews. Chapter five of the report focuses on the data that we can bring to bear. I mean, I think you've had a chance to read an earlier draft of it. The short version, as you will see, is it's really, really complex. Most implementers try to do many different things to achieve the overall goals of counterinsurgency. They try it through different mechanisms. Backing out appropriate measures of effectiveness if you put me on the spot, I can't give you a good answer. I can say, and again, I don't wanna plug too much, but there's right now through a RAND study through the Army, we're looking at how you can empower units at the tactical level to dynamically design their own measures of effectiveness that at the end will pass, will be robust enough to convince folks back in DC. So I think it's a conversation that needs to happen. I don't have the answer. I thought we would have the answer. I mean, really, that's one of the things I hoped we would do, but it was so complex. We had 197 implementers, and none of them, no two were the same. So it's not a good answer. I know you guys have a tough mission ahead of you, but happy to have an ongoing conversation about that. Just a couple of quick points on Serge's question about, so I interpreted sort of about experimentation. Did, you know, were you locked into these programs? We did do some experimentation. My experience is richer in the Iraq context than others. There was this task force on business stability operation, and there's another RAN study on that available on our website if you wanna look at that. We did support a variety of micro-credit initiatives, Islamic financial institutions, and so forth. And in 2007, when we, there was a famous testimony that General Petraeus and Ryan Crocker had on the hill in September of 2007, giving the first results of the surge, and it was one of those kind of moments in which the nation was focused on Iraq. Ambassador Crocker put out several other ideas for things that we could be doing economically, one of which was to take a program that we had developed for the Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union to create enterprise funds that would actually acquire assets and leverage private investment. And I thought at the time that this would be a great idea because we thought Iraq was at a low point and we could get some private investment. Congress did not favor that at all. The Congress was always skeptical of the enterprise funds even though there was quite a lot of success financially with a number of the enterprise funds in Eastern Europe, but it wasn't compelling to the appropriators. So that's one of the things you deal with when you try and experiment is that there are a lot of institutional forces against experimentation and partially because people logically fear failure if something hasn't been tried before and it's hard to get situation. And in that respect, SERP was, as I say, serendipitous because the money kind of was there, there was an urgent need for it and there was a considerable amount of experimentation with SERP and the program guidelines did change over time as we try to capture in the report. And over time, the program itself organically emerged towards the kinds of things that we have discovered and Renata's discovered work better, smaller, more coordination with the civilian side and so forth. So this may be a little bit a theory of a government as an organic being, but it doesn't welcome alien bodies injected into it. On Will's question about the real problem with whole government is actually in Washington. Will, of course, you're right. You have lots of scars to prove it as do I. I do think that as John described, we're getting better at understanding the need for whole government and the need for a kind of integrated strategy. The challenge I fear is that that's this generation. Just like Vietnam was, there was a long period of time in which the generation that had counterinsurgency experience retired went off. Our challenge is to so embed these observations and these instincts that they will survive for the next generation when we face similar kinds of challenges in an environment in which many people in the public space would not like to dedicate resources and think about that we might have to do this again because it was so painful the last time. Thanks, I saw Elyse Raj and then I'll move over here. Bonzé and Jody, so first year. Good morning, this is Elyse Raj. I'm the president of the National Coalition for Tribal of Afghanistan and I've been listening to you with deep interest. I've attended a lot of these functions and unfortunately when I leave these functions, I leave it with a great deal of frustration. I represent every single tribe in Afghanistan, sir. The biggest problem that I see on the part of the International Coalition of Afghanistan is that they want to rebuild Afghanistan with the image of the West which cannot be done. Afghanistan is a nation of tribes. We have, one tribe is not the same as the other. Give me one little example so that I'm sorry if it takes a few minutes, but it's better that you understand. A journalist came to me and said, I'd like to talk to some elders in Helmand.  He came back a week later, he said, you let me wrong. I said, why? He said, I went over there and I saw this long bearded man standing on the street corner and I asked him if he'd helped me and he sent me a place where I nearly got kidnapped. I said, every single bearded man in Afghanistan is not the tribe of elders. It's very important that you know who the elders are. A friend of mine from Kimonix came to me one day and he said he had a large budget to help a village. I said, well, how are you going to do it? He said, I'm going to roll into the village and I'm going to start implementing projects.  They're going to either invite you in or come out and meet with you and once they're asked them what they want, don't tell them what you're going to do. So my recommendation to gentlemen who are spending a lot of money, throwing money on Afghanistan is not going to buy dedication. All it's going to do is enrich people like those some and the rest of them. It's not going to, the money that goes into Afghanistan has been into Afghanistan is like the Colorado River. Very big up on top, never reaches the ocean. The people are at the ocean level and they do not get the diamonds. All the people are gathered and collected. So please understand the Afghan psyche before you spend any money in doing anything. Money is not a solution. You have to win the trust of the tribal people each on their own level. Thank you very much. Thank you. Fourth, one, two, three. Fourth row in the middle, Banzi, black suit. I'm in a Banzi with USAID. Just quickly, I just wanted to see what other panel could discuss. Given the fact that we focused on building a relationship with a community, did we then bypass the Afghan institution, government institutions that needed to build that relationship with the people and did that have an effect on the subspending, if you can discuss that? The second one is that you mentioned there's a continuum from 300 to 1 million. We provide small activities, which is good. But again, I think I've heard that so many times, looking at the regression analysis, is there some sort of a cut-off point where you will say, if you start at 300, you can go up to this point before you lose the impact of subspending. And then forward to your left, Jodi. Oh, sorry, on the same row. Thank you. Jodi Vittori from the NGO Global Witness. I wanted to take up on Dr. Sexton's bait from earlier and ask actually questions about the quantitative methodology. I know you have to take a very complex methodology and had like 120 seconds to explain it on the screen. But just from that kind of broad overview, you showed six correlations on there that you said went to CERP funding, but it seemed like there are so many other intervening variables that would make those correlations. Can you explain a little bit more how you decided that that had any correlation? Let's take those for now. And do you want to start? Can you go for a shot? No, no, go ahead. Yeah, one chance. Well, I mean, I don't disagree with your observations about understanding the context of the society. I mean, I think that's fundamental in what I tried to indicate in smaller, but better training is to understand how to evaluate what you're doing. And I certainly agree with that. And on Mr. Abansi's question about did this bypass national or provincial level governments institutions? I mean, that's a subject that I've actually worked a lot on. We did a study on Haiti after the earthquake and I have views, but it was kind of, I don't want to take a researcher's attitude, it was outside of this. We weren't evaluating the overall economic strategy towards Afghanistan. That wasn't our remit. Our remit was to actually look at the use of SERP and what we could say about SERP and the effects of SERP. I think you raise very good questions and the little work that I've done in Afghanistan's economic development, these are key questions of strategy for the coalition that both of you have raised. And I think that it's fair to ask and for the United States, we need to understand what we're doing and do it deliberately rather than by accident. But I'll let Daniel do the methodology. We're very briefly speaking to the first question. Again, one of our key findings from the qualitative work was that a few thousand dollars to a unit that could then sit down with the community, talk with the community about what they wanted to have happen in their community. That's what was different about SERP. It was a large top-down program. Sometimes was. Those are the ones that we, I'll speak to your point in a second. Those are the ones that we by and large think are not useful. The large roads, the schools that required a contractor to come in from Hellman City or even worse to come from another province. And had no teachers. Yeah, so it was the $3,000 to sit with the community. They wanted the mosque refurbished. They refurbished the mosque because that's what the community asked for. Those were the projects that our implementers said were successful. And when we talk about dollar amounts, so I'll transition. Some of the folks we spoke to said no more than $5,000. We had some people say that I never want more than that amount of money. $5,000, no questions about how the money is spent. We'll figure it out. Unfortunately, in our quantitative analysis, I think for some of the reasons that Renard raised earlier, we did not find a sharp relationship. I would say we found weak quantitative evidence that projects under $50,000 were more effective in that the marginal dollar was twice as effective. But again, that's not smoking gun evidence. We also had anecdotal reports that if you had a $5,000 limit that every estimate came in at $4,999 because the insurgents and the locals are smart. So speaking to the last question about methodology, I'm happy to have a longer conversation. I'm happy to walk you through chapter seven, hopefully provide some details. Very quickly, all of our analysis was within districts. So we include district effects that hopefully deal with some of these concerns. And then we include controls for military presence. We included controls for local topography, access to roads, other things that might affect the economics. We had, we built on a lot of the work that's been done. I mean, there's been a great body of good work that's been done on SERP. We took it and we think we took it to a new level. We had access to the best SERP data thanks to the SERP team and some of these people here that really went, bent over backwards to make this data work first. So we had the best quality SERP data and then we had access to a wide range of US unclassified satellite data in military data. So we triangulated it across data sets and we used a pretty robust methodology. But again, happy to talk further without boring all these people. We can talk for hours about that. A quick response to Armindo's question about the local government piece. And it poses an interesting dilemma that I just popped into my head. If you had, let's say $5,000 went downrange and you used it to clean up and to refurbish a community center, CDC, community district center, I think we call those. And that was to open up local government. So there would be a leader there and then local residents come in and complain about I don't have any water and we don't have a market and why is this this way? And then an OTI or a aid project, LGCD for example would come in and they'd actually do a lot more to refurbish the center and make it nice, bring in some furniture, chairs, desks, maybe some computers. This thing starts functioning and people are coming, there's forms they fill out and there's a system in place and that's working. Let's say it's two years into it. And then funding stops or support stops or we decide to move to somewhere else and the district center fades away or closes. All right, does that mean the SERP, if the $5,000 was successful? Because it did what it was supposed to do at the original part of it and then follow-up came in but then it also eventually went away. So was that a failure or was that a success? In terms of sustainability, and if you looked at it very strictly from an investment point of view or from sustainability, no, it probably was a failure. But from that $5,000 in that particular commander's effort to stabilize or to calm or to create something that had possibilities, does that mean that SERP effort was a success? And I would argue yes, it was. Again, I'll go back to my point, what's follow-up and how long do we expect that to happen? Thanks. I just wanted to really briefly touch on, I think with respect to the sort of smaller is better question, I think that there's, you guys are exactly right. The one thing that I wanted to add was that there are different, I think interpretations of what small is. The three to $5,000 projects look a lot different than the $50,000 projects. And once you get into the really big range, then they suddenly look very different. So I think that one of the key takeaways that I found was smaller is better within categories, but not necessarily across the board. So for example, doing a $50,000 project is not necessarily better than a $200,000 project. It really depends on what the nature of that project is. And then just on the econometrics element, I think that one of the key things that they did well here was getting very closely well-geocoded project locations. And that's really cool. I think that one of the challenges is always figuring out what those confounders are that you talk about and they try to address some of it. But I think that there's always a possibility with some of our work and their work that you're going to be mistaking these relationships here. And I think that we always have to acknowledge that we could be getting it wrong and we could be getting it wrong badly. Let me go over. A gentleman on the end in the middle, and that's where our best. Hi, I'm Phil Schrafer, retired international health care worker. It's been a year in Turkmenistan. I'm addressing a two-part question to Renard because he's got the NYU connection and probably to the gentleman from Afghanistan that talked about tribes. The first part is my simplistic idea of Afghanistan government is you've got the democratically elected government and Kabul supported by the coalition. You've got the Taliban insurgency area and then you've got an area controlled by landlords. Maybe that's overly simplistic, so I guess I'm asking. And the second part is the major agricultural poppies with the obvious drug implication. A gentleman with his hand standing in the way back. Jack Pagano, a former CAT member with General Petraeus and General Allen was in Afghanistan for seven years. Now working on some projects here as a senior strategist. You guys are wonderful. You say all the right things. You tell all the right things. It's wonderful. We're back here in Washington, D.C. But right now in Kunduz and the Helmand province, there's a big problem going on. And if we don't get our act together, that's gonna fall. And then we're gonna sit here again and gonna go, well, the lessons learned. What did we learn? What are we doing? What can you guys do right now to get with General Nicholson?  Get the action rocking. Make it happen. We're not doing that. A guy that's been there. I've seen the good. I've seen the bad. I've seen the ugly. I'm a retired Army Lieutenant Colonel. So I know the bureaucracy. I know what's going on. Why can't you guys get in a room? Get it done. Thank you. Let me take this one on this other side and then we'll come back here in the next round. Hi, my name is Mahmoud Nourzai. I'm from Afghanistan and I work with the Afghan National Security Council. I heard the conversation and the debate is really interesting and fascinating. But I want to add on the point that was discussed by Prince Ali Siraj. Afghanistan is a very unique place and it has got a unique culture and a unique sort of engagement with the outside world. We've observed many of the USID programs and so many other aid programs in Afghanistan. What happened was that in majority of the cases it ended up strengthening the wrong guys. Like a person who is a warlord, like Governor Shizai and his brother sort of commanders and people who have been violating human rights or been involved in illegal activities. The question is that when programs like SERPs where enables the commanders on the field to sort of help a mosque or provide heating to a school that directly impacts the communities and it does win the hearts and minds. But in the larger scale when there is interlocutors involved between a commander and the community and those middle guys usually end up taking the large chunk of the money and that's what happens. Most of the cases that antagonize the insurgents or the local opposition and it results in the whole context of foreigners are here, they're here to corrupt us, they're here to basically do what they want, not what the community wants. And I think with the fundamental issue and this war in Afghanistan was that the money was never meant to reach the people on the ground, the people that are at the community level. Of course the intention was there but it never reached there. So we end up, as the general men say, that Helmand is on the verge of collapse, my hometown Farah is on the verge of collapse, Kanduz have been captured last year, October last year and this year as well. So I think it would be more constructive if a proper assessment of what's needed on the grassroots level and how this money can be channeled would be the right way. And of course it's always great to have operational money available for the commanders that certainly helps to win the war and the hearts and the minds. Thank you very much. Thank you very much. Let's start at the end, this makes it up. Quickly to the gentleman in the back, thank you. For those of us who have breathed the air and put the sweat in in Afghanistan, we're all feeling I think some of your frustrations. So I'm sympathetic to that. And I'm not sure, I certainly don't have an answer to that. I certainly would pose a couple of questions. You know, what is the new, what are we trying to do in Afghanistan? If you go back to that long history since after 9-11 and I think the deal was all about al-Qaeda and then how that transformed and it went to Taliban and it went to this and it went to that. And then now what is it? I'm not sure we have that. And I'm not saying that that answers your question. We now have a transition in our U.S. government that's coming up. So I wouldn't expect an answer coming soon. That does not alleviate the problem. Kanduz was great at one point in time. And that road of going north was seen as the, whoa, let's go, this is gonna work. Eight even build a bridge there, you know. And so the hope and I think the spirit that we had up in the north for some time, I hope it's not gone. I know it's under threat. But again, with the civ mill piece that I think is stronger now and with us talking more and more about how, what stabilization means now in today's context, don't give up hope yet. But I know that's about all I got for you, man. Sorry. Yeah, I mean, I guess it's hard to make a clear prescription on any of these topics, but I think the message that the better that operators can learn whether it's through their local contacts and also continuity at the local level, not just in terms of personnel, but also information, it really helps to make these projects work. But I think that when you have relatively short towards of duty, both for civilians and military folks, you just don't have that kind of a setup. And even though as a nation, and as a, and this is not just the US, right? This is all the members of the coalition. When people are rotating so quickly and people are not necessarily building up expertise, you end up in a situation where even the dedicated folks aren't able to have the impact that they want to have. And so I think that that's also a DC question as much as a writing down policy question. I would just add, I mean, addressing a few of these sentiments from my own experience, partly with USAID, there is an extreme contrast between the amount of money that is available both for military spending and for emergency situations. And you talk about whether these are really emergency funds or not. And the more boring but important sustainability of programs and efforts over time. And I think some of these comments speaking about how things have deteriorated from when we had the surge. It's a reflection of a lot of factors, but it's also a reflection of it's very difficult to get consistent budgets to do sustained development work once troops are off the ground. So that's an issue that's a policy issue here for Washington. Let me take one more round of questions. I see the gentleman in the white in the second row here. Thank you very much, panel members, for the wonderful discussion. It was really enlightening. My name is Najibullah Nurzai. I worked as a former program manager for the EU delegation in Afghanistan for Justice and Rule of Law for over five years. I understand the context. It was really difficult at that time. I mean, what the emergency funding were. So I'm sure that I haven't read the report yet. I'm sure that methodology will give us a lot of, I mean, the data that we should know what the lesson learned were. And also CIGAR is doing wonderful job like seeing all those funding scrutinizing and giving us the lesson learned. I just want to make a question on the looking forward as the gentleman in the back said, how we can go forward. Whether we will lose the foot there, the achievement that made in the almost more than a decade. I was representing EU with meeting with commanders on civil and military side. Like there has been change of mandate. Now RSM is providing support and advising. Whether the funding is still available, how we can go ahead with it. And also considering the changes there, like security is deteriorating, most of the province and the verge of loss. And also having the good funding, good news coming up, the Brussels conference, 15.2 million and also the other conference on the security side. Is there any hope how we can go ahead? Like, or we will have the dark days coming back. Thank you. In the red, if you rose back. Hi, Cheryl Garner from the State Department. Question I had really focuses on the way forward, not just for SERP, but also for other development projects. And specifically as these discussions about civil relations and gray zones and where we're going, but specific to Afghanistan, has there been discussion of how to do this type of development or program implementation now in the framework of the citizens charter? Thank you. And the gentleman just back there. Ian Jacobs from the State Department and actually a former NYU politics grad student. So nice to meet you, sir. I have two questions for you. The first is that, you've talked a little bit about incentives so far. And one thing that you haven't talked about are the incentives of the leaders in these communities that we're giving money to via the SERP program. If I were a leader in that community and I know that I'm getting $5,000, $50,000 or even $5 million for a project because there's a potential conflict in my area, I have a very strong incentive to make sure there remains conflict in my area because I wouldn't want that source of funding where money cut off. It helps me maintain my position if I'm making sure that projects are in my village or in my area are helping out the people in my community then I want to keep that money coming. So I'm curious if there's any evidence or if there's any thought that these projects actually might be creating a longer conflict, if you will, because you remove the incentive now for local leaders to want to end the conflict because you're effectively paying them to have conflict in the first place. The second question I have is that, and correct me if I'm wrong here, the distribution of where these projects happens are highly correlated with the population centers or the urban areas, if you will, in the area. Is that a correct assertion or not so much? Not quite. You've already checked before. Okay, all right, so I could be wrong on this one but the concern that I had was that if you're not normalizing these kilometer blocks by how many people live in these areas, what you're really doing is you're just kind of almost testing the effect of a population to an economic benefit. And what I'm curious about is that you said some of these projects were restoring a mosque but the variables that you used to determine the effectiveness or the efficacy of the sort of programs were all economic based, nightlights, for example. And there seems to be a disconnect between what you're saying you're measuring and what you think you're measuring. And what I'm concerned is that you've just measured the effect of economic development in a city or an urban area as opposed to what the actual certain programs have done. So I don't know if that's something we can talk about offline or because we're coming at the end but that's just a thought that I had as I was listening to this. Thank you. Thank you. I acknowledge and there are a few other hands. We have a wonderful lobby for mingling and follow up questions but let me cut it off there in the interest of time. And I'll just ask the panelists to address this round of questions and any other final thoughts that you might have and Charlie maybe you can go first. Well thank you very much Scott and thanks for the fantastic questions and the great deal of interest in this study. I guess I feel inadequate to address the broader questions of Afghanistan strategy. Those who know me know it's unusual that I would say that I don't have an opinion about something but I just feel that I haven't spent enough time and personally in this to have anything useful to share I certainly share the anxiety that many have that the progress that we've made will go south in one way or another. On the last question about incentives and whether or not we're paying people to have conflict I don't think, I mean my experience with this is in terms of the implementer's observations in the qualitative interviews. And yes there were some cases people recalled where they built a well Taliban came in blew up the well they built a well again they got blown up again and but most of the implementers described that in those kinds of circumstances they just stopped if there was not any buy in from the local community if they didn't feel that it was something that was useful we couldn't just keep building things that got blown up. And a lot of the most effective uses of SERP and a lot collectively the SERP use of SERP is in relatively stable areas that just happened to have coalition presence. And there's a little I mentioned in my opening comments but there's actually quite a big distinction between attitudes towards SERP and the services. The army was the most supportive army officers that we interviewed were 90% in favor. It thought that it was very useful. Special operations forces which were way, way out of the rural areas, 80% supportive. And I had the opportunity to visit some people in Urzgan province at one point on another project. And the Marines that in Helmand in particular were in the most kinetic environments, only 60% supportive. And there's actually quite a big distinction and I think that rather than the services it correlates to the kinds of environments that they found themselves in. And so we are maybe inferring but it's reasonable to say that those implementers that had experience in relatively stable circumstances actually had the best impressions of SERP. Just very briefly speaking to the last point about are we measuring the right kinds of outcomes? And I think Renard raised this in a different format. And this is actually something that Cigar is taking on right now, which is what are the right measures of effectiveness? And it's very, very difficult. How do you measure mosque rehabilitation? So I'm happy to have a longer conversation about that and how do you measure local reports and other ones? And you'll notice there's been a great deal of polling data in here. There's at least two reasons why it's not included. I'm happy to have a side conversation why that is, but it's very deliberate. So I think those are great questions and it's can we measure just this independence of the broader economic development spending? Very difficult. We do the best we can. We think we have the best data that's likely to ever be available. I mean, I'll wait and see if anything better comes along. But we've had great access, we've had great partners that we've worked with on the military side. And just a great team. So, but I think it's a conversation worth having for the next time it's used. Let's design it correctly to make sure that the folks in DC have the information they need. To address the lady's question, I'm not very familiar with the charter you mentioned, but for looking forward in the future, the 12 hours a day now are not just consumed with Afghanistan as they might have been in 10 and nine and 11 and 12. It's Syria, it's Iraq, it's Afghanistan, it's Pakistan, it's Libya, it's Yemen, it's Somalia and I could go on. So that's how the day is often divided up in the civil mill world, you know. And so not that we're competing for attention here, but that's I guess I'll go back to my point about this transregional, transnational global threat. And the questions that are arising now are much more complex and the answers whether they be through how do we do a CERT program or what is stabilization or how do we even think about development in these kind of gray zone, high probability of conflict areas where access for civilians is negligible. Big, big challenge for the next couple of years, but that's all I can say. I was just gonna make a good point on the perverse incentives because I think it's a really important one. And I think it speaks to how we structure this kind of work going forward. So independently, if you have some kind of a program that tends to go to places where there's violence, then it makes perfect sense that you would tend to want to keep some low level of violence that justifies keeping getting the money. And for example, when you look at rural Colombia during the height of the violence there, you actually found local paramilitaries that could knock out their local FARC opposition but didn't because that would allow them to demand more from the central government and this kind of a relationship. However, the idea of this is set up, right, is that yes, you get some additional sort of funding when there's violence in order to sort of stabilize the situation, but in terms of larger aid projects, they're not gonna come when things are unstable. And so when that's sort of wading in the wings as a transition and long-term strategy, then the local leader is gonna do much better to move towards a sort of peaceful resolution and cooperative environment in order to sort of move through that larger pipeline. But if it's just syrup on the table, sure. I think that that's exactly some of the time what the problem is when maybe syrup projects are out beyond the capacity of the rest of the coalition. Well, let me thank the panel and please join me in a round of applause for the panel. Also, thank you very much to the audience for really great questions. Good discussion. Thanks for those that have been watching on the web and hopefully we'll see you here again for another good discussion on Afghanistan. Bye.