So, ladies and gentlemen, thank you very much for coming out on a human afternoon. We are very pleased here at the United States Institute of Peace to welcome you to a discussion of opposed development. And this is an idea, a concept, not without controversy. I hope we'll be the case this afternoon. Otherwise, you'll be bored, and I promise you, you will not be bored. We've had a little opportunity to talk among ourselves, and I suspect you will have a very lively discussion. Opposed development is where someone is trying, a host government is trying to develop, and it's getting assistance from the international community or from its own resources to help provide services to its people, health, education, security, justice. These are the kinds of things that characterize development, and there are places in the world where that development is not opposed. Okay. There is one category of activity. There are other places where it is opposed, and it can be opposed by people shooting at you, or people are opposing with an alternative idea or alternative set of services. That's opposed development that we want to discuss. It's still development, I think, although there may be a challenge even to that conclusion. But what we'd like to do is tease out, is discuss, is try to identify the differences between opposed development and unopposed development, and see what the implications are, see what the policy implications are. Organizationally, they may be different. The U.S. government, some of the U.S. government is somewhat represented here, may want to organize differently. When there is a general officer in the country along with the ambassador, U.S. ambassador, U.S. general officer, that's a different organization than when you don't have military on the ground. When there's military on the ground in opposed development, that means there's a different character. That means there's a different character to the operation, and we want to try to explore that. And as I say, there are policy implications in terms of funding, in terms of organization, in terms of duration, so these are the kinds of things we'd like to pull out. At the Institute of Peace, we do ideas and we do actions. We do thinking and we do doing, so we have the opportunity to do some thinking with this panel and you today, so that we can, in our action, we have officers, of course, in Kabul and Baghdad and do work around the world, we have an opportunity to put those into practice and test them, and those kind of things, so that brings me to this panel, and this panel is remarkable in its thinking and doing, in its work in the field, and in its thinking about what it's done over time. We're going to start out with Dave Cuckullen. Many of you, most probably in this room, everyone knows, he's already signed a couple of books on the way in. Famous author, one I know best, I've read a couple of times, is the accidental gorilla, but he has others and I think another one coming out soon. So just back from his honeymoon, so we're very pleased to have Dave here. Nancy Lindborg, also well-known to everyone here, also thinker and a doer, president of Mercy Corps, has a great perspective on how development works and has done some things in a pose, but the fact is, I think in Pakistan, you guys just suspended because of some opposition here, so anyway, she knows of what we're speaking about here today. Andrew Natsios, also known to everyone here, director, administrator of USAID, knows a lot about Afghanistan and Iraq, knows something, therefore, about opposed development, and is now teaching at Georgetown, right, got it right. Andrew Wilder, two Andrews in a row, don't get confused. Andrew Wilder just flew down this morning, Monday, actually, he came down earlier this week from Tufts, where he's a research director as well as professor, well-known to people who have followed this literature, and we're very pleased to hear Andrew's thoughts on also a doer, I mean, a thinker who I've already indicated, also a doer, spent a lot of time, I think, grew up in Pakistan, but also spent a whole lot of time in Afghanistan, so thinking and doing comes naturally to him, and Jim Shear, deputy assistant secretary of defense for this kind of work. He is super well-qualified for the thinking and the doing, and without anything else, I am going to let Dave Krakallan kick us off. Dave. And what we'll do, if this is all right, we'll have 10 minutes or so from each. After Dave speaks, for example, I'll ask the panelists, first, you'll get your turn, but I'll first ask the panelists if they have comments or questions for Dave, just for clarification. Similarly, then Nancy will do her opening remarks, similar opportunity for the panelists, and then Andrew, and then Andrew, and then Jim. After that, we'll open it up, and we'll have an opportunity to have a conversation. Dave. Okay. Thank you, Ambassador. So I think I've been asked to go first because I came up with a term, a post-development, but of course, I didn't come up with a thing. We've been doing it for a long time, and I'm very, very conscious not only of the incredible depth of expertise of people on the panel, but also in the audience, and I won't embarrass people by naming them, but I see some of the people that have contributed the most to what we're doing out on the ground today in this field sitting here in the audience. So what I thought I'd do is just really set the scene for a few minutes about what are we talking about here? What are we talking about? What are we not talking about? What are the basic characteristics of this thing that we may choose to call a post-development, and what are just some of the implications? And I think we're going to get a lot more into the implications as the afternoon goes on. So some background first. As all of us know, U.S. foreign assistance tripled under the Bush administration from about $9 billion a year in 2000 to about $27 billion a year by 2008. The Obama administration have talked about doubling it again to over $50 billion a year. We've also seen in that same timeframe the proliferation of new forms of foreign assistance. And we might immediately think of things like the Millennium Challenge Corporation and PEPFAR and so on, but there are also sort of pseudo-national security forms of foreign assistance that have really become important in the last eight to ten years. And the obvious one is CERP, the Commander's Emergency Response Program, and 1206 and 1207 funding, which are forms of foreign assistance administered by the Department of Defense. Making DOD, in fact, quite an important, though not a formal, participant in the U.S. Development and Foreign Assistance Program. Now, this tsunami of cash is being managed by an organization, USAID, that was set up to, and in fact is still in the main oriented, to operate in the peacetime provision of official development assistance to developing countries. And so there's an orientation issue, how do we orient to the current environment? And as of the end of 2007, you find that if you look at where the U.S. Foreign Assistance budget is being spent, at no time since 2007 has it been less than 50%, and sometimes it's been much higher than 50% of that budget is being spent either in conflict environments or post-conflict environments. So we've got an organization designed for traditional peacetime assistance to developing countries that's now had some of its responsibility taken over by other organizations and is in fact doing the bulk of its work in conflict and post-conflict environments, environments that you might call opposed development environments. Now those environments have some special characteristics, and let me illustrate that by a way of a couple of examples.  First of all, you have no enemy as such. You have a series of development targets that you are trying to deal with. Say you're running public health programs, then you might be interested in infant and maternal mortality. Say you're running education programs, you will be interested in access to educational materials, access to schooling, those sorts of issues. You have various traps and pitfalls that you need to consider in a development environment. There will be spoilers out in the environment who may choose to undermine or disrupt the program that you're trying to run. There will be the classic dependency trap. There will be issues of elite capture where you may bring a free good into a society affected by scarcity, and power brokers in that society are going to try and capture and exploit that free good for their own benefit. There will be perverse incentives to corruption associated with just the mere fact that you bring in a lot of new resources into the society. There will be issues of crowding out where you bring in new resources that may inadvertently put local players out of business who are already trying to deliver the same sorts of services that you are now delivering, and you may in fact create enmity and opposition in that process. So that's the sort of normal development environment, and there are problems, and there are traps, and you will sometimes generate opposition. But fundamentally, what you're doing is working a set of programs against a set of targets. Now let's take a second example. Imagine you're the same aid officer, but now there's a terrorist enemy in the environment, and they're targeting you and targeting your implementing partners and the people that are working with you to carry out your projects. Well, fundamentally, if you think about what you're doing, although the threat environment is different, your job is still basically the same. You're still not really targeting an enemy as such. You're still working on development targets. You're just doing it in a much more high risk environment. And those risks include dangers and hardships, but also accountability risks.  It's harder to know whether the workforce is turning up on time. It's harder to put in place accountability procedures that allow you to track where the money goes, just because it's a more dangerous environment, and it's harder to get out there and do those things. And in addition, all the pre-existing problems that I just spoke about, elite capture, the dependency trap, crowding out local entrepreneurs, all those issues are still there.  It's opposed, but there's no enemy. But now think about a third type of environment, and that is if you're running an aid program in a counterinsurgency or stability operations environment. Now there's an organized enemy in the picture. And that organized enemy isn't just a terrorist. They're actually running their own development and political programs. And so now, you are not only running your program in isolation against a set of development targets. There's an enemy aid officer out there running a competing program against yours. And that fundamentally, in my view, changes the nature of the enterprise. Because you're no longer working against a set of targets or metrics or issues where you're trying to fix a particular problem, you're doing that. But from the standpoint of the local population, they now have a choice. Which access to justice program, the Taliban program, or the Afghan government's program sponsored by us, gives them a better result. There's now a sort of swing voter mentality among a lot of the people that are taking advantage of our development and assistance programs. Again, you still have all the same problems as before, and you have still the high-threat environment. More importantly, as you're out in that environment, there's probably now a US military organization operating in that environment. Because it's a development program that's happening in the context of counter insurgency or stabilization. And in my field experience over 20 years or so, as soon as you bring a US general officer into a theater, it changes dramatically what everybody else is doing. It changes the context for not only you, but also the host nation. So let's look at some practical examples real quickly. The Israel-Hizballah war in 2006, the very day that the firing stopped, Hizballah had its reconstruction units out on the ground running programs to rebuild buildings that had been collapsed by Israeli bombs made by the US dropped from Israeli aircraft provided by the US using US intelligence. And so we in the State Department said, we probably need to get out there and do some reconstruction in order to undermine some of the negative effect of Hizballah rebuilding buildings that our ally Israel just destroyed. We found ourselves in a competitive environment where Hizballah were basically charging NGOs money for the privilege of rebuilding destroyed structures with a Hizballah flag over the top. And when we turned up a week to ten days after the Hizballah representative has already started working, most of the projects had already been allocated to somebody else. Another example is the Sardis in 2007, Muqtada Osada's organization in Baghdad. As we were running security operations in Baghdad City, the Sunnis would attack Shia communities and there was a number of incidences where the Shia population in a given area would displace to a temporary refugee camp. Within an hour or two, the Sardar organization are there providing short-term humanitarian assistance, assistance in getting jobs, relocation assistance, and long-term community organizing type assistance. Again, in competition with the Iraqi government and US forces in Iraq. So if you're an aid officer in that environment, there's some fundamental differences about what you're trying to do because it's now competitive in a different way. And I won't even touch on the Taliban because we're lucky enough to have Andrew Wilder here and he can give you chapter and verse on Taliban governance and business development and agriculture and taxation and rule of law programs that are out there competing with our programs. I want to draw a distinction between opposed development and stabilization programming. I think that stabilization program is probably a subset of opposed development. I'm looking down here at Jim and Sloan because they wrote the book literally on stabilization programming. So I'd be interested to see what you guys have to say about that aspect as the discussion develops. Let me just quickly then finish with some ideas of what the implications might be. Firstly, I think there's a pretty clear need for more fungible and flexible funding arrangements for some of the aid officers out on the ground in places like Afghanistan and Pakistan. If you turn up in a district now and you have money for public health, most times you only get to spend that money on public health. And if you turn up in the district and it turns out that the Taliban's running a really effective rule of law program and what you really need to be doing is improving access to transitional justice for the population, bad luck buddy, you just have money for public health. So changing that is something that we may want to think about. Now a portion of the aid budget is already fungible and flexible in that way, but we maybe need to think about proportions. The second thing we need to think about is early entry capability. And I use that term advisedly. When the situation is still fluid, it's early in a process, the military are out on the ground in force without a lot of idea about how to do development. I say that as a military guy, right? But they just want to get something done. And there's a need to get advisors out on the ground early, firstly with a preventing harm approach and secondly, ensuring that the short-term actions that all these very energetic guys are taking on the ground in the first days, weeks and months of an operation are aligned with longer-term best-practice development and also longer-term objectives of the US government in relation to what happens in that environment. So that early entry capability means mobility, communications, the ability to operate in a high-risk environment, the ability to hire and fire people in a way that works properly in a war zone, all those sort of elements that make an expeditionary foreign assistance capability. The third implication is remote monitoring capability, which I had a dollar for every time some Afghans showed me a Polaroid photo of some random bridge and said, this is your project that we're working on. There's no way to know if that's your project or somebody else's project or a picture downloaded from the internet. And we're paying people money, oftentimes on the basis of very scant information, because we can't get out on the ground without a four- or five-day organization process to get a military convoy to take a guy out to have a look at the project, and it just becomes very difficult. Now Sloan Mann here in the audience and Eric Meister before him pioneered the idea of the embedded aid officer working with special forces and general-purpose forces on the ground and got around some of that. But it doesn't address the bigger picture of how the ordinary aid officer in a PRT gets out to 10 or 12 projects in a week.  Things that OTI does with its own local Afghan workforce are another approach, but we have to sort of do a bit of work on how to think about those. Out of time? No, purified. It's up. Final point would be that aid is as small as it is because the basic aid business model is to bring in contractor implementing partners to do most of the work. That model would tend to work very well, I think, in a traditional development environment, but perhaps less well in an environment where your implementing partners may not choose to go to the most dangerous parts of a country or they may choose to go do something cheaper in another country rather than get caught up in the sorts of work that you want them to do. And so perhaps there's a requirement in an opposed development environment to carry more of the execution capacity inside the organization itself rather than relying on implementing partners. And then finally, and again, I default to Andrew and also to, in fact, to both Andrews on this, but traditional development approaches in an opposed development environment may actually have a destabilizing rather than a stabilizing effect. And we need to think about whether that's because development doesn't really work and there's an argument out there that that's true or whether it's because we're doing it wrong in places like Afghanistan and Pakistan. So let me stop there. There's a lot of issues there. I have the privilege of just raising questions instead of answering them. No, Dave, you have done more than that. Stay there for a moment, because there may be questions. Does anyone on the panel have any clarifying questions or comments for Dave at this point? Going once. All right, now you can say it. David, thank you very much. Thank you. The originator of this concept, David Collins, thank you very much. Nancy Lindberg. Thank you. Nice provocative beginning, Dave. Thank you. It's great to be here and thank you, Bill, for convening us. I think these are, in fact, some of the really weighty issues that we've been wrestling with. And as Bill mentioned, I'm the president of Mercy Corps, which is an NGO that works primarily in what we call transitional environments, about 40 around the world. And it includes every one of the countries that you mentioned and others. And we really think of transitional environments as countries where there's a fragility of government that precludes them from being able to meet the needs of their citizens from basic goods to problem solving. And they're especially vulnerable to shocks. So any kind of natural disaster or conflict or economic collapse is particularly destabilizing. That what you do in those environments will greatly shift depending upon the issues like is there an armed insurgency? Is the U.S. military present? And I think some of those factors that Dave mentioned as fundamental to opposed development do change how we think about what we're doing. But I'm just gonna put a stake on the ground here and say I think there's a problem with the concept of opposed development at a real fundamental level, not that it isn't a useful taxonomy to think about this collection of characteristics as being an important way to think about the kinds of interventions and what various actors do. But rather, especially if we peg to what the presidential security directive I think has tried to do with the greater elevation of development and helping us at a strategic level to think of what is the role and relationship of development to diplomacy and to defense. And to more broadly define the role of development to our national security. Broadly defined in terms of when we have stable partners out there who can help us collectively meet the world's challenges. That's the goal of development. And there's a narrower definition that comes into play with the use of complex development. And or sorry, opposed development. And when you have opposed development it sounds as if you are in an environment where the people themselves are not in a position to move forward on their futures. And I would posit that fundamental to the concept of development is that you have country led approaches or community led approaches where they are charting the course forward that they are able to have an investment and a hope and an active role in their futures. So they may be doing that even in the midst of armed insurgencies or maybe they're not and good development isn't happening because of the lack of security. But I would posit that a lot of what must happen particularly in these highly post-kinetic environments or where there is the presence of armed insurgents is an important activity but it may not be development. And that these kinds of conversations are critical I think for just getting common understandings and alignments of our various terms. I know there's been a lot of conversation about what does stability mean. And he pointed to somebody here who was integral in that definition. And I think the question that we think about in our own work at Mercy Corps is stability necessary to even begin the pathway of development. And what are those activities that enable you to get to stability and security and what we would think of as ambient security so that people can begin to start making that active investment in their lives. How do you sequence those activities? What actors with which capabilities are critical to have on the ground? And how do you resource those capabilities as a policymaker? One of the things that I know that we're, there's a lot of conversation about a whole of government effort to coordinate. And I wanna make a couple of points on that. First is that I think we all understand the importance of coordinated approaches. I would argue strongly that it needs to be coordinated but differentiated. Differentiated both with the civilian capacities but also with the partners outside the government who have an important added value that you want to be able to leverage both short-term and long-term for your goals in a particular environment. There's, and Bill had posed a number of issues for us to think about in the context of opposed development. The different ways that we would think about time frames, the capabilities of various actors and the kinds of projects that they might do. And I wanna just give a couple of examples because Mercy Corps, for example, began working in Iraq in April 03 at the conclusion of the hot war, I would say. And we went into South Central Iraq where we had not operated before so we had to do a lot of work to establish ourselves as an actor that was, first of all, nongovernmental which they didn't really understand. And secondly there to enable the community to organize and identify what it is they wanted to do. And I wanna underscore the importance of having that flexible funding that enabled us to do an activity that was tailored to the context of that community and tailored to what they said that they wanted. And be able to then move with that community through an iterative cycle of projects that built on immediate, almost peace dividend kind of activities that helped them understand that there was an immediate benefit to this new era and to a peaceful environment. But then move that increasingly into more developmental activities where they were more engaged, where they had community structures that enabled them to identify. And they co-invested, very, very importantly. They were responsible for a significant amount of investment either resource, other financial or material or labor or all three. And embedded in this process was an opportunity to then go to local authorities to try to enable budget investment from the local authority. So in other words, it was a multi-year effort to move from an immediate post-kinetic environment with activities that were pretty short and designed to have tangible, understandable benefits. And then handshake into the longer-term development. And it's that kind of flexibility of resources and it's a timeframe with the same people working on the project over a period of years that I think enabled us to feel like we were starting to make a difference. There's a study that we have done that's available in the back of the room. Heather Hansen here is our Director of Public Affairs is able to ask more questions, answer more questions. Where we looked at what were the benefits of community-led development with our programs in Iraq and Afghanistan. And it's very much our own efforts to try to understand how was it effective. What we learned is the three critical attributes that the communities themselves most valued was the opportunity to have full participation of all the elements that they felt that they were able to engender greater trust and that they were able to be clearly a part of the decision-making. So I think the ability to do that is vested much more strongly with civilian agencies because by virtue of being in a uniform you are allied with the national interest of that country's whose uniform you're wearing. And that's an important and critical role that the uniformed personnel are playing. But it is not, it's not going to be seen as fundamentally the self-interest of the community members with whom you're working. So the more we understand the fundamental values and the extraordinary capabilities that the military does bring and we need to bring to these environments but look at the core capabilities of each of these groups. I think the better we'll be able to look at how we make a difference and it's far from an easy effort. There's also a security dimension and if you believe that there's an added value which I strongly do of both civilian action and with NGOs, that differentiation must be strong. And I just wanna cite, there was a recent USAID request for assistance in Yemen where on an open source website they cited the need for the implementing partner to coordinate closely with the special operations who were dedicated to hunting insurgents. That I think is not helpful to either objective and that while that coordination might be important to have somewhere you don't strongly link that on the ground in a way that I believe will undermine the effectiveness of both approaches. Recommendations and I look forward to the conversation cause I don't think we've solved this as a community, as a government and these are the critical issues to continue wrestling with. I would so agree with the need for more and more flexible resources that enable the highly contextual work to happen at the community level. I would argue strongly for increased resources at USAIDs, it does have strong capabilities to work in these more complex development environments but it needs more and it needs a greater ability to put civilian actors out in, I think the answer, the question that we haven't answered fully is what do you do in those immediate post-kinetic environments where it's still very hot and understandably something has to happen right away? Is it an embedded civilian force? Is it something the military just handles? I think that's an open and important question. And finally, I would just underscore very, very strongly that you need to have differentiation. You need to create the glide path for those development actors to get on the ground as early as feasible to bring those development principles forward and be able to stay for the long term and really move the development agenda forward in a way that's connected to some of those early provision of needs and services. Thank you. Nancy, okay, excellent. Thank you very much. Great contrast here. Let me ask the panel if they've got questions. I have one. So if the military's there in the immediate post-conflict that you said, it's not development, is that what you say? I think that the military, by definition, is very challenged in enabling development as a community-led process because you are in a uniform. If I'm a military officer, I am in uniform and I am sworn to uphold the interests of my country. That's fundamentally true. However, that may not always be perceived by a community as in their interests. They may have different interests and development has to be about enabling those communities to move forward in a way which they're invested in their future and they participate in the way forward. There may be a happy coincidence of activity but I would strongly argue that people, that the military is not our best tool for promoting development. They may provide very important early services. We've seen the extraordinary value of the military in a humanitarian crisis. Haiti being the most recent example. I mean, it's extraordinary. But that's not development. Any comments from the panel here? I would just say one comment which is a very, very obvious point which is none of this is new, right? I mean, we had this exact same problem in Vietnam. We had this exact problem in the 1990s in post-Cold War humanitarian intervention. And we've all been struggling with this stuff for a very long time. I think what is new in the current mix is a huge number of military officers with new funding mechanisms like CERP 12x6, 12x7 that are out there with essentially, let's say development-like authorities.  And I think that's one of the things we need to think about. And Andrew will address that, right? Yeah. We're counting on you. One of the two will. One of the two Andrews. One of the Andrews. And the first Andrew is Andrew Nacius. And the floor is yours. Thank you very much. I will start off by saying that this is not new. We've been struggling this for a long time. Fred Cune used to say to me, Andrew, we keep doing the same thing over and over again making the same mistakes. And that's why there's been an effort to try to create evaluations and all that. There's a huge literature on this. And I'm not sure we're any closer now than we were before. I brought back a guy named Frank Kenefeck who was a development engineer, career foreign service officer. He was an, he's not here, so I can say he was an older guy. He was not young, but he was brilliant in Afghanistan. He was the senior guy managing the road project from Kabul to Kandahar. And, you know, we built these large asphalt plants to pave the road. And he said, you know, Taliban and Al-Qaeda can blow up those plants with one mortar shell because if those light on fire, we don't have fire engines to turn them out. And I said, why aren't they doing it, Frank? I don't understand why they're letting us do, they're killing a lot of our staff, but they're not stopping the project. And they could do it very quickly. And he said, they're harassing us, but this road is so popular with the Afghan people and the push tunes, which is the area that we were moving through, which is the ethnic base of the Taliban, that they can't afford to be seen as destroying it. Because if they blow it up, everybody will know who did it. And he said, the same thing happened when he was running road and development projects in the communist insurgency in Thailand in the 1970s in Northern Thailand. He went through the exact same thing happened. He said, they could have killed us any moment. They didn't because the health clinics and the roads were tied with the schools all integrated together when they would move into an insurgent area. And he said, they couldn't bring themselves to kill us all because the people would be so upset they would lose their base of support. So I just want to add a little bit to what Nancy's, I don't agree with what everything Nancy is suggesting, but I agree with a lot. And I would say most interesting at all in Iraq is a fatwa that was issued by the Ayat Sola Sistani, one of the greatest religious figure among the Shia. He issued a fatwa saying, it is okay for any Shia, 55% of the population, to work for USAID by name and their partner organizations, but not for reconstruction that is managed by the Defense Department. He made, and he was not an intimate of the US, I don't think any of our people ever met him because he refused to meet any US government officials. He knew the difference. It's very interesting to me that he would issue a fatwa of that kind. I don't know exactly when it was issued but I was told by some of the people that were taken aback that he could make the distinction obviously between the civilian reconstruction program, which he understood, and that was not civilian, it was run by the military. And I'm a former civil affairs officer, I'm not hostile to the military at all, my son's in the military, and but there needs to be, it seems to me a greater degree of understanding by state and DOD of what the internal dynamics are of aid agencies, AID and its partner organizations and UN agencies, which they do not understand. They don't understand the regulatory constraints AID is under, they don't understand the Foreign Assistance Act, the Inspector General's Office, the GAO, they don't understand the business model and as a result, they make a lot of really very poor judgments in ordering things to be done that don't make a lot of sense legally, developmentally, or operationally in the field. And I think that's because AID has been so marginalized. I like to say at least one controversial thing, I have reached the conclusion now that we need to amend President Kennedy's order of 1962 and take AID out of Chief Mission Authority in every embassy in the third world. And I say that, DFID has done that, and no one is arguing DFID is dysfunctional in the developing world. We are failing because AID is not allowed to do its work. People are telling the embassies in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Pakistan not to do certain things, they're doing them, and there isn't a lot of difference between the Obama administration, the Bush administration, and this point I might add because there's been no real effort in military schools or military schools better. I have to say they've made an effort. They have AID offices teaching. But the Foreign Service Institute, we attempted to put a curriculum in place in the Foreign Service Institute of Development and the director who is a former ambassador in the developing world who is very supportive said, Andrew, this is a good idea, we're gonna put it in, we'll have AID offices teaching. And this faculty and the career staff said, absolutely not, that is not what we're doing, we're not gonna train anybody. And then they took it out of the curriculum, which I found frankly unbelievable, unbelievable. I think there are some, there are four fundamental problems between the three Ds. The three Ds are not gonna be integrated without compromising the integrity of what the three are. And we are not, there are more clashes between the three Ds than there is commonality. And there's a function, there's a disagreement over mission and mandates, statutory mission, statutory, a practice, a theory. I mean, the development literature is very rich now. We can't follow what the development literature is telling us to do because AID's been so marginalized. Two, there's a huge difference in time horizon. The aid programs that don't work are ones that are too short term to actually institutionalize what the changes are. It is about getting ownership, but that is not sufficient. AID is about building institutional capacity in the country, whether it's in the NGO community, a private sector, profit sector, business community, or in the government. It's about building institutions that when the aid program ends and the funding ends can carry on whatever it is that the program was. And if once the funding ends, the program doesn't continue, then you have a problem in terms of sustainability. We have lost the central problem of all development programs, whether it's the World Bank of the UN or the NGOs or AID, is the sustainability question. We used to integrate it in our programs, and AID has got more in state departments, in gorged aid. No one even talks about it anymore. It is the central problem. What happens when the funding stops? And if you're doing your work right and you're over a 10 year period, you can actually make programs sustainable, but you can't do it in six months or a year. You're talking about really creating something that didn't exist before, or strengthening institutions that are very weak or not existed. So time horizon is very important, and the demands of the military and the demands of diplomats in terms of time horizon is so short term. I think that's one of the major problems with counterinsurgency programs, is the timeframe is completely unrealistic. And when you tell people it's unrealistic, what the reaction of state and DOD is, more state than DOD is, you're being uncooperative.  They're not dependent on what we think, or do, or how much money we put. They're dependent on the society and the level of development that they're in. If you have an advanced society, which Iraq actually was, it's a little easier to actually create institutions. I talked to an AID contractor who's one of the best development people in Washington, I won't tell you his name, and he's working in the ministries in Iraq. And he said, I have never seen a professional class of people more embracing training than I've seen in 30 years, that I've seen in Iraq. They want, the Iraqis want this to work so badly, they're actually integrating the training into the ministry's functions right now. And it's because of the stage of development in there, what they went through with Saddam, and what they wanna do for the future. A lot of our programming is dependent on the society in which we're in.  That's complete nonsense. There is no, you know, the one thing Bill Easterly and Jeffrey Sachs agree on. The only thing is that these things need to be localized and countries are not all at the same level of development. Their values are different, their worldview is different, and that profoundly affects the success of aid programs. Now, I wanted to conclude with some operational lessons we learned in Iraq and Afghanistan. It's a different matrix or layer of thinking that I think we need to start putting, and I telephoned a lot of the electrical lines and the insurgency was already beginning. And I came back with a nine-page memo I wrote myself with 11 recommendations. And it's interesting, it was supposed to be a 10-minute conversation with Condi, it was an hour. And she said, Andrew, go back again, come back with more of these recommendations. And they're based on our observations of what was happening. And these are the comments. The first is, if you do a reconstruction program, which you're typically thought of in health, you know, in different sectors, that's one way of, there's other ways of looking at development from a security standpoint, from an opposed development standpoint. If you have a development project which requires interconnected infrastructure like water mains and water lines, sewer mains, a mountainous area where there's a highway project that has 100 bridges on it, one bridge goes out, the whole highway frankly shuts down. Or, most importantly, electrical lines. That is extremely high risk in an insurgency. Why? All you have to do is blow up one two feet section of a water line, a big water main, or take one line down. If you have a 300 mile distribution line for electrical, one down, the whole thing shuts down. I think the worst thing to do frankly are projects that require continuous 24 hour security in these kinds of environments. In another environment where it's peaceful, it's very appropriate, but not in this environment because you open yourself to the insurgency. Secondly, you have point of service infrastructure like schools, health clinics, and water wells.  It only shuts down that one school. And once you get the teacher and the books and the kids in the classroom, really it's a self-contained unit. And so those are still high risk because they're visible and the military does like visible projects that everybody can see. But the great irony of reconstruction in a counterinsurgency is the more visible it is, and therefore it wins hearts and minds, the less viable it is developmentally because it's much more at risk from a security standpoint. Now we have learned some things in Iraq and Afghanistan and Pakistan that are very interesting, which is a third category, which are very low risk in terms of what happens in terms of insurgency attacks. One, our voucher programs. We ran a voucher program. This is nothing to do with insurgency, but after the, this was during the Clinton administration before I was at eight, so I had nothing to do with this. But 1998, it was a brilliant idea. OFDA did $90 voucher distributions to everybody affected by the Great Flood. 90,000 families, 100,000 families got these vouchers and they rebuilt their houses and they paid their school fees, bought clothes, because that was all destroyed in the flood. It, very low overhead, and once you give all the women, we did only women heads of household got the money, and we did an audit afterwards. It was very, very effective, very effective. It was invisible. Once the money was distributed, you didn't know who got the voucher and who didn't get it. We did the same thing in the Pakistan earthquake. We did vouchers through the NGOs for people, instead of bringing stuff in from the outside, we told the Pakistani merchants in Islamabad and Karachi, you go up to the earthquake zone, you sell this stuff, we will give you vouchers through the NGOs. They, you redeem them and you will buy stuff. You choose what you want. It was very popular. It affected the mass of people. So it was very effective in terms of winnings hearts and it was once you pass them out, it was completely invisible. Seed programs, very useful, and fertilizer programs. We did this in the early stages of Afghanistan in 2002. Once the seeds distributed, you know, we found that we distributed a kind of seed that was very interesting because it was high yield. It increased by one to 200% yields. I actually had a farmer say, this is a miracle from Allah because I now have twice as much wheat with the same size plot. Now we got this from the CGIR network. AID has been the biggest donor to this network. So subsidiary of the World Bank. It was in Syria. I actually had a people object to the fact it was from Syria. It's an international organization. We collected this seed that was developed at this center all over the Middle East. We distributed it in early 2002 and it affected the crop in a big way enough so that actually prices collapsed for wheat because there's so much wheat being grown in 2002. But the seed program, once you distributed the seed, you know what the farmers did? They didn't eat the wheat. A lot of them kept the wheat seed for the next year. They said this seed is producing massive amounts of increased food.  We're gonna find some other way to eat. We're gonna use this for the next crop, a seed. So once it got to the agricultural system, it was actually very effective at increasing yields and very invisible.  How will they know who got it and who didn't get it? Or mass employment programs. I mean, you could say any collection of people doing work you could claim was somehow run by the West by someone associated with the US military, AID. But the fact is, when they start shooting very large numbers of people, they do lose their base of support. So I think these projects are not as visible. You can't put a big sign in a seed program. Once the seed's distributed, there's no sign. There's no evidence. The military is dominated by engineers. I mean, that's, before Vietnam, everybody was an engineer who went to West Point or Annapolis. And there's a tendency to wanna construct things. People take literally the term reconstruction. We used to go to NSC meetings and I'd say, does it not mean physically reconstructing things? It means constructing institutions, governance, and people would not get what we were talking about. People say, you are diverting money into soft capacity building, community development, market, they used to call them soft programs. They used to infuriate me at these meetings. The point, finally, is this. We are not gonna be able to fix this if AID continues to be marginalized in the interagency. It needs to be at all the NSC meetings. It needs a permanency. We had a permanency from the beginning of Afghanistan at the time I left. There's no AID officers at the NSC meetings anymore, deputies or principals meetings, to sell the president that DOD or state may be wrong on one of these things. The notion that the State Department has the two Ds is a very dangerous idea. I think, frankly, it's undermining the whole development approach. Not because, and I have great respect for our diplomats, I was a diplomat for a year and a half as an envoy to Sudan. They are completely different disciplines. Even the foreign service system is different for how we select officers, how we train them, what the culture of the institution is, what they actually do for work. Completely different institutions. You can merge aid into state. You will not have a development agency anymore. Let me leave it at that. Andrew, hang on. Before you leave the podium, the others have an opportunity here to ask questions. Yes, Jim. Visibility and viability. I get the point. But that road you referred to was very visible. Yes. Cell phone towers or insurgents were self, there was self-censorship because to hit that would hit a popular thing. So how do you reconcile those two points? Well, first, we built the road from Kabul to Kandahar. In 13 months, we got, you know, Louis Berger got an American Association of Engineering award for what they did. I don't think most people know the follow-up on that. Taliban went in and blew up all 128 culverts. Now, I wrote, and the big dig for a little while, now what a culvert is, is to keep the water away from the road. The big enemy of roads is heavy trucks and water. If the water gets in the road, the road eventually gets washed out, okay? They knew that if they blew the road up in all the bridges, they would get blamed for it. So what they did is they blew the culverts up. So water can do, they can't get blamed for rain, you know? So there are subtle ways to undermine any kind of development project that requires sort of a continuous line of security. People don't even drive the road anymore, I'm told, because there's so many attacks on in terms of security. Now, cell phone towers are interesting because they don't have lines like a regular telephone line. So I would categorize cell phone towers with our most successful program in Afghanistan was the radio program. There are 58 radio stations, AID funded through inter-news and trained and did capacity. They're all private. The big TV and radio station in Kabul, all AID projects. There's a Harvard Business School case study on how successfully we're with a very small amount of money. We too often associate the amount of money we spend with the importance of the program, which is a big mistake, by the way. Some of the most important things we do are the least funded and some of the biggest funded things are the least effective. There's too much quantitative measurements, too many metrics in this city that are completely counter-developmental in theory and practice with what really works. So my point is the cell phone towers are an example of a moderate security risk, not low and not high because you don't have the wires going between the cell phone powers. One thing I did suggest is I read a book called The Gray Wolves.  And what we did was, very interesting, I said we did it in World War II or after World War II, we should have done the same thing. We went to the mayors of the cities in Germany and said if they blow up the electrical lines in your city that we can reconstruct, we are gonna charge you higher taxes to fix them. That was punitive. I said why don't you pay the tribal shakes along all of the areas that we're reconstructing that are distribution lines, and they get paid if they prevent any, and they did it, they actually did it. And I was most proud, but that came out of the Gray Wolves history of the underground Nazi movement in the late 1940s in Germany, a more positive incentive, which is you prevent the blowing up of the line in your area, your jurisdiction, and we will pay you. If it gets blown up, you don't get paid. After that happened, there was a precipitous drop in the number of lines being blown up. So there are ways to do it, but it requires, I think, some institutional history. You know, all of the documents from the Marshall Plan are in AID's archives, which are most of, are computerized now. Probably is there any AID offices left to read the documents, because the layoffs have been so bad over the last, in the 1990s, and there aren't enough staff in AID. Nancy's absolutely correct. You want this to work, we need a couple thousand more offices than we have now. One last question, or I'm not even sure it's a question, but Dave, you had a case study about road building in Kunar, where, but I don't think it was USAID who did it. It was the military, or was it AID? There was a lot of AID funding went into that project. That case study was a case study not of development project as such. It was the case study of the way that, given series of military units, used the existence of a pre-existing development project as a mechanism to create local governance and to create networks for the population to start solving their own problems. So I characterize it as political maneuver in the book. Unfortunately, that's a rare exception in Afghanistan. But I think just to sort of build on that, our best practice that we've developed over the last few years has shown us that the idea that hearts and minds are one better from more visible projects is actually fallacious, it's not true. You do a lot better with low visibility, even in a straightforward counterinsurgency sense. And I think one of the reasons why we're all sitting at this table is we've discovered that best practice counterinsurgency and best practice development turn out to be very closely aligned, in fact. The sorts of things you want to do in terms of ownership and community buy-in, small local projects, making sure that the visibility is low, all those sorts of things that you do in any best practice development project also are essential to effective counterinsurgency. I'm very interested to hear what Andrew Wilder says about that, because we haven't done so well in Afghanistan with any of the stabilization effect of development. We've made the assumption that if you do development right, it just is magically going to have a stabilizing effect. But there's another whole school of thought about this, which again I deferred Jim and Sloan on, that if you actually go out and treat the sources of instability as your target and you make someone's day job, fix that source of instability and you track against that, then you can get a different result. I wouldn't, I'd be with Nancy on this, I wouldn't call that development. I'd call that stabilization programming. It's a different activity. Andrew, did you have- We're just on the road thing again in terms of the popularity of roads. I mean, it's been popular with a number of people and one is, I think the people appreciated them, but also I'm not sure that's the reason why the road wasn't damaged. I mean, the Taliban also liked them because they got a lot of resources from roads. You get a lot more money from the building of a road and then the taxing of the people traveling on the road from a good road than a bad road. And I think there's quite a bit of growing evidence on the significant amounts of money from these major road building projects and other infrastructure projects slipping in. So the popularity might have been the popularity of the Taliban liked them as a revenue source. And I think a similar point for communication towers. There's quite a bit of evidence that they get quite a bit of money back. You know, through threatening to blow them up unless you get a kickback. So I think there's those kind of dynamics at play. And it's also very popular with donors in particular the US because then you have lots of money to spend quickly. Roads are a good way to do it. But that would go back to my argument that the low risk category of vouchers, of seed distribution, of things that are very invisible and not heavily structural. You can't blow them up easily. Mean that the ability of Taliban to tax those kinds of activities is far lower. I would argue. Matthew. Andrew, two points you made that I really resonate with. The first is the whole sustainability issue and how do you move more quickly into things that are market driven as opposed to market undermining. And secondly is this whole issue of the burn rate determining success of programs. So from your perspective of having been at the helm of USAID and aware of all the competing forces that come to play on that. I mean, we've seen over and over again that as a metric it's probably the least useful of all. You're always a diplomat. And. It's the stupidest metric. It's not just low risk. And in fact it can mask or undermine those activities that are truly helpful and create a whole different layer of problems. So how do you see the best possible navigation out of that? I've just written three chapters of this book I'm writing. By the way, this discussion confuses foreign aid and development. They're not the same thing. Foreign aid is just a pot of money. You could use it to build an opera house in Kabul and it would be foreign aid. Certainly not a development project. These Japanese built a big opera house. It was very visible. It was wonderful diplomacy. They had nothing to do with it in Egypt. You know, it's very famous opera house. But let's not confuse the two things. They're not the same thing at all. The burn rate is what, AID, how AID is judged. I did not know this until after I left. I said, you should have told me you were doing to these meetings. They said, Andrew, you were already having fights every single day all day long. We said, we can't afford another fight. We have a yelling match at an NSC meeting. Our officers, and you know, both administrations are still doing the same thing. They have a monthly meeting and they look at the burn rates. And DoD compares a self-estate and AID in terms of how fast you're spending the money. And the AID officers would go and say, this is the dumbest thing. Because usually the faster you burn the money, the less effective the program is in terms of sustainability in the long term.  And you don't have to be a development expert to see the numbers. You either burn the money or you don't burn the money. I think burn is a very appropriate term. Doesn't mean you're spending the money wise. It means you're burning the money. This has been used against AID for years, years. And our officers have to have to put up with this. I've written three chapters in my book on development and the clash of the regulatory system of Washington, what's called the counter bureaucracy in the political science literature, and development theory and practice. And it's very destructive. It's OMB, it's the GAO, it's the USAID IG, it's SIGUR and SIGGAR, whatever it's called, the Afghan and Iraq Inspector General's Office. It's now the F office, which is the worst of all of them. And it's the Congressional Oversight Committees.  But it's easy to look at, easy to read, and so you can beat people up with it. And we have all these metrics, hundreds and hundreds of metrics. We're getting just an avalanche of them. They don't tell you whether the program's sustainable, whether you've built an institution successfully, whether there's any local capacity been built, whether there's any local ownership been built. Those things don't have easy metrics, and so they don't measure them. James Q. Wilson says in his book, Bureaucracy, the risk of creating all federal agencies into what he calls production agencies where everything's measured is the things that can't be measured aren't funded and aren't done anymore. AID is doing service delivery because it's easy to measure and not institution-building because it's hard to measure. And that is not what we should be doing in these countries. I told you, you would not be bored. I told you, you would not. Andrew Wilder. The manager going later, it's a lot of what I wanted to say has already been said, but thank you again for inviting me back. And apologies to some of you who I'm beginning to sound like a broken record because this issue of opposed development, if you want to call it that, of the securitization of development, I think is a very important issue which is having a big impact on our, not only our counterinsurgency strategies, but very much on our development strategies. But in my comments today, my research has been mostly Afghanistan focus, I'm largely speaking from that perspective. But I think in terms of the concept of opposed development, which I think does need more fleshing out, I mean, I think some of the questions I'd have, but most importantly probably is what are the objectives of doing development in the presence of armed opposition? Why bother? Why are we doing it? Who is opposed to development? I mean, are we just talking only the armed insurgents or more broadly at the community level and also what is being opposed? I mean, is it the development or is it the people or institutions doing the development being opposed? But I want to focus on what I feel is the key issue is what are the objectives of opposed development and why do opposed development? I mean, is it primarily in order to promote humanitarian and development objectives? I mean, basically seeing development as a good in and of itself or are we primarily doing it to promote stabilization and security objectives in order to win hearts and minds? And I think it's really important to know the objectives that we're setting out due because I think it leads to very different kinds of programs and I think in Afghanistan we've seen a lot of confusion between these two and if I could just quote, I was asked to review a copy of a paper ISAF had produced on water resources and it was their strategy for developing water resources in Afghanistan and it was a good sound paper but just to read the objective of it the objective of this water strategy the intended purpose of an immediate increase in water resource investments is to speed the ability of Jiroa or the Afghan government to effectively govern, enhance its security and significantly improve its economy with the intent of hastening a reduction of coalition involvement down to a level of training, management and technical support which from my perspective is a tall order for a water project and pretty and confused objectives but also I think just more fundamentally if we take the health sector for example in Afghanistan which I think is a very good example of a success story in the Afghan context where there was a good sound policy to begin with fairly strong ministry of health leadership on it relatively good donor coordination relatively experienced implementing partners and fairly good monitoring and evaluation and it's led to a very effective public health system called the basic package of health services which has led to actually this is one of the few areas where I think we do have some pretty measurable results in terms of reductions in maternal mortality rates and infant mortality rates and so I think overall success but the health program in Afghanistan is not at all popular preventive primary healthcare is not very popular people if you ask them want curative services they want hospital based facilities a model of healthcare that would be inappropriate in the Afghan context too expensive and people are disappointed they want ambulances they want ultrasound equipment they want again curative facilities when the focus of the program has been healthcare so in terms of winning hearts and minds this has not been an effective program but in terms of good development practice I believe it has the study I've been leading at TUSF for the last couple of years has been trying to look at this issue of sort of the securitization of aid not from a humanitarian principles angle you know that it's blurring lines in terms of the military shouldn't do it or civilians are better at it but much more from an effectiveness angle you know is for me I mean security and stability are certainly the top priorities of Afghans not to mention the international community and if aid is very effective at promoting security and stability objectives in a context like Afghanistan I think it makes a lot of sense to securitize some of your development aid I would keep your humanitarian aid as a separate category which you didn't emphasize but if it's effective at promoting stability and development a strong case can be made for securitizing certainly a significant percentage of your aid but if it's ineffective then it doesn't make sense and I think that's what our research is pointing to in the Afghan context is that there's actually not a lot of evidence very little evidence of significant stabilization and security benefits from the vast amounts of development aid that have been spent in Afghanistan there are some stabilization benefits and you know in terms of our research at a very local sort of tactical level aid projects a small amount of money can play a useful role in legitimizing and initial interactions they have a PRT commander wanting to go talk to some tribal elders at a village level this kind of money can have some legitimizing effects in terms of that interaction maybe some consent generation for the presence of armed forces but this is very much a transactional relationship this is a buying access or renting some temporary access this is not about winning the hearts and minds of people over to the government which is the objective of some of these things so again our research doesn't find lots of evidence of this but there is some certainly at a tactical level some benefits but the research has questioned and you know very quickly on this some of the assumptions around the idea that aid projects have a stabilizing effect and first of all that poverty is a major cause of insecurity in Afghanistan for which there is very little evidence and so I think if that is a major assumption guiding our strategy then we need to be rethinking it the second is the very strongest perception you often get in these interviews especially at the PRTs and policy makers is that we're going to do reconstruction reconstruction leads to economic growth and economic growth leads to stability so the road is going to open up the area to development which leads to stability but we know these linear sort of modernization and the military models are somewhat ahistorical and the economic growth can create winners and losers in the Afghan context and you think it's a fight over and so I think I would question and certainly if you look at Afghanistan's history to me there's a lot more evidence about how the efforts to rapidly modernize and develop Afghanistan have in most cases been much more destabilizing than stabilizing the very third assumption is that our aid projects actually make people like us or like their government and there's again very little evidence from that at a time when more aid is going to Afghanistan than ever before in its history the aid sector is more unpopular than ever before and aid actors and for that I include most aid actors certainly in our research no one comes out looking really good in terms of public perceptions and I think often unfairly because I think having worked in the Afghanistan sort of in the 80s, 90s periods lots has been achieved in this period from a development perspective but this doesn't seem to be translating into popularity for the government or for the presence of international forces so I think that assumption should be questioned and finally the very idea that this that behind a lot of these efforts which is to extend the reach of the central government which is the fundamental domain objective of the PR stated objective of the PRTs the assumption is that that is stabilizing and certainly in our research in the South and Southeast nearly inevitably in an interview with Afghan elders or religious leaders or commanders about what they feel are the main causes of insecurity the number one nearly invariably comes up is sort of the bad corrupt and predatory government and so the objective of trying to expand or extend the influence of that government I think is not, it's hard to argue that that's been stabilizing and that has been alluded to earlier I think not only is it not stabilizing but again a lot of the efforts are indeed destabilizing and again this winter loser dynamic is one of the most important ones in ethnically and tribally divided society often serves a zero sum mentality anyone else's gain is your loss there's a very hard to do development even good development there without creating perceptions that they got more than we did and generating grievances out of that so that's a very hard dynamic to avoid I think in doing work in Afghanistan the press is reporting more and more about the whole aid and war economy and I think that that needs a lot more attention than it's gotten to date in terms of the role of aid and aid contracting and the logistical contracting and security contracting in terms of fueling or funding the Taliban for one but perhaps even more disturbingly in terms of consolidating the power of a very unpopular political elite and increasingly creating vested interests to maintain insecurity and certainly in the research editing in Rosegine where some of the private security companies you know the Afghans are all joke about it you know you create a problem to solve a problem you know and Dexter Falcon's been reporting a bit on this in the last couple of weeks in the New York Times and then the biggest issue is the corruption issue where again this idea that if aid is housing as positive security effects there's a tendency that as security deteriorates the answer is to spend more aid but in these insecure areas where we have very limited implementation capacity the government has a very weak capacity we have very little capacity to provide adequate oversight of what's being done has been talked about already inevitably trying to spend lots of money quickly in those environments is fueling corruption and therefore delegitimizing which is I think playing a major role in delegitimizing the government which I think is one of the major causes of instability so I think again just to really highlight that we need to be much more aware of the destabilizing effects of this large amounts of money we're trying to spend in short order in the Afghan context and then just to finally touch on a couple issues which I think have been alluded to already but the unemployment issue is something I wanted to just talk about because that's again part of the assumption that poverty is a major cause of insecurity it's linked to the idea that's unemployed, angry young men who are a major cause of insurgency and therefore create jobs and lots of jobs quickly and that will somehow have this positive impact and I think it is a factor but I don't think it's nearly as important a factor as it is assumed of course there's lots of unemployment in Afghanistan and lots more under employment and so for one I don't think we have the how much employment do we have to provide to somehow get these security effects and if it is being driven by money if someone is getting now $6 a day to work on a USAID funded cash for work program for 50 days which is the usual or I think 50, 60 days they're hired for on some of these projects and then someone, Taliban comes along and offers to pay $300 or $400 to put an IED in the road I mean again what's to stop that and so I don't quite understand how that's being addressed by these short term cash for work programs I think we're also importing a western notion of unemployment into the Afghan context I actually don't really know what unemployment really means in the Afghan context in rural agrarian society like Afghanistan where traditionally people clean their own irrigation systems and canals and planted their fields we now go in there and say well you're now unemployed therefore we're gonna pay you now to do the work that for centuries you used to do so I think we're creating some dangerous precedents sort of monetizing some of the rural economy which traditionally wasn't so and then finally it's this independent actor model the idea that people are unemployed today so who's providing Taliban give me $10 you give me $5 so I'll go join the Taliban but I think the decision to join the Taliban if you're living in the South is not one taken lightly it has a big impact on your family, on your village, on your tribe and so I think these are not decisions that are just motivated by economic considerations or even primarily so I was gonna say a bit about the sustainability issues but we've talked a bit about that I think there's very dangerous precedents of this large amounts of money being spent quickly in terms of creating a bubble economy dependent on us to keep all these people employed and doing things and when that external donor funding starts to dry up then what and so I think again the danger of raising expectations and I would argue in context like this we should probably be doing less rather than more doing a few things well and focusing on those but not creating this bubble economy of aid which is not gonna be sustainable and just as an aside I would argue also in terms of even the local government now the focus on the districts I would strongly caution against trying to do too much at the district level because the Afghan government never had effective district government and in my view they're probably certainly my lifetime probably never will we haven't really figured out how to get Kabul to work let alone 34 provinces and the idea that now we wanna get 400 districts or 80 priority districts functional maybe we can but then what is our exit strategy because there isn't the capacity in Afghanistan or the resources to sustain effective district government and I think we need to be careful about raising expectations that district government is gonna become a viable level of government in Afghanistan so just to conclude in terms of the recommendations again I would definitely echo what Andrew was just saying about prioritizing quality over quantity and that's also in some ways prioritizing more qualitative research and monitoring evaluation methodologies over quantitative I think that is a real problem that unless it can't be put on a PowerPoint slide and quantify then it seems to have little value and I think that's oversimplifying these complex realities there again recognize the destabilizing effects of aid and then finally this back to the I think what Andrew was alluding to in terms of the three days but don't set development aid up to fail by creating these unrealistic expectations of what it can do in terms of security objectives I think there's a lot of evidence of development aid in Afghanistan having positive development effects and there's also some fat examples as well but there isn't a lot of evidence yet about having positive security effects and I think we really run the risk of discrediting development aid and setting it up to fail by expecting it to somehow have a major impact on defeating the insurgency and I know especially in this town being able to say that the development aid has a security benefit is pretty useful in terms of getting resources and getting a seat at the table so I recognize the value and practical terms of linking our development very closely to our security but if it's ineffective in the long term we risk discrediting development aid and having it not no longer value because it's perceived to have failed in terms of defeating an insurgency in Afghanistan so thank you very much. Good Andrew, questions this Andrew. The worst thing we do and the UN does it and we go along with, in fact we tell the UN to do it is these international pledging conferences. Most Afghans in Iraqi, they don't remember all of it. The one thing they remember is when they announce after these pledging conferences that the donors pledge $10 billion. Most of them don't know what $10 billion is but it sounds like a huge amount of money and it creates the expectation which is one of the, I think one of the dangers of these interviews for their very front, there are limitations to doing interviews because people sometimes if you, I ask people myself when I go into the field, where did you get that information from or what's the basis for your saying that? When you start to drill down, they don't have a basis for it, rumor, they heard something on the radio or it's the perception. The biggest problem we have is creating expectations through these pledging conferences which the Afghans then keep repeating.  You promised to do this much money in southern Sudan. You're not doing it. I said, well, number one, the U.S. government is doing more than they pledged by far in southern Sudan but it's always used as a propaganda tool by people who are opposed to what's going on. So I think actually we should abolish having these international pledging conferences. I think they're actually destructive to the process and they create expectations which are very dangerous. Matthew. Two points that you raised that I think are really interesting. The first is the securitization of aid. I think there's a difference between a narrow definition of security and a much broader definition of the relationship of development to security. Where I get very hopeful is the possibility of the new presidential security development strategy to reframe development as part of a broadly defined national security agenda where by having trusted partners who are able to meet the needs of their people globally engaged in solving some of the world's problems. And so I think it's important that we start reframing the security issue as that more broadly defined agenda and the role of development in helping us get there. And then secondly. Matthew, can I interrupt right there? Hold on to your second point, don't lose it. Andrew, I was gonna ask this question too, but when you said securitization of the development, if you could just define what you meant by that. Well, basically it's a trend of using our development aid much more explicitly to achieve security objectives as opposed to say first and foremost development objectives. And the two are arguably linked, and I'm arguing why the evidence base of the link is weak, but it's overall we're seeing very explicitly. Now, USAID strategy in Afghanistan was defined last year as to support our counterinsurgency objectives. So that's the security. Development is a supporting role to achieve our security objectives. And I would agree with you that I don't think that's linking to the broader vision that we're hoping will emerge with the development strategy that we all as a country need to have. That gets to that definition of clarity. The second thing, I mean, I really wanna affirm the importance of looking at this from an aid effectiveness approach. And in the study that we did, we tried very hard, one of the credit to link it to effectiveness and one of the effectiveness factors that we looked at is how is it perceived by the communities? And what is it that they value and how do they find advantages in the activities? And both the interviews and the degree to which we have survey research shows that they really value that community led process, which we define by three factors. Yeah, and I just saw that came out very strongly in our research too. And I also wanted to re-emphasize that when I say that perceptions of aid and aid actors are very bad, it doesn't mean to say that I think that there's no good news. Again, I think lots has been done. And in our research too, the better perceived programs were what, for example, like the National Solidarity Program where there's a process involved and the process is as important often as the product and it's a relatively small amount of money that could be managed. There is a monitoring and evaluation dimension to it. And these things were more positively perceived because I think of that community development approach. And I think it was having clearly there's evidence of those having positive development outcomes. What we did not find was any evidence of even good, well-perceived development programs necessarily having discernible stabilization or security benefit. So even good development doesn't necessarily lead to security if the drivers of insurgency are not primarily related to issues like poverty and unemployment. I mean, in our research, bad governance comes up as the main one, neighboring countries comes up as one, sense of ethnic grievance, tribal, inter-tribal disputes. I mean, a long list of things are fueling the insurgency in Afghanistan. We seem to be pinning a lot of our hopes that it's unemployment derived as legitimacy from delivering social services to its population or roads. It's been much more closely linked to religion, justice, security. So not coincidentally, I believe, that's what the Taliban offer. We offer roads, schools, clinics and sort of those benefits. And I think because I think that's what we felt was going to be important to legitimize the government, a big focus to get those Kabul-Kandahar road built before the Karzai, first of presidential election, because the idea that that road would help legitimize and make them popular. And just as an aside, I think, I'm not an expert on Iraq. And Bill, you can speak more to this. I think in the Iraq context where you had a lot of infrastructure and roads and a fairly developed economy, when those were damaged and destroyed in the war, in that context, maybe getting those up and running was a much more important factor in terms of winning hearts and minds. And it was an important source of grievance. But in Afghanistan, those things didn't exist. So I think it's quite a different situation in Afghanistan than Iraq. Good. Andrew? Any... Just one comment. I think it's important not to conflate stabilization programming with development. And I think the development in a counter-incidence environment still has a very valuable role, but it isn't winning hearts and minds. In fact, the whole concept of winning hearts and minds has been very thoroughly discredited in the counter-insurgency community in the last 20 years. Ever since a lot of work on choice theory, as I think from gratitude theory, has shown us that you can bring all kinds of benefits to a population.  And also that doesn't actually matter very much whether they like you or not. So actually the role of long-term development is two-fold. Firstly, it's capacity building so that you can finally unask the place after 10 or 15 years because somebody in there can take over responsibility. And that's nothing to do with winning hearts and minds. It's about allowing the government to get around and do the things it needs to do to take over suppressing the insurgency when you leave. And the other thing is consent generation, which Andrew talked about. And I think that's a big key to why we've done a lot of the things we've done in Afghanistan because the international community felt that it needed to show it was bringing some kind of benefit to the Afghan people in order to legitimize the international presence. Not only in the eyes of the Afghans, primarily in the eyes of the contributing countries that were putting people in. And I think you may or may not see that as a valid activity but it's nothing to do with stabilization or security. It's a political strategic activity. The one thing I'd say on that is I absolutely agree that the thinkers on coin, David Foremost, understand that but in practice, in the field and doing the notion of winning hearts of minds is alive and well.  Let me just add one comment. Nancy, you talked about the national security strategy. The national security strategy is gonna have development strategy, I'm sorry, of the administration, like other ones in the past through other administration that have almost no effect on the actual practice of aid because it is driven now not by strategies from the White House but by the regulatory process. If you look at how aid does its work, it's driven by the burn rate, it's driven by OMB's part annual evaluation of each aid program which is frankly an enormous waste of time. It's the F office which is now more powerful than it was before because the aid administration is no longer in charge of it. It's the IG, it's the figure, I mean, AID officers go to these meetings, they present these reports and they beat the crap out of the eight officers when in fact these regulatory apparatus in Washington have completely misunderstood what the purpose of these programs are. When you read that, you read that little quip of what the, you don't think an aid officer wrote that whole thing. AID wrote part of that. It's then sent up through Ambassador Holbrook and the mission and you know what they do?  That's what happens. Andrew, I understand this is in your book. Is that right? This is coming in your book. The stuff about the regulatory apparatus will be published in the next two weeks by the Center for Global Development. Thank you. We'll look forward to it. That's great. And we're looking forward to Jim Shear who I know has a plane to catch at some point not too long so I appreciate your thinking through this and over to you. Well first of all I have to convey heartfelt thanks not only to the organizers but to colleagues. I think I have learned more in the last hour and 15 minutes than I have in many months quite frankly. It's been terrific. It's been an education and as the caboose on this train let me just make two or three quick points and I do apologize. I'm heading for playing in just a little bit. First of all I'm delighted that Dave Kilcullen actually defined and made some interesting differentiations in this cohort of opposers. Some of my early field experiences back in the early 1990s were in Cambodia and you could drive through Takeo and Kampot provinces and see Khmer Rouge and Black Pajamas taking a few tolls not next to government police but down the road. Interestingly after their awful time in government but back pushed out into the Northwest they divided villages out. The best way to tell if the KR were there is that the road just ceased blocked off. Separation was key so these were adamant opposers at one point who became toll takers. They seemed to as and was said by other colleagues toll taking became part of their MO and suddenly Kusan Pan would show up in Bangkok and get some nice suits and fly into Penang to be part of the UN peace process. So you're wondering this is an insurgency that was dying maybe because it was evolving in terms of its attitudes toward the outside world. Interesting question. Also very much on the competitor side I think as we see today in parts of Afghanistan there is a competitive quality to this side. Very much appreciate Dave's differentiation. I've learned a lot from other colleagues here visibility versus viability. The aid as an insurgency USAID which is an interesting concept. And I have to say there's an irony wrapped in this whole thing which is looking back over the last few decades we as a country have actually done a lot of insurgent support. We sent Mike Hess into Kosovo who helped reestablish the banking system in a robustly independent province in the face of a very heavy handed counter insurgency which we helped to dislodge. There are other examples too. These team war we in the Aussies helped keep Falunthal sort of armed but in complements until the right time. I mean you go on and on there are other cases too. Now insurgencies and support can lead to separation secession separate states and development opportunities there too. We are talking about coin counter insurgency and it is it is hard and I acknowledge that and a lot of good criticisms have been made here. Let me just tick off a few things that I would like to say I draw from this that we are we corporately the U.S. U.S. government and it is the three D's and I we perhaps need a better construct on that. Flexible resources huge whether it's cross sector you know rule of law here economic development there that that's very challenging and I'm sure Andrew can give us chapter and verse on the problems of flexible resources. Stay tuned on that one. Blended expertise number two yes need development experts with commanders every level where the military is president in expeditionary mode because there is this balance between quick impact and I will plead guilty to an interest in quick impact but how you make sure that's a sustainable impact so that the school or the clinic you build tomorrow has teachers or doctors in three or four months or a year and so expertise is critical and I think the U.S. Defense Department would be the first to claim that it needs it needs a tremendous amount of expertise at lower levels. Third a understandable degree of separation with NGOs who define their as a key to their operational effectiveness to be separate and independent. There's always a need for better cross communication and better knowledge of each other while protecting some extent privacy concerns when we are working on the spot issue. That said let me just say that there are multiple problems in the field in complex environments guilt by association with guys with guns is one of those problems but you can have be built by association with the development assistance you're supplying girl schools in South Eastern Afghanistan. So it's complex and I would say yes the separation from military organizations is key but it's not the sufficient condition for success in the field. Third point fencing in problematic partners. Lots of partners in the field and I think we've heard today that on issues of corruption, elite capture and so forth there are problematic partners. I don't think I'll go into that in any more detail but it's a clear and present issue that we all wrestle with. Local buy-in, huge and very significant and great appreciation to Mercy Corps for its effort looking at community led development on that and how to achieve real local buy-in. Recognizing that one impediment oftentimes is a national aspiration in the capital as distant as it is relative to the aspirations of the local community at the district level. Not always in sync, sometimes difficult in various operating environments. And finally, it's a bit provocative let's be open to remedial destabilization. We're all gonna make mistakes in these environments and a lot of money is at risk. And that's not a popular thing to say to a congressional staffer to say we're gonna make some risky investments here but let's be open to making some mistakes, learning from them. And remedial work can be destabilizing at times given the society involved, what we're achieving to do. We have to be practical and realistic. I have no question about the dangers of trying to do too much too fast but let's be open to at least making a few mistakes provided we can learn from them. On that, I will conclude and... And so if you have time for any questions from this crew here and then this also is going to lead into questions from this crew here. But from the panel, anybody have anything for Jim before he has to go? If not, okay, then this is a good opportunity. But really quickly I'd love to hear just one more sentence on remedial destabilization and if you mean something different than just the ability to have greater risk-taking ability. And Jim, while you answer that, as you're thinking of your answer to that, let me invite people to do what we've already started doing is that is if you would like to ask someone a question in particular to Jim here, but others as well, please just come to these two mics and we will then take questions but Nancy has just asked one. And appreciation for tackling spot or looking and doing. It is mainly about allowing and being tolerant of risk-taking but it's also a question of making some effort to bring strong voices and interests into a mix on priorities which doesn't reflect just the prevalent view of the leadership you're dealing with. And I will now sit down and let the... Ah, very good, very good. Okay, thank you all very much. This is exactly what we had hoped for here and now we have an opportunity for those and you've been standing longer, so why don't you start? If you'll just let people know who we are and direct your question to a way person. Afternoon, everyone. My name's John Patton, State Department Office of the Coordinator of Reconstruction and Stabilization. I have some connection to all of you, whether NGO background, Feinstein Center, USAID field officer in Kandahar for two years, regional DEVAD and now on Afghan pre-deployment training for the civilians that are going out under the SRAP mandate. So I do have some questions here. The many interconnected issues, of course, I think there are many commonalities or linkages to some of the seemingly intractable problems we've brought up on this. But one thing I should mention in what we are training, whether it's at civmil training or the civilian specifically, or if it's at a brigade combat team, we pretty much have stricken the phrases, hearts and minds out of any training materials, including extending the reach of the Afghan government. Certainly there are a lot of governance programs being focused to that, to actually link people to not non-corrupt systems, but at the community level or at the district level to actually connect people to services that should be run by Jairoa. And let me shift focus here to the actual questions. One of the things we're missing, I believe, is at the community level, and Nancy, you raised this about what the people need or what the people want. There are some problems with this still, including who are the power brokers and what are the power dynamics in a particular area, especially at the very community level. We have people that say, well, we wanna talk to the elders or we wanna talk to the Shuras. Often these are power brokers, but are not representative of the people. So I think that is a missing link there as far as some of our programming. So I don't know if any of you have an answer. Okay, how do we get down to some of those core grievances or some of those underlying dynamics in instability? We certainly do not train a project approach at all. We work closely with USAID OMA on how you actually analyze some of this and actually triangulate some information to get down. What kind of programming do we need to do based on things that can actually stabilize here? And I don't think we're there yet, but I was wondering if Nancy, if you could just, from the NGO perspective. Well, from the NGO perspective, and I also think from a community-led development perspective, one of the things that we found in our study, which I think is reflective of a practice that many people try to follow, is the principle of participation, where you go beyond just, clearly in Afghanistan, often it means women, but it could also mean just others who are excluded from some of the traditional power structures. Andrew talked a little bit, I think as Dave did as well, about the destabilization of vast amounts of resources, where I think when you really push a lot of money into a community, you exacerbate some of those tensions that you talk about. And so that's why when you've got a very participatory approach where you broaden who's at the table, and then they have to contribute. So it's their project, not Mercy Corps' project or the USG's project, that has some greater effectiveness in dealing with absolutely very real dynamics that one has to stay alert to. But it also requires a much longer timeframe. Longer timeframe, a lot of tea. And that's the policy question I don't think we've really gotten to yet. And Andrew, I would actually challenge you on these. My last question, because I want to give other people the answer. Yeah, I'm sorry, okay. I'm happy to challenge, yeah. No, the whole issue of- Which Andrew are you speaking to? Andrew Wilder, and the whole issue of some of the programs, whether we're talking long-term development, whether we're talking ostensibly for stability, the whole thing about employment. I agree strongly, Andrew. Okay, what happens on day 90 when these guys aren't working anymore? It's still a real issue. C-Program, when I was there, was a disaster. Because a lot of the things we're doing, even people that thought they were a good project, were not connected in any way to local officials that are responsible at the line director. It's for basic services. So they have to be linked. And a lot of that stuff did exacerbate conflict. And I know that's not a question there, but that's something we still need to consider. Good question, thank you. You wanna talk about the C-Program? Okay. C-The Wheat Seed? You mean the- Wheat Seed, I think you're right. There were various seed programs there. Well, the Wheat Seed program I was talking about was the one we started in the spring of 2002. Yes, which was wiped out recently. Which was undermined recently by another massive distribution. What had become a sustainable produced- Most seed programs have undermined the agriculture director at there. Ambassador Litt. David Litt, retired Foreign Service Officer and now director of the Center for Stabilization and Economic Reconstruction in Chapel Hill. Arguably one of the more prominent battlegrounds right now where we can conflate securitization of development and development issues is Yemen. I'd be very interested to hear any and all of you. Maybe Andrew Wilder gets a pass, I don't know. But I'd like to hear all of your perspectives on what should be a way ahead in Yemen and what should not be. Okay, well, I was gonna actually defer to Nancy because most of you are actually working very heavily in the Horn of Africa and I think you're doing some work in Yemen. So, but I think we know from experience that the approaches that are appropriate in a mature conflict environment are not necessarily appropriate in an incipient conflict environment. And that one of the things that can happen is that if you jump in with both feet with programs that might make sense in Iraq or Afghanistan to somewhere like Yemen, you can actually have a destabilizing effect or you may, in fact, have the opposite. And one of the issues we've discovered is that expectation management, early in conflicts becomes very, very important. Too often we've seen people go in and say, tell us all your grievances, tell us all your problems. And they come out with a list of 50 or 60 grievances and then they say, we're gonna fix these. And that's great for the first guy in the tour, but every time you do that, you raise and then disappoint expectations. And by the time the third or fourth person is in there, they're battling against the whole wall of disappointed expectations that have arisen from the best of possible intentions early in the program. I think the most important thing you can do early, and I think, I know we agree on this from our time in Iraq, is educate people in the aid mission and the embassy itself on how to recognize changes in the environment early enough to communicate those to Washington. And I think that's not about delivering development, it's about country team internal skillset. You know, we aren't broadly in Yemen, in part because we're very reluctant to work in an environment where it's so explicitly and so publicly a special ops insurgent hunt, according to the RFAs on the website and the way they're worded. And so, you know, I think the coin, I mean, you made the point, David, that a good coin strategy, there's a lot of overlap with good development. But I think if you fence everything inside what is seen as a military frame, you undermine the good development, even though the elements may be quite similar. So it's a little bit of a conceptual understanding to have. What I will say in the Hornmore broadly is there was a GAO report that came out in April that looked at what was the harm done by a number of projects undertaken by forces associated with AFRICOM, where they were dilapidated after a short, you know, there was no community development or community ownership factor. So structures were built and abandoned, but still labeled as, you know, so visibility gone bad. And exacerbating some of the community structures by this grievance approach. So I think we would be well-served to, in an incipient conflict environment, look at what are the ways to appropriately be involved in it with which actors to accomplish what purpose. And not assume that, I don't think that you would call that coin strategy, though. It's where the old hearts and minds approach. Yeah, I think that we've found through practical experience that bottom-up community-led peace-building approaches have a much greater chance of success. Certainly in the early stages of conflict, and definitely once a conflict is fully blown, then government-led top-down security approaches. And I think it's important that people understand that and how community-led development fits into that. Of course, when you do get to, you know, the Battle of Fallujah in 2004, it's past the stage for that, you know. But, yeah. Just on that issue, because I think it really is a critical one, which is it's hard to find anyone who's not a development practitioner or a coin practitioner on the ground that understands these issues, who doesn't ultimately conclude that the tsunami of cash that David referred to is harmful and having negative impact, both developmentally, as well as from a security angle. And to me, that's how can we address that in this town when it's identified that too much money is a big part of the problem, but we seem unable to close off the taps. I know I keep referring to these guys, but we need to be shifting away from input metrics to impact and outcome metrics. And when I was Secretary Rice's advisor, I had brief after brief where people would say, this is the effect we're having in Afghanistan, and the briefing would be how many schools we built or how many kilometers of road we laid down. That's inputs. It doesn't tell you anything about what you're actually doing and what effect you're having. And I think once we shift to that, you can actually quantify effect. We just haven't tried very much. Let me just add something. We had yelling matches every month. Mark Ward would go to the meetings. This dispersement obsession you have with the burn rate is undermining the education program. We would discuss this every week. We'd say the more important metric, how many kids are in school? Are the teachers in school most of the week? Because sometimes they don't report. Are they getting paid? Are the textbooks in the school? And then there is another metric, which is harder to assess. Do the kids actually learn anything whether in the school? You know, what's fascinating to me is some of the most conservative people, and I'm a conservative in the city, would never use a metric in the United States domestically by how many schools we rehabbed as a metric for determining whether we had a functional education program. No conservative would argue that. They would always argue are the kids literate when they leave school. So I find it very odd that some of the people who are most demanding for these metrics are the people who would never use that metric domestically in the United States. I mean, it doesn't make any sense to me at all. But the debate is there. I think the reason, frankly, is it's easy to track disbursement rates. It's much harder to get into the quantitative measurement stuff. Now, we used to have an office in aid, the CDIE office. It's a center for development information and evaluation. When I was doing research in my book in Paris at the OECD, the director, who's New Zealander, he said, how is CDIE doing? I said, CDIE has been abolished. My successor abolished it. He said, that can't be possible. It was the gold standard. We actually used CID more than the World Bank to determine, because you know what they did? Impact evaluations. They did impact. And they abolished it. They said, this is useless stuff. It's because it's not, it's back in theory. It has not been funded. It has not been funded. And we don't know whether there is an obsession in this city with metrics, even with an AID now. And I think it's because we're being driven by the IG, the GEO, and all these people to produce these numbers. They can create a new evaluation office that is metrics driven, which would be, I think, exactly the wrong thing to do. So it's the devil in the detail that counts. Thank you, excellent. Next question. I have so many questions and comments on the way to start. But this has to be short. In fact, I'm thinking that the people who are at the mics now, I think we'll end at the last one here. And that, that, that it may even take. I just wanted to get back to questions again. That's probably not a bad idea. We'll take two at a time. Okay. We'll just take one here and one here, and then we'll answer them, then we'll go to the answer. And comments are okay as well, right? Comments are okay. You don't have to, that's right. You don't have to. I have a comment for the panel. My name is Sloan Mann. I'm with Development and Transformations. I think the first thing I'm gonna do is send a note to Obama and ask him to create a task force of primarily made up of people on this panel to fix foreign assistance from top to bottom. So incredibly interesting discussion today. I've enjoyed it, and I think there's a lot of experience and depth of knowledge that we could use to fix some of these broken mechanisms. I wanted to comment on post-development for stability programming. Reminds me briefly of the ongoing discussions in the military between coin and stability operations. Is stability operations a thing that we do? Or is it in coin environment we find ourselves in? And other people say, well, coin is a subset of stability operations. And I think that I look at opposed development as almost a subset of stability programming. Stability programming can happen anywhere where there's instability. That's not necessarily defined by an insurgency. I feel like in opposed development, you have to have an active, as you said, a competing program working against you. I wonder if the panel had a comment on that. And then briefly, Nancy, I couldn't agree with you more when you said that stability necessary to begin the pathway to development. I mean, that's absolutely critical. One of the things that we continue to push in our training. So what's the approach to stabilize the environment? And that's what I would argue, stability programming or stability assistance is what we call it. And I'll stop there. Thank you. And so hang on to comments on that if there are, and question here. Thank you. I am Fahim Hashemi, a full right scholar from Afghanistan. Thank you very much for your very inviting information and feedbacks about Afghanistan's situation. But I have a question plus a comment about what you talked about. I really agree that unemployment and neighboring countries impact ethnicity and other problem impacts the current situation in Afghanistan. And also I agree that some of the projects have been successful and some of them have failed. But I think there are some reasons for why projects succeed and why they fail. For me, the reason for success of projects like radio and TV stations in Afghanistan was the right choice of project. It was what people wanted in Afghanistan. Second, the right choice of staff that some educated and committed people were chosen and employed for them. And it was right rewarding. People who worked for radio and TV station in Afghanistan are highly paid rather than public servants. And it is why they do good job and it incurred to the success of the project itself. On the other hand, the reason for failure of some of the projects is the same thing that I mentioned. Let me give an example of our national police. First of all, the right choice of staff because most of the people who are in our national police they are not educated. They are not committed people and just they get into national police in order to find a job and make money. So second is about rewarding. The salary of our national police is so low which is about from 100 to $200, which is nothing in Afghanistan. So accepted or not, people who gets into our national police, they commit administration corruption or do bribery or something in order to make a living for themselves. And this fact is applicable to our entire public servants which has caused administration corruption in current government of Afghanistan. I wonder if there is any fundamental projects in order to eradicate the causes for these failures in Afghanistan ongoing or what do you suggest to how we could get rid of this current situation in Afghanistan, thank you. Thank you, thank you, good questions, which we will answer both of these at the same time but who would like to take the first one from Sloan? Or that was mainly a good comment for this day. It was a good question. I think you agree. We agree. Okay, all right. Except being on some panel or something. Yeah, for the Obama administration, that's right. Let me comment on the comment on, because people have raised the corruption issue. I actually think there's a lot of misunderstanding of this. It's too, we're too close to the end to go into the depth. We did a survey when we started an intake corruption program because we do it in most countries before we ask public attitudes. Is corruption against the law and is it bad? And the survey results nationally Afghanistan showed 27% of the people thought corruption was bad and that it was illegal. Over 70% of the people said it's legal and it's normal and there's nothing wrong with it. 70%. So you can do your surveys, but I have to say this is a problem in many developing countries. They think it is culturally acceptable and they don't see it as a problem. I mean, and if you have a vast majority of the population who says it's not that they tolerate it, they don't actually see it against the law and they don't see it as an evil thing that's under, because when you go into the whole notion that corruption undermines public administration, presumes a Western technocratic approach to service delivery through the government. That's not how people view the government in most developing countries. There's a book on this broad subject of culture and development by Douglas North called Violence and Social Orders. I would urge everyone to read it. He won the Nobel Prize for Economics. His work is now being widely read in Europe and at the World Bank and I think the reason, we're misunderstanding what this is from a cultural standpoint, what these terms mean. They mean something very different there than they do for us. Thank you. Andrew, please. I actually think this corruption thing is critical and I think I would further distinguish between petty corruption. If you have to go to the visa office, passport office and pay a little money to get your passport at, that's annoying, but it's accepted as standard practice. But it's taken to the levels of the corruption in terms of the perception that a small political elite are getting fabulously wealthy at the expense of other groups and it's partly that winner-loser dynamic that they're getting more than we are, that I think is deeply unpopular and destabilizing. And so I personally would not agree that corruption is not a serious problem or perceived as a serious problem. Or that only 27% think that it's a serious problem in Afghanistan because certainly in the interviewing we're doing, it comes out as a much more significant factor there, especially in terms of elite capture of a lot of the goods. And that's the level of corruption which I think is particularly destabilizing. And so where a lot of our aid resources we want to be, again, strengthening the government, but it's then perceived to be enriching and empowering a few at the expense of others. That, I think, is where we're getting into these problems. Good distinction. Last three questions then, let's take all three. Where do we start? We'll start over here and go over there. Hi, my name's Peter Koharis. I have a principal at a small international consulting firm in another life. I worked for an NGO in Asia and for UNICEF in Africa. In the category of shameless plugs I wanted to refer you folks to an article I co-authored in Parameters, which is the strategic journal of the US Army of War College called Counterinsurgency 3.0. We quoted one of Mr. Wilder's articles and I think a number of you would find some of our points resonating. I think Nancy, your points about bottom up. We focus on that quite a bit. We also take on the smart power consensus. I wanted to shift gears though and put something to the panel. It may be that all of us in our thinking has radically or should radically change in light of an announcement last week that, and I happen to do this in terms of my legal capacity, working with host governments and extractive industries, there is apparently $950 billion worth of precious resources, minerals in Afghanistan. If that amount is staggering, I think we would all agree and how we think about development, how we think about the national government, how we think about access to the resources, developing the resources, licensing these resources, corruption, all of these issues now are in a completely different realm as a result of this information, this news. And I know the Afghan government is quite excited among other people. And we may not have the capacity to think about this now in this panel, but this changes everything or has the potential to change everything in terms of what we've been discussing. So I just want to throw that out there for you folks to talk about. Very good, very good. That's on our list. Sir. I'm Bill Stubner from the Lewis Berger Group. First of all, Dr. Kilcullen, I just want to thank you for the book you authored, this last one, and I'm looking forward to the next one. We're actually using some of your framework to bump against our integrated development programs to try to see, are we doing things that way and can we validate some of what you said? But my question's gonna be for Andrew Nathios. Andrew, and I don't know if you've been notified, apologize if you haven't, but our Fred Cuny of engineering development, Jim Myers passed away very recently, I don't know if anyone told you that. This was the guy that really was a miracle worker on the Kandahar Kabul Road. But this is about not just the incredible shrinking of the USAID, but also, I think, I assume you're gonna be addressing this in your book, but the increasing bureaucratization that we've seen over the last 10, 15, 20 years. As you know, when I introduce you places, I always say this is the guy that sent me to my death in 1992. But you were able to send the USAID person out into the field at that time outside the wire to get the answers. And one of the things, just a few weeks ago, I briefed 44 and service officers who were gonna be deploying to Afghanistan this summer. Only two had ever been in a conflict area, and most of them had no expectation that they were going to be going outside the wire. People like Nancy's people, our people, we are out there, and we have a real communications problem. When Carl Eikenberry was going out, I had breakfast with him just before he went out to be the ambassador, and he said, well, what would be the most important thing for me to do? And I said, try to find a way to get away around some of the restrictions to get the AID people and state department people outside the wire. Does your book address that? And if so, how do you think we're gonna solve that problem? Thank you, Bill. Good question, and last question. So you've got that, Andrew, right? Yeah. Okay, very good. Yes, thank you. I'm Ann Sweetser, I'm a social anthropologist. I've worked for the past decade with the Asian Development Bank, but before that, in the mid-90s, I was working on something called the Participation Initiative in the Policy and Planning Program Coordination Bureau. So the question about the current training got me out of my seat. It's another example of a body of material that was developed over a period of time within USAID that seems to have completely forgotten. One question I have concerns the government in a box. And if anybody would like to comment on that, when I think of governance, I think of you build the road, but you get some local NGOs or somebody or community members to decide how they are going to monitor the culverts and the drains so that your flat surface with drains will continue to be functional. And then you think about the relationship between those people in the community and the local and the district and so on. Governments and how they can be responsive. That notion of governments is a complete contrary notion than something that comes in a box, which is something that troubles me, so thank you. Good, thank you. Okay, so we have, from Peter, we have the minerals in Afghanistan, the trillion dollars. From Bill, from Louis Burger, we've got a question for Andrew on aid and others outside the wire, and on governance or government in a box. Let me just go quick. Okay. The notion of a trillion dollars, that has been around for 30 years. There are three dozen studies by AID and the World Bank that go back to the 1970s. We did an assessment in 2002 of the same thing. We gave it to the military, they saw it. It's no new thing. The reason we didn't pursue it is there's a warlord mining in a very bad way, destroys half the stuff he's mining.  Okay, so there's a small problem with security and a warlord controls the area. No one is touching those minerals until there's security and there isn't any security. And this is not new. It's been around for years. The World Bank is full of these surveys and so is AID and the other European donors. Second, with respect to the imprisonment of AID, they call AID mission in Kabul the AID staff, the prison, that's what it's called, the prison, by the career staff. No one gets out. Someone can be there for six months and never leave. The security restrictions, because of the 1998 embassy security act, are draconian. No other donor goes through this. If we had these restrictions for the defense department, we'd never fight any warrants anywhere. And it's not just AID, it's the embassy too. It's ridiculous. And it's not just in Afghanistan. It's in Uganda, it's in Kenya. You can't leave Nairobi without getting a permit from DS, which is preposterous, Kenya. And by the way, the rural Kenya is much more stable than Nairobi is in terms of security, so it's a little bizarre. It is out of control and the only way to fix it is to go to the government regulations, the committee that passed that legislation and changed the law. And they won't do it. They will not do it.  Well, we're in the middle of a war. You want to run development programs, you have to go out and look at them. And that means risk. And people are not willing to take risk in the federal government under these circumstances.