lake community college library and an important for the state of utah is overpopulation. i feel like overpopulation is the root cause of many of our societal problems. i don't know that there are easy solutions to the problem, but i do feel like that is probably the most important issue facing our state as well as our city on a global scale, all of that. >> voices from the states, part of c-span's 50 capitals tour and our stop in salt lake city, utah. >> now john sopko, special inspector general for afghanistan reconstruction, presents the findings of his office's latest report on u.s. government efforts to stabilize the country. this is two hours and 35 minutes.

ntlen.d morning, ladies and welcome to the brookings institution. my name is john allen and i'm the president of brookings. it's my distinct pleasure today to be joined by my friend john f. sopko, the special inspector general for afghanistan reconstruction or sigar as we have shortened it to save time. john joins us as part of our event today entitled "afghanistan, lessons for -- from the u.s. experience -- sorry." stabilizati stabilization, lessons from the u.s. experience in afghanistan. this event happens to share the same title with the report just issued by sigar which will be ruled out today and you will be hearing from john shortly on the

report's contents, the findings and the recommendations. now, i have had the honor of knowing this gentleman, john sopko, for many years. he was a vital partner to me in my previous role leading u.s. and nato fs in afghanistan and has been a trusted adviser to many u.s. policymakers and leaders throughout the years. he and his team have maintained close and tireless oversight over our mission in afghanistan and have been a critical part of ensuring we remain accountable for our efforts. and equally as important in making sure we learn from our successes as well as our mistakes. frankly, over the last nearly 17 years of this conflict, there has been much to learn. to the audience for this hour, john will first provide us his own set of remarks laying out the report, then we will come together on the stage for roughly about 30 minutes of

conversation which will be a short period of q & a between him and me. i think we will have enough time in that hour to go out to the audience for a couple of questions, but we will be followed by a panel, a panel that will have a discussion on the report in afghanistan w large which given the caliber of the panelists that we have today will undoubtedly be an excellent discussion and not without some pointed views, and it will be during that period of time where we will have about 30 minutes probably for audience questions and answers. finally, i would be remiss in not noting that this event takes place just a few days before our most solemn and important of american holidays, memorial day. while over 2,000 u.s. servicemen and women have made the ultimate sacrifice in afghanistan since 2001, what's often overlooked and sometimes even forgotten are the sacrifices by our many

foreign service officers, u.s. aid professionals and civilians of all stripes and forms as well as our numerous coalition partners and allies who also gave their lives in the name of peace and security for the people of afghanistan. memorial day is about honoring each of these heroes and we must never forget them and their sacrifices. those lives lost must mean something and indeed through the lessons learned reports of organizations like sigar we can and we must find new and better ways to ensure that our missions are achieved with greater effect and with less sacrifice, less suffering and less waste for all parties. so with that let me welcome john sopko, special inspector general for afghanistan to the stage, for his keynote remarks. john?

>> good morning. and, general, thank you for those very kind remarks in that introduction, and more importantly for hosting today's event and the release of our fourth lessons learned report, which is entitled "stabilizations: lessons from the u.s. experience in afghanistan." this report is the culmination of two years of work by our office and examines the u.s. stabilization efforts in afghanistan, detailing how usaid, the state department and the defense department tried to support and legitimize the afghan government in contested districts in afghanistan from 2002 to 2017.

today's report is also available in an interactive format, and like af our products may be downloaded from our website at w wchw wchl www.sigar.mill. i think on the interactive format we are the only inspector general's office who releases reports in such a format. sigar will be releasing its fifth lessons learned report on june 14th focusing on our counternarcotics efforts in afghanistan for those who are interested. we began our lessons learned program in late 2014 at a suggestion by you, general allen, and also ryan crocker and some others. my staff has told me that i have credited you enough times about our lessons learned program that we should probably start writing you some royalty checks. but that would be wrong.

but in all seriousness, you made an observation that resonated with me during one of my first trips to afghanistan. while you were the commanding general of isa. we later followed up on that after you retired at a little breakfast meeting over in pentagon city. you noted that of all the worthwhile audits and investigations that sigar was conducting, there was still a question left unanswered. what did it all mean and what did it all mean in the larger context of reconstruction and national security? part of the reason you and others thought that lessons learned program would be a worthwhile endeavor for my organization to undertake is due to our unique jurisdiction. of all the igs we have jurisdiction to look at all u.s.

reconstruction programs and projects in afghanistan, regardless of their funding source, and regardless of which agency is actually conducting those programs. we are statutorily unique in that fashion sincearee the only federal oversight agency that can look holistically at the whole of government effort in afghanistan which means we are not constrained by agency stove pipes. i'm pleased to say that there has been great interest in our lessons learned reports up to date and today's report is really no different. while we were finalizing our report the departments of state and defense along with usaid were finalizing their own stabilization assistance review or sar, and they asked sigar to brief their staffs on that work.

their interagency review was recently approved and is well aligned with the sigar report that we are releasing today. but before i go any further, i think we have to ask the question what is stabilization? it is one of those terms that is rarely, if ever, precisely defined. while definitions have varied by u.s. agency and even within a particular u.s. agency over the last 17 years we've been in afghanistan, earlier this year the u.s. government finally defined stabilization as, quote, a political endeavor involving a civilian military process to create conditions where locally legitimate authorities and systems can peaceably manage conflict and prevent a resurgence of violence. but put simply, stabilization is

the process of building sufficient governance to keep insurgence from returning and cong t population of that area that government rule is preferable to insurgent rule. sigar undertook this project for reason, the stabilization effort in afghanistan was not the first the u.s. government has undertaken, nor will it be the last. given the current security environment and the dangers of allowing poorly governed spaces to serve as launching pads for transnational terrorist groups, we anticipate future u.s. government efforts to stabilize those areas by clearing them of terrorist groups and helping generate sufficient governance to keeperrists from returning, not only in afghanistan, but around the globe.

and i believe the panel discussion this morning will go into greater detail about that. today's report contains seven findings, identifies ten lessons, makes seven recommendations to the executive branch and includes four matters for congressional consideration. rather than go through every one of these, i would like to begin with our overall assessment of the stabilization effort in afghanistan and then highlight some issues of particular concern. unfortunately, sigar's overall assessment is that despite some very heroic efforts to stabilize insecure and contested areas in afghanistan between 2002 and 2017, the program was mostly a failure.

this happened for a number of reasons, including the establishment of a set of unrealistic expectations about what we could do andt could be achieved in just a few years' time. the lack of capacity of u.s. government agencies to fully support those accelerated efforts andtuti rivalries and bureaucratic hurdles compounded this already difficult task. every organization and agency we found that worked on stabilization in afghanistan from dod, civil affairs and special operation forces to state and usaid suffered from personnel and programming deficits born from rapid scaling, short tours of duty and the pressure to show quick

progress. no organization we found was prepared for these challenges and unfortunately it showed with the results. stabilization is unique because it's an inherently joint civilian military undertaking, yet given the size and resources of dod, the military consistently determined priorities on the ground and chose to focus on the most insecure districts. a logical decision on its face, but ironically one that had unintended negative consequences. why? because those areas often remained perpetually insecure and had to be cleared of insurgents again and again. civilian agencies, particularly usaid, were compelled to conduct

programs in these fiercely contested areas that were not ready for stabilization. because the coalition focused on the most insecure areas and rarely provided enduring security afterlearing them, afghans were often too afraid to serve in the local governments there. afghan civilians also had little faith that their districts would remain in government hands when the collision withdrew. implementing partners struggled to execute programs amidst the violence and u.s. agencies were unable to adequately monitor and evaluate the projects. we spend a lot of time in our report on that particular issue. one of the challenges facing stabilization efforts in afghanistan as i alluded to and as it's reported in our report today came from the

institutional differences and rivalries that start right here in washington. while the military was focused on clear, hold and build, those are tenets of the coyne doctrine, state and usaid faced challenges given the pressure from dod to quickly show gains on the ground. this led to significant tensions between usaid and the military over aid's reluctance or inability to work in the most contested an insecure districts, the same areas the military believed to be the most important to reverse taliban momentum. often the military would claim a district was cleared and thus ready for aid to start stabilization programs, yet clear meant something very different to the military than it did to aid, and the afghan contractors tasked with, for

example, paving a road in an insecure environment. the military may have deemed the area safe enough for them, but it made little difference if the contractors charged with executing the hold or build phase of stabilization effort were in danger or felt they were so. some senior aid officials told our staff at collision military forces pushed the agency into going along with clear, hold and build, and demanded that it implement programs such as cash for work o a large scale over aid's objections. senior military officials like wise told us that they had little choice but to do things quickly and focus on the most dangerous areas. again you have to remember the timeline, the short timeline that the military was given, particularly as it was drawing down resources.

usaid officials also had a difficult time arguing against the military's belief that stabilization would buy support for the population, convince them to share information about ieds and thus save coalition lives. as one aid official told us, quote, the military expected us to be bags of cash, unquote. prior to the surge aid advisers were often able to exercise veto power about where and how military commanders used funds particularly fm the certain program or commanders emergency response program, but later usaid's influence over cerp expenditures were significantly diminished as we were doing that draw down and that quick exit from afghanistan. as one official quoted when aid tried to stop implementing projects in areas where they could not be monitored or evaluated, the military

sometimes set aside the civmil partnership model and used cerp funding unilaterally. as a result all types of stabilization programming were implemented during all stages of the clear, hol auild sequence, even when aid knew the sequencing was inappropriate and the programs would be ineffective. der pressure from the military the aid built schools in places where they cannot be monitored, the government could not maintain and staff them and students only attended sporadically if at all due to insecurity. military commanders likewise concentrated large cerp projects in less secure areas where they were less likely to succeed. in contrast to dod, state and aid, the two agencies that provided the most personnel for the civilian surge, did not have sufficient staffing, especially

built-in staff redundancy to enable rapid mobilization in the field. without that capacity in afghanistan, state and aid particly struggled. to meet the demands of the civilian surge state and aid pulled staff from the other assignments and hired temporary staff. the number of civilian personnel under embassy kabul's control, for example, more than tripled between january 2009 and december 2011. astoundingly, by2011 more than 20% of u.s. a id's worldwide staff were in afghanistan. as one aid official told sigar, at the height of the civilian surge our existing numbers were so limited we were forced to bring on roughly 250 to 350 people per year to do the work

of aid across afghanistan. unfortunately, many had no or little practical aid experience. one of the hires told our staff that he got the job because, quote, i had a pulse and a master's degree, end quote. by 2011 the demand for personnel had so exceeded the supply that state and aid were unable to hire enough people to fill all of the civilian slots that coalition military forces requested. even with the hiring of temporary employees. now, i would like to say one thing before i get some water. unfortunately i'm a little parched. excuse me. i apologize. i should have had this in the beginning. as i said, the use of temporary hires by aid and state actually had both positive and negative

tradeoffs. on the positive side, unlike permanent aid and state personnel, temporary hires could stay in afghanistan more than one year according the loss of institutional memory or what i and my staff call the, quote/unquote, annual lobotomy that occurred when personnel rotate out of the country after one year or less. unfortunately, those same temporary hires had little if any experience or training in monitoring and project oversight and carrying out specific aid projects. as a result we were astounded to find out that few of those civilians working at the local level had agency authority to oversee programming. at one point usaid's regional representatives who are the most senior usaid officials assigned to each regional command in

afghanistan had no oversight authority over the programs in their area of operations. decisions, therefore, had to default to the embassy in kabul which had problems obviously of communicating quickly to the staff in the field. contracting also surged. at one point high ranking aid official determined that in order to meet the u.s. government average ratio of dollars to the number of contracting officials, aid would have to send nearly its entire overseas workforce to afghanistan. the number of contractor personnel overseen by district hires state and aid personnel was extremely large. in 2011 there were approximately 18 contractors for every direct hire at state and the ratio was 100 to 1 at usaid. now, even with sufficient number of highly trained personnel,

stabilization operations in afghanistan would have been challenging. unfortunately, as our report lays out, state and aid did not have the right personnel to effectively execute the mission, in spite of efforts made years earlier to provide them with exactly that capability. now, despite all of this and despite all of those other challenges, the question ultimately we ask is did stabilization in afghanistan work and was it effective? did it meet its goal? you know, we talk a lot about inputs, outputs and outcomes. did it reach that ultimate outcome? now, as our report lays out, we tried to answer that question by looking at other experts who had studied the issue. in external research reviewed by

sigar unfortunately found that the evidence is inconclusive and sometimes exactly contradictory. some research found that usaid and the state department programming actually did accomplish stabilization. some found no impact, and other research, ironically, found that the program itself was destabilizing. there are some factors that seem to be common among, however, the most successful stabilization interventions in afghanistan and those will be -- are laid out in the report and actually we have on the panel following us a military leader who actually we highlight as one of the leaders who actually succeeded in stabilization in his district in kunar. but what did we find were the common lessons learned, the common best practices for stabilization to work? first, we found out that

stabilization was most effective in areas where the government had a degree of physical control. second, more successful was implementers undertook fewer activities with a higher degree of oversight, flexibility and staffing. third, stabilization could not be done well on the cheap. successful projects were labor intensive for donors and implementing partners alike. fourth, we found at best it results in small gains that require a constant reinforcement to avoid reversals. the timelines that u.s. agencies were operating under assumed that quick security gains would be watched by equally quick stabilization and governance gains. the latter failed to materialize

before security forces withdrew and instability returned to many of the areas where stabilization programs were working. our research also found that imementing smaller projects helped programs avoid some of the common pitfalls of working in the midst of a counterinsurgency. avoiding these pitfalls of stabilization such as predatory officials, corruption and insurgent sabotage, while still providing tangible benefits to communities was easier for smaller scale projects. acg to a 2010 u.s. embassy assessment, it was also easier to ensure community buy-in and ownership of small scale infrastructure projects than it was for large ones. as sigar has identified previously, research has demonstrated that superficial measures of success such as shear amount of money spent or

outputs produced had no correlation to the eventual impact or outcome. as one senior usaid official told us, quote, if you go fast you actually go slow. if you go slow on purpose, you actually go faster with stabilization, unquote. one area where u.s. efforts seemed to get it right was in kunar province. the panel discussion as i mentioned will go into that example in greater detail, but a combination of capable individuals in key roles, a willingness by those individuals to collaborate and a presencef u.s. military forces in the area helped that initiative succeed more than others in the country.

so in conclusion i have identified only a few of the major challenges the effort to stabilize afghanistan faced. the poor results of that particular mission may make it tempting to some policymakers to conclude that stabilization should never be undertaken again. i would disagree with that. given the security challenges we face in today's world, stabilization or whatever you want to call it is important. eliminating that ability or capability is not a realist choice. rather, the u.s. government must address the challenges and capacity constraints identified in our report. given the lack of alternatives to stabilization in an ungoverned space that has been cleared of insurgents or

terrorists, the best course of action may be for the u.s. government to balance the importance of any stabilization mission with a realistic understanding of the level of effort required and what is achievable. additionally our government must improve its ability to prepare for, design, execute, monitor and evaluate stabilization missions. the need for such expertise will not diminish anytime soon. as military historian max boot writes, quote, while the tools of warfare have changed, the challenges of small wars fought against gur ril las and terrorists have remained constant. the to learn how their ancestors dealt with haitian can a could,

philippine inn sur rec toes, nick rag want sand northeast is thats and other i go regular foes. just as with the examples that max boot rerences we cannot afford to fail to absorb the lessons we have learned in afghanistan. as we continue to contemplate such programs both there in afghanistan and in other countries in the future. let me conclude by acknowledging the tireless efforts of those who worked on this report. sigar's efforts were led by david young, who was supported by jordan kaine, paul kaine, jordan sherter, olivia peck and elizabeth young under the leadership of program director john winthrop. they have my thanks and hopefully your thanks for issuing the report today. and with that, thank you very much for this opportunity to speak to you.

>> i'm sure some of you are seeing on your phones that there is an apparent announcement that the white house has just canceled the conversation with the north koreans coming up, so we will see how that develops today. someplace where i don't think we were going to have a stabilization effort. in the near future. john, thank you for those

comments. i really appreciate them. let me just make a real quick editorial note, on the panel as john mentioned we will have an army officer by the name of vowell who was a fellow here last year at brookings. kunar province was one of the toughest fights that we had in afghanistan, it was up against the pakistani border, sandwiched in between nurostan and nagahar. a tough place to be a commander and successful in stabilization. there is an excellent documentary called "the hornets nest" which as the name implies was a stuff fight. he is featured personally along with his great battalion. it's worth taking a look at. john, when i retired from the marine corps in 2013 i never thought i would be concerned over these matters again or mentioned in a sig report, but 18 months later i found myself

the presidential envoy to the global coalition to counter the islamic state and with the onslaught of isis we had no real idea how this fight would ultimately take shape, but the one thing we did know was that we would eventually have a massive stabilization effort not just to rescue the populations but to keep out daesh or isis in the aftermath, but it was going to be big across both iraq and syria. with that in mind and given the lessons that you were already surfacing from the afghan experience, as you well remember to w set up a network of inspectors general from the very beginning of this which we think was really essential to these kinds of events which would look hard at u.s. and coalition efforts as they were unfolding to get the most out of the work that we were doing. so already, john, you and your team have had an effect on a future crisis that we would be involved in. so what i'd like to do is we will have a few minutes of questions, i will ask a question then we will go to the audience

for a couple, and these are going to be forward-looking. the report obviously speaks for itself, there is a lot of detail in there about the deficiencies and the challenges that john and his team were able to see and to document, but this isn't the end for the united states and for coalitions. already as my remarks implied, within 18 months of supposedly the end of the conflict in afghanistan, we are now embroiled once again in something in iraq and in syria and it will continue and it will continue and we need to profit and benefit from the work that you have done and others to ensure that we are better prepared as we go. so, again, thinking about the future, john, either in -- let's just call it a hypothetical administration of the future, we have a crisis, it is one where we have the capacity not in the -- not as a result of an

emergency, which is afghanistan, but we have the capacity for some deliberate thought about how we will be involved in this evolution, how we will intervene or how we will be invited in and how long we will be there and what we think the issues will be. you've been summoned to the white house because of your work to advise the president and his national security team on what they should be thinking about right now as the united states contemplates yet another effort which could result in a large stabilization effort. if i could ask what will you tell the president? keeping of course, in mind that you ll probably be hired the minute that you are done talking. please, what would you tell the president, two or three things? >> well, you know, the first thing and, general, you and i chatted about this in the green room before we came is get your staff to read the lessons learned reports that are already out there. i mean, that was one of the things you discovered to your chagrin when you were leading a

team that you had no blueprint, no lessons learned and then you found a usaid report out there which actually helped you. reports have been written, we discovered that in afghanistan, that there was an excellent report done by usaid on usaid's involvement from 1950 until late '70s. we found that report and it laid out a lot of the issues that we were finding right now, but no one had ever read it. we couldn't find anybody in the embassy or usaid who had actually seen it. so the first thing is read what's been out there. the military will have done lessons learned. the problem is the state and aid do lessons learned and do they incorporate it into their training, teaching, et cetera. the second thing is before you go in, know where you're going into. as a military commander you know you have to know the terrain. well, that applies to

stabilization also. know how and why the people in that region supported the terrorist groups. what was the issue or the issues they were doing? i think in afghanistan we decided to duplicate norway in each one of these districts. we tried to provide schools, highways, et cetera, et cetera. what we should have looked at is what were the services that the taliban and the terrorists and the insurgents providing which made the people relatively happy? you don't have to give them everything at the start. the everything is do it incrementally. and everything i would tell the president is despite your inclination to do it quickly, announce a success and declare victory, sue for peace, go home, it's going to take a long time. let's be realistic about this. let's be honest to the american people and to the american congress that none of these

things can be done quickly and successfully. so those would be some of my advice. >> okay. so the president is dutifully impressed with thi and then lays t bombshell on you that we always expect these days and that is this is goingo be a coalition effort, it's not just the united states. so, mr. sopko, please advise the president of the united states on how he and she should be thinking about how a community of nations effort for a stabilization effort might be considered because as you know we had 50 nations engaged in the coalition in afghanistan. >> and all 50 nations were sometimes going at cross-purposes to each other. >> how do we solve that or how do we think about it in ways that reduce the -- >> first of all, we have to realize that we are dealing with our coalition allies all are sovereign nations. they have their own political reasons for doing what they're doing. they all have parlance or

congresses that their officials, their generals have to respond to. so you are never going to eliminate the fact that every country has their own rerequisites, their own, you know, foibles you may want to call it, they probably view ours the same. so knowing that let's assume the germans cannot go into a certain area, take that into consideration. it's not a fault of the german parliament or they have a restriction or the japanese have a restriction. realize that and come up with a plan that utilizes each one of those countries' best capabilities. so that's the first thing. we have to be humble enough to realize that every other countries like ours they've got political answers they have to come to. the other thing, general, is if you know you're going to have a coalition approach, realize that

what's promised isn't always what's delivered. i think you probably faced that with nato. you would go out and recruit the troops, the nato promised x thousands but it turned out only half showed up. how do you then go forward with that hole in your approach? and i think that's something to take into consideration. >> okay. you're hired. get packed. you know, one of the things that was an issue associated with afghanistan, which i experienced in iraq and we've experienced elsewhere, is -- and i think you've touched on this, how should we be thinking about both the stabilization and ultimately the reconstruction effort, because they should blend, one should lead logically to the other and sometimes they can go on concurrently, in order to avoid creating additional burdens to the host nation? because as you well know, and, again, we're forward-looking, we

did leave quite a bill for the afghans each yea for the maintenance of roads and infrastructure and buildings, et cetera. how should we be thinking about that? >> i think first just thinking about that is important. i don't think we did think about it that much, particularly on the civilian side, and part of it was a problem, i think, that comes back here to washington. we tend to think in appropriations cycles, maybe we all think that way. we get an appropriation cycle, it's one year, two-year money, we have to show success to justify it. if we don't spend it, we lose it. and that is the problem. i've commented before, i think you and i have had a conversation, is it's not that anyone we sent to afghanistan was not as smart and not as brave and not as honorable. we gave them a box of broken tools. we gave them a personnel system that was broken. a procurement system that was

broken. your rotational system that you had to face was broken. how you could get the people you wanted and have them stay long enough was broken. we need to look at those issues first. i do agree with you about the afghans. i feel bad when i go over and talk to the afghans and we're putting new conditions on the afghans. but we realize that all of the coalition are also putting new conditions and they're not coordinated. and each one of the aid programs from all the various programs have their own requirements, documents that have to be filled out, meetings that have to be made. you wonder sometimes what puts the afghans on their side. here comes another guy who's ing to help me and another burden i'm putting on them. if we could somehow get the allies together to think on a common platform, let's not

overwhelm the afghans with filling out paper. you know, paper reform. the paper reduction act, which we passed years ago here in the united states, we ought to apply to our coalition development. >> i think that to your point, the personnel rotation processes of all the agencies, and you used the term broken, i would perhaps use different terms, but they were certainly challenging. remembering that while units came in for a year at a time, and they didn't always come in at the same time. there was overlap, an echeloninf units in a out. we've often heard this war was fought, this 14, 15, 16-year war, one year at a time. i think many of the rotational issues, had they been better coordinated from the beginning, across all of the inner agency and across all of the coalition partners could have given us an

operational perspective and a longevity of operational perspective, which would have been helpful. in my first meeting with hamid karzai, he pointed out i was the fourth four-star general commanding in afghanistan in four years. this creates our own institutionalne that make this very difficult. we have 15 minutes left on this session. i'd like to say thank you. let's go to the audience for some questions. about 30 seconds after you get the microphone, i will be looking for a question in what you're saying. we'll move very quickly to that question if i don't see it. this gentleman here in front. then i'll come ac the aisle. >> hi. thank you so much for coming to speak here today. my name is jonathan. i'm a student -- >> please identify -- yeah,

you're about to do that. introduce yourself and tell us where you're from. >> so i'm wondering -- >> from where? >> from connecticut. i'll be at osd this summer in their east asia office. i'm just wondering if you can speak a little bit about pakistan. i think pakistan has been a key variable that has impeded any success or stabilization efforts. so moving forward with our stabilization approach with afghanistan, what type of approach should we take with pakistan? >> can i just quickly answer that -- and i'm going to defer to the general here. i look at just afghanistan and just reconstruction. pakistan's obviously an important player. the new strategy from the administration has a key component on pakistan. so -- but i'm going to defer to the general because i think you spent a lot more time dealing with the pakistan issue than i did. so sorry, i'm not avoiding it, it's just i don't do pakistan. so general? >> i'll just give you 30

seconds. the relationship between the united states and pakistan is not divorced from the relationship of pakistan with afghanistan. and getting the pakistanis to see that their vested interests over the long-term are best served by a stable afghanistan, one that does not, in fact, benefit from the haqqanis or from other taliban elements is in their long-rm best interests. there was a long time when i believed that peace in afghanistan passed through islamabad. in many respects, i think the long-term stability of pakistan passes not just through islamabad but also through kabul as well. so getting the pakistanis, the afghans, and the international community to have a similar view that a stable afghanistan, one that has the capacity for both governmental stability, security to the population, and a viable, reinvigorated economy is not just important to afghanistan, it's important to the long-term

stability of pakistan as well. thank you for that question. coming over here. gentleman. yes, sir. >> thank you. general, first, i'd like to thank you for your comments. m a retired fso and a vietnam veteran. >> thank you for your service. >> my name is jack. i made frequent trips to afghanistan. when you began the discussion, you said that stabilization is keeping insurgents from returning. in my conversations with general carter, general richards, even gener general nicholson, i got the impression that insurgents never left, that they just went underground when we went there, that they were simply part of the society. so the objective of stabilization, have we picked

out the wrong target? >> that's a good question. maybe by saying they always stay, i think what we're indicating is this problem is an afghan problem. it's not like the people are going to run back to pakistan. but when the area or distr is unstable, those people, whatever the terrorist group is, have to be taken out of the way. eliminated in one fashion. if they decide to go underground, if they decide to join a reconciliation group and become part of government, that's another way. but you have to provide a service which in many of these districts they provided. part of the idea is creating a central government that can run

afghanistan and have government control over a region so it doesn't become a hot bed for other terrorist activities. and can i just add one thing, general. >> please. >> we keep referring to pakistan as being the key problem. the problem also , as we saw on this report, is that the afghan government at times was viewed very negatively by their local people. what you really need is to insert a government that the people support, a government that is not predatory, a government that isn't a bunch of lawless war lords. and that is a key thing. that was one of the things i didn't talk about, but i'm certain the panel will talk about, when we poured so much money into these unstable

environments, we contributed to that problem of creating more war lords, more powerful people who basically took the law into their own hands. in essence, the government we introduced, parcularl some of the afghan local police forces which were nothing other than war lord militias with some uniforms on, were just as bad as the terrorists that were there before. >> let me add to this. if i were also summoned with him that day to the white house, one of the things i would tell the president is something we learned not just in afghanistan. we had seen i sewhat in iraq. but we really saw it in colombia. some days there's a distinction without a difference between the insurgent and the criminal patronage networks. and i don't think we got a full grip on that in afghanistan. in my mind, there was a trar threat to afghanistan's future but also in a military context. you had the ideological

insurgency, which we would euphemistically call the taliban. you had the drug enterprise, which fueled an awf lot of insurgent and criminal behavior. then you had the criminal patronage network. i don't believe we were properly organized, frankly, to deal with that. if, again, the president were to ask me my views on how we get ready to go, my first comment to the president would be, you must assume that there will be an inherent, sometimes inextricable link between criminality and corruption and the insurgency. and you've got to give the civilian agencies and you got to give the military commander capacity to bring to bear law enforcement and drug enforcement capabilities in the right numbers to assist in the dealing with the insurgency. if we're not properly mixed that way, we'll fool ourselves into believing we defeated the taliban in a particular area only to find out we have the criminal patronage networks.

we have to be thinking in those multidimensional ways. two more questions. this gentleman here. yes, sir. >> my name is jeff stacy. i used to work at scrsc and have spent a few years now doing global development consulting. my company has done more projects in afghanistan than anywhere else. i'll be headed back there on a u.n. contract in a couple weeks. my first question has to do with maybe one of the elephants in the room, which are the afghans themselves. i imagine that you gentlemen and a lot of people here might agree with something, an observation along these lines, that we've all met a lot of afghans who are actually pretty darn good, who are well traveled, who speak a lot of languages, who have great skills, and a lot of them are young. if they could only get the

leaders at the top of their organizations who do tend to be corrupt from their own complaints out of the way, there's a lot of capacity already there in kabul and other cities in afghanistan to make use of. my first question is, would you agree with that? the second has to do with the donors that you mentioned toward the end of your remarks. i remember meeting some eu police folks working on a longstanding project. they obviously had to spend most of their time coordinating with the u.s. a much bigger police training program. their observations very much in sync with yours. they've been there for years. some of the additional complaints they would make were, well, they were seizing detectives and essentially sergeants and captains and what have you. their american counterparts were very young, hired from all over

the u.s., didn't have a lot of training, and then of course we got into, if we're honest with ourselves, a period of a kind of militarization of our police training. and that was something the eu was very sensitive to. and one last thing about the eu -- >> quickly please, sir. >> yes, the question is they set up a project in kosovo where they actually built a justice ministry in the adjoining office with every top official there had an eu adviser. so the question is given that the eu doesn't have a great reputation in this town, even more so since the election, are we also able to learn lessons from some of our allies and friends. and you said if donors are all there and we're putting on con tin genesis and things, who coordinates all that? is it always the u.s. because we fund the most and have the biggest presence, or should it

be the u.n. on occasion? >> first to your question about the afghans. my personal experience is they are a remarkable people. while i met a few that i probably wanted to tame from time to time, the vast, vast majority of afghans from the most mod attorney the most traditional were extraordinarily admirable people. i've got great commient ultimately to them, until i take my last breath. with respect to the eu, when i was the commander there, which is gettingo be a few years ago, but i think i can speak pretty knowledgeably about it, i felt that the eu was a good partner for us. they did good work. in some areas where, as you remember, i'm sure you're familiar with this, we had provincial reconstruction teams that were nationally owned.

so there were some limitations. john used the term, or i'll use the term caveats. there was a national caveat associated with stabilization where there were sometimes gaps in what the hungarians might be doing or the germans might be doing. the eu worked hard to fill in those gaps. the eu remains, i think, a credible player. now, is it the perfect outcome? we can all do better. but the eu has been a good partner, i think, for us in this regard. we may have a different opinion in some places in washington, but i think the euilbe an important partner. and the u.n. will continue to be an important partner. i think when we look at the post-isil campaign, what we'll discover is one of the heroes of that is a woman by the -- in the undp. we were able to put together a stabilization fund which came in immediately behind the clearing of tikrit or ramadi or some place like that where we were able to put stabilization funding in immediately to

achieve the rescue of the population to create the environment where insurgents could not or would not want to come back in. the u.n. is a zbragreat partner. it has to be the right moment for them. the ee u is a great partner. it's too late when you put it together on the ground. you're going to have to live with the inefficiencies of that. if there's anything you'd like to add on the donors. >> i agree with the general. the one thing i would add about the youth in afghanistan, i view them as sort of the canary in the coal mine. as long as the current government is still surrounded by these young, honest, honorable, well-educated, and they're taking a lot of risks supporting the government. i meet with the president almost every time i go there. i see his top advisers. as long as we see them, i feel

good. i feel optimistic. when they sappear, then we got some problems. so i agree with that. we iued a report, the prior lessons learned report, on security sector assistance where we talked about in great detail the whole issue of police training, and that was one of the problems we saw. we're sending too many of u.s. military helicopter pilots and other people to do police training. we should have police doing that. so i just add that. >> one final point. when we're in the room evaluating or advising the president of the united states, one of the key pieces of advice we must give that individual is the process of stabilization has to leverage the full potential of the women of that civilization, women of that culture. we have to support their aspect of civil society, their role within the stabilization, and those efforts that can capitalize and leverage it will accelerate the role of women in this society but also leverage onef the most powerful

influences in society as well. let me go to professor ma matti please. >> gail mattix from the u.s. naval academy. very interesting, i'll leave this short because it does dove tail the previous question and some of your answers, but that is just to take the comments on coalitions a little further. how do we actually accomplish addressing tho problems with the coalition? do we do that at nato? do we do it -- does the u.n. take it on? does the united states take it on? what do you suggest we learn from these lessons, and where and how do we do that? >> you take it. go ahead. i'll jump in. >> i think in our security

sector assistance, lessons learned report that came out, we talk about having to take that into conversation early o wh the coalition. that was just in the security sector. we have not, either in this report or in our lessons learned report, i think, on private sector development, really looked at that issue yet. that's something we have called divided responsibilities that we're working on right now which tries to look at that whole issue of responsibilities and authorities, and it's sort of that gap between them. i don't have a better answer. i know as a practitioner, you had to deal with that on a daily basis. >> let's go to the isil campaign again. that was an ad hoc coalition in which nato had an interest and was formally a partner, as was the eu. we're going to have to be organized, quickly organized

diplomatically to determine where those priorities are and establish those priorities within that coalition. just as a matter of, i think, importance, ad hoc coalitions can only get you so far for a certain period of time. fromhe moment you form an ad hoc coalition, you need to be thinking about who you're going to hand this off to if you don't accomplish the mission within the period of time envisaged for that coalition. so it might be that a coalition will get handed off to nato for security purposes and handed off to the eu for stabilization purposes, but i will tell you as we began to build a counter-isil coalition, we had five lines of effort. one of the earliest of the five lines of effort we established early on, and germany and the emirates took the lead on the planning with stabilization. the rescuing of liberated populations. so from the very beginning of the counter-isil effort, stabilization was important. we envisaged we had more capacity to do it in iraq. that was the first part of the

fight. we also had a government we could deal with. it was much more difficult, and i think we have one of the panelists who will address this. it was much more difficult to undertake coherent stabilization in syria. we have to think about areas where we would conduct stabilization where we're either in opposition to the central government or the central government can't reach into that area. we have to have flexibility in that regard. but the grand strategic meeting of the nations has to occur early along in the process, whether it's a u.s.-called coalition, as this one was, or it's a nato-led coalition or a u.n.-led coalition. that process of early leadership to determine from the very beginning where stabilization plays in that process. it cannot be an afterthought. it can't be something wie start to think about as we clear the first village. sorry we went over a couple minutes. my apologies to the next panel. john, thank you for your comments and your contribution this morning. ladies and gentlemen, help me to

thank our friend. [ applause ]

>> well, ladies and gentlemen, good morning. while my colleagues are getting

themselves miked up, let me welcome y all to the second part of our conversation, this expert panel. i'm really delighted to lead a conversation with a fantastic group up here. you have their full biographies. i'll just give them very brief introductions now. todiy left is colleague here in the senior foreign policy program, someone with deep experience in afghanistan and in many places around the world where conflict, organized crime, and terrorism combine to pose major chaenges to stability and security. next to her is j.b. val. colonel val is currently billeted as -- i think his most important affiliation is with the brookings institution.

he was here in 2016, 2017. he comes to this dais with three combat tours and therefore a lot of relevant experience and familiarity with stabilization challenges on the ground. you heard about the province where he was operating in afghanistan. we'll discuss that more today. to his left, delighted to welcome frances brown. frances is a fellow next door at the carnegie endowment for international peace. she joined carnegie after doing quite a bit of work in the u.s. government, both at usaid and on the nsc and is now writing work on stabilization in syria, which is a topic'm sure we'll spend some time on over the course of our conversation. finally, not last or least, but in fact will be first in our

discussion this afterno - this morning, is david young. david is the sigar team lead for lessons learned. that's david's baby, i think it's fair to say, or at least one of them. he's an experienced analyst of governance and of stabilization issues, both inside and outside the u.s. government. so i am going to turn it over to david first, actually, to kind of clue us into some of the other findings and especially forward-looking lessons for the u.s. government on stabilization issues coming out of this report. david, inspector general laid out one central finding in his remarks this morning that urgency and intense ity that's sort of imperative to win control in heavily contested areas led in many cases to

stabilization operations where the preconditions for success simply weren't there. there was still too much violence. it was still too contested. i'm curious, first of all, were there cases of success? wh were the conditions for success? and then, we can talk a l bit about this integrated military civilian tool kit that seems critical to successful stabilization. so please. >> sure. well, thank you for having us and for moderating, tamara. we found some of the critical ingredients for sucss included, as the inspect or general mentioned in his speech, a willingness to collaborate among civilian and military officials, both afghan and coalition, a willingness for those individuals on the ground to provide robust services, including what implementing partners sometimes did with direct implementation and that you had to have the right people in the right places.

but it mostly -- what we found most of all is stabilization efforts across the country mostly failed. we traced that back to two critical decisions. the first was that we prioritized the most dangerous districts of the country first, and there was considerable debate about this throughout the campaign. some believed that the best way to sequence stabilization programming was to build out sort of ink spots from relatively stable areas, including provincial capitals, and work your way gradually toward the more insecure areas, and doing so in a sense would build momentum toward that effort. this was tried in 2006 and '07, but mostly failed due to a lack ofresources. the idea was these were tipping point districts. if you go after the easier places first, it a way for getting to the much more complicated places. by 2009, that model was flipped on its head. for the bulk of the rest of the

campaign, the idea became going after prioritizing the most insecurets of the country first with the hope that if you take the worst places out, if you mitigate in the worst places, it would create what was th lower hanging fruit areas.o the rest of the country would sort of sort itself out if you take care of the most problematic areas first. unfortunately, what ended up happening instead of that cascading impact was that we got bogged down in these extremely insecure areas. as thector general highlighted, the civil servants were afraid to work because of widespread taliban assassination campaigns, civil servants that did work had trouble moving around in the country because of the danger of doing so. implementing partners had implementing projects, et cetera, et cetera. so these areas that we prioritized were so dangerous that we had little hope to convince the population that

they would, in fact, be able to be protected when the drawdown eventually occurred. so -- and i want to emphasize, these were areas that were so dangerous, that many of them had s, a they needed more timece in to actually come around and to accept and adjust to a new sense of normal. but there was no time, which brings me to the second critical decision, which was we drew down forces and civilians on timelines that were unrelated to conditions on the ground. so if you'll remember, there's a surge from 20 -- an 18-month surge from about 2010 to 2011 and a three-year transition period from about 11 to 2014. the obama administration had very good reasons for instituting these time-based timelines. we had the financial crisis, which had just occurred. every dollar spent in afghanistan would be a dollar less to spend here in the united states on the economic recovery. there was a sense that the

prolonged surge would give senior u.s. military officials more room to request for more extensions and more escalations down the road. finally, there was a sen that these open edtimelines would allow -- would exacerbate afghan dependency on american aid. while these reasons were very good, in our analysis, we found they were just not good enough. a government in afghanistan state simply cannot be reformed on the timeline and at the scale that we had envisioned. believing that we could do so led us to make a number of critical compromises on programming, planning, and staffing that nearly guaranteed the effort would fail in our eyes. for instance, military planners in kabul had to change, had to come up with new objectives for the campaign plan to accommodate these new timelines. as the inspector general

mentioned, u.s. aid had problems with staffing, but they weren't alone. department of defense had a shortage of civil affairs units. so they converted chemical warfare companies into civil affairs to implement their programs using four-week-long training cycles that were entirely powerpoint. village stability operations, another dod program, scaled extremely quickly, unsustainably fast, because there was this pending sense of this precipice at the end of a drawdown that would have to come. there was a sense the clock was ticking and we had to make as much progress as we could while we had the forces to do so. i wanted to highlight one last thing regarding the service delivery model. we talked about the service, the hope, the way stabilization worked in afghanistan was that you provide services in order to convince the population that government rule is better. unfortunately, the services we tried to help the government provide were far more ambitious

than they needed to be and poorly suited to the afghan environment, the avenue context. for instance, the taliban mostly secured the support of the population through coercion. just simple, forced cooperation under threat ofth but in theory, it should not require a great deal of social service delivery to win the hearts and minds of a population that is being terrorized by the taliban. the bar should be pretty low in those circumstances for winning them over because they're looking for a safe alternative. they, you know, are looking for essentially rudimentary law and order as a prerequisite to anything else we might provide them. so it's not clear that this robust service delivery model was necessary in many cases where coercion was the main method for securing the population's support. in other places, securing the -- in other places, the taliban actually went beyond coercion and provided limited service

delivery, specifically security and dispute resolution. the -- b iteadf us using that as a model, instead of us competing on the terms of the taliban, we tried to provide a diverse array of relatively advanced services ranging from agricultural guidance and advice to agricultural equipment to health care and education that went well beyond what the taliban had provided and in some cases what the taliban had used to accrue legitimacy in the eyes of the population. so in our eyes -- or for instance, instead of doing dispute resolution or programming along dispute resolution lines of effort like the taliban was doing, we built courthouses. we trained prosecutors in nearly contested districts because even though afgha them

unfamiliar, slow, and corrupt. and we did this despite the fact that 90% of afghans resolve their disputes through informal means because according to one senior u.s. aid official we talked to, we wanted to give them something that they never had before. and this was a chronic mismatch between what afghans find effective and occasionally legitimizing and what we wanted to provide them. so it points to this -- in our eyes, it points to this need to pinpoint what the government's pitch should be based on what had been provided to them in the recent past and allowed them to accrue that legitimacy. >> david, thank you. i think it's important to highlight here sigar's mandate is broad. what you've done in this lessons learned report, and i think it's fair to say in the series of lessons learned report, is you're not only looking at

implementation. in many ways what you've identified here, it sounds to me is, yes, some failures of implementation, but primarily a failure of design, a failure of the sort of theory of the case of stabilization as applied in these circumstances. vanda, i want to turn to you on precisely that point. one of the findings that david just laid out is this idea that the u.s. set the bar too high. it was trying to provide governance at a level beyond where it should have been trying to compete with the taliban, which is really about basic security, basic law and order. do you agree with that? >> not fully. i think there was a more complited mismatch of various sets of expectations and various sets of promises that were raised. i agree with david that a key part of the taliban's

entrenchment was fundamentally its ability to provide order. often very brutal order but nonetheless fundamentally very predictable order. so in my many trips to afghanistan, i frequently encountered very similar narrative fromple about the taliban and the relationship of the taliban to the population. people would inevitably say, look, we don't like the taliban, we didn't like it, but then the taliban when in power, you could travel from kandahar to kabul with a million rupees and no one would rob you. predictable brutality is universally far more easier to develop coping mechanisms and adjust to than unpredictability. what happened with the u.s. intervention was not that we provided far mor ambitious governance. we promised far more ambitious governor na governance, but what we often

provided was really misgovernance byhe afghan ficials.nt and associated the tremendous amount of corruption, unpredictability, and abuse that was partial conditioned by the fact that we often picked as our crucial security partners hhl problematic war lds on whom we relied because of the lack of u.s. troops and international troops, u.s. capacity to deliver crucial anti-taliban gains. and they often proved highly predatory toward local populations, highly abusive, and highly unpredictable in their predatory behavior. with often minimizing access to markets for local populations, not simply resorting to generalized -- and a set of rules but becoming very exclusionary as to how people could go about their every day livelihoods. i would also say that a crucial

element, however, that applies in afghanistan is local people often have far greater expectations of what a government should provide than what an insurgent group should provide. that is the classic rise of expectations with a different kind of entity to rule you. so, you know, my view is not that we gave them too much. we gave them actually far less than they g uer the lin, but we promised far more. >> excellent summary. i have to ask you as well, vanda, and we heard john allen talking about this earlier. how much of the problem here is the afghan government? >> i will tell you it is a fundamental part of the problem. this goes back to the relationship between pakistan and afghanistan. afghan people will often tell you that if only pakistan were

not a problem, there would not be proem in afghanistan. indeed, pakistan has been a tremendously complicated actor, no doubt about it. however, if there were good governance in afghanistan, then thetabilizing effects of pakistan would be far more limited in their effects than they have been. now, there clearly is a new government, four years into the government, but it's the post-ham post-hamid karzai government where people had very high expectations on how much the government would deliver on cleaning up on corruption and delivering better, more predictable governance. it's been a tremendous struggle for the government with a lot of disappointment, unmet expectations, and because of a reduction in troops, continual

reliance on highly problematic war lords, highly problematic military power brokers as sources of delivery of some rule and governance. i want to highlight one second of actors, not just the afghan government. it is more broadly the afghan political class. it would be very unfair and inappropriate to put t blame solely on the afghan government. a large part of afghanistan's continuing troubles is the fact that the political class continues to see its role as constantly engaging in brinkmanship and rocking the boat of the state to gain a narrow parochial privileges and engaging in very narrow parochial competition for political and economic spoils and never really coming together, even at times of great crisis and potential inflection points to put national interests and some sort of basic unity and

capacity for governance to take place. so instead, no one in afghanistan ever governs. people constantly engage in politicking. >> thank you. j.b., i want to come to you on this question of expectations and shifting expectations. i've been thinking about this as well because iraq just went through parliamentary elections very soon after the territorial defeat of isis in iraq, although there's still quite a bit of work to do. and one of the striking outcomes of that election washat in the areas that isis held the hardest for the longest around mosul, there was the least sectarian voting, the most interest expressed in effective governance, in service delivery. so i'm curious whether what vanda is describing about rising expectations or people expecting more from government than they do from an insurgent, does that ring true to you? >> absolutely. first off, thanks for having me.

it's still apparent that i'm successfully perpetrating an academic fraud to be brought back here. th's what wee, man. >> but vanda is spot on with expectations and expectation management is a challenge from a tactical level to a strategic level. service delivery or the political framework. my particular case study in 2010 in afghanistan worked there for a couple reasons. i won't say it's a model for everywhere. i'll close with some of the salient lessons learned. i'll quickly paint a narrative. i won't go over the entire case study. you don't need that. you can read it thanks to david's great work. but in 2010, we came in at the start of the surge. the strategy and mission was to do counterinsurgency, of which

the center of gravity are the people and winning them over. people gravitate to the side or sides that are winning. at that time, to paraphrase a former speaker of the house, all politics is local. so you want to have people connect to their district government. i think everybody in the audience here gets their driver's license and most of their interaction with their government at a local level. i don't think you go bang on the whituse ery day to get some services. maybe you do. same thing in any other country. you want the connection to happen there. you want that interaction to happen. so we had 13 districts in kunar province, only of which three were key terrain districts because they had most of the population. well, a very important district sat two kilometers away from the provincial capital, but it wasn't a key district so it didn't have anything going for it for services. oh, by the way, it was the major transit route for insurgents and had been historically to the south of the two gateways to kabul. when those two provinces fall,

kabul has always fallen. in the 1980s, those were the places the moou jaone a very successfully fought off the soviets. we come to 2010, very similar situation. every three and four-letter insurgent or terrorist group was up there from al qaeda, local taliban, capital "t" taliban. all of it was up there. all of it wants to take kunar. you had sanctuary. you had the terrain. you had the capabilities. we came in with lessons learned in afghanistan previously, in iraq previously. we had a bunch of people in the unit that had learned this is a whole of government problem. this is not a militaryroblem. it's not for an infantry battalion and a task force to solve. there are things we can do to enable. but in the month we were there -- the case study you read about in the book that happened at the end of june of 2010, i lost nine soldiers. the conditions with that are bad. there's a giant red arrow -- if

i could show you a map, there was a giant red arrow pressing. we broke up six suicide bombers by luck that month. there's pressure everywhere. this whole come in and try to win over the people wasn't going to work until we could set the conditions for that. it was pretty bad. so what we did, we got with our office of transition initiatives partners who we were so lucky to have them embedded with us, usaid is what i would call the ranger regiment. they're in there, doing precision, surgical, and they can make quick effects by synchronizing tactical things on the ground. and the time is good too. they're kind of an advanced guard. very effective tool for us. we had a reconstruction team that was civilian and military. we had aid folks there, department of agriculture folks. you can integrate the provincial and district government

capability. i'll echo this later on. we had to go in to clear out significant threats to not only the district but the provincial capital. the military side of that was pretty effective because we were able to pull insurgents away. but the main effort and the integrated planning from jump street, from the beginning, was the ability for stabilization efforts, contracts, and the government to own the problem. i mean immediately. once hostilities ended, once we cleared the battlefield, trucks with stuff were coming in. we had contracts prewritten. we had worked that out with the district governor ahead of time who had looked at where he could have employment and work for wall abatements that prevented flooding, for farm animals. we did all that immediately to show, hey, we're here and we're going to stay here. it helped also that the district governor was a former

mujahideen. he not only knew everybody, knew the players, both sides, he knew the terrain, which was very helpful. he gave great advice on how to meet expectations by underpromising and overdelivering. key point. so it was all about integrating people -- and we were lucky in a couple ways. in the army, we say things are always about people, leadership, and the communication in between. the political will was there. coming up to the operation, we had talked to somelders in the valleys. we got them to come in, say we're here to help you. i was looked at in the face by members of the taliban that said do not ask us to help you. we are taliban. this is our government. that's pretty shocking, isn't it. how do you do something about that? but that was a cry for help. they were getting some of those

dispute resolutions in the upper valleys. that's my parcel of land. no, it's not. well, you pay me a thousand rupees, i'll solve it right now. it's done. the afghan government could not compete with that. but the brutality aspect of it, the going in and beheadin elders in villages was too much. it was too much. soy bicallywe had to free that. some of the lessons learned i think are applicable. that whole integrated political military plan is key from jump street. a consistent plan over time that is not going to wax and wane because the political will waxes and wanes. you have to have that up front. you got to have willing partners. you have to. you can't have somebody who's going to pull out. you can't have somebody who's got one toe in the water. everybody's got to be all in. you really do. and we were very lucky that way. i will say that. this may not be rapplicable in other places. but it was for us. you cannot want success more than the people do.

you cannot want success more than the people you're trying to help. you can't do that. i can go on for days about some examples of that, but i'll just leave that little bumper sticker there for you. persistence, constant dialogue. i've said in a forum be, you know, greg morton wrote a book called "three cups of tea." i'll argue that's incorrect. it's three gallons of tea. socializing and talking to everybody all the time is part of it. the discussions before and after operations. when the military side is done, we go to the main effort of stabilizing. it continues. you're not just going to create a government. we cleared the enemy out. okay, you got it. it's going to require assistance and effort. but they have to want it too. seek out the true spheres innce. learn who the power brokers are locally and operationally are key and essential. sometimes they're very hidden. we had a particular challenge

culturally understanding some of those differences and aspects. people who had gone into hiding because they were targets really could pull the people together when they wanted to. we had to find out what their motivation and incentives were and bring them to the table. that was hard. that human mapping of what we do in our business was all about human beings was very difficult. measures of performance. mr. sopko mentioned this earlier. measures of performance do not equal measures of effectiveness. handing out money for projects as a measure of effectiveness is an incorrect evaluation. i spent a thousand dolrs this week on a trash cleanup project. i'm successful. no, you're not, because nobody aske for that. you pulled men out of the village during a harvest season, so the road looks great, but there's pumpkins rotting in the field. road to hell is paved with good intentions sometimes. you're dealing with an open, dynamic, human, interactive systems. so a system of systems. you cannot predict how this is going to end.

you have to constantly be there to see where the changes are. you have to be persistent. you can't come in, drop in, and leave. not just from a security standpoint, but to be there with the people you're helping to stabilize. the afghan government, your partners of whateve nation, ve to be the lead in that. they have to. everything is hard, and it's hard all the time. many things are simple, but the simplest things are difficult. so persistence pays off. we had a great set of leaders and partners who were persistent and wanted to see that outcome. and those operations you read about, i mentioned the nine soldiers i lost before that first month we were there. lost another eight between the two operations keeping the district stable. there's a cost to that. memorial day is coming up. we allember these at that particular time. it's not just barbecues for the summertime. there will be a cost. is it worth the cost of human

capital, real capital, and you have to ask yourself how does this end. >> thank you, jb. i want to come back to this issue of integrating the military-civilian tool kit and how back here in washington we set up thafor success because i think that's a key policy question for the future. frances, i want to bring this to you now. you've been thinking a lot about syria's stabilization. it's somhi ie been working on as well this past year with colleagues at the world bank. and i think one lesson they've taken away from their previous experience in places like iraq is, you know, less emphasis on physical infrastructure, more emphasis on the human infrastructure that you were just talking about. the problem is they're not well set up to do that kind of work. i think one of the grave challenges in these environments is that that human terrain is so shaped by the conflict, right.

you essentially have a politics and an economy of civil war. and in afghanistan, after decades of civil war in syria now, after a nearly a decade of civil war, this gets pretty entrenched. especially when you're not working through a central government, a central government that's not your partner in the syrian case, how can the united states or other outsiders come in and do this work without reinforcing that war lordism and thereby setting the conditions for conflict relapse as soon as we're gone? are you essentially kind of rewarding the guys who won with the most brutal tactics in their own local area? they've set up their own system to sustain themselves in power, and you're essentially saying, okay, i now give you legitimacy and authority with my money and my investment. and you know, that's a deal that

can break apart as soon as our money and invest are not there. >> yeah, that is so important. i think that is a lesson that comes through both from the recent syria experience and also loud and clear in this report on the afghan experience that if we are thinking about a stabilization endeavor, we really need to be thinking about it in terms of a realistic, political end state. that realistic political end state needs to be local, and it also to the extent applicable needs to pertain to the national government. in the afghan case, as i think really is made very clear in the report, the afghan case we really had a trsformative, almost fantastical political end state in mind. it was a clearly stated political end state, but it had no bearing on the realistic timeline that change would take, the karzai government's willingness to reform or decentralize, and as you say, local power brokers' willingness

to cede responsibility, authority, and accountability to the local level. it was a real mismatch. our political desired end state in the afghan state was a real mismatch. in the syrian case, we've got a different smatch ongoing on the realistic political end state. very much exacerbated by these war economies. so in the syrian case, our problem has been both that we haven't had a realistically stated political end state or a clearly stated political end state that we're trying to stabilize towards. so stabilization programs always need to be in service of a broader goal, and i'd say in the syria endeavor, it's really been a remarkable progression of not clearly stated end states. as you know very well, in the early years we had an assad must go statement. it wasn't backed up by security choices for many reasons, but in that sense, it wasn't a realistic political end state. in the middle years, i think

starting from 2013 to 2014, it became increasingly unclear what our stabilization programs were stabilizing towards. we had still a stated policy of assad must go, planning for a post-assad day after. at the same time from the u.s. standpoint, we had really prioritized militarily the fight against isis. so our revealed preference was in that direction. we really saw this come through in the confusion on the ground within our stabilization programming at that point. are we empowering these local actors, these more accountable actors in order to be responsive and advance a postssad future, or are we empowering these accountable local actors to enforce a counter-isis objective? >> or are we just empowering the people who are really good at fighting isis? >> yes, precisely. precisely. that begs all kinds of moral hazards. so there was a real lack of clarity there. one thing that i think we've

learned time and again is you really need clarity of objectives from every level in order to achieve the impacts we want, the effects we want. fast forwarding to the current day as stabilization programs are under way still, we have still less clear political end state i think we're driving towards. there has been from the trump administration a sort of revealed preference for the counter-isis fight or even a declared one. former secretary tillerson stated a much more ambitious -- going back to the lack of realism -- a much more ambitious set of objectives for syria. now since his departure, it's manifestly unclear what our actual objectives are at this point. and meanwhile, we're sending mixed signals in that the president himself has called into question our forces in eastern syria, backing up some of these stabilization efforts, as well as the actual stabilization programmings. without a clearly stated

political objective, i don't see a any way of getting around some of these challenges you mentioned in confusion and perverse incentives on the ground. >> i wt to turn to this question of how to build a better effort. and i think one of the big issues raised by the report is the insufficient capability on the civilian side but also the primary recommendation of the report to both the executive branch and to congress is to compel the state department to take the lead across the interagency and develop a comprehensive, whole of government strategy that somehow somebody's got to direct, right. so there's a capability problem, but there's also a leadership problem. i was discussing this integrating the tool kit challenge with some colleagues last week, and one of them challenged us to say, okay, well, what is a successful

example of the united states ever fully integrating the tool kit on behalf of a major stabilization mission? i think when we add to that the political will question, a lot of people in the american public, a lot of folks in congress question whether this is something we can effectively do. and so i'm curious for your thoughts on that. you know, is there a successful mission that you would point to? and is this something that you can't fix merely by developing a strategy but you need somebody who is given perhaps congressional -- you know, congressionally allocated authorities, presidentially invested authorities across the interagency to direct that strategy and implement it, not just design it.

i think in particular of the effort that was put into play after the fall of the berlin wall. you know, obviously this is very different circumstances. but congress congress and the administration mobilized pass the seed act, those new authorities and investments were directed by somebody who had congressional authority and presidential letter to bring the interagency together. do we need a stabilization czar? not just in terms of title but legal authority as well? vanda, do you want to start? >> i guess the reason i'm not

fully comfortable with the german example. the reason is that our fundamental problem is not simply the lack of our coordination and the illusion of the whole of government approach but far more -- i would say the crux of the problem far more is the cross purpose workings of our counterparts. at the had a very strong region of what it wanted to accomplish in the country. and the vast amount of resources and still what we are, three decades past, still disparity between east and west but no level of disparity we would see elsewhere. to me the crucial problem is not our deficiencies. although they are, of course, a very big problem. the problem, is the counterparts deficiencies, highly parochial,

highly one of getting spoils rather than building a state, an accountable, equitable state. ander weave not developed a road map as to how to go about it. particularly the obama administration would put pressure on karzai, who would retaliate and we would push back. and, frankly, there have been real imitations even with the government and what it had performed. so, to me, that is the crux of the problem. how do we get our local partners despite all the rhetoric, all the strat i didn't of building

local capacity to embrace the same political division of good governance, inclusion and equity? the more we build up war lords, the more we hand over military equipment, the more we are, in fact, undermining that larger political goal. >> i tak that point. but i'm not going to yet let go of that. did you consider as you were developing the recommendations here whether congress might, you know, assign these authorities, legislatively? >> sure. well, in 2004 and five, these responsibilities was already established and petered out because of a few political compromises and issues we talked about to your issue of can it

work ever, i haven't seen any evidence that it can. in these specific areas, in places like vietnam, iraq, afghanistan. but the issue of who should be in the lead, we recommend that the state should be in the lead. it's interesting what's on paper is not always what's in practice. it's important to note that, in theory, they were the lead drafter of this strategy. the reason we're reinforcing it again and again is that once that strategy made it down the channel to in country, state was in control in kabul and dod was in control outside of cabell.

it comes back to resources. how can we recommend that state be in the lead of an effort that they're poorly resourced to execute? that is why we are also recommend recommending because no cdible state department effort cou b led on the ground if it's thinly resourced and it's stood up the day that it's launched. we feel it's important to establish these institutions so that we're prepared. in particular, state and aid are not given the political band width or resources to do

anything between these wars. >> from a military perspective, s, these are inherently political missions and i think everything you were describing about the work you were doing on the ground is, in essence, politics. right? you're doing local politics. the national interests that drove t was counterterrorism. is there a way to get past that fixation to really think about this in a broader way? >> short answer, yes. the counter terror mission of going after trancenational terrorist networks in the away game, so they don't come to our home game, that's the aspect. counterinsurgency, the broader application of force and stabilization against insurgents who have kept that region so

unstable that those transnational terrorist groups could continue to have that purpose to project their violent extremism other places. from a military perspective, there's a role we have to play to enable stabilization to happen. i think the report does a great job of identifying what the they were trying to do too much of. i saw that at my level. we were the only thing that could get a lot of things done at a very tactical level. state never reached 1,000 officials in country, even during the surge. hundreds more, but i think they never had 1,000 where there were 120,000 multinationals on the ground during the surge. it's going to gravitate toward the bigger bubble, resourcing of security. we have to be better at that when we plan.

there's no -- i won't say military ops are understanding the political instate first, then identify the problem. last thing you mentioned where has stabilization be successful so far? s4, bosnia, kosovo. there are good aspects of that, there are things that don't quite fit the stabilization model. to grauder we haven't done a good stabilization effort since japan, korea. >> and even bosnia is hardly settled. and lot of combustible, deeply unsettled element. >> yes. although one must make these judgments in relative terms, right? good. i want to come back to you, vanda, on this. frances, first, on the issue of integrating the tool kit --

>> yes. such a challenge. i agree with david that the stabilization assistance review, i think, provides a value. u.s. does the lead implementer, dod support, tracks what those department agencies would like to do. i think the challenge is that in most of these environments we have to ask which part of state. it's not a unitary actor, as we all know. you have the ambassador, the chief of mission. is he devising the strategy and which bureaus back in washington are support, stabilization or the regional folks? i don't need to tell this audience sometimes there's friction there.

>> i can certainly say that the person of the nfc doesn't have the ability to lead these efforts in every single country under which we're approaching stabilization. i do think it's always going to be challenging on that regard. >> one of the key challenges is persuading governments of these places to embrace a different model of governance. you know, seeing the government as a mechanism for patronage and division of spoils is a recipe for continue d instability. i want to challenge that a little bit. lebanon is one, where the

division of spoils works effectively to give all those parties incentive not to return to conflict, right? it's not great in terms of delivering government services. civil society has developed alternative mechanisms to meet it needs, including that patronage system. but it works. right? so number one, is that so bad, if you can get to that place? maybe that's an okay place to get to with war lordish division of spoils to peaceful division of spoils? the second question is, if you are sitting in front of the afghan political lead, how do you persuade them that that shift is worthwhile? >> that's a tough one. that's what u.s. foreign policy has struggled with throughout the engagement.

the level of instability is too high for it to remain stable. the country is deeply troubled. governance is absolutely paralyzed and deeply dysfunctional. but you don't have a very potent insurgency runningn at the same time. so the level of spoils you can extract in the time of peace is very different than when you have an intense insurgency burning. nonetheless there are elements of afghanistan, an inflection point that was missed was when

kundis province fell to the taliban, including the capital city. there was panic among the afghan elite with many people, camping and readying to go out of the country, to fly out. everyone was liquefying assets. the taliban was surprised they were able to retake it and keep it for so long. they kept it for several weeks. but this moment whe -- there was a moment when the afghan elite was really shook up that the system was finally coming to a crash. and itill all come out.

from behaving differently. very quickly the moment of we have hit the brink dissipated and that same bad behavior, same behavioral patterns set in. it is this inflection point i blame -- probably the most distressing ones. the other aspect i would highlight is with the limited presen presence, the amount of money to be handed out in bags and otherwise is far spawler. afghan economy is doing better than it was a year ago, but nowhere near where it was in 2010, 2011, 2012. so to divide the same amount of spoils, there is limited ability. it's not simply the taliban that is critical involved in poppy.

it's just about everyone in afghanistan. as well ashe population. if you get rid of the international money what is there to vide? my final point is that unfortunately in places like afghanistan and even pakistan, the elites have a wayou and this problem that they can leave and the people cannot, that you can play politics all the time to the brink thinking it's not going to fall, it's not going to fall over. it's not going to go into the abyss or the civil war again, ful full-blown civil war. the moment that it does. and perhaps if they not have this escape route that would encourage better behavior.

and next year's presidential elections. >> okay. it is time for me to open up this conversation to all of you. i'm going to follow my boss' lead, which is always wise, which is to ask you to please identify yourself briefly before you ask your question. i did pose that word in the singular. please restriction yourself to one question. you can direct it to a specific member of our panel or to the panel in general. why don't we start right up here in the front? please wait for the microphone. >> thank you very much. i'm an afghan american journalist. you've covered so many aspects of this, it's going to be hard to try to keep this question focused. i guess i'll start with the notion that i heard about

afghans having -- the elite having the opportunity to pick up and leave. your commentary really summarized what has been the trouble of what was really termed the elephant in the room. i'm going to speak to you as an afghan now, not just as a journalist, having watched this whole saga unfold as i was 9 years old while watching them be bombed. while the west is on the briveng of a new rivalryit russia, while this lead democracy is trying to survive in the midst of being portrayed at least by your opponent staged to look like it tonight have substance, we are now in the context of afghanistan talking about the

flaws of that situation and you just spelled out that the elite could just pick up and leave and parts of the flaws are in the way they engage. in this elite democracy, political rivalry is well and alive and continues. what is it stance toward afghanistan? afghans are glad to see a little more commitment toward afghanistan, afghans are very anxious about what will become of their country. and with new rivalries people are more anxious about what this means, when will the u.s. reduce its involvement there, especially when we are all talking as experts about how much we should hand the problem

over to the locals? >> we'll have to leave it there. we do tend to prioritize the short term over the long term. the need for long term viewpoints for persistence, for strategic planning. so number one, do you think that there is today in the u.s. government having been through these last 15 years, do you think there's sufficient will within the government, recognition within the government of the need to keep our hands on the plow? and to sustain this effort at this stage? who wants to pick that up,

frances? >> the need for persistence, state of predictability and that lesson has been learned across the u.s. government. laying out a commitment to afghanistan. i did not work on that strategy. that is out there for all to see. i do think that we need to continue to push on this issue. what we've learned in the afgha case, syrian case and iraq case is that we need to instate predictability. it doesn't matter if we have a surgery for 18 months. people make their prediction on what they think the rules of engagement will be next year and the year after that.

and in situations in which they are not sure about that question, what are the rules a year fromnow, ty will hedge and hoard and that undermines stabilization in afghanistan, syria and elsewhere. implementation is always the hard part. >> let me make this a little forward looking as well. given this lesson emerging, should the u.s. government think a lot harder before taking on new places? >> yes. from a military perspective alone. i don't have those kind of opinions but you are still maintaining a security environment for the word order along with allies and partners. armed force across the globe to maintain what we did decades

ago. the more and more that happens, that we continue to do that, it drains resources and other capabilities. and our secretary of defense would say the same thing. the benefit is we're globally engaged and that's good. stabilization security across the globe is good. and are those reasoned with a long-term view or just trying to deal with a 50-meter target right there? have we thought throughhat very well? i would argue that the armed forces military united states doesn't have a great track record of getting the next conflicts right every time. we don't. probably because we don't have that long-term view sometimes and almost certainly we don't integrate all the facets of national power in those things. i remember president clinton

told us we would be in bosnia for a year. we're still there. there's reasons why. but that comes at a cost. the more we deal with that, we have to weigh strategically the cost benefit of weighing will we be there longer and anticipating what those costs will be, i gus? >> others? >> in undertakinth report, we sought to accomplish two things, specifically or midway through we started realizing these were the two critical objectives. first to raise bright red flags for the enormous investment necessary to even consider making progress in these kinds of environments. so that there would be sort of a one-stop shop of a document we could look at 20, 30 years from now when we're considering the next big one. in the event that as those deliberations unfold the idea is that if they have it, they can

see better principles and national security council and policymakers can have a better sense to exactly what it would take and whether it's worth it or not. to be able to ask that question, is it worth it? even though if everything goes well and everything in our control we are able to effect beneficially, there's still uncertainty at the end of that tunnel. if they perfect sue large-scale stabilization like iraq or afghanist afghanistan. how do you go about doing it to what are the boxes you need to check, the best practices, the ways in which everything from strategic level of considering the will of the host station government, whether they are on board with your strategy all the way down seeing how those dominos fall to how do you

cluster projects that there's not one-fs, a sense of a service being provided, contus engagement with the government? as well as if you decide to pursue this, here are ideas. >> the framework for thinking it through. vanda, anything to add? >> i don't want to throw cold water on the discussion in the room. i'm not persuade that the white house is as committed to long-term persistence in afghanistan as was announced. i think that the white house was deeply conflicted last summer in how the decision would be made. i see various signs of impatience and very difficult

situation for presidential elections that will require a lot of thinking on our side about how do we want to handle that? including the role of getting the government set up with all the problems that followed or do we want a prolonged political crisis and what does that mean for u.s. gament? >> thank you. >> the gentleman in the blue tie? where is our micrhone? right there. >> i'm james brody, active duty army officer assigned to intelligence agency. there seems to be a recurring theme to synchronized the roles of the state department and aermt. what are lessons learned or things we can do to redefine that? >> i'll start off. my personal opinion is that the

military does a good job. we beat ourselves up. some will tell you what you did right, wrong, indifferent. you get a take-home package of stuff that you learn and take back home again. you prepare for a deployment or prepare for a war. that i think are helpful. what i see inside the military right now. ur plus one. national defense strategy articulates. but the military is not running away from the middle east.

and i say that because my father's generation out of vietnam, we didn't do that so well. we didn't take the experience, regional experiences where we had integrated civil military operations. we cracked open the books after 9/11. early 2002 going, wow! i don't think we're throwing everything out. if you go to training centers right now it's platform on platform, cyber, space. that's great. asymmetric threat to your organization. it's not just decisive action combat. that's the lessons born from iraq and afghanistan. >> very quickly from the civilian standpoint i served with u.s. aid in afghanistan as

well. at the tactical level often the coordination and integration goes well. i think the challenge then is as you go further up the chain there's diverge enter chains of commands and many tables to coordinate above that. that can often lead to confusion with no ill will, miscommunication. a lot of organizational challenges that really come to the fore. >> my name is karen johnson. i'm a franklin fellow in the operations bureau in the state department and i'm very happy to hear the discussion about the stabilization of systems review, which the -- which was quite a challenge anyway. the real challenge now, to

implement it. and that's going to take a lot of time through congress and state department will have in terms of the civilian response core and everything. we obviously know the history of cso. to be able to be effective in our coalition arrangements. so in the interim what can be done -- i know that there has been discussion and sometimes very small exchange of, say, resources from dod to the state department for destabilization efforts. for example, we could see whether that division of labor happens in our coalition? for example, u.s. government is limited but say the danish

government or other governments don't have those legal limitations or authorits. what can we do in the interim as we w t tok on the heavy lifting of convincing congress to give state more money, et cetera? >> great. how do we do this sort of stop p work on the civilian side while making that case for bigger civilian capabilities. is there a role that coalition partners can play in that? >> as you know as well, it's helpful. we need to look at aspects as to

how this decision is being tried. maybe a relatively lower hanging fruit, we need to think about e monitor and define success on stabilization. what i mean by that is that in the stabilization setting in syria and elsewhere, we've really edged towards look at efemoral indicators of success rather than durable, lasting indicators of success and anecdotes about success rather than sort of a more systemic evaluation of how we're doing on the stabilization endeavor. during the height of the surge a couple of districts.

and these were areas in which there was genuine success. the problem is that these particular factors in these areas weren't generallyized out for the broader effort for the reasons that jb has also described and they didn't necessarily last beyond a couple of rotations or that particular governor who may, unfortunately, have been assassinated or reassigne reassigned. >> made great ps onrogresort of tracking local atmospherics, local attitudes toward district governanc governance. >> are we actually making lasting progress? in syria, we've seen similarly a tremendous amount of atmospherics in monitoring on, again, local council dynamics, how are these processes working in these very sort ofnula gra

level. tragically in the syrian case they don't necessarily effect the outcome of the stabilization effort. ultimately it is military factors that affect whether local council gets to stick around or not. if we're going to start on the implementation side we need to relook at how we're defining success and how we're measuring it. then the bureaucratics will move backwards from there. >> having to make that case to congress, it is extremely -- look, i think the development field has moved a long way. usaid has come a long way. developing, monitoring, valuation can make a persuasive case. but a lot of that does default

to the narrative, great anecdote. that shining example. and so part of the problem here is what persuades congress. right? the best social science won't be the story that brings them home onthat. >> just to add to that, lacking the u.s. government's orb cod codfied u.s. government end state in times of uncertainty the u.s. government hedges like anybody else. so yeah some of our own bureaucratics exacerbate that. >> right here in front.

>> hard lessons learned. >> i don't think anyone here would disagree. >> relearned. >> if we were having this meeting at brookings kabul and were mainly an afghan audience, what do you think the reactions would be to the report? have you sort of discussed with them? >> we interviewed 20 senior afghan officials, senior and mid-level afghan officials ranging from ministers to provincial governors to program managers involved in the stabilization effort. their quotes and feedback and insight are littered throughout our report. in the process of interviewing them, the perspective -- the extent of 20 people sprinkled

across the government is representative. thei perective was often that the u.s. government did not listen, pay enough attention to their concerns. district delivery program was sort of the -- started in 2010 and was meant to be the program that's deployed civil servants to the key terrain districts so they could then have people there to provide what's necessary. over time, there is a hand receipt process that ddp was using that allowed -- that meant that when, for instance, a district government official needed to buy a table for the

office or something, the table -- the receipt for that took a -- it was hand receipted and not distributed, took time to get back up to kabul. as these hand receipt processes built up, there was a $700,000 or so shortfall and usa interpreted this as misallocation of funds. and they shut the program down after 2.3 million were dispersed out of, say, 40 million intended. so this misinterpreting poor capacity for wiluption. and it was hard, in fairness, it's very difficult for foreigners coming into a country, even bright government employees to discern capacity for corruption. this was one of the casualties in that battle.

of the people implementing it on the ground and in cabell with the afghans whose support wats absolutely vital to that effort. >> vanda, did you want to chime in on that at all? >> i'll wait for another question from the audience. >> we've got a few minutes left and i see a lot of hands. i'll do the best i can to collect a few questions and come back to our panel. yes, sir, in the back corner? just wait for the mike, if you would. there it is. >> hi. gw law school, from late 2010 to early 2012 i worked for state at embassy kabul. my question is directed to david it's really what could be like operational question as distinct from strategic or tactical. i think chapter five provides an

excellent case study of a couple of key challenges we fac with stabilization. first, the initial focus on levels of government on focusing our governance strengthening effort at levels of governance, namely zbrikts that were not sustainable in the medium term. and civilian effort and military effort from focusing on it. so from making the shift away from a pure stabilization perspective, my question is the difficulty in making a clear and coherent policy decision on what is a straightforward discussion at the district level or provincial level, which has

giant implications is it an argument against stabilization as a whole? if not, is there something more that could be done to strengthen our ability to coherently make policy decisions like that? i suspect it's more likely to be at higher headquarters in embassykabul versus washington, but i leave it to you. >> hang on to that question, guys. we'll collect more. >> sean carburyit the dod office. end state and how that affects what you're stabilizing toward. what's the end state in afghanistan? what's being stabilized towards? is it realistic? how do you walk back promises and expectations that are unrealistic and unachievable?

>>hank tyou. >> doug brooks from the afgn american dreamer, contractors who work support these missions. you want an earful sit down with a contractor if you're not the government and will fdut a lot of the problems. going back to what the colonel mentioned in terms of vietnam, we did have a staublization czar, if you will, there. i wonder if that could ever be repeated because in many ways that was successful. >> thank you. and let's take one more on the aisle right here. >> thank you. my name is edward resim, retired vice president. i know nothing at all about afghanistan.

i wouldn't have been surprised if i heard these statements 10, 12 years ago. what i'm very surprised is that these lessons in year 15, 16 or 17. that's really surprising. what sort of comes through to me is nothing but a terribly complicated situation, that something must be terribly, terribly wrong to learn from these lessons. if you wanted one or two things done so we don't have these lessons in five years time, what thud the be? >> that's a fantastic question to end on. i'll go straight down the line and let david take that at the end. i think that will be a great note to wrap us up. vanda, do you want to talk about the end state?

>> there was an announcement at the time, of course, time lines, process of u.s. engagement will be condition based with very little articulation. president trump during the announcement made many statements to the effect, we will not tell the afghans how to run their state. we don't care about politics. our goal is to degrade the taliban, which were notions that involved the george w. bush administration and obama administration frequently back and forth. stabilization require inclusive equitable governance or is it enough just to kill enough of the terrorists and enough of the taliban? subsequently after the president's comments many top u.s. officials were walking them back and reemphasizing the need for governance and reemphasizing the need for politics.

also what we have been back and forth all the time on is what is the importance of the taliban being part of the negotiations? afghanistan to drive the taliban through negotiations? again the president and various government officials have made quite contrary statements. the taliban, itself, is making, of course, very contradictory statements. my take is that our strategy in afghanistan is essentially waiting for the taliban to make mistakes. we are holding the bag. if we go out, fourth scale civil war takes place.

so we're hoping overtime the taliban will make mistakes. military militant groups do themselves in. they do make mistakes. those mistakes alone are not sufficient without also critical changes taking place on the part of the colombian state. but nonetheless the mistakes were crucial. but nonetheless we are in this mode. what will shake up the mode very fundamentally again is what happens with the political situation after the presidential elections. thank you. >> thank you. >> on the civilization, the czar, my opinion is that there is a role. it could be a more empowered special representative but the

challenge you'll run into, i think, strategically is that you have 50 nations in afghanistan. there's an international and ltinatl and nato command component. of course, you want that. to have one person integrate that is a supreme challenge the way we've set up this byzantine command and control architecture to bring in alliances. it's evolved over time, particularly in afghanistan. but in concept absolutely. so to set stabilization zones throughout the country. lot of the same problems. sanctuaries in cambodia and pakistan. lot of the same problems. insurgency that had a bunch of support from agencies and client population they could control. similarities. until we could control those outside factors, stabilization could be a lot harder and take a lot longer time. it's an open dynamic human based

system of systems. as long as the administration and the congress gives them the power, him or her, the capabilities to pull that together, you get a lot -- i would be rationally optimistic that you would get a better synchronized integrated whole of approach because that person has the power to do so. >> thank you. frances? in my view, it came from an analytic proposition, that helping the government be more responsive and accountable at the local level will undermine the driving factor of the insurgency. it also, though -- our focus also came from a romantic notion that things were simpler on the local level. things were more traditional on the local level, that an elite capture didn't happen on local

level. and that perpetuated some of the reasons. as you rightly pointed out, the right focus would have been at the middle level of government. getting the provinces right. there's 34 of them, will 400 districts. getting that level first, the incentives and authorities on that level would have, i think, been a much better way to go. why couldn't we correct in midcourse? i think this comes back to bureaucracy. i wrote a piece on afghanistan entitled bureaucracy does its thing again. when many sharp people some of these problems have a lot to do with their own bureaucratic structures. in terms of what lessons, we keep returning to these lessons. what should we take away. there's a lot of good in there.

i'm struck by, first of all, the fact that these are different pair diems, different conflicts. ilization campaign under a counterinsurgency logic. extending the writ of the government and legitimacy of the government. syria stabilization effort is a counter, counterinsurgency effort. there's also in the afghan case insurgency. in syria we now have -- i don't know if it's a quadrilateral or antagonal logic. we have the assad government, armed extremist groups. we want to marginalize the iranians and russians. it's a much more complex dynamic. yet for all the differences between the two conflicts what i take away from this report is huge similarities within our own

ability as the u.s. government to address these efforts. so in that sense it's to focus more on our own organization and own bureaucratics and read the report. >> and with that, we'll turn to david. been there from the get go. this, by no means, is the first report. this is one that's getting a lot of attention. successing of this particular report in the realm of this work and how do we think about getting the lessons we need early in the process? >> a lot of lessons were coming out early on, and we document them. part that have problem was -- problem with learning lessons

early on is a lot less to impose on the effort became moot shortly thereafter because of new strategies, new campaign, new agendas. but i also wanted to touch -- it's very auspicious, this report coming out now, because of the issues being discussed with syria and the u.s. government's new concerted effort to delineate roles. of what implementing stabilization looks like in a large scale while the stabilization review can provide the small scale scope. so it can provide that balance.

couple of other things that jeremiah had said, if i can finish those. if you haven't gotten chapter five yet, the provincial level was often bypassed in terms of dispensing -- in terms of on-budget assistance. the districts themselves had 15 to $20 monthly budgets. one of the most difficu reasons -- most difficult issues of doing that, according to senior usaid officials we spoke to, pushing resources down to the district level it enabled the government to bypass the political entrenchment at the provincial and national levels. byssing the issues where all

the obstructions are happening is exactly the wrong way to go about it if, in fact, those obstructions are what needs or where the most reform is necessary. there were many examples of this, working around afghan structure problems to accommodate whatever priorities were on our plate on that given da day. >> david, thank you. thank you for bringing the report to us today, for giving us the opportunity for what i think was a fantastic conversation. folks, i hope you will join me in thanking our amazing panel. thank you very much.

here is what's coming up today on c-span 3. next, a forum on the global economic and national security implications, resulting from the forced migration due to armed conflict or natural disasters. and after that, challenges in the region thanks to korea and china. following that, acting director of immigration enforcement talks about his career and border security. then nasa scientists relay the latest findings from the mars roefr curiosity, which landed on the planet in 2012. the senate is back today at 3:00 p.m. eastern for work on the

$716 billion dense authorization bill. they'll take a vote at 5:30. if successful will work on amendments throughout the week. the house is back tomorrow at noon eastern to work on a slate of anti-opioid addiction, including cracking down on synthetic opioids into the u.s., treatment and recovery and giving pharmacists guidance on issuing prescriptions. >> former fcc chair tom wheeler talks about the end of net neutrality. he is interviewed by david mccabe, technology report for axios. >> net neutrality has shifted to legislation. some on the hill would like to shift it to legislation. do you think it's possible to legislate this issue? >> well, david, it's fascinating

that the republican position all along during my term was this is something that congress ought to decide. now when congress has an opportunity to decide with the congressional review act that's pass tate and in a bipartisan way and is now pending in the house that the republicans in the house and the industry all say no, no, no. look, if the chairman of the fcc has the courage of his conviction convictions that what he has done is right for america and will stand up to a vote, he ought to call speaker ryan and say schedule it for a vote in the house and let's see what the representatives of the american people say. >> watch the communicators tonight on cspan 2 at 8:00

eastern. this week, live coverage this week from the u.s./north korean summit from singapore. and then join us for analysis and your mments. live on c-span and c-span.org or listen using the free c-span radio app. an important issue to men the state of utah is our use of water. being a desert state we really need to focus on how we use our water and with an some of the drieinte we've had, it's been really important to me to focus on conserving water and pass legislation that passes laws about conserving water. >> i live in utah. we live in a basin and air quality is important to us. what we need to do is more public transportation so that we can reduce emissions. >> an important issue to me is

wage inequality. there's lots of jobs out there, but they're always part time. i've been getting part-time jobs but the wage is low and they keep you at part time. i was a manager for eight years. and they're always keeping wages low. wages for the wealthy are continuing to increase but those of us at the bottom are low and being a college graduate now in a week, i will now be going into a job market where there's not a lot of jobs for me. and congress doesn't seem to care about that. >> an important issue for the state of utah is over population. i feel like overpopulation is the root cause of many of our

societal problems. i don't know that there are easy solutions to the problem. but i do feel like it's probably the most important issue facing our voices from the state, part of c-span's 50 capital tours and our stop in salt lake city, utah. next, a forum on the global economic and national security implications resulting from the forced migration of refugees due to armed conflict, natural disasters. form eer pennsylvania governor d home land security tom ridge and former obama administrator and u.s. trade representative michael froman participate in the event. let's get started. i'm dan