>> coming up, a couple of programs on iraq. first, a discussion on development challenges. also, the special inspector general for reconstruction treated then, a look at the current state of israeli and palestinian negotiations. monday on c-span 2, the national oil spill commission is holding eight two day public hearing. also, a look at preliminary findings on the well blowout. watch live coverage starting at 9:00 eastern on c-span 2. >> changes need to occur in congress. it will only occur if the people begin to get involved in the political system, begin to

run for congress, and begin to take -- make the changes necessary. >> that was john boehner in 1990. you can learn more about the presumptive speaker of the house for his own words in over 800 appearances on line in the c- span video library. it is washington, your way. >> next, and look at development challenges in iraq. we will hear from the deputy special representative of the u.n. secretary-general as well as the state department's barack affairs director. this is one hour and 40 minutes. -- as the state department's iraq affairs director. this is one hour and 40 minutes.

>> we seem to have an unbilled middle. this may be a metaphor for the election day. let's hope not. i am fred tipson. i would like to welcome you to the round table on chirac's development challenges. -- on iraq's development challenges. we have offices in over 130 countries. we worked in more than 160 countries. among those assignments are development challenges in many of the most difficult parts of the world. we want to highlight in particular of the work of the u.n. d.p. and the mission of the united nations and iraq. let me make a plug for future round tables.

one in particular is coming up and not unrelated to the challenges we are facing in iraq. that is for the 2010 human development report. this year, looking at 10 years since the innovation of the human development report. it was one of the first indices and reports that went beyond income and gross domestic product measurements for measuring human welfare. it added measures of longevity and literacy and embellished a wider view of what human development encompassed. what is interesting about this report, and i hope you can join as a november 17 for that event, what is interesting is that there are a number of new indices proposed and added. there is one measuring the quality. there is one measuring gender

empowerment. there is one called the multidimensional poverty index. that was developed in conjunction with oxford university. it looks at an even more multifaceted way of thinking about both poverty and progress. please come out for that. the roundtable today is being vetoed -- videod by c-span. we're proud to welcome the c- span audience. that means you are on your best behavior. you always are in this audience. we look forward to vigorous interaction with you after we have made initial presentations to get the conversation started among the panelists. having been working in the congress in 1980 when we had one of our last tsunamis in the united states government, in

those years, it was not expected that there would be a change in the u.s. senate. as the night wore on, those of us who worked for the republicans, myself included, found ourselves increasingly confronted with the prospect that we would be in the majority. i sympathize with any colleagues that may find themselves in opposition tomorrow morning because it is a rather significant change in u.s. politics and even one of the houses shifts. i note that experience because as we will no doubt note in the course of this discussion, the iraqi people had an election seven months ago and have yet to form a government based on that election. they have received some criticism because of that away. in every democracy, there are challenges even once the

government has been formed in operating the government and reaching consensus in moving agendas forward. i hope it is not the case in this country next year, but we may find ourselves challenged by the need to collaborate across often contentious political boundaries in making a government function. fortunately in iraq, if things continue to move forward in a positive direction. that is what we want to focus on today, both the challenges and take note of the fact that there are some very dedicated people in iraq working despite the lack of a formed government to move the agenda of human development forward. it is for that purpose that we are gathered today to reflect

and understand how that process is unfolding. to do that, we have a star- studded cast. we have our own deputy special representative to the secretary general christine mcnab. christine is also the humanitarian coordinator and senior undp official in the country. several hats complicate her challenges and operating there. she is one of our star performers from previous assignments and other difficult locations -- and other difficult locations. i will not go through all of the biographies. that is why we put them on the back of your invitation. we're also pleased to have john desrocher from the state department. he recently returned from iraq.

he is now leading the department's effort on iraq. he also has a distinguished career in the foreign service, including in a location that is very dear to the heart of our administrator. john was in auckland, new zealand, as the counselor general for several years. we're happy to have them bring the new zealand perspective to the issues. les campbell is an old friend from the national democratic institute. his the head of the u.s. -- every time we tell him we have a need for a speaker anywhere related to the middle east, les is immediately suggested. he shared the podium before. we're pleased to have him back again. he is a practicing politician in

his native canada. he may wish or not to say more about that experience as we go. i think these challenges of government performance in democracies whether old or new, there are some common themes that run through them that perhaps we can all take account of. that is our lineup. asked each panelist to take a few minutes to lay out the challenges. we will then turn to the audience to see what kinds of questions there presentations provoke or that you came with. without further ado, i would like to turn to christine to begin. >> thank you very much. can you hear me in the back and on the side? very good. i have been in the rock for one

year. i intend to be there at least another year. -- i have been in iraq for one year. i intend to be there at least another year. i come to iraq with a strong development background. i am also the humanitarian coordinator. i would like to tell you about what i have seen and thought about since arriving in iraq. arriving was quite spectacular from the development workers point of view. a step off the plane into the baghdad military airport. i felt like i had stepped onto a film set. we have seen it on television. i stepped into it. i was then lifted by u.s. forces helicopter over to the international zone and started my career as the deputy head of the united nations mission. fortunately for me, there are two deputy heads. the other one deals with politics. i got the easy bit, development and humanitarian aid.

nothing is easy in iraq. it is highly complex. we are dealing with the country with majority of the population have known nothing except for, sanctions, and conflict. at least half of the population is under 18. they literally have not known peace cannot democratic development, or respect for human rights. we have a huge agenda ahead of us to work with the government and the people of iraq on development, human rights, humanitarian relief, the building a war-ravaged country and a country where the infrastructure was severely damaged. it was first damaged by the era of the sanctions. that meant the central work and

maintenance could not be done on electricity, water supplies come irrigation systems. this was further smashed by war. then we have the struggles that is placed huge numbers of people in 2003. the international community has an obligation to iraq. we're all citizens of member states of the united nations. that is my starting point. people in the rock have a right to a decent future. -- people in iraq have a right to a decent future. they want the same as we want for our families. peace, security, the schools, a health clinic to go to, jobs, and hopefully a career ahead of them. at the moment, remarkably few the rockies -- the iraqis have that. there are a lot of different

challenges. some parts of the country are more peaceful than others. a lot of children go to school. i will come back to why schooling is still an issue. the big picture is that there is so much work to be done despite the money poured into the country. the budget is not where it should be. it is still a government with a deficit budget despite sitting on the sea of oil we all care about. it is not being pumped fast enough and effectively enough to cover the budget at the moment. yet we need now to lay the foundations for what is to come. that is a stable, democratic iraq. that is a normal country plane in normal role in a very important region of the world. -- playing a normal role in a very important region of the world. let me skip quickly through some of the challenges as i see them. you know about the millennium

development goals for what every family has a right to expect. we are making progress. child mortality has decreased over the last decade. access to sanitation and water has increased. there is widespread cell phone ownership. that is part of the catchall of modernization. poverty and malnutrition still exist. there are still children stunted growth because of lack of access to food. but there is good news. poverty is very shallow. most families in poverty and just on or below the poverty line. we do not have the deep agonizing poverty where children slowly starve. it is much better than that. even if children are born and grow up fairly healthy, they

have many challenges ahead of them. one is illness caused by damaged water supply and sanitation infrastructure. the other is that basic of going to school. the numbers in primary schools are dropping. it used to be 95%. it is now down to 85%. the figure that worries me is this one. although the majority of children go to primary school, by the time you get to senior high school level that feeds the universities and training colleges, it is only 20%. this is an absolute long-term catastrophe for the development of iraq. that 20% will have to carry all of the expectations of a trained work force doing all the technical jobs that need to be done in the future. the lack of schooling is partly the result of the damage of war. many teachers have fled. they were targeted in the post-

2003 fighting. for those who stayed, there were real threats against security. many parents did not dare to send their children to school. he was ok to go to the school down the road. it was not ok sending your children 20 miles to the secondary education. that is one of the huge issues. another issue is that women who used to be a part of the economy and development of the country have been severely marginalized following the war. i am talking about 30% open unemployment and probably higher. women have been forced back into the homes. for many, this is an inconvenience and not quite what they expected to do with their lives. it is a tragedy for the women who are widows and become

dependent upon the good grace of distant relatives to make a living. it is very difficult for women- headed households. if we continue about the challenges, there is another serious challenge. the u.s. government has been instrumental in helping to solve this. that is the internally displaced people. 2.5 million people had to flee their homes. they're still living in the country but in a squatter settlements in baghdad or rural areas that have been devastated. there are serious problems getting them back to their homes or helping the more they are. in urban areas, there is a land issue that has to be solved. in rural areas, there is a jobs issue. you cannot survive in the rural area unless the irrigation systems are working. agriculture is dependent upon

that. jobs depend upon agriculture. there are huge challenges. 1.5 million still to be settled. there have been recent flows of refugees. they are much smaller than before. they are specific groups. there has been targeting of minorities. you probably seen in the press over the weekend that there are awful incidences of the catholic church in baghdad where all the people at the service were taken hostage. in the rescue attempt, over 50 of them died. there is targeting. there is also a bright side. we've seen targeting against christians during election time to the muslim neighbors said that we will protect you. muslim colleagues came up and demonstrated with the christians to keep them at the university.

there are also things on the bedside. the final development challenge and want to mention is not the obvious one, but it is a very important one. it is that of rebuilding the state of iraq. it is rebuilding the civil service, the public service, the schools, the education system as a whole. the universities, the hospital's, the sanitation supply. the court of rebuilding the state is the people who work for the state, the civil service reforms. getting things light civil service might mean that you are in the service of the people. you are civilians helping other civilians. it has been a highly militarized economy. civil service reform is key. the other reform is not even a reform. it is building the private sector.

it has never really had a private sector. it has not really existed in iraq before. we're working closely with usaid to build up the capacity of the government to enable the emergence of the private-sector, to regulate the private sector, to give them stable operating conditions. the key issue in the future will be jobs. oil will generate income, but it will not generate jobs. the oilfields are generating about 30,000 jobs. we need 3 million jobs. it is an essential part of our work. the u.n. has agreed with the government of the rock on a five point agenda. -- with the government of iraq on a five point agenda.

there's a highly neglected area of climate change in environmental management. the country is getting drier and haltotter. the one the water supply is declining drastically. the marshlands and down to 10% of the regional area. they're one of the most important marshlands globally. we will work on that through the global environment facility, through the united nations mahmud to program, we often partner with the world bank. i have one final message in my 10 minutes. as much as we have done together in very difficult security conditions, there is more to be done. it is in our selfish interest as well as our humanity interest to keep on working in iraq.

we are all aware of the risk. we take measures to mitigate risk. it is a high-cost enterprise. it is like what someone once said about education. if you think education is expensive, try ignorance. it is the same with iraq. if you think a successful iraq is expensive, think about the alternative of a failed state in the middle of the middle east. thank you. >> thank you, christine. john, i will turn to you. >> and want to thank you for the invitation. it is great to be here with christine and les. i think will have to talk a little less because christine cover the range of development challenges. well. -- pretty well.

i will glide through bit of the remarks prepared so as not to repeat a lot of what you have already heard. i will give you the u.s. government ankle on some of these things. -- and will give you the u.s. government and wgle on some of these things. she laid out the challenge is very well. i was checking my notes and clicking them off as she went through them fairly. our relationship with the rock -- iraq is governed by the strategic framework agreement signed in 2009. it covers the gamut of our relationship with iraq in all sorts of fields of discussion. we work on things like public services, economic reform, reducing violence, strengthening the rule of law, the respect for human rights under the rubric of this agreement. we've spent billions of dollars

since 2003 on reconstruction and all sorts of areas like security, economic reconstruction, global governance. christine made the point about jobs. it is a great deal about jobs. iraq is a country rich in oil, but you do not need to look at the globe for very long. you can find countries that are rich in oil or other natural resources that also suffer real poverty. we want to help the iraqis build a diversified and complete economy. oil will be a foundation for that is not the only part. there are only so many jobs that the oil sector will create. there are a lot of young iraqis out there who will be looking for jobs. trying to develop the commercial sector in iraq, developing a good business environment.

we have had a couple of very successful trade missions. we had one last year to washington. secretaries and justice for turned from a trip to baghdad. -- secretary sanchez just returned from a trip to baghdad that well. we work with our international partners. christine talk a lot about refugees and displaced people. with our a lot of time and ou partners. we have had some success. it is a very difficult challenge. we are having some success in getting people back to the areas where they came from and supporting them until they can do that. that is really crucial. the u.s. military has done a great deal from the beginning.

we do a lot of support for reconstruction goals, things they do on their own and to support us. they work a lot with the u.n. as well. we also work a lot in the rule of law sector. we spent a lot of time working with the government of iraq to build capacity and reduce construction. it is a wonderful program called the commercial law development program. it trains lawyers and judges on the commercial and economic aspects of the law to build an environment where business can thrive. the iraqi government has put forward its own anti-corruption strategy. it has signed the u.n. convention against corruption. we're very supportive of that. there are a great many challenges. i was taking some notes as christine was speaking. it is important to recall how

economically isolated iraq has been for so long, not just since 2003 and the sanctions, but even before. that isolation has taken a toll on the for a structure of the country. you have to think of infrastructure in the most broad terms. it is not just the electricity or transportation sectors. those have suffered. it is education and health. it is all the things that you need to build a society that have suffered a great deal in the past decade. this cannot be rebuilt overnight. we're putting a lot of effort into that. the education system has suffered. refugees and displaced people have fled. that damages education. the agricultural sector can be a

great employer. it should be an important employer. it operates on a very outdated, centralized approach. in addition to the infrastructure problems with irrigation and everything else, and makes it a real challenge. atop a bit about the financial environment. it was been a great deal of time working with the rockies -- the iraqis on the financial environment. the banking system is just starting to develop. it is hard to develop an economy lawyer banking system is still developing. -- while you are banking system is developing. people who want to do business in iraq. security is still an issue. if i sign a contract, is there a legal system to enforce the contract? if by land, can i get clean

title? can i borrow money against the value? things that seem basic to us but are the underpinning of any diversified economy. that is what we spend a lot of our time working on. i really took to heart what christine set about rebuilding the state and the role of the state. so many people fled. the educational system was so damaged. thersome in the areas -- so many areas across ministries. you have a lot of people that want to work with you well but do not have a lot of experience or international exposure to different methods of doing things. that makes it very tough. these are all things we're working on with our view and partners -- with our human partners very well together. i think the potential in iraq is

great. we're working on this with our you in partners. -- with our u.n. partners. oil is a large part of it. iraq has played a large role in the past. it is still something we need to ell. on wal there's an extraordinary opportunity to help the iraqis develop this extraordinary potential. it is something i enjoyed my year in baghdad. i am still doing it from washington. it has been quite meaningful for me. it has been great to work with partners like the u.n. i think i will leave it at that. perhaps we will look forward to exploring more of that in the questions and answers. -- >> we look forward to exploring more of that in the questions and answers.

iraq since been in a ro 2003. we went in shortly after things settle down after the invasion in june of 2003. one of the connections to the u.n. at the time shows you how naive many of us were about iraq myself and the director of our team, an arab-american woman come decided to go to iraq. we're able to hitch a ride with the u.n. plane did we did not think about what would happen when we arrived. we arrived in the military hinder. -- we arrived in a military hangar into a u.n. car.

people assumed we were u.n. employees. they tried to bundles into an orientation. we were afraid to say we did not work for the u.n. we were afraid we would be seen as imposters. as soon as there was a coffee break, we snuffed out -- snuck out. flagged down a cab and went to a hotel. in the early days, there was a lot of optimism. is who dozens of the rockie were hopeful about what would happen. people could walk the streets. it seemed like anything could happen. i will not going to the history of what happened after that. i think we all know. it is amazing that given the tragic story in so many ways that iraq has fallen off the

public agenda to a certain extent. it is great to see such a big crowd. it is still very important what happens. even if the optimism in the early days was a highly overblown and the mistakes were huge, it does not mean that we do not have a collective responsibility to make it turn out well. i want to explain some good news and bad news. on the good news, i am referring specifically to political development, elections, advocacy organizations, civil society organizations trying to have an impact on policy at the national and local level, women's participation, youth participation, freedom of speech, media, all the sorts of things that go into building a functioning democratic system.

as bad as the news has been in iraq and as bad as the security has been -- i am the regional director. a deal with countries from iraq to iran. under most measures, iraq compares favorably to the rest of the middle east if not ahead in the areas i was talking about. in iraq, there are hundreds of political parties. that is a competitive political system. almost anyone interested can join the party and try to work through political life that way. there have been successful local elections, provincial elections, national elections. being a party member and working with the party is a viable option in iraq. there are many problems. i will say it once and not keep qualifying perio.

there is a surprising degree of freedom of expression and iraq -- in iraq. in most cases, people are free to pursue. they talk about a variety of things. unlike many neighbors, it is possible to hold different opinions, expresses opinions, whether it is done through the media or writing articles. there's a wide degree of freedom of expression. there was a quota system in place for the last election that led to the election of about 25% of the parliamentary seats for women. it is imperfect. i suppose we could wonder if the iraqis were entirely serious about this. the fact is it happened. we know from experience in other middle eastern countries like morocco and jordan and kuwait

that once women are in political life, it leads to many more bad things. in the case of morocco, -- it leads to many more good things. in the case of morocco, it led to a system that was better for women and families. it was the precursor of thousands of women elected at the local level. many good things can happen. the iraqi parliament is functional but has not been functional for the last six or seven months. it is no more dysfunctional than any of the parliament in the arab world. when it is meeting, it actually has power. i am not going to say mto many good things because of the current impasse, but they actually pass laws of consequence. they stop loss of consequence. they have a big role in

negotiating treaties and ratifying treaties with the international community. those statements do not apply to any other arab parliament. the rock parliament does matter. that is the good news. -- the iraq parliament does matter. that is the good news. another piece of good news is that there was a move prior to the election toward issue-based politics. i know the christine was in bosnia. i was in bosnia in the mid- 1990s. there is some unfinished business there. when the immediate threat to people was lifted, the existential threat, when people did not have to worry about whether they and their families live another day, it cannot take long before their attention moved away from -- it did not

take long before their attention moved away from sectarian issues to issues like jobs, health, everyday concerns. we started to see that last spring in iraq. up until not long ago, the iraqis behaved as if there were closer to their steering groups because there were existential threats. in the last election, there is good evidence that people started to exercise votes based on the parties they thought would bring the best feature economically -- future economically in terms of services. the other good news is that the election was fair. i wrote an op-ed in march were and mentioned the support of the u.n. -- we are i mentioned the support of the u.n.d.p. for

election monitoring. not only were the technicalities of the election run well with you and assistance and the assistance of others, there was a domestic monitoring. there was iraqi volunteer monitoring. the results announced were roughly true. ndi had been pre-election polls that tracked closely with the results as well. the results of the election with the pre-ive election polls. we found out the iraqis clearly believed in the winter. it was clear through all the evidence that was the case. in the pre-election poll we found it interesting that

roughly double the number of people who actually voted for that coalition perceive him to be the winner for four weeks after the election. people's perception of him as the winner was increasing as time went on. maliki's perception of le as the winner was diminishing. that is a common phenomena in politics. when you do post-election polls, many more people than actually voted for the winner will claim to have voted for the winner later. we will see that wednesday. if there is a big sweet, everyone will say that there on that train. the same thing happened in iraq. more people than actually voted for him claimed they did. i think it is important because they say to themselves election is over, we have a winner, was

use that for the bases of forming the government. no government as we know, that is part of the bad news. i do not know if john will have comments on this or not. the idea that the iraqi government should be all- inclusive is good in some ways. in a post-conflict in burma, a government that excludes anybody is a mistake. the more inclusion, the better. there was an election. people voted. they took it seriously. there was an outcome. the outcome of the election should be the predominant factor. it may not be the only factor, the addition of a large impact on forming the government. that has not worked out. it is a shame that the incumbent did not step down. i was looking forward to -- i am

not sure if this was true. it may be the first time that a peacefully indstep aside the arab world. it would have been very exciting if that had happened. i am not sure that all-inclusive government is the way to go. it sounds an awful lot like the system in bosnia and lebanon. if you allow this kind of bargaining for these positions that supposedly belonged to set, you are stuck with that forever. when do you back away from that. i think we know from experience in other places that is not a good long-term formula. i want to finish by reading five headlines from a series of 16 focus groups.

this was completed by ndi a couple of weeks ago. we were asking the iraqis. they were saying that the political parties were undefined and driving frustrations. the iraqis see their party leaders as self-centered elites looking to match some--- maximize personal gain rather than help the rockies. and the sense that the party to not focused on the needs of the public. issue-based politics are novel. we ask the question about issue- based politics because we realize it is not normal in a rock did iraq or the arab world.

about do not talk helping certain sectors. we explore different ways they might get a typical public to buy into the issue-based agendas. they are open to it, but parties would have to communicate. there are mixed views of the saddam-era. some say life was better under him economically. there is not yet proved that democracy can be relied upon to deliver better material results than a dictatorship. all these years after the war, all these billions of dollars, and people are still unsure if the system can deliver better results than saddam hussein. that is said. there is a strong sense of iraqi identity.

we have been conducting focus groups since 2003. we have always found the same thing. counter to the conventional wisdom in washington, 98% of non-kurdish choose to first identify themselves as the iraqis. even in kurdistan, most identify themselves as the rockies. it is a lot of pride and hope. they want to see the country succeed. there are many qualifications to that. kurdistan surprises people. most would think that 99% do not think of themselves as the iraqis. focus groups conducted among christians and other minorities ago that. they want to be treated as

iraqis. they just want a better life for themselves and better representation within the national government. i will conclude by saying that despite some negative history, the invasion of iraq led to much suffering. but once it happened, the idea that to turn it into a normal country that is integrated with the rest of the world where people have a reasonable expectation of a better life, i think that is our responsibility. it can happen in the traditional development area. the u.n. works in both of those areas along with other organizations. we have great raw material to work with. christine and john said that there is a lot of satisfaction in working with the rockies --

iraqis. we know that there's tremendous raw material. if we can marshal the resources and push forward, i think we have great people to work with. >> let me take the program and as the moderator to ask each of the panelists questions in specific areas. i will invite them to also address any issues that other colleagues raised in their presentations. christine, i wanted to ask you the security question. we have referred a couple of times to the august 2003 bombing in the hotel that killed a number of colleagues, including my good friend who was visiting and interviewing sergio. with the u.s. transition, what are the needs for security?

how do you operate in a rocket this point? what needs to happen to make your position more secure? >> a lot needs to happen to make our position more secure. i just had a note given to me from readers -- writers -- reuters to date about a large number of desperate security is a huge issue for anybody in any organization or any other country working in iraq we were not a way very long. in 2003, there was an impression that disappeared for a long time. i we did not. i think we were out of the country for a maximum of one year. we were away about one year.

we have a large group of national staff working for us. they work across the country and the governors. their security is their anonymity. even long after the bombing at the mattel, we had you and staff working for different agencies to do not tell anybody that they work for the u.n. we have staff that leave their homes and different time of the day. we have other staff at work in the international zone who come in and out with the flow of civil servants because unfortunately for them, u.s. and u.n. sound quite similar in arabic and english. the u.s. has been a target more than the u.n. has been. they do not want to be confused. they would rather beat wind up with the iraqi civil servants. we are obvious because we do not

speak arabic. if we do, we're not fluent in the right dialect. we're easy to pick out as being from the international community. we have had amazingly good support from the american forces. it is heartwarming to go out with the american soldiers. even on the most difficult missions when they have just at, they say to us that even after all of the fighting to go out with us and the american humanitarian colleagues is what it is all about for the soldiers. they have done the fighting and now they want to see the rebuilding.

the u.n. has been very reliant upon american security since 2003. we're making difficult adjustments in our own posture. it is still not safe for us to go wandering around except in the north. it is much safer in kurdistan. they have a protected no-fly zone that allow development to take off earlier than the rest of iraq. the government forces in northern iraq are very effective defense force. they do protect us well. we can make the transition from being with the u.s. troops to being on our own with the government forces. that is relatively easy. what is not easy is to move around in the center and the south. there are still bombs going off and rockets flying around. there is still targeting of minorities, anybody seen as

other, the international community. we have to think through our own security posture. one approach is that we are beginning to produce a lot more printed and other media materials explaining what the .n. actually does and how we help in solving problems. that is one part. we have more open publicity of what we are and what we do. the other is trying to find solutions such as our own transport means, helicopters, armored buses and vehicles. everyone in a rock moves around and armored vehicles because you do not want to be collateral damage in a roadside bomb. despite this, our own special representative had his own convoyed targeted. it was a near miss.

the car behind was hit. at least one person died and others were badly injured. the targeting is there. we have to ask the government of iraq and the united states to continue to support us along with other donor countries. it is not because we want to go around in armored fleets. it is because we want to go around and get the job done. when you move into state building and capacity development, you have to be out there. you cannot do it from a distance. you have to be out there talking to people. it is a long-term project. we have to start now. we cannot wait for to get quieter. the security issue is a personal thing to ask about. the bottom line is doing business in iraq is very expensive. we do have to make sure we have security.

some of that is provided by the iraqi government. at the moment, we still need the out on security to give our staff and employees confidence that we're doing everything possible for them to do their jobs and return home safely. >> john, the transition is really underway between the military-led operation to a more civilian-led operation. what are the particular challenges in doing that and engaging with the iraqi government and repositioning the u.s. government in iraq? how do you think about government engagement in a situation where we do not have a formed coalition government? >> i would start answering that by saying that we think about government engagement in transition constantly.

the august 31 deadline in the drawdown to 50,000 troops, i got there the previous august. we were already thinking about the percentage of my days that would be spent working with our military colleagues on the transition. it is a big challenge to determine how we will pick up items and issues the the military has done and how we will address them. we are very different from the military. operating in this environment is very expensive. it is not a normal environment that we're used to working in. if we want to get our job done there, we have to be prepared to do that. it is very expensive.

we're determined to be able to get out. you cannot do your job properly from behind the walls. we are determined to get out. i got out quite a lot. my colleagues got out quite a lot. we continue to do so. we have the provisional reconstruction teams around the country that get all the time. the basis of what we do cannot be done remotely. you cannot do it with a phone, fax, or e-mail. that is a challenge that u.s. leadership has taken on. we have made the determination that the job is so important and different that we will endeavor to find the resources it takes so that our people can do this safely. it is tough. we are learning a lot. a lot of it is new. doing it well.re i felt i could do the job i

needed to do. there are some days when you could not go out. it was a pretty impressive operation from my perspective. >> before we turn to the audience, let me ask you the regional questions. iraq has neighbors that vitally interested in the outcome of the international relations with iraq and development in the country. how big a factor is the outside influence in the cool lessons of these political parties --: since -- coalescence of these political parties? >> i met with most of the political leaders.

they are still in flight to elsewhere. i have a political science background and interested in politics. i kept thinking to myself why is this? there are obvious reasons. there are regional power brokers. iraq cannot afford to ignore iran or saudi arabia, but it seemed odd as they were making these shuttle trips to these capitals of tehran and so on. i began to realize there is a tremendous ball and the political system in iraq. there is no head of state. -- i began to realize there is a tremendous flaw in the political system in iraq. there is no head of state. there is symbolic power, but it is not a particularly prestigious office.

talibani is seen as a party representative and not as above it all. as these leaders go around to try to get a clue about how they could form a government that would be supported, the surrounding countries are almost serving as the traditional head of state. there is nothing in iraq that has the legitimacy of the british monarchy or the u.s. presidency. prestige is drawn from being the candidate of iran or turkey. . .

>> just a question. >> thank you. >> question for less campbell. you know, why can't they seem to get a government? and what sit going to take for them to be able to overcome the divisions between them to actually form a government?

>> i'm not sure i can answer that exactly. i think what you're seeing is a very complex negotiation to carve up the pie. i think the sort of easy answer is that rather than seeing the election and seeing political power as deriving from people, an election happened and they should respect that outcome, i think what, how the iraqi politicians see it is that they were able to demonstrate their relative strength based on election, and now there's a pie to cut up. and the pie means positions whether it's the high positions, prime minister, speaker of the parliament, president. but also other positions. who is going to control what, how are things like oil well and the split in oil wealth going to be decided. and they're negotiating how that pie is going to be split up. so it's very, very complex and

just a long, long complex negotiation. and then you add the outside countries, and they have their favorites because there are parties closer to iran, deloser to the saudis and turks. and so i think it just ends up, i don't know the terminology in negotiations, but it's a negotiation with probably 100 points to be decided and it's just taking forever. but at some stage it's also about stubbornness. i think if any one of the major contestants, and particularly my opinion is my opinion, but i think that the incumbent had said, listen, the normal democratic practice is that the party that wins the plureralt of seats has the first chance to form the government. i'm going to step and side and resign. that would have gone a long way to resolve the problem. but to defend iraqis a little bit, there's no history of democracy. so we saw it in britain not long after the iraqi election

where for one moment the british prime minister thought maybe i could find a way to stay on. no, i lost, i have to step down. but iraq doesn't have that long list to draw on. >> yes, please. >> could our speakers talk a little bit more about the impact of the neighbors, not just relations with political parties but what role they are really playing, and which other countries are trying to get more involved in iraq right now. not even neighboring countries. for commercial or other reasons. thank you. >> ok. let me have a first attempt, and i will hand over to the other panelists. we are seeing a lot of interest

in iraq because of course this is a very oil-rich country and iraq government has made very clear that it doesn't know who its friends are. and it's a bit of a different picture depending on where you are. in the north, kurd stan has highly developed relationships with turkey is its biggest trade partner and there are many turkish firms working in the north of iraq. but also china. china is interested in coming in. and there's a huge reconstruction program going on in the kurdistan region. and the government of all of iraq also has a huge reconstruction program ahead of it. for example, they probably need several million new housing units. they're going to do the first batch of 750,000. this will attract interest from global countries. it's not going to be done locally because the skill sets and materials aren't there. the oil chapter is a chapter all on its own.

and i know i'm not to call them concessions because they're called something else. but, however, the oil deals that have been going on are bringing in companies frol different parts of the world and they in turn will bring in subcontractors to provide safe and secure housing for the workers. and those workers will probably come from outside because the number of oil engineers in the country is just enough for about one oil company. they've even had informal chats of how are we going to share these 1,500 engineers. obviously they're going to have to bring in people from outside. so the trade route of interest is very important. on the neighboring countries and outstanding issues, of course kuwait is a very important stumbling block to the development of iraq because of the repar rations program.

it's, i think iraq so far has paid back $30 billion and probably have another 40 billion to pay, and they really do need to renegotiate with kuwait on thou that is going to be managed. there are border demarkation problems with kuwait that need to be solved. so the political mission is very active on working on that front. if we look to the east, of course we have iran with many long and very bloody conflicts behind them. huge mine fields on both sides of the border just of an example of a problem. and then water. there are huge problems with water sharing. there are no transboundry agreements. and iraq is downstream of almost everybody. iran, syria, turkey. they have to do transboundry negotiations sometime in the future. at the moment they haven't got the knowledge base to do it because they need to nor more

about what they have in the country and how it's managed. so there are complex problems and because of the oil well it will generate interest from outside the region. it's not just a regional question. >> actually, if i can take a minute, i can go back to the previous discussion about government formation. obviously for a lot of reasons i'm not going to go into detail on, a lot of that, buts there something i do think is important to note that we do want to see an inclusive, an accountable iraqi government and we do want iraqi's political leaders to move forward quickly in government formation. but i do think it's important to know that what's going on here is a political process and there are political discussions going on, pretty intense discussions going on. it may sound like i'm stating the obvious but i'm not. you need to think about what's

not happening here. we're not having a military stepping in. we're not having a coup. we're having a political process in a place where the political process is new and we have an election result that is kind of broadly spread among some pretty large, four large blocs, coalition blocs. there's a lot to work out there. and i just want to remind people that this could be happening another way. while we would like things to move quickly, the fact that it's a political process is a fact i think we need to keep in mind. in the interest of the neighbors, i think criteen covered it well. you're talking about a country that has substantial resources that it developed wisely will be an economic powerhouse in the years ahead. there is a consumer market there that will some day, that countries will want to serve. there are resources there that

countries will want to be able to share in. there are -- it would be unusual if they were not so interested. that would surprise me more of the interest of the neighbors. so i don't take that as all that unusual. and dealing with the neighbors will be part of what a new sovereign iraqi government does in the years ahead. >> another question in the back. >> thank you for all the panelists. this is really informative. i was surprised that u.s. aide only came up once in the discussion and that sparked a discussion for me regarding coordination on the ground knowing there are so many agencies, and i'm 14ur many in this room working in iraq. i was wondering if you can comment on coordination on the ground and how that's working. >> let me turn to the coordinator in chief, i guess.

>> yes. also new for the u.n. system. there are many people on the ground. hume terrence, development agencies, ngos, whatever. and the government needs to keep a grip on who is doing what in the development of iraq. and one of the traditional u.n. roles is support to government of aid coordination. and there is a very active iraq partners forum which is both the multilateral and bilateral agencies. it's co-chaired by me as the u.n. resident coordinator together with a representative of the world bank. but already agreed with government that as the new government comes in, they will be the third co-chair of this forum. it's a logical progression in any country. usually the donors starts chatting over lunch and then have a formal forum or fora.

and then government is invited to join. government takes over. government gets technical assistance to manage the aid coordination. because it's not just us as individuals that need to manage. it's also the budgets. the budgets of the aid donors need to be integrated and reflected openly and transparently in the national budgets. it doesn't usually happen until you make a concerted effort. there is another mechanism and that is we have a humanitarian coordination mechanism which brings together both governmental and nongovernmental humanitarians. we reestablished that forum this year. we're going to have our third meeting together in november as soon as i get back. and erks again, it's with the government's full knowledge that this -- because also the government is responsible for its idps and for helping returnees. so the humanitarian work is

also coordinated. so that is a typical u.n. world bank role in the donor community. but as fast as possible, we build up the capacity usually as minister of planning or finance or both to take over this function just so that the transparency will increase within the country. because in many countries the development budget is quite a big chunk of the country's capital budget and without a lot of effort it doesn't get reflected. i don't know, john. >> yeah. i mean, certainly careful coordination is something we take very seriously in this area, and i think that's pointed out by we have in baghdad created a position that has nt really existed in the structure of that before. in this case the assistant chief of mission for transyig. and that is an office that's always been filled by someone who has held ambassdorl rank.

that person was my boss when i was in bag dad. and because we have to draw together effectively first internally within the u.s. government our own efforts, whether it's what the military is doing. and i mentioned the commerce department's. and then we have aid and all these, and then coordinating with our nonu.s. partners. we take it very seriously. we spend a lot of time on it. there's a lot of organizations there and you don't want to be stepping on each other and you want to be sure that you're addressing you're working with the host government to help determine priorities and address priorities that they have so that they of course have a buy-in to the programs that you're doing. >> just on the election.

different types of support were being provided to the election commission, but it was a u.s. aide funding was giving a lot of staff support and logistical support and so on to the election commig. and our funding by the way in iraq, most comes from the state department, democratsy of human rights labor. werpt supporting domestic election monitoring, sort of the accountability of the equation. so these programs are very integrated in iraq. i think maybe to a greater degree than we've seen in a lot of countries. >> if you could say a word about the multi-donor trust fund. because we find in our work here in washington that there's very little widespread recognition of the importance of these trust fund vehicles. >> within undp there is a trust

fund office, and the iraq multidonor trust fund was the first one and the biggest ever in the end it totalled over $1.3 billion coming in from donor partners to the government of iraq. and the agreement is that they will be put into the same budget and that money is then through a series of committees in iraq allocated to specific sectors and projects. and i chaired the steering committee together with government and there were a series of technical committees which look at the programs and projects that are being requesting, which are requesting financing. now, the reason this is important is it's a u.n. mechanism. and there are 20 u.n. agencies regularly working in baghdad out of the baghdad, across the whole of iraq. and what we don't want is competition between agencies

for donor and government support. we want it to be integrated. and we also want the government to have a voice in what programs and projects are in fact done by the u.n. using donor money. there were several very important financors of this mechanism. one was the european commission which put in half a billion dollars. other important ones include japan and spain. and a number of others. and a smaller sum of money came from the u.s. because the u.s. money has been mainly used not for the development agenda but for the humanitarian agenda and specifically for the idps and refugee returns. so the multidonor trust fund has now come to a close. we have actually allocated all that money. we go into a new cycle of programming now, and it's a very traditional framework and

we're now discussing with government setting up a new trust fund. it will be much smaller because the reconstruction costs a large amount of money to do of what reconstruction we were able to do. it's not finished. but the government now says we take over the nuts and bolts of the reconstruction. what we now want to the is the much more state building, national capacity building development which is long and patient work with many people involved. this is the face-to-face development of the country. so we hope we will have another trust fund up and running which we will then invite. firsto of all we do an agreement with government, then we do a memorandum of understanding with agencies, and then they put the money in. and they can earmark it. they can say look, we hope to give you a million but probably not. 2 million or 5 million. and, we'd like it to be used

for children. or they can even say we'll give you some money but we'd really like to use it for the idps. well, that's fine because that can also go in through the essential social services, because idps have the same needs as everybody else, just more acute. so the trust fund mechanism is a way of ensuring. the donors are represented on the steering committee and on the program committee as is the government. so that also brings us altogether around the table. it really is important that we work together. >> would you wait for a microphone. thanks. >> i think a critical piece of the discussion that's missing here is what role private contractors will play meeting these challenges in iraq. and we're hearing that the state department could be

sending a person, everything from support to health services to infrastructure to security. so i'm just wondering what role private contractors will play in meeting some of the challenges that we've addressed today, especially working with state department. >> i'm not in a department to talk about contracts to be let and so on. but we do and will continue, i believe, we talked before about the extraordinary expense that working in iraq generates. and you need to be transported, you need what we call life support, which is basic housing, food, clean water. all of the things you need to support yourself in those places where locally it can't be gained, can't be gotten locally. we will continue to do that and

we see contractors having a role in that. but i'm not really in a position to -- i mean, we don't -- when and if we do the rfb, we'll do it. it's not the kind of thing we talk about in advance. that's kind of the limit on what i should say about that. >> the one thing that really struck me was hearing that only 20% of the young people who would be in an educational system that continues are truly progressing to the point where they can be part of the infrastructure that is going to be very critical to achieving all of the goals that everyone has in every country, whether

it's ours or the surrounding countries, to make it viable and stable. my question is, what about the other 80%? most of whom i'm sure are cell phone users, by the way. but if you had 80% of young people post primary age throughout the country not going to school, not employed, it would seem to me we have a very precarious population situation. and i want to know how all of this really across the board is being addressed. >> well, i can start. the first thing that we have to the do is raise awareness of it. because people look at the primaries and say, that's ok. it's not great but it's ok. and i'm saying you can't wait for the primary school

generation to move up through the system. you have to fix secondary now. so we have to do a lot of strong messaging to government. that is going to give some results but it's not going to fix the problem for the 80% out of school. so we have to look at alternative solutions. and of course one of the alternative solutions is to get children or young people, because by this time we're talking about middle to upper teens, is to get them into vocational training, into preantsships, into -- what is the word? interns. i keep running into interns running around washington. now, i haven't been able so far to get enough attention to this, and i'm really working hard on it. because in bosnia where i came from, where my last posting was, we started off a fantastic program. i didn't see the end of it. but this was to really tackle the issue of the out-of-school

youth and to get them into work and to get them trained within the context of work. so work plus education. it's been done in many other countries. there are many models for it. and one way we're going to tap this is every time a private sector company arrives, we are going to be knocking on their door saying, hello, corporate social responsibility. your firm has signed up for the global impact. this is what we need and this is what we want you to do, and we want you to focus on two or three things. the overall development of the communities around your oil installation or your factory or whatever. and then, mine affected parts, i want the mine action. and thirdly, i want them to focus on giving more opportunity to youth. and we're actually negotiating with an unnamed company at the

moment, which is getting very enthusiastic about setting up vocational training institutes in the south of the country. it's not solving the problem for everybody. we are sincerely worried about the impact, particularly on girls. because what is going to happen is they're going to get married young, and they are not going to have the knowledge and skills to make them independent in their adult lives. they are going to go into a dependency on the family which will continue. and which will make it very difficult for them to help their own children in turn to get the education they need, even when the education comes on line. so if there are two or three areas where i will individually focus on. one is education. and the other one is water. we haven't talked very much about water which is just as big of an issue because the whole development is based on water availability. but education, yes.

unicef is very active in the country. it has more focus on primary and pre-primary. but let's work on them to go up the ladder a little bit. and unicef is one of the few agencies i know that does very active smsing to all those cell phone owners out there. we need to do a lot more. one of the real puzzles for us nowadays is how to use media to get the message across. because in the good old days, if you go far enough in time there was the state-owned radio. that was the only earn tainment. then we had state-owned television. now we have everybody has got the satellite dish picking up 100 channels and probably never ever watching the iraqi news. so it's a real issue of how to do that. so any bright ideas, we will be gladly listen and see how to do

them. thank you. . >> from the state department point of view, the new recognize that you had 80%, and i'm afraid i'm not going to be clear on the exact age. but we're probably talking 13 or 14 through -- >> secondary school. >> yeah. >> the 15 to 18, 20 years who are not in school, who are not employed, and who provide real fodder for any kind of extremist influnes, internal influence that is not in the positive direction that we would like to see this country grow. what is the view?

host: well, i do not think that there is not an easy or a short-term solution to this problem. i think what you have to do is you have to set up a -- just one example. as chris teen pointed out, the oil sector, oil offers iraq a great potential but it is limited how many people will be able to work in the oil sector. what you have to do is develop a diversified economy that offers employment that develops over time and you're right about this large cohort of young people out there who will be tough to reach and you can't do it with everyone tomorrow and you can't do it across the board. but the quicker you get in place an economy that they see perhaps not nearly as fast as anyone would like but they see is creating businesses, is creating jobs, opportunities

for people is offering them something so that they can see a future in. that's what you have to do. it's a tough road and it's not something that happens fast. i don't have a simple let's do this and take care of this. there's just not one bull's eye for that, unfortunately. it's a long-term challenge. >> and it's not widely understood that this particular problem is as bad as it is. it's not just potential terrorist recruits. it's crime. it's young people without a future are very problematic for it. but i wanted to ask the ndi question for the middle east. if i'm a nondemocracy middle east and looking at what's going on in iraq, why should i

be persuaded that a democratic system is worth the effort? why should i pragmatically, even, consider going that route in my own political development? what do you take away from the iraq experience to date? >> well, first i think it's important to be reminded that the idea of iraq as a democracy was something that sort of developed after the fact. i spent a lot of time having to defend this notion that democracy is something that's imposed on people. and i would say where does that come from? the united states tried to impose democracy on iraq and that was sort of an after the fact justification. i don't think that was ever the real reason for invading iraq. i think it was in the aftermath of the invasion, for organizations like ndi, it

seemed like we should along with many others, do what we could to help iraq become a well governed country. and i would argue that being democratically governed, even though it takes a long time, is the best way of governing. in fact, there is something called the arab barometerer and there are similar around the world but the air barometerer is a series of polls that are done every year. and this polling shows that the vast majority of arab citizens, more than 80% believe that the democracy is the best way of ordering your political system. so the selling of democracy is an easy sell. but i think people do look at iraq. and they think that if chaos comes with democracy, they don't want it. but i also have to say that for the arab world to think that it comes with democracy they don't want it.

there are negative thinks associated with democracy as well. i'm going to jordan tomorrow. there's an election next monday and more than a few have said iraq eas have more freedom to choose than we do. and they see the bad parts of it but there's also a little bit of envy that iraqis have more freedom to choose their leaders than jordainians do. >> so i don't think iraq has emerged yet as a potential model for the arab world. but most arabs are subtle enough that with the good comes with the bad. and i think that democracy across arab is a long-term endeavor. i think the idea of pursuing democrat siss is based on the asprigses of the people in the arab world itself. it's not based on us imposing something. and i think every one agrees that ultimately good government nans has to have a hand in

development. and i would say that democratty governance and good governance go together. but nothing will happy in the next year or two -- happen in the next year or two years. >> who else would like to address the panel? yes, sir. >> u.s. institute of peace. i have a question for john. it's a very important document. isk actually in baghdad in 2008. it's something which iraqis requested of the u.s. is iraqi conceived idea. shows very much that they want a relationship with the u.s. that's not dominated by the security realm. they want to see economic development. they want to be integrate to the region. i know it's a difficult question to answer right now because there isn't a

government for you to talk to but it's a broad agreement. it's aspirational. can you perhaps give us some insight on what is happening to sort of what set of structures are being set up? >> i think it's an important point to make that the actualizing of it, if that's a word, has not stopped during the government formation process. not to get too work chart on everyone, but in each of these realm, in the economic realm, the diplomatic realm, we break this down, we break this down into subjects and we talk a little bit about the economic realm because that's what i did most recently in baghdad. we have an energy group, transportation group, electricity group. we sit down with the iraqis and the proper partners across ministries and talk about the problems that exist and if

there are ways for us to solve them together. and that continues to go on. it ebbs and flows a bit. some things go up and some go down. but it's something that we still use every day. we did not stop using it on the day of the election. we continued to have these conversations. it's important to point out that the government currently in place does continue to function and continues to function in report ways that fred was talking about, i jotted down a couple memory joggers because i wanted to make a point of this. but during these government formation discussions, they have taken and continue to take major decisions. i'll mention a couple of them. they have announced a major part of taking advantage of the oil resources that iraq has, is once you get them out of the ground you have to get them to the field out to the gulf so

you can get them to the tankers. the iraqis have done during recently an enormous tender for this project, a huge amount of money. i mean, the government was able to function and move this process forward. they're not falling behind. they just did their third patrolling bid ramp this for the natural gas. the government works on a draft budget for next year and so on. so the point being is that the government is continuing to function. and our relationship continues to go on. and it's a really valuable tool. and we've not stopped using it. and we'll keep emphasizing it more and more in the future. >> we have the best? washington and we couldn't

function without the people helping us. >> i've been a contractor for u.s. aid in iraq. i was very interested in your discussion in the role of the surrounding countries as a collective head of state i wish you could elaborate on that because i've not seen anything in depth in any of the think tanks or newspapers. can you elaborate and talk about maybe who are the stronger neighbors and their connections to particular political parties and leaders. >> we can elaborate on it a little bit. the absence of a true head of state, i don't think it's something that people just forgot or didn't do. i just think that the way the system was set up, it didn't provide in the end -- what happened is that the political positions right from the get go

became a part of the negotiation power sharing. so you might remember that the symbolic president during the iraq governing council time was actually a sunni. but when they sorted it out it ended up being a kurd. but as i mentioned, just my opinion that when the person occupying what should have been a head of state type position is actually seen as a political partisan who is part of the sort of hurly burly of everyday politics, that position is never going to be seen of where you go to get legitimatesy as a government. so i think for the leaders of the parties that are predominantly shia, where their connections tend to be much more iran heavy for religious and cultural and other historical reasons, they tend to travel to tehran because they're trying to demonstrate that should they form a government, they would have the support, the blessing of

tehran. i'm simplifying a lot but i think that happens for the coalition which includes a lot of strong sunni leaders. they have a lot of support from the sunni community. he tends to spend more time in the gulf, specifically saudi arabia, to a lesser extent turkey. to show if he got the upper hand, that he would have the support of the powerful neighbor saudi arabia and to a lesser extent turkey. it then starts to break down again. much more complicated. because in the shia parties there are those perceived as being much more sort of straight and some have just incidental ties to iran and it's not the case that saudi arabia is exclusively promoting one party or another. and it gets much more complicated. in the end, syria plays a big role as well but you may know

the siren -- syrian government is partly made up of the christian sect. but what's obvious, though, is that the political parties try to establish these allegiances. some of them exist that have existed for decades, but they're trying to use these in my opinion to demonstrate to the people of iraq, but maybe more importantly within this negotiation, saying look at me, i go to tehran. they back me. therefore, you should back down. then that person's competitor says, no, i go to readd, the king sees only me. you should back down. i think there was an article yesterday or the day before, the king issued an invicinityation. that maliki wasn't invited. or if he was it was stort of an afterthought. that was played up by the people invited. so it's endlessly trying to

play this game to gain atlantasy. but i agree with john. i'm not all that down in the whole system in the sense that it is being played out with an eye on the election, not as well as i would prefer, and it is being played out peacefully. and it's a complicated thing. so i think it's being played out. it's ashame they haven't formed the government. i think the focus group shows that the iraqi people are frustrated beyond belief. as they said, it looks like a bunch of self-serving elites trying to feather their own nest. but on the other hand, politics is always a messy kind of bad looking affair anyway, and this is a lot of politics. but the neighboring countries, in the absence of home grown legitimatesy, the neighboring countries add that in the mix. >> we're just a few minutes to

our close. i just want to give colleagues an opportunity if they had any final points if they wanted to make. if not, i have one. host: this has been a very rich set of questions that we've had to answer and i hope that we've used our time well to put some of our issues on the table. host: i would like to say that it's been great being here and listening to the questions. our emphasis, and i know chris teen's emphasis as well, is there's been events, the u.s. military draw down and the sort of landmarks that we've reached. and that does not mean that we're leaving it behind. we're not at all leaving it behind. there's a lot of work to do there. we're working very hard together with our partners. we appreciate the interest that

you have we will realy want to keep working together and build a really stable, sovereign independent iran because the job isn't finished. >> just thank you and the washington office for organizing this. i think it's nice to bring iraq back to some focus. as i mentioned at the beginning, for understandable reasons it's sort of slipped. i'm glad it's not the number one thing on the agenda but i don't think we want it to slip too far because the challenge is huge, and congratulations to the undp for keeping this on the agenda. >> thank you. i wanted to return to the theme i start which. i can't help on election day but imagine the effect of today an u.s. politics and relate it to the challenge that we always have in the washington office which is responding to interest largely in the congress in this

case of people who don't really understand that there is an economic side to the u.n. there is a development side to the u.n. and how much not only undp but the various agencies do in partnership, very close partnership as you heard with u.s. aide, the state department, and ngos. the whole challenge of course is one that iraqis bear for developing their own country. but the effectiveness of engaging with the international community and particularly with the u.n. system i think is one of the key conversations. so in our efforts to convey the information and impressions to the officials in washington, nothing helps more than to bring the best and brightest and experienced here to town to talk to audiences like this, to meet officials that are doing over the course of the two days to reengage with john and less. and i just want to express my

personal thanks to all three of you for helping us to capture that message. thank you. and thank you. >> ladies and gentlemen, good

evening. it's a great pleasure to welcome all of you to the school and the campus of the george washington university. it's a particular pleasure to welcome this evening's squirked speakers. -- distinguished speakers. who are here with us this evening to share their expertise on the issue of fighting corruption in wars in iraq and afghanistan. as many of you know, the school is a special place. we're a special place first because of our location which is right in the heart of washington, d.c. and if you draw a line from the white house to the state department and another line from the world bank and the imf to the fed, those two lines literally intersect here at the school. and if you draw those lines carefully they would intersect here in this room. the school is a special place however not just because of where we are but because of who we are. an extraordinary community of scholars and students.

and because of our location and our programs we're actually able to reach out to other distinguished experts such as those who are here with us this evening to share expertise and insights on important issues of the day. >> this evening's event is sponsored by the security policy forum which was launched in 2007. over the course of the past three and a half years it has brought more than 40 experts here to the gw campus to discuss national and international security issues and the proper policy responses to these problems. i would like to thank the professor who convened and started and has led this series from the beginning. his efforts have made this possible. so now it's my pleasure and privilege to introduce my colleague and friend, professor. jim. [applause]

>> thank you very much for that kind introduction. it's my pleasure to have this assembled group of guests. i would like to briefly introduce them. steven biddle, who is currently the roger burt og senior fellow for defense policy at the council on foreign relations. before joining the council in january of 2006 he held positions at the u.s. army war college strategic studies institute at the university of north carolina chapelhill, the defense analysis and harvard university. dr. biddle is a member of the defense policy bhoord and has presented testimony before congressional committees on various issues related to the wars in iraq and afghanistan. he served on general stanley mcchrystal's initial strategic assessment team in kabul and in

2009, and general david petraeus' joint assessment team in baghdad and in 2007, and is a senior advisor to general petraeus in washington in 2008-2009. his book, military power explaining victory and defeat in modern battle, prince ton university press, 2004, won a number of very prestigious prizes. he has published a wide var rice of journals both policy and academic. he holds a phd in public policy from harvard university. and i would add that he holds the record for the most appearances in security policy forum programs. that is testimony to the opinion as both a practitioner and scholar, although i noticed

you left that track record off your biographical statement which suggests a level of modesty to me, as well. stuart w. bowen junior was appointed inspector general for the coalition -- the coalition provisional authority in january of 2004. since october of 2004, he served as the special inspector general for iraq reconstruction. as the taxpayers' watch dog in iraq. mr. bowen oversees more than $56 billion in u.s. appropriated reconstruction funds including the iraq relief and new construction fund, iraq security forces fund, the economic support fund and the manager's emergency response program. since january 2004, mr. bowen has made 27 trips to iraq, and i understand in a couple of days he will make that 28.

managed the production of over 350 dautses and inspections issued five lessons learned reports and provided over 27 quarterly reports on iraq reconstruction to the congress. his service includes service in the white house as deputy assistant to the president, special assistant to the president and aeeshyat council. from 1994 to 2000 he held a variety of positions including deputy general council, deputy general council for litigation, and assistant general council. mr. bowen previously served as an assistant attorney general of texas and as a briefing attorney to texas supreme court. mr. bowen holds a p.a. from the university of the south and a jurs doctorate from the st. mary's law school.

finally, shawn roberts is the professional at george washington university. he jind the elliott school of international affairs in 2008 as the director of the sprags development studies program. professionor roberts is a cultural antsdz pollings with applied experience in national development work. froom 19980 2006 he worked at the united states agency on central asia on democracy programs, designing and managing prjects, political party assistance, community development, independent media strengthening and elections assistance. he is the author of a popular blog on central asia. he frequently comments on current events in central asia

for the media. he received his phd from the university of southern california. i add that professor roberts will be doing dubble duty today. he will be talking later on about the general asian context in the war against crippings and be serving to moderate the discussion. after the panelists have completed their presentations we'll have time for q and a and i will circulate through the audience. and make 14ur all i don't have you have time to ask your question. professor. >> thank you for coming out this evening. thanks to dean brown as well.

it's an honor to be on the panel with steven who has been carefully studying iraq since it happened seven and a half years ago, the reconstruction part. and a pleasure to be here with shawn as well. corruption in iraq. not a new story. certainly something that has been present in that country long before the united states invaded in 2003. but it was something that became part of our bailiwick, part of the relief and reconstruction effort once it became clear how large our engagement would be. initially, as many of you know, it was expected that we would liberate and leave. the president decided on march 10, 2003 that by september of hah year u.s. forces would be leaving. they're now, as you know, going

to leave at the end of next year. plans changed. the situation changed. and indeed, what we found in iraq was something much more difficult and much more grander than ever expected. looting was just a piece of it. it was the breakdown of the entire government that led to our engagement. and one of the consequences of that breakdown was an capassbation, a worsening as many iraqi ministers have told me of the corruption problem in that country. as jim said, i'm leaving soon to go visit again my staff that's working over there. actually, seven years ago tomorrow the congress created the office that i lead in part because of fear on capitol hill that there was significant corruption within the u.s. program.

at that point, billions of dollars had been appropriated and there was limited oversight, limited engagement on our side. so let me talk about the two aspects of corruption in iraq right from the beginning the u.s. part and the iraqi part. my job, part of my mission is to root out corrupt practices and to hold accountable those who engage in them, and we've had some success over the last sen years in doing it. 50 indictments, 41 convictions, 71 million recovered. that's the largest output of any law enforcement eenty in the country, and it should be because we have that jurisdiction. but the corruption problem has been very, very difficult to make cases over there because it has been and still significantly is that environment. on the iraqi side, however, the

corruption problem has been many orders of magnitude more expansive and more insidious for that matter. we've had termed it,ive termed it the second insurgency. and indeed, iraqi leaders have agreed with that. they said unless they achieve victory over this second insurgency, the victory over the first not withstanding events, a horrible day in baghdad that you saw killing over 80 people. not withstanding the successes in fighting back that insurgency, this second continues to be a sort of cancer within the government and within the fledgeling democracy. as i said, part of it is a historical legacy from saddam hussein. but as the minister told me,

the form of corruption that exists in iraq today is more insidious, is of a different order than what existed under saddam because it is pervasive. it was to a certain extent controlled. now it is omni present from top to bottom. billions of dollars lost on the iraqi side of the equation to these corrupt practices. part of the challenge i believe and i was discussing this yesterday with deputy secretary of state jim stineberg is the discontinuity that exists in the current iraqi government structure. it's an elect ral democracy such as it is without the prime minister. the longest -- set the record this month from the longest period of election to failing to seat a government. the fact that they have an elect tral democracy yet they have a command economy.

over 90% of the national income is generated from oil and gas sales. and all 19 industries, companies that run the oil and gas, business in iraq are government owned. and which means a handful of all controls the flow of that money. and that simply cannot continue, and as the secretary told me, the most important step towards victory over the problem of corruption will be privatization. echoing what the minister told me last year. the challenge is getting there. there's not any incentive within that government to move towards privatization because too many people at the top are benefiting enormously from the current structure. how does iraq tackle this enormous corruption problem? well, the united states created two new entities six years ago to help them move forward.

the board of supreme daut had existed for 60 years. it was the government audit agency that the analog to the gm. but pretty much a puppet of saddam during his era. and as a result, ambassador bremer through two orders established an inspector general contingent, 35 inspectors general in every ministry, and a commission on integrity. sort of an analog to the f.b.i. . the commission on integrity had the mission of pursuing and prosecuting corruption cases across the country, and the inspectors general had the mission of investigating wrong doing within iraqi ventures. and, unfortunately, the last six years of work by both of those entities is characterized largely by failure.

. .

it was used very recently in an attempt to prosecute those individuals involved in purchasing bomb detectors, these lawns -- there was an article about it today. they are completely bogus. they do not work. but whenever you go through a checkpoint in iraq, for the last two years, a policeman or soldier will come up and waved this divining rod, it looks like, and wav you through. as we have known, there is nothing in there. but millions of dollars in contracts were spent on this date divining rod --ke divining rod. when the issue at burroughs,

the minister invoked the article to protect -- and the issue arose, the minister invoked article 136-be to protect the employees. so, the commission on integrity, notwithstanding a new strategy this year provided by the un that looks good on paper, has a long way to go. the inspectors general, again, they do not have a law that authorizes them permanently, so they are still waiting on new government to get them some form of legal protection. as a result, they are very much within the ambit and purview of the prime minister's office. they are appointed by the prime minister, and are the -- and although there are a sensible rules that should -- ostensible

rules that should guide them, they do not. they have finally created a training category for the inspectors general that will open this month. it seems the least now that this new concept -- and the only one in the middle east, i might add, the concept of having an agency to hold them accountable -- will survive. whether it will survive in a meaningful and robust fashion depends on the government. it depends on the commitment of the new prime minister, whomever it may be, stooping to them -- to strengthen that fight within the government. the new strategy also empowers those inspectors general in a robust fashion, but again, that is a document, a proposal. it is more sophisticated than anything we have seen before,

and if implemented, will make a difference in iraq, but again, the second insurgency is still a battle to be one. -- to be won. the upshot is, at seven years into the iraq reconstruction program, with the winding down, we see in progress on the u.s. side in fighting corruption. i think my office has acted as a deterrent, obtaining a significant number of convictions, and the amount of wrongdoing, at least based on our caseload, has gone down over time. but on the iraqi side, corruption has like a cancer spread and become more egregious. at this point, unless a new government comes in that will authorize the commission on integrity with a meaningful statued and give it what it needs to pursue and convict

commitfficials to wrongdoing -- and by the way, they have no commission now. last year, a prosecution was going forward, and then it froze. there were a tactical delay is and suddenly a change in venue, new judges, acquitted, in the blink of an eye. that is, frankly, a horrible signal to send to the iraqi people. they let their government and really have two reactions. "-- they look at their government and really have two reactions. one, they're not getting the services they expect. two, a day of view of the leadership as corrupt. -- and they view the leadership as corrupt. and they are largely correct in

that perception. in order for iraq to become a successful democracy, it is going to have to meet certain standards and show its people a demonstrable commitment, beyond something on paper, to holding accountable those who take advantage of a system that is fraught with corruption. let me conclude by saying that, on the u.s. front, we still have a 110 cases going on, a significant cases. our largest cases are yet to be concluded and i am headed overseas to work on one in the near future. the deterrent effect has had an appropriate curtailing of the wrongdoing that was certainly more prevalent in the early days of the iraq reconstruction program. on the rocky front -- on the

iraqi front, the cornerstone for any fundamental correction of this problem is the formation of a new government, won the comes in and take some action by authorizing integrity and by repealing when 36-the -- 136-b, the ultimate get out of still free card for those who commit corruption in the iraqi system. without that action, i fear we will see much of the same, and much a big kind of wrongdoing that we have seen in iraq. much of this is echoed in afghanistan.

stephen biddle will discuss that now. thank you. [applause] >> what an elegant segue. [laughter] it would be a hard act to follow in itself. it is nice to be back at gw. i it was asked to talk about afghanistan. i'm going to talk about the issue of corruption as related to the larger issue of government performance in afghanistan and its importance to the conduct of the campaign. i would like to start by talking about ways that we should not think about the problem, but that i think are nonetheless quite common, especially in the debate here in town. the first of these problematic ways to think about the governance issue in afghanistan is that governance is a problem

of building capacity for public administration in the government of the islamic republic of afghanistan, that the central challenge for us is to take a country with poor human capital and a limited base of public administrators and with some combination of aid, training, mentoring and advice and oversight, increase the corps of trained public in administrators in the country and get them to the part of the country where their skills are most needed. this is not actually the problem in afghanistan. heaven knows there is a lack of skilled trained public administrators, but that is not the long pole in and this attend. the long -- in this tent. the long pole in this tent is to deal with maligned self interest on the part of the government that are actively undermining

the war effort through corruption. if we do not deal with the problem of maligned self interest, we simply go about this as if it was a benign process of training and more ministers going through an educational training process and putting them out in district government offices. not only are we not making things much better, we are actively making things worse in several important respects. one is, we run the danger of creating a more efficient kleptocrats who are better skilled and better able to extract resources from the society and from our efforts in the country and redirect them from the purposes we like to the purposes we would not like. secondly, our involvement with this activity runs the risk of making us appeared to be

complicitous in emmeline activities of actors that we appear to be -- to be complete set in a the malign activities of factors that we appear to be assisting, which undermines the war effort. i would argue that it is universal in the problem of counterinsurgency, not limited to afghanistan. as a general rule in insurgency, you are dealing with governments whose self-interest does not lie in the same direction that ours does. there is a reason why we do not tend to do a lot of counterinsurgency in switzerland. there is a reason why we do not have 100,000 american ground troops dealing with counterinsurgency in britain. where you have insurgents to begin with, it is usually because of maligned government on the part of the regime whose

interests lie in an uneven distribution of resources through the society in some way. it is not a problem unique to afghanistan, but when we think about government reform in the context of counterinsurgency, it goes beyond taking an ally that we hope once what we want and giving them the ability to do it it involves instruments to get them to reduce the scale of the malign of that activity. an interesting characteristic of this is that it is built on a presumption that the government once what the counterinsurgency once, -- wants what the counterinsurgency wants.

instead, we need to induce a change in preference, coal and intent with respect to governments, rather than just and intent -- guoal with respect to governments, rather than just building up the nine capacity. enign capacity. a second unfortunate way to view this is as a matter of law with criminal prosecution of a handful of bad actors who are breaking the law by redirecting toward private purposes. stewart suggested some of the

analogous problems that have bedeviled us in iraq over the years. the problem is only partly difficulty in meeting the normal legal standard of the burden of proof. the problem is just as much of that government in afghanistan is a network problem, not a random handful of individuals problem. the difficulty with the governments in afghanistan is that collections of individuals linked by patronage contracts, in which money is used to buy influence and by behavior that is sought by those higher in the system, and sup imbedding itself in large pyramids of many dozens, if not hundreds of thousands of interconnected actors. taking action against a single individual at the top of the pyramid -- and there are perhaps

a dozen by some accounts, such maligned networks operating in afghanistan, which successfully only removed part of the problem, but it makes it extremely difficult for us to get anywhere in dealing with the real problem of maligned governance because of the individual at the top of the pyramid has an entire network beneath them, supporting, enabling and abetting their activities and delivering, in exchange for the financial flows that move within the network, political benefits to those of of the person or persons at the top of the networks. when we then go to hamid karzai and we say, we really need you to remove your younger brother, as a random example -- it has ben reported that general nicker

stall -- that general macchrystal asked hamid karzai to remove his younger brother. we tried to use political leverage and our leverage was not up to the job. the reason our leverage was not up to the job was because the individual we were trying to generate pressure against was at the top of a large network of individuals that the president of afghanistan believe was delivering for him a combination of of votes in kandahar province, and a passable, tolerable degree of security in kandahar province because the money at the disposal of this network is a variety of private security companies that act to enable convoys and other movement to take place within the province in exchange for those benefits, or by comparison

with those benefits, the leverage available to us to get hamid karzai to act against an actor so useful to him was not up to the job. therefore, that individual remained in office and remains to this day. if we look at this as a problem of individuals at the top, we are going to have a great deal of difficulty generating the political leverage we need to get individuals moved or removed when we cannot meet the legal standard for prosecution. now, these two on helpful ways of looking at the government's problem are central to whether or not we are going to succeed in the campaign as a whole, because in one of the i think most interesting features of the assessment report that general mcchrystal issued after taking

command, the theater believes that improvement in afghanistan is co-equally necessary for success in the campaign with the improvement in security. perhaps the unique feature of this assessment report, relative to other joint campaign guidance documents that i have seen in military headquarters and theaters of war, is that it took as a military responsibility, because of the centrality of its necessity in the undertaking, the improvement of theater is not enough to improve security. if government continues the way it does, because the primary mechanism by which the taliban accesses the operation in afghanistan is because the consequences of this network approach. this is not simply a matter of petty corruption that police

checkpoints or having to carry drugs in order to get a driver's license or any of the minor exchanges for government services that go on in a major way throughout the developing world and throughout afghanistan's history. the central problem of governance in afghanistan is said -- is that there is a limited threat of economic improvement for the people outside of these malign networks. when the line networks controls the courts, contract -- when a emelina network controls the court, the central government -- never controlsgn the courts and the central government and the united states appears to be complacent with this because per our

doctrine we are trying to support and enhance the existing local government, and when that actor network is using its political, judicial, and economic influence to, for example, condemn private land for public use, and then redirected that condemned land to the benefit a profit of members of the network, an agrarian society, in which the fundamental source of wealth and the livelihood of most members of the population is their land, this kind of public taking of private land in and none apparently unlimited way -- ay,an apparently unlimited we poses the threat to citizens outside of the network of being rendered literally destitute.

when instead of their neighbors pomegranate farm it eventually gets around to being there pomegranate farm, this is not just being shaken down at a checkpoint, this is your ability to feed your family, your ability to sustain your basic lifestyle in the country. when you see that happening around you, you cannot go to the courts, because they are part of the network. you cannot go to the provincial government because they are part of the network. you cannot go to the americans, because as far as you can tell they are part of the network too. the only available source of protection against what too many looks like potentially unlimited governments predation is the taliban, because the taliban offers the ability to protect people against this kind of government activity. as long as this is the perception of a significant number of civilians in areas in

which these networks are operating, our ability to keep the taliban out by screwing into the ground an infantry platoon outside of every residential compound in kandahar province is negligible. if we can address the government's problem, our troop reinforcements has a process of providing security, if all we do is provide security and we leave the government and its current state -- in its current state, there is no way we will improve this country. we have to take action against these networks. now, none of this is to suggest that we are going to fail in afghanistan unless we eradicate all dozen or so maligned actor networks in the country down to the last corrupt official.

i suspect strongly that that is an unrealistic game. what we do need to do however, is constrained at -- constrained it and capped its stake to create a perception that the government it -- constrain it an to create the perception that the government is not going to take anything but that there are actual constraints that will protect the population. this could give us a tolerable degree of corrupt activity in a country like afghanistan that is sufficient to enable our security effort to keep the taliban out in a stable way. on the table entering was a paper i just wrote with two co- authors that talked about several different forms of --

for lack of a better term -- and state governments in afghanistan that might be sufficient to this purpose. -- end state governance in afghanistan that might be sufficient to this purpose. i will suggest that success does not require perfection. there are intermediate states that are sustainable. i would like to say a little bit about -- if this is the conceptualization of the government's corruption problem in afghanistan that we are going to act upon, what does that imply then that we do? how do we go about this? what sort of implementing guidance should be given to the theater command on trying to cope with reducing the power and influence of malign actor networks in afghanistan. it seems to me that a useful way of thinking about that is

through a mechanical engineering metaphor. i find they are so transparent and were so readily with large groups and social science students. [laughter] if we think of these networks as political machines -- which of course they are -- this is not different from other political machine networks, the hydraulic fluid and that enables the machine to do its work is money. the overwhelming majority of the money that is now creating the hydraulic pressure in malign actor networks in afghanistan is coming from us. it is redirected from contrasting money that the united states is spending in the country, and to a lesser extent that other outside international factors are spending in the country. the first step, it seems to me,

in any feasible campaign to reduce the influence of maligned actor networks in afghanistan is to reduce the hydraulic pressure of the machine, rendering it less able to do beneficial political work for its owners by turning off the intake valve at the bottom of the pyramid where the money comes in that enables the machine to do its work, by reforming the way we do our own contract thing, so that we stop funding companies that are complete said in a -- part of thesein and networks. we should stop paying private security companies to contract with these companies that transport all of the materials we need to function.

they then subcontracted private armies to protect them. all all of that money gets a cut taken by the network. the private security that is being used to keep all of that working then becomes a private army that the network can use to enforce its be dicks. all of this is happening with our own and -- its edicts. all of this is happening with our own money. the first up is to reform who we are contracting with so that we stop actively providing the wherewithal for these machines to do their nefarious work. once we shut off the intake valves at the bottom and the hydraulic pressure starts to subside, the machine starts to become less useful to its members. especially, initially, at the bottom of the network. when the machine becomes less useful, that means that the leverage we have available to

get changed in action of the machine because mark -- becomes more plausibly sufficient to get people removed that we want removed. as we reduce the value of this activity to its owner, it becomes possible to direct leverage, especially at lower ranking actors who are less powerful and less important. as they are removed, the hydraulic pressure is less and still further and we can move to the next layer. when we make progress there we can move to the next layer. if we approach this as we would target any other network. we do not target al-qaeda by going straight for osama bin laden at the top, we start at the bottom and work our way up words, if we approach this network in the same way, it seems like our odds of success in significantly diminishing it scale of activity become

significantly better. note some of the disadvantages or advantages of seeing this this way. there are some important ones. the first one is, the way we are currently getting the deans and the bullets and the water in the gasoline and the construction materials and the plywood and all of the rest to our operating bases is precisely this kind of contract. security remains important to counterinsurgency. the report said they were co- equally important. that means if either one of them collapses, you lose. if we are going to keep the supplies flowing to these bases and we are going to de-fund to the private security in the private trucking that is now doing it, we are going to have to return to the day in which

logistical activity was a military function. that means there is a trade-off between the degree of population security we can pursue at any given moment and the success of our activity to reform government, because it is almost certainly going to require that we pull out of population security in at least some parts of afghanistan, at least some military resources that will be necessary to escort convoys, once we start defunding the malign private activity that is moving the material right now. we are not so flush in soldiers and military capacity in afghanistan that this is a painless redirection of effort. it is an important, and i think necessary trade-off, but in the famous words of many washingtonians, "hard choices

must be made." i love the use of passive voice in that phrase. this is one of them. i think we are going to have to accept a slower scale of progress in population security if we are going to make any headway in the government's line of operation because the two are so closely related. a second down side to approaching this the way i am suggesting we ought to is that it is slow. either one of the other ways of thinking about governance could, in principle, produce relatively rapid progress if it was done appropriately. if the central challenge in governance is getting enough trained people into the necessary number of local governance buildings in places like kandahar, you could imagine

taking -- to use a mis-used often overused cliche -- a government box and deliver the box. parachute administrators into different places and, in principle, you could start getting public administration. regrettably, it has not worked that way because that is the central problem. but it did work, you could imagine making fairly rapid progress. if the central issue is prosecuting a handful of individuals at the top, you could imagine getting some real change in the short term. death, on the other hand, you're going to approach governance in

afghanistan in a way that involves starting at the bottom and working our way up, and we have to shape the battlefield before we proceed to the size of operation, by doing things like changing the way we do our contracting, this is not going to happen quickly. the whole point of the process i have been talking about for the last several minutes is that it has a sequence to it. and if you do not do it in order, you are not going to succeed. if you try to take coercive action against actors who are currently too powerful because they control too much money and have too much influence, it just is not going to work, unless you prepare the battlefield by weakening them pefirst to make the level of leverage significant. that is not going to happen

overnight. there is a lot of hallmark we need to do before we are going to start substantial -- we need to do before we're going to start substantially reducing these networks. there is sequencing necessary and there is prioritization necessary. of this runs into one of the central domestic political problems of afghanistan, which is a crunch between the time line of government insurgency which is slow-moving, and the patience of americans who, by arge, have not read as much counterinsurgency theory as are veryand twho impatient. we are cursed with one of those hard choices where, if we are

going to do this right and have a reasonable prospect of success as opposed to government approaches that i think are unlikely to succeed, we're stuck with avenues and approaches that take time to unfold. they do not move as fast as some of the other approaches that we have been trying to make headway with in the past, but whose, i think, a misunderstanding of the nature of the underlying problem has led to a lack of progress, not withstanding the potential to move fast if only there was a correct answer to that underlying problem. with that resoundingly optimistic suggestion them more time is needed, let us all be patient, i will end this talk. [applause]

>> i come to these problems from the margins and do not have nearly as interesting things to say about them as the palace -- as the panelists, so i will talk about some things as a broader context and lead into some questions that we can ask the panelists. first, my background intersects with these problems in two different ways. the first is through development. we heard both where corruption is a development problem in afghanistan, where some of the proposed solutions our development efforts, whether they are, in iraq, to work on establishing an anti-corruption agency within government, or, as stevens said more generally, it can just be an issue of governance.

but also, development creates corruption. as steve mentioned, the oil of the corruption machine is money. development brings in a lot of money. the theater in afghanistan has brought in a very large amount of money. this is an issue, i think, about the delivery of foreign assistance. we have already had some discussion of that, but i think we could explore that a little bit more in our discussion. also, in terms of my other intersection with this issue, my area of research has been in the region of central asia which is in the shadow of the war on terror, in particular, the war in afghanistan. i have witnessed how the war on

terror has contributed to the corruption problem in central asia as well, which i think brings up a whole other group of questions. in central asia around 2000 -- and when i talk about central asia, i am talking about the former soviet states -- u.s. foreign aid budgets were decreasing around the year 2000. then 9/11 happened, and that brought a lot more money into central asia. the one way that u.s. aid in particular decided to deal with this in terms of corruption was to try to avoid having that money go to governments. a lot of that money went to community development. it went to projects involving and non-government

organizations. very little of it actually went to development. however, there is another element to this. at the same time we witnessed airir bases being built -- er bases being built. the u.s. government decided they would not pay rent on these bases, but they did have to provide fuel for them. i believe is literally led to the fall of two governments in the past two years, because the u.s. military and the nato forces at that base were getting their fuel contracts from the son of the president.

in the first case, it was the president and his son. in april of 2005, the overwhelming information that this money was going to the son of the president led to a popular movement that essentially deposed the president. just this past april, in april of 2010, we saw a repeat of this. this issue came up afterwards. he might have thought that after five years the u.s. military would have learned this problem, but in fact, immediately when the new president took over in 2005, once again, his son began to receive money for the fuel contracts. as a result, this past april we saw another popular revolt remove this president.

this is an important question because it also has to do not only with foreign assistance, but with the logistics of delivering goods and resources to afghanistan. in both of these cases, we're talking about logistics as a military function, but in fact, even though it was a military function, there are aspects of the local economy that gets pulled into it. if that money's going to certain segments of the population, that creates a new problem of corruption, an imbalance of power and the potential for instability. "i wanted to bring up those issues as kind of a lead into some questions to ask the panelists. first of all, in terms of corruption as a governance problem, i think that we have to

recognize that in both the cases of iraq and afghanistan, the u.s. government had a major role in helping to establish new government. i am curious, from both of you, reflecting on how the was done, have you learned anything? are there things that perhaps could have been done differently so that we did not end up with corruption being such a critical part of government operations in both countries now? >> we have done a number of audits to develop and support anti-corruption operations in iraq, and surprise, surprise, they have not worked very well. we have invested billions of dollars in electricity, oil,

capacity building, reconstruction across the country, and we invested virtually nothing in supporting these anti-corruption programs. less than $50 million of a $50 billion program. that speaks for itself, i think. there, at the outset, was not an interest in being robust, forward leaning, and supportive of tackling what, frankly, was a historical problem in iraq. it is no surprise the correction would be encountered. what the surprise is, i think, by the iraqi minister's i have talked with own admission, is added -- is that it has gotten worse since 2003.

it is underfunded. something came to my attention and i spoke to the ambassador about it. these inspector general's are up there floundering with no resources. his last act of appropriations before he left iraq was to approve funding for the inspector general's. it did not help a lot, because money is not the answer. but that is another story. >> and the afghan side of this, the issue is partly a function of the government blueprint that the afghans created with our assistance in the 2004 constitution, which ironically, was driven in part by the idea of presenting war lordism and

this kind of local control by creating a remarkably centralized plan. the blueprint for government in afghanistan is as a centralized as any constitution in the world today. it is a remarkably centralized document, and among the motives of that was to prevent the kind m that weordis that we have seen in the country in the past. but did not work out. the blueprint for authority in the country, the underlying distribution of perceived political legitimacy in the country which is not traditionally centralized, by grafting onto the underlying distribution of legitimacy, a centralized system that did not fit very well, we set up a government for weakness. we then, however, added to

that blueprint the development of security and a perception that we were not persistent and would not stay long enough to see this through in 2003. the central problem with the growth of mine actor networks that we now see in afghanistan -- malign actor networks that we now see in afghanistan began when we handed the problem off to nato in order to enable ourselves to focus on iraq, which persuaded hamid karzai that we were no longer is engaged enough in afghan security to guarantee that he was going to be able to rely on us to keep himself in office, and he started reaching out to a

collection of power brokers with bases in different sub-groups within the country and in different localities around the country, many of whom have grown into the heads of these networks that i talked about earlier. if we had provided a degree of commitment that we were going to provide the security element of the -- remember, security and governance are very important -- if we had followed through on the security side with a perceived guarantee that we were going to continue to do so long enough that the solution would eventually become self sustaining, i suspect that the kind of reliance on local

malign actors that enabled and empower them to go about using the local government and capturing it the way they have, would not have gotten nearly the kickstart that it did. now, i also would have preferred that we believed our contract in an expenditure in the company for development as well as security in the beginning. in a way that anticipated the danger that we could end up feeling the growth of predatory fueling the-- a feeli growth of predatory government. we would need to provide security assurances for credible and believable actions instead of handing them off to nato in that way, and the degree of early oversight that would've been more effective in controlling the way our money got used. >> in terms of the money iused,

and maybe this is particularly a question for stewart, is there a problem with the mechanisms for u.s. foreign aid that is feeding into the kind of corruption that you have seen particularly, not the local corruption and the governments, but the actual delivery of u.s. foreign aid, which you have also mentioned has had its share of problems in afghanistan and iraq? >> yes, i think it is a problem of the mechanism specifically. the lack of a coherent structure that ensures that there is careful planning for the execution of the kind of programs that we have seen in iraq in afghanistan. this is not the development problem, per se, nor is it a diplomacy problem. this is something different.

it is something that is not completely generous in that we have had stable reconstruction problems at a fairly small scale since vietnam. but none of those lessons have been absorbed. they have been encapsulated in their own experience and then put on a shelf. i have, in our research, uncovered some of the lessons learned reporting from the balkans, and it raises some issues very applicable to our experience in iraq. but in respect to what i said from the outset, note entity in the u.s. government is responsible for executing reconstruction efforts, contingency relief and reconstruction efforts abroad. this is the kind of environment that, in this century, the united states is going to be

called upon in order to protect its national security interests abroad. that was the case in 2003, a lack of effective structure. it is the case today. the commission on contrasting had a hearing in march with representatives from senior officials from defense and state and usaid, and they were asked to do is responsible for reconstruction in afghanistan -- who is responsible for reconstruction in afghanistan? it was an un-answerable question, which underscores my core. , which is that without the -- point, which is that without a coherent and clarity,

we have confusion and lack of progress. >> do you have anything to add on that? >> note. >. >> if some of the successes, in particular that you mentioned, stuart, as of late in iraq, relate to deterrence, and we are talking increasingly about u.s. withdrawal from both iraq and afghanistan, it obviously not being completed withdrawal, foreign aid and so on, but assuming the lot of leverage is lost with removable troops, can we expect that the local

corruption in both countries will get worse after u.s. withdrawal, or perhaps the opposite, that it will get better? >> one of the central distinctions' i would draw between these two theaters is that in afghanistan, predatory governance is the primary issue right now. that is the way in which the taliban gains entrance to the country. if we fail in this undertaking, we will lose the war. certainly, if the united states withdraws our military but retains our expenditures, that

is a double whammy that i think is very likely to produce failure. if we are going to withdraw our military presence, i think we would do better to do -- to remove our economic presence as well. i would prefer having them both the present but to better directed then they are now, but if we removed our military and continue to allowed poorly managed expenditure to fuel predatory malignant behavior, i think that is a recipe for disaster. iraq, i would argue, is bogged down in an ethanol-sen teheran war -- ethnic listen tyrian -- ethno-centarian war.

others mean them genocidal violence at maximum or oppression at minimum, and have a willingness to spill blood for that. the central requirement for success in iraq, it seems to me, is that some stabilization mechanism for preventing still smoldering fears from splashing over into large-scale violence be retained in the midst of whatever draw down the united states is going to execute. my own preference is that our drawdown be slow and gradual, as opposed to rapid and sudden, because i think the experience of similar ethno-sectarian wars

elsewhere calls for a peacekeeping element, which is essentially what the u.s. military is doing in iraq right now. i think slow removal of that presence is conducive to stability. all of that, i think, suggests that -- corruption narrowly defined is at the very heart of the underlying problem in afghanistan. it is an important aggravate are, but not the central underlying problem in iraq. in iraq, the key is the ability to moderate these underlying disputes which of not gone away, and i am very concerned that our withdrawal will work not just to facilitate greater corruption, but to enable flash points to become a large scale violence if we are not very careful.

>> today we saw one of these flash point. 10 car bombs in a shia neighborhoods executed by y suniis.-- buyin budget recurrence and recurrent and recurrence of that would signal -- a recurrence and recurrence a recurrence of that would signal a real problem. the officials in the four governments who have come and gone in iraq have become millionaires. in iraq, you join the government to become a rich, very rich in many cases. one former ruler is a

multimillionaire living in poland rainout. that sort of grand corruption is the kind of thing that frankly, with a well planned stabilization and reconstruction, and a coherent capacity buildingt, that the united states should have sought to supersede the early on, it happens often. because of the structural continuity of corruption in the government today, it is tough to say. delimited reconstruction results that we have seen across the country -- a limited reconstruction results the we've seen across the country means there -- means that the money went somewhere else. if you are holding office, and you control 90% of the revenue, it too frequently in iraq,

officials have taken advantage of the situation and enriched themselves. all of that criminal enrichment is a form of a second insurgency that has limited progress in the reconstruction program. it cannot be perfect. but what is good in iraq, to find the reconciliation that still seems to be missing, and to find coherent and sensible steps that create a move towards privatization, promote international investment, and take advantage of the third largest oil resources in the world. this is a rich country that has

a legacy of education and capacity, but it is all in tatters now. one of the largest tatters fluttering in the breeze is this continuity, that huge amount of money flowing through opaque lee and being criminally taken advantage of it. we call it corruption. >> thank you. we are going to take some questions from the audience. >> i will circulate through the semi-random and night -in a fashion. wait until the microphone arrives before starting your question. let me hold on to the microphone. what you both have been saying obviously has huge implications

with our strategy dealing with iraq or afghanistan. as a government, how can we set it up so we can better learn these questions in the future so they are not put on the shelf and forgotten? >> well, we have taken that on squarely by producing a lessons learned series and pressing those lessons to the congress and the department of defense. the lessons, disorganized and properly overseen a contract in within the department of defense and the department of the state. police training, huge programs both in iraq and afghanistan the done it in completely different fashions. but the hardest lesson from iraq that we spelled out in our

book-length report in 2009, hard lessons, you can find it on our website, it is what i have been saying, that there is no clarity or continuity, no cohesive point of decision making authority of responsibility to make sure planning and execution of reconstruction operations are carried out. then, somebody held accountable. if you want to all the people accountable, he would be called in fourth the alumni that managed iraq early on. they are not in government for the most part. there is no identifiable point of accountability. that is my job, to impose that accountability. it has been difficult to do over seven years because of the moving target. in our latest report which we put out in february, we propose

the creation of something called the u.s. office for contingency operations, which would bring together those elements into one place and put somebody in charge so the planning would begin the first boot steps foot on foreign soil in a stabilization operation. >> i think that is exactly right. let me add a word from the perspective of the military side. the u.s. military in particular devotes an enormous effort to lessons learned activity. there are legions of lessons lerner's that go for it to collect material about the conduct of ongoing operations and issues report, pamphlet, documents. the u.s. military regularly revises its manuals. and they will be updated and

revised, and that process will reflect the perception of what went well and what went badly. one piece of revision i hope they make is to remove the underlying assumption in the document that there is interest alignment between the counterinsurgency and host. the interesting feature of any effort including this issue of what do we learn from governance reform activities in iraq and afghanistan, it is generally done without a lot of social science methodological input. it is done in a remarkably casual way by officers who have been busy figuring out how to conduct military operations their entire career who have not been typically trade as social scientists to unveil underlying cause-effect relationships from observational data that will lead you to do a better job of prescribing future

action that is likely to bring about the effect from that cause that you want and not something else. the military devotes huge effort to this. i think there is a massive, and that opportunity -- unmet opportunity to make a terribly important contribution to that effort, which is understood to be imported by the military, by bringing to the table a collection of mythological skills and social science perspectives that the military does not normally have at its disposal. it is in the state to do this as a hermetically sealed operation. >> next question. >> thank you both for its excellent presentations. there is an article in the

washington post just the other day talking about the recent military operations to secure a region, and it mentioned one of the partners with whom u.s. forces are working is a colonel in charge of the afghan border police. he is widely regarded as one of the problematic figures in the region, but the article and the size the opinion among u.s. forces -- actually, the astonishment among u.s. forces of the military efficacy of his band of merry thieves. this points to one of the dilemmas that i have heard from many military personnel that have been in afghanistan, that for the most part, the formal afghan national security forces are weak and unreliable, but that these private security companies can be relied on,

however corrupted they may be. this in some ways is an echo with -- this is just another dilemma i wonder if particularly professor biddle could address, what do you do when the security forces with whom you are supposed to work who may not be honest themselves are completely ineffective and the thieves but the only effective military allies you have on the ground? >> as a preamble, let me note that the dynamics between those people are quite different than the ones with the sons of iraq. the cause will drivers are very different. that been said, it is a potentially fatal problem in afghanistan to allow maligned

actors with private armies at their disposal to run rampant the way they do now in afghanistan. that does not require that they all be eliminated down to the last sold. i think there is a variety of intermediate conditions between complete extermination that is stable if enforced properly that could involve potentially a roll in governance for actors such as those it. the first thing we need to do is make a decision about how much suppression do we require, which is not a decision that has not been reached yet. that having been said, we are going to have to deal with them. the idea that he can deliver security and therefore we should let him run rampant will lose us the war. that is a short-sighted trade

and requires explicit guidance at the theater level to the local commanders who are dealing with people like him to tell them, and i suppose to accept this guy's services because they provide security even though they this off certain parts of the population or not. we cannot simultaneously go after these people in the country because of both limited resources and limited capital, so we have to choose priorities. that means some of these actors will be allowed to operate in the near term. the decision about where to start might very well end up leaving in order to focus somewhere else. if we are going to leave them all in place, and believe that

they are going to deliver a security force if we play ball with them, as to not constrain their activities, not to limit their take, not to bind them in an enforcement mechanism, then we will lose. none of that necessarily means he needs to be shut down tomorrow morning. again, it is not going to happen simultaneously across the theater all at once. if factors like that are not brought into some confinement system that works and can be enforced, we will lose the war. >> we have another question over here. >> my question is about whether the media has played a sufficiently strong watchdog role. when i was with the bbc, my sense was the answer is no with

one that distinguished exception. it seemed to me, sitting in london, miller pioneered stories of corruption. i think it was a brilliant exercise it. i am interested in your take as to whether that watchdog role has been played sufficiently. >> i am not qualified to say whether the media has done is sufficient job, but i am qualified to say that miller has done an excellent job, or he did, when he was on the beat for the l.a. times printed to a certain extent, as i think was evident, we had similar roles -- to investigate and report. the difference is i have subpoena power. that makes my effort more encompassing and shortens my

time line. even with the subpoena power, it is difficult to get to the bottom of issues in an environment that was entirely cash-driven. we issued two reports, when recently and one in 2005 about that environment. $19 billion by the coalition, a temporary agency that no longer exists that was created to spend that money without capacity. both reports reached the same conclusion, that there is no real accountability for how that money was spent, so who knows how much of it ended up in an illicit hands and fed the insurgency? it is impossible to say. but i think that the reporting overtime and iraq certainly

became more concise and improved. i think jim glanced for "the new york times did a great job as well. i think the bbc has covered it very regulate and thoroughly. >> we have a question up front. >> thank you both for speaking to us. my question is directed towards dr. biddle. assert that the maligned governments for the corrupt system is mainly our own the contract. i was wondering where the opium war fits into the hydraulic fluid -- most put it at 90% of afghan gdp. could that be considered part of the hydraulic fluid as you put it? >> it is, but it is a relatively small part. we spend multiple times the gdp of the country every year, the united states, much less the

larger international community. the narcotics problem is a contributory to the underlying difficulty. it is not at the heart of it, how webber. i think our own expenditures are a much larger source of the maligned funding then the narcotics trade. one of the problems that we have when we approached this as a rule of law at issue is we often do it to the lens of narcotics. it is reported that the early attempts to persuade president cars site to remove his brother was oriented around his reputed role are around the narcotics trade, and the evidence simply was not there. i don't think narcotics money is at the heart of the network. that is not to say that we can simply ignore it.

down the road, if we eventually get to some sort of negotiated settlement that produces a cease-fire for most of the combatants now fighting in afghanistan, i think if we get a favorable outcome, i think that is the pathway it could be realized. if we get that we allow the narcotics trade to continue at today's levels, that source of illicit money will eventually run the risk of undermining any of the enforcement mechanisms we developed for controlling other forms of predation by powerful figures upon the population within afghanistan. so we will eventually need to deal with narcotics to. in fact, i think it will be easier to deal with in sequence later in the process. i think the primary mechanism by which we will eventually bring our aquatics under control and afghanistan if we do will be by making the government's writ run

in the places where poppyseed are grown. until you do that, i think it will be difficult to destroy much of the crop to make any significant dent in this. a solution to the narcotics problem is likely to follow substantial security and government improvement, rather than to proceed it. i think it is necessary eventually to get to a stable system where the level of predation is kept within tolerable bounds, but i think it is not the first priority. it will get substantially easier to resolve downstream once we have met the nearer term requirements first. >> i am going to use the guy with the microphone prerogative to use the last question it. nic, -- ina senacynicic,

the end, we are all enablers. their job basically involves a relatively small piece of the puzzle. their awards come from kidding packages from point a to point b, getting a project delivered on time, and if they have to cut corners, payoffs, some local element, hiring security, they are going to do that. ultimately, little acts of corner cutting end up undermining the entire mission. i guess, ultimately, it is a question of whether there are macro solutions here. >> i think this speaks to the

standard issuance of counterinsurgency command and unity effort. it is classically positive to succeed in counterinsurgency you need to get cooperative behavior among a variety of very dissimilar government agencies. aid agencies, government reform agencies, the military to provide security. if any of them are undermining the activities of the other, the result will be failure. this is difficult in counterinsurgency because of the complexity of the activity relative to conventional warfare. now, unity of effort is such a big theme in the literature because it is so hard to do. it is hard to do within the military. within the military, you have a very clear chain of command with very clear responsibilities and duties and obligations.

getting civilian agencies to cooperate with a larger campaign plan that includes their activities as insubordinate element of an essentially military-directed campaign is an extremely hard undertaking. that was probably done to an all-time, world champion, intergalactic, record level in iraq in 2007. because ryan crocker and david petraeus were joined at the hip and shared a perception of the importance of unity of effort and the difficulty and the necessity of disciplining their respective organizations so they cooperated. i think one could argue that we have been less successful in this domain in afghanistan that we were in iraq. but i think it requires at the theater level a joint campaign

plan that includes civilian and military elements that are integrated so they don't undermine each other, and the right hand does not undo what the left hand is doing pretty if we continue to contract, we do it only because we are prioritizing the disempowering of another network and another actor summer of first, so therefore not send a message to everyone in the military go cut your own deals. it has to be coordinated and led for this kind of cooperation for this to work. if we cannot get that because the ambassador and the military commanders are not working together as closely as they should, we will not succeed. i think 2007 suggested it is possible. it is not so difficult that is

unimaginable, but it is obviously very hard. whether it is going to be done successfully in afghanistan is very up in the air at the moment. >> i agree with what steven is saying. to a certain extent, the success of these types of operations is personality-dependent. that is too loose a metric to hang the protection of our national security interests abroad on. i think the answer is structural. the military has achieved a level unprecedented in its recent operations in iraq and in afghanistan because they are integrated. i think the key is integration, not coordination. there are hundreds of coordination meetings in iraq all the time but they do not result in good things out in the

field. the military's integration comes from 1986. in the past, there were problems about agencies working together. i think we have a moment now, where exhibit a and exhibit be to develop something new in the inter agency that goes beyond goldwater nichols andon. but who are not integrated, who still work in their silos of excellency. and civilian surge, these are phrases that have popped up but none of them amount to serious

solutions, to a problem that, frankly, everybody agrees on that. i think there is serious breakdowns and effort, and is traced back to the weakness of unity in command for the civil military operations. resolving that is going to take a bold step forward of this framework, which could be something like u.s. operations which would bring that backbone back together with civilian expertise and the elements scattered across the agency'ies. yet we have not responded as a government to this continuing weakness. >> on behalf of the elliott

school of international affairs here at george washington, i want to thank you for sharing your sobering insights on what is obviously a very difficult problem that is likely to challenge the u.s. operation into the indefinite future. again, we appreciate your time and public efforts. thank you. [applause] [captioning performed by national captioning institute] [captions copyright national cable satellite corp. 2010] >> a former ambassador is not conceding to the stanford mayor, dan malloy.

malloy was ahead by more than 7000 votes, which caused an automatic recount. it would give democrats 19 the governor's seat with republicans holding 29 seats. one final governor's race that has yet to be decided, minnesota. it looks like that seat will remain empty until a recount is completed around mid december. the democratic candidate is ahead by only 0.4 percentage points against the republican in a race that includes an independent. tomorrow morning on c-span, you can see the election night speeches and reaction. we will have that for you at 10:30 a.m. eastern. in this first weekend following the midterm elections, president obama is calling for compromise

between democrats and republicans in addressing issues facing the nation, including the extension of the bush tax cuts for middle-class americans. we will take a look at his remarks, and the newly elected senator mark rubio gives a public address and talks about his party's principles and legislative authorities for the new congress. >> this week, americans all across the country made their voices heard. your mission -- your message was clear. you are fed up with partisan politics and you want results. i do, too. i congratulate this week's winners -- republicans, democrats, and independent, but now the campaign season is over. it is time to focus on our shared responsibilities, to work together and deliver those results, speed up the recovery,

creating jobs, and strengthening the middle class so the american dream goes like it is back within reach. that is why i have been asked to sit down soon with leaders of both parties so we can have a discussion about what we can do together to move this country forward. over the next few weeks, we will have a chance to work together in the brief upcoming session of congress. this is why this session is so important. early in the last decade, president bush enacted a series of tax cuts that were designed to expire at the end of this year. what that means is if congress does not act by new year's eve, middle-class families will see their taxes go up starting on new year's day. but the last thing we should do is raise taxes on middle-class families. for the past decade, they saw their costs rise and incomes fall. they are the ones bearing the brunt of the recession and making ends meet.

they are the ones who need relief right now. so something to be done. i believe there is room for us to compromise and get it done to get it. let's start where we agree. all of us want certainty for middle-class americans. none of us want them to wake up on january 1 with a higher tax bill, which is why i believe we should extend the tax cut for all families making less than $250,000 a year, which is 98 percent of the american people. we also agree about the need for cutting spending and bringing down the deficit. in fact, if congress were to implement my proposals to freeze discretionary spending for three years, if it would bring spending down to its lowest level has a share of the economy in 50 years. but at a time when we will be asking folks to make difficult sacrifices, i don't see how we can afford to borrow an additional $700 billion from

other countries to make the tax cut permanent. we would be digging ourselves into an even deeper fiscal hole and passing the burden onto our children. i recognize that both parties are going to have to compromise to get something done. i want to make my priorities clear from the start could middle-class families need permanent tax relief. i believe we cannot afford to borrow and spend another $700 billion for millionaires and billionaires. there are new public servant in washington but we still face the same challenge it. you made it clear that it is time for results. this is a good opportunity to show that we are willing to come together and do what is best for the country we all love. thanks. >> with election day behind us, it is an honor to talk to you about the opportunity before us,

and opportunity to put america back on track. for too long, washington has taken our country in the wrong direction. although i am a proud republican, this is the truth. both parties have been to blame. the american people said enough is enough in this election. we republicans would be mistaken if we miss read these results. this election is a second chance. a second chance for republicans to be what we said we were going to be proud america is the single greatest nation in the earth. it is a place built on free enterprise where the employee can be the employer, where small businesses are started every day in a spare bedroom, and a place where somebody like meat can be a united states senate. . i know about the unique conceptualism about our country.

i have seen it to my own eyes. i was raised in a community of exiles of people who lost their country, people who had to come to a foreign shore to find opportunity. for some, answers or here in america, but some found a new dream. that is what we must do as a nation, to fulfil our sacred obligation to leave the next generation of americans a better america at than the one we inherited, and that is what this election is about. for the past two years, republicans have listened to the american people. the past two years provided a frightening glimpse of what can become of our nation if we continue down a growing debt, and the government reaching further into our lives. it is nothing short of a path of

ruin, that threatens to diminish us as a nation and people come one that makes america more like the rest of the world. as republicans, here is what our commitments should be proud of our focus should not be just winning elections. it must be to ensure the next generation inherits [inaudible] most importantly, we will stand up and offer an alternative to the policies coming out of washington for the past two years. the challenges are too great, too generational in scope. instead, we will put forth bold ideas and have the courage to fight for them. this means preventing a massive tax increase at the end of the year. it means repealing and replacing the disastrous spread in

simplifying our tax code and tackling in national debt that is pushing us to the brink. for many of us coming to washington for the first time, and others returning to serve, it is a long way from home. a long way from the people whose eyes we looked into town hall meetings, roundtable discussions, and promised this time it would be different, that it to elected republicans to office, we would not squander the chance you give us, and we must not because nothing less than the identity of our country and what kind of future we leave our children is at stake. that is our commitment credit from you, we ask desperate to hold us accountable to the ideas and principles we campaigned on. this is our second chance to get this right, to make the right decisions and tough calls, and to leave our children what they deserve -- the freest and most

exceptional society in all of human history. thank you for listening. god bless you and your family, and may god continue to bless the united states of america. >> next, chief palestinian negotiator saeb erakat. also, a look at u.s. involvement in the middle east peace process. first, opening remarks from the public policy scholar, aaron miller. this is an hour and 20 minutes. the center is the living national memorial to president

wilson established by congress in 1968. it is a non partisan institution engaged in the study of national and world affairs. the wilson center establishes and maintains a neutral forum for open and informed dialogue. the center commemorates the ideas and concerns of woodrow wilson by providing a link between the world of ideas and the world of policy.

today's meeting is basically a conversation between the chief palestinian negotiator and head of the negotiation affairs department, and aaron miller, public policy scholar at the woodrow wilson center. >> we have distributed the bios of our speakers. i am sure you were all familiar with them. it is not necessary for me to introduce them again. i would like to remind you to please close your cell phones. no text messaging. it interferes with the live web cast that we have. it is very important for us not to have antique interference with the live web cast.

it is at the center and it is live and is picked up around the world. please be kind enough to turn off your cell phones for the duration of the meeting. i would like to give the floor to my colleague, karen and david miller. -- aaron david miller. i also want to welcome the ambassador, saeb erakat. he is the representative to the united states. thank you. >> thank you very much. let me welcome you to the woodrow wilson international center. it is a privilege for me to host.

i have known him for more than 25 years. i consider him a close friend. our wives are friends and our daughters are friends. i have been to his home and he's been to mine. my world is to find more to what is probable. we still have our disagreements, i consider him a close friend. no one is in day -- is any better position to offer you and c-span a comprehensive assessment and review of the palestinian issue and prospects for the negotiations.

he has seen it all. from the early days in madrid, where you and i were. i will never forget how upset secretary of state baker on that day. from madrid to the washington talks, where we negotiated against the backstop -- backdrop of secret negotiations are going on in oslo. to the oslo process, or he became prominently and permanently involved. to the camp david sinnett july -- a senate july 2000.

pretty grim prospects. he has been there through it all. it should be of no surprise to any of you that he remains a champion and an advocate of palestinian national interest. he is an articulator in the palestinian national narrative. that is his role. i respect that. at the same time, he is also aware of the fact that be is really palestinian problems -- it is a complex conflict in which both sides bear responsibility for the perpetuation and both sides bear responsibility for the solution. that solution must be based, not on an imbalance of power, but on a balanced of interest. the format to date is very

straightforward. i will ask him to in questions that i have been dreaming of since i left government in 2003. it encompasses the three areas. palestinians internal politics, negotiations, and his expectations and a view of the american role. specifically the last 20 months of the obama administration. once we finish with that, we will go to your questions. these are to be questions. no comment in their entirety and certainly not speeches. let me began. since clarity and honesty have been your trademarks, no one would be disappointed in your

responses to these questions. henry kissinger once said that israel has no foreign policy. it just how does it -- it just has domestic politics. how does it shape the palestinian position and the negotiations? >> sometimes -- we are just like any other side.

we are normal people. in transitions, societies go through a period of transition. for us, we are in this transition. that would mean that my wagon will always be overloaded. countries have factions. how do you balance? how do you balance the political geography?

palestinians are scattered all over. in many cases, they have to abide by the rules of a given country they live on a. -- live in. you have an israeli occupation. i was 12 years old when the israeli occupation came. when the israeli occupation came, -- that will tell you something. that will tell you something about the nature of the negotiations. we are different. we are not your normal conflict.

we have people 11 going to synagogues same -- we have people who are going to synagogue and saying the same thing every saturday. they believe they occur saying it and hearing it for the first time. there are people who go to churches every sunday and believe they are hearing and seeing it for the same time. deal with that. been a believe and a divine power -- they believe and a divine power. the palestinian politics -- it

is to people going through labor pains, going through a transition period -- transition. israel was formed as an independent country. they do not feel like they have finished their transition yet. we have many internal complexities. hamas is the palestinian party. the defeated my party. in 18 days, they were the speaker, the parliament, in five weeks, there were the government. i had been elected from the constituency in 2006.

my party cost me to deliver a speech in response to the in tradition -- introduction to the government for a vote of confidence. you are my prime minister. you are my wife's prime minister. they honor their commitment to the previous agreement. it is a political transition, and faction split the role of the government. you are the government for the palestinians. you are everyone. those traditions that we have all for our people, you should honor. unfortunately, democracy in

palestine has failed. they've responded to me by saying,we won the election and we must change the charter. since we won the election, it must be canceled. we have a problem. the internal dynamics are so difficult. not because we chose this path. we are a very young authority, or a sense of authority. we make mistakes. people are watching us and they want to score points with us and the fall what we do. so far, we have 26 parties.

i am happy -- we are on the right track. it is difficult, it is painful, and will take a lot of time. but this transition is a must for us. >> you provided a good transition to my next question. not to be unkind, but you could look at the palestinian national movement today as a kind of palestinian hump the dump d. -- humpty dumpty. you have to political entities, two sets of security services, two different sets of funding streams, to different ideas about what constitutes the future is palestinian. how did those divisions shape, constrained, the negotiation and the implementation of a

punitive agreement with the israelis? did ministration seems to be subscribing to what i would call the kevin costner school of diplomacy. the main character hears voices that say, build it and they will come. is the logic that they will reach an agreement and the agreement will be so compelling that the divisions will heal because they will have no choice but to acquiesce? how do you manage? how did you manage? >> the difference between us and hamas is not an economic problem, a social problem.

if they ran the country, they're good. they stood up 16 years later. was that the withdrawal because of negotiations? secondly, there are mistakes that we made, corruption and so on. to be fair, they never disputed the fact that the plo have the jurisdiction in negotiations with israel. this was article 5.

also, article number seven, it specified that the negotiations with israel, -- they passed for one thing. i think it is a fair demand. i do not think that the division today is because of negotiations. they were always there. they maintained an agreement with you. in 2006, the one. -- they won. look, aaron, if i have an end

game agreement with israel, who would prevail? if i do not have an endgame agreement, i will stop. >> this is a tough one. i think. change is hard. to expect a change in others it is understandable. particularly when you're the weakest party in the negotiation. if you had to identify one in perfection, weakness, flock, in the palestinian strategy these many years, with respect to the israelis and the negotiating process, and there are many strengths, but no one is perfect. we know this.

>> israel these are not perfect? shocking. >> what was the most significant shortcoming in the palestinian strategy? >> i have no army, no air force, no economy. if it is my word against an israeli, we cannot stand a chance. when we entered these negotiations, many people were there, like jim bakker. he denied my existence as a

palestinian. i am here. they insisted that we deny israel without defining the border. -- define israel without defining the border. nations are no nations without borders. that is where the police give tickets. that is where you have language. american officials insisted that my ticket to negotiating -- at without defining the border. that has been the loophole in the peace process. respected israeli governments fought -- you have to lower

these expectations. let's see what kind of arrangements -- it will not be a country like yours. i know we will have limitations. the problem we face is not that he wants -- look at what he says. he says settlements should not objects of peace.

what does this translate to me? he had already decided which part of my territory he will give back to israel. that is called dictation. once he finishes this, he will say, come here, boy. this is what we have for you. they come with conditions. i am supposed to accept that. i will not negotiate jerusalem. you have to join the zionist movement. that is what it boils down to. they recognize israel as a jewish state. after he puts all of this list of conditions, he tells me, come and negotiate. why? israel is still deciding where

its border will be. oh! the region is changing. iran, at ahmadinejad. we have to keep our army and the jordan valley. the only way that this region -- >> we will get to mr. netanyahu in a minute. >> i will come to that later. >> i could identify a hundred mistakes that americans made during the course of -- >> americans and israelis did not make mistakes. exclusively palestinians. >> i could identify thousands of mistakes that we made. forget the americans. everybody strategy involves

changes. looking in the mirror, that is the place for that change, whether you are in israeli, palestinian, or american, has again. -- has to begin. that is the real question. you may not want to answer it. but that is the real question that needs to be confronted. why did we do wrong? over the course of the last two decades. israel has to look and be a mirror to make an assessment of where their tactics and strategies ran off a highway. if they are prepared to do it, it is logical to assume even if you are the weaker component that your rights have been taken away. you need to do so as well. let's move on. the peace process. a general question. how would you characterize the status of the process right now

status of the process right now ,