, and tarana burke, clarence thomas, rosamond gaetz brewer and nikki haley. hillary clinton, rex tillerson, james mattis and canadian prime minister justin trudeau. thursday at 8:00 p.m. eastern, tim cook, john kasich, kate .rown and luis gutierrez friday at 8:00 p.m. eastern, jimmy carter, betsy devos, mark meadows and keisha lance bottom. next week in prime time on c-span and c-span.org and on the free c-span radio app. >> next a look at reconstruction in afghanistan and the lessons that can be drawn from future rebuilding efforts. the special inspector general for afghanistan reconstruction spoken to brookings institute giving his this report.

from the office in the sea, this is -- and d.c., this is 2.5 hours. >> good morning, ladies and gentlemen. welcome to the brookings institution. my name is john allen. i'm the president of the brookings. it is my pleasure to be joint by sopko.nd, john john joins us as part of our event entitled "afghanistan: lessons for the u.s. expense -- stabilization, lessons from the u.s. experience in afghanistan."

this event happens to share the same title with a report which will be rolled out today. you will be hearing from john shortly on the report's contents, the findings and the recommendations. i have had the honor of knowing this gentleman for many years. he was a vital partner to me in my previous role leading u.s. and nato forces in afghanistan. he has been a trusted advisor to many u.s. policymakers and leaders throughout the years. he and his team have maintained close and tireless oversight over our mission in afghanistan and have been a critical part of ensuring we remain accountable for our efforts. and making sure we learn from our successes as well as our mistakes. frankly, over the last nearly 17 years of this conflict, there has been much to learn.

to the audience for this hour, john will first provide us his own set of remarks lineup the report, and then we will come together on the stage for 30 minutes of conversation which will be a short peel of q and a between him and me. we'll have enough time to go out to the audience for a couple of questions. ,e will be followed by a panel a panel that will have a discussion on the report in afghanistan. which given the caliber of the panelists we have will be an excellent discussion and not without some pointed views and it will be during that time we will have about 30 minutes for audience questions and answers. finally, i would be remiss in not noting that this event takes oure just a few days before most solemn and important of american holidays, memorial day. servant --2000 u.s.

service men women have made the sacrifice in afghanistan since 2001, it is often overlooked and of ouren, the sacrifices foreign service officers, usaid professionals and civilians of all stripes and forms, as well as our numerous coalition partners and allies who also gave their lives in the name of peace and security for the people of afghanistan. memorial day is about honoring each of these heroes. we must never forget them and their sacrifice. those lives lost must mean something. indeed through the lessons learned, reports of organizations, we can and must find better ways to ensure that our missions are achieved with greater affect and with less suffering ands less waste for all parties.

with that, let me welcome john sopko, a special inspector general for afghanistan to the stage where his keynote remarks. -- for his keynote remarks. john? mr. sun: good -- mr. sopko:. that was very kind remarks in that introduction. more importantly for hosting today's event. the release of our fourth lessons learned report which is entitled "stabilization, lessons from the u.s. experience in afghanistan." this report is become culmination of two years of work by our office in examines -- and examines the u.s. stabilization efforts in afghanistan. , the stateow usaid department and the defense

department tried to support and legitimize the afghan government and contested districts in afghanistan from 2002 to 2017. today's report is also available in an interactive format, and like all of our products may be downloaded from our website. on the interactive format i think we're the only sector general's office that releases reports in such a format. we will be releasing its fifth lessons learned report on june 14 focusing on our counter narcotics efforts in afghanistan. we began our lessons learned 2014 at a late suggestion by general

my staff have told me that i have credited you enough times about our lessons learned program, that we should probably start writing you some royalty checks. [laughter] but that would be wrong. you made anusness, observation that resonated with me during one of my first trips to afghanistan. while you were the commanding general. we later followed up on that after he retired at a little breakfast meeting over and pentagon city. thenoted that of all worthwhile audits and investigations that we were conducting, there was still a question left unanswered. what did it all mean, and what did it all mean in the larger context of reconstruction and national security? part of the reason you and others thought that lessons learned program would be a

worthwhile endeavor for my organization to undertake, is due to our unique jurisdiction. we havehe igs, jurisdiction to look at all u.s. reconstruction programs and projects in afghanistan regardless of their funding source and regardless of which agency is actually conducting those programs. we're statutorily unique in that fashion. since we are the only federal oversight agency that can look holistically at the whole of government effort in afghanistan, which means, we are not constrained by agency stovepipes. thereleased to say that has been great interest in our lessons learned report of to date. today's report is really no different. while we were finalizing our report, the departments of the state and defense, along with

usaid were finalizing their own stabilization assistant review. they asked us to break their staffs on our. inner agency privy was recently approved and is well aligned with the report that we are releasing today. before i go any further, i think we have to ask the question, what is stabilization? it is one of those terms that israeli, if ever precisely -- is rarely if ever precisely defined. definitions have buried within u.s. agencies. year, the u.s. government finally defined stabilization as a political endeavor involving a civilian military process to create the conditions where locally,

legitimate authorities and a system can peaceably manage conflict and prevent a resurgence of violence. stabilization is the process of building sufficient governance to keep insurgents from returning and convincing the population of that area that government rule is preferable to insurgent rule. we undertook this project for one simple reason. the stabilization effort in afghanistan was not the first the u.s. government has undertaken, nor will it be the last. given the current security environment and the dangers of spacesg poorly governed to serve as launching pads for transnational terrorist groups,

we anticipate future u.s. government efforts to stabilize those areas by clearing them of tororist groups and hoping generate sufficient governance to keep terrorists from returning around the globe. i believe the panel discussion this morning will go into greater detail about that. contains seven identifies 10 -- lessons, makes seven recommendations to the executive branch, and includes formatters of for congressional consideration. rather than go through every one of these, i would like to begin with our overall assessment of the stabilization effort in afghanistan, and then highlight some issues of particular concern. unfortunately, our overall assessment is at despite some very heroic efforts to stabilize

insecure and contested areas in andanistan, between 2002 2017, the program was mostly a failure. this happened for a number of reasons. including the establishment of a set of unrealistic expectations about what we could do and what can be achieved in just a few years time. the lack of capacity of u.s. government agencies to fully support of those accelerated efforts, and institutional rivalries and bureaucratic hurdles compounded this already difficult task. every organization and agency we found that worked on stabilization in afghanistan from dod civil affairs and special operation forces, to state and usaid, suffered from

personnel and programming deficits. scaling, short tours of duty, and the pressure to show quick progress. no organization we found was prepared for these challenges. unfortunately, it showed with the results. stabilization is unique because it is an inherently joint civilian military undertaking. given the size and resources of dod, the military consistently determined priorities underground and chose to focus on the most insecure districts. face,cal decision on his but ironically, one that had unintended negative consequences. why? remain those areas often perpetually insecure, and had to

be cleared of insurgents again and again. civilian agencies, particularly usaid were compelled to conduct programs in these fiercely contested areas that were not ready for stabilization. because the coalition focused on the most insecure areas and rarely provided enduring security after clearing them, afghans were often too afraid to serve in the local governments there. afghan civilians also had little faith that their districts would remain in government hands when the coalition withdrew. implementing partners struggled to execute programs amidst the violence. u.s. agencies were unable to adequately monitor and evaluate the project.

we spend a lot of time in our report on a particular issue. one of the challenges facing stabilization efforts in afghanistan, as i alluded to and s it is reported our report today, came from institutional differences and rivalries that start right here in washington. while the military was focused on clear, hold and build, those are tenets of the coin doctrine, state and usaid face challenges given the pressure from dod to quickly show gains on the ground. this led to significant tensions between usaid and the military over aids, reluctance or inability to work in the most contested and insecure districts. the same areas the military believed to be the most important to reverse taliban momentum. often, the military would claim

a district was cleared and thus able for aid to start stabilization program. cleared meant something very different to the military than it did to aid. has tohan contractors with paving a road in an insecure environment. the military may have deemed the areas safe enough for them, but it made little difference if the contractors charged with executing the hold or build phase of stabilization effort, were in danger or felt they were so. some senior aid officials told -- thatf and coalition coalition military forces forced the asian -- push to the agency and demand that implement programs such as cash for work on a larger scale over aids objections. senior military officials likewise told us they have little choice but to do things quickly and focus on the most dangerous areas.

again, you have to remember the timeline, the short timeline of the military was given, particularly as it was drawing down resources. usaid officials had a difficult time arguing against the military's belief that stabilization would buy the support of the population, convince them to share information about iud's, and and thus saveeds, coalition lives. as 18 official told us, the military expected us to be backers of cash. surge, eight advisors were often able to exercise veto power about where and how military commanders used thes, particularly from surf program. were, usa's influence significantly diminished as we were doing the drawdown and quick exit from afghanistan.

noted, when aid try to stop admitting project best projects in areas they evaluated, the military sometimes set apart the model and used surf funding unilaterally. as a result, all types of stabilization programming were implemented during all stages of the clear, hold and build the sequence, even when aid new the sequencing was an appropriate and a programs of be ineffective. under pressure from the military, the aid built schools and places where they cannot be monitored, the government could not maintain and staff them, and the students only attended sporadically, if at all due to insecurity. military commanders, concentrated large projects in less secure areas where they were less likely to succeed. dod state andhe

eight, the two agencies that provided the most personnel for civilians served, did not have sufficient staffing, especially built in stafford and then see to enable rapid mobilization in the field. without that capacity in afghanistan, stay in aid particularly struggled. to meet the demand of the civilian surge, they pulled staff from other assignments and hire temporary staff. the number of civilian personnel l's controlsy kabu more than tripled between january 2009 and december 2011. 2011, more than usaid u.s. aig -- worldwide staff for in afghanistan. as one aid official told us, at

the height of the civilian surge, our existing numbers were so limited, we were forced to bring on roughly 250-350 people per year to do the work of aid across afghanistan. unfortunately, many have no or little practical aid experience. staff the hires told our that he got the job because i had a pulse and a masters degree. by 2011, the demand for personnel had so exceeded the supply, that state and aid were unable to hire enough people to fill all of the civilian slots that coalition military forces requested. even with the hiring of temporary employees. i would like to say one thing.

as i said, the use of temporary hires by eight and state actually had both positive and negative trade-offs. on the positive side, unlike permanent aid and state personnel, temporary hires could stay in afghanistan. more than one year of institutional memory, or what i am my staff called the annual lobotomy that occurs when personnel rotate out of the country after one year or less. unfortunately, those the same temporary hires had little, if any experience or training and monitoring and project oversight and carrying out specific a projects. result, we were astounded to find out that a few of those civilians working at the local level had agency authority to

oversee programming. usaid's regional had no oversight authority over the programs in their area of operation. , therefore had to default to the embassy in kabul, which have problems of communicating quickly to the staff in the field. contracting also surged. point, a high-ranking aid official determined that in order to meet the u.s. government average ratio of dollars to the number of contracting officials, aid would have to send nearly its entire overseas workforce to afghanistan. the number of contractor personnel overseen by direct hires stayed at 8% was extremely

large. in 2011, there were approximately 18 contractors for they direct hire at state, ratio was 100-1 at usaid. even with sufficient number of highly trained personnel, stabilization operations in afghanistan would have been challenging. unfortunately, as our report lays out, state and aid the not have the right personnel to effectively execute the mission, in spite of efforts made years earlier to provide them with exactly that capability. this, and despite all of those other challenges, the question alternately we ask is did stabilization in afghanistan work and was a effective? did it meet its goal? we talked a lot about inputs, outputs and outcomes. did it reach the ultimate outcome?

we tryreport please out, to answer that question by looking at other aspects -- experts who had studied the issue. and external research found that the evidence was inconclusive and sometimes contradictory. some research found that usaid and similar programming actually did a complex -- accomplice stabilization. some found no impact and other research found that the program itself was destabilized. there are some factors that seem to be common among the most successful stable of -- stabilization intervention programs in afghanistan. those will be laid out in a report. following,the panel a military leader who actually we highlight as one of the leaders who actually succeeded in stabilization in his district

into an arm -- district. what were the common lessons learned and best practices for stabilization to work? first, we found out that stabilization was most effective in areas where the government had a degree of physical control. second, it was also more successful when implement tears undertook -- implementers undertook fewer difficulties with a higher degree of insight and staffing. third, stabilization cannot be done well on the cheap. successful projects were andr-intensive for donors in the letting partners alike. for, we found that best, result in small gains that require constant reinforcement to avoid reversals. the timelines that u.s. agencies

were operating under assumed that quick security gains would be matched by equally quick stabilization and governance gains. the latter failed to materialize before security forces withdrew and instability returned to many of the areas were stabilization programs were working. our research also found that implement thing smaller projects help programs avoid some of the common pitfalls of working in the midst of a counterinsurgency. avoiding these pitfalls and stabilization such as predatory officials, corruption and insurgent sabotage while still providing tangible benefits to communities, was easier for smaller scale projects. according to a 2010 u.s. embassy assessment, it was also easier to ensure community buy-in and ownership of small-scale and for structure projects than it was for larger.

previously,tified research has demonstrated that superficial measures of success, such as the sheer amount of money spent or outputs produced, have no correlation to the eventual impact or out come -- outcome. as one senior u.s. aid official told us, if you go fast, you actually go slow. purpose, youw on actually go faster with stabilization. one area where u.s. effort seem --get it right was into an was in a province. the combination of capable individuals and -- in key roles, i willingness by those , andiduals to collaborate

a heavy presence of u.s. military forces in the area, helped the initiative to succeed more than others in the country. in conclusion, i have identified only a few of the major challenges, the effort to stabilize afghanistan faced. the poor results of this particular mission may make it to some policymakers to conclude that stabilization should never be undertaken again. i would disagree with that. given the security challenges we face in today's world, stabilization are what everyone whatlege is important -- ever want to call it is important. eliminating that ability or capability is not a realistic choice. rather, the u.s. government must address the challenges and

capacity constraints identified in our report. given the lack of alternatives to stabilization in an ungoverned space that has been cleared of insurgents or terrorists, the best course of action before the u.s. government to balance the importance of any stabilization mission with a realistic understanding of the level of effort required and what is achievable. additionally, our government must improve its ability to prepare for, design, execute, monitor and evaluate stabilization missions. the need for such expertise will soonimeinish anytime -- diminish anytime soon. warfare havels of changed, the challenges of small guerrillast against and terrorists have remained constant.

american soldiers struggling against al qaeda and the taliban could profitably study the past and learn how their ancestors , philippines,tian nicaraguans, and other irregular foes. amples, weth the ex cannot afford to fail to absorb the lessons we have learned in afghanistan. as we continue to contemplate such programs both their in afghanistan and in other countries in the future. acknowledginge by the tireless efforts of those who worked on this report. are efforts were led by david young, who is supported by jordan came.

they have my thanks and hopefully your thanks for issuing the report today. with that, thank you very much for this opportunity to speak. [applause] john: i am sure some of you are seeing on your phones that there is an apparent announcement that the white house has just canceled a conversation with the north koreans coming up. we will see how that develops

today. some place i don't think we were going to have a stabilization effort. [laughter] in the near future. john, thank you for those comments. i really appreciate them. let me make a real quick editorial note. on the panel, we will have an army officer who was a fellow here lester. province was one of the toughest fights that we had. it is up against the pakistani board. -- border. it is a tough place to be successful in stabilization. if you want to see a little bit more on that, there is an interesting documentary out there. he is featured in the personally with his great battalion. i retired from the marine

corps in 2013, i never thought of the concerned over these matters again. or mentioned in a sick report -- sig report. with the onslaught of isis, we had no real idea how this fight would ultimately take shape. the one thing we did know was that we would eventually have a massive stabilization effort, not just to make you -- rescue the populace, but to keep out isis in the aftermath. it was going to be big across both iraq and syria. with that in mind and given the lessons you are already surfacing from the afghan experience, as you lower member, we worked to set up a network of inspector generals from the very beginning of this. it would look hard at u.s. and coalition efforts as they were unfolding to get the most out of the work that we were doing.

havedy, you and your team had to affect on a future crisis that we could have been involved in. we will have a few minutes of questions, i will ask a couple of them will go to the audience for a couple. these are going to be forward-looking. the report, obviously speaks for itself. there is a lot of detail in their about deficiencies and the challenges that john and hits team faced and were able to see a document. this isn't the end for the u.s. and coalition's. is my remarks implied, within 18 months of supposedly the end of the conflict in afghanistan, we are now embroiled once again in something in iraq and syria and it will continue. we need to profit and benefit from the work that you have done and others to enjoy that we are better prepared as we go. buting about the future,

color and hypothetical administration of the future, we have a crisis. it is one where we have the capacity, not as a result of an thegency, but we have capacity for some deliver thought about how we will be involved in this evolution, how we will intervene are how we will be invited in our how long we will be there and we think the issues will be. you have been summoned to the white house because of your work to advise the president and his national security team on what they should be thinking about right now as the u.s. contemplates yet another effort, which could end up in a large stabilization effort. if i could ask, what would you tell the president? john: keeping in mind that you'll probably be hired the minute you are done talking. what would you tell the president? john: the first thing, you and i

chatted about this and the green to read theur staff lessons learned reports that are already out there. you discovered it to your chagrin when you are leading a blueprint, theno lessons learned and found a usaid report out there which actually help the. reports have been written. we found that report and it laid out a lot of the issues we were finding right now. no one had ever read it. we couldn't find anybody in the embassy or usaid had actually seen it. the first thing is, read what is out there. the problem is, the state and incorporate that into their training, teaching etc..

the second thing is, before you go in, know where you are going into. as a military commander, you know that you have to know the terrain. that about applies to stabilization also. know how and why the people in that region supported the terrorist groups. what was the issue or issues they were doing. i think in afghanistan, we decided to duplicate norway in districts.wehese try to provide schools, highways, etc. what we should have looked at was what were the services that but hallinan and the terrorist, insurgents providing which made the people relatively happy. >> you don't have to give everything. to giver thing to do is it incrementally. lie with other president is despite her a clinician to do it itckly, and declare victory,

is going to take a long time. this.be realistic about let's be honest to the american people and the american congress that none of these things can be done quickly and successfully. that would be my advice. 4 the president is due to flee. he lays the bombshell on you that we are was expect these days. this is going to be a coalition effort. please advise the president of the united states on how he or she should be thinking about how the community of nations effort .might be considered we had 50 nations engaged in the coalition. all 50 nations were sometimes going across purposes to each other. john: how do we solve that? john: had we think about it in

ways -- we have to realize we are giving with our coalition allies. they have their own political reasons for doing what they are doing. they all have parliaments are congresses that their generals have to respond to. john: so you're never going to admit that each country has -- theing that, let's assume germans cannot go into a certain area, take that into consideration. it is not the fault of the german parliament. realize that, and come up with a plan that utilizes each one of those countries's best capabilities. that is the first thing. we have to be humble enough to realize that every other ours, they have

political answers they have to come home to. the other thing i think is if you know you are going to have a coalition approach, realize that what is promised isn't always what is delivered. i think you probably face of that with nato. you go out and recruit the money, nato promised x it turns out only half set up. have you go forward with that hole in your approach. i think that is something to take into consideration. john: ok, you are hired. [laughter] one of the things that was an issue, associated with is, and i think you have touched on this very how can we be thinking about both the stabilization and ultimately the reconstruction effort. they should blend.

one should lead logically to the other.and ordered to avoid creating, additional burdens because as you well know, we did leave quite a bill for the afghans each year for the maintenance of roads, infrastructure, buildings etc. how should we be thinking about that? john: i think first, just thinking about that is important to read i do not think we did pay attention that much. part of it was a problem i think that comes back into washington. we tend to think in appropriations cycles. we get in appropriations a cycle that is one year or two year. if we don't spend it we lose it. i've commented before. it is not that anyone we sent to

afghanistan was not as smart, not as brave and not as honorable. we gave him a box of broken tools. we gave him a personal system that was broken. a procurement system that was broken. your rotational system that you had to face was broken. you can get the people you wanted and have them stay long enough was broken. we need to look at those issues first. i do agree with you about the afghans. i feel bad when i go over and and we are putting the conditions on the afghans. we realize that all of the new coalitions are also putting new positions and they are not coordinated. each one of the programs from all of the various countries have their own requirements, documents that have to be filled out, meetings that have to be made. you wonder sometimes, what puts

the afghani thinking on their side. getink if we could somehow the allies together to think on a calm and quiet platform, lets not overwhelm the afghans with filling up paper. paper reduction act, which it ago should apply to our coalition development. john: of thing to your point, the personal vote tatian process -- rotation process, used the term broken, i was a challenging. remembering that while units came in for a year at a time, they do not always come in at the same time. there is overlap. we have often heard that this war was fought one year at a time. i think many of the rotational

issues had they been recorded .rom the beginning all of the coalition partners could have given us an operational perspective and a longevity of operational perspective, which would have been helpful. in my first meeting with the new commander, he pointed out to me that i was a four-star general commanding afghanistan and four years for him. this just create our own institution. we have 15 minutes left on this session. what i would like to do is thank you for your answers. but go to the audience for a couple. i will ask when you get to the microphone, and about 30 seconds after the good the microphone, be looking for a question. we will move it very quickly to the question if i don't see it. this gentleman right here in front.

thank you so much for coming to speak your today. my name is jonathan and i am a student. john: as you introduce yourselves tell us where you are from. connecticut, i will be at osd. this summer i was just wondering if he did speak of a more about pakistan because i think they have been a key variable that has impeded any success for stabilization efforts. moving forward with our stabilization approach with afghanistan, what type of approach should we stay with that? john: i'm going to defer to the general here. i look at just afghanistan and just -- reconstruction. pakistan is also an important player. the new strategy from the station has a key component on

pakistan. i'm going to deliver it to the general because he does a lot more dealing with the pakistan issue than i did. i don't be pakistan. john: i'll just give you 30 seconds. the relationship between the u.s. and pakistan is not the worst. getting the pakistanis to see that there are vested interests over the long-term are best served by a stable afghanistan. not that is not -- does benefit from other taliban elements. there was a long time when i believe peace in afghanistan passed through islamabad. in many respects, i think the long-term stability of pakistan changes throughout islamabad and -- getting the pakistanis, the afghans and international community to have a similar view

the stable afghanistan, one that has the capacity for both governmental capacity, security to the possible it -- --ulation, and a vibra vibrant community. >> thank you. general first, i would like to thank you for your comments on being a retired uso and vietnam veteran. i made frequent trips through -- to afghanistan. when you began the discussion, he said that stabilization is keeping insurgents from returning. my conversations with general , even general nicholson, the got an impression that in , the insurgents

never left. they just went underground when we went there. they were sadly part of the society. the objective is the stabilization, have we picked up the wrong target? john: that is a good question. maybe by saying they always stay, think what we are indicating is that this problem is an afghan problem. it's not the people are going to run back to pakistan. the area is, unstable those people, or whatever the terrorist group is have to be taken out of the way. eliminated in one fashion.

if they decide to go underground and join a reconciliation group and become a part of the government, that is another way. you have to provide a service, which in many of these districts, they provided. that is part of the idf's is creating a central government afghanistank -- run and have government control over a region that does become a hotbed for other terrorist activity. john: can i does add one thing? askeep referring to pakistan being the key problem. the problem also, as we saw in this report, was that the afghan government at times, was significant lee viewed very negatively by the local people. what you really need is to insert a government that the people support, a government that is not predatory. a government that is not a bunch of lawless warlords.

that is a key thing. that is one of the things that i did not talk about when we pulled so much money into these on stage stable environments. we continued to that problem of creating more powerful people have basically take the law into their own hands. in essence, the government introduced, particularly some of wereocal police forces just as bad as the terrorists that were there before. this.let me add to one of the things i would tell the president is it is something that we learned, not just in afghanistan, but we had seen it somewhere in iraq. we really saw it in columbia. some days, there's a distinction without a haze. within the insurgent and the criminal. i don't think we got a full grip

on that in afghanistan. in my mind, there was a triangular threat to afghanistan's future, but also the military contact. you have the ideological insurgency, which you can call the taliban. you have drug enterprise, which fueled an awful lot of insurgent and -- hader i don't believe we were properly organized to deal with this. in my mind, how we get ready to go, my first, to the president would be you must assume there will be an inherent, sometimes an acceptable th best inextricable link between carnality and insurgency. you have to give the military commander capacity to bring forth law enforcement and drug enforcement capabilities and the right numbers in dealing with the insurgency.

that way, not wired we will full ourselves into believing we defeated the taliban. we have to be thinking of those multidimensional ways. will take general questions. >> my name is jeff and i used to work for an investor. i spent a few years now doing global development consulting. my company has a more projects in afghanistan than anywhere else. a first question has to do with maybe one of the elephant in the room, which are the afghans themselves. imagine that you gentlemen and a lot of people here might agree with something, an observation along these lines.

we have all met a lot of afghans who are pretty good. who are well traveled, who speak a lot of linkages, who have create skills. if they could only get the leaders on top of their , there's a lot of capacity already there in kabul and other cities in afghanistan to make use of. my first question is, would you agree with that? the second has to do with the donors that you mentioned for the ends of your remarks. euemember meeting some police folks working on a long-standing project the eu has had. we obviously had to spend much of our time coordinating with the u.s. their observations are very much in sync with yours and have been there for years. some of the additional complaints they would make or

were where that while they were seasoned detectives, and essentially, sergeant and captains and what have you, their american counterparts were very young, hired from all over the u.s. got honestrse, if we with ourselves, we got into a period of militarization of our police training. that was something that the eu is very sensitive to. one last thing about the eu, they set up a project in cozumel with a set up a bill justice ministry. every top official there, had an eu advisor. the question is, given that the eu does not have a great reputation in this town and even more so since the election, are we also able to learn lessons from some of our allies and friends? end, youht up at the

said donors were all there and we are putting on contingencies and things. who funds that? should be the u.n. on occasion? john: first to your question on afghans. my personal experience is they are a remarkable people. that i met a few probably wanted to tame from time to time, the vast majority stems from the most modern to the most traditional. they were extraordinarily admirable people. i have ultimate commitment to them until i take my last breath. when i was the commander of the i felt that the eu was a good part for us. they did good work. , i'm sureeas where

we are familiar with this, had provincial reconstruction teams that were locally owned. often use the term caveats. with were national caveats stabilization. the eu worked very hard to fill in those gaps. the eu remains a credible player. is it the perfect outcome? we can all do better, but the eu has been a good partner for us in this regard. we may have a different opinion than some places in washington, will think the u.n. continue to be an important partner. i think what we will discover is one of the heroes of that was a woman in the undp.

we were able to put together a stabilization fund that came in ,mmediately behind the clearing put ine were able to stabilization money. the u.n. is a great partner and have to be the right moment for them. the eu is a great partner. matter of ultimately us having the capacity for strategic planning in this regard. not trying to put it together on the ground. that is too late. if there's anything you like to add? john: i agree with the general and the one thing i would add, i do the youth in afghanistan as sort of the canary in a coma. as long as the current government is still surrounded by these young, honest, honorable well educated.

and they are taking a lot of risk supporting the government. i meet with the president almost every time i go there. i see his top advisers. as long as i see them, i feel optimistic. when they disappear, we have some problems. i agree with that. we issued a report on security sectors, where we talked about and tell, the whole issue of police training. that was one of the problems we saw. we should have police doing police training. when we are in the rim advising the president of the united states, one of the key pieces of advice you must give individual.

we have to support their aspect of civil society, their role within the stabilization and those efforts that can capitalize on that and leverage it will accelerate the role of but alsoa society, leverage one of the most powerful influences in the society as well. this will be the last question we have on this panel and then we will break and go to the regular panel. academy.he u.s. naval very interesting, i will leave this short because it doesn't dovetail the previous question and some of your answers. that is just to take the comments on coalition a little bit further. accomplishctually addressing those problems with the coalition? do we do that nato? does the u.n. take it over? does the united states taken over? what you suggest that we learned

these lessons and where and how do we do that? john: you take it. i think on our security sets, we have sector assistance. takelk about having to that into consideration early on with the coalition. that was just in the security sector. we have not either in this report or in our lessons learned report on private sector development really looked at that issue yet. that is something, we have a lessons learned report called divided responsibilities that we are looking on right now which tries to look at the whole issue of responsibilities and authority. it is sort of that gap between them. i don't have a better answer yet. i know as a practitioner, you had to deal with this on a daily basis. that was in ad hoc

coalition in which nato had an interest in nato has -- nato was a former partner -- formal partner. you're going to be quickly organized diplomatically to determine where this priorities are and establishes priorities within the coalition. as a matter of importance, ad hoc coalitions can only get you so far for a certain. of time -- certain period of time. the night before, you need to be thinking about you are going to hands off to if you don't complete the mission. it might be that a coalition will get handed off to nato for the security purposes and handed off to the eu for stabilization purposes. i will tell you, as we begin to build it, we have five lines of ofort one of the earliest the five flights of effort, we established early on the

emirates took the lead on stabilization. from the very beginning of the counter i select for -- isil effort, stabilization was important. it was much more difficult and i think we have one of the panelists who will address this. it was much more difficult to undertake coherent stabilization and syria. we have to think about areas where we would conduct a stabilization or we are either in opposition to the government. we have to have the flexibility in that regard. the grand a strategic meeting has to occur early in the nato-led,ether it is a u.n. coalition. that process of early leadership to determine from the very beginning as it begins or stabilization place in a process. it cannot be an afterthought. it cannot be something start to think about as we finally clear the first village.

i am sorry we went over just a couple of minutes. my apologies to the next panel. thank you for your contribution this morning. [applause] john: thank you very much.

>> ladies and gentlemen, good morning. while my colleagues are getting memselves miced up, let welcome you all to the second part of our this caption. -- discussion. i'm delighted to lead a conversation with a fantastic group appear. you have their full biographies, so i will give them brief introductions. van myally to my left is colleague andda, senior fellow here at the foreign policy program. in many places around the world where conflict organized crime and terrorism combined to pose major challenges to security and stability. next to her is jb.

as kernel is currently build an alumnus of the brookings institute. he was here in 2016-2017. he comes to us with three combat tours in afghanistan and one in iraq. a lot of relative experience and familiarity. you heard a little bit about the province where he was operating in afghanistan. to his left, delighted to welcome francis brown. after doingarnegie quite a bit of work in the u.s. administered -- u.s. government. she is now writing a work on

stabilization in syria, which is a topic i'm sure we will spend some time on over the course of our conversation. david young is the team lead for stabilization for the report your hand -- holding in your hand. he is an experienced analyst of governance and stabilization issues inside and outside the u.s. government. i am going to turn it over to david first. to clue us into the other findings and especially forward-looking lessons for the u.s. government on stabilization issues coming out of this report. laid out general sopko

one central finding this morning , that urgency and intensity, imperative to win control in contested areas let in many cases to stabilization operations where the preconditions for success were not there. there was too much violence. all,curious, first of where there pieces of success? what were the conditions for success? we can talk a little bit about this integrated military civilian toolkit that seemed so critical to successful stabilization. david: thank you for having us and for moderating. we found some of the critical agredients included willingness to collaborate among civilian and military officials, both afghan and coalition, a willingness for those

individuals on the ground to provide robust services, including what of limiting partners sometimes did with direct implementation, and that you had to have the right people in the right places. we had that in a few places. what we found most of all was stabilization efforts across the country mostly failed. we traced that to two critical issues. the first was we prioritize the most dangerous districts first. there was debate about this throughout the campaign. toe believed the best way sequence stabilization programming was to build out spots from relatively stable provincialuding capitals and work your way gradually toward more insecure areas. doing so would build momentum for that effort. was tried in 2006 and 2007, but mostly failed due to a lack of resources.

the idea was these were tipping point districts. if you go after the easier places, it paves the way for the harder places. by 2009, that model was flipped on its head. for the rest of the campaign, the idea became going after, prioritizing the most insecure parts of the country first with the hope that if you take the worst places out, it would create what is called a cascading impact into the lower hanging fruit areas and that the rest of the country would sort itself out if you took care of the most problematic areas first. unfortunately, what ended up happening and set up that cascading impact was we got bogged down in insecure areas. the inspector general highlighted, civil servants were afraid to work because of widespread taliban campaigns. civil servants that did work had trouble moving around in the country because of the danger of doing so.

and limiting partners had trouble implementing projects, etc.. these areas we prioritize were hopengerous we had little to convince the population they would be able to be protected when the drawdown eventually occurred. i want to emphasize these were areas that were so dangerous many of them had seen little to no governance in years. they needed more time to actually come around and except and adjust to a new sense of normal. there was no time. which brings me to the second critical decision. we drew down forces and civilians on timelines that were unrelated to conditions on the ground. if you remember, there was a surge from -- an 18 months surge from 2010 to 2011 and a transition period from 2011 to 2014. the obama administration had

good reasons for these time-based timelines. we had the financial crisis, and every dollar spent in afghanistan would be one less to spend on economic recovery. aere was a sense that prolonged surge would give senior u.s. military officials more room to request for more extensions and escalations down the road. finally, there was a sense that these open-ended timelines would -- would exacerbate afghan dependency on american aid. while these reasons were very good, we found they were just not good enough. the government in afghanistan simply cannot be reformed on the timeline in the scale we had envisioned. believing we could do so let us to make a number of critical compromises on programming, planning, and staffing that nearly guaranteed the effort would fail.

for instance, military planners in kabul had to change, had to come up with new objectives for the campaign plan to accommodate these new timelines. as the inspector general mentioned, usa have problems with staffing, but they were not alone. the department of defense had a civil affairs unit. they converted chemical warfare companies into civil affairs to lament their programs using four weeklong training cycles that were entirely powerpoint. village stability operations, another dod program, scaled quickly, unsustainably fast, because there was this pending cents at the end of a drawdown that would have to come. the clock was ticking and we had to make as much progress as we could. i wanted to highlight one last thing regarding the service delivery model. service --bout the

the hopes dashed hope that yoution occurred would convince the population government role was better. the same system which try to help the government provide, were far more ambitious than they needed to be, and poorly suited to the afghan context. the taliban mostly secured the support of the population through coercion. simple forced cooperation under threat of death. in theory, it should not require a great deal of social service delivery to win the hearts and beingof a population terrorized by the taliban. the bar should be low in those circumstances for winning them over. they are looking for a safe alternative. they are looking for essentially rudimentary law and order as a prerequisite to anything else we might provide them. it's not clear that this robust service delivery model was in many cases where

coercion was the main method for securing the population's support. places, the television actually went beyond coercion and provided limited service delivery specifically, security and dispute resolution. using that as a model, instead of us competing on the terms of the taliban, we tried to provide a diverse array of relatively advanced services, ranging from agricultural guidance to agricultural equipment to health care, education, that went well beyond what the television provided. cases, what the taliban had done to accrue legitimacy in the eyes of the population. in our eyes, instead of doing dispute resolution, or

programming along dispute resolution like the taliban was doing, we build courthouses. we trained prosecutors in fiercely contested districts because even though afghans found them unfamiliar, slow and corrupt. we did this despite the fact that 90% of afghans resolve their disputes through informal means, because according to one senior usaid official we talked to, we want to give them something they never had before. this was a chronic mismatch between what afghans find effective and occasionally legitimizing and what we want to provide them. it points to this need in our eyes to pinpoint what the governments's pitch should be based on what had been provided to them in the recent past it, and allow them to accrue that legitimacy. tamara: thank you. i think it is important to

's mandatehere, sigar is brought. what you have done in this lessons learned report is you are not only looking at and limitation. in many ways, what you have identified is -- yes, some failures of implementation. primarily a failure of design. a failure of the theory of the case of civilization in these circumstances. i want to turn to you for comments on precisely that point. one of the findings david just laid out is this idea that the u.s. set the bar too high. it was trying to provide governance at a level beyond where it should have been trying to compete with the taliban, which is about basic security. do you agree? wrecks absolutely. -- >> absolutely. i think there is a mismatch of

expectations and provinces. fundamentally, i agree with david. a key part of the taliban's entrenchment was fundamentally its ability to provide order. often very brutal order, but predictable order. i frequently encountered very similar narratives from people about the taliban and the relationship of television to the populations -- of the taliban to the populations. afghan people would say, we don't like taliban. but when the taliban were in power, you could travel from kabular to cobble with -- and nobody would rob you. printable brutality is easier to develop coping mechanisms then i'm stability -- instability.

what happened with the u.s. intervention was not that we provided far more ambitious governance. we promised far more ambitious governance. what we often provided was ms. governance by the afghan government and associated officials. the tremendous amount of corruption, unpredictable, and abuse that was partially conditioned by the fact we often take as our crucial partners, highly problematic warlords to him we relied because of the lack of u.s. troops, international troops. proved highly territorial toward populations, abusive, and unpredictable in their predatory behavior. minimizing access to markets for local populations, not simply resorting to imposing

a set of rules, but becoming very exclusionary as to how people could go about their lives. that a also posit crucial element is -- that applies in afghanistan, people often have far greater expectations of what a government should provide than what an insurgent group should provide. it is the classic rise of expectations with a different kind of entity to rule you. my view is not that we give them too much. we give them actually far less than they got under the taliban, but we promised far more. tamara: excellent summary. i have to ask you, as well, vonda, and we heard john allen pko earlier.ig so

how much of a problem is the afghan government yet the -- government? vanda: it is a fundamental part of the problem. this goes back to the relationship between pakistan and afghanistan. afghan people will tell you if pakistan was not across, there would be no problems in afghanistan. indeed, pakistan has been a complicated actor. no doubt about it. however, if there were good governance in afghanistan, the stabling effective pakistan would be far more limited than they have been. -- the ded it stabilizing affect of pakistan would be far more limited. people have expectations on how the government would deliver more printable governance, -- predictable governance. it has been a struggle for the

unity government with disappointment, unmet expectations, and because of a reduction in troops, continual reliance on highly problematic warlords, military powerbrokers as forces of delivery of governance i would highlight one other set of actors. more broadly, the afghan political class. it would be inappropriate to put the blame solely on the afghan government. a large part of afghanistan's continuing troubles is the fact the political class continues to see its role as constantly engaging in brinkmanship and rocking the boat of the state to gain privileges and engaging in political competition for

economic spoils, never coming together, even at times of great crisis and potential inflection points to put national interest and some sort of basic unity in place for govern is to take place. no one in afghanistan governance. people engage in politicking. you on i want to come to this question of expectations and shifting expectations. i have been thinking about this as well because the u.s. went through parliamentary elections very soon after the territorial defeat of isis in iraq, though there is work to do. one of the striking outcomes of that election was that in the areas that isis held the hardest for the longest, around mosul, there was the least sectarian voting. the most interest expressed in effective governance. in service delivery.

i'm curious whether what vanda is describing, does that ring true to you based on your experience? >> absolutely. thanks for having me. it is apparent i am successfully perpetrating academic fraud. [laughter] that's what we do. >> a citation management is a challenge from a strategic level. 2010rticular case study in in afghanistan worked there for a couple of reasons. i will not say it is a model for everywhere. i will close with the salient lessons learned for potential syria stabilization or other places the military and civilian apparatus would be involved. i will not go over the entire piece, you don't need that

thanks to david's great work. in 2010, we came in at the start of the surge in the strategy was to do counterinsurgency, of which the center of gravity are the people. winning them over. the people gravitate to the side or sides that are winning. at that time, to paraphrase a former speaker of the house, our politics is local. you want to have people connect to their district governments. everybody here gets their drivers license and most of their interaction with government at a local level. i don't think you go bang on the white house every day to get services. maybe you do. the same thing in any other country. you want the interaction to happen. we had 13 districts, only three of which were key district because they had most of the population. set two columnar's away from the capital, but it did not have anything going for

services. it was a transit route for insurgents and had been historically. the gateways to kabul. kabulhose provinces fall, has always fallen. those are the places they successfully fought the soviets. the soviets could never find purchase their. 2010, a similar situation. every terrorist group was out there from al qaeda, a local afghan taliban, the taliban leadership, all of it wants to take the region. you had sanctuary, the terrain, the capabilities. we in with lessons learned in afghanistan and iraq previously. this is a whole of government problem, not a military problem. there are things we can do to enable.

in the month we were there before the case you read about in the book, that was june 2010, i lost nine soldiers. the conditions were bad. there's a giant red arrow pressing on -- we had a suicide bombing ring we picked up by lock in that month. there was pressure everywhere. winning over the people was not going to work until we can set the conditions for that. it was that. -- bad. we got with our partners. we were so lucky to have them embedded with us. what i would call in military, arranger regiment. a precision, surgical, and they can make quick effects by synchronizing tactical teams on the ground. they are kind of an advance guard.

a very effective tool for us. we had a provincial reconstruction team that was civilian and military. eta folks there, department of agriculture folks. you can it -- you can integrate capability. later on, we had to go into more war, because we had to clear out significant threats the district. the military side of that was pretty effective because we were able to pull insurgents away over 30 days. the main effort and the integrated plan from the beginning was the ability for stabilization efforts, contracts, and the government to own the problem immediately. once hostilities ended, trucks were coming in. we had contracts prewritten. we had worked that out with the district governor, who had looked at where he could have employment and work for law

abatements that prevented flooding, for farm animals, we had veterinary capabilities, we did all of that immediately to show, we are here, we're going to stay. it helped the district governor was a former mujahedin. this gregarious, red bearded, hated the soviets. he thought there. he not only knew the players, both sides, he knew the terrain, and he knew -- he get great advice on how to meet expectations by under promising and over delivering. a key point. the end state, it was about integrated people. we were lucky. in the army we say it is always about leadership, people in the communication between. coming up to the operation, we had talked to elders in the valley. we got them to come in and say, we are here to help you. the face by in

members of the taliban who said, do not ask us to help you. this is our government. that was shocking, isn't it? they were getting some of those dispute resolutions in the valley. that is my partial land. no it's not. pay me a thousand rupees and i solve it right now. it's done. the acting government cannot compete. but the brutality element. beheading elders was too much. -- free thatdata up. some of the lessons learned are very applicable. the military plane is key from jump street. thatsistent plan over time is not going to wax and wane with political will. you have got to have rolling partners . you cannot have somebody who's going to pull out. you cannot have somebody who has one tell in the water.

-- toe in the water. this may not be replicable other places. you cannot want success more than the people do. you cannot want success more than the people you're trying to help. you can't do that. i can go on for days about examples. i will leave that bumper sticker there for you. persistence, competent dialogue. greg mortensen wrote a book called three cups of tea. that is incorrect. it is three gallons of tea. socializing all the time is part of it. the discussions before and after operations, when the military side is done, it continues. you are not just going to create a government. you guys got it. it's going to require systems and effort. they have to wanted to. seek out the true spheres of

influence. knowing the power brokers are key and essential. sometimes they are very hidden. we were challenged culturally understanding those differences and aspects. people who had gone into hiding because they were targets could pull people together when they wanted to. we had to find out what their motivations and incentives were. that was hard. the human mapping of what we do was very difficult. performance, and mr. sopko mentioned this, do not equal measures of success. handing out money as a measure of effectiveness is an incorrect measure. you are not successful. nobody asked for that. you pulled men out of the village during harvest season. the road looks great, there are pumpkins rotting in the field.

the road to. hell is paved with good intentions sometimes you're dealing with interactive human systems. a system of systems. you cannot predict how this is going to end. you have to be persistent. you can't drop in and leave. not just from a security standpoint, but the be there with the people you are helping to stabilize, your partners have to be the lead. they have to. everything is hard. it's hard all the time. many things are symbols but the simplest things are difficult. persistence pays off. we had a great series of partners. about,perations you read that first month we were there, nine soldiers i lost, i lost another eight between the two operations keeping the district stable. there is a cost to that.

memorial day is coming up. there will be a cost. you have to assess and analyze stabilization, the cost of human capital is real capital. you have to ask yourself, how does this end? tamara: thank you. i want to come back to this issue of integrating the military-civilian toolkit and how in washington we set that up for success. i think that's a key policy question for the future. francis, i want to bring this to you now. i know you have been thinking a lot about stabilization. it is something i have been working on with the world bank. one lesson they have taken away from their experience in places one iraq is less emphasis physical infrastructure, more emphasis on human infrastructure. is, they are not

well set up to do that sort of work. i think one of the great challenges in these environments is that human terrain is so shaped by conflict. you have a politics and economy of civil war. in afghanistan after decades of civil war in syria after nearly a decade of civil war, this gets entrenched. how do, especially when you are not working for a central government, like the syrian case, how can the united states or other outsiders do this work without reinforcing that warlordism and setting the conditions for conflict relapse as soon as we are gone? are you rewarding the guys who won with the most brutal tactics in their own local areas?

they have set up their own systems to sustain themselves in power, and you're saying, i now give you legitimacy with my money and investment. you know, and that is a deal that can break apart as soon as our money and investment are not there. >> that is so important, and that is a lesson that comes --ough with the lease and the recent syria experience in this report on the afghan experience. if we are thinking about stabilization, we need to be thinking about a realistic political and state. that's needs to be local and applicable, needs to pertain to the national government. in the outside case is made very clear, the afghan case, we had a transformative almost -- political and state in mind. it was clearly stated, but it had no bearing on the realistic

take,ne that change would the karzai government's and asness to perform, you say, local powerbrokers willingness to cede responsibility and accountability to the local level. our political desired end state in the afghan case was a real mismatch. in the syrian case we have a different mismatch ongoing on the realistic political and state, very much exacerbated by the economy. in the syrian case, our problem has not been -- our problem has been both we have not had a realistic stated political and state, or a clearly stated and state we're trying to stabilize toward. stabilization programs need to be in service of a broader goal. i would say in the syrian endeavor it has been a remarkable progression of not clearly stated end states.

in the ears -- early years we had a statement that was not backed up by security choices for many reasons. in that sense, it was not a realistic political end state. in the middle years it became unclear what our programs were stabilizing towards. out --a stated policy of of assad must go. i the same time from the u.s. standpoint, we prioritized the fight against isis. our revealed preference was in that direction. we saw this come through in the confusion on the ground within our stabilization programming at that point. actors,mpowering local in order to be responsive and advance a post-assad future? are we empowering the factors to enforce a counter-isis objective?

tamara: or are we just empowering the people who are good at fighting isis? frances: precisely. that begs moral hazards. there was a real line of clarity there. you really need clarity of of objective from every level in order to achieve the impact we want. the effect we want. the current day, stabilization programs are underway still. politicalless clear end state. there has been from the trump administration a revealed preference for the counter-isis side. former secretary tillerson stated a much more ambitious, going back to the lack of real -- a much more ambitious set of objectives for syria. since his departure, it is unclear what our actual objectives are. meanwhile, we are sending mixed signals.

the president himself has called into question our forces in eastern syria, backing up stabilization efforts as well as the actual programming. without a realistic political objective, i do not see any way of getting it around these exact challenges you mentioned of confusion and perverse incentives on the ground. tamara: i want to turn to this question of how to build a better effort. i think one of the big issues raised by the report is the insufficient capability on the civilian side. but also the primary recommendation of the report to the executive branch and congress is to compel the state department to take the lead across the area and develop a copperheads if, hold government strategy -- comprehensive, whole government strategy that somebody has got to direct. the capability problem, but also a leadership problem.

, was discussing this integrating the toolkit challenge with some colleagues last week, and one of them challenged us to say, what is a successful example of the united states ever fully integrating the toolkit on behalf of a major stabilization mission? i think when we add to that the political role question, a lot of people question whether this is something we can effectively do. i am curious for your thoughts on that. is there a successful mission you would point to and is this something you can't fix merely by developing a strategy, but you need somebody who is given congressional -- congressionally

allocated authorities, presidentially invested authorities across the interagency to direct that strategy and implemented, not just design it. i think in particular, the effort that was put into play after the fall of the berlin wall, obviously this was a very different circumstance. but congress and the administration mobilized the freedom support act. those new authorities and investments were developed by somebody who had congressional authority and a presidential letter to bring the interagency together. that office still exists in the state department, although i think that with all of those original authorities. ?o we need a stabilization czar i don't mean that in terms of title, but legal authority as well. vanda, do you want to start?

vanda: i guess i'm not fully comfortable with the term -- the example. the crucial reason is because our fundamental problem is not simply the lack of our coworker nation and the illusion of the government approach. i would say the crux of the problem far more is the cross purpose workings of our counterparts. when that was not an issue in germany, the german leadership had a very strong vision of what it wanted to achieve. it had a very strong commitment to integrate east germany. a vast amount of resources, and still, with three decades now no level of disparity we would see elsewhere. the crucial problem is not our

decisions. there are very big problem. the crucial problem is the local. there the was often highly rather than building an equitable state. anyave not developed roadmap as to how to go about it. we saw in the obama they struggled with it terribly in afghanistan. they would put pressure on karzai. karzai would sabotage and we would pull back. we would constantly be afraid if we lose any kind of conductivity -- connectivity. there have been real limitations with the government and what it had performed. the crux of the

problem. how do we get our local partners , despite all the rhetoric, the strategy of building local partners, the capacity to embrace the same political vision of good governance, inclusion, and equity. warlords,e build up the more we hand over military agreement, ironically, the more we are undermining that larger political. tamara: thank you. i take that point. i am not yet going to let go of the question of authorities and washington decision-making. david, let me ask, did you consider as you were developing the recommendations, whether congress might assign these authorities as a slate of? david: -- authorities

legislatively? this was david: already established and petered out. i think to your issue of, can it work ever, i have not seen any evidence it can. in these specific areas like , butam, iraq, afghanistan the issue of who should be in the lead in the interagency disputes, we recommend the state should be in the lead. the recent review also says they should be in the lead. usa's lead implementing partner and support their efforts. what is on paper is not always what is in practice. it is important to note the regional stabilization strategy was drafted by states. in theory, they were the lead drafter. the reason we are enforcing it again and again is once that

strategy made it down the channel to a country, state was and dod wasn kabul in control outside of kabuii -- kabul. the defense department is in charge of determining what stables -- areas need to be stabilized. that is one of the things that cause these risks. it comes back to resources. how can we, and sigar recommend ? we state be in the lead are recommending the revival of the civilian response corp. with necessary modifications. no effort could be let on the ground outside of kabul if it -- if it stood up the data strategy is launched rather than between the continuous operations. we feel it is important to establish these institutions so that we are prepared.

the military is accustomed to being prepared for the worst between contingencies. state and a are not given the political bandwidth or the resources to do anything between these wars. tamara: from a military perspective, yes, these are inherently political missions. everything you were describing about the work you are doing is politics. local politics. military's mission is counterterrorism. the mission that drove us there is counterterrorism. if you look at syria, that's even more prominent in ways that frances was saying. are there ways we can get past that fixation? col. vowell: the short answer is yes. the counterterrorism mission of going after networks in there

home areas, that is an aspect. what we were doing was counterinsurgency, the broader application of force in stabilization against insurgents who kept that region so unstable that transnational terrorist groups could have that purchase to project their extremism to other places. a military perspective, there is a role we have to play to enable stabilization to happen. did a greatreport job identifying what the military was trying to do too much of in the political environment. i saw that at my level. we were the only thing that could get a lot of things done at a tactical level. i don't think state ever reached 1000 officials in country, even during the surge. 120,000 multinational soldiers on the ground in the surge. numbers are going to

go toward the resourcing of security. we have to get better at that when we plan. how do we keep this strategy over time wherever we are? there was a great description of serious problems. there is no military answer. if we are to find the problem -- is important. you mentioned were has stabilization been successful. it was not fully rebuilding, but kosovo. ongoing mission. aspects, there are things that don't the destabilization model. we have not really done a good stabilization effort since japan. vanda: even bosnia is hardly settled. deeply unsettled elements. tamara: yes, although one must always make these judgments in

relative terms. good, i want to come back to you on this. first. on the issue of integrating toolkit? frances: such a challenge. i agree with david, the review provides a valuable definition of whose lane is hughes -- lane is whose. the state should provide a strategy. that very support -- much tracks with what those agencies would like to do. in most of these environments we have to ask, which part of the state? state is not a unitary actor. have many bureaucracies we a breakdown between regional expertise and functional. when you can see the stabilization mission, you have the ambassador who is chief of missions, is he devising strategy? which bureaus are support?

the stabilization folks or the regional folks? sometimes there is friction there. additionally, from the nsc perspective, having had the functional perspective, i can say the functional person at the nsa does not have the wherewithal to leave his efforts in every country under which we are undertaking stabilization. i think we're making progress things to reports like this and the stabilization assistance or be. -- review. i think it is always going to be challenging. tamara: you made the very worthy , that one of the key challenges is persuading the governments of these places to embrace a different model of -- seeing thet government as a mechanism for patronage and division of spoils is a recipe for continued instability.

guess, number one i want to challenge that a little bit. i think we see cases, lebanon is one, where the division of spoils works very effectively to give all of those parties an incentive not to conflict. it is not great in terms of delivering government services. civil society has developed alternative mechanisms to meet its needs, including the patronage system. but it works. is that so bad if you can get to that place? maybe that is ok to get to that place from warlordish division of spoils. the second question is, if you are sitting in front of the afghan political elites, what is the case you make to them that persuades them that shift is

worthwhile? one.: that is a tough that is what u.s. foreign-policy has struggled with. the case i have tried to make is ist the level of instability too high for it to remain stable. in fact, the conversation i have had often involves my interlocutors pointing out, look at nepal. yes, nepal has got out of the civil war, the country is deeply troubled. governance is paralyzed and dysfunctional. division of services is not equipped. but you do not have a very potent insurgency at the same time. the level of frivolity and spoils you can extract at the time of peace is very different from when you have insurgency.

to me, a crucial inflection point that was missed -- the current this province, including the capital city. the taliban looked like they were going to take over another province to the north very quickly. there was panic among the afghan elite with many people ready to go out of the country. everyone was liquefying assets. ultimately, with u.s. effort, the taliban was pushed out from kunduz. .hey kept it for several weeks what there was a moment when the afghan elite was really shook

up, the system was coming to a clash. that was an opportunity to say it will all fall apart if you start behaving differently. of, --ickly, that moment dissipated. the same behavioral patterns that in. it is this inflection point i blame -- one of the most -- i would identify as one of the most distressing once. the spoils are shrinking in afghanistan to be divided. with the former more limited u.s. presence in international presence, the amount of money to be handed out is less, and otherwise it is smaller. the afghan economy is doing better, but it is nowhere near where it was in 2010. there is limited opportunity to divide the same amount of

spoils. , theretake poppy out won't be many spoils to divide at all. it is not simply the taliban that is critically involved in poppies. it is everyone in afghanistan, including political elites as well as the population. if you get rid of the ,nternational money and poppy what is there to divide? my final point is a crucial problem is that unfortunately, thelaces like afghanistan, way out is not just the taliban in large houses and prep -- property. who in the elite doesn't? the problem is they can leave and the people cannot. you can play politics to the brink thinking is not going to fall, it's not going to go into the abyss. it's not going to go into civil

war. canthe moment it does, you evacuate your family. if they did not have that escape route, it would encourage better behavior. my last comment is next year's presidential elections. tamara: it is time to open up this conversation to all of you. i'm going to follow my boss' lead, which is always wise, which is to ask you to identify your self briefly before you ask your question. i did post that word in the singular. please restrict yourself to one question. you can directed to one member of the panel or the panel in general. >> thank you very much. i am an afghan american journalist. you have covered so many aspects it's going to be hard to keep

this question focused. i guess i will start with the notion that i heard about afghans -- the elite having the opportunity to pick up and leave. your commentary really summarized what has been the trouble of what was earlier termed the elephant in the room. i'm going to speak to you as an afghan now, not just as a journalist. having watched this saga unfold since i was nine years old, watching the palace be bombed, while the west is on the brink russia, rivalry with is trying democracy to survive in the midst of being --trayed at least by your

staged to look like -- we are in the context of afghanistan talking about that situation. you have just spelled out that the elite could just pick up and leave. it seems like in the most modern corners of the world, and this leads to democracy, rivalry is well and alive. as this administration makes more clear, what is its stance toward afghanistan, while afghans are glad to see more commitment toward afghanistan, afghans are very anxious about what will become of their country. with new rivalries, people are even more anxious about what this means.

when will the u.s. reduce its involvement there, especially when we are talking as experts about how much we should in the problem over to the locals. are a political system that on our own, tends to prioritize the short term over the long-term. all of the lessons emerging from the report from our conversation today are the need for long-term viewpoints, persistence, strategic planning, sustained efforts. think theredo you is today in the u.s. government, having been through these last 15 years, do you think there is sufficient well within the government, recognition within the government, of the need to keep our hands on afghanistan?

how do we make the case to the american people that we need to sustain that effort? who wants to pick that up? frances: i think, as you say, what we have learned from the last 15 years is the need for persistence is the need to instate pretty debility. -- predictability. that has been learned. we did see the new south asian strategy come out last august that did layout a commitment to afghanistan. i did not work on that strategy. that is out there, and i think it is a striking articulation of long-term commitments. i do think we need to continue to push on this issue. but we have learned in the afghan case and the syrian case and the iraq case is we need to and state predictability. it doesn't matter if we have a

surge where democracy seems to be doing better. people make their calculations based on what they think the rules will be next year and the year after that. in situations in which they are not sure about that question, they will hedge and they will board. d. hoar i do think we have learned this lesson. learning is always the easy part. implementation is the hard part. maybe it is too soon to tell. tamara: let me make this forward-looking as well. given the lessons emerging from afghanistan, should the u.s. government think harder before taking on new missions in new places? >> yes. [laughter] from a military perspective i don't have those opinions.

we are still maintaining a security environment for the world order with a lot of allies and partners every day. what we do asant an armed force across the globe to maintain what we did decades ago. the more that happens, that we continue to do that, it drains resources, it drains other capabilities. our secretary of defense within the same thing. that is the cost of doing business. if we are engaged, we are engaged with allies and partners and that's good. there are reasons to do that. but every time something flares up, you make decisions. reasoned decisions with long-term view, or is it trying to deal with the 50 meter target? , would argue the armed forces the military does not have a great track record of getting the next conflicts right every time.

probably because we don't have a long-term view and we don't integrate the factions of national power. i.r. number -- i remember president clinton said we would be -- for years. there is reasons why. that comes at a cost. we have to weigh cost-benefit of weighing, will we be there longer than anticipated? what will the cost be? tamara: others? david: in undertakings report we things,o accomplish two or midway through we started realizing these were critical objectives. that was to raise bright red flags for the enormous investments necessary to even consider making progress in these environments so that there would be a one-stop shop of a document we could look at 20 or

30 years from now when we are considering the next big one. in the event that deliberations unfold, the idea is they can see -- and have a better sense of what exactly it would take and whether it is worth it, to be able to ask that question, is it worth it? even though if everything goes well and everything in our control we are able to affect beneficially, there is still uncertainty. with those risks, if and when they decided to pursue another long-term stabilization mission, a large-scale stabilization mission like iraq or afghanistan, the second objective comes the play, which is, how do you go about doing it? what are the best practices? the ways in which everything from a strategic level of

considering the will of the all the way down, watching how the dominoes fall down to the tactical level of how do you cluster projects to make sure service delivery isn't a collection of one offs? so they raise a real sense of service being provided and continuous engagement with the government. botheport we hope serves purposes of a giant red flag for caution as well as come if you pursue this, here are some ideas to how for how to go through it. >> here is a framework. anything else? throat coldant to water on the astral cold water on the discussion, but i am not persuaded the white house is as committed to long-term persistence in afghanistan as what it -- was announced. i think the white house was deeply conflicted last summer in how there were a lot of tensions

in how the decision would be see signs of headed to and we are a potentially difficult situation with presidential elections that will either a lot of thinking on our side about how we want to handle that. do we want to have a replay of 2014, including the role of u.s. intervention in getting the national unity government set up and all the problems that followed, or do we want a prolonged political crisis and what does that mean for u.s. engagement? why don't we go right in the middle, the gentleman in the blue time. where is our microphone? i'm james brody, active-duty army officer. there seems to be a reoccurring theme, the need to redefine the id, of the triad of usa, a

the state department, and the army. what are some of the lessons learned that can redefine the work together? i'll start off. my opinion is the military does a good job of collect and lessons learned and we beat ourselves up. open, didng center is you follow tech the -- tactics, techniques? it doesn't end. andrun through the tape prepare for war. specific to afghanistan's stabilization, there are a bunch of ar's that came out that are helpful and if i can, what i see inside the military right now is we have challenges, four plus one, the strategy articulates the does -- same kind of threats, regional actors and the

power competition is coming back , but the military is not running away from the middle completely,th asia just focused on that. we have inculcated the lessons learned. my father's generation coming out of vietnam, we didn't do that so well. we didn't take some of the regional experiences. we were cracking open the books after 9/11. we were cracking them open. in 2002, going wow. i think we have done a better job from a military perspective. we have done a better job of doing that and we aren't throwing everything out. onis a lot more platform platform, cyberspace, there is still in surgeon stuff going on, somebody trying to integrate asymmetric three -- threat into your organization. it is not just combat, there is a whole human network and that

is one of the lessons learned from iraq and afghanistan. >> quickly from the civilian standpoint, i served in afghanistan. the technical level, the coronation and integration goes really well. a challenge is, further up the chain, there are divergent chains of command, many people to coordinate above that and that could lead to minute -- miscommunication. there are fewer civilians to do the coordination at each level. there is a lot of organizational challenges that come to the four -- fore. >> the side of the room, and yes ma'am. >> my name is karen johnston, i teach at au. i am very happy to hear the discussion about the

stabilization of systems review, which was quite a challenge because it codified the division of labor, but the really challenge is going to be now trying to implement it and that is going to take a lot of time through congress, trying to rebalance the asymmetry in resources and the demands the state department will have. cso, buthe history of my question is -- this will take a long time in trying to redirect the resources to enable that division of labor to be effective in our coalition. in the interim, what can be done? i know there has been discussion and sometimes very small exchange of resources from dod to the state department to do some stabilization

efforts. for example, we could see whether the television of labor -- deliberation happens in our material support limitations, let's say the danish government or other governments do not have those kind of legal limitations or authority. what can we do in the interim, tactically or very specifically while we try to work on the very heavy lifting of convincing congress to give more money, etc.? workw do we do the stopgap on the civilian side while making that case for bigger civilian capabilities and is there a role that coalition partners can play in that? francis? >> i think you very well laid out the challenges and review and the interagency effort underpinning it is moving to the implementation plan and they realize.

you always need a proof of concept and your idea to start smaller is helpful. we need to look at aspects in which maybe this division has been tried or is being tried. the other thing i think, and maybe a lower hanging fruit, we need to think of how we monitor and define success on stabilization. know, metrics drive how we operate in the u.s. government and outside of it. in themean by that is stabilization setting, in afghanistan and syria and elsewhere, we have edged toward looking at a femoral indicators rather than durable, lasting indicators. we have graduated -- gravitated toward anecdotes for success rather than a more systemic evaluation endeavor. , during thean

height of the surge, we saw a couple of district that really turned it around on the stabilization front and we would hear about these constantly. areas in which there was genuine success from a governance stabilization standpoint. the problem was that these particular fact is in these areas didn't always generalize to the broader effort. they also didn't necessarily last beyond a couple of rotations or that particular governor who may have been assassinated or reassigned. we gravitated anecdotes and looked to indicators. in afghanistan, we made great progress on tracking atmospheric, local attitudes toward district governments, but none of that told us if the government was willing to be centralized and reform.

are we making lasting ross s? -- process -- progress? in syria, we have seen progress in global consul dynamics, these very granular level. these have been meaningful indicators during the stabilization effort, but tragically in the syrian case, they don't necessarily affect the outcome of the stabilization effort and in the syrian case, it is military factors that affect whether a local council gets to stick around or not. saying all by way of that if we are going to start on the implementation side, we need to re-looked at how we are defining success and measuring it has the bureaucratic's will move backwards from there. who'll just add as someone ran a program at the state department's and had to make that case to congress -- i think the development field has moved a long way. way inas come along

developing monitoring and evaluation. case,an make a persuasive but a lot of it does default to the compelling narrative, the great anecdote. example of a provincial governor who is the best partner ever and we can put more money into that place. part of the problem is what persuades congress. the best social science in the world is not necessarily the story that brings them home. in the syrian case, because we lacked the unified u.s. codified u.s. government political and state, we had different components of the u.s. government persuading conference -- congress in different ways. in times of uncertainty, the government hordes like anyone else. some of our own bureaucratics

exacerbate that. >> right here in front. thank you very much. alexander kravitz from inside. stabilization hard lessons learned. if we were having this meeting kabul, and mainly an afghan audience, what with the reactions be to the report? discussedus, have you with them and gotten feedback? among our many interviews, we interviewed 20 senior afghan officials, senior and mid-level from ministers to provincial governors to program managers involved in stabilization efforts. their quotes and feedback are

littered throughout our report. david: in the process of interviewing them, we shared our findings with them. 20 people sprinkled across the government are represented. their perspective was often that the u.s. government did not pay enough attention to their , that they overestimated their ability to institute reforms and that they misunderstood afghan core capacity for willful bad intent. was in 2010am, it and meant to be the program that deployed civil servants to key terrain districts so they could have the people there to provide services necessary to stabilize the district, even the concept of stabilize a she. over time, there was a hand

receipt process that dbp was using that meant that when a district government official needed to buy a cable for the office or something, the receipt for that was handwritten -- receipted and not distributed to get back to kabul and as these hand receipt process is built up, there were $700,000 it was interpreted as misallocation of funds and 2.3 the program down after million were dispersed out of 40 million intended. this is one example and probably the most egregious capacity fortion willful corruption and it was difficult for foreigners coming into a country, even bright government employees to discern core capacity for corruption and this

was one of the casualties in that battle. -- that points to a significant gap in the expectations and communication of the people implementing it on the ground and in cabell -- kabul with afghans whose support was vital to the effort. >> did you want to chime in on that at all? , we have only got a few minutes left the knife -- and i see a lot of hands. i will collect a few questions and come back to our panel. wait for the mike, if you would. from late 2010 to early 2012, i worked for state at embassy kabul, as the government entity pop -- policy chief. my question is to david as the author of the report and france

s, an operational question as distinct from strategic or tactical. i think chapter five of the report provides an excellent case study of a couple of the key challenges we face with stabilization. first, the initial focus on levels of government on focusing our governments strengthening ,ffort at levels of governance namely districts, that were not sustainable in the medium-term and secondly, the common problem of bureaucratic inertia that prevented all of the different parts of the u.s. effort, different elements of the civilian effort and military effort, from focusing on it. for making the shift away from districts, which might have made sense from a stabilization inspective, the difficulty

making a clear and coherent policy decision on what is a pretty straightforward question of whether we should be focusing our governments efforts at district level or at the provincial level which has giant our difficulty in making a decision like that a argument against stabilization as a whole and if not, is there something more that could be done to strengthen our ability to coherently make policy decisions like that? i suspect it is more likely to be higher headquarters in embassy kabul versus washington, but i leave it to you. >> hang onto to that question, guys, we will collect a fee more. -- few more. >> i am with the dod ig's office. you mentioned in syria, the evolving and state and how that affects what you are stabilizing toward.

what is the end state in afghanistan? what is being stabilized towards? is it realistic, how do you walk back the promises and expectations that are unrealistic and unachievable? >> thank you. i am from the afghan chamber of commerce. the contractors who work to support these missions and you want a near full, sit down with a contractor and you'll find out a lot of the problems but going back to what the kernel mentioned in vietnam and the courts program and we did have in bobilization spare who controlled, i wonder if that could be repeated because in many ways, it was successful? >> thank you, and let's take one more on the aisle here. >> thank you. am a retired former vice president at the world bank

group. i know nothing at all about and , but the lessons i learned this morning sound very logical, rational, very sensible. i wouldn't be surprised if i had heard them 10 years ago. 12 years ago. i am very surprised that i am in yearthese lessons 15, 16, or 17. ist comes through to me something must be terribly wrong to be listening -- listing these lessons in 17. my question is, if you had one or two things that you want done so that we don't have these lessons in five years time, what should they be? questions a fantastic to end on. i will go straight down the line that at thed take

end. i think that will be a great note to wrap this up. one comment about the end state in afghanistan. i don't think we have defined the end state, i don't think it has been defined. there was an announcement that there are no timelines, that the process of u.s. engagement will be condition-based. with very little articulation of what conditions were. madect, president trump many statements to the effect, we will not tell the afghans how to run their state, we don't care about the politics, our goal is to degrade the taliban. which were notions that both the george w. bush administration and obama administration flipped back and forth. requirebilization he credible governance or is it enough to kill enough of the terrorists and taliban?

subsequently, after the president's comments, many top u.s. officials were walking them back and re-emphasizing the need for government and emphasizing the need for politics. nonetheless, the message was heard loud and clear and -- in afghanistan and still has consequences today. also, we have been flirting back and forth all the time on what is the importance of the taliban being part of the negotiations? months, we have gone back and forth on is the purpose of the military effort in afghanistan to drive the taliban into negotiations. the president and various officials have made quite contrary statements. the taliban itself is making very contradictory statements. our strategy in afghanistan is waiting for the taliban to make mistakes. we're holding the bag.

if we go out, full-scale civil war takes place. however, we don't really have a strategy to break out of it, so we are holding and hoping that over time, the taliban will make enough mistakes. that is not impossible. militant groups do themselves in, they do make mistakes. critical mistakes were made in colombia at the height of power. those mistakes alone are not sufficient without critical changes taking place on the part of the colombian state, but nonetheless, the mistakes were crucial. nonetheless, we are in this mode -- what would shake up the mode is what happens to the political situation after the presidential elections next year. >> thank you. came --e stabilization

think there is a role, it could be a more powered , but theepresentative challenge you will run into strategically is you have 50 nations involved, particularly in afghanistan. there is a multinational component, a nato command component to it in the foreseeable future. --tead of having one person having one person integrate that is a supreme challenge, the way we set up his byzantine architecture to bring in alliances and it has evolved over time and particularly in afghanistan. that alone is a challenge for one person to pull together, but in concept, absolutely. what we do with the courts program was to set stabilization zones throughout the country. of problems, sanctuaries in laos and cambodia, sanctuaries in afghanistan.

support from outside agencies and the compliant population, but until we can control those outside factors, stabilization will take longer. it is an open dynamic, human-based system of systems. fundamentally, someone could as long as the administration and the congress gives them the ther, him or her capabilities to pull that together. oppositionrationally -- optimistic that you would get a better approach because that person has been empowered to do so. frances: thank you for the question on focus on district level, why the focus and what could we have done to alter that? district levele came from an analytic proposition, which was that afghans encounter their government mostly at the local level, helping the government be more accountable at the local level will undermine the driving factors of the insurgency.

the districtus on level came from a romantic notion that things were simpler .n the local level i think those didn't hold up and that perpetuated some of the reasons. out, theghtly point right focus would have been at the middle level of government. getting the provinces right, there are 34 of them, there are almost 400 district. getting that level first would have been a much better way to go. why couldn't we correct midcourse? this comes back to bureaucracy. i am glad it got brought up in reference to vietnam. iraqote a piece called " receipt does its thing again" because i think a lot of our inability to course correct when many sharp people around hadrnment were pointing out to do with our own bureaucratic

structures. in terms of what lessons, we keep returning to the lessons in 2018, what should we take away? a key recommendation of mine is read the reform -- report. syria think about the context in relation to the report in afghanistan, i am struck by the fact that these are different paradigms. these are different conflicts. afghanistan conflict was a stabilization campaign under a counterinsurgency logic. we were extending the legitimacy of the government. the syrian effort is a counter-counterinsurgency effort . in the afghan case, there is a binary logic, government versus insurgency and in syria, we have a quadrilateral logic or pentagonal logic. we have the assad government with armed extremist groups, we

want to marginalize the iranians and the russians. complex dynamic and yes, for all those differences between the two conflicts, what i take away from this report is that huge similarities within our own government to address these efforts. i think in that sense, our best lesson is to focus a little more on our own organization and our own bureaucratics and read the report. >> with that, we will turn to discussed, --as has been there since the get-go and this is not the first report. this is one that is getting a lot of attention for reasons i think frances highlighted. the can you say about sequencing and how we think about getting the lessons we process?y in the

david: getting the lessons early, a lot of lessons were coming out early on and we document them. -- the that problem was problem with learning early on is the nature of the war changed so much that any lesson you might want to impose on the effort became moot shortly thereafter because of new strategies, new agendas, taliban researched, etc. , also wanted to touch regarding stabilization's role with cigar, we think it is auspicious this report coming out now because of the issues being discussed around syria and u.s. government's new concerted effort to delineate roles regarding stabilization. it allows us to hopefully be able to provide enormous case study of what implement in

stabilization looks like at a large scale while the assistance review can provide the small-scale scope and the beginnings of a small-scale stabilization focus. it provides that balance. a couple of other things on what jeremiah had said, if i could finish within those. for those of you who haven't gotten chapter five yet, the provincial level was often bypassed in terms of on budget --istance and the reason there are interesting reasons for that. as francis mentioned, the district level became the focus but the district themselves only budgetso $20 monthly and it was completely unrealistic to try and push on budget assistance down to the district level. one of the most difficult issues with doing that was that according to senior officials we

spoke to, the best part about pushing resources down to the district level was it enabled the government to bypass the political entrenchment at the provincial and national levels and while understandable, bypassing the issues where all of the obstructions are happening is exactly the wrong way to go about it. wherethose obstructions the most reform is necessary. there were many examples of this throughout the campaign of working around afghan government structure problems to accommodate whatever priorities were on our plate on that given day. thank you for bringing the report to us today, for giving us the opportunity for fantastic conversation. folks, i hope you will enjoy me -- join me in thanking our fantastic panel. [applause] to be continued, thank you very much.

>> c-span's washington journal. --c-span's "washington journal," live with news and policy issues that impact you. discussesg reporter the latest coming out of the u.s.-chain of trade and james and deborah talk about their book "our town." "washingtonatch journal" live at 7:00 eastern this morning. join the discussion. monday morning, watch our special world war i centennial.

the u.s. and france 1918, live at 9:00 a.m. eastern on c-span's washington journal and american history tv on c-span3. ,ur guest is edward lingle author of "thunder and flames: americans in the crucible of combat, 1970-1918." we will look back to key battles in northeastern france where american army soldiers and marines saw their first major comment on the western front and more than 10,000 americans died, were wounded or went missing in the area. watch world war i centennial, u.s. and france 1918 memorial day starting at 9:00 a.m. eastern on c-span's washington journal and on american history tv on c-span3. appearing before the senate foreign relations committee, secretary of state mong pao -- mike pompeo discussed the cancellation of a meeting with between president trump and kim

jong-un. he took questions about diplomatic security and the president's financial interest abroad. senator bob corker chairs this three and a half hour hearing.