Why Are We Failing Failing States?
Leveraging US Strength in an Uncertain World
Stanley Foundation Conference on National and Global Security
Washington, DC,
Thursday, December 7, 2006
Much has been written and discussed about failed states from force structure questions to "getting better at reconstruction" and lessons learned. Despite the fact that everyone acknowledges the importance of security issues associated with failed and failing states, why is it that the United States and the international system can‘t seem to do what everyone acknowledges needs to be done? The purpose of this discussion is to take a step back and identify what is/are the underlying dynamic(s) that is/are creating a massive global public policy disconnect and propose solutions for breaking the impasse.
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Post–Panel Summary
The following summary of the panel "Why Are We Failing Failing States" was drafted by Tony Fleming. It has not been approved or reviewed by the panelists.
Sarah Cliffe (World Bank), Richard Lacquement, Jr. (US Army) and Anatol Lieven (New America Foundation) discussed their respective experiences in addressing the US interest in addressing the question of failing or fragile states. For the purposes of the discussion, such states were defined as those in which the national government is unable or unwilling to fulfill its obligations to its citizens, including security and basic services.
Cliffe noted that the World Bank has recognized the importance of links between diplomatic, economic, other approaches to dealing with fragile states. Three–quarters of such states have been affected by conflict, and in the last 20 years these states have made little progress. In addition, the World Bank has discovered that the impact is not isolated to the state in question–that being a neighbor of a fragile state results in an average decline of 1.6% in a country‘s GDP.
A significant obstacle to addressing fragile states is the necessary coherence between diplomatic, security, and development approaches. Until recently, organizational mandates and interests have precluded coherent engagement between international actors. Each viewed the other as either slow to act, uncoordinated and impractical, politically naïve, or too focused on quick fixes and exit strategies.
Recognizing that the core economic and development competencies cannot be conducted in isolation from the wider peace and security spheres, there has more recently been improved efforts at coherence though close collaboration between the diplomatic, security, and development communities. Increased attention is still needed to supporting unified recovery strategies, ones that provide for security–development linkages and development planning that also addresses political governance sectors.
This goal is a central principle as the UN Peacebuilding Commission (PBC) works to strengthen integration of political and security issues with economic development. Focusing on the results on the ground, the PBC will encourage development of integrated nationally owned transitional recovery strategies that incorporate peacebuilding issues.
Regional organizations often have a comparative advantage in dialogue on sensitive political, security, and economic governance issues. In fragile situations with weak reform leadership, regional organizations have a strong interest at stake and a better understanding of conditions on the ground and can be well positioned to lead dialogue. For this reason, capacity–building within regional organizations and outreach to non–OECD donors is key.
To ensure more effective policy implementation, the World Bank considers it essential that recovery strategies are nationally owned and focused on institution–building. Strategies must include buy–in from all major international partners, as no one partner can go it alone and expect the others to accept the results. A clear operational plan to meet peacebuilding goals is crucial in any peace–support operation, and development approaches need to vary depending on governance and conflict context. Practical joint activities can bring different capacities together, such as border and customs, and the use of engineering capacities for physical reconstruction.
Funding needs to be available quickly and flexibly and governments must be willing to make long–term commitments. Recent research shows increased risk following post–conflict elections. There is a need to resolve inequities in post–conflict assistance (peacekeeping budgets and aid flows) between countries.
Richard Lacquement addressed development from the viewpoint of military operations. Until recently, the task of rebuilding fell to the military which, looking around, found themselves in a role that would be more effectively fulfilled by civilian actors. Rebuilding efforts are not just a matter of problems to be solved, but understanding the aims to be accomplished, from our point of view and from others who may not agree. What we want to accomplish and what the local population thinks we‘re there to do must be kept in mind.
An important consideration is to determine, when you go in, the level of commitment you are willing to make. Are you willing to accept high costs over a period of time, understanding that such protracted efforts are hard to maintain in the face of ambiguous aims. The ability to sustain such efforts relies in large part to the sense that the effort is meeting a security interest, such as the development efforts in Germany in the face of a potential Soviet threat to Western Europe. Likewise, there needs to be a clear picture on the overall policy aims of intervention and rebuilding, how long the effort will take, and how much it will cost. Though the rhetoric often suggests a goal of liberal political outcomes, it may be necessary to make concessions on some goals rather than pursue unlimited aims (such as regime change). Once security becomes less of an immediate factor, or missions take on a more humanitarian or moral purpose, staying power is harder to maintain politically.
Whether we are engaged in nation rebuilding (in which former institutions are utilized) or nation building (in which new institutions are introduced) is a significant distinction. Reconstruction of Germany and Japan followed the former model, whereas the United States has engaged in the latter in Afghanistan and Iraq. In this regard, Iraq is more similar to the US Civil War than World War II with outside forces attempting to impose new institutions or cultural practices on a population that is resisting to the best of their ability.
What this all leads to, suggest Lacquement, is a better understanding of reality as to what conditions exist on the ground in fragile states with a humility and willingness to carry out the necessary efforts. For this reason, the military‘s approach to one–size–fits–all is not an effective approach. The military recognizes that in many ways rebuilding efforts are beyond their expected roles and support a greater integration of diplomacy with military action. Working with international institutions and major regional powers is seen as increasingly essential and needs to be pursued where possible.
Anatol Lieven noted that the ability of the United States to rebuild fragile states and offer development aid is far reduced from its level during the days of the Marshall Plan. There is a strong need for prioritization, not only in terms of American political limitations but also in terms of morality. This is particularly true when it comes to the use of military forces, and underscores the importance of getting others to contribute to the efforts. An example of success in this regard is that of Australia‘s leadership in East Timor; similar outreach will likely need to be applied for North Korea, drawing in Japan and South Korea in reconstruction and development efforts.
There are a number of key requirements to keep in mind for our efforts in Afghanistan. First, our efforts there must be taken within a regional context. Secondly, we must think in a very long time frame. When talking about creating a state out of nothing, we‘re talking about a generation at least if we are to have, not even a democratic but a minimally secure Afghanistan. If we are willing to think in those terms, we may be able to think about achieving some long–term goals.
Third, for states that have collapsed utterly, we may have not any choice but to use our own military cadres, especially if there is ongoing violence. In such dire situations, there may also not be functional institutions to assist in the recovery efforts, and our own forces will be required if aid is to get where it is needed.
Lastly, we need to keep in mind an extension of the Pottery Barn rule: if we go into a country and take over, we have to take its interests first, even when those interests may conflict with our own. The Afghan leadership recognizes that recovery and stability will involve a relationship with Iran, to which we‘re opposed. Similarly, the US policy on opium in Afghanistan may need to be reconsidered in light of the country‘s interests.
Panel Transcript
This text has been professionally transcribed; however, for timely distribution, it has not been edited or proofread against the tape.
Julia Taft: My name is Julia Taft, and I was asked to by the Stanley Foundation to chair this, which I am very pleased about. Although, after this morning‘s discussion on terrorism I thought maybe we ought to – we‘d all do better just having a bunch of Prozac, but now we‘re not. We‘re talking still about very serious issues this afternoon in terms of this session. So I – I want to congratulate the Stanley Foundation for being willing to take on, yet again, a provocative conference. They have actually been at the forefront of many other provocative conferences on multilateralism and the UN. Now the zeroing in on the responsibility and in this case the United States to be part of a responsible member of the international community is something that is quite interesting and timely.
The title of our panel today is why is the US Failing, Failing States, and, of course, this title assumes that we are failing, failing states, and we hope to find out whether you think that‘s true and our panelists think that‘s true. They will each provide their own perspective on this, and also to discuss many of the tensions that do exist when we try to talk about US foreign policy and the issue of failing states.
We – just early today the anniversary of both Pearl Harbor and the Stanley Foundation were highlighted. We‘re also highlighting today the Iraq Study Group and much has been discussed about that. Iraq is a failing state, and I think it really exemplifies how complicated it is to know what the hell to do, and we have this new bipartisan effort to look at it, but it‘s not enough to say the US is failing or it may be failing, failing states. The critical question is what do you do about it and how do you get that kind of guidance.
There are other tensions that I hope our panelists will explore and I hope you too in the discussion period, for instance, the issue of the balancing short and long term objectives. Again, we talked this morning about the long view, the institutions after World War II that the US created, and we stayed with them. We stayed with Bretton Woods. We‘ve stayed with NATO. We‘ve stayed with our commitments over the long term, and we‘re talking 50, 60 years. I don‘t know if anybody feels we‘re taking a 50 or 60 year horizon now, and I think that‘s one of the questions that we‘ll want to explore.
Another one of the tensions it seems is value oriented. One is appalled, outraged by Darfur but is there the political will to do anything about it and how do you marshal that is a real tension. Another tension that comes up so frequently is that we and other member states pride so well the fact that there are existing boundaries and existing sovereignty for other states, and yet many of those states may in fact not be – may have had borders imposed by conquering authorities or through colonial times, and I think we have to look at whether the international sovereign state is part of what helps make countries fail.
You know the definition was not, I think, put in the program, but the definition that all of our speakers were given of a failing state is one in which the national government is unwilling or unable to fulfill it‘s obligations to it‘s citizens including security and basic services. But in that definition unable and unwilling are two really very different aspects, and we all know that the unwilling states are the ones that cause the most problem, but those that are unable are unable to do it because they have huge debt. They have huge poverty. They have little capacity for governance. They have few natural resources and little infrastructure. Those can be dealt with in a fairly straightforward way, but the unwilling states are ones I hope we can explore more today.
Prevention, of course, is something that I also hope we can discuss at great length. It does seem to be quite interesting about who – what is the US responsible for. Is it our responsibility to help engage and lead in the emulation of situations that may create failing states? Do other countries expect us to take that responsibility? Do we expect to take that responsibility? These are questions, I think, are not – there wasn‘t a poll done – I should talk to Steve Tull about this – about who thinks it‘s out responsibility, but, in fact, there is an impression internationally that we should be constructing; we should be engaged, and the real trick is trying to figure out how do we do it.
We have three wonderful panelists today who are going to help give some insights on this and what I have asked be done is that each presenter speak for about ten to fifteen minutes, and then I‘ll give five minutes for their comment on the other panelists and we‘ll open it up for questions.
We‘re going to start with Sarah Cliffe. Sarah Cliffe is the head of the post conflict – it‘s not called post conflict.
Sarah Cliffe: Fragile states.
Julia Taft: Fragile States. That‘s rights. Fragile states at the World Bank. I‘ve had the opportunity to work with her for years on low income countries under stress and Afghanistan and Iraq and Sudan and many other places, and she‘s been the focal point for trying to bring together much of their instruments, perspective and expertise of the World Bank in trying to figure out how to deal with the post–conflict situations.
And she will be followed by Colonel Richard Lacquement. Did I do it right?
Richard Lacquement: Close enough.
Julia Taft: Lacquement who is a colonel in the US Army. He‘s actually in South Korea now, just moved there on assignment a couple of months ago, but he is, in fact, a strategist with a lot of J5 planning, did Operation Iraq Freedom as a strategist in the Department of Defense, and he will be focusing on the issue of the military implications for whether we‘re helping limit failing states.
And, finally, Anatol Lieven who is former senior associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, he is a writer. He is an academic author of many different books, and you‘ll read them in your brochure for this, and we‘re very pleased to get this kind of perspective of an academic practitioner.
Anatol Lieven: Actually, most of my experience has been as a former journalist.
Julia Taft: Okay. Well, you learned a lot though. That‘s what academics do. But to all three people have been on the ground in these situations over the years and will, I‘m sure, give us a very refreshing and hopefully some practical ideas about what does one do to set priorities to figure out when is it best and in what way to assist in our responsibility for failing states.
So with that let me introduce first Sarah. Why don‘t you begin, and then we will go from there. Thank you.
Sarah Cliffe: Thank you, Julia. Do I have this working?
We tend to talk about fragile states rather than failing states partly because it tends not to be very popular with national counterparts to go and hand them a business card that has "failing states" on it. But partly for a more substantive reason is that we think there are a group of countries situations which require a different approach to the approach that has traditionally been used among development actors, and those include post–conflict countries with very low capacity and difficult political and security situations. But they also include countries in deteriorating governments or raising conflict situations as well as countries in a sort of prolonged impasse both internally and with the international community. The last category would have countries in situations like Zimbabwe or Burma, for example, included in them.
So we try and look what is needed in these countries which is different from our traditional development approach. About three quarters of these countries are conflict affected, and they‘re important not only because in the last 20 years or so this group as a whole has made very little progress in improving their own populations, but also because the potential spillovers they have on their neighbors can be very high through spread of conflict, through refugee flows, through spread of epidemic diseases and through barriers on trade and investment. I have some research on that that in just hard economic terms shows that being a neighbor to a fragile state costs you about 1.6% of your economy every year. So even in economic terms the spillover effect is quite high.
These are also countries where I think we all accept now, although this has been a shift in the international community, that there is a real need to look at the links between diplomatic political security and economic and developmental issues. They‘re countries in which trying to make progress on an economic development agenda while the political arena are all the security situation remains in crisis clearly doesn‘t work, but they‘re equally countries where trying to make progress on the political and security side if the economic underpinnings of that are not in place has not shown a very good track record of working.
So I‘m going to focus here on the first question that was put to the panel which is why is coherence between international actors so difficult in these situations, but particularly here focusing on coherence between the diplomatic community, the security and the economic and development community. There are obviously issues within each of those communities too. For instance, Julia and I have struggled on coherence with the UN system and the World Bank, but I‘ll focus on the links between the three.
The first, I think, is that there‘s a real difference in the mandates organizational culture and the objectives which those communities have typically taken. And I‘m caricaturing this a little bit, but I would say, in general, military colleagues think that the other two communities are very slow, somewhat impractical and badly coordinated between each other. (Laughter) Fair? In general, the diplomatic community, I think, tends to think that the other two are politically naïve and take actions which are particularly unadvisable, and the development community tends to think that the other two are much too focused on quick fixes and exit strategies, don‘t focus on the root causes of conflict and on longer term issues. So there really is something to overcome in terms of the cultural perspectives between those communities.
Work is ongoing in trying to do this in many individual governments through new government initiatives, and some of my colleagues might touch on that, as well as at a multilateral level most notably through the UN Peace Building Commission which I will briefly talk about, but also at a regional level and in the OECD.
Going quickly over the international architecture, the implication for my own organization which is the World Bank, and we have really come to realize that our economic and development activities cannot be conducted in isolation of political and security considerations, but our expertise is economic and developmental. So, for us this is very much an issue of partnership. It‘s not an issue of us being led to expand where we really don‘t have traditional expertise. So where we focused on to address that is trying to support, with the UN, unified recovery strategies which cover the political security, economic and social areas. A number of post–conflict situations like Liberia, Timor, Haiti, we work together on that kind of strategy on specific practical initiatives to focus on specific problems which clearly have both a security and an economic aspect to them and some of those examples here.
Security sector reform is obviously something where actual expertise in the security sector is very important for agencies in the lead, but it is also something that typically involves some kind of economic and financial aspects: budgeting of the security sector, ensuring the soldiers are paid, accounting procedures, this sort of thing. And in the second aspect we have, I think, a limited contribution to make.
And then we‘ve looked, in recent years, at some specific joint approaches on issues with peace–keeping operations where we have joint interests. In some cases those have been issues like customs and border protection with ICEF in Afghanistan, for instance. We have a program where we look at the technical aspects of customs. ICEF looks at the security aspects and collaboration with that. In Liberia we‘ve looked at the UN peace keeping mission at the aspects of economic governance, particularly national revenue resource management which involved both of us, and have put together collaborative programs on that.
UN Peace Building Commission I touched on briefly. This is a new institution and, I‘m sure everyone knows, created last year really intended to bring together troop contributing nations, security council and diplomatic interests in New York, neighboring countries and economic institutions. Still very early days, but I think the PBC is still a pretty good initiative to have put forwards. It has only two countries under its mandates at the moment, so we need to see how it focuses on those. It has no mandate in prevention, but I think one thing that has become very clear is that our division into post–conflict countries and post–conflict prevention countries is simply wrong. Most post–conflict countries have a very high risk of conversion to conflict. So, in affect, post–conflict peace building is also about prevention.
The panel was also posed a specific question about the role of regional powers. I think here regional organizations have a strong comparative advantage on sensitive issues of dialogue on economic governance or political matters, in particular in fragile situations where there is very weak or poor leadership. I can take on example of that is Liberia during the period of transitional government before the election of Ellen Johnson–Sirleaf. The transitional government had essentially completely failed to protect eh government assets of Liberia. Its record in terms of financial mismanagement and corruption was very, very bad. There was an initiative for some period shed between the UN will ban the Imath, the US and the EEC to try and put in place much more robust oversight and economic controls in Liberia. Essentially, that effort did not get any traction until ECOWAS, the sub–regional organization, took a lead in it because really only ECOWAS had the positioning and the legitimacy to be able to say to Liberia, "Look, you are not managing on your own to control this and you really need to ask for some external oversight and outside help on that. For the rest of us, the legitimacy of taking that position was much more difficult.
So I think regional organizations are key. Of course, very different levels of capacity within them and also important to remember that they themselves can have their own perceptions within the countries they‘re working in. They will not always be unproblematic for them to take an economic role.
Last areas that I‘ll talk about will be a few ideas to throw out about how to ensure more effective – this is not so much, in fact, policy implementations more effective results on the ground. The first is trying to ensure that recovery strategies are nationally owned. I think we all give lip service to this, but I find that there is still a problem in a lot of these situations of international actors believing that strategies can be developed from outside. All our experience with this is no matter how beautiful the plan, it never works in implementation if it has not been sponsored by some form of national leadership. Strategies need buy–in in general from all the major international partners, and this, I think, is a challenge for the bilateral whole of government initiatives because typically as in the US, for instance, in the planning that goes across government agencies it‘s been difficult enough to coordinate across government agencies within one international actor. The planning process has not gone outside to other international actors. And, again, the problem you come across is when you‘re actually physically in the country it‘s not just you who‘s acting. So a plan which wasn‘t consulted with other main international actors can have difficulties in implementation.
Clear operational plan to meet peace building goals, again, this should be something that‘s very obvious, but we still have great problems doing it. We have been trying with the UN to put in place far more simple and focused transitional results matrixes looking at what needs to be done in three months, six months and nine months in, 12 months out; but we still find in those processes that he tendency of both national actors and international try to argue that everything is priority and nothing can be excluded is very high. So coming up with a really practical operational plan is really difficult.
Approaches need to vary depending on governance conflict and context. Again, this should be obvious, but we still tend to have one post–conflict model. We don‘t vary enormously, for example, between a period of transitional government, unelected, perhaps put together from previous warring partners versus post–election governments. We don‘t vary things enormously between areas of a country which might have quite strong local leadership or developmental local leadership versus areas of a country which may not. To some extent I think that the military concept of the three dot war or the idea of varying between areas is something that on the developmental side there is a need to think a little bit more of varying approaches in different situations and different areas of a country.
Funds need to be available quickly and flexibly. Again, this is obvious but not something that all international actors have always been very good at doing. Practical joint activities, I think, between these actors are useful, and I talked a little bit about some of the initiatives we‘ve had to try to do this.
The flip side of speed is the long–term commitment is also essential in these situations. So we have really a good body of research now that shows that for the first decade after a peace agreement countries remain extremely fragile. If they make it through that first decade without reversing to conflict then the probability of them going back in in the future is quite a lot lower, but the first decade is very, very shaky.
Paul Collier has also just completed some new research with us where he looks at the relationship between conflict and elections. Interestingly, he finds that the two–year period before an election is considerably safer in terms of the risk of going back into conflict then the two–year period after an election. Now, I think that has some intuitive sense to it because in the run up to an election a lot of the national actors think that they can win, so their incentive to take and may be lower. After an election it becomes clear who has not one, but it‘s interesting in terms of policy because certainly for peace keeping policy we often tend to do the exact opposite. Many peace keeping operations have us there any day when an election is completed. Think of the recent European commission – peacekeeping mission in the DRC, for example. And even on the economic side we tend to not focus a great deal of effort on stabilizing this fragile period.
Last point here is there‘s an enormous inequity in post–conflict assistance between countries. This, again, I know would be obvious, but the type of assistance we have given to Bosnia, to Iraq, to Afghanistan, to Kosovo in comparison to the type of assistance we‘re giving in places like DOC, there is a huge difference both in terms of peace keeping capacity and in terms of economics.
I‘ll stop there, Julia.
Julia Taft: Great. (Applause) Thank you for that quite wonderful capturing of some of the challenges in terms of post–conflict prevention. I just want to say a couple words to elaborate on that issue since getting to also the US role in this.
Sarah and I used to go crazy with State Department over the Iraq needs assessment and the – the various pledging conferences that he US was pushing the other donors to participate in. I mean, we had weekly phone calls and we were taking notes. We were trying to – the UN and the World Bank were the staff support, but the US – I was always impressed that the US was able to keep online first five countries, then there were ten countries that would have these darn phone calls, and we – and it was intense. And they all wanted to be sure they were in the Madrid Meeting. Or they all wanted to be sure that they were in the Liberia Pledging Group Meeting, and it was actually very, very positive because in each of those activities they relied on the multilaterals to help them, but they really were solidifying their relationships with other donors.
Now, what‘s quite shocking – and we‘ll get into this in a minute – is the issue that pledging conferences pledge for a year. Sarah‘s just pointed out we‘re talking about a decade at least, and the money falls off and the interest falls off, and how do you sustain that.
So, thank you very much. Let us go now to the military. I hope you don‘t think that we are – we in the diplomatic and UN forces are slow and badly coordinated, but I wouldn‘t be surprised if you did; but you have really seen this from both central planning in the Pentagon but, certainly, in the field in a number of places and recently in Iraq. Would you please share with us your views?
Richard Lacquement: Thank you very much, and, first off, I also want to thank the Stanley Foundation for putting this together and arranging this. I appreciate the opportunity and I enjoyed the panel this morning – I‘m sorry. Can everybody hear okay? I‘m sorry about that.
Just a little bit more about myself, I‘m kind of an odd character for military officer. I‘ve had about half and academic career and half a standard military career. I went to West Point, became an artillery officer, did – have done standard artillery assignments in several units, did Desert Storm as kind of regular conventional field artillery man and all that. Then shortly thereafter I was sent off to graduate school so I could go teach at West Point, and there I kind of, in the mid ‘90s, got into this issue of, "Geez, what should our military look like after the Cold War? And we had been in Somalia. We were contemplating Bosnia. We were looking at these things, and so I started looking at the other side of these. At the time it was called Military operations other than wars. Now we tend to call them stability operations, and I went back tot the artillery, did things like that for the 101st until 2001 when I sent units off to Kosovo, did not actually go myself. But then went to the Naval War College and, from there, ended up in Iraq with the 101st and also spent a brief time in the Pentagon from March to May of 2003. I won‘t go into great detail there. It was more a matter of seeing what was going on. I was not at sort of the heart of a lot of the key decisions going on, but then teaching at the Naval War College as I was kind of delving into the issues much more closely.
I will be able to go through some things much more quickly because Sarah hit them very well. One of the things I found was I was reading the Brahimi Report, and I was looking at the UN and finding it kind of jarring that a the same time we were talking about stovepipes in the United States government between state department and defense and I‘m looking at the same thing being said about DPKO and UNDP and the political officers and sort of these disconnected stovepipes within the United Nations system. So I sort of kept an eye on the UN and the Peace Building Commission, things like that, as we look at very similar issues in the Department of Defense. So, and just kind of most recently I was one of the parts, the author – part of the team that authored the new Counter Insurgency Manual. I don‘t think the final is out on the streets yet, but, actually, I had the chapter on "Unity of Effort" which was to try to look at how you pull the military and sort of non–military groups together.
I‘m going to go through – this is – this is probably a little bit more on the academic side, but I find that that there‘s a – there‘s a framework issue. Sort of a fundamental – you know, if you go back to the Sun Tzu–ian "Know your enemy, know yourself," that we tend – and this is not just the military. This is broader to kind of the institutions we‘ve talked about, regional organizations. We tend to miss a key aspect of interaction between what we think we‘re trying to do and who we think should be doing it to, or who is the subject of our actions and how they‘re going to feel about these things. And so, although this is kind of a little bit broader then just the military – I‘ll be happy to talk in detail in the short time we have. I worry that this is a little bit too much wave top; you can push me down during the discussion. What I‘d like to do is get at some of what framed these problems.
Again, I think if there is a theme to why I got into this, the military was the ones who were stuck with these things. The US military when we looked around and said, "This looks really civilian," or, "It looks like there should be someone else doing these things," but we were the ones doing them. There was a certain logic to that, but it sort of pushed us into the holistic, you know, how do these things really play out.
But when we looked at the nature of these problems what we realized, like I said, is kind of war is a continuation of politics by other means – a classic Clausewitz quote. Then you kind of look at what politics are. I mean politics is all about allocating values and you can do that violently; you can do that nonviolently. Then you‘re beginning to realize that this whole continuum thing makes a lot of sense, and so as we looked at what was going on we had, in the US Military in particular, but I think others, is that we put ourselves into a battle mode where we though our job was simply to fight and beat other military forces. We weren‘t thinking about the sort of ultimate political aims and what was sort of going on here and, in particular, we tended to discount local populations. I think this, if there‘s a theme, tends to come back to knowing yourself. It‘s really kind of knowing the context you‘re putting yourself into. Sarah kind of got to that, I think, on some of the what do we understand about the places we‘re going in or what sort of templates are appropriate or should be there. But these – these are incredibly difficult and complex difficult issues that transcend these nifty categories that we‘ve set for ourselves that work nice organizationally but don‘t work well when it comes to actually trying to affect populations.
There‘s a major disconnect between rhetoric and reality and I would suggest that part of it is – some of it‘s a classic, "It‘s easier said than done." That‘s true, but part of it is what sort of rhetoric do we have. We tend to ignore that this is kind of a classic western, liberal rhetoric. We tend to – the disconnect is that rhetoric against society that are less amendable and to the way that‘s going to play out in societies we‘re going into. Usually the issues we‘re talking about a lot of times you get into this idea of the template is simply a problem to be solved. It‘s just a coordination game to come up with a solution when, in fact, these often are issues where it‘s not a matter – I mean the aims are completely different. What we want to accomplish and what people are fighting against may well be – they understand exactly what our goals are, and that‘s what they don‘t like and we tend not to be mindful of that. We tend to do a lot of script writing as interveners, and we tend to mirror image a lot. There‘s some quick shorthands I‘ll talk about a little bit more, but we tend to ignore the disparity of the stakes of what we think we‘re in there to do and what the local populations think we‘re there to do and what they find acceptable.
And then there‘s also just the general disparity of when you come in from the outside what sort of commitments are you willing to make. How important are some of these things. I think there is something about the hierarchy of interest there. We tend to know intuitively, we feel strongly about some of these issues, but when it comes down to – and it‘s not that it can‘t be changed, but there‘s got to be a historical sweep of things that countries care about and you‘re willing to exercise or absorb high costs over a long period of time, and the further you get down that hierarchy of needs, the less the willingness of populations and maybe democracies are a little more sensitive to absorb certain costs.
And I think when you come down to the Unites States in particular outside powers, these are national organizations that are kind of manifestations of our kind of liberal, democratic visions of what we think we should do. These standards mean that high cost protracted efforts are very difficult to sustain in the face of what are ambiguous threats or ambiguous long–term values that we might drive, and, yet, depending on who we‘re dealing with very clear short–term costs that they can impose on us that can challenge us. So what this means is that we have these ambiguous threats on clear value and that makes it hard to portray the positive stakes domestically, particularly in democracy to stay the course.
Now, what I‘ve done is I have some slides here that are more kind of a framework for thinking through these things with a lot of little sort of historical references along the bottom. Ultimately, when you look at external participation – I think that‘s a key one, external participation in nation–building or rebuilding, and that‘s a distinction I‘ll come to in a little bit. You know, clearly the issue of intervention. Who‘s doing the intervening? What are the stakes and interest? What are the policy aims? How can you measure they‘re achievement? How long will it take, and who cares? This is both domestically and in the places we‘re going into, and how much. Again, sort of this focus on local allies. We tend to think of ourselves as being in control of these things and ignore those who also have a vote. In military terms we talk about the enemy has a vote in battle. I think in these other political arenas, post–conflict or otherwise, we tend to – we also tend to discount those things.
And – and again I think there‘s sort of this embedded liberal assumptions and their supposed – and their assumed universal appeal which we tend to ignore or take for granted.
This first slide is really kind of a – just kind of to set up the framework. Most of us understand when it comes to a war that certain objectives engender different levels of resistance. There‘s certain historical examples from very low stakes, if you will, just trade concessions or maybe a little bit of territory or just get somebody to stop doing something versus what – and those are what – and those are what Clausewitz would call limited aims. And limited aims he meant in kind of a state system way in you‘re going to overthrow the other regime. You‘re going to change their form of government, and even there you can picture gradations from decapitation. We‘re simply going to take Saddam out. We don‘t care who takes his place might be one version of that versus societal annihilation what, essentially, Germany and Russia were engaged in World War. Germany was trying to annihilate Russia, was going to kill as many Russians they could, just sub–humans, and we‘re seen historically sort of cartejemalas. That‘s kind of the far end of unlimited aims, not just doing away with the government, but doing away with a society. And we kind of understand that resistance goes up as those aims change.
Well, in the kind of nation–building aims I think we tend to sort of push this up. Alright, we‘re still in the continuation of politics, and maybe violence is still there, but if we‘ve got to go to these nation–building – and I use – I try – I use the word nation building partly because I was drawing on the studies from RAND and Dobbins, The US and UN roles in nation–building. So I said okay, I‘ll accept their wording on it. I understand there are others out there, but what we tend to think, you know, we have some general aims. Especially in the wake of a conflict, reestablishing peace tends to be kind of a basic one, but often times there‘s economic development goals in there in a sense that we don‘t want the war to come back. So, there‘s something else besides just getting back to peace, and, for Americans in particular, we tend to have a third one that is liberal democratization. You know, our view of them if there‘s not a liberal democracy, that‘s one of the reasons they have problems anyway. So just every conflict the United States has ever been involved in includes at some high level that values level of promulgating liberal democracy, and that‘s maybe a little bit different than others, but we‘ve certainly embedded it in international institution. So I think assumptions are that‘s what they‘re there for, is that end of history, the right answer and it‘s just a matter of getting somebody help there.
But there‘s a difference between what we‘ve seen in sort of rebuilding countries using a lot of existing institutions, and here‘s where you would see differences between post–World War II Germany and Japan. Very dramatic events, but essentially we were tapping into very well–established societies and we able to tap into parts of their polities that we could build on or rebuild versus much more revolutionary nation–building starting almost from scratch where which a major overhaul of the institutions. And these are just some impre – some examples of some of the cases, and these are just a handful of all of them. You could kind of run down a whole – a whole slew of them and also sort of toss one other one on here.
If you look, I sort of have Germany and Japan in this kind of sort of nation–rebuilding or reconstruction mode, and if you look at Afghanistan and Iraq, I think there‘s a fair case made, what we‘re doing there – our agenda is a very revolutionary one, social revolutions most certainly in terms of displacing former elites, actually empowering groups within the country that did not have any power, and very weak institutions, if at all, for some of the things we‘re looking to do.
But I‘ll throw another one out there that some people have mentioned, and I think it‘s a good parallel. That we shouldn‘t, for Americans in particular, realize kind of how this played out in the US Civil War where the aftermath of the Civil War where we said it was kind of a – our first think is we‘re kind of reconstructing the South, and, in fact, that‘s exactly what Andrew Johnson said immediately after the Civil War. We‘ll just simply let them all vote again, come right back and the Republicans said, "No. They actually have to accept favor in all these amendments that were going to get at the issue of civil rights for African Americans – blacks." And that – that was a revolutionary change to the South which southerners effectively resisted and thwarted.
What I think you‘re seeing is kind of Iraq I find to have more parallels with American Civil War both in terms of external forces trying to impose a new set of standards against strong local resistance, and that just sort of ends with – and I‘ll just sort of build this – is this is just – this is the interactive dynamic that we have to understand, have to play out in war but we tend to ignore in other contexts. This is not just about the strategies and inputs that we bring to it, but it also has to do with the nature of how that particular strategy plays with a particular group of people in a particular corner of the world for particular stakes. In the post–conflict international environment, in the regional environment matter a lot as do the domestic environment of those states that are intervening.
So that‘s just kind of the framework, and coming back to the issues of interest, the ability to sustain these things, I think, goes back to this point about we do have a sense of hierarchy of interests, and most states do. I would say the United States think it‘s fairly clear if there‘s a security interest, and this goes back, again, to sort of Germany and Japan and Korea, the sense that we stayed and altruistically helped stay around long enough to help rebuild these countries, or help them become sustainable livable democracies had an awful lot to do with this other union and our perception of these countries as helping us against another security threat.
If you look at Afghanistan, certainly in terms of a national security threat, but in terms of commitment to actually rebuild that country substantially different than it was, that commitment to social revolution, the question of how much we‘re willing to pay when we felt the security threat has been dealt with. Haiti falls into what I call the regional proximity mode. If you look at some of these cases where intrinsically it‘s not that great a security threat, but once you get into – and, actually, Sarah provided an interesting point on the GDP effect – you start to have a major effect on world being. You‘ve moved down from the quality of life and well–being, states more by are more likely to impact that. So even if it‘s not a direct security threat, their ability of imposed costs leads to calculations. Which suggests, as we‘ve seen, you‘re likely if you can find a regional sponsor nearby and, in particular, a great power nearby at one of these fragile or difficult situations, they‘re more likely to get the staying power of somebody to stay involved. What that also says is when you get down to these sort of ideological or moral or purely humanitarian issues, staying power is very low, particularly if the people on whom you‘re trying to encompass are willing to impose violence back. That means they‘re going to drive costs up that are unlikely to be sustainable in the long run for what our aspirations are certainly ones people would like but not necessarily ones they want to pay a lot of cost for. Democracies are sort of showing willingness to sort of forego those ones quickly.
Where that leads to, and I‘m just going to start at – I‘m sorry. Fifteen I‘m at right now. My mistake. What that leads to is kind of our, and I‘ve kind of highlighted this, is a better understanding of reality with a strong dose of humility in terms of understanding what the conditions at hand are and our ability to influence them and stick with them. Quite frankly, and a lot of this to come back to a basic framework, is we haven‘t done very well, and we haven‘t been very successful. We‘re kind of back to a basic research framework. We really have to look hard at these issues again, and the military is finding that one–size–fits–all problem solving doesn‘t fit well. So language and cultural awareness are part of the manifestation of our understanding of these complexities.
We‘ve already talked about greater integration for – the need for greater integration in Iraq between diplomacy and defense, and you will see the military push harder on these things, but we felt we‘ve been drawn out of our land to see more work by civilians in recognition of these are conflict problems and we would like to help them, and there are other evidence of the Peace Building Commission. DOD with the state department have been working and the talk with NGO‘s, and then really, quite frankly, I think there is a need to emphasize collective action. The cost and the sustainability over time means we do have to rely more on international institutions and finding someone locally who‘d willing to take the lead role has been a key indicator do success in other things. So working with regional and international group of global groups has been a key indicator of success that we should purse.
Thank you very much. (Applause)
Julia Taft: That – that was quite, quite spectacular. I think Bob Gates might call you back from Korea to give him some more advice back on terms of military roles here. Our final presenter is Anatol Lieven, journalist (Laughter) and research fellow now with the New America Foundation who actually has written something that was distributed for everybody. It really was so good we asked him if he would do more, go deeper and help us figure out what are some practical things that can and can‘t be done with them.
Anatol Lieven: Thank you so much. Actually, in the time available I can‘t go deeper; I can only go shallower, and for deeper things ask you to read the policy brief which expands on my ideas at greater length. My first experience of a failing state, at least in the areas where I was a completely failed one, was when I went into Afghanistan with – in the 1980‘s, and the first thing that struck me in the areas that had been "liberated" from the communists and so we had control was the complete absence, the complete destruction of any institutions of statehood whatsoever. Nothing – nothing of all the things that we take for granted in the west. I mean, postal services, police, sewers, sanitation, telephones, the whole thing had gone. There are two things, however, about that which has left me with an abiding – well, it‘s a rather different perspective perhaps on western discourse about this than many of my colleagues.
The first thing is that one of the reasons why these institutions had been destroyed so completely in Afghanistan was that the local population hated them. It hated the state because the state had always presented itself to the local population in the guise of savage corrupt policemen, the brutal recruiting sergeant, the looting tax official and so forth and so on.
The second thing which has always left me with an element of humility both about our moral purposes and our understanding is, of course, that the people who had done this work of destroying the Afghan state were, at the time, our gallant allies and who were being idealized in much of the western media and western propaganda as forces for the creation of modern democracy, etcetera, etcetera once the Soviets were driven out. It didn‘t take me too many journeys into Afghanistan to realize there was something wrong with that picture. All we were interested in the last resort was destroying the soviet presence and creating a humiliating defeat on the Soviets going on to destroy Afghan communism. We weren‘t interested in what happened to Afghanistan after that at all, and we demonstrated the fact in the ‘90s. So much for morality.
Now that was perhaps an extreme case, but I do not think that we are necessarily free of some of these moral complexities today. One point I make very strongly in the policy brief on that score is that it is morally and politically grotesque to spend 20 times more on fighting wars than on preventing them, in other words by – on developmental aid in particular.
Incidentally, this is not inherent in the American system. During the first decades of the Cold War, especially under the Truman and Eisenhower administrations, America spent a vastly greater proportion of its budget on developmental aid, not just marshal plan which is so often mentioned, but on the eastern side of East Asia as well. The sums spent there are simply fabulous by contemporary standards and, I mean this is particularly tragic, of course, in terms of the Iraq war where there‘s so much money that could have gone to transform key societies has essentially been thrown away. The problem is, thought, that as the Colonel has already stressed, one simply can‘t do this everywhere realistically today, realistically even then.
You may remember the advice of Senator Vandenberg to Acheson. When Ascheson went to ask him for advice on how to get the Marshal Plan through the US Senate Vandenberg replied, "Scare the hell out of them." In other words, the only way you can get this through is by terrifying them with factor of a communist takeover of Western Europe, and it worked. But it can‘t work very often. Therefore, development aid on the scale necessary, not just to minimally stabilize, but actually to try and transform failing states will, in my view, for the foreseeable future have to be confined to the Muslim world, and there‘s parts of the Muslim world like Pakistan, for example, which seem to present a direct threat to us.
I have to say, however, that my belief that we need to set priorities, as indeed the other speakers have said, comes, not just from issues of practicality including American political realities, but also from morality. I have a certain problem with the title of this panel because I don‘t believe we have anything like the same moral obligations to states around the world even when their needs, in absolute terms, may seem to be the same. It does seem to me that we have principal obligation to countries obviously to which we have made formal commitments, and, of course, in terms of our ability to draw on our own populations for resources. Yes, I mean, in terms of it does come down to our own national interest.
The issue that the need to set priorities of course is above all true when it comes to direct intervention involving western military forces. It must be apparent by now that we can only do this very rarely. The example of Bosnia and Kosovo in terms of stabilizing these places after the occupation, of course, shows that it is a tremendous help if you can get wealthy members of the international community to put up most of the money. Europeans are only prepared to do this in Bosnia and Kosovo because these countries are on their doorsteps. They have a direct impact on their national interests. That was true to an extent of Australia. It may be true of North Korea with regard to Japan and South Korea, but it‘s not going to be true in most other parts of the world.
When it comes to setting moral priorities another issue, I think, to keep a close eye on is the word genocide. We have to be very careful about the extension of this word from cases like Rwanda to places like Darfur in my view. Rwanda was a genuine genocide by the standards of the Holocaust in the Second World War and one or two other cases. Frankly, if you extra – if you call Darfur a genocide and extrapolate it back into history, there are a number of western journals, including British ones, who would have to be put in the same category with Hitler. That‘s more grotesque, and, in any case, if Darfur is a genocide there have been so many such incidents around the world that it is simply impossible to intervene in all of them.
This discredits the term genocide, and, frankly, it discredits us because it produces the idea that if we can‘t, in fact, intervene in these cases we must be so morally worthless that it isn‘t really intervening anyway. Which is something, by the way, I would not say.
Now, in terms of priorities today there are two priorities, or, actually, only one. The two are obviously Iraq and Afghanistan where our soldiers are dying, our prestige is deeply involved, and, of course, there‘s the threat to our national security in the case of Afghanistan at least. In Iraq we created that threat, is by now obvious. Problem is that by now we can‘t do anything about Iraq. It‘s a lost cause and I don‘t even want to talk about it.
Julia Taft: [Inaudible comment off mic]
Anatol Lieven: I have, as a matter of fact. That‘s why I keep falling asleep today. I spent the night reading it.
Afghanistan may be in the course of being lost. If so, this will be a political, military and moral disaster given the fact that in Afghanistan the national security threat was obvious, but also given the fact that Afghanistan by 2001 was so utterly impoverished that you would have thought really a relatively small amount of international aid properly delivered should have been enough to create a fantastic effect in that society and buy widespread loyalty. If we‘re defeated in Afghanistan there won‘t be any point in talking about direct intervention anywhere else in the foreseeable future; it won‘t happen. And, by the way, we won‘t deserve it to happen because we would have demonstrated our crucial failing when it comes to taking over in those places.
Now, the growing disaster in Afghanistan, in my view, has certain wider lessons for interventions in general, some of which have been touched on by my colleagues. The first of which is it has to be set in a regional context and it has to involve the support of key regional states. The intent to develop Afghanistan in a kind – as a kind of economic island is contrary to every basic economic theory and also to the whole Afghan history. And when Afghanistan has enjoyed any commercial activity, any commercial prosperity – which God knows is not very often – it has done so as a root between different places. Today that means to a very considerable extent Iran. Unfortunately, we have ruled out talking to Iran in those terms so far, although following the Baker Commission we may now have to do so.
The second is the need, as you stressed, to think in terms of a very long timeframe. When you‘re talking seriously about creating a state out of virtually nothing, which, as you said, was the case in Afghanistan, you are talking, in my view, about a generation at least; and that is what we will have to face in Afghanistan if we are going to create, not a democratic state, but a minimally capable state in that country and raise living standards in Afghanistan to the point where we have a serious of chance, or the future Afghan state has a serious chance, of defeating violent extremism. Mow, the good thing about that is if you think in those terms, maybe you actually can start thinking realistically about achieving certain things, for example, in the context of the war on drugs. Anything less than that it‘s not worth thinking about many of these issues.
Thirdly, in states which have collapsed or, to a degree, never even existed to the degree of Afghanistan – and I‘m not speaking here for failing states elsewhere in the world. I‘m talking about places which really have fallen to pieces utterly. I think we don‘t have any choice but to use our own catteries to a great extent, and I think they have to be military catteries if these are places where really significant violence is occurring, and also partnership with states and local institutions in principal, but what if those institutions basically don‘t exist or, as in Afghanistan today, they are facades to hide a variety of more or less theocratic local clans. Trying to work through them simply means that the money simply never gets to the people who need it and the projects who need it. That means we have to use our own people. I‘m sorry to say this with a US soldier present, but I think that has to be soldiers to a great extent, frankly, because to be brutally honest, a certain proportion of them will die in the course of these operations and our diplomats or aid workers are not trained or prepared for this, nor should they be in some ways.
The third point, or maybe it‘s the fourth, is a very difficult one I think, but I think it is exemplified by Afghanistan. It‘s an extension of the pottery barn rule. If you go in and take over a country like this you have to put its interests first if you‘re going to really develop it and have a chance of developing. The problem is that its interests may conflict with yours. As, indeed the Karzai administration in Afghanistan has explicitly said and pursued its regards, and any government would have to regard good relations with Iran as critical to it‘s stability, to its development and its future. We are opposed to that, in my view, wrongly, but that has been US policy so far.
Even more difficult is the issue of the war on drugs. At present, western policy in Afghanistan is dedicated to destroying between two–fifths and three–fifths of Afghanistan‘s GDP. Difficult to present that as any Afghan national interest at least in the short to medium term. We say that we‘re offering compensation. Given the realities on the ground, the vast majority of that compensation will never reach the Afghan farmers, and a great deal of it will be recycled by the Afghan governing elites back to western banks. That is contrary to the national interest to Afghanistan and to ordinary Afghan people, the Afghan farmers in particular but also Afghan commercial networks.
Now, there is a way around this but it would require really radical thinking on our part. Some people are indeed advocating this which is buy the stuff up and distribute it to the world in the form of anesthetics, basically. When I‘ve put this to western officials, the result is we‘re not even allowed to think about that. It‘s taboo. So while our soldiers are dying in Afghanistan our bureaucrats are worshipping taboos as if they were Polynesian something from the 19th century. Not, in my view, a very impressive picture.
I am not sure, frankly, that our societies, let alone our governing systems, are capable of adjustment on this scale. I think we are capable of helping certain failing states around the world which have not failed completely. Pakistan is in some danger of failing in the future, but it hasn‘t failed. It has a, in some ways, a moderately effective state system still. In countries like that we can do an enormous amount to help because we can deal directly with authorities which, although flawed, are still extent and can interact with us in positive ways.
As far as dealing with cases like Afghanistan are concerned, I say not convinced at last – I would like to be convinced but I‘m not – that we are capable of this at all, and absolutely sure that we‘re not capable of doing it very often. Thank you. (Applause)
Julia Taft: You‘ll want to be sure to read this brief. He does go into more depth, but in still a wonderfully provocative way.
Anatol Lieven: I‘m also a little bit more positive.
Julia Taft: Right. I hope so. We had 191 countries and you‘ve got bad news on Iraq and Afghanistan. We haven‘t even had too much of a chance to talk about Haiti. At some point we‘re going to have to figure out what kind of criteria, and I think the Colonel was pretty close to what criteria, we might use, but I‘d be very interested in asking each of the panelists to what the other two presenters said. Maybe picking up one of two of the points and reacting because I know that Sarah needs to leave a little early.
We were winking in the back when you started talking about Afghanistan about the services they didn‘t have when you went in with – in 1980. Well, they never had those services they did have a wonderful, the Karez system for irrigation because everybody wanted that, but that was about the only thing I‘ve found – any service they all really liked.
Anatol Lieven: Well, they had sort of elements of what we think of a state. That doesn‘t mean bureaucrats don‘t like them very much.
Julia Taft: Well, it‘s just fascinating. Sarah, why don‘t you comment and make any additional points, and after each of the presenters‘ comments we‘ll turn it over to questions from the audience. Thank you.
Sarah Cliffe: Let me – let me start then maybe with the elements that I take issue with. They‘re always more interesting. In terms of Afghanistan and inventing institutions from scratch I‘m very skeptical, I have to say, of the terrorists arguments. The argument that we go into these countries and there are no institutions. There are always institutions, and Afghanistan after the recent war had many components of state institutions in place. Some of them may have been disliked by the population, that‘s certainly true and that‘s common in many post–conflict countries; but we have to, I think, make some choices internationally about where do we build on what exists and where do we try and transform. And I actually agreed very much with Richard‘s presentation that the stronger are our objectives to transform quickly the more resistance you will get to the programs you‘re trying to put in place. So I think it‘s very important to recognize in situations like Afghanistan that there are institutions in various ways.
There are, for example, civil servants who may collect taxes and record expenditures in great big manual ledgers that to us look as if they come from something a century ago, but that is still a system, and in some cases it may actually be better to try to resuscitate that system and make sure some elements of transparencies, some anti–corruption controls are within it then to try to bring in a great crew of international finance personnel or, I have to say in my view, worse, military people doing the job of public finance people and bring in a system from the US or Australia or the UK to put in it‘s place. I think in general that doesn‘t work.
The question of not going through governments and governments‘ interests versus our interests, I think this is a very important questions, and I agreed with what you said, for example, on the relations with Iran for example. I‘m much less sure about our reaction to supporting and providing finance through government. For instance, in the first two years of the Afghanistan program 18% – one eight percent – of all aid flows went through the Karzai government, and this, at the time, was a government that certainly had some quite serious reforming elements within it that were trying to improve their credibility with the population. Certainly they didn‘t have enough capacity to help all the aids coming in, but 18% is pretty low. That basically means that most of the things that were happening in Kabul or in the countryside would have UNICEF written on them or US AID or the European Commission, not the government of Afghanistan. And if you‘re trying to support a government to build it‘s credibility with it‘s own population it‘s questionable, I think, whether doing that through a lot of programs which have international credits on the surface is provided is the right way of doing it.
I think there are a lot of questions to be thought about though in objectives or in interests. For example, another one which Afghanistan has clearly thrown off is between short–term security objectives and long–term security objectives. I think, my understanding is that even within the security establishment there would be little doubt that people agree that a long term objective is to have a government in Kabul which is stable, transparent, respected, is able to be and international partner. Whether that long–term objective is compatible with the short–term objective of providing finance through some sub–national bodies for anti–terrorist pursuit or to try to capture people that you‘re interested in capturing in local areas I think is questionable. So I do think that that interest of question is involved.
Julia Taft: Thank you very much. Colonel.Thank you very much. Colonel.
Richard Lacquement: I don‘t have that much more to say. I mean, Sarah actually pointed out my agreements with Sarah along the way, and I found that one of the kind of interesting things over the last couple of years is that as the military is struggling with this, and actually the places where I was working on this were ones where we were saying the military needed to be better at these sorts of tasks. So, in fact, a lot of what you said that these are likely to be military soldiers is something I think would have been resisted very strongly in 2003 that now, I think, has been accepted that that‘s the way things have usually been historically and that, in fact, we kind of wrote it out of our union contract in a very odd way in the American military and had to put it back in, except that we don‘t write our contract. Our civilian bosses do and if we keep being asked to do these things, maybe we should figure out how to perform our role better. So I‘m actually quite sympathetic to that. I think the military is coming around to that more.
But I think it does sort of point up to – there are sort of two parts. I pointed out that there‘s – but within the development community, within the diplomatic community, within the defense community – the three D‘s – and also we talked and we see this in NGO‘s and a lot of different sectors, this sense of – I don‘t know. I say that the outcome was humility. I think there was a lot of befuddlement, a lot of confusion, a lot of disappointment, and the blame would go many ways – "It‘s our fault. It‘s their fault." – if we‘re not adopting or if they‘re not performing the way we hope they would to come back to realize, "Gee, we just weren‘t clear on how these things work and we‘re back to basic research agenda." But some of it was also things that we relearned and realized we just weren‘t well educated. We stayed in fairly narrow lanes and learned a fairly fixed set of things, and we needed to do a better job of educating our members.
And I think there‘s one last piece I‘d throw into that. We looked at it and said there‘s nothing really wrong with democratic values. These are good things to pursue. We often intended just to ignore they are demanding, they demand different things of different people; but we also intended to ignore how we got to where we were versus kind of here we are, just take this and do it.
And just a quick vignette, when I was in northern Iraq I went to the University of Mosel to give a lecture to the political science department, and what I found resonated more, I talked about federalism and how the United States sort of stood up and how we dealt with our issue of religion. We were all Christian and we kind of understood that but just didn‘t want any denomination to dominate. That had more resonance with groups who were going to be – they were all going to be – Islam was going to be part of whatever government was there. The question was which versions of Islam and how should that play out and the things about federalism in our early days. We‘re the United States are not the United States is. The states individually were more powerful than the government. But these things about how we got to some of the agreements we‘ve had now, and this is true in many, many other contexts. Comparative politics, even amongst our own value systems, how you get from her et other and how you move from one set of organizing principals to what‘s a fairly mature one for us. But maybe it‘s better to help other people start the path then drop them at the instant where we are now.
Julia Taft: Anatol.
Anatol Lieven: Following up the lessons of the Civil War. I remember I gave a talk at the Carlisle Barracks, the army ward, right, a few years ago. And with reference to Afghanistan and other places, I was talking about the difficulty that we with our idea of formal military institution sometimes have in understanding the real nature of the military and military power in other systems like Afghanistan where there is a complete overlap between the formal military armed criminal groups, local militias. I said but after all this isn‘t completely alien to the American experience either, not just if you look at the western frontier, but also if you look at the experience of Missouri and Kansas during the civil war and elements like Bill Contrail and Bloody Bill Anderson. This – this voice spoke of form the back, "Son, where I come from we don‘t consider Colonel Contrail a bandit." So we – we can learn from our experience in that regard.
I have to say that I was initially astonished by the fact that the US Military was so unprepared for the challenges, first of Somalia of course, but then of Iraq and Afghanistan given America‘s experience in Indo–China in the 1960‘s and ‘70s. but I have to say a number of US soldiers have said to me, "Yes, but then again we spent 30 years deliberately forgetting those lessons because they didn‘t fit with our institutions – with the whole way in which our military is organized and what we think it is there for." That‘s why, you know, I worry about whether the nature of our own system makes it very difficult, in come ways, for us to get to grips with the challenges facing us.
Now, in Afghanistan I entirely agree that when we went in 2001 that there were institutions there, but they weren‘t state institutions. The Taliban was specifically not a state. It didn‘t define itself as a state. I don‘t know what the western parallel would be; maybe some kind of evil military crusading order, but it wasn‘t a state. We – indeed, what was a state was basically Taliban armed forces and religious structures – I mean, religious political structures which we destroyed, and there were structures there, but they were what we call informal or non–state of sub–state structures with which we have great difficulties in interacting. And sometimes not just in terms of our institutions, but also in terms of our mortality, if you will, our culture. I mean, the easiest of these are local tribal jiggers composed of tribal elders and tribal chieftains. After that it gets a bit more difficult. There are local warlords and militias with whom the US Military interacted very well in the struggle against the Taliban, but – well, I mean to illustrate the difficulties of interacting with them on a bureaucratic basis. I had the pleasure of, form when I returned from Afghanistan to the Carnegie Endowment in early 2002 of offering to enhance the interior décor of the Carnegie Endowment with a hundred heads which a local Afghan warlord had offered to me. For only 100 thousand dollars it was a real, real bargain. He, of course, assumed I was CIA. He really couldn‘t get his mind around the concept of a think tank.
He assumed I was CIA and he said, "There are all these local figures, all these local people claiming to be helping you, but I know that they‘re really Taliban. And for only 100 thousand dollars not only will I go out and kill them all, but I will bring you their heads." This was somebody with whom, unfortunately, we had to work. I‘m not saying that we had to necessarily give him 100 thousand dollars.
Julia Taft: [Inaudible comment off mic]
Anatol Lieven: Well, you see, among the cabinet offices there are such people, and, indeed, they‘re also some of the main drug dealers in the country. This is not a government as we usually understand it and as for the 18%, well, yes it‘s more, but most of that 18% didn‘t get spent either on the projects we needed. So, yeah. Sub–national bodies difficult.
Julia Taft: All of these issues are so difficult, and when people sit down and go, "Gee, why can‘t we go into the country X, and why are we getting out of country Y too soon," it is very complicated. This is why I think the mix of people who are here today and the institutions they represent that was mentioned earlier today , the importance of the think tanks. We need to have some critical massive thinking and intellectual depth on this, and particularly more information about cultural nuances. I don‘t see too many people from either of these countries here at this conference, but I really believe we have got to do something about the Aspar that they know more about these countries than we do, and that might be something for Stanley to think about.
We have a few minutes for questions. May I entertain the first one and please introduce yourself and direct if you have somebody in particular or to the whole panel.
Dan Smith: I‘m Dan Smith, Friends Committee of National Legislation. Point 66. Geneva – you go into a country, occupy it. There are limitations and prohibitions on changing the system, and, as I recall, the conventions don‘t say if you‘re going to change it, change it to a liberal western democracy. So, what do you change and with whose permission do you change it?
Richard Lacquement: I‘ll take it. Actually, we ran into that fairly quickly when we got over there. What the rules are are other than security issues or there was a clause in there essentially for discrimination against certain groups, think World War II, so we could undo German laws against the Jews. Essentially, you are bound to obey local laws that aren‘t security threats or discriminatory toward certain groups.
So when we came in one of the things they desperately needed was economic liberalization because they had state owned industries, state owned this, state owned that; and we said, "Okay, what are you doing with a five star hotel under government control? Why don‘t you privatize it?" And the first thing we got back was you can‘t do that. The law says all assets belong to the Iraqi people so you can‘t privatize anything, but you can lease it for 90 years, which most western will recognize as kind of a pantomime to owning, but it was the sense that, yes, it does constrain you.
Now, we also use it on the flip side. We use it – hesitate – what I said. By the way, I‘m speaking on my personal capacity here. I should know. That‘s – it‘s in the program and I had a note and I forgot to say it. I should have said we use it against Bremer. What happened was when we were told to fire the faculty of Baghdad Univ – or of Mosley University, everybody at fourth level and about Baath Party – don‘t get me wrong. We knew that our orders were to do this. One of the issues we ran into was that it cut so far down into the faculty that we would essentially be unable to continue the academic year at Mosley University.
The Geneva Convention actually tells you you are required to take care of the educational needs of the children of the population. So we essentially sited the Geneva Convention back to CPA and said, "To continue the school year we have to have the professors." So we got them to relent on the fourth level. One level down and we brought about 50 or so of these folks back into the classroom until the school year was over, and then they were fired. So they were conditionally back on. So, yes, there are constraints from the Geneva Convention and they‘re useful; and the military is very well aware of them because a lot of it is two parts. One it‘s the common use of international law that says we must do certain things, and most units knew that. And that‘s kind of where the stability ops were we knew we had to do these tasks. The other part was it‘s also kind of the standards in terms of when you‘re dealing with these societies and you‘re trying – we just opposed a regime. The new legal standards are unclear. It‘s essentially becomes international law. The Geneva Convention and the enduring standards that were there that you have to live with. It becomes a useful way to help guide you through.
That was extremely important and very useful, and it could go – it does. I think we need to be shrewder about it. We should have been smarter about it going in. I think it turns out we had the resources to do it, but we were dealing with problems most people hadn‘t thought about in advance. I think that‘s – again, a sign of this was all there in plain sight. It was a matter of education and preparation.
Julia Taft: Okay. Next question.
James Snyder: James Snyder. I‘m in from NATO headquarters in Brussels. So Afghanistan is probably our top priority. I made three trips with some think tankers so I have two – I have two comments and then a question based on the comments.
The first is as it related to drugs, we thought we saw a pattern in Afghanistan and was a part of the reason why poppies were such a nice alternative was so much productive land was caught up in competing claims for the land based on what kind of titles various governments gave various families and individuals. And, along with that, was the complete destruction of the irrigation infrastructure. That is, Afghanistan could be a productive place of the land titles were resolved by some authority and if the irrigation system had been basically put back on line, both of which it didn‘t seem like anybody was working on outside of sort of a local capacity. That was the first comment.
Second comment is talking to the international aid community. I know it‘s the easiest thing in the world to beat up on them, but I was, frankly, wholly under whelmed by what had been accomplished so far in five years, and the – what came out of that was the question based on one of the groups that I had taken which was every international organization is in Afghanistan, every IO, every NGO, every state agency. If we‘re going to make it work, this is going to be the place to work, but what seemed to be missing was what my group called the Paddy Ashdon figure, a senior civilian coordinator, and not just a coordinator, somebody with the power to direct, to organize aid in a most productive way. Now I know there‘s some concerns, of course, about there‘s the dually elected democratic government of Afghanistan, but I‘m wondering if I could get some comment on that because I was dealing with field personnel and usually questions on those were way above their pay grade. So I thought I‘d open it up for the panel. Thank you.
Julia Taft: I think everybody wants to answer that question. Do you want to start?
Sarah Cliffe: Sure. Yea, on poppy I actually agree with what Anatol said on this issue. I think it‘s a demand not a request. So long as you have a situation where families can get $2000.00 or $3000.00 a year by cultivating poppy, and $300.00 by doing subsistence agriculture you won‘t be able to solve the conundrum. So land claims might have some importance, but I don‘t think on their own they‘re likely to be able to solve it.
On BIH and coordination in Afghanistan I think that there‘s an interesting story that one of Patty Ashton‘s advisors once told me that when they were doing the rounds prior to elections they talked to a couple of people who were competing for mayor – for a mayor‘s position in Bosnia. And the asked them why in all their public statements they only talked about ethnic identity, political history, basically very personal style campaigning. They never at any point talked about what services they would deliver, what they would do to improve the welfare of the town they were competing for, and the answer they got was, "Well, but you guys do all that. That‘s what you do here. So it‘s not us who are going to get credit for that or held responsible for it. It‘s you." And I think that – that is the downside of the office of a high representative or a Kosovo–type models is that you have the leverage of the international community to take responsibility for executive powers essentially, and you don‘t set up the kind of accountability mechanisms in society that you have to have I the longer–term to get out of that situation.
Bosnia, by the way, also not looking too great at the moment. So I‘m not sure it‘s absolutely the model we want to take lessons from.
Julia Taft: Anyone else?
Anatol Lieven: To be really cynical, I have to say that a reason why many Afghan local officials of my acquaintance couldn‘t talk convincingly about some development is that nobody would believe them anyway given their records, you know, some of the warlords we have.
I entirely agree with you about drugs. I would just like to add though a point about irrigation which is quite true for rather – for other reasons in terms of the failure to get Afghan agriculture back on it‘s feet. You mentioned where Karez, the underground canals in Afghanistan, I cannot understand why we haven‘t got more of these that run again. While one of the reasons, I think, it‘s two fold. The way to do this is not to do this through a central institution in Kabul. It‘s to have people, honest people obviously. US officers for example going out there, going to villages or strings of villages, getting the elders together, asking how long is the Karez that‘s been destroyed – 20 miles, fine. Here‘s money to rebuild five miles of Karez. I‘m coming back next year. If those five miles have been rebuilt you can have money for another five years. If it hasn‘t been, well that‘s the end of it.
The other thing is, you see, this doesn‘t require western engineers, western corporations, contract business going through US AID. What the villagers then do is they hire the traditional Karez engineers who, by the way, are Afghan, but they‘re also, to a considerable extent, Iranian. They‘re all – they‘re still out there these people. I mean, the skills have declined, but they‘re still there. This can be done. It‘s not impossible, but it‘s not the way that we have been used to work unfortunately.
Julia Taft: It seems everybody‘s trying to get their own logo and their own credit for this. For those of us who did work with the Afghans there was a finance minister who drove us crazy trying to say, "Wait a minute. How much money are you spending? Where are you spending it? Even though you‘re not giving it to us you ought to be accountable to the Afghan government," and he was absolutely right, but the system is not disciplined. There are things that I think can be done on a practical basis to improve the donors on that but even without funneling the money into a very fragile government structure.
Princeton?
Princeton Lyman: Princeton Lyman, Council on Foreign Relations. You would have thought that going into Afghanistan in 2001 not to allow the reestablishment of the drug trade – of the poppy trade would have been one of the highest priorities if anybody knew anything about Afghanistan, but it didn‘t happen. On the contrary, it was allowed to be reestablished, and it now produces 90% of the world‘s heroin with terrible damage to our own domestic society and enormous cost, and it seems incredible that now we are sitting around saying, "Gee, what do we do with the criminalization of the state of Afghanistan?" But this is not a problem just in Afghanistan. The criminalization of resources in other failed and failing post–conflict in other states is also the case, and I don‘t see in the strategy that we‘re all talking about in coming to post–conflict situations dealing with the very high profitable criminalization which took place in Bosnia. It certainly takes place in the DRC, will take place if not already taking place in Liberia, and you – how do you complete with that? How do you plan for it? How do you address it? It seems to me that that is something we don‘t talk about very much but is a reality on the ground.
Julia Taft: Very good point.
Sarah Cliffe: I think not getting enough emphasis on crime and drugs in early recovery strategies is a critical failing, and it‘s not just Afghanistan. For instance, the interim corporation doing work in Haiti didn‘t want to mention drugs, and, yes, quite possibly the most central security risk was the drug transit issues in Haiti. Why this happens my be partly a failing on behalf of my community form the development agency side who tend to play the driving role in the early planning phase that I think many of our have a relatively small comfort level or focus on those issues and have not always given them the priority they need. It‘s one of the areas where I think more coherence I think with the diplomatic and defense communities is important to try and get them centrally addressed.
Julia Taft: Next –
Richard Lacquement: I was just going to say a very quick thing. I think there‘s also – and on the military‘s side we tend to also discount some of the decisions, the economic components of decisions being made about who are enemies were and who should be allowed. The degasification, demobilization of the army, we go through and say certain folks can no longer do what they did, and we go through and make those decisions quickly without an alternative, and we don‘t give – don‘t have a transition for them to come up with something else. And in a country that was government run in the first place like Iraq and many of these other places, there isn‘t a private sector. What private sector there is is criminal or – in a variety of different fashions.
In Iraq there‘s a contention, and the military was seeing this in advance, but that there was a lucrative market in hiring unemployed people to place bombs and do things for the insurgency. So they were motivated by money to come out and attack us. So not so much – again, so a criminal act but driven by an economic decision, or and economic effect of a decision made for another reason that we just weren‘t as shrewd or savvy about.
Anatol Lieven: But this – sorry. I just have to say one thing. Who was supposed to prevent poppy cultivation and the heroin trade coming back? I mean, we decided, and in my view this was actually militarily inevitable, that we were going to go into Afghanistan with very limited numbers of out own troops and rely on local Afghan allies. Out local Afghan allies, unfortunately, were up to their necks in the drugs trade, the Northern Alliance.
Julia Taft: And did we or did we not have a policy not to bomb any of the processing plants? I was told military said they were not military targets. I‘m dying to know the real answer here because that –
Richard Lacquement: I don‘t have any inside knowledge on that one, but the idea would – yeah, it may have been that the businesses on our list – so not so important, yeah, different factors. Plausible.
Anatol Lieven: You need a police force to do that. You need custom forces. We didn‘t have them. You know, we had limited numbers of US Special Forces plus the US Air Force. There just weren‘t the people to engage in that kind of effort.
Julia Taft: Next question
Justin Logan: Thanks. I‘m Justin Logan from the NATO Institute. And I would just add to the last mark that we‘re not doing too well with the drug war here domestically so I think exporting it to Afghanistan may be something in question, but I want to get back to one of the more fundamental remarks that Anatol had made about the scare the hell out of them factor. And I think the discussion of failed and failing states 15 years ago, ten years ago, today, part of the reason that we‘re having this discussion – if you read, for instance, the foreign affairs article by Krazner and Pasqual about state failure there is this laundry list that implies that there is a grave threat to the global order by state failure, and we get human trafficking, drugs, everything under the sun, communicable disease, etcetera. And I wonder whether it‘s not the case that we‘ve sort of come to a strategic hypochondria in that we see in – in Burundi, in the DRC a monopoly of threats that legitimate the deployment of the US Military, the deployment of US diplomatic personnel in a way that is really disproportionate to the challenge that those issues face. So I‘ll just see to what extent people agree or disagree to that.
Julia Taft: I don‘t know how many American military are in Burundi or DRC. There are UN peace keepers which the US provides precious few people. I think it‘s less than ten which raises some questions about division of responsibility and burden sharing. And I do think – I wish we had more time to really go into that because it is true that there are a lot of expectations that the US can fix these things. We‘re seeing it‘s very difficult to fix any of them, certainly more difficult if you‘re doing it on your own. So the question of what forum does one use for burden sharing discussions. I know NATO for years, and maybe they still have a burden sharing framework, but actually the US and the Brits are the only people who have military left practically for NATO. So it‘s very interesting issue about how do you now say it‘s not important because it is important if it does create regional instability or create problems. We can‘t do it all.
Richard Lacquement: I‘ll just say going back to the sort of hierarchy of interests, the scare the hell out of them part I have found that kind of like with drug war. The war against drugs, how you make this case being, I‘ll use the term, and existential threat, when I look back through US history and the way we generally thought of when countries were willing to fight and pay extraordinary costs they usually had a pretty quick one, two three step process to show ho who they‘re dealing with is an existential threat. Germany and Japan were not – neither Germany or Japan had the conquest of the United States as one of their objectives. We very positively decided and made the case that if Japan gained their greater East Asian race and if Germany gained control of Europe on step later was an existential threat to the United States. Same thing with why were we in Korea. The idea is you don‘t stand up to the Chinese in Korea, you do this, the soviets get – the communists get a little bit more uppity and there you have an existential threat. So the country goes away.
The argument has been made and there are a lot of people that made the argument that terrorism is an existential threat. These people really have it in for us, but it‘s a harder care to make when it‘s not a state and you look, and how much could they really do? And people have come to realize even 9–11 wasn‘t that bad in the overall scheme of things that could happen. It hurt but it wasn‘t an existential threat. So then – and that‘s with – like I said, the most dramatic thing that‘s happened recently. Take that to Rwanda, Burundi, Bosnia, Kosovo and all these others, you don‘t get very far into the what‘s the existential threat to the United States, may yeah, refugees and economic cost to the Europeans which is bad for trading. And it‘s – I think it‘s part of the nature of these threats and how do you link them back in a way that maybe the tapes we‘ve played and what we have understood are really the things that deeply threaten us. We don‘t have a new narrative or a causal narrative of how these things come back in that way. We‘ve also lived with really this low level of bad stuff, drugs and crime and all that stuff for a long time.
Anatol Lieven: Alcohol
Julia Taft: Oh, is it cocktail time? (Laughter) let‘s have two more quick questions and then I think we‘re going to have to wrap it up. What time are we supposed to be over? Okay. Two more quick questions and then we will – Sarah, can you stay for just five minutes? Okay.
Mary Mullin: My name is Mary Mullin. I work with the Bosnia Support Committee. I just thought I‘d mention, this isn‘t my question that Mladic is still at large 11 years, and they‘re still at large. That must be affecting Bosnia.
But what I wanted to mention was I was at a hearing in Congress on Afghanistan and they were talking about the drug – how much it‘s costing us to try to stop the drug trade in Afghanistan, and they were saying wouldn‘t it be worth our while to have them grow other crops that maybe don‘t make as much money but pay them like we pay our farmers? Now maybe in the same way, I know they have – I know they were mentioning something of the sort that it would be easier to actually give money to individuals or in groups or they weren‘t sure how to do it, but they were saying it would cost the United States less and it would do more for Afghanistan if they‘re not making more money on like – I guess they were going to grow some herbs or I forget what it was they were talking about. But they were saying that it‘s so much money to try and curb the drug trade that I would be easier to try and work against it the other way.
Julia Taft: Anatol, you want to comment on that?
Anatol Lieven: Yes, it would certainly be cheaper. The problem is it would need structures to deliver the compensation, resembling in certain ways, dare I say it; you know some of the structures put in place here by the new deal. The problem is that brings us back again to the weakness of the Afghan state and the limitations of our people on the ground.
That‘s why I hesitate about that because poppy farmers – I talk to poppy farmers about compensation although – you know, giving up their poppies, and they said to me, "Look, you know the situation here. Any money you get, two–thirds of it will simply stay in Kabul with the bureaucrats there. Nine–tenths of the remained will be stolen by the regional government. You don‘t seriously think that any of it is going to come to me, you know.
Mary Mullin: There‘s no way that could happen – is there no way that could happen? I was just asking.
Anatol Lieven: Well, I‘m very skeptical at the present because my fear is that you would have these fake arrangement which, to some extent, you have today where people promise to give it up and do other things, and then they go on growing it anyway and they bribe some official to certify it isn‘t there. That‘s why, frankly, I‘m more attractive to the idea of us buying it directly through the system and the commercial networks. (Laughter) No, no, now. This whole idea of a grave shortage of codeine and morphine across Africa and the developing world. Use it for that. Buy it, use it. It would make more sense to me.
Julia Taft: Okay. Sarah?
Sarah Cliffe: Yeah. In my – I think generally agree with Anatol on drugs but disagree on the capacity of the Afghan state. I – this type of thing I think the reasons he laid out are right, that people would find ways of bypassing it. They grow it anyway. They‘d take the compensation and then use their old channels to get around it. But in terms of can Afghan‘s structure deliver simple programs to community levels I actually think they can.
We finance a program that covers 17 thousand villages that we‘ve ordered the hell out of because clearly the risks in Afghanistan are so high you have to be doing three monthly finance checks, and so far it‘s come through. Sometimes we‘ll have problems with it. It‘s a highly corrupt environment. There will be problems with it, but it‘s actually performed surprisingly well.
Anatol Lieven: 17 thousand – one seven thousand villagers are not –
Sarah Cliffe: Villages.
Anatol Lieven: Oh.
Sarah Cliffe: That‘s quite a lot.
Anatol Lieven: That is quite a lot.
Julia Taft: Okay. Last question. (Laughter) There is hope yet.
Leon Wintraub: Thank you. I‘m Leon Weintraub, a former member of the Foreign Service, now an adjunct professor at George Washington University. I‘d like to address like Anatol did at the start the title of the symposium, are we failing, failing states. It seems to me that sets the outsiders, the western powers with the people and resources and the institutions, in the nature of wanting these states to succeed more than the actors within the states want them to succeed. And as much as I‘m in favor of multilateralism and cooperation, it seems to me all that we‘re doing with these huge amount of resources and sophisticated models can really only be affected at the margins unless there‘s some kind of compact within the state, whether it‘s Liberia or Afghanistan or Iraq, to take an example, where there‘s not a political will, I don‘t see what kind of difference we can hope to make. I wonder if that‘s too pessimistic an observation.
Julia Taft: No, I think we all agree with you, and that gets to the question of the definition of those countries that are unable versus unwilling, and when you have an unwilling country you don‘t have the national identity, the national consensus, the national cultural interests and all the competition for power that makes it so frustrating for any external group to try to be helpful. But I think that the unable people are – can benefit and do benefit a lot from the variety of support.
Let me just have any further comment on that and then we need to close up. Colonel, you wanted to react.
Richard Lacquement: I agree. And I think implicitly I kind of changed the title for the panel to kind of like which failing states do we care about and why because it‘s really not about them. It‘s about us and whether we care to get involved with failing states is kind of my perception. It‘s not about US leveraging power, it‘s about how we tend to approach, or that‘s the way I took it.
Julia Taft: Sarah?
Sarah Cliffe: I think it‘s only true when you have national leadership can you really get something done. You can‘t impose it from outside, but I don‘t think that means we should disengage completely. So if you take Liberia, transitional government, unwilling to engage in a pro–developmental program, new government is willing but greatly lacking in capacity. Had we 100 percent disengaged fro the transitional government we would be unable ourselves to come in quickly to help the new government to launch a program. So I think in those situations we have to stay in, limit the resources that are transferred because they‘re not a good environment for resources, but stay engaged and plug away to the extent possible trying to protect the assets of the country until leadership are more willing to engage in the approach.
Anatol Lieven: On that score, I think when dealing with local elites it‘s very, very difficult because it varies from case to case and requires great cultural, almost anthropological sensitivity, but we have to first identify what they‘re really about, what they really want, not what to say they ask what they really want which would always be liberal democracy, progress, pluralism, development, etcetera, etcetera. But what they really want and then identify what of what they want is unacceptable for whatever – completely unacceptable for whatever set of reasons and what we can work with.
I mean, to take another example from Afghanistan, if I had had a part if crafting the strategy I would have made tremendous effort to direct a considerable amount of money to the religious establishment in that country which is desperately important in terms of real power and influence on the government in Afghanistan which has tremendous moral authority and is respected and which we are in danger of loosing, at least in the Poshtoon areas, to the Taliban. But once again we didn‘t – we didn‘t think along those lines. That‘s not what we thought we were doing. Unfortunately, of course, a lot of the local elites tend to be about is nepotism amongst other things. So the question is how much nepotism? I‘m not against a certain degree of nepotism. It‘s oiled the wheels in many societies over time including our own.
Julia Taft: On that note, please join me in thanking all of our panelists for a really interesting conversation. (Laughter)
Kathy Gockel: Before you all run away, very quickly, they‘re supposed to have a slide come up. I‘m Kathy Gockel with the Stanley Foundation and I actually work on Middle East programming. When we started this title I have to explain it to you. I kept coming up with topics and everybody on my team said, "They‘ve already had a conference on that." So finally I got so frustrated one day I said, "Well, why are we failing, failing states?" And they said, "There‘s your topic."
Anatol Lieven: It‘s very euphonic.
Kathy Gockel: Yes. We wanted actually for people to disagree with it. So I‘m glad that people did. That was the whole point. I do want to thank everyone for coming. We are supposed to be having a slide come up here soon with Jeff Martin. It was supposed to be up by now, but speaking of debauchery I guess, we have alcohol up in the rotunda and appetizers at four but we thank everyone for coming.
There he is.
Jeff Martin: Thank you everyone for coming. A few short minutes here for closing the conference. And let me apologize for this slightly Orwellian method of doing so. When we decided to have the panels in three different rooms and the conference end we really found no other way to draw everyone back together for a closing session but we wanted to make a few comments at the end and make a few announcements as we always do.
First of all, I want to thank you for joining us for our first conference on global and national security. Please be sure to complete the general, that‘s the bright green evaluation form that‘s in your folders, and also complete the evaluation form, the yellow one, that was left on your chair in the evaluation session that you‘re in now. Drop both of those off at the back of the room. There‘s a basket there, or if you can‘t find a basket just leave it on the table there.
We also like to invite you to join us for the reception upstairs in the rotunda on the eighth floor. It will be starting in just a few minutes. To get there go to the elevators just outside the Polaris room, go up one floor and there you‘ll find a bank of eight other elevators I think. You can take any of those up to the eighth floor and staff will be scattered along the way to help guide you to the reception. We really have lots of food and drink and certainly enjoy having you there.
During the reception you can either leave your coat here. It‘s quite safe here, or with the coat check which stays open until 7:00 p.m. or you can take it with you up to the rotunda where there are coat racks there as well.
Let me say in closing that we convened this conference to raise the level of discussion surrounding how the US acts in the world and we feel good about the quality of the presentations and discussions which have taken place today. In fact, as someone noted, there was a lot of buzz in the halls, and that‘s always a good thing from a conference organizers perspective.
It would be foolish of me or anyone else to try to summarize in any sort of comprehensive or even general way the kinds of themes that were talked about here, but there was one theme that did some through quite strongly to me anyway, and that is that votes within the policy community among policy experts and with US citizen around the wor – around the country, there is a sense that it‘s time for the US to mend it‘s relations with the rest of the world.
It‘s your work and our work going forward from here to talk about and think through and execute the ways that we give life and meaning and action to that general imperative.
Finally, I want to say in closing, my thanks to our staff. Which, not to my surprise, rose again to a tremendous challenge that was laid in front of us. We had never had this kind of conference before which we‘ve done lots of other kinds of meetings, but this was anew thing for us. Across the board, from the panels that were put together, the presentations that were given generally, the people who set those up did a spectacular job. And from a logistical standpoint organizing this kind of conference was a whole new beast for us. Our usual checklists didn‘t work. We had to make up new ones and everyone worked with great spirit and great energy and great wisdom, I think, to pull this off. And I want to congratulate everyone on our staff who made a terrific effort on this.
We have learned a lot over the course of this day and look forward to the next time – the next time of us being here. Thanks very much.
Julia Taft: I think we ought to give special thanks for Kathy and Natasha. Would you please both stand up from the Stanley Foundation? I assume you are going to do a summary of this and make it available?
Kathy Gockel: We do have rapparteurs in every session, and each panel organizer will sit down and determine how best to get that out to you. One of the things I wanted to do was actually do some type of policy brief or memo because I think we had enough here. One of the things we wanted to do with this panel that we are very happy about is have people who have been open the ground as well as in academic think tank. So we will let you know. I know we will have a follow up communication with everyone. But thank you so much for being here, and thanks for out panelists. We really appreciate it. Thank you.
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