American Enterprise Institute

April 18, 2007

[Edited transcript from audio tapes]

1:15 p.m.	Registration
1:30	Panelists:	Kimberly Marten, Barnard College, Columbia University
		Michael Rubin, AEI
		Rory Stewart, Turquoise Mountain Foundation, Kabul
	Moderator:	Mauro De Lorenzo, AEI
3:00	Adjournment

Proceedings:

Mauro De Lorenzo:  Given the relentless focus on the failures of the CPA (Coalition Provisional Authority), which is understandable given their political significance both here and Iraq, we have tended to lose sight or failed to ask questions about the lessons that are to be learned more generally and to try and situate the CPA and its performance in a historical context both to the more distant past and to similar efforts run multi-laterally in the 1990s and before and going on in other parts of the world today.  And it is time, I think, to start drawing those lessons, and also I think to stop focusing as much on specific personalities and to look more at the structural issues and the historical issues and to ask why, not just in the case of the CPA but more generally.  There is always a problem of finding the political will in any post-conflict situation to restore order, to provide basic order and security; it is not a failure which is unique to the CPA. 

Our panelists today include two people who have direct experience in the CPA.  Our first speaker is Rory Stewart who has just published a memoir of his months spent as a governor in southern Iraq.  He previously worked in the British Diplomatic Service and resigned and walked across South Asia, including several months walking across Afghanistan in 2001.  Some of you may remember his memoir of that journey published a few years ago.  Rory now lives in Kabul again and is the chief executive of the Turquoise Mountain Foundation.  If you have read the book you will remember his first visit to the Turquoise Mountain.  It is a foundation devoted to architectural preservation.  Perhaps I will let him say more about that as he also talks to us about his experiences in Iraq.  Rory, thank you.

Rory Stewart:  Thank you.  No wonder the CPA failed; I cannot even operate a microphone.  Thank you very much indeed for having me today, and I’m extremely pleased to be here and extremely pleased to be engaged with a subject like this. 

One of the things that strike me in both Afghanistan and Iraq is the tendency to focus on personalities and assume that the problems we are facing are largely because we sent in the B-team.  Now, as a member of this B-team, of course I’m rather sensitive to this charge and instead would like to focus more on some of the structural issues, some of the institutional issues why, I believe, intervention was highly likely to fail.  And I want to start with a brief anecdote to try to illustrate what I’m talking about. 

Many people, of course, have said that the problem in Iraq is a series of tactical errors made by the administration in the early months, and indeed we made a lot of mistakes.  But my guess is that even if we had got those things right –          de-Baathification, abolition of the army, decision not to bring in enough troops - the operation still would have failed because of, in very broad terms, who we are and who the Iraqis were.  Now, these are obviously very vague, general statements which I’m going to try to flesh out over the next 10 minutes. 

What do I mean by that?  Well, on the 10th of January 2004, I was sitting in my office in Al Amarah as the coalition deputy governor coordinator when I saw a crowd was gathering outside our office.  On the other side of the road was the newly-appointed Iraqi governor.  When I arrived we did not have an Iraqi governor but we just had a provincial council election, and a man called Riyat [phonetic] had been appointed as the governor.  And this crowd was carrying large banners which said, ‘Death to the governor!’  So Riyat came into our office and said, “Could you please clear this crowd away?”  And the British colonel who was sitting in the room with me said, “No, Governor, we are not going to clear this crowd away.  It has got permission to demonstrate and we have cleared this crowd, that they are authorized to be there.”  And slightly foolishly, in retrospect, one of us said, “Governor, often in Britain we have 25,000 people demonstrating outside the Parliament building.  You are just going to have to get used to this.”  And the governor said, “This is not Britain, this is Iraq,” and went back to his office.

  About an hour later, the crowd surged forward and the governor’s police cordon, which was largely composed of close relatives of his - he had a hundred cousins in the police force - opened fire on the crowd and five people were killed and about 20 injured outside my office window.  So we went in and we suggested that he retire home and that he take the police with him, and we put a company of British troops between the crowd and the governor’s office and they stood there for the next seven or eight hours with people throwing improvised explosive devices at them.  Soldiers were getting injured but they behaved, I think, very well for eight hours keeping the crowd back.

 But at about six o’clock in the evening, for some reason that is rather difficult to understand, the crowd got into the governor’s office and I began to get reports saying that they were looting the office.  I rang the British colonel and he denied it.  But when I walked over the following morning, at nine in the morning with my colleagues, I discovered that, indeed, all the windows had been smashed and all the computers had been stolen and the governor was sitting at the one remaining piece of furniture in his office, which was the large hard wood desk.  All the chairs had been removed.  And he said, “What on earth is going on?”  And one of my colleagues, an American colleague said, “Governor, maybe it is better that a few computers got stolen than more people got killed.”  And the governor said, “What on earth are you talking about?  You would not have allowed the crowd to go rampaging into your office and steal your computers, would you?”  And, indeed, he was correct.  Had the crowd attempted to do so, they would have been shot at the door. 

And from that moment onwards, any trust between us and the Iraqi governor was lost because he understood, he grasped that we were prepared to treat ourselves in quite a different way from the way we were prepared to treat the elected Iraqi government.  But the lessons from this are perhaps not as easy as you might think.  Indeed, we made a number of mistakes, but the mistakes were not of the sort that people point to when they talk about the looting in Baghdad at the beginning of 2003.  It was not that we lacked troop numbers; we had about a thousand troops in the town at the time in a relatively small town.  All these troops had served in Northern Ireland and they had pretty extensive experience in crowd control.  The problem really was an ideological problem. 

In essence, we firstly had sympathy for the crowd.  We had sympathy for the crowd because the crowd was there with banners saying the governor was corrupt and nepotistic and incompetent and, indeed, he was all three of those things.  We knew that the crowd was from the Beni Laam tribe and he was from the Abu Mohammed and he had given most of the jobs in the government to the Abu Mohammed.  So we probably had a subconscious sense that it was good for him to have to confront this crowd.

 Secondly, of course, we had BBC camera crews on the ground and that considerably reduced the freedom of action of the troops.  Rightly so because, in fact, this very date, 10th of January 2004, and this very incident became a very serious scandal in the British military 18 months later where a video was released showing some British troops beating up some of the demonstrators in the courtyard of the governor’s office.  So, though my perception of it was that the troops had behaved with considerable dignity and restraint, it led to a very serious and real military police investigation for troop brutality.

 But finally and most importantly, when I really pushed the British colonel on why they had failed to defend the building, he said, “I do not believe that I should have my troops killed defending a piece of empty property.  Property is less important than life and I do not think either the British public or the British politicians would put up with troops being killed defending an empty building.”  And he was probably right.  And one way of analyzing it, perhaps in slightly brutal terms, would be to say that we were unable to define the conditions under which we were prepared to kill Iraqis or the conditions under which we were prepared to let our own troops to be killed. 

Why do I raise this?  I raise this because I suspect that even if we had had twice the number of troops on the ground, they would have faced exactly the same kinds of problems.  We often talked about the CPA as though Ambassador Bremer was supposed to be some ideal platonic philosopher prince who would arrive on the ground and sketch out an idea of an ideal society.  In fact, of course, none of those were of that sort.  We arrived on the ground with a model, a half-understood picture of what Iraq was like under Saddam and perhaps an equally modeled and half-understood picture of what societies are like and some theory on how to get from one to the other. 

When we looked at the planning process, I did not feel that the problem was that we lacked planning; I felt that the nature of our planning was pretty peculiar.  I remember sitting at a conference with Ambassador Bremer and the two- and three-star generals and representatives from other provinces in October 2003, where we were shown a slide on the board in a room a bit like this which said that in the next five months we were supposed, amongst other things, to have privatized all the state’s enterprises, computerized the Baghdad Stock Exchange, reformed the university curriculum, recruited another 25,000 policemen, and set-up women’s centers throughout the province.  Now, this was one page of a hundred page document which had been produced by the CPA in lurid electric green and pink colors showing time lines indicators.  It was not an absence of a plan.  It was rather a plan which was unachievable. 

In addition, of course, the problem is whatever our imaginations, whatever our philosophical imaginations, whatever our planning capacity, whatever our ability to actually understand the situation, which I think even Iraqis struggle to understand the situation in our province in which 54 new political parties had emerged in the three months after the invasion, and even an Iraqi would struggle to distinguish between Harakah Dawah, Hizb Al-Dawah Al-Islamiyya, and Hizb Al-Dawah Tanzim al-Iraq which is to say the Call Movement, the Islamic Call Party, and the Islamic Call Organization of Iraq, the tendency, let alone the many parties that call themselves Hezbollah and Hamas and consisted of three men and a briefcase and have no connection whatsoever to their namesakes on the other side of Arabia. 

Well, since simply the complexity is who we were, and we were largely three sorts of people.  Rather than being ideal Machiavellian princes, we were either soldiers, or we were development workers, or we were diplomats by and large.  There were some exceptions to this, but institutionally and in terms of numbers on the ground, that is really where we came from.  And those organizations are not set up to do this kind of job.  They are not recruited to do it; they are not trained to do it; they do not want to do it.

 Soldiers, and I was an infantry officer myself, are amongst other things entirely allergic to politics.  They do not like politicians much back home.  They certainly do not like Iraqi politicians on the ground.  And again and again, military officers would say to me, “I’m not talking to that man.  He is completely corrupt.  He is entirely discredited.” 

Development workers believe that their job is to alleviate poverty and in the case of the British Development Agency, questioned whether they really wanted to be on the ground at all given that they did not think Iraq was poor enough to justify their presence.

 And finally, diplomats of which I was one, are really most comfortable drafting resolutions in the United Nations, in penthouse apartments in New York, and are extremely reluctant to find themselves in a fly-infested, overheated office in provincial Iraq where the actual job day-to-day was not the job of the diplomat, not the job of a soldier or development worker, but in fact much closer to the job of a 1920s Chicago ward politician. 

What do I mean by that?  What I mean is that I sat in my office and for nine hours a day, I saw between 40 and 50 Iraqis who would walk in and say, “My name is Saad bin Abduahid bin Faleh bin Majid bin Halifeh [phonetic].  My great grandfather was in a boat with Wilfred Chester [phonetic] in 1952.  I am the premier paramount sheikh of the Abu Mohammed. I command 10,000 men and I would like you to build a clinic in my area.”  And he would then leave and the next man would walk in and say to me,”My name is Sheikh Mohammed Abbas Mohammed Alghurabi [phonetic] and my grandfather was in a boat with Wilfred Chester [phonetic].  I am the paramount sheikh of the Abu Mohammed.  I would like you to build a school in my area.”  And when I turn to my translator and say, “Well, which one of these men is the paramount sheikh of the Abu Mohammed,” the translator would say, “Oh, it is Sheikh Mohammed Abbaz Mohammed Alghurabi [phonetic] because we saw him on television in February 2002 signing in blood that he would give his life to defend Saddam. 

Or, it was about trying to spend the money.  I got $10 million a month in vacuum sealed packets by April 2004 which I was allowed to spend with considerable freedom, and yet it was very difficult to spend this money in April 2004.  I only spent $8.5 million and had to return $1.5 million to Baghdad and was criticized.  People said, “What on earth are you doing?  There is an insurgency here.  There is unemployment.  People want to kill us.  Spend the money.”  So, I thought okay, well, I will set up a jobs program for 3,000 people. 

So we advertised around the province.  Thirty thousand people applied.  How do we select who to give the jobs to?  People are carrying bombs into the registration queues, so I need to deploy two companies and British troops to try to register them.  If I give jobs to the Abu Mohammed, the Beni Laam riots.  If I give jobs to rural areas, the towns riot.  I select the people by lottery, randomly by lottery, these 3,000 jobs.  They need to appoint 250 engineers to oversee them, 50 chief engineers above them, five above them, me on top of them trying to allocate jobs planting trees and picking up garbage around the province and I have only spent $1.2 million and I have got another $8.8 million to spend by the end of the month.

 This was not an easy job, but finally, of course - and this is where I will conclude – the final problem was not who we were.  The final problem was what Iraq was.  What do I mean by that?  Well, what I mean is that under Saddam, of course, all power had been drawn up to the center and it was extremely difficult at a local rural area to discover who was in charge or who wanted to be in charge. 

This is different in Afghanistan.  In Afghanistan, it is very easy for me today to walk into a village and find somebody to deal with.  But when in Arafie [phonetic], which is a town in northern Decca just north of Nasseriya [phonetic], we held an election for a very good district council in a town of 120,000 people and these 10 men who were mostly non-tribal, non-political individuals in their mid-30’s with engineering degrees from Baghdad University took office.  A group of Sadrist militiamen led by a 28-year-old cleric, five of them, walks into the council office, abducted one of the councilors and tortured him.  The councilor escaped.  He came into my office and he demanded justice.  We asked the Iraqi police to intervene.  Four hundred and fifty Iraqi policemen in the town and they refused to do anything against the militia group of five.  We asked the Italian military to intervene.  The Italians went in with their armored personnel carriers.  The 28-year-old cleric fired a rocket-propelled grenade at them and they went away again.

 So, then I thought, okay, maybe the answer here is a political solution.  So, we gathered around in a room and I sit there and there is the headmaster of the local school, there is the imam of the mosque, there are the sheikhs of the two major tribes, and there is the police chief and the mayor.  And I say, “This is a disgrace.  You are a town of a 120,000 people.  You have had a decent election which you were all proud of.  How are you allowing a 28-year-old with four friends to go and abduct and torture your councilors?  What should we do?”  And the headmaster of the school says, “Ah Mr. Rory, we have thought about this a lot.  We have decided what we should do is hold a new election for a new council.”  So I said, “Well, I cannot see much point in that because Sheikh Hallis Edi [phonetic] will simply do the same thing again.”

So then I look at the Sheikh Beshuelat [phonetic] and I say, “Sheikh Arcan [phonetic] you have said for the last six months, ‘This is a tribal society.  Give me guns.  Give me ammunition.  I can keep security here.’  Here is your chance.  What do you need?”  And he says, “Oh, I cannot do anything against this man.  He is not from my tribe.”  So I say, “Okay, you Sheikh Arcan, have got 45 percent of the people in this province and you Sheikh Talib bin Benitebcaab [phonetic], you have got another 45 percent of the people in this province.  Surely, between you, you can do something.”  And they go, “No, he is not from my tribe.” And finally, the imam of the mosque concludes, “Mr. Rory, this young man –- he has had a difficult life.  His father died when he was young.  Can we not just forget about him?” 

I leave that room not thinking that the people in that room do not understand what I’m talking about.  They all fully understand notions of rule of law. Iraqis today all understand what is at stake, but nobody wishes to take political responsibility.  Nobody wishes to say, “I’m in control of this town and I’m going to run it.”  And in the absence of that, I think it would have been very difficult for any of us to administer the province. 

Now, why do I point to the Iraqis in my conclusion?  Because I have served in the Balkans, I have served in Indonesia working on East Timor, I have served now in Afghanistan, and the basic incompetence of the internationals is a common theme through all these theaters.  Nevertheless, we are more successful in some of these countries than others.  Why?  Because we win the consent of the local population.  People complain the electricity still does not work in Baghdad, but of course I know it still does not work in Kosovo seven years after the invasion and after we have spent over a billion US dollars.  But the difference is that in Kosovo or Kabul, the local population largely gives us the benefit of the doubt and acknowledges that the problem is that we are incompetent; whereas in Baghdad, they assume we are engaged in a deliberate conspiracy to humiliate them. 

So I’m going to conclude there, and I’m going to conclude because I have been talking about Machiavellian princes all the way through with my favorite quote from Machiavelli, which is that Machiavelli says, “Many have imagined Republics and principalities which have never been seen or known to exist, and those who persist in trying to do what they think they ought to do rather than what they can will undermine their power rather than sustain it.”  Thank you very much indeed.

Mauro De Lorenzo:  Thanks very much.  We are going to turn now to my AEI colleague, Michael Rubin, who is also a resident scholar here.  He is a specialist of the 19th century history and current affairs of Iran, as well as Iraq and Turkey.  Before joining AEI he was a staff adviser for Iran and Iraq in the office of the Secretary of Defense, including a year spent as a political adviser to the Coalition Provisional Authority.  Michael, thank you for joining us.

Michael Rubin:  Thank you, Mauro.  Oftentimes I get asked what books I recommend on Iraq.  And instead of recommending any single book, what I recommend most if people want to understand both what went right and what went wrong and the general dysfunction of how everything worked together, I would recommend reading Ambassador Bremer’s book which I’m not too favorable towards, in combination with Rory’s book to get a sense of - which I am very favorable towards - what was in theory going on in the center versus what was in reality going on throughout Iraq and how the center did not necessarily want to or have the ability to deal with the reality.  And that pair of books, more than any other, I do think sums up in a way the atmospheres of at least the coalition administration of Iraq.  The Iraqi tale of the story is a different issue which is just starting to get fleshed out right now. 

I also very much always –- I have never met Rory before.  I always enjoy when on television we are told that we have to debate because we tend to agree on a lot and it makes it a much more fun debate for me, at least, when I can actually agree with what people say and expand out and illustrate points.  All too often in Washington nowadays, the debate about Iraq is completely divorced from what is actually going on in Iraq.  And while people who have a lot of experience in Iraq by no means agree any more than 10 Iraqis in a room would agree with each other, the fact of the matter is what is going on in the ground in Iraq and experience there does, I do think, add a great deal of nuance.

  But I’m going to start my talk today disagreeing just a little bit because I’m going to operate from the premise that while I agree that the coalition - the United States, Britain and others - have not been very efficient, good, however you want to define it as occupying powers, we might not have a choice in the matter.  Sometimes we are drawn in to these events and my criticism of US policy all along, not just five years ago but I think also five years from now, is while too many people in Washington think the world revolves around Washington - the beltway is known for its naval gazing - the fact of the matter is often times US policy is much more reactive to events rather than leading events, and this idea that there is a plan or strategy looks good in theory, on paper.

 What I want to do though is start out with some of the debates I observed both in the pre-war phase and also while I attended the same meeting as Rory did - we did not know each other that October meeting with all the fancy PowerPoints and so forth - it was at that meeting where I got up and left during coffee break and did not come back for five months.  That is part of a neutral reaction; I’m not a diplomat and I do not have the patience of one.  I do not play one on TV as many of you know.  At any rate, one of the key debates that I think has not been resolved and, frankly, I do not think any of these debates are going to be fully resolved until the administration and, frankly, the Congress and the CIA and others declassify the documents from the run-up to the war.  Documents are classified for two reasons:  To protect sources and to protect methods.  Protecting oneself from embarrassment, from a bureaucratic embarrassment, is not an excuse for classification of documents and those documents should be as transparent as possible now. 

One of the key debates before the war was a theoretical debate which people had across the bureaucracy did not always come down to neat State Department, Pentagon and so forth lines, especially since most of the planning took place in the National Security Council and the Central Command.  At any rate, it was a debate between when would the United States, and by extension in the future occupying powers, have more influence when it became clear that a war was imminent?  Would they have more influence before so-called ‘boots were on the ground’ or after ‘boots were on the ground?’  Should in a case like Iraq where there were, according to The Guardian Newspaper of London from August 2002 – okay, everyone turn and stare - according to The Guardian Newspaper from August of 2002, one out of every six Iraqis fled the country under Saddam Hussein’s rule.  You add a great deal of exiles, I think sometimes this debate, this corollary debate between exiles and internals was a little bit too exaggerated.  After all, there was not a genetic difference, for example, between China and Taiwan.

 Putting that aside, there is the debate about whether we should use our leverage before the war in order to extract as much concession and agreement as possible, for example, the interim constitution and so forth, or whether we would have more influence after the invasion, liberation, whatever you want to call it, had occurred.  And this got into the whole debate about whether there should be a governing council appointed beforehand or whether there should be a large Baghdad conference afterwards and so forth.  And there was, in retrospect, a lot of people talked about how everyone had their asset; who they wanted to put on the throne.  None of those debates have much -– there is not much reality to it because everyone recognized that it was a non-starter to put Chalabbi in power as the president or Allawi or anyone else for that matter.  At any rate, you had this debate over influence and it is a debate, I think, that will have resonance in the future.  When you are trying to get interested parties who have a disparate political viewpoint together, when do you get them to make the commitment?

 Now, of course, there is also the question if you get them to make a commitment, what happens if they break it?  But when it comes to key issues such as a bill of rights or the role of religion in the constitution, the fact of the matter is, and this came out into play much later in the debate regarding the Transitional Administrative Law and so forth, that whoever puts the first draft on paper even if it is revised later, it automatically impacts the debate. 

I heard Azar Nafisi once talk about, in the context of the Islamic Republic of Iran - this is about 10 years ago now before her book - that throughout the Middle East women are fighting for rights they never had.  Iran is the exception; they are fighting for rights that were taken away from them.  In this case when it comes to, for example, the role of religion in the constitution, if there is going to be a constitutional debate later on after that transitional law was passed, it becomes an issue about whether you are taking away rights.  And in that regard, perhaps we could have used our leverage a little bit better. 

This also goes into the role of US policy-making.  Too many people have been thrilled at the cheap political shot, whether it is the Pentagon, whether it is the State Department, whomever.  The analogy I have always tried to make, because I do not really blame either the State Department or the Pentagon and I’m not here to assign personal blame; I’m looking at this from the viewpoint of going forward, that when you have the State Department and you have the Pentagon in a policy dispute, whether it is about Iraq, whether it is about Lesotho, whether it is about Uzbekistan, whatever it is, it is like on one of those famous L.A. Law or Law and Order shows or whatever, when you have two lawyers arguing their case before the judge, people like me, fairly low-ranking guys, we are the people sitting one or two rows behind desperately picking things out of a suitcase to shove in front of the chief counsel so that they say the right thing at the right time and do not chew our heads off afterwards.  Well, if the judge never makes a decision and the judge in this case is either, I would say, is the National Security Advisor with perhaps the President being the Appellate Judge, then you have a situation where the debates just become much more shrill.  And what happens as they become much more shrill as they do in court cases, is people tend to try to play them out in the press as well. 

What I think we saw before Iraq and what certainly impacted the occupation in Iraq was the fact that decisions were not made by the National Security Council, and when they were made the National Security Council let down its responsibility to coordinate policy to impose discipline over the process.  If there is to be declassification of documents so a real study of this can begin, I do think that what is missing in a lot of literature that is out there is a study of some of the policy debates which were going on inside the National Security Council because this is where everyone was coming together to hash out the issues.  Another key issue, and in the literature I have only seen this really discussed at length in Anthony Shadid’s book, perhaps I have missed it in others’ books, is the question about the formal declaration of occupation.  Oftentimes when the United States goes into military conflicts including on the ground and societies, whether it is Kosovo, Bosnia, or so far Somalia, or whether it is the French and the Côte d'Ivoire war or what have you, there is no formal declaration that one is an occupying power.  It is something that is sort of just thrown by the wayside. 

This became a major issue in the diplomacy after Baghdad had fallen and the Coalition Provisional Authority was established.  In order to win greater diplomatic flexibility from many European powers, the United States agreed to define the Coalition Provisional Authority in the UN resolutions as an occupying power.  This is all well and good.  The problem was that in an instant, Iraqi allies became collaborators.  It justified a lot of the opponent’s influence operations and so forth.  And it is one of these issues that need to be grasped.

The question of whether or not to define oneself as an occupying power is not the question of whether or not to adhere to international law.  They are two very different things and there is –- I mean the JAGs were not sitting around playing Solitaire or Minesweeper on their computer at anytime during the Coalition Provisional Authorities operation; there was active legal debate.  But this issue of stigma and taint is one that I think needs to be addressed specially in the context of the Middle East.

 One of the other issues -- and this is what really came through clear.  I mean, Rory’s writing is fantastic and one could sense some of the frustration that was out there, and I felt the same frustration myself when I was roaming around the country, is how to break out of the bubble, and how can occupation authorities break out of the bubble.  Now, a lot of people have taken as a lesson learned from Iraq the fact that perhaps we should set up -- I do not know what it is called - an occupation corps, a reconstruction corps.  Whatever it is, a group of people whose job it will be to administer in a post-conflict environment. 

That is all well and good, but unfortunately the debate has centered over who should be in charge of it.  Should it be USAID?  Should it be the State Department?  Should it be the Pentagon?  Should it be someone else?  That is neither here nor there.  That is, I mean excuse me, bureaucratic masturbation: It may feel productive at the time but no good can come of it.  What you have is a greater problem of people who are very good administrators but do not have the opportunity or the ability to sense how their policies are playing out on the ground and in reality, and on the other hand, you have a lot of people who frankly are putting their lives on the line.  State Department people, USAID people, Pentagon people, Civil Affairs people and so forth, who have that feel for what is going on in the ground but do not know, have the ability to transfer that into the policy debate on the center because they are not the ones that write the memo.

 Now, this does not mean that you should just discount all the pencil pushers and so forth and just focus on the guys in the field, because sometimes the guys in the field lack the comparative perspective and they tend to blow up local affairs that they may tend not to recognize the patterns that can emerge when people put all those reports together.  Still, it is a problem and it was not just the problem in the Coalition Provisional Authority.  If you talk to foreign area officers in the US Army, for example, whether they are Soviet specialists, whether they are Middle East specialists or so forth, there is a sense that they are going to have a wonderful time doing their jobs.  They love their jobs but they realize that if they are not at the Pentagon or if they are not at the command central staff, they are going to get passed-up for promotions, that they are going to get bypassed and that, basically, if you fail, you will be lucky if you ever make colonel.  I have known a couple who were lucky but it is few and far between.

Now, just finishing off because I do not want to go on too long, I am very worried about the PRTs, the Provincial Reconstruction Teams.  I think it is a very good idea but this is where the bureaucracy is poisonous.  All too often in Washington we will have these debates whether over who controls the pocketbook.  Because the power of allocation is power and is influence.  The problem is that too many of the people –- put it this way: the people who are out in the field and the people who are in the PRTs do not necessarily have the power to make those disbursements as quickly as they might, especially in an occupation environment.  A war zone and a Washington bureaucracy -- Washington bureaucracy has its purpose: If you keep things slow, you do not make mistakes.  But on the other hand, in a war zone, sometimes you need to react much more than six weeks from now or six months from now. 

What I would argue needs to be done is when embedding PRTs into military units or vice versa, everyone from whatever bureaucracy who is necessary to sign off on a piece of allocation should be embedded in that unit and should be in the field and not behind the desks.  They should not be, as the military calls them, ‘fobbits’, people who spend their time on forward operating bases or FOBs.  And if that means that USAID or any other bureaucracy is going to have to take the number of people in its chain to sign off on an allocation from 30 and whittle it down to three, so be it.  But there has got to be an ability for both accountability but also for instant reaction.  That balance seems out of whack. 

And the last thing, and this is a cheap shot I know, one that I have made repeatedly, not a cheap shot to anyone here, is the issue of metrics.  How are we going to measure success?  Too often, it seemed -- and when one reads a lot of the reports coming out of Baghdad or even the reports to Congress, one will hear the metric which people used to define success as allocations.  We have allocated $30 million for school reconstruction or we have allocated money for conferences which are not going to be held in Iraq so the money does not get spent in Iraq but regardless. 

Well, the problem is that allocations do not measure anything and this becomes also clear when reading the Prince of the Marshes, the frustration that occurs about how to measure success and the how the center measures success and so forth and how you can make meaningful change.  Rory is one of the few people I know who have been to Iraq, who have really grappled with issues such as how to leave a permanent impact and make permanent change, and for that I applaud him, especially at the end of your book when you talked about returning a year later and so forth. 

Let me end there because we have lots of time for Q and A but I do think that I just want to reiterate that it is all well and good to say that we cannot do this, that we are not good at it, and I admit we are not good at it.  But the problem is should we have to do it again, it is likely not going to be a choice which we have the luxury of time to make and, therefore, I think it is necessary to start putting aside some of the personification of the problems and start looking at some of the broader issues.  And with that, let me turn the floor over.

Mauro De Lorenzo:  Thank you very much.  Our final speaker is Kimberly Marten who is the chair of the Political Science Department at Barnard College at Columbia University.  Did I say that right, Barnard or Bernard?

Kimberly Marten:  Barnard.

Mauro De Lorenzo:  There you go.  She is a defense policy scholar specialist on peace-keeping and, I believe, formerly on Soviet military capabilities.

Kimberly Marten:  Still [inaudible].

Mauro De Lorenzo:  Okay.  And her most recent book which -- why do you not hold it up since we are -- is Enforcing the Peace which is a comparative look or a comparison of contemporary peace-keeping efforts with similar efforts by liberal democratic states during the colonial period.  Kimberly, thank you very much for coming down today.

Kimberly Marten:  Thanks.  It is a pleasure to be here.  I’m going to sort of step back from the details that we have been talking about up until now.  I have not been to Iraq.  I have briefly, however, been to both Kosovo and Afghanistan.  And rather than focusing on the details of Iraq, I want to put it in a broader perspective and look at Iraq as an example.  And what I am going to argue is that our failure in Iraq was virtually inevitable, and that is because liberal democratic countries do not do complex military occupations well.  And I’m going to argue that the US was far from being unique in the goals or techniques that it pursued in Iraq. 

In fact, the goals and techniques were very similar to the Chapter Seven peace enforcement operations of the 1990s; in other words, the operations that have been authorized by the UN Security Council to use force to impose peace in foreign societies and to try to protect civilians and get societies up and running again.  And what I argue in the book is that those Chapter Seven operations are very similar in many ways to some of the imperialism that was practiced by liberal democratic states at the turn of the 20th century.  In the Q and A period we can talk about that comparison.  I do not want to go into the details now about how different Chapter Seven operations are from imperialism.  I certainly recognize the differences that Chapter Seven operations are designed to bring resources to societies and not draw them out.  But I think it is important that we not ignore the similarities that are there as well in terms of the goals and methods, and I’ll talk a little bit about them.

 And let me make clear that I’m not excusing the leaders of the Bush administration who made the decision to go into Iraq, because I think the historical parallels were so clear before we made the decision to go in, that it was actually inexcusable to ignore the fact Iraq was likely to fail.  And so I’m not trying to say that therefore individuals should not be blamed for the decision. 

What I am trying to do is put it into broader context and say that it was pretty clear from the start that things were not going to go well no matter what we did.  And let me just also add that military officers knew this history and knew that it was not going to go well, and mid-level and senior army officers tried to say that to leaders of the Bush administration and did not get a fair hearing.

  The major argument I want to make is that we as liberal democratic states cannot force political change on foreign societies using liberal democratic means.  It just does not work.  Why does it not work?  Well, liberal democratic countries tend to be crusaders.  The United States is not unique in this regard; it has been true of liberal democratic countries throughout history.  We want other countries to look more like us because we think we have it pretty good and we want to share those benefits with other people.  And this is how countries like us did empire at the turn of the 20th century.  The goal was to bring the benefits of our good fortune to the underprivileged. 

So, in the French empire they talked about a civilizing mission, bringing all the benefits of French culture, French education, French engineering, and French medicine to lesser developed societies.  In Great Britain, they talked about trusteeship.  They talked about getting other countries ready to assume their own rule under British leadership in the empire.  With the United States and the Philippines, we talked about replacing Spanish despotism with democratic institutions.

 Now, this is also how countries like us do peace operations.  The argument that we make is that peace comes from there being liberal democracies, and so therefore what we should do is create liberal democracies in other places in the world because then we will have peace.  And the key that we always talk about is tolerance.  If only people could get along with each other, if ethnic groups could be convinced to live in common societies together, then there would be peace in the future. 

So what we should do is create power-sharing governments where everyone has a voice.  But the problem is we need to keep troops on the ground to do it because this usually is not a vision that is shared by the people that have gone through civil war and have gotten into this situation where they are.  And we have learned through experience that when we try to use just minimal force, staying a short amount of time, and then leaving as soon as possible so that people have ownership of the situation, we often discover that we have to go back.  We discovered that in Haiti, we discovered that most recently in East Timor.

 So, that is the situation we face and the basic problem that we have is that liberal democratic countries lack the enduring political will to stay on the ground long enough to force this to happen.  By definition, our agendas are contested.  We always ask, “Do we really have a dog in that fight?”  Some of us think that humanitarian intervention is the thing that should be privileged because humanitarian goals are the most important.  Others of us ask whether the national interest is being served with what we are doing on the ground and that debate is never resolved.  And because we are a democracy, that means that it goes back and forth and the resources come and go and there is no common vision that stays on the ground long enough to actually enforce the kind of political change that is necessary with adequate resources to do it.

 Now, this is not new in our era either.  In the imperial era, the offices that were responsible for managing the imperial effort tended to be a low budget priority.  Why is that?  It is because they did not tend to have big constituencies.  And so whenever debates in the liberal democratic governments about the direction that things could go, they were often low in the budgetary priorities, and also a lot of the people who were sent on the ground to lead these imperial missions at the turn of the 20th century were not really the movers and shakers in society.  They were often people who were sort of on the margin, who could not find a place in home territory, and that is why they ended up getting sent to foreign countries.

 In complex peace operations, we have also tried to do things on the cheap.  The question is why can’t somebody else do it?  Why does it always have to be us that is going in and providing the resources?  It is time for somebody else to take over the operation.  Many countries have a low tolerance for casualties, especially when it is not clear what national interest is being served. 

And so, as we can see, there is just no sense of consistency to keep in place the kind of political change that we think is necessary.  And so the result throughout all of these operations has been inconsistency.  In the Imperial era, this was known -- the inconsistency was summed up by the phrase “Man on the spot-ism.” In other words, the person who is on the spot was believed to have the best answers to what was actually necessary to take place on the ground.  And, of course, in that era, communications were really poor.  It took a long time for messages to get back and forth, so people in the capitals did not really have much of the sense of what was going on in the foreign territories.  And the result was that what happened on the ground in empires was often not at all what the people in the capitals intended.  The people in the capitals intended that they would be doing good things and sharing their good love with other societies that were less fortunate. 

On the ground, however, military officers would often receive promotion for combat success and there were numerous cases of combat being started in places where the capitals did not want it to happen with it being reported back to the capitals that it was not the imperial officers who started the battle; it was problems on the ground that had to be dealt with.  That is just one example. 

One example with inconsistency comes from US imperial history and that was the US occupation of the Philippines in 1905.  In the capital city of the Philippines, in Manila, the military operations looked a lot like peace operations looked today.  So you had US military personnel doing civil administration, leading educational reform, reforming all kinds of government services, training local troops, leading medical clinics, engage in police activity, also giving out benefits to the rebels who were on the side of the US and on the side of establishing a new democratic government in the Philippines.  So, Manila looked a lot like peace operations today look.

However, in Mindanao, an outlying island of the Philippines, a man named Major General Leonard Wood is very famous for having done things quite a bit differently.  His troops were attacked by a group of rebels, the ethnic group that was called the Moros, and he saw the opportunity to get back at the Moros who had attacked him because the Moros were having a political meeting that included not just the rebel fighters but also the women and the children. 

Traditionally in that society, the entire society will get together for days at a time to hold a political meeting, and they were holding that political meeting in a volcanic crater that was not active at that time.  And Leonard Wood saw his opportunity, so he stationed his troops all around the outside of the crater and he had the machine gun down everybody who was in the crater, and they killed several hundred of the Moros.  When the word got back to the United States that this had happened, there was an outcry.  There was a congressional investigation.  There were press reports saying how terrible this was because this was not in line with what the US was doing in the Philippines.  The US was an alternative to Spanish despotism and this was not in line with limited use of force.  However, to give you a sense of inconsistency, Teddy Roosevelt promoted him to lead the entire Philippine operation because of his success in fighting off the Moros.

 So, obviously what is happening in peace operations these days do not come close to being that level of brutality.  I’m not trying to make the argument that that is reflective of what peace operations look like today.  I’m just trying to give you a sense that the inconsistencies that we are hearing about are not at all unique to our time, and they are also not unique to the United States as an actor.

 What about the peace operation’s era?  What are some examples of inconsistencies there?  Well, what I have seen by looking at the cases of both Bosnia and Kosovo, for example, is that the fundamental thing that the international community is trying to do is to impose liberal democracy by non-liberal democratic means.  So, in Bosnia, we still have an operation.  We have had it since 1995, something called the “Office of the High Representative,” and I know at least one member of the audience has served in the Office of the High Representative and so I’m eager what he has to say about this.  This is the office that is set up through an international procedure that involves input from the United Nations, from a variety of other international organizations, but it is there to ensure that the Dayton Peace Accords of 1995 are enforced in Bosnia. 

And one of the things that the Office of the High Representative has done repeatedly is that when free and fair elections in Bosnia put into office somebody who is ethnically intolerant or corrupt, they say that person actually cannot serve.  Sorry, that is not in accordance with the Dayton Accords.  And so as a result, your free and fair election has been overturned.  And at times, in addition to overturning elections, it has also meant that the people who have been appointed by those elected officials, judicial officials, for example, are told, “You are not a judicial official anymore because you are not acting in accordance with what the Dayton Accords say”.

  Now we could all agree that it is really good to have in place a set of power structures that say liberal tolerance is the direction that we should go.  We do not want people who are corrupt; we do not want people who are a liberal.  But I think we are sending a mixed message to the Bosnian population when we say, “Yes, we want you to have ethnic liberal tolerance and we are going to make sure you have it whether you do it freely and fairly through democratic elections or not.”

 And in Kosovo, since 1999, the country has been in limbo.  We may see in the next few months that there is independence for Kosovo, but that independence is going to be with oversight.  It is going to be managed sovereignty.  And again, I think we are sending a very mixed message and we are not dealing with the fact that it is fundamentally inconsistent in the message that we are sending people on the ground about what their future should look like.  We say we want to give people ownership but at the same time, they can only have ownership over their political futures if we do things the way that the international community wants them to do it.

 So, what do we do when put all of these together?  Before I sum up, let me just also make the argument that multi-lateralism makes it worse.  We have heard a lot people [audio gap, 49:04-49:18] -- and my vote for multilateralism with an increase to inconsistency and [inaudible] in Kosovo.  I just want to give one example from Afghanistan where inconsistency has been a problem because of multi-lateralism, and it is a real problem today because the operations in Afghanistan have been taken over by NATO and that means that you now have obviously different NATO countries doing things. 

So one quick example happened in Faizabad in 2004, which was that the Aga Khan Foundation, a very well respected NGO was engaged in humanitarian operations and a rumor started among the local population that the Aga Khan Foundation officials were raping local women, and as a result there was a riot.  Well, the Faizabad area is where the German military had its provincial reconstruction team, and there were German military troops on the ground when this riot took place against the Aga Khan Foundation, and a lot of people from the Aga Khan Foundation were injured in the riot.  The Aga Khan Foundation people had to roar-in in vehicles and pretend to be armed to rescue their own population from the rioting that was happening, and the Germans stood aside and did nothing. 

Why did the Germans stand aside and do nothing?  It is because the German Parliament’s interpretation of the German constitution says that German military forces cannot engage in police activities, and that means that German military forces cannot engage in riot control.  And so here you had somebody that was being supported by the international community being involved in a riot by a local population, you had German troops standing right on top of the situation and they could not act.  And that is another example of inconsistency. 

So, what is the solution?  There is no easy solution.  My solution is that we should not be involved in regime change without a great deal of careful forethought about what we are unintentionally unleashing, and we should be rethinking the purpose that we had in going into foreign countries rather than believing falsely that we can control politics in those societies.  We should be concentrating on using force to provide security to the population, and that is something that is reflective in the December 2006 brand new Army and Marine counter-insurgency manual.  I’m afraid that it is too little, too late for Iraq.

Mauro De Lorenzo:  Thank you very much.  Before we launch into Q and A, I would like to pick up on Michael’s theme just for a second, and the theme that you may not have a choice.  These operations will be either the United States alone or in partnership with other countries will be called upon to this. Again, is there a way to do it better?  Maybe if you could –- not necessarily do it well but do with other things -- if you could maybe comment on that for just a minute before we start Q and A.

Rory Stewart:  I will start away on this.  I mean, yes, that is right.  We will often be called upon to do these things and we could do them better.  But we have to be a little bit cautious in statements such as, “We have no choice.”  We have to be honest about what the limits of our power are.  [Indiscernible] place can be we do not have a moral obligation to do things we cannot do and there is simply no point saying, “Despite the fact that we are manifestly, entirely ill-equipped for this operation and will be unable to succeed, we are nevertheless obliged to undertake it.”  So we need to find those cases where it is not impossible for us to have some impact and, clearly, we can improve dramatically. 

I’m working in Kabul at the moment.  The garbage is seven feet deep in the center of the city five years after the invasion and there is simply no excuse for that.  There is no reason why that should be the case.  There is no reason why our bureaucracies with the billions of dollars we are spending cannot clear the garbage out of central Kabul.  And the reason why we are unable to do so, I think, is to a large extent a reflection of the very sclerotic nature of our bureaucracies.  There is something really, really bizarre about the way that it was set up.  A lot of comparisons have been drawn with colonial officers, but of course what strikes me most is that although the colonial regimes were extremely unpleasant, racist and exploitative, they were considerably more professional than we are.

 British colonial officers who were posted to -– they were posted there for 40 years.  They spoke local languages fluently; they served in extremely remote, hostile areas with very little protection.  If they fail to balance the budget, they have no money to spend.  If they fail to keep security, they would be killed in their beds.  We are not in that situation.  We live in highly-protected compounds generally, the civilians anyway, behind HESCO Bastion walls and razor wire.  If we fail to balance the budget, it does not matter.  We can just bring in another $3 billion in international aid.  If we fail to keep security, we can ultimately evacuate ourselves in helicopters.  We serve for six months to two years, and our basic incentive structure is to please our masters at home, and that largely seems to focus around writing the right kinds of reports and focusing on the right kind of paperwork or, in the case of the British Diplomatic Service, acting as a glorified travel agency for visiting politicians from London.

 None of these conditions are necessary but you need to think very seriously about your bureaucratic incentives.  And the most important question you need to pose is how on earth do you make these bureaucracies actually accountable to the beneficiaries on the ground rather than to the [indiscernible] or the political masters back home?  And that is a very, very difficult thing to achieve. 

So yes, I think there is a lot of improvement.  But equally, I think we need to be realistic that these improvements are improvements in the very fundamental structures of our institutions, our bureaucracies, and our political cultures which might take decades to achieve and going into another conflict without having changed these things would be a waste of time.  Thank you.

Michael Rubin:  Okay, I will elaborate on a couple issues very, very briefly in answer to that question.  With regard to the colonial model, I’m not willing to, nor do I think it was suggested, to paint it with a completely negative taint although, of course, overwhelmingly, many people would consider imperialism negative.  I’m always reminded in Iran how historians will oftentimes complain and including some government officials that the problem was we were never colonized properly because we were never formally colonized so that we had all the negatives of colonialism without having the roads and the railroads built and everything like that.

 I’m also reminded of Parkinson’s Law, this observation which was first enunciated in a seminal economist article in the 1950s, I think 1952, looking at the British Admiralty and talking -– basically looking at the employment of the British Admiralty and noting how with time the bureaucracy doubled, tripled, and yet the effectiveness did not increase at all.  And there has to be some real attention, and this goes into the whole issue of -– I mean, simply we do not –- we are all stuck in huge compounds.  Some attention to whether the size of the civilian footprint that we have there is needed.  I mean, how much of it is fact [sounds like] that people never go outside or only go outside once a month?  Would they not be maybe better off in aid [sounds like] to be [indiscernible] and so forth to start [sounds like] operating from Washington which would take the security strain off the American security and the annoyance strain off, in this case, the Iraqis?

 I oftentimes either lived in Mansour or in Karada.  And normally, before the Green Zone was put up, you could drive from one to the other in 10 minutes.  After the Green Zone was put in the middle of everyone it would take over an hour at times.  If the University of Baghdad was letting out and all the cars were double parked, it could take an hour-and-a-half, and the point of that is that this is what annoyed the Iraqis more than some of the grand strategic debates we had.

 The last thing I want to throw out, somewhat provocatively is this whole issue of the Hezbollah model.  Oftentimes, American policy makers complain about it, complain or observe what the Iranian sponsorship of Taraki’s social service networks and so forth is doing and how it is impacting the politics in either Lebanon or now Iraq or perhaps, at some point, Afghanistan.  The counterpoint to that though is if the Iranians have a model that works, is it possible to either disrupt their model or adopt the best of it?  Why are they more efficient at this than we are?  At the very least there should be a comparative study as to the relative efficiencies albeit at recognizing the political baggage accompanying them.

Kimberly Marten:  I agree with Rory that I do not think that we should be doing this kind of thing and I hope to goodness that we do not go into Iran in the future and try to do something similar.  Sometimes people say, “What about Japan and Germany?  Was that not an example of the liberal democratic states doing complex military occupations well?” 

And I think it is important to keep in mind that there are two major differences between Japan and Germany and all of these other cases that we are talking about.  One is that they were natural states where the population had voluntarily formed the state structures for many, many years in advance and there was not a sense of people wanting to split off and form their own territories or get rights that have been defied under the previous regime. 

And the second thing was that Japan and Germany were both devastated by the war.  They had societies and civilian infrastructures that had been absolutely, just absolutely devastated by the war.  They were exhausted and that meant -- it was very clear the US was going to fight through to the death to have victory in those cases and there was no particular incentive to support an insurgency because any insurgents would just have faced a very strong, very deadly US force until victory was achieved.  And I do not think either of those two conditions are going to be present in any of the places that we are potentially thinking about going in and doing something similar in the future.  And so I do not think we should be using Japan and Germany as models. 

I think we should be using the peace operations of the 1990s as cautionary models.  And what we should be concentrating on is what military forces can do well, and what we know they can do well is to provide peace and security; they can do a good job of training other forces to take over their jobs so that eventually they get to go home.  But they are not good at doing politics and we should not be asking them to do politics that is backed by military force to go in a particular direction.

Mauro De Lorenzo:  Thanks.  Can I invite comments –- go on. If you would not mind introducing yourself or identifying yourself from [indiscernible] microphone [indiscernible].

James P. Lucier:  I’m Jim Lucier with the Institute on Religion and Public Policy.  My question is for Kimberly Marten.  If I understood you correctly in your opening thesis, you were saying that liberal democracies are inherently not able to stay long enough to impose their liberal democratic vision.  But does that not beg the question, I mean, what is long enough?  If you stayed forever, would that be imposing a liberal democracy on those countries?

Kimberly Marten:  That is a good question and I would say that the answer is, I think, we do not have a real world example to look at.  But you could imagine that if we continue to have military and police forces from foreign countries on the ground in Bosnia and those forces stayed there for let us say another decade or two, and during that time there is sufficient economic assistance that comes into Bosnia, that it is eventually in good enough economic shape that we could imagine making it part of the European Union so that at that point, there are economic incentives for things to keep on working the way that they are working.  At that point, a generation would have passed.  The generation - that would be the people who were taking political office would have memories of the past but they would not have been the people who were themselves responsible for carrying out the atrocities that happened. 

So, maybe we can imagine that with enough time, cultural change could happen with economic support to allow something like a new society to emerge.  I have my doubts about whether that is going to happen in Bosnia so I do not think that we can take it as a sure thing.  We do not have any examples where that has happened and, certainly, without that kind of continuing attention coming from multiple directions, that the change is not going to stick.

Mauro De Lorenzo:  You have a question for her? 

Danny Corskune:  [Inaudible, speaks without a microphone]

Mauro De Lorenzo:  Please if you can come near the microphone.

Danny Corskune:  Hi Danny Corskune [phonetic] with [indiscernible] of the State Department.  I was just wondering, after Iraq we have been looking at various post-conflict lessons over the last 10 years.  Looking for one of the intrinsic lessons that we must learn and replicate, one of the mistakes that we should not do is we have been focusing very much on these very technical things.  How do you get people into the field?  How do you make sure that the appropriations chain is shortened?  How do you -- all these very sort of technical lessons.  But what strikes me is where we have been more successful than not. 

What Rory is saying is where we have seen that nation-building is an inherently political endeavor.  It is about creating legitimacy; it is about marginalizing shall we say spoilers and promoting those who are willing to maintain some kind of progress, whether they are moderates or not, where we can reward certain political constituencies over others, create a sense of momentum, et cetera, et cetera.  Now, if that is the case, that it is the inherently political nature of how we approach our task which makes a difference between success and failure, is there any chance of replicating that, or will we forever be doomed?  And as a side note, as a bureaucrat myself, I have always looked in awe at those who can do it knowing full well that I certainly will never be able to bring that sort of political mastery to the job.  So it is [inaudible] to the panel.

Rory Stewart:  Well, I think it is a very good point.  I’m supposed to take the two points separately; one of them being a point about lessons learned and technical focus, and second being the question of politics and nation-building.  The first, I absolutely agree.  I mean, one of the most extraordinary things for anybody like Mr. Corskune, indeed anybody who operates in this environment is this obsession with lessons learned and people perpetually saying, “Oh well, the lesson we learned in Bosnia is that you must not hold early elections; otherwise, you are going to have sectarian conflict,” which will then be followed by, “Oh, the lessons we learned in Iraq is you must hold early elections because if you delay the elections you intensify sectarian conflict.”  Well, the lesson we learned in Kosovo is you must have a light footprint; you should not have too many UN troops on the ground.  And then when you get to Afghanistan, the lesson learned is we must not have a light footprint because if you have a light footprint you empower these nasty forces. 

So, the first thing is to say that there are very, very few lessons which can be applied from one context to the other.  But the second point is a much more important perhaps and interesting point, which is the question of how on earth we do the politics involved in nation-building because, as my fellow panelist pointed out, the challenge is of course that we are not dealing usually with Japan or Germany.  The case is somewhat like Afghanistan. 

You are dealing with a country which is the third poorest country in the world where the constituent populations - Uzbek, Tajik, Turkmen, Baluch - give their names to neighboring countries, or the Pashtuns [sounds like] are divided by the Turab [phonetic] line from identical groups on the Pakistani side of the border.  And the real challenge for somebody like Karzai is to create a sense of nationhood, to find a narrative of national identity, something which replaces the only narrative they had in the 1980s, which was Jihad against foreign military occupation, and that political challenge of operating in an environment in which your own central government is almost entirely inept and incompetent; where the problem with your military is not a problem of training. 

The problem is they do not want to fight the Taliban.  The problem with your counter-narcotics ministry is not a problem with training.  The problem is that basically the population and the government is not very serious about the business accounts of narcotics.  That situation in which you are dealing with a country which is both more and less than a nation, which is really where power really resides at a village level not at the central level, but that the identity of the country is bound out with much broader regional factors that connects it very closely to central Asia around and Pakistan. 

I’m trying out of all this mess, muddle, poverty and trauma to create a sense of what Afghanistan might be and give people a stake in the enterprise of Afghanistan.  That is where the real battle takes place, not something which for very obvious reasons foreigners are not in a very good position to help because, of course, societies like Afghanistan and Iraq have a very strong tradition not just of Isthmus conservatism but also of nationalism.  And we are not in this game.  We are discredited from the beginning.  We cannot present ourselves in those contexts as a neutral force coming in to try to build a nation because we are perceived almost whatever the legal language, I believe, as foreign military occupiers.  Thank you.

Michael Rubin:  Just a couple small points.  I would not be so enthusiastic to dismiss some of the discussion of the details; the devil is often in the details.  Although I do agree with Rory, and it is part of my training as historian rather than a political scientist that one always has to prioritize the local situation, not try to impose a single model on everything, I do also, at the same time, in response to your question, want to enunciate what was also said that there is this balance between, if I may, multilateralism and effectiveness.  And one hand, perhaps, the Barcelona process had a lot of consensus and dialogue and political engagement.  But if one is looking at the transformation of societies involved in the North African countries, for example in Barcelona and so forth, I’m afraid they have not moved forward; in fact, they have moved backwards especially when one looks at Hosni Mubarak or President Ben Ali of Tunisia.

 Actually, two other quick points, I would agree that, again, going back to Rory’s point, that sometimes the lessons which people derive from each event are contrary; that one of the problems we have had in the analysis of Iraq is a tendency towards anachronism.  People who try to make sweeping generalizations do not recognize that the solution at one point in time is far different from what the anecdote might have been at another point in time, because whether an event is a mistake or happenchance, the fact of the matter is everyday is changed, the situation is changed.  A situation is changed; you need to respond to them. 

The last thing I do want to point out is the whole Japan-Germany situation.  Within government, I cannot talk on behalf of the foreign offices or ministries of Foreign Affairs of other members of the coalition, but it seems a little bit to be a straw-man argument, in one case at least I would just propose, and this goes to James Lucier’s question, that a lot of the discussion which I heard was more about the Korea example.  Now, that does not mean that Korea is a perfect analogy, too, and a lot of us spent a lot of time and really enjoyed tearing apart analogies.  But in Korea, which was Harry S. Truman’s problem, as the editorialist at the Times noted, going into a war without a purpose, trying to change a culture that could not be changed, that had no history of democracy.  The fact of the matter is the commitment to Korea was not a matter of two years, three years, four years; it was a matter of generations.  And this raises an open question as to whether if this is ever to be successful, we have to be able to measure it in generational time.

Kimberly Marten:  On the Korea analogy, I just want to point out that the US occupation of Korea that immediately followed World War II was not very good in correspondence to the occupation that occurred in Japan, and it was because there was not enough planning put into it and Korea was not considered as important as Japan was in 1945.  But in terms of why we stayed in Korea, we stayed there not because we thought that we were going to turn Korea into a democracy.  We stayed there and supported an incredibly violent authoritarian regime for decades.  The reason that we were in Korea was because US national security was thought to be directly involved and we were not pushing democratization and we were not trying to tell people where to go in their political system. 

Michael Rubin:  Play at various –- I largely agree with you but at various times we were pushing democratization.  It was often overcome and predominantly overcome because of the national security calculations, but this also raises an issue which has developed in a lot of the discussion about humanitarian intervention today, about whether national security concerns are a disqualifying factor to enter into a humanitarian operation or, conversely, if the decision is made to go to war for reasons that have nothing to do with democracy or humanitarian intervention, whether after that decision is made we should aim to restore the status quo or we should aim as reminiscent of imperialism as it may be for a change in governing system.

Juliana Chua [phonetic]:  First, I want to congratulate this panel.  It is really first rate.  My name is Juliana Chua [phonetic].  I’m currently teaching at the Institute for Politics [inaudible], and for over a dozen years I have been involved with IFUS [sounds like] in the National Foundation for [inaudible].  My question at the risk of sounding as if it were a statement, that I would like for you to help me flesh out an answer to the -- let’s call it the dilemma, is how can we change the dialectical Manechian dilemma so often in this discourse between involvement to change regimes in a military fashion maybe on the one hand and let’s call it isolation on the other?  Manechian is in dialectical distinctions between going into changes for humanitarian reasons versus national security. 

When I was at IFUS what we did fit none of these models well, and it seemed to me that in many ways we had a kind of model that in many respects it worked.  IFUS has been involved in election assistance and election management, primarily though not exclusively.  So the will to change was already there.  The change was not radical.  The idea was to present, to offer assistance to aid a momentum that was in the direction of democracy.  I can give you examples of cases where, to pick up on Michael Rubin’s point, the presence from abroad was minimal, but sometimes it was cut off altogether because it was a matter of do we help versus do we not help.  Is it not possible, especially in this day of increased communication as [inaudible] or sophisticated approach to what constitutes regime evolution?  Is it not possible to maintain a relationship that is not all the way regime change, let alone through military operations, but that it involves a certain nuance?  I think you talk about ways it is –- if the question you asked was how can we do this better, but more important is also can we change some of the actual discords?  You may want to call it regime change.

Mauro De Lorenzo:  Any reactions?

Juliana Chua:  Go on.  That is enough.

Rory Stewart:  Well, that is quite a question.  I imagine one of the problems that causes the discourse of our en masse democracies, it is extremely difficult to have a grown-up –- or maybe that is slightly pejorative term, perhaps –- difficult to have a nuance and a sophisticated discussion of these issues in a public forum, and we can see exactly what you are talking about, this Manechian dialectic now playing itself out in Afghanistan and Iraq because we are essentially able to conceive in the public domain only two possibilities.  One of them is total success and the question of a liberal democracy, and the other is failure and withdraw. 

So, we lurch from troop increase to withdrawal, from engagement to isolation.  And we have failed, as a political culture, to articulate a credible middle ground.  We failed to articulate what might be achieved.  It has become impossible within the public discourse to say, “We are doing very well in Afghanistan.”  And the fact that we are doing very well means that in 20 years time, Afghanistan may resemble Pakistan today.  This is not something that it appears yet possible to say. 

You have to say every Afghan is committed to a gender-sensitive, multi-ethnic, centralized state based on democracy and human rights and rule of law.  Unless we learn how to articulate these things, unless we find a way of explaining to the electorate who I think is actually much smarter than we give them credit for being, unless the politicians start having more confidence and faith in their elections in terms of articulating the difficult compromises and choices involved in engaging and state-building, development and democratization,  unless we are actually prepared occasionally to be honest about the fact that our values maybe incommensurable, that these things do not necessarily go together, that we may have to make tragic choices, that we may in a particular community have to choose whether what matters most is security or development or development or democratization, or whether we want to distinguish between our own interests and their interests more clearly in order to win the trust of the local population or any population, all these kinds of linguistic and conceptual alterations need to take place before we can resolve these problems.  Thank you.

Michael Rubin:  If I could just add something, I largely agree with Rory here.  I also think you put your finger on an important issue.  There is no doubt that the debate is highly politicized and polarized.  I would argue that among policy practitioners of different sides of the aisle and so forth, it is a lot more subtle in nuance but I’m afraid that is not going to change until at least January 2009 when there is a blank slate.  One of the arguments which I would just -– that always frustrates me is the tendency to, among some newspaper reporters and so forth, to promote straw man arguments.  And all I could say is it is important when someone writes “people say”, to actually see whether anyone actually had ever said that. 

The other thing I do want to say with regard to Rory, his comments about imposing one’s will, in a way, is just an anecdote that is neither here nor there.  But one of the more amusing anecdotes I have found when I was in Iraq, and it came out of a Ministry of Interior press release based on an Iraqi security force, Iraqi army raid on an insurgent based in Mosul.  And it was clearly written by someone who was not Iraqi but it had this wonderful Freudian slip.  He was talking about how today a unit of the forces, instead of saying “ethnically and sectarianly diverse,” it said “ethically and sectarianly diverse.”  And perhaps that is the downside of trying to impose our will sometimes. 

Mauro De Lorenzo:  Another question.

Male Voice:  Normal [sounds like] is an achievable solution and I would agree with that previous questioner that this is an excellent panel.  I particularly like Rory because he confirmed what amazon.com said about in a [inaudible] this morning, which is that his understated sense of British humor is actually funny. 

I would like to take you back to your initial analogy that we got the wrong people playing the wrong game, which certainly squares with my experience in Vietnam and various places in Africa and Indonesia.  Three parts:  how do we get the right people, what realistically can they achieve, and how long will it take?

Male Voice:  The question is for you.

Female Voice:  [Inaudible].

Rory Stewart:  That is better.  I use two pairs of shoes.  I can answer that question.  The other one is more difficult.  How do we get the right kind of people?  Well, for many of the things we are doing, I really believe that when we are talking about people, I’m really complaining about institutional structures and bureaucracies rather that individuals, because my sense is that for the kind of things that I believe that we should be doing in Afghanistan - protecting ourselves against terrorist attack, clearing the garbage, building roads and dams, doing some level of development projects - what is really frustrating is our inability to empower not the [indiscernible] capable people on the ground.  My sense in Iraq was not that my colleagues were idiots.  I mean, my State Department colleagues often spoke fluent Arabic; they had served ten years in the region and had a very good nuanced understanding of the political situations.

So, my guess is that you could solve a great number of these problems by getting us out of an extremely strange phase.  We vent it with our bureaucracies in terms of our accountability mechanisms, our measurable indicators, and said we have some relatively competent intelligent Americans here in the military and the State Department, and we are going to let them –- or USAID, we are going to let them spend the money.  We are going to let USAID to actually make some decisions on the ground rather than creating a whole series of rather peculiar drain pipes, saying you can only allocate $50,000 for gender, or $100,000 for civil society, or $120,000 for political participation in the poll of [indiscernible], particularly women.  Instead we need to try to liberate people and create a condition in which people can be considerably more responsive to what a particular community is asking for, and take seriously the notion of putting a very high degree of critical mass of investment into particular communities or particular institutions.

 We are always trying to spread our money as thinly as possible.  We are usually focusing on a single issue rather than going into a particular Afghan bureaucracy or a particular Iraqi community and delivering a very broad range of services at a very high level to a very limited range of people.  I think those kinds of changes we can make.  I do not think -– and to achieve them I do not think involves a total revolution in our structures.  Thank you.

Kimberly Marten:  I want to actually get back to something that Michael raised, which is this whole question of metrics.  And I think that metrics is a response to something real, which is evidence of there being corruption and wrongdoing in the field and therefore having a need to have some way for liberal democracies to supervise what is happening and to have an accountability of where the money goes.  But on the other hand, I see the “over-political sciencization [sounds like],” to use Michael’s framework - I’m talking about how political scientists see the world – of a lot of development projects and peace operations.  And just one example is that USAID is apparently now putting out metrics to have an understanding of how to deal with illegal armed groupings.  The idea is that if you can put the illegal armed groupings into a set of categories and figure out what the network structure is that is responsible for what is going on with the illegal armed grouping, then you know what action to take on the ground because your metrics tell you that that is what is going to get to a good answer. 

I can understand that the reasoning behind that, that you want to have something quantitative to measure so that you know where the money is going, but that completely takes away from the possibility of the real art of peace operations to go on with people who, at some point, you just have to trust to be trying to do the right thing.

Michael Rubin:  I would actually concur with that point, which is why I said –- I mean, I find this measuring allocations ridiculous as opposed to measuring success somehow.  Actually, the only metric which I have found consistent over time when I’m looking at the situation is refugee flow and refugee production and refugee settlement, despite what the White House might say when everything is peachy keen in a press release to judge how any community in Iraq is doing.  I found judging displacement as the metric which as an analyst I would most look at. 

But one of the experiences I had early on was the befriending a Sunni whose uncle had a mosque, had endowed a mosque in Karada in Baghdad which is a majority Shiite district.  It is in the center of Baghdad.  And SCIRI, when the militias moved into the area said, “You know you have got to start acknowledging Ali in the call to prayer.”  And the guy said,”No, this is a private mosque.  It is a Sunni mosque.  We do things the way we want.”  They came back the next week and said, “No, you have got to start doing this.  How about you give a sermon, you lead prayers one Friday, I’ll lead prayers next Friday?” And he said, “No, this is a private mosque.”  And the next week passed and then the Americans raided, looking for an illegal arms cache after an anonymous tip, and dug up his aunt’s grave because that is where he was told that the arms were hidden. 

Long and short of this is those sorts of mistakes happened early on at the very beginning and with time, especially as with many of the units are now military units going back for their third or fourth rotation, their knowledge of the ground and the ability for others to play them has gotten –- their knowledge has gone much better and the ability of others to play them has gotten much more difficult.  It is not to say mistakes do not happen.

  Now, what am I trying to draw out of all this?  The fact of the matter is we could, going to your question of how do we choose the right people.  Let me turn that on its side a little bit and say if we are going to send people back to an area, we ought to be sending them back to the same area of operation so that they can maintain their contacts and their institutional wisdom.  At the same time, if we are going to be sending people in, especially in this case military, that there is a balance between unit cohesion, training the whole unit as one, rotating them in as one, and institutional memory. 

And perhaps it is time we start thinking about instead of just having units overlap two weeks or three weeks in order to hand off contacts, that we simply have them overlapping completely so that people get put in sporadically, pushed out sporadically but that conventional wisdom continues, because one of the problems - and this is a cultural problem that does not really translate well from Washington to Baghdad or wherever else - is the fact that it is all well and good for one colonel to hand off to another colonel, or one diplomat to hand off to another diplomat an introduction and say, “This is my friend on the city council.  He is a very good guy.”  Relationships are not built that way in Iraq or in many places in the world.  Basically, they were not built that way anywhere outside the United States and Western Europe; that personal history matters, personal relationships matter, and we have got to find a way to spend much more time doing this and it is something, if one goes back to the old travel logs and accounts from the 19th century British experience or the French experience, that they tended to do a little bit better.

Mauro De Lorenzo:  I want to thank our panel and I want to thank all of you for coming.  We have run out of time unfortunately, but thank you.

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