initiation and completion of these projects we're working closely with yemen, yemen's armed forces to improve that capacity. we don't attach a dollar figure to it yet. it's an annual allocation of funding. at some point we may discuss a long-term program. but for now, as we continue to develop plans, we're working it one year to the next. and so, we seek to be helpful to yemen. we want to assist yemen and dealing with its terrorist problem and in doing so create conditions for long-term development and cooperation with and in support of our great country team in the embassy and cannot and ambassador fierstein. so i think i have most of your points. >> yesterday. please join me in thanking general allen. hot

[applause] >> you're watching public affairs programming on c-span 2. >> now a look at development charges in iraq. we'll have from representative of the u.n. secretary-general's office as was the state

department's iraq affairs are. posted by the united nations developing program, this is about an hour 40 minutes. [inaudible conversations] [inaudible conversations] >> well, i think we'll get started. can everyone here on right in the back? is the microphone working effectively? great, thank you. we seem to have an unfilled middle, which is somewhat observed as a metaphor for a political situation on this election day. let's hope not. my name is fred gibson, i'd like to welcome you to our roundtable today on iraq's development challenges. most of you know undp well, but for those of you who don't come where the leading development agency of the united nations, have offices in over 130 countries and do work in more

than 160 countries. but among those assignments, at development challenges and many of the most difficult parts of the world and we wanted to highlight in particular the work of the undp and the mission of the united nations as well in iraq. that me however make a plug for a future roundtables. and one in coming up, not unrelated i think to the challenges were facing in iraq and that is the launch event for the 2010 human development -- human development report of undp. if you're looking at 20 years since the innovation of the human development report, which has many of you know was one of the first indices and reports based on the indices that went beyond income and gross genetic product information for measuring human welfare and that

in particular measures of longevity and literacy that embellished a wider view of what human development encompassed. what's interesting about this report, and i hope you can join us on november 17th at aed for that launch event -- what is interesting is there a number of new indices that have been proposed and added in that report. one measure inequality, one measuring gender empowerment and one called the multidimensional index developed in conjunction with oxford university, which looks at an even more multifaceted way of thinking about both poverty and progress against measurements of poverty. so please come out for that. the roundtable today i should tell you is being videoed by c-span and were glad to welcome c-span audience.

that means that you're on your best behavior of course. but you always are in this audience and we look forward to vigorous interaction with you after we've made some initial presentations to get the conversation started among the panelists. i can't help observing, however, having been working in the congress in 1980, when we had one of our last tsunamis in the united states government. those years you may remember, or not, it was not expected really that there would be a change in the u.s. senate. and as the night wore on, those of us who worked for the republicans, myself included found ourselves increasingly confronted the prospect that we would be in the majority. so i sympathize with many colleagues who may be finding themselves in that position tomorrow morning because it is indeed a rather significant change in u.s. politics, and

even one of the houses ships. i note that experience because as we will no doubt notes in the course of this discussion, the iraqi people had an election some seven months ago and have yet to form a government based on that election and have received some criticism for back-to-back delay. i was simply pointing out in every democracy, there are challenges, even with the government has been formed in operating that government and reaching consensus in moving agendas forward. and though i hope it's not the case in this country next year, we may find ourselves challenged by the need to collaborate across often very contentious political boundaries in making the government function. fortunately in iraq, they have

continued to move forward in a positive direction and it really that we want to focus on. today, but the challenges iraq faces, but also hopefully take note of the fact that there are some very dedicated people, not just in the international community, but especially iraq were working despite the lack of a foreign government to move the agenda of human development forward. and it's for that purpose really that were gathered today to reflect and understand how the process is unfolding. to do that we have a star-studded cast. in particular, around deputy special representative of secretary-general, christine mcnab in iraq. interesting not only is the drs g, she's also the humanitarian coordinator and also the senior undp official, so several hats, which as you can imagine

complicate her challenges in operating their, but is one of our star performers from previous assignment another difficult locations. i'm not going to go through all the biographies because that's why we put them on the back of your invitation. but we're also pleased to have john desrocher from the state department to as just come back recently from iraq and is now leading the department's efforts on iraq from washington and also has quite a distinguished career in the foreign service, including in a location that's very dear to the heart of our administrator, helen clark, former prime minister of new sealand. john was in auckland for several years, so we're very pleased to have them bring the new zealand have on these issues.

and leslie campbell, not from the democratic institute and as many of you know the head of u.s. committee, can walk at that. but every time we tell him we have the need for a speaker, anywhere related to the middle east, he immediately accepts less and less as share this podium before. but we're very pleased to have him back in. i might also know things are talking about electoral politics, that is also a practicing politician in his native canada. he may wish or not to say more about that experience as we go. but i think these challenges of government performance and democracy is, whether old democracies were new democracies, there are some common themes that run through them and perhaps we all can take account of. so that their lineup. we've asked each panelist to spend 10 or 12 minutes laying out their view of iraq's development challenges.

i will then have as little interaction from the panel, stimulated by me as the moderator, but then hopefully turn to the audience to surface the kinds of issues which their presentations provoke for you, which you came wife. so without further ado, i'd like to turn to christine. >> thank you very much. can you hear me at the back? up the sides? good. i've been working in iraq for one year and i intend to be there for at least another year. so in a way, this is my midterm review. icom to iraq with a strong development background as i am also the humanitarian coordinator. so i'd like to tell you a little bit about what i've seen and what i thought about things since arriving in iraq. when arriving in iraq was really quite spectacular from a development worker's point of view. because when i stepped off the

plane into the baghdad international airport military site, i felt like i'd stepped into a film set. we've seen it on television. i stepped into it. i then got lifted with the u.s. forces helicopter over to the international reserve and started my career as the deputy head of the united nations mission. fortunately for me, they were to deputy heads. the other one deals with politics. i get the easy bit, development and humanitarian affairs. nothing is easy in iraq as i'm sure john will also tell you. it's highly complex because we are dealing with a country where the majority of the population have no nothing except war, sanctions and conflict. because half the population is under 18, they literally have not known piece. they literally have not known democratic development or

respect for human rights, for their human rights. so we have a huge agenda ahead of us to work with the government of iraq and the people of iraq on developments, on human rights, on humanitarian relief, on rebuilding the war-ravaged country and a country where the infrastructure was severely damaged. first up is damaged by the area of distinctions. because that meant essential work maintenance could not be done on the electricity, water supply irrigation systems and this was smashed by war and then we have the international struggles which displays huge numbers of people after 2003. and we as an international community actually have an obligation to iraq because they are member states of the united nations and we are all citizens of member states of the united nations. so that's my starting point. people in iraq have a right to a

decent teacher and they're not very different to anybody else. the absolute vast majority of the same i want for my family and you want for your spirit peace, security, because school down the road, a job and hopefully a career ahead of them. at the moment, remarkably few iraqis have that. but it's not all bad news. it's not one mass. it's a lot of different challenges. and some parts of the country live more peacefully than others. a lot of children go to school. but i'll come back to a schooling is still an issue. so the big picture is so much work still to be done despite the money that has been poured into the country. the budget is not where it should be. it is still a government with a deficit budget despite sitting on the sea of oil that we all hear about is not being pumped fast enough, effectively enough for export to cover the budget at the moment.

and yet, we need now to lay the foundations for what is to come, which is a stable, democratic iraq, which is the normal country playing a normal role in the very important region of the world. it was that if you go back several decades and we want to go back there. so let me just give very quickly through some of the challenges as they see them -- as my team sees them. you all know about the millennium development of the great shorthand for what every family has the right to expect. we are making process, child mortality has decreased over the last decade. access to sanitation and water has increased. there is wide spread cell phone ownership that cover the mdg eight if you're wondering, that's the part of the catchall at the end of our optimization.

the poverty non-attractions still exists. they're still children stunted in their growth because of lack of access to food. so there is good news. poverty is very shallow. most families in poverty are just on or below the poverty line. so we don't go that deep agonizing poverty were children slowly starve. it's much, much better than not. but even if children grow up fairly healthy, they have many challenges ahead of them. moderate illness caused by water supply and sanitation infrastructure and another is basically going to school. the numbers in primary school are dropping. it used be 95% now dropped to 85%. but the thick of it that really worries me is this one. although the majority of children go to primary school, by the time you get up to senior high school level, which feeds the universities and training

colleges, it's only 20%. this is an absolute long-term catastrophe for the development of iraq because that 20% will have to carry all the expectations of a trained work force during all those technical jobs that need to be done in the future. and they're schooling is partly -- the lack of schooling is partly a result of damage of war. many teachers have fled because they were definitely targeted in a post 2003 fighting. and for those who stayed, who are very real threats against security, so many parish is quite simply don't send their children to school. it's okay going to the village school of the school down the road. it's not okay for name your children 20 miles to get their secondary education. so that is one of the huge issues. another issue is that women who

used to be a part of the economy and development of the economy have been severely marginalized. because jobs are in such scarce supply, i'm talking about 30% open unemployment and probably much higher. women have been forced back into the homes. and while for many this is perhaps an inconvenience but not quite what they expected to do with their lives, it's a tragedy for the women who are widows and thereby become dependent on the good grace of rather distant relatives to make a living. it's very, very difficult for women headed households. if we continue about the challenges, there is another serious challenge and the u.s. government has been very instrumental in trying to help solve this. and that is of the internally displaced people. they're still 1.5 million people who have to flee their homes,

who are still living in the country, but in some of the most awful squad gisela smith in baghdad or rural areas which have been devastated. and there are serious problems getting them back to their homes, all settling them where they are. because in urban areas, there's the whole tenure issue which has to be solved and in rural areas the jobs issue. you cannot survive in a rural area unless the irrigation systems are working because agriculture is dependent on that. jobs are dependent on agriculture. so some huge challenges. 1.5 million still to be subtle. there have been some recent flows of refugees which you might've picked up, but they're much smaller than before and they're very specific groups that have been targeting the minorities and you probably have seen in the press over the week this awful incident of the catholic church in baghdad, where all the people in service were taken hostage and in the

rescue attempt over 50 of them died. so there still targeting. so there's isogenic right side. we have seen targeting against christians around election time when the neighbors actually fed to them, please don't leave us. we will protect you. or when the student convoy was attacked. christian students, then muslim colleagues came out and demonstrated to keep them at the university. so there are things that also are the good side of this. and the final development challenge i want to mention -- because it's not the obvious one, but a very important one is that of rebuilding the state of iraq. rebuilding the civil service, rebuilding the public service, the schools, the education system as a whole, universities, hospitals, water and sanitation supplies. but the core of rebuilding the

states is the people who work the states, civil service reform. they think like civil service might mean you're actually at the service of the people and that you were civilians who are helping other civilians because it's been a highly militarized economy. the civil service reform is key and the other reform is bad if not even a reform. it's building the terror. because iraq, amazingly, has never really had a private or. its state-owned enterprise, farmers and their penetrators. but a private sector, as we would know and recognize was to generate jobs has not existed in iraq e4, but were working out very closely if it happens with usaid, to build up the capacity of the government to enable the emergence of the other to regulate private site are, to get them stable operating

conditions. because the key issue in the future will be jobs. oil will generate income, but it will not generate jobs. the oilfields down south are generating about 30,000 jobs. we need 3 million job startups. so it's really an essential part of our work. the u.n. has agreed now with the government of iraq on a five-point agenda, which covers the areas i have mentioned already plus one highly neglected area and that is climate change and environmental management. because the country is getting drier and hotter, that is the trend at the moment. water supply is declining disastrously. the very famous marshlands are down to 10% of the original area and one of the most important marshlands globally. and we will work on that through the global environmental facilities, through the united nations environmental program,

with the world bank. we often partner with the world bank and whether donor community. so i have one final message in my 10 minutes and that is as much as we have done together since 2003, in very, very difficult security conditions, there is even more to be done, but it's in our selfish interest as well as a number humanity interest to keep on working in iraq. we all who are there do that with some rice. were all aware of the risk. we take measures to mitigate risk. it's a high-cost enterprise, but it's like something that somebody once said about education, which is very simple, if you think education is expensive, try ignorance. it's the same with iraq. if you think a successful iraq is expensive, think about the

alternative of a failed state in the middle of the middle east. thank you. >> thank you, christine. john, we'll turn to you. >> thank you. thanks very much. i want you to new mac for the invitation. it's great to be her with christine and les and talk to everyone. i think i'll talk to everyone a little less in my 10 minutes than i would have because christine cover the range of deployment challenges pretty well. although maybe just glad to get through the remarks i prepared so as to not repeat a lot of what she vardy heard and sort of give you the u.s. government and go on some of these things. pardon me. i mean, christine laid out the charges very well and very clearly and you know, i was checking my own notes and sort it ticking them off as she went through them very thoroughly. i run approach, the u.s. government relation with iraq is

governed by the strategic framework agreement, which is something we signed in 2009, which covers the gamut of our relationship with iraq across economic and political and diplomatic, all sorts of fields of discussion and we work on things like public services and economic reform in reducing violence in strengthening the rule of law and respect for human rights under the rubric of disagreement. we spent billions of dollars since 2003 iraq reconstruction and all sorts of areas and economic reconstruction local governance. christine made the point about jobs. it is a great deal about jobs. iraq is a country that's rich in oil, but you don't need to look at a globe for very long. you can find countries rich in oil or other natural resources that also suffer real poverty. and we want to help the iraqis

build a diversified economy, a complete economy, one that oil is the foundation for, but not the only part of. as christine said, there's only so many jobs the oil sector will create. and there are a bodice young iraqis out there who will be looking for jobs. trying to develop the commercial sector in iraq, helping with things like regulatory reforms and good business environment, the banking sector and telecommunications that area. we've had a couple of very successful trade missions. we have one last year to washington and commerce undersecretary sanchez just returned from a trip to baghdad, were trying to bring business people together where our companies, iraqi companies can sign partners and hope together and that's going very well. we work a lot with our international partners and i should certainly talk about that. christine talked a lot about refugees and displaced people.

we spent a lot of time and a lot of our assistance with our u.n. partners working on refugees and ibp is. and i think we've had some success there. it's a very difficult challenge, but we are having some success in getting people back to the areas where they came from and supporting them until they can do that. that's really crucial. we've -- of course, the u.s. military has done a great deal from the beginning and done a lot of support for reconstruction goals, both things they do on their own in things they do to support us. they work a lot for the u.n. as well. we also work a lot in the rule of law sector. we spent a lot of time working with the government in iraq to build capacity in its legal institutions to strengthen and try to reduce corruption. there's a wonderful program the department of commerce has commercial law development programs, which trains judges,

trains lawyers on the commercial and economic aspects of the law, to build an environment where business can thrive. the iraqi government has put forward its own anticorruption strategy and sign the u.n. convention against corruption. obviously were very supportive of that. but they're a great many challenges. as i said, the sort of jotting down some notes as christine was speaking in it's really true. it's important to recall how economically isolated iraq has been for so long. obviously not show since 2003, not just since the sanction period, but even before. that sort of isolation has taken a toll. it certainly has taken a toll on the infrastructure of the country. you have to think of infrastructure and the most broad terms, not just the electricity side or the transportation sector, although

as those have suffered a education and health, all the things you need to build a society suffered a great deal in past decades. and those cannot be rebuilt overnight. we're putting a lot of effort into that. the education system as i said has suffered. refugees and displaced people have fled that damages education as christine pointed out. the agricultural site for. iraq's ever cultural sector can be a great employer. it really should be an important employer, but it operates on a very outdated statist centralized approach, which is really, in addition to the infrastructure problems with your taste and everything else, it makes it a real challenge. it talks a bit about the financial environment. we spent a lot of time in baghdad working with the iraqis on the financial environment. the banking system, the banking system is really just starting

to develop. it's hard to develop an economy, you know, what you're banking system is still developing. legal and regulatory i mentioned. you know, we talked to people who want to do business in iraq and obviously security is a concern. the security situation has improved, but security is still an issue, of course. .. so damaged there really is a

gap and expertise in so many areas across the ministries. you have a lot of people who want to work with you well, don't have a lot of experience, don't have international exposure to different things, to different approaches you can take and that makes it very tough, but these are all things we are working on with our ulin partners i think very well together. i think the potential in iraq is great. i really do. and, you know, not just because of the oil although that is a large part of it because of the extraordinary role in the area would world that iraq has played in the past, and i think i do second the idea that it's still something we need to work, and we need to work on while to read there's an extraordinary opportunity here to help the iraqi is to develop this

extraordinary potential. it's something i really enjoyed the year i was in baghdad and i still doing it from washington and it's been quite meaningful to me and it's been great to work with partners like the u.n.. and i think i will leave it at that. >> thank you. we look forward to exploring more of the questions and answers leslie, let's turn to you. >> thank you. i guess i'm lucky because i get the field of political development to myself so far, happy with that since that's my specialty and ndi. ndi has been in iraq since 2003. i was part of the first trip, two of us that went, and us soon as things settled down in 2003 and one of the connections with the time and this is going to some crazy but it's a true story. and it shows you i think how naive many of us were about

iraq, myself and deputy director and in arab-american woman decided to go to iraq. we had no idea how we would get there, we were going to do but we knew we would hitch a ride with a u.n. plan, didn't have any idea or affiliation but hop on the plane. but we didn't think what we arrived when we arrived. we negative the military hangars and the only cars for the cars the u.n. had a sweetheart in those cars and they brought us to the u.n. office, it was the one that was eventually blown up. but people just assume we are you in employees and they fed us and tried to put this into an orientation and we sat there afraid to say we didn't work for the u.n. because then they thought we would be imposters was soon as there was a coffee break we set in the orientation and as there was a coffee break we snuck out and went out for another building. and again it sounds absolutely whacky that we flagged down a cab and said take us to the hotel, which we did. but in those very early days there was a lot of optimism, and as crazy as that sounds, we met

over the course of a week, dozens of iraqi is who at that moment were mostly hopeful about what would happen. it is when the foreigners could walk the streets and the soldiers were some tannin on the top of tanks and it seemed like anything could happen. i won't go into the history what happened after that because we all know and it's amazing sometimes that given this very tragic story in so many ways that iraq has fallen off the public agenda to some extent and it's heartening to see such a good crowd because it is important what happens and even if the optimism in the early days was highly overblown and the mistakes were huge it doesn't mean that we don't i think collectively have the responsibility to try to make it turn out well. so i want to do a typical thing and explain a few things in the category of political the limit will put them in the good news

category and diffusing is in the baggage category. on the good news, in iraq, and again i am referring specifically to the political development, elections, advocacy organizations, civil society organizations that are trying to have an impact on policy at the international local level. women's participation, u.s. participation, media, all of the things that go into building a functioning space system as bad as the news has been in iraq and as the security has been, and by the way i and the regional directors we deal with countries ranging from iran, iraq is in the middle. under most measures iraq actually compares favorably, it's not in the head. so in other words in iraq there are hundreds of political parties. i don't know if that is good, probably not, but the fact is there is a competitive political

system and almost anyone that is interested can join the party and try to work through political life that way. as you know there have been successful local elections, national elections and being a party member working in the parties of an option in iraq. also in iraq there are many problems. i will keep saying maybe i will say it once and not keep qualifying because i don't want to sound as if i am naive. there are many problems its degree of expression in iraq. there are problems in the freedom of expression but in many cases in most cases people are free to pursue, the interviews, the talk about a variety of things, and unlike many of their neighbors it is possible to hold different opinions, expressed those opinions whether it is done through the media or writing

articles. there is a wide degree of freedom of expression. there was a quota system in place for the last election that led to the election of about 25% of the parliamentary seats for the women. lots of criticism to read it is in perfect and so on, and i suppose we could even wonder if the iraqis were entirely serious but the fact is it's happened, and we know from experience in other countries including morocco more recently in jordan, incomplete, once the women are in political life that leads to good things in the case of larocco it lead to a change of the family code and larocco and the precursor to the election of thousands of women said the council of la. so good things can happen. >> the iraqi parliament is going to sound funny if i say that

it's functional because it hasn't been functioning the last six or seven months. but let me put it this way. it's no more dysfunctional than any other parliament and the airport in fact when it is meeting it actually has power. i'm not going to say to many things about the iraq parliament because of the current impasse, but the iraq parliament actually makes decisions. the parliament passes laws of consequence. the parliament stops consequence, the parliament has a big role in negotiating treaties with the international not so much negotiating but the rule in ratifying with the international community. so the statements i just made don't apply to any other parliament. they don't apply to any other parliament, the iraq parliament matters. so that's the good news. moving closer to the current time another piece of good news is there was a move prior to the

election toward what i will call issues based politics. i know that christine was in bosnia and i was there in the mid nineties and one thing that happened in bosnia and is an unfinished business, but when the immediate threat to people's lives lifted i will describe as the existential threat when people didn't have to worry about whether or not they and their families will live another day it didn't take long before their attention moved away from what we can call secretary in issues. we cared about pensions, jobs, health, everyday concerns. we started to see that last spring in iraq until not long ago for good reasons iraqi >> perhaps even as if they were closer to their tribes because there will be existential threats but in the last election there is good evidence through focus groups and polling and so long that people begin to

exercise the thoughts on the parties they thought would bring the best future economically in terms of services and i will talk about that more in a moment. another piece of good news is the election was fair to require wrote an op-ed that formed the cut appeared in the foreign policy in march where i mentioned the support of the u.n. to the hi electoral commission i think is the correct name to win the support on the domestic election monitoring may help with that as well. there was the domestic monitoring, iraqi volunteers monitoring, and they found for something called a parallel tabulation they actually tabulated the results parallel that the results that were announced were true, there may have been wiggling of members here and there but the results were mostly true. the lead in pre-election polls which track fairly closely with the results as well so the

result of the election seemed to drive with the pre-election and then they conduct a post-election poll where we found out that iraqi is very clearly believed to in this case the coalition to be the winner. if you remember the coalition won a couple of seats. was a very small margin of victory that was clear to all the evidence that that in fact was the case. in a pre-election poll what we found interesting was that roughly double the number of people who actually voted for the coalition received him to be the winner three or four weeks after the election. in other words people's perception of him as a winner was increasing as time went on where as people's perception of maliki in his coalition was the winner was diminishing as time and on. even among the supporters. i mention that because that is actually a very common phenomenon in politics you may have heard of this very common phenomenon where when we do post-election polls, many more

people than actually voted for the winner will claim to have voted for the winner leader, and we will see the starting wednesday. if there's a big sweep, if there's a big sweep everyone will say that they were on that train and the same thing happened in iraq, where it actually turned out that more people that actually voted claimed they voted for all law to really think it's important because okay, the election is over with, now let's move on. let's move that is a basis for forming a government. i will go quickly through the bad news although there is a lot of bad news. first of all, no government as we know. and maybe i don't know if sean will have any comments on this or not, but i see the idea that the iraqi government should be an all inclusive government is good in some ways. i think we would all agree in the conflict, posed conflict environment a government that excludes anybody is probably a mistake. the more inclusion the better bid on the other hand people

voted, they took it seriously, there was an outcome. the of, of the election should be the predominant factor. it may not be the only factor forming government what it should have a large impact on forming the government, and unfortunately had that hasn't worked this far. it's a shame that the incumbent did not step down as someone working on middle eastern democracy. i was looking forward to what probably -- i don't know if this is completely true or not i think it's true. it may have been the first instance if it happens that maliki, the current prime minister stepped aside peacefully to allow the successor it may have been the first genuine peaceful transfer of power other than succession father to son in the arab world. it would have been a huge moment. maybe it will still happen but it would have an exciting if that happened. so i'm not sure that all inclusive government is exactly the way to go and the reason i say that is that it sounds an awful like like part of it is built into the constitution that sounds like the system in bosnia

and lebanon where if you allow this kind of bargaining for these positions that supposedly the long then you're stuck with that for ever and windy you back away from that? i think we know from experience in bosnia and lebanon and other places that formula isn't a good long-term formula, and yet the iraqi people spoke to the election. i want to finish reading five had foynes basically from a series of 16 focus groups the ndi just finished working in iraq in september, september 22nd through 27. so just a couple of weeks ago. we are asking all iraqis what they feel the problem they would like to see to it first political leaders of parties or undefined and driving frustrations. so people, iraqi see the party leaders, parties and civil servants as self-centered eletes looking to maximize their own personal gains rather than

working to help average iraqis, and the failure to enunciate the agenda from their point of view gives them a sense of the parties are not focused on the means. issue based politics is novel creating opportunities and challenges for political parties that might pursue. we ask this question of issue based politics because we realized that is not normal as in much of the arab world. the personalities and power it's not about all i can do a better job in health care or i will help the agricultural sector. people don't talk that we come i am this person and vote for me. so we explore different ways they might get a skeptical public to buy and to issue these agendas. they are open to beat pet parties have to communicate doherty carefully. there are mixed views. this is a saddam era. the pollsters tell iraq is ready to the point because the nextx& year although it is not the majority view some say it was

better understood, particularly regarding security and to a lesser extent economic conditions and these suggest for many iraqi still is not to prove that democracy can be relied on to deliver better material results in dictatorship. so all these years after the war all these billions of dollars and people are still unsure whether or not the system we have now can deliver better results and that's sad obviously. on slightly better not there is a strong sense of iraqi identity. i should mention we've been conducting focus groups since 2003. we've always done the same thing counter to what the conventional wisdom in washington is 90% of the non-kurdish participants choose to identify themselves first as iraqi, not in terms shia client identities even in kurdistan, 34% recognize themselves as the iraqis also 65% say kurd so there's a lot of pride and hope about iraq. they want to see their country

freed. it has been strong since to the sentry. there are many qualifications i can get into, but this can be built upon. and it includes kurdistan which surprises people. most people that i know i would say 99% of the kurds don't think it is true. the iraqi minority groups also increase the iraqi nationalism. so focus groups conducted among the christians to be the leading minorities echo those with them on minority iraqi. they want to be treated like iraqis, not mine doherty some don't want minority rights but what iraqi writes. they want a better life for themselves and better representation in the national government. i will conclude by saying that -- and a lot of history and a lot of it is negative over the last seven years, but the invasion of iraq, the great idea led to less suffering but once it happened, the idea that to turn iraq into a normal country i think as christine said, a country that is integrated in the rest of the world where

people have a reasonable expectation of a better life is our responsibility and can can happen in the political dilemma area and it happens the u.n. actually works on both of those areas along with other organizations and be of great material to work with and i'm heartened and i think that christine said the same thing and john mengin in fact use it very clearly that you got a lot of satisfaction, satisfaction out of 14 with iraqi spirit of full fuss that have been in iraq working with iraqi silda there is tremendous material there's a way for a clauson how marshall the resources and push forward a few week of great people to work with. >> let me take the prerogative of the moderator to ask questions in specific areas, and invite them as they respond to also address any issues of our colleagues raised in their presentations. christine i want to ask the

security question because obviously the referred a couple of times to the august, to those in three bombing at the hotel that had a number of colleagues including my good friend that just happened to be visiting and interviewing sergio at the time the bomb went off. the u.n. withdrew and reintroduced itself, but now we've of the u.s. transition what are the needs for security? how do you operate in iraq at this point and what needs to happen to meet your position more secure? >> a lot needs to happen to make the opposition more secure. i just have a note given to me from writers today, eight bombs on baghdad many in coffee shops and full of civilians, at least 26 dead, expected to rise sharply. it is coming out of the massacre in the christian church earlier this week. sensitivity is a huge issue for

anybody and any organization or any other country working in iraq. we went away for a long. in 2003 some people got the impression we disappeared for a long time and we didn't. i think we were out of the country for one year, is that about right? jake has worked there lot longer than i have for the u.n.. so we were away about a year and worked in different ways. we've quite a large group of national staff and they went right across the country, and their security is anonymity because even so long after the canal hotel bombing we had the u.n. staff working in different programs and agencies who don't actually tell anybody to work for the u.n.. we have staff to leave their homes at different times of the day. we have other staff who work in the international zone who come in and out with flow of civil

servants into the international zone. unfortunately for them who the u.s. and the u.n. found quite similar in both the arabic and english, and the ngo's of course has a target more so in the last several years than the u.n. and they don't want to be confused, so they draw the line of the iraq civil servants. so the international staff, we are very obvious because we don't speak arabic, or if we do it is fluent, not for the wind but fluent in the wrong dialect, so we are very easy to pick out of not being of iraq but to be in the international community. and we have had an amazingly good support from the american forces. i have even said it is heartwarming to go out with the american soldiers because even on the most difficult missions, they will turn are not and tell us even when the adjustment shot which as happened on a fly

missions leading the force he was shot but saved by his jacket. they say to us after all the fighting, and he had been there in 2003, 2005 was back on his third tour, and after all the fighting, to go out with you and with your american if a limit and humanitarian colleagues is what it's all about for us, the soldiers. we've done the fighting and now we want to see the rebuild. now has no, we are very reliant on american security ever since 2003. so we are making some very difficult adjustments in our own posture. it's still not safe for us to wander around except in the north. it's not safer in kurdistan because the to the protected no-fly zone which allows telemental to gough earlier than the rest of iraq. it is a safe city. the forces, the government

forces, the push irca in northern iraq are very effective force. they protect us very well. so there we can make the transition from being with u.s. troops to being on our own with the government has a herd of horses and it is relatively easy. what is not easy is to move around in the center and south because there are still rockets flying around and targets of minorities, anybody is seen as other international community. so what we have to do is think through our own security posture and we have a two-pronged approach to this. one is we are beginning to produce a lot more printed and other media materials explaining what the u.n. actually does. we are on your side basically. we are working for your development in solving some of the problems you are coping with, so that's one part. we have a lot more open

publicity with the u.n. is and what the u.n. does. the other is trying to find solutions such as our own transport means, helicopters, armored vehicles, everybody in iraq moves from an armored vehicles. you don't want to be collateral damage to a roadside bomb. despite all this, our own special representative had his convoy targeted about ten days ago, and was a very near miss. the police car behind was hit rather than his car. as recently the police officer died and the others were badly injured. so the targeting is there. so we have to actually ask both of the government of iraq but also the government of the united states to continue to support us and other donor countries come also to continue to support us. not because we want to go around in huge armored fleets of vehicles but because we do actually want to go around and get the job done, and once you move into the state building

capacity development, we have to be out there. you can't do it from a distance. you have to be there talking to people. it is a long-term project and we have to start now. we can't wait for it to get quieter, so the security issue is a very personal thing to ask about. and the bottom line is the bottom line. doing business in iraq is very expensive because we do have to make sure we have security, some of which is provided by the iraqi government, but we need at the moment we still need to add on security to give our employees confidence that we are doing everything possible for them to do their jobs and return home safely. >> thank you. john, let me ask you, not so much on security, but this transition that is really under way between the military-led operation in the united states

to more of a civilian through co-lead observation. one of the particular challenges in doing that, and engaging with of the iraqi government and repositioning the u.s. government for the iraq -- within iraq, how do you think about government engagement even in a situation where we don't have a form a coalition of? >> well i guess i would start answering that by saying we think about government engagement and we think about transition constantly, and the transition -- i mean the august 31st deadline and the drawdown of the troops i got they're the previous august, and we were already in, just thinking of a percentage of my day there would be spent in that year in baghdad working with the military colleagues on this transition because it is a big project, and it is a big challenge to determine how we

will pick up items, issues the military has done and how we will address it because we operate different from the military. operating in this environment is i mean christine leaded all very well, it is expensive, it's not the normal environment i used to working in but if we want to get our job done we have to be prepared to do that and it's very expensive. we are building -- we are determined to be able to get out you can't do your job properly and we're determined to get out and i got out quite a lot and my colleagues got out quite a lot and we continue to do so. our colleagues at the provisional reconstruction teams around the country to get out of time. the basis of what we do can't be done remotely. if you could we would from here but can't do it with a phone or fax or e-mail but that is a

challenge that our leadership that the u.s. government leadership has taken on and has made the determination that the job is so important, yet it's different than the we we've operated before but it's so important that we will endeavor to find the resources that it takes so that our people can do this safely and it's tough and we are learning a lot to read a lot of it is new but i can speak on a year's experience i feel like we are doing it well. i felt i could do the job i needed to do. sometimes there are some days you expect it to go out and that happens sometimes, but it was a pretty impressive operation from my perspective. >> let me ask you since you volunteered for the role of the political development focus, let me ask the regional question. iraq obviously has neighbors who are interested, vitally interested the outcome of the

international relations in iraq but the political parties developed in the country how big a factor is the outside influence and called lessons of the political parties within iraq and the form of the government itself? >> it's a great question i was in iraq in june meeting with the various political leaders, met with most of the leading political leaders they were in full flight and still doing the same thing to turkey, syria, saudi arabia and elsewhere and in thinking about this in the political science background interested in politics as you mentioned earlier, and i kept thinking to myself why is this? there are the obvious reasons there are these regional power brokers and certainly iraq can't afford to ignore iran or saudi arabia, but it seemed odd as they were making the trips to the capitals to tehran and so on

and there is a tremendous fall in the political system in iraq and that is the fact that there is no head of state. there is a president, jalal talabani is the current president, but he has symbolic power but it's not symbolic in the sense of a european head of state. this is a very prestigious process. it's not a particularly prestigious office because jalal talabani is seen as their representative of the party. he's not received as somehow above it all. and so i thought to myself it's interesting as of these leaders go around to try to get a clue as to how to get from government and would be supportive the surrounding countries are almost serving as a traditional head of state. there's nothing in iraq that has the legitimacy of say the british monarchy or even the u.s. presidency with its long history and of its prestige so

prestige is strong from being the candidate of iran or of saudi arabia or a turkey coming and so one way of looking at what is happening right now in the role of the surrounding countries is playing this kind of role almost a collective head of state for iraq and you can imagine i think how damaging it is over the long run and iraqi people are very, very upset that the politicians are trying to derive their legitimacy from the relationship with iran and saudi arabia rather than a relationship with the voters, and this i think is a major flaw in the country. >> thank you very much. let's turn now to questions from the audience. i make take several of the time for us to come to begin with. please identify yourself and ask your question as concisely as you can also if you have something further to say don't hesitate to say that.

yes, please. >> [inaudible] >> kim aigner-clark. why can't they seem to get the government and what is it going to take for them to be able to overcome the division between them to really elect them in the form of government? >> i'm not sure i can answer that exactly. i think what you're seeing is a very complex negotiation to carve up the pie. i think this sort of easy answer is that rather than see the election and political power as the riding from the people and the election happened and they should recite that outcome. i think of the iraqi politicians see it is they were able to demonstrate their relative strength based on the election and now there is a pipe and it

is the high positions, the pri minister, president but it's also of their positions. who's going to control what? how are things like we'll and the split going to be decided and they are negotiating not really about the outcome of the election, they are negotiating how that is going to be split up and so it is very complex and i think it is just a long, long a complex negotiation, then you get the outside countries and then they have their favorites because there are parties that are closer to iran and closer to the saudis or the turks. i think it ends up being i don't remember the terminology in the negotiations but it is a negotiation of probably 100 points to be decided and it's just taking forever. it is also about the stubbornness. if any one of the major contestants in particular my opinion but i think that the incumbent has said the normal

space practice is that the party that wins a plurality of the seats has the chance to form a government. i'm going to step aside and resigned. that would have gone a long way to solving the problem and i would say to the actor will there is a history of democracy so this idea we saw this happen in britain not long after the election where for one moment the british feminist turks fought i could stay on in the realized that is not what goes, i lost, i have to step down by iraq doesn't have that long history to draw on. >> yes please. >> pact, women's policy group. can our speakers talking a lot more about the impact of the neighbors, not just relations through political parties but what role they are playing and what other countries are trying

to get more involved in iraq right now, not even neighboring countries for commercial or other reasons? thank you. >> let me have a first attempt and then i will hand over to the other panelists. we have seen a lot of interest in iraq because of course it is a very oil rich country and iraq has made very clear if it who does know who its friends are and it's a different picture depending where you are. in the north, the highly developed relationships with turkey as its biggest trade partner and there are many turkish firms working in north of iraq. there's also china very interested in coming in. and there is a huge reconstruction program going on in the kurdistan region. and the government of all of iraq also has a huge

reconstruction program ahead of it. for example they probably need several million housing units, they will do the first batch of 150,000. this will attract interest from global companies. it's not going to be done quickly because the skill sets and the materials aren't there. the oil industry of course it is a chapter all on its own. i know i'm not to call them confessions because the call something else but the old deal that has been going on are bringing in companies from different parts of the world and they will bring other firms subcontractors to provide safe and secure housing to the thousands of workers they will need and those workers will probably come from outside because the number of oil engineers in the country is just enough for about one oil company. how we are going to share these 1,500 engineers between us.

are we going to take in terms? obviously they are not keen to bring people in from outside. so the trade route of interest is very important. on the neighboring countries and outstanding issues of course kuwait is a very important stumbling block to the development of iraq because of the reparations program. it is i think iraq so far has paid $40 billion probably another 40 billion to pay, and they really do need to renegotiate with kuwait on how that is going to be managed. there is the demarcation line problems also with kuwait need to be solved. so the political of the u.n. political mission is very active on working on that front. if we look to the east of course we have iran long and very bloody conflict behind them huge minefields just as an example of the problem, and then water.

there are huge problems with water sharing and there are no boundary agreements, and iraq is downstream with almost everybody. iran, syria, turkey, they have to do the trans boundary negotiations and the teacher. they haven't gotten the knowledge base to do it but the need to know more about what they have in the country and how it's managed so there are complex relations and because of the oil it will generate interests from outside the region it's not just a regional question. >> would either of you like to address this? >> actually if i could take a minute i would even go back to the previous discussion of the government formation. obviously from a lot of reasons i am not going to go into detail on a lot of that but there is something i do think is important to note. we do want to see an inclusive and accountable iraqi government

and we do want iraqi political leaders to move forward quickly on the government formation, but i think it's important to note what is going on here is a political process and there are political discussions going on for, and i mean it may sound like i am stating the obvious but i am not stating the obvious. and to think of what is not happening. we are not having a military step in, we are not having a to, we are having a political process in place the political process is new and we have an election result that kind of broadly is spread among some pretty large blocks, colish and blocks. there is a lot to work out and i just want to remind people that this could be happening in another way. when we would like things to move quickly i think the fact that it's a political process is something we need to keep in mind. on the interest of the neighbors i think that christine covered

pretty well. you're talking a country of 30 million people that has substantial resources that is developed wisely will be an economic powerhouse in the years ahead. there is a consumer market that will someday the countries will want to serve, there are resources countries will want to be able to share. there are, you know, it would be unusual but they were not so interested. covered surprised me more than the interest of the neighbors, so why don't take that as all that unusual and dealing with the neighbors will be part of what a new sovereign iraqi government does in the years ahead. >> another question in the back. >> hi, jenny from the modernizing foreign assistance network. thank you for all the panelists it's been really informative. i was surprised that u.s. aid

only came up once in the discussion and that kind of spark to a question regarding the coordination on the ground, knowing that there are various agencies, so many ngos and i sure many in this room of working in iraq. i am curious if some of you could comment on coordination on the ground and how that is working. >> would you like to take that one? >> let me turn to the chief coordinator -- comer meter in chief i guess, christine, for the u.n. system. >> it's also for the u.n. system there are many people on the ground, humanitarian, to submit agencies, initio, but never and the government needs to keep a grip on who's doing what in the government of iraq and one of the traditional roles on the undp is of the government coordination and there is a very active iraq partner forum which is both the multilateral and bilateral agency has cochaired

by me as the u.n. resident coordinator with representatives of the world bank, but already agreed with the government that the new government comes in the will be the third co-chair of the forum. there is a progression if any country usually they don't chant to each other over lunch and they have a formal forum and then the government is invited to join the government takes over and gets technical assistance to manage the coordination. because not just as individuals, the need to manage the budget also. the budgets of the aid donors need to be reflected openly and transparency in the project. it doesn't usually happen until you make a concerted effort. there is another mechanism and that is we have a humanitarian coordination mechanism which brings together both

governmental and non-governmental humanitarian. we've reestablished this year and we are going to have our food meeting together in november as soon as i get back, and again it's with the government knowledge because also the government is responsible for the idp in helping the returned. so the humanitarian work is also coordinated. that is a typical u.n. world bank role in the community, but as fast as possible we build up the capacity usually as a minister of planning board of finance or both to take over this function just so the transparency would increase within the country. there are many countries that is quite a big chunk of the country's capital budget, and without it doesn't get reflected in that national budget. >> certainly careful coordination is something we

take jury seriously in this area and it is pointed out by what happened in baghdad, created a position that hasn't really existed in the structure of the embassy before, the assistant chief of mission and this case the permission for assistance transition, and that is somebody who -- that is an office that's always been built by somebody who's held in iraq to give you an idea how seriously we take that person was my boss when i was in baghdad, and because we have effectively first internally within the u.s. government hour own efforts whether it is what the military is doing and i mentioned the commerce department commercial development program and we have a ied and all these partners will work with within the u.s. government and coordinating with our long u.s. government partners we take various and spend a lot of times. there's a lot of organizations and we don't want to be stepping on each other, and you want to be sure that you are addressing,

working with the post government to help determine the priorities and address priorities that they have submitted a bye into the programs that you are doing it. we spend a lot of time on that briefly. >> just to give you a specific civil from my perspective of the coordination just on the election. it was providing different types of support to the election commission, but it was the u.s. aid funded program of the organization that was getting a lot of staff support and logistical support and so want to the election commission. our funding by the way in iraq, not all of it comes from the state department democracy human rights and labor as the bureau. we were supporting domestic election monitoring which is the accountability site in the whole equation publicity's programs are very integrated in iraq.

i think maybe to a greater degree than we've seen in a lot of countries of there's a lot of integration of the different agencies. >> why don't you say a word about the multi donor trust fund because we find in our work here in washington that there is very little widespread recognition of the importance of the trust fund vehicles as a way of getting a donor's. spec within the undp there is a trust fund office in iraq multi donor trust fund was the first one and the biggest ever. in the ended totaled over $1.3 billion coming in from the donor partners to the government of iraq, and the agreement is they will put the money into the seam budgets, and that money is then through a series of committees in iraq allocated to specific sectors and projects. and i chair the steering committee together with government and there are a series of technical committees

which look at programs and projects as which are requesting financing. the reason this is important is a ulin mechanism and there are 20 agencies working in baghdad out of baghdad across the whole of iraq. and what we don't want is competition between agencies of the government support. we want it to be integrated and we also want the government to have a voice in what programs and projects are in fact done by the u.n. is using donor money. there are several very important finances of this mechanism. one is the european commission that put in half a billion dollars, very important ones include japan and spain and a number of others, and a smaller sum of money came from the u.s. because the u.s. has been mainly used not for the development agenda but for the humanitarian

agenda and specifically for the idp refugee returns. so the trust has now come to a close. we've actually allocated all of that money. we go into a new cycle of programming now under a very traditional u.n. development assistance framework and we are now discussing with the government setting up a new trust fund for that. much smaller because the reconstruction costs a large amount of money to do what reconstruction we were able to do. it's not finished the government has taken over the nuts and bolts of the specific reconstruction. what we now want to do is the much more difficult to building capacity building, institutional development which is long and patient work with many people involved. this is the face-to-face default of the country. so we hope we will have another trust fund of that running which we will then invite.

cristobal we do in agreement with government and then we do the memorandum of understanding of u.s. agencies and then we invite the donors to put money in and they can hear market as a look we would love to give you hopefully $100 million but probably not, probably 2 million or 25 million, and we would like to be used for children in the essentials surfaces. or they could even say we will give you some money but we would like you to use it for the i.t. cp. that's fine because it can also go in through the essentials social services because the idp have the same needs. avaya sure this coordination. the donors are represented on the steering committee and on the program committee as is the government. so that also brings us all together around the table. it really is important that we work together. >> yes, right here.

>> would you wait for a microphone? thanks. >> [inaudible] a critical piece of the discussion that is missing is the private contractors will play in meeting these in iraq and we are hearing this department could be releasing everything from health services to infrastructure security, just wondering what role private contractors will play especially working with the state department. >> i'm not in a position to talk about the contracts and so on but i mean, we do and will continue, i believe we talked before about the extraordinary expense that working in iraq and

generates, and you need to be transported, you need what we call life support which is basic housing through clean water, things you need to support yourself and those places where locally it can't be bought and locally. we will continue to do that and we see the contractors having a role in that, but i'm really not in a position to -- i mean, we don't -- win and if we do we will do the aris p.. it's not a kind of thing we talked about in advance comes i think it is a limit of what i should say about that. thank you. >> yes please, right here. >> will you need for a microphone, it's right over there. thank you. >> maryland, strategic communications services. the one thing that really struck me was hearing that only 20% of

the young people who would be in an educational system that continues our truly progressing to the point they can be part of the infrastructure that is going to be very critical to achieving all of the goals that everyone has in every country whether it is ours or the surrounding countries to make a viable and stable. my question is what about the other 80%? most of the line sure parcel phone users by the way. but if you have 80% of young people post primary age throughout the country, not going to school, not employed, it would seem if every precarious population situation, and i want to know how all of

this really across-the-board is being addressed. >> i can start. the first thing we have to do is raise awareness because people get the primaries and say that's okay. it's not great but it's okay. you can't wait for the primary generation to move up, you have to fix the secondary now so we have a lot of strong messaging to the government. that is going to get some results. it's not going to fix the problem of the 80% out of schools we have to look at alternative solutions. and of course one of the alternative solutions is to get children or young people by this time we are talking about middle to upper teens, it's to get them into the vocational training and apprentice ships and what is the word, in turn, i keep running into the word in terms in

washington. i think we should start and in turn system here to read i haven't been able so far to get a lot of attention to this and i'm really working hard on it because where i came from where my last posting was we started off a fantastic program and i didn't stay to see the end of it, but this was to really tackle the issue of the out of school youth, and to get them into work and to get them trained within the context of work for plus education. it's been done in many other countries. there are many models for it. and one way we are going to happen this is every time a private sector comes to make a rise, oil or non-oil we are going to knock on their door saying hello? corporate responsibility. door firms signed up for the global compact. this is what we need, and this is what we want you to do. and we want you to focus on two or three things. the overall development of the

communities around your oil installation or factory or whatever, and in the affected parts of the country i want them at the mine action, and thirdly i want to focus on getting the work opportunity to use, and we are not negotiating with one of the unnamed companies at the moment, it is getting very enthusiastic about sitting at the vocational training institutes in the south of the country. so this is what we are doing. it's not solving the problems of everyday. we are sincerely worried about the impact particularly on the girls because they are going to get married young and they are not going to have the knowledge and skills to make them independent in their adult lives. they are going to go into a dependency on the family which will continue and make it very difficult for them to help their own children to get the education they need even when

the education comes on line. so there are two or three areas i look at that should be focused on. one is education, and the other is water. we haven't talked much about water, but is just as big an issue because the whole of development is based on the water availability. but education, yes, unicef is very active in the country. it has more of a focus on primary, but let's work a moment to go up the ladder a little bit unicef is one of the few agencies i know that those active to all of the cell phone owners out there to read the social messaging. we need to do a lot more. one of the new puzzles nowadays is how to get the media to get the message across to read in the good old days, if you go far enough in time the radio which everybody listens to, because

the was the only entertainment, we had state-owned television and that was great for the social messaging, and now the satellite dish picking up 100 channels and probably never watching the the iraqi news so it is an issue to do that, so any bright ideas we will gladly look into them and see how to do it. thank you. >> [inaudible] quickly. >> from the state department point of view, from the state department point of view as a follow-up to this, when you??+; recognize you have 80%, and i'm not going to be clear on the exact age but we are probably talking 13 or 14 -- 14 to 18, 20-years-old who are not in school, who are not employed and

provide fodder for any kind of extremist influence, internal influence that is not in the positive attraction that we would like to see this country go. what is the view? >> i do not think that there is also an easy -- if there is not a short-term solution to this problem. i think what you have to do is just one example was christine pointed out, the oil sector, oil offers iraq a great potential but it is limited how many people will be able to work in the oil sector. what you have to do is develop a diversified economy that offers employment that even less overtime, and you're right about this large cohort of young people out there who will be

tough to reach, if you can't do it with everyone tomorrow and you can't do it across the board, but the quicker you get in place an economy that they see perhaps not nearly as fast as anyone would like but they see as creating businesses, creating jobs, creating opportunities for people is offering them something so that they can see a future in, that's what you have to do. it's a tough road and something that doesn't happen fast. i don't have a simple let's do this and take care of this group of young people because there's not just one bull's-eye for that unfortunate like it's a long-term jobless. >> it's not widely understood that this particular problem is as bad as it is. and it's not just potential

terrorist recruits, it's crime, its young people without a future are very problematic. but i want to ask les the ndi question for the middle east. if i am looking at what is going on in iraq, why should i be persuaded that a space system is worth the effort? why should i pragmatically even consider going that route in my own political development? what do you take away from the iraq experience today? ..

>> it seemed like we should do what we could to help iraq become a well-governed country and i would argue even being democratically governed is the best route. majority of iraqis would agree with that. there was barometers is a series of polls done every year, and this polling shows that the vast majority of arab citizens, more than l 80% in most country believe democracy is the best way of ordering their political

system. the idea of democracy is not a hard sell in the arab world. in fact, it's the opposite. it's an easy sell. i think people look at iraq if chi yous comes -- chaos comes with democracy, they don't want it. there are negative things associated with democracy as well, but interestingly enough, i'm going to jordan tomorrow because there's an election there next monday, and a few jordannians said to me iraqis have more freedom to choose their leaders than we do. they are there and see the bad parts of it, but there'sen joy that iraqis can choose their leaders more so than jordannians can. it's a model talked about for their world, but most arabs are subtle enough to understand there are the good coming with the bad and democracy across the

aircraft world is a long term endeavor. the idea of pursuing democracy is based on the ideas of arabs themself, not us imposing something. ultimately, good government has to go hand in hand with development, and i think for me anyway democratic government and good governing go together, but nothing will happen in the next year or two years. >> thank you. i'll try to restrain myself from asking my own further questions. who else would like to address the panel? there were a couple. i must have scared you away. yes, sir, please. the microphone is on its way. >> shown kaine from the u.s. institute of peace. i have a question on the agreement. it's an important document and i was in baghdad in 2008 and it's

something that iraqis requested of the u.s.. it shows they want a relationship with the u.s. that's not dominated by the security realm. they want to see economic development and they want to be integrated into the region and internationally. i know it's a difficult question to answer right now because there suspect a government for you to talk to, but it's a broad agreement, it's aspirational. can you give us some inside on what is actualizing it and what structures are set up? >> well, we actualized it already. i think it's an important point to make that it has, the actualizing of it, if that's a word, has not stopped during the government formation process. not to get detailed on everyone, but in each of the realms and the economic realm, the dip

government realm, we break it down. i'll talk about the economic category and we have a silt down with the proper iraqi partners across ministries and talk about the problems that exist, and if there are ways for us to solve them together, and that continues to go on. it ebbs and flows a bit. some things go up, others go down. the every sis changes. -- emphasis changes. it's something we still use every day. we didn't stop using it on the day of the election. we continue to have these conversations. it's important to point out that the government's currently in place does continue to function and continuings to function in important ways when fred talked about this in the beginning, i jotted down some memory joggers to make a point of this.

during these formation discussions, they have taken and continue to make major decisions. they have announced a major part of taking advantage of the oil resources that iraq has. once you get them out of the ground, you have to get them from the field to the gulf to get them on tankers. i won't bother you with the acronym, but there's a long acronym for this project. the iraqis have done during an enormous tender and a huge process of money and they did their third round, this one more natural gas, another important resource they are working on. the government works on a draft budget for next year and so on. the point being the government is continuing to function, and our relationship to the framework agreement continues to go on, and it's a really valuable tool, and we've not stopped using it, and we'll keep emphasizing it more and more in

the future. >> thank you. yes, please, is there a mic nearby? way over here. thanks. i'll now put in a plug for our interns. they were mentioned before. we have the best in washington, and we couldn't function without the people who help us. thanks. >> i've been a contractor for usaid in iraq. i was interested in your institution of the role of surrounding countries as a collective head of state. i wish you could elaborate on that. i have not seen anything written in death penalty on -- depth on that in the think tanks or newspapers. can you elaborate on who are the stronger neighbors and connections to particular parties and leaders in iraq. >> i can elaborate on it a

little bit. i mean, the, you know, i think the absence of a true head of state, you know, i don't think it's something that people just forgot or didn't do, i just think the way the system was set up it didn't provide in the end -- what happened is that the political positions right from the get-go came a part of the negotiation of pour sharing. you remember that the symbolic president during the iraq governing counsel time was a sunni, but when they sorted it all out, he was a kurd. when the person occupying what should have been a head of state type position is seen as a political partisan and part of the sort of every day politics. that position is never going to be seen as where you go to get the legitimacy to form the government, so i think it breaks down simply actually. i think fortunate leaders of the -- i think for the leaders of the

party who is predominantly shiite where their connections are iron-heavy for religious, culture, and other historical reasons, they travel to teheran because they are trying to demonstrate should they form government, they would have the support, the blessing of teheran. i'm simp fying a lot, but i think that happens for the coalition which includes sheets, but his coalition includes strong sunni leaders. he spends more time in the gulf, particularly saudi arabia and turkey to show if in fact he formed government or got the upper hand, he would have the support of the powerful neighbor of saudi arabia and lesser extent, turkey. it breaks down more complicated because within the shiite

parties, those are straight front for iran and some have accidental ties to iran, and it's not the case one is promoting one party over another. it gets more complicated. syria in the end plays a big role as well. as you may know, the serian government is partly made up of a christian sect. what's obvious is the political parties tried to establish legions, some that existed for decades, in my opinion to demonstrate to the people of iraq and to say within the organization look at me, i go to teheran, they back me, therefore you should back down, and that person's competitor says, no, no, i go to the king and he received me, you back down.

one -- there's a news item yesterday or the day before is the king of saudi arabia issued an invitation and at least the political spin is that maliki was not invited or if he was, it was last minute as a snub. i don't know if that's true, but it's an endless game to game legitimacy. i agree with john. i'm not all that down on the system in that it is being played out in some framework with an eye on the selection and it is being played out peacefully, and it's a complicated thing. it's a shame they haven't formed a government, and i think the focus group shows that iraqi people are frustrated beyond belief and they are sick and tired of it because as they said, it looks like a bunch of self-serves elites that are feathering their own nests which

is true. politics is always a messy bad looking affair any way. this is a lot of politics. in the absence of home-grown legitimacy, the countries add that legitimacy in the mix. >> we'll, we're just a few minutes from two, our close, i wanted to give our colleagues if they had any final points they wanted to make. if not, i have one. >> no, i think this has been a very rich set of questions that we've had to answer, and i hope that you think we've used our time well as well to put some of our issues on the table for you to think about. thank you. >> no, i would like to say, no, it's been great being here and listening to your questions. you know, our emphasis and i know christine's emphasis as well is there's still a lot of work to do in iraq, the u.s.

military draw down and the sort of landmarks that we've reached, and that does not mean that, you know, we're leaving it behind. we're not at all leaving it behind. there's a lot of work to do there. we're working hard on it together with our partners. we appreciate the interest that you have in it, and we realliment to keep working -- really want to keep working together to build a stable, sovereign, independent iraq because the job isn't finished. >> i'll just thank you and the washington office for organizing this, and i think it's nice to, you know, bring iraq back to some focus today. as i mentioned in the beginning, for understandable reasons, it's sorpt of flipped. i'm glad it's not number one anymore, but we don't want to it slip too far because the challenges are huge, and thanks for keeping it on the washington agenda. >> thank you.

i wanted to return to the theme i started with which is i can't help on election day, but imagine the effect of today on u.s. politics in related to the challenge that we always have in the washington office which is responding to interest largely in the congress, in this case, of people who don't really understand that there is an economic side to the u.n.. there is a development side to the u.n., and how much not only undp, but how much we do in partnership, very close partnership, as you've heard, with the state department and ngo's like ndi. the whole challenge, of course, is the one that iraqis bear for developing their own country. the effectiveness with the international community and particularly the u.n. system is one of the key considerations, so in our efforts to convey the

information and impressions to the officials in washington, nothing helps more than to bring the best and brightest and most experienced undp people to town to talk to audiences like this and meet firls as we're doing in the course of two days and reengage with john and les, and i just want to express my personal thanks to all three of you for helping us capture that messaging. thank you. >> and thank you. [applause] [inaudible conversations] [inaudible conversations]

[inaudible conversations] our discussion on iraq continues in a moment on c-span2. we're hear about effortings on corruption in iraq and afghanistan. after that david cameron takes questions at the house of commons and then after that, the british secret intelligence service. republicans gained half a dozen senate seats in tuesday's elections cutting into the democratic majority stopping short of a full takeover. the updated tally for the senate stands at 50 senate seats for democrats and two independents. republicans now have 46 seats. senate races in washington state

and alaska have not been called. for more information, go to c-span.org. you with hear more about the elections tomorrow morning and joining the radio talk show, morning in america. live coverage at 6 a.m. eastern. >> now efforts to fite corruption in iraq and afghanistan. we're hear from stuart bowen,

special inspector general. this is about an hour and 40 minutes. >> ladies and gentlemen, good evening, i'm mike brown, dean of gw's elliot school of international affairs. it's a great pleasure to welcome you to the campus at george washington university. it's a great pleasure to welcome this evening's distinguished speakers, and getting their perspective on fighting the wars in iraq and afghanistan. as you know we're a special place first of all because of our location, right in the heart

of washington, d.c., and if you draw a line from the white house to the state department and another line to the fed, those two lines literally intersect here at the elliot school, and if you draw them carefully, they intersect here in this room. the elliot school is a special place, however, not just where we are, but who we are, really an extraordinary community of scholars and students, and because of our location and programs, we're able to reach out to other distinguished experts such as those here with us this evening to share expertise and insights on important issues of the day. this evening's event is sponsored by the security forum launched in 2007. over the course of the past three and a half years, it brought more than 40 experts here to the campus to discuss national and international security issues and the proper policy responses to the

problems. i would like to thank a proafort -- professor who started this from the beginning and his leadership and efforts have made this possible. it's my pleasure and privilege to introduce my colleague and friend, professor jim lubervick. [applause] >> thank you very much for that kind introduction. it's my pleasure to have this assembled group of guests. i would like to briefly introduce them. stephen biddle who is the counsel of foreign relations and before that he held position at the war college in the united

states of north carolina at chapel hill for defense analysis and harvard university. dr. biddle is a member of the defense policy board and has talked about related issues related to the wars of iraq and afghanistan. he served on general mcchrystal's assessment team and general petraeus' team and is a senior advisor to general petraeus assessment team in washington in 2008 to 2009. his book, "military power" explaning victory and defeat won a number of very prestige prizes. he's published defense policy in a wide variety of journals both

policy and academic. he holds a ph.d. from harvard university as holds the record for most appearances in security policy forum programs, and that is a testimony to my opinion of a practitioner and scholar, but you left that track record off your bigraphical statement that suggests a level of modesty to me as well. stuart w. bowen, j.r. was on the provisional authority, and since 2004 he's been the inspector general for iraq reconstruction as the taxpayer's watchdog in iraq, he oversees more than $56

billion in u.s. appropriated reconstruction funds including the iraq relief and reconstruction fund, the iraq security forces fund, the economic support fund, and the commanders emergency response program. since january 2004, he is made 27 trips to iraq, and i understand in a couple days that'll be 28, managed the production of over 350 audits, and provided over 27 quarterly reports on iraq reconstruction on the congress. his service career includes service in the white house as deputy assistant to the secretary and associate counsel. he held a variety of positions, texas governor george bush's staff including deputy general

counsel, deputy general counsel for litigation, and assistant general counsel. mr. bowen served as attorney general of texas and stream court justice. he holds a ba from the university of the south and a doctorate from st. mary's law school. john roberts joined the elliot's school of international affair in 2008. professor roberts is a culture anthropologist with international development work. in 1998 and 2006 he worked at the united states agency for international development in central asia on democracy programs designing and managing projects in civil society

development, political party assistance, community development, independent media strengthening, and elections assistance. he's the author of a popular blog entitled the robert's report. it's www.roberts-report.com and comments on current events in central asia and foreign events community. i had that professor roberts will be doing double duty today. he'll be talking a bit later on about the general central asian context in the war against corruption, and he'll also be serving as a moderator. after the panelists have completed their prosecutions, we'll have time for q and a, and i circulate through the audience and most, if not all of you,

will have time to ask some questions. professor roberts? >> thank you, jim, and thanks all of you from the elliot school for coming out this evening. thanks to dean brown as well. it's an honor to be on a panel with stephen who has been carefully studying iraq since it started seven and a half years ago, the reconstruction part, and a pleasure to be here with shown as well. reconstruction in iraq, not a new story. certainly something present in that country long before the united states invaded in 2003, but it was something that became part of our relief and reconstruction effort.

once it became clear how large our engagement would be. initially as many of you know, it was expected that we would liberate and leap. the president decided on march 10th, 2003 that by september of that year, u.s. forces would be leaving. now, as you know, they are going to leave at the end of next year. plans changed. the situation changed. indeed, what we found in iraq was something much more difficult, much more, much grander than expected. luting was just a piece of it. it was the breakdown of the entire government that led to our engagement, and one of the consequences of that breakdown was an exacerbation, a worsening

as many iraqi ministers have told me of the problem in that country. as jim said, i'm leaving soon to go visit again, my staff that's working over there. actually 7 years ago tomorrow, the congress created the officer -- office that i lead in part because of fear on capitol hill that there was significant corruption within the u.s. program, and at that point billions of dollars had been appropriated, and there was limited oversight, limited engagement on our side, so let me talk about the two aspects of corruption in iraq right from the beginning. the u.s. part and the iraq part. my job, part of my mission, is to root out corrupt practices and hold accountable those who engage in them, and we've had some success over the last seven years in doing that. 50 indictments, 41 convictions,

and 41 million dollars recovered. that's the largest output of any law enforcement entity in the country, and it should be because we have that jurisdiction. it's just been very, very difficult to make cases over there because it has been, and still significantly is a cash environment. on the iraqi side, however, the corruption problem has been many orders of magnitude more expansive and more insidious for that matter. we've termed, and i termed it in a report several years back the second insurgency, and indeed, iraqi leaders have agreed with that. they've said unless they achieve victory over this second insurgency, the victory over the first, not with standing events today, a horrible day in baghdad

where ten car bombs killed over 80 people, not with standing the successes in fighting that insurgency, this second insurgency tends to be a cancer within the fledging democracy. as i said, part of it is a historical legacy from saddam hussein, but as min steer told me, the foreign corruption in iraq today is more insidious or of a different order than exa -- what existed under saddam because it was controlled by his cronies. now billions of dollars are lost on the iraqi side of the equation. part of the challenge, i believe, and i was discussing this yesterday with deputy secretary of state is the

discontinuity that exists in the current iraqi government structure. it was an electoral democracy such as it is without a prime minister. they set the record this month from the longest period from election with failing to seat a government. the fact that they have an electoral democracy if they have an economy. over 90% of the national income is generated by oil and gas sales, and all 19 industries and companies that run the oil and gas business in iraq, are government owned which means a handful controls the flow of that money, and that simply cannot continue, and as secretary steinberg told me the most important step towards victory over the problem of corruption will be privatization

echoing what minister told me last year, the challenge is getting there. there's no incentive in the government to move towards privatization because too many people at the top are benefits enormously from the current structure. how does iraq tackle this e enormous problem? well, the united states created two new entities six years ago to help them move forward. the supreme order had existed before, it was the government audit agency, the analog to the gao, but pretty much a puppet of saddam in his era, and as a result, two orders established an inspector general contingent and in every ministry, and a commission on integrity, sort of an analog and the fbi, the commission on integrity had the

mission of per suing and prosecuting cases across the country, and the general had the mission of investigating wrong doing within iraqi ministries, and unfortunately, the last six years of work by both those entities characteristicked largely -- characterized largely by fairly. the first head on commission of integrity was run out of the country back in 2006, and his successor has been probationary to this day, and they still don't have an effective law. indeed they increased their prosecutions this year, but their number one prosecution case type is fraud, resumé, lying on resumé. obviously they are not getting

at the real issue, the fraud that is rampant in iraq. part of the problem is a legal structural issue. in iraq criminal code, there's a section, 136b that gives any minister the power to immunize any of his employees from prosecution. think about that. that is a fundamental undemocratic law that, and it is used quite frequently. it was used this year in prosecution of the minister of trade. it was used very recently in an attempt to prosecute those individuals involved in purchasing these bomb detectors. there's an article in the post about it today. they are completely bogus. they don't work, but when you drive up to a check point in iraq for the last two years, an

iraqi policemen or soldier comes up and waves the devining rod and wave you through, and in fact, as we know and we complained in several reports, there's nothing in there, but millions of dollars in contracts were spent on this fake devining rod. the minister of interior when this issue arose, the minister invoked 136b to protect the employees and the individuals, the leaders that benefited from these corrupt contracts. prime minister maliki said yes, 136b should be changed, but like so much in iraq, there's been in progress. so the commission on integrity notwithstanding a new strategy this year provided by the u.n. that looks good on paper, but

has a long way to go. the inspector generals, again, they don't have a law that authorizes them permanently. they are still waiting on the new government to give them some form of legal protection, and as a result, they are very much a, within the ambit and purview of the prime minister, and there are rules that should protect them, they are largely in the breach, and there have been replacements and firings for those who go too far in their investigations. some progress over the last quarter. they finally created an academy for the training of the inspector general. it will open this month, and so it seems, at least now that this new concept, and the only one in the middle east i might add, the con cement of having ig's in an

agency to be held accountable will survive. whether it survives in a robust fashion depends on the commitment of the new prime minister whoever it may be to strengthen that fight in the ministries against corruption. the new anticorruption strategy also empowers those inspectors general in a robust fashion, but again, that's a document. that's a proposal. it's more sophisticated than anything we've seen before, and if implemented, it will make a difference in iraq, but, again, the second insurgency is still a battle to be won. the upshot is that seven years into the iraq reconstruction program with it winding down, we've seen progress on the u.s. side in fighting corruption. i think that my office has acted as a deterrent obtaining a

significant number of convictions and amount of wrong doing based on our case load has gone down over time, but on the iraqi side, corruption has like a cancer, spread and become more egregious and at this point, unless a new government comes in that will authorize the commission on integrity with a meaningful statute and give it the independence it needs to pursue and convict the officials who commitment wrong doing -- by the way, they have no convictions today. just one aside, the minister of trade was caught dead of right last year, and the prosecution was going forward, and then it froze, and tactics, delays, and suddenly a change in venue, new

judge, he was acquitted in the blink of an eye, and that's frankly, it's a horrible signal to send out to the iraqi people because they look at their government and really have two reactions. one, they're not getting the services that they expect, and two, they view their leadership as corrupt, and the iraqi people are largely correct in those two views, and for iraq to make the progress it needs to make to become a successful democracy, it's going to have to meet those service demands, and it's going to have to show its people a commitment, a demonstrative commitment other than on paper to hold accountable those who take advantage of the system that is wrought with corruption, and so let me conclude by saying that on the u.s. front, we still

have 110 cases going on, significant cases. our largest cases are yet to be concluded, and i'm heading overseas to work on one in the near future, but the deterrent effect has had an appropriate curtailing, ineffective inappropriate curtailing of the wrong doing that was more prevalent in the early days of the iraq reconstruction program. on the iraqi front, the fundamental cornerstone that has to be laid for any progress on this continuous problem of corruption, is the formation of a new government and then a parliament that comes in and takes action by authorizing the commission on integrity and authorizing the inspector general and by repealing 136b. the ultimate get out of jail free card for those who commit

wrong within the iraqi system. absent those actions, i'm afraid we're just going to see more of the same, and much of that, of the kinds of wrong doing that we've seen in iraq, although the situations between the two countries are very different are nevertheless echoed in afghanistan that my friend stephen biddle is going to address now, so thank you. [applause] >> what a good segue. [laughter] that's a hard agent to follow in itself. it's nice to be back at gw. i was asked to talk about afghanistan. i think what i'm going to do is broaden the context slightly beyond corruption narrowly defined to the issue of

governing to which corruption is embedded and relate that to afghanistan and its importance in the conduct of the campaign, and i thought the way i would do that is to start by talking about some ways that we shouldn't think about the problem, but that i think are nonetheless quite common especially in the debate here in town and dc. the first of the problematic ways to think about the governing issue in afghanistan is governance is building capacity in the republic of afghanistan, that the central challenge for us is to take a country with poor human capital and through administrators and aid, training, mentoring, advice, and oversight, increase the corpus of trained capable public administrators in the country, and get them to the parts of the country where their

skills are most needed. this is not actually the problem in afghanistan. heaven knows there's a lack of skilled, trained public administrators, but that's not the long pole in the tent. the long pole in the tent is not the need to create benign capacity, the long pole in the tent is to deal with malign self-interest on the part of elements on the government that are actively underminding the war effort through corrupt activities. if we don't deal with the problem of malign self-interest, and we simply go about this like a benign process just training up more administrators running through the elliot school in kabul and putting them out in district governing offices, not only are we not making things much better, we are actively

making things worse. in several important respects, one is we run the danger of creating more proficient who are better able to extract resources from the society and from our efforts in the country and redirect them from the purposes we would like to the purposes that we wouldn't like, but secondly, our involvement with this activity runs the risk of making us appear to be come csh come police sit in the activities in the actors we appear to be assisting. this is not a problem that's unique to afghanistan. hch knows there's plenty of it in iraq. i argue it's yiewn veer saw -- universal. as a general role in counter

injeer jen sigh, you deal with governments who self-interest doesn't lie in the same direction as ours does. there is a reason why we don't tend to do a lot of counter insurgency in switsland or in great britain. where you have an insurgency to begin with it is because of usually maligned misgovernment on a regime with an interest lying in resources in the society to some degree and in some way. it is thus not a problem unique to afghanistan that when we think about govern reform in the context of insurgency it goes beyond taking an ally to give them what they want and asking them to do it better, it involves a central dimension of the use of leverage to dhaing

the calculus of that actor to reduce the scale of malign activity. an interesting feature of american counterinsurgency doctrine as it exists today it's built on a presumption that the outside wants what the counterments. they lack their ambitions. i argue this is rather uncommon in counterinsurgency and much more common is a need to change the interest calculus of local actors to induce a change in preference and goal and intent with respect to government rather than just building up a benign capacity. that's one, i think, unhelpful way thinking about afghanistan, which unfortunately is a product of our current doctrine and it is widespread at the moment. a second unfortunate way to think about the problem of

government in afghanistan is to view it primarily as a rule of law and criminal prosecution of a handful of bad actors who are breaking the law by redirecting money away from public purposes and towards private purposes. the problem here is that our ability to meet the standard of evidence, first of all, required for criminal prosecution in an environment that has as confused as afghanistan is problematic and stuart suggests some of the problems from iraq in several years, the problem is only partly difficulty in meeting the normal legal standard burden of proof, however. the problem is just as much that misgovernment in afghanistan is a network problem, not a random handful of individuals problem. the difficulty with misgovern in

afghanistan is individuals linked by patron contacts and in which money is used to by influence and buy behavior that's sought by those higher in the system ends up embedding itself in large pyramids of many, many dozens, if not hundreds or thousands of interconnected actors taking action against the single individual at the top of the pyramid and there are perhaps a dozen by some accounts of many line actor networks currently operating in afghanistan would only remove part of the problem. secondly, it's difficult for us to get anywhere in dealing with the real problem of malign misgovernment because the network has an entire network beneath them supporting, enabling, and embedding their

activities and delivering in exchange for the financial flows that move within the networks political benefits to those above the person or persons at the tops of the networks. when we then go to hamid karzai, and we say, we really need you to remove your younger brother, just to pick a random example. it's been reported that general stanley mcchrystal tried that and the president of afghanistan asked for evidence, our evidence could not meet legal standards. we then tried to use political leverage to get the same result to obtain, and the problem was our leverage wasn't up to the job, and a central reason why our leverage wasn't up to the job is because the individual we were trying to generate pressure against was at the top of a large network of individuals

which the president of afghanistan believed was delivering for him a combination of votes in kandahar province and a national degree of security in kandahar province because of the assets in the network are a variety of private security companies that act to enable convoys and other economic movements that take place within the province in exchange for those benefits or by comparison with those benefits the coercive leverage available to us to get hamid karzai to act as an actor who is useful to him wasn't up to the job, and therefore this individual remained in office and remains there to this day. if we look at this as a problem of individuals at the top, we're going to have a great deal of difficulty to get the leverage to get the political actions we need to get the individuals

moved or removed when we can't meet the legal standard of evidence for a criminal prosecution. now, these two unhelpful ways of looking at the government problem are central to whether or not we're going to succeed in the campaign as a whole because in one of the, i think, most interesting features of the assessment report that general mcchrystal issued shortly after taking command, the theater command believes that improvement in governing in afghanistan is co-equally necessary for success in the campaign with improvement in security, and perhaps the unique feature of the mcchrystal assessment report relative to other joint campaign guidance documents that i've seen in military head quarters and theaters of war it took a responsibility because of the

centrality of the success in the undertaking, the improvement of government in the theater. it is not enough just to improve security in government continues the way it does because the primary mechanism by which the taliban gets access to populations in afghanistan is because of the con convinces of this -- consequences of this misgovernment by networks of malign actors in the country. this is not centrally a matter of ped di corruption at police check points or paying in order to get a driver's license or any of the minor exchanges of money for government services that go on in a regular way throughout the developing world and have throughout afghan history. the central problem with this in afghanistan is it poses a potentially unlimited threat of economic predation on the part of afghans outside of these

networks. when a malign actor network controls the courts, when a malign actor network controls the elected local government, when a malign actor network controls the officials acting in the province, and when the united states is far as civilians in the area can see appears to be complacent with this because per our doctrine we are building up, supporting, and enable and enhance the existing local government, and when that malign actor network is using its political judicial and economic influence to for example, condemn private land for public use, and then redirect that condemned land to the benefit and profit of members of the network in a society in which the fundamental

source of lively hood is their land, this kind of public taking of private land in an apparently unlimited way because all the apparent authority sources within the society are evidently complacent in the taking, posing the threat to civilians outside the network of being renders literally destitute when instead of their neighbors pom granite farm, it events becomes their farm. this is not shaken down for payment at a check point. this is the ability to feed your family, your ability to sustain your basic lifestyle in the country, and when you see that happening around you, you can't go to the courts because they're part of the network. you can't go to the government

because their part of the network, and you can't go to the americans because they seem to be a part of the network. the only available source of protection against what to many looks like potentially unlimited government predation is the taliban because the taliban offer the ability to protect people against this kind of government activity. as long as this is the perception of significant numbers of civilians in areas in which these networks are operating, our ability to keep the taliban out by screwing into the ground an infantry platoon outside of every residential compound in kandahar province is negligent. our troop reenforcements have the prospect of providing security if all we do is provide security and leave misgovernment in its current state, there's no

amount of reenforcement that's going to stabilize this country. we have to make progress against malign actor misgoverning in network fashion and in important parts of afghanistan. now, none of this is to suggest we're going to fail in afghanistan unless we eradicate all dozen or so malign actor networks in the country down to the last malign actor and the last corrupt judicial official. i suggest -- i suspect strongly that's an unrealistic aim. what we do need to do, however, is constrain it and cap its take to create a perception that in fact the government is not in inevitably eventually going to

take everything. there are a variety, i believe, of prespective potential forms of constraint and enforcement to give us a tollerble degree of corrupt activity in a country like afghanistan that is sufficient to enable our security effort to keep the taliban out in a stable way, and on the table entering was a paper that i just wrote with two co-authors that talks about several different forms for lack of a better terms end state government in afghanistan that might be significant, but i won't go over that in great detail right now. what i want to do with my time, however, is first of all suggest that success does not require perfection. there are intermediate states that i think are sustainable and detain l. the second thing i want to do with my time, however, is say if

this is the concept of the government and corruption problem in afghanistan that we're acting upon, what does that imply then that we do? how do we go about this? what sort of implementing guidance should be given to the theater command on trying to cope with reducing the power and influence of malign actor networks? it seems to me a useful way of thinking about that is through a mechanical engineering metaphor. if we think of the networks as political machines, which, of course they are. this is not like other machine political networks, the hydraulic fluid that enails the machine to do its political work for its owners is money.

the overwhelming majority amount of money that is now creating the hydraulic power in afghanistan is coming from us. it is redirected from contracting money that the united states is spending in the country, and to a lesser extent that other outside international actors are spending in the country. first step it seems to me in any feasible campaign to reduce the influence of malign actor networks in afghanistan is reduce the hydraulic pressure in the machine, rendering it less able to do beneficial political work for its owners by turning off the intake valves at the bottom of the pyramids where the money comes in that enables the machine to do its work, by reforming the way we do our own

contracting, so that we stop funding companies that are in parts of these networks, so that we stop paying private security companies who are providing the security to keep the trucks that we're contracting with to move the beams and bullets and water and construction materials that all of our military forward operating bases need to function, we are currently paying private contractors to do that who subcontract to private armies to protect them, all of that money gets a cut taken by the network, and the private security that's being used to keep all that working then becomes a private army that the network can use to enforce it. all this is happening with our own money. ..

to get change in the action of the machine becomes more plausible capable of being sufficient to get people removed the we want removed reduce the value of its activity to its owners we become possible to direct leverage especially lower ranking actors less powerful and less important as they are removed the hydraulic pressure

in the machine diminishes further and we can move to the next layer. and we make progress there we can move to the next layer. if we approach this as we would target in the other networks we do not target the al qaeda network by giving st for osama bin laden at the top. we start at the bottom and work our way upwards. if we approach this network the same way, it seems to me that our odds of success and eventually diminishing its scale of mullen activity is much, much greater. now, notes, however, several of the disadvantages associated with this approach to governance reform in afghanistan as opposed to seeing it as a matter of benign capacity building four as a matter of fools of prosecution of criminal action. and there are several important ones. the first one is the way we are

currently getting the beans and the bullets and the water and the gasoline and construction materials and plywood to all of our forward operating basis is precisely this kind of contract. security remains important to counterinsurgency. the mcchrystal reports as either collapses you lose. if we keep the supplies going to these pieces and we are going to defund the private security and private trucking that is now doing it, we are going to have to return to the day in which logistical activity was a military function, which means there was a trade-off between the degree of population security we can pursue at any given moment and the success of our activities to reform government because it is almost certainly going to require that we pull out of population security and now least some parts of afghanistan at least

some military resources will be necessary to escort convoys once we start to be funding the maligned private activity that's moving of that material right now. and we are not so flush and soldiers and so flush and military capacity in afghanistan that this is a painless redirection of effort. it's an important and i think a necessary trade-off, but in the famous words of many washingtonians, heart traces must be made. i like the use of passive voice in that phrase and this is one of them. i think we have to accept a slower scale of progress in population security if we are going to make any headway in the government's line of operation because the two are so closely interrelated to read a second

down side to approaching this the way i'm suggesting we ought to is that it's slow. either one of the other ways of thinking about governments could in principle produce relatively rapid progress if of was done appropriately. if the central challenging governments is getting enough's trained people into the necessary number of local governments in places like helmand and kandahar, the bill that is referred to in theater, the cash till the end of a number of positions that need fill in a particular district or province, you could imagine taking a -- to use a misused often overused cliche -- government in a box and deliver the box and parachute public administrators and to places

like marjah or helmand and you could start getting public debt and attrition. regrettably it hasn't worked that way because that is in the central problem, but if that were the issue you could imagine making fairly rapid progress. if the central issue is prosecuting a handful of key individuals, you could imagine generating legal cases, giving the prosecution and getting people removed and using that as a metric of progress as a change in the short term. if, on the other hand, if you're going to approach government in afghanistan as a problem of countering line networks with a pyramid structure in which we have to start at the bottom and work our way up and we have to shake the battlefield, to use a wonderful military phrase, before we proceed to the size of operations by doing things like changing the way we do our contracting, this is not going to happen quickly to read the whole point of the process i've

been talking about for the last several minutes as it has a sequence to it, and if you don't do it in order, you're not going to succeed. if you try and take coercive action against actors who are currently too powerful because the control too much money and have too much influence, it just isn't going to work. unless you prepare the battlefield by weakening them first to make the leverage you have available sufficient, that isn't going to happen overnight. simply sorting out who are we giving money to at the moment in afghanistan is not a quick process as i suspect stuart could explain better than i could. there was a lot of homework need to do before we start substantially reducing hydraulic pressures and any of these networks, and we are not going to be attacked against all networks at the same time either. there is sequencing of necessary and there is prioritization necessary.

all of this runs into one of the central domestic problems in afghanistan, which is the crunch between the time negative counterinsurgency, which classically is rather slow moving, and the patience of americans who by and large don't appear to have read as much counterinsurgency fury as i would like and seem to be substantially less patient than in all of that for doubtless reasons of their own. nevertheless, i think we are left with one of those hard choices. if we are going to do this right, and pursue it in a way that i think has a reasonable prospect of success has opposed to governments approaches i think are unlikely to succeed, we are stuck with avenues and approaches that take time to untold and that do not move as fast as some of the other approach is that we've been trying to make headway with in the past, but who's i think

misunderstanding of the nature of the underlying problem has led to a lack of progress notwithstanding the potential to move fast if only they were the correct answer to that underlining problem. so, with that, resoundingly optimistic suggestion that more time is needed let us all move forth and be patient, why don't i stop? [applause] >> i come to these problems from the margins and don't have nearly as interesting things to say about them as my other two panelists, going to use my time mostly to kind of raised some of the issues in a broad context and also leading to some questions that hopefully we can discuss with the other panelists. first of all, my background intersects with these problems

in two ways. the first is through a filament, and we heard both where corruption is a definite problem in iraq and afghanistan, where some of the proposed solutions our development efforts, whether they are in iraq as stuart said, to work on establishing an anti-corruption agency within government, or as steve said marginally it can just be an issue of developing governments. but also development creates corruption. as steve mentioned the oil of the corruption machine is money and development brings in a lot of money and the case of iraq and afghanistan has brought a very large amount of money. and this is an issue i think about the delivery of foreign

assistance, and we've already had some discussion of that but i would like to also explored a little bit more in our discussion. and also, i would like to, in terms of my other intersection with this issue, my area of research has been in the regional central asia, which is in the shadow of the war on terror, in particular the war in afghanistan. and i have witnessed how the war on terror has contributed to the corruption problem in central asia as well, which i think brings up a whole other group of questions. in central asia around 2000 when i talk about central asia i'm talking with the former soviet states of kazakhstan, turkmenistan, uzbekistan and tajikistan.

budgets, u.s. aid budgets in general were decreasing around the year 2000, and then 9/11 happened and that brought a lot more money into central asia. the one way that usaid in particular decided to deal with this in terms of corruption was to try to avoid having that money to go to governments. so a lot of that money went to the community if a limit, it went to projects involving ngos and very little of it actually went into government. however, there was another dimension of this. at the same time we witnessed air base is being built in turkistan and uzbeckistan, and while the u.s. government decided they were not going to pay rent for the air bases, they did have to provide the fuel for the flames on the air bases, and

in particular in the case i feel very much that the u.s. involvement, military involvement literally led to the fall of the two governments in the past ten years, because in both cases the u.s. military and naval forces at the base were getting their fuel contracts from the brother, not the brother, the some of the president. in the first case it was -- and in about april of titles and five, the overwhelming information this money was going to the son of the president led to a popular movement that is essentially deposed president. and then just this past april, in april of 2010, we sought a repeat of this.

this issue came up afterwards. you would think that after five years the u.s. military would have learned this problem, but in fact immediately when maxine took over for the new president in 2005, once again his son began to receive money for the fuel contracts, and as a result this past april we saw another popular revolt remove this president, and this is an important question because it also has to do not only with foreign assistance, but the logistics of delivering goods and resources to afghanistan. in both of these cases we are talking out logistics as a military function, but in fact even the was a military function, there are still aspects in the local economy to

get pulled into it, and if that money is going to certain segments of the population that creates a new corruption problem and in balance in the power structure and potential instability. so, i'd want to bring up those issues as a kind of lead in to some questions to ask our panelists. first of all, in terms of corruption as a government problem, i think we have to recognize in both the case of iraq and afghanistan the u.s. government has a major role in helping to install motion the new government. so i'm curious from both of you reflecting on how the was done, have we learned anything? are there things that could have been done differently so that we do not end up with corruption

being such a critical part of government operations in countries now? >> we've done a number of audits of the efforts by the united states to develop and support anti-corruption programs in iraq and supplies they don't yield a very good outcomes. truth be told, we invested billions in electricity, oil, capacity building, reconstruction across the country and we invested virtually nothing in supporting these anti-corruption programs. less than 50 million of 56 billion-dollar program. and that speaks for itself i think at the outset there wasn't

an interest to be robust and forward leaning and supportive of tackling what frankly was a historic problem in iraq. no surprise, you know, the corruption would be encountered. with the surprise is with the yonah division is it's gotten worse since 2003. notwithstanding the development and creation of the new entity's the inspector general created by the cpa order 56 on funded as a matter of fact something that came to my attention that the cpa and i pressed it to the ambassador bremmer these are all performing with no resources and his last act of the appropriations before he left iraq was to improve funding for the i.t..

it didn't help a lot because money is not the answer. you need a plan but that is another story. >> on the afghan side of this i think the issue is partly a function of the government's blueprint the afghans created with our assistance in the 2001 bond process and constitution, which ironically was driven in part by the idea preventing warlordism and local control by the remarkably centralized plan. the blueprint for the government in afghanistan is as centralized has any constitution and the world today. it is a remarkably centralized document, and among the several motives of that was to prevent the kind of warlordism that we've seen in the country and in the past. a bummer about how that worked out.

i think the central problem with that is the we created a blueprint in which the allocation of the authority government power in the country was a very poor fit to the underlying distribution of the received political legitimacy which was not terribly centralized. afghanistan is a decent was culture and quality by grabbing on to the underlining distribution of legitimacy, a centralized system that didn't fit very well. we set up a government for weakness. we then, however, added to that blueprint a serious problems under resources, not development activity but security, and creating on the part of karzai the perception the we were not persistent and would not stay long enough to see this through in 2003, the central problem

with the growth of the maligned networks we see in afghanistan was not as a result of fear of our leading as a result of the july 2011 date that found its way into the president's speech in 2010. this problem is when we handed the problem off to nado to enable ourselves to focus on iraq which persuaded hamid karzai we will no longer engaged enough and afghan security to him to rely to keep himself in office and he started reaching out to a collection of power brokers with bases in different subgroups within the country and in different localities around the country, many of whom have grown into the heads of these malae nectar networks talked about earlier. if we had at the outset designed and afghan constitution the was a better fit to the underlining distribution of perceived legitimacy in the country so

that the government wasn't set up for a fall and then provided a degree of commitment that we were going to provide the security element, remember, security and governments are at least in fact coequal the important. if we could follow through on the security side with the procedure to guarantee that we would continue to do so long enough for the solution to eventually become self sustaining, i suspect the kind of reliance on the local malign actors that enabled and in power to them to go about misusing the local government and capturing it in the way they have wouldn't have gotten nearly the kickstart that it did. i also prefer that we would police our contracting and expenditure in the country for development as well as security from the beginning in a way that anticipated the danger that we could end up fueling the growth

of predatory government that would undermine our security effort, but i think the we would need to not just do the redesign of the government blueprint, although there was necessary. we would also need to provide security assurances the work credible and beatable handing them off to nato to work that way and a degree of early oversight would be more effective in controlling the way our money got used. >> in terms of the money used for assistance, as you mentioned, and maybe this is particularly a question for stuart, is your problem with the mechanisms of u.s. foreign aid that is feeding into the kind of corruption you've seen particularly not the local corruption and the government of iraq and afghanistan that the actual delivery of u.s. foreign

aid which you have also mentioned has had its share of problems in afghanistan and iraq? >> yes if this problem of the mechanism specifically. the lack of an efficient structure that insures there is careful planning for the execution of the kind of programs that we have seen in iraq and afghanistan this is not a development problem her say, nor a defense or diplomacy problem. something we call this is something different. it's something that's not completely generous in that we have a stabilization reconstruction operations fairly persistent. we have a much smaller scale since vietnam. in the balkans for example, but none of those lessons had been absorbed. they had been encapsulated in their own experience and put on the shelf, and i have in our

free search uncovered some of the reporting from the balkans, and it raises some issues very applicable to what we've experienced in iraq but it gets back to what i said at the outset, no entity in the u.s. government is particularly responsible for planning and executing and being accountable for stabilization reconstruction operations contingency relief and reconstruction efforts abroad and this is the venue the kind of environment that i think in this century the united states is giving to be called upon to protect its national interests security interests abroad, and the was the case in 2003 called the lack of the effective structure. sadly it is the case today, the commission contract and had a hearing in march with the representatives from senior officials from defense and state usaid and a simple question put

forward to them was who was in charge of the reconstruction program in afghanistan? that was an unanswerable question, which underscores my point that without an effective structure to plan and execute the use of money development, defense and the to have merged in both iraq and afghanistan with the response program for a simple, three and a half billion to build them, the lack of coherence and clarity leads to confusion, and lack of progress. >> do you have anything to add on that? >> well, finally, one more question i think that i want to raise and then we can open up to questions from the audience. if some of the success in

particular that you mentioned, stuart, that he'd seen in iraq as of late relate to deterrence, and we are talking increasingly about u.s. withdrawal from both iraq and afghanistan, obviously not complete withdrawal of foreign aid and so on, but assuming a lot of leverage is lost with the removal of troops, can we expect of a local corruption in both countries would get worse after the u.s. withdraw, or perhaps the opposite? >> it will get better. >> one of the distinctions i would draw between the two theaters is the center of the of corruption to the underlining

valley. i think in afghanistan predatory governments which is a bit broader than corruption merely defined but closely related to it is the primary value right now, that is the way in which the taliban indian the country. therefore if we fail in this undertaking we will lose the war and certainly if the united states withdraws our military but retains our expenditures, that is a double whammy likely to reduce failure. if we withdraw military presence i think we would actually do better to remove our economic presence as well. i would prefer having them both present but better directed than they are now. but if we remove our military and continue to allow poorly

managed expenditure toole predatory malignant behavior, i think that is a recipe for disaster. iraq, i would argue, is at the bottom and ethno-secretarian identity war in which corruption makes everything worse. but the war itself is not about corruption. the war itself is about mutual fear on the part of the confessional and ethnic groups, kurds and arabs, shiites and sunnis but the others mean genocide of violence at maximum or mere repression at minimum, and a willingness to spread blood to prevent that. the central problem in iraq today is that those conflicts are in a condition of negotiated cease-fire that have not been resolved as one could not reasonably expect them to be resolved on this short of the

time frame. the central requirement for success in iraq seems to me that some stabilization mechanism for preventing still smoldering fears from flashing over into large scale violence retained in the midst of one virtual down the united states is going to execute. my own preference is that the drawdown be slowing and gradual as opposed to rapid and sudden because i think experience of similar ethno-secretarian identity war elsewhere suggest that a slow trot