Stabilizing Afghanistan

Transcript

MR. JAMES B. STEINBERG: ...beginning of a series of collaborative briefings involving analysts from the international crisis group and our scholars here at Brookings. This is a new venture in which we're taking advantage of the common interests and expertise of two organizations which have been deeply involved in a broad range of regional problems of civil conflict, and none more timely, of course, than looking at the situation in Afghanistan and Central Asia.

We're particularly fortunate, I think, to have this very timely report from the International Crisis Group because as we have begun to see from the discussions that have been taking place in Bonn and also on the ground in Afghanistan, the kinds of issues addressed in this really outstanding report are very much coming to the fore very quickly, and it is a tribute to the ICG and its team that they have been able to produce such an important study in a way that's very timely for all of the various governments and international organizations and individuals on the ground who are going to be wrestling with the very difficult question of how to deal with political, social and economic reconstruction in the region.

I think, I don't want to excessively anticipate the report itself, because we're going to hear from the individuals involved in preparing it in a little bit more detail and you all have copies of it, but I just want to draw your attention to a couple of features which I think are particularly important in this report.

The first and most important is that it does take a regional perspective. I think this is something that all of us who have been thinking about this problem are very struck with. Although the sort of title of the problem as we think about it right now is Afghanistan, it's very clear, and the report does really a magnificent job of drawing out why the problem of building stability and economic opportunity in Afghanistan can't be approached in a vacuum. I think it's one of the real strengths of the report that it brings a skill and insight to the question of not only how to deal with the problem of Afghanistan itself, but recognizes these important linkages.

Second, and I think it's a hallmark of the ICG's work in general, is that there's a very acute sense of the problem of the short term versus long term, and the conundrum of the challenge that we face now in Afghanistan of the United States and the coalition's need for support, assistance and collaboration to deal with the very urgent terrorism problem of al Qaeda and the Taliban, but also recognizing that as we move forward and building new relationships in the region that we need to be sensitive to the fact that we may take some decisions which support the military effort in the short term, but which could have long term consequences that not only will not necessarily contribute to stability in the region but also could create problems of instability and potentially even support for terrorism in the future. So how we mediate between those short term requirements and the long term requirements I think is one of the most urgent and difficult challenges, and certainly one that I felt during my years in government is one of the hardest problems to try to overcome, and there are some very good insights on that in this report.

Finally, I think again, it's a hallmark of the work that the ICG has done, something I was very familiar with from its work on the Balkans, is that there's a real appreciation of the need to work with the people on the ground. I think it's particularly acute in this case as the report recognizes, that there's not a tradition of a strong central government in Afghanistan, and the need to work with local organizations, NGOs and the others and with local political groups and ethnic and tribal groups is going to be critical to the success of this effort.

So all in all it seems to me that this is a report that has great insights and will be of enormous value to policymakers.

There are also some issues that are going to be controversial and debated, and I think that's why we're here.

So our format this morning will be, first I'll turn the podium briefly over to Mark Schneider to tell you a little bit more about ICG and the genesis of this report. And then Robert Templer will talk about the report itself. Then we'll have comments from two Brookings scholars—Steve Cohen who is one of the leading experts on the region and has been an important commentator on this problem as the world has turned its attention to Afghanistan and its neighbors over the past several months. And finally, Michael O'Hanlon who has been doing very important work on looking at the overall situation in terms of the military, political and economic reconstruction.

Again, welcome. I'm looking forward to both today's meeting and those in the future. I also, as a word of pre-warning, I'm unfortunately going to have to leave around 10:00 o'clock, so if you see me slip off the podium it's not because I'm in profound disagreement with the comments that are being made.

Thank you.

Mark?

MR. MARK SCHNEIDER: Thank you, Jim.

First just let me say that ICG did not pay Brookings for that endorsement in any way, shape, or form. I want to thank Jim very much for taking the lead in helping now to provide this first venue for ICG to release one of its frequent reports on issues relating to conflict around the world, and hopefully this is a series that will continue.

As many of you know but some of you may not, ICG now has six years of experience in attempting to help the international community strengthen its capacity for analysis of the causes of conflict and analysis of the ways in which conflict can be contained and hopefully resolved. And during this period of work which was initiated by senior statesman George Mitchell is the founding chair, Mort Abramowitz and others, it combines the European and international, really, Board of Directors, currently chaired by Martti Ahtisaari, the former President of Finland, co-chaired by Steve Solarz. The president of the organization is Gareth Evans, the former Foreign Minister of Australia. We're based in Brussels, although we have advocacy offices one of which I head here in Washington; another in New York where Nancy [Sobriginer] acts with the United Nations directly. But our fundamental work is done in the field. We have field-based analysis that takes place in the countries where we work.

Currently we have programs in some 20 countries. Actually we're about to expand that, as I'll explain. But we focused initially on the Balkans, Central Africa, Central Asia, Indonesia, and we just opened a program a couple of weeks ago in Colombia.

The two additional programs that directly relate to September 11th, essentially aimed at looking at the consequences with respect to the global war on terrorism involve our opening an office in Islamabad, I guess it will be next week; and several weeks from now in Amman, Jordan, which will essentially look at the way in which events in those countries relate to the efforts to contain and hopefully prevent future terrorism.

It might be useful I think to note that what we have been looking at as Jim mentioned is not merely the short term issues related to conflict prevention, but the long term issues that hopefully can avoid causes and factors that result in conflict down the road from occurring. By developing the kind of policy prescription that national leaders, political leaders, that the international community can take to help countries avoid those factors sliding into deadly violence. And where violence already exists to help countries and help the international community combine to contain that violence and hopefully bring it to its conclusion.

The report that you're about to hear about from Bob Templer in a sense builds on what we've been doing over the past year and a half really in Central Asia, where we have offices in Osh and have been looking at the issues that flow out of Afghanistan and the way in which they impact on the region as a whole. The report itself I think begins to raise some of the questions that relate to ensuring that once the military conflict ends in Afghanistan that the steps are already being taken to ensure that the situation does not deteriorate in the future and that there is some possibility of building a state that functions and a state that begins to deal with the underlying social and economic problems that confront a country that is currently in the category of a failed state.

With that introduction, let me just briefly note that Robert Templer is the Asia Program Director for International Crisis Group. He coordinates all of our work in the various countries related to Asia. He previously was Regional Director for Strategic Intelligence in Singapore, a Fellow of the Open Society Institute in New York, Freedom Forum, Teaching Fellow and Visiting Professor at the University of California at Berkeley. In addition to his academic background he worked extensively as a journalist, as a columnist at the Asian Wall Street Journal, was Editor for the English Desk for Europe and Africa and the Asia Pacific Editor for Agence France Presse. Bob?

MR. ROBERT TEMPLER: Thank you.

I was at a dinner in New York last week with a group of friends and one person there I had never met before. I was sitting there talking to him about Afghanistan and explaining some of the issues related to rebuilding the economy in Afghanistan. As I was going on about this his eyes started to glaze over a little and he started to look a little bit confused, so I slowed down and was speaking in words no more than one syllable. I later discovered that he was this year's recipient of the Nobel Prize for Economics. So should any of you in the audience have a Nobel prize for your recent work on the reconstruction of Afghanistan, I think I'd prefer it if you left now. (Laughter)

I made this point in part because this report that ICG has put out, which is a collaboration of very many people in the field and here in D.C. and in Brussels, is really a starting point for our research. I feel as though I ought to have one of those little caveats attached to it that lawyers like so much about how either stock prices can go up and down, and likewise our opinions can change. And that we definitely reserve the right to change our mind on a great many of these issues. But what we have tried to do is to pose some questions and lay out some basic principles that we feel need to be considered if Afghanistan is to be stabilized, and beyond that, if this region is to reach a degree of stability whereby it won't be a haven for terrorist organizations, it won't be a major source of drugs and instability and other problems throughout this region.

One of the big problems in dealing with Afghanistan of course is that there's an awful lot that we don't know. You see in the press a lot of the time very confident assertions of certain things such as there are 18.5 percent of the population of Afghanistan is Hazaras; 23 percent are Pashtun. I mean these figures have really come out of nowhere because there's not been a census for a very long time in Afghanistan and people really don't know the answers to a lot of these questions. That's just one of a long, long list of things that we don't know the answer to.

We don't know, for example, really the political views of the somewhere between four and six million Afghans who live in Iran and Pakistan and whether when they go back to Afghanistan how they will interact. We don't know a lot of the stuff that's going on on the ground at the village levels—who really has power. Is it really just the warlords, is it really local shuras Is it local elders? We don't know the impact of the Taliban on the specific nature of Pashtun tribal life as well. Not only were they a religious group but they were a group that overturned a lot of the sort of internal tribal structures. They were from the lesser tribes, they ousted the more aristocratic tribes who are now coming back. A lot of these things are very uncertain, so the whole political situation I think is going to remain enormously fluid.

But I think there are also signs of optimism. There are good reports coming out of Bonn about a possible deal. We don't know if the deal will stick in any way. But even within this whole array of caveats I think it's important to begin the process of thinking about the reconstruction of Afghanistan right now.

One of the reasons for this, there's been so many cases around the world where there's been slippage between the initial military action that might stabilize a place; the humanitarian action that may be necessary in the immediate aftermath to save the population; and then the reconstruction process that goes beyond putting back in place what existed before the conflict; then the development process down the line, to build up a country. The sort of process that all countries in the developing world are going through.

What needs to be done is enough thinking about these processes now so that there's essentially a wet edge which will need to be set so that they overlap and move smoothly so that there aren't large gaps in funding, thought, design of administration between these different processes, and they do tend to be a major obstacle.

One of the aims of our report is to try and get people thinking about some of these issues now, even though a great many things are not in place. We don't know the political structures, we don't know the administrative structures that will emerge and we don't know what sort of peacekeeping force if any is going to be involved in Afghanistan. Thus we're hoping and we're working on the notion that these things will fall into place in some way.

The basic point I think about the rebuilding of Afghanistan is that it's going to be a much longer and much more expensive process that is probably recognized at the moment. We have a number of figures in the report, a range of figures that different organizations have been giving. Some of these figures will certainly give people indigestion. Suddenly there are huge problems with absorption of this aid and how this money is going to be administered and spent, but we do believe it's going to cost a very significant amount. In part because of the level of construction in Afghanistan and because of the size of the population. There probably won't be enough simply to put Afghanistan back to the state it was in in 1978. The population has probably grown by about ten million people or some such figure since that time. What's going to be important is putting back a much more stable Afghanistan.

Also Afghanistan, because it has been so ravaged by conflict for so long really lacks any of the hard infrastructure that's necessary for a society. It's going to be enormously expensive to do that. It's going to require massive efforts at education and health to get the population back on its feet.

There are some brighter spots in that area. There are quite large numbers of Afghans who are educated and well trained and capable of organizing things and I don't think Afghanistan needs a UN administration in the same way that Kosovo and East Timor have had.

There is an enormous potential in the country, an enormous potential for example among women in Afghanistan that can be drawn out and used very effectively if the aid is designed in the right way.

But there is going to be a real necessity to do a number of things, and particularly to get over this affliction which I think most Westerners suffer from. They're called AADD, which is Aid Attention Deficit Disorder. There's a willingness to rush in immediately with some humanitarian aid. People love the publicity that's generated by that. What they're less interested in is what's really needed in this region which is a ten year program, maybe even a 20 year program. But that money and that commitment needs to be made up front if these projects are to actually work.

There are a number of organizations that do work in this region. Agha Khan Foundation, for example, that does make very long term commitments to funding its projects. They've been very successful because of that.

So the problem with short term commitments is they create the short term mentality, they create the cycles of corruption, a whole array of problems, and they invariably don't work. They achieve very little.

What's needed is a much longer term vision. Whether anybody can persuade politicians around the world to take that sort of vision is another matter. I think in political life, the short term is the next 15 minutes; the medium term is tomorrow; the long term is next week. To get the long range mentality is extremely difficult but I think it's time to make a really concerted approach for people to pay attention over the long term and to make those sort of commitments. I think it's actually essentially in a broad, [purisitic] aspect for this country and for all other countries, to make sure that Afghanistan does not become a haven again for terrorists and that it doesn't fall back into the sort of instability that we've seen in the past. If it does fall back into that it will still be a very ripe place to cause enormous arrays of problems in that region and beyond.

There's also going to need to be a substantial regional growth. I don't believe the conflict in Afghanistan has ever really been isolated to Afghanistan. It's always been in some form of regional conflict. It's been at times a super power, proxy-conflict, or direct conflict even. There have been elements of direct and proxy war by the neighbors going on there. Each of the neighbors have tried to maintain influence with ethnic or religious groups that have links to inside the country. So unless the neighboring countries are pulled back from Afghanistan to some degree and cease the level of interference that they've been carrying out in the past decades the country won't be at peace.

Now to do that is an enormous problem, but I think it does involve first addressing the key concerns that all the neighboring countries have.

Pakistan has been very concerned about a hostile government in Kabul, and one has to understand that it has had hostile governments in Kabul for most of the past 50 years. Really only the past six or so years since the Taliban has there been a Pakistan-friendly government in Afghanistan. Afghanistan, for example, was the only country that voted against Pakistan's membership in the United Nations.

Iran has also felt enormous concerns and pressures from the drug trade, from refugees, and from the treatment of Hazaras and other Shiite groups in the country, and it wants to be a political voice and protection for those groups.

Something needs to be done about drugs across this whole region. It's a major source of both inputs for the conflict and instability and social problems in the surrounding nations. The scan of this is really quite extraordinary—something like 1 in 30 Iranians is now an opiate user; a similar figure in Pakistan. They have the largest numbers of drug users of any countries in the world. HIV is going to be an enormous problem in this region if it's not tackled shortly. Very little aid is given.

For example, Pakistan has a budget for harm reduction and HIV education of $40,000 a year. So there are tiny sums of money available for dealing with these sorts of problems. And they've been very much neglected, particularly here in the States, as we said, because you don't get your opiates from this region. They come from Mexico and other places in Latin America; but Europe receives 80 percent of its opiates from this region. Most of the money that Europe has put in there has been on the basis of extinction efforts in Central Asia. A lot of that money has simply gone into reinforcing corrupt and repressive police forces. They haven't really set the full approach, but what it has done is sort of boosted the power of quite repressive governments in that region.

That's generally failed and it runs very much counter to European Union obligations that they have within their own legal systems, within the Treaty of Amsterdam to apply demand reduction and harm reduction strategies in their own countries. They don't export that policy. All they export is interdiction. I think we've seen all over the world that it's a failed policy, that it needs to be reconsidered, and that a regional approach for drugs and security and a developmental approach to drugs is probably the only way to tackle this very serious problem in the region.

Also there needs to be an effort right from the start to build ideas about conflict prevention into assistance to this region and through Afghanistan. I think it's important in Central Asia to target assistance to some of the most tense regions in Central Asia. The Ferghana Valley, various other places, that either are particularly at risk of ethnic warfare, other forms of conflict that are possibilities in these places, but also to target places that are most in need and have seen the worst rises in poverty in the last ten years. But even within Afghanistan I think it's necessary to design projects with the aim of draining resources for conflicts by berthing them away from fighting, providing them with the economic incentive

One thing that's been very noticeable in the past few months is the large numbers of Afghan men who have been turning up at the border, and they haven't necessarily been saying that they were fleeing American bombing. What they were saying is they were fleeing press gangs, essentially. They did not want to be forced into fighting.

What I think we need to do now is in some way harness this lack of energy, if you like, in Afghanistan for fighting. People are so fed up with conflict. So many young men are so distraught at the idea of having to do any more fighting, but they need an alternative and they need jobs in some way. So there needs to be a very concerted and immediate effort to provide income to these people and to draw them away from the conflict. And that again needs to be a long term process, also building in education and training and various other economic incentives down the line so that it becomes self-sustaining. But in the short term it's going to require immediate impact projects on mine clearance, road building, irrigation systems, all these sorts of things that need to be tackled.

There needs to be a very serious level of local commitment to projects. Again, I refer to the Agha Khan Foundation and some of its work. It's always been very careful to make sure the communities are deeply involved in the design and implementation of all projects so that they don't simply feel that... This [cargo] mentality often springs up when you have large influxes of aid into a country. It's extremely important, I think, to get that local design element into the project so that people set their own priorities, they do know what they need to do, and they are willing to do it given the resources.

I think in Afghanistan it's particularly important because there are some very serious risks about dealing with the people who are probably going to end up in power in Kabul. It's unclear whether these people are truly representative in any way of Afghan people so it's necessary I think to look at political social structures much lower down than that as a means to channel aid in.

Now this is complicated and it requires I think much more sustained focus and effort than simply shoveling money to a central government for them to spread around the place. But I do think a lot of experience among NGOs who have been operating in Afghanistan is setting up local level operations and I think that experience needs to be drawn on now and used to spread the aid across the country to make sure that it's not too Kabul-centric as it has been often in the past; to make sure that it does get to all ethnic groups and to all people.

This brings us to another I think really essential point which is the role of women in future development. That is an enormous problem that's got to be tackled in Afghanistan. There is a huge potential out there, there are large numbers of educated women who have been completely sidelined and suppressed under the Taliban that can be brought out into public life on the political level, but also as teachers, doctors, all sorts of professional careers, things they've had in the past and which they are desperate to resume in many cases.

I think there is going to have to be a realistic assessment of how much can be achieved and how quickly. I don't think the treatment of women can be the only measure of success in Afghanistan. It's extremely difficult to alter Pashtun values overnight in any way, and I don't think that's going to happen. But I think what needs to happen is a concerted effort to ensure the aid is spread very evenly across all ethnic groups, across the entire country, across all provinces according to their needs, of course, but not sidelining any particular group. And it has happened in the past. There have been definite aid groups that have favored certain areas over others. That problem has exacerbated tensions and has become a major source of conflict in some areas.

The major areas which I think are going to have to be tackled very rapidly, the infrastructure needs, as I mentioned—roads, irrigation systems, demining, the enormous problems in education and health which again are going to have to be brought back from almost nothing. There's an immediate pressing concern about humanitarian actions. Beyond that, a real need to reopen everything from new universities to schools to educating the enormous numbers of young boys who have been fighting and now need to be given some alternative in their lives beyond carrying a rifle.

There needs, I think, to be a major commitment to expanding media and communications. There's been a lot of talk about a broad-based government, but how broad-based can it be if most Afghans don't know what's going on in Kabul, don't know about the political crises, and don't know what their supposed representatives are saying for them. So I think much more needs to be done initially to expand, for example the BBC and the Voice of America services which are very popular, to expand access to radios. But beyond that, to put in telephone systems, to put in maybe sort of community-based information sensors where people have access to the media, to expand newspapers and provide the necessary subsidies for printing and distribution.

I think human rights needs to be right at the heart of any redevelopment efforts in Afghanistan. I think this means an immediate commitment, possibly by the United Nations, and that can only happen with, of course, the U.S. government to set up a commission of investigation in Afghanistan, to assess the situation and to start looking at the human rights situations in place now and start gathering evidence in the future.

My great fear in Afghanistan is the country will go back to being run by the General Dostums and the (unintelligible) mafias and the group of people who really should be locked up at the first opportunity. That's going to require a commitment which at the moment I don't believe is there at all, but I think it's essential to start getting human rights monitors on the ground and then to build up the long term processes of building up a justice system, of tackling some of the things that have gone on in the past.

One key point here though is that no deal should be made that grant immunities at this time. If that happens the issue will come back to haunt Afghanistan in the future. And it's something that the UN has, for example, quite good guidelines on not signing and not being party to such deals. It's important I think that all countries agree on that.

The only immediate sort of concerns in Afghanistan, I think there is a real concern that there won't be the resources, that attention will drift so that people are not going to raise the money. I think it's absolutely vital that political leaders in all Western countries start the process of selling the necessity of rebuilding this area to people in this country.

I think you're all probably aware of the sense of the lack of knowledge about the degree of foreign aid that the United States gives. Many people think it's about ten percent. It's about 0.1 percent of GNP. Now if the United States moved to 0.2 percent of GNP which would put it at the OECD average and still 0.5 percent below what the United Nations has set as a target of developed nations, there would be enough money essentially in order to tackle Afghanistan and Central Asia and this whole region, but also to deal with the incredible array of pressing problems in Afghanistan, HIV, a whole range of other things. That commitment is completely lacking at the moment but I think people do need to go out there and sell it more to the people there and to the press and to everyone else.

We need to get the neighboring countries on board in this process and I think that's going to be essential and very difficult, particularly in the case of countries like Uzbekistan which has been problematic in its relationships with pretty much all its interlocutors in the past ten years. I think it's going to require quite considerable pressure, quite considerable diplomatic attention, and also a very long term commitment of funds as well. I don't think it's enough to say to countries like Uzbekistan you have to open up, you have to change your system, if not we're not going to give you any help in doing that. I think there needs to be a much more concerted effort to push these countries forward.

And I think the most pressing thing is to get Afghans on the side of this effort. That means getting immediate benefits or very rapid benefits for them, of reviving some sort of hope in this country. I think that is possible, it's very difficult, it's a challenge, but I think we need to rise to it very rapidly to ensure that this country doesn't slip back into another 20 years of conflict.

MR. STEINBERG: Thank you, Bob. A very concise and thorough account of a very comprehensive report.

Steve, let me turn to you for comments.

MR. STEPHEN P. COHEN: I'll be very brief.

Ambrose Bierce, the American humorist, wrote in "The Devil's Dictionary" that God invented war to teach Americans about geography, and I think I would add a corollary, that God invented ICG to explain to us what we should be doing after the war. It's an excellent report and I certainly hope you read it carefully. I did, and it compares very favorably with reports by other international organizations which will not be mentioned. I do have a World Bank approach paper here, but... (Laughter) And really, I think the level of analysis, the level of understanding and the forthrightness of the report is very important, much to be commended.

I would just confine my comments to two areas. One, a few words about Pakistan and a few words about Afghanistan.

In the case of Pakistan I'd elaborate on a point that has just been made and also sounds an alarm bell, something that disturbs me very much, it was alluded to in the report as things that move very quickly. The elaboration is with regard to Pakistan's role in Afghanistan, and as you said, concern of the Pakistanis about an Indian role in Afghanistan. And there's also concern about, a pathological concern by Pakistanis about the Indian presence in Kashmir, and Kashmir is a disputed territory.

I think that one of the unresolved issues coming out of Afghanistan will be the India/Pakistan conflict and sooner or later the United States and other entities, private groups, NGOs, are going to have to address this problem. Because even though we've been able to reverse Pakistan's role in Afghanistan, it's likely that General Musharraf and the Pakistan government will continue a forceful policy in Kashmir, forceful literally. I think this is a potential for another major global conflict which would certainly dwarf what happened in Afghanistan and it also, in my mind it also drags down both India and Pakistan.

The alarm bell pertains to the kind of assistance that we are providing to Pakistan, or we apparently are providing to Pakistan. Or we apparently are providing to Pakistan. As the report notes, something like a billion dollars has been earmarked for Islamabad and I gather that this money is now being pushed across the table to the Pakistanis.

I think a serious mistake is being made, or a serious mistake is again being made since this is what we did in the past. There is not going to be any accountability for this money, as far as I can tell. It's not going to be a multiyear assistance program. And it's not going to focus on building the very Pakistani institutions which are necessary to keep

Pakistan functioning as a normal state. The report does discuss in some detail the importance of rebuilding the Pakistani taxation system which is non-existent. And I think it's a serious error on the part of the United States and the World Bank and other IFIs to simply give Pakistan the money without insisting on a reasonable level of accountability.

And I think it's particularly egregious because this government in Islamabad is in fact a pretty good government compared with its democratic predecessor that takes the notion of structural reform in Pakistan far more seriously than either Nawaz or Benazir did. I think these kinds of conditions should have been insisted upon. I think the Pakistanis should have asked for these conditions instead of asking for more F-16s. What worries me very much is that we'll have a one year pile of money pushed at Pakistan, a lot of it will be recirculated in ways which do not help the Pakistani government. In three years the Pakistani public will come back to us and say you've given the government all this money, where is it? What do you have to show for it?

I'd like to see schools, universities, colleges, a new taxation system, improvement of the Pakistani bureaucracy. The whole civil infrastructure for Pakistan must be rebuilt. And as the report notes, Pakistan has the people to do it. It's a country that has a lot of talent, and I think you imply in there that there's a lot of educated unemployed in Pakistan. There's also a lot of schools that have never been built. And clearly matching up the educated unemployed with schools is a logical and natural thing to do. I very much hope the Pakistanis do this, but I'm afraid that without international insistence this money may be frittered away.

With regard to Afghanistan let me raise an issue that hasn't been discussed at all, and it's a problem that will occur after we get through the present series of difficulties, after we negotiate some kind of political structure in Bonn and in Afghanistan. After this Loya jirga. After the Americans depart but presumably some kind of limited American presence is there to help manage the relief program. Then what kind of security structure does Afghanistan have?

The report makes a brief reference to the need to rebuild, to build security structures for Afghanistan. But Afghanistan is a country that's quite unique. It's a country that's armed to the teeth and the typical Afghan male has two weapons—a Kalashnikov and a squirrel gun, a long range gun which can pick off people and other items at a long distance. And Afghan women are armed to the teeth. Literally. Or at least armed through the burka. Almost every Afghan woman in the countryside in particular has a small weapon. So it's a country that's rich in weapons. It's a country the NRA would very much approve of. But it's a country that doesn't have an army. It doesn't have a central military authority. Even the Taliban never built an army as such. I think that it's important now for scholars and administrators and perhaps some of our military to begin thinking about what kind of military structure would be appropriate for a free and independent Afghanistan.

My guess is that there are some important lessons to be learned from around the world. The way in which the South Africans managed to bring together white South Africans and black South Africans and create a very tough professional army might be a model for Afghanistan. The way in which the Indians have a multi-ethnic army both at the officer corps level and also the other ranks might be a model for Afghanistan, whereas the Hazaras and the Tajiks and others would be represented in both the officer corps and the other ranks.

I think armies are very, very difficult institutions to build, and it may take a generation to create a professional army. But I think Afghanistan will have to come out of this with the beginnings of a professional military establishment. The alternative is a series of warlords. The alternative is that each province will have its own military system, and that system will probably be funded by narcotics. I think that would again simply lead Afghanistan back to where it has been in the past few years.

Thank you.

MR. STEINBERG: Thank you, Steve.

Mike?

MR. MICHAEL E. O'HANLON: Thank you, Jim, and I join my colleague in admiration for the ICG and for this report. I wanted to make also just a couple of succinct remarks, I hope, on some issues in economic reconstruction and development.

One is to agree with the point made about roughly the order of magnitude of money that would be required here. Looking at some of the past examples of economic assistance for societies that have been ravaged by war and that need fundamental rebuilding and reconstruction, I think one comes up with rough figures in the ballpark of anywhere from one billion a year to even five, six billion dollars a year over perhaps a decade. That's the order of magnitude that I would expect in this case. The lower end of that range comes by analogy with Taiwan and South Korea after their wars and serious devastation in the period a half a century ago, and scaling to the size of the population in Afghanistan. The higher range comes from some of the efforts in the Balkans. And obviously in between levels could be imagined as well that would be more consistent with the Marshall Plan level of resources.

I don't know the right number for Afghanistan, but we're looking at an overall requirement, I think, of roughly two to five billion dollars per year from the international donor community as a whole, of which the U.S. bilateral contribution might be ten percent of that amount and the total U.S. contribution, including through international organizations, may be more like 20 to 25 percent if we follow the [25] million and try and get our economic aid levels up to a more appropriate point. I'm not sure we need to get quite to 0.2 percent of GDP but we certainly should be several billion dollars a year higher than we are right now in my judgment, and I'm a little disappointed to see the U.S. policy debate has not made this point very vigorously in the three months since September 11th.

The second main set of arguments that I would want to make would pick up a little bit on what Steve Cohen was driving at, although I'm not sure he'll fully agree with this point, but it's to acknowledge that in the short term I'm not convinced we can envision an integrated national security structure or even a real strong central government and to encourage that much economic aid for reconstruction be provided at the local level.

The reason I say this is because I'm not particularly optimistic about the prospect of the process in Bonn, and even if we do manage to get some kind of a process for a coalition with elections I'm nervous about winner take all elections in such ethnically divided societies as Afghanistan. We've seen a lot of problems along these lines obviously in Africa, whether it's Angola or Rwanda. I'm not sure either one of those would be an appropriate analogy, but I do worry that if you push too hard for winner take all elections first of all you may get resistance from Rabbani and the Northern Alliance which may feel they won this war and they deserve the first place among equals in this government and if you push them too hard they will simply resist.

Secondly, even if we can overcome that short term problem, in the medium term I think there's a danger that a winner take all election could lead to ethnic conflict, regardless of which side wins and could also involve some pretty great unhappiness from Pakistan and some instability regarding that country.

So I would favor a great deal of allocation of aid at the regional level. The hard question is what does the regional level mean? Does that mean you give a certain amount of money to each city and each faction within the Northern Alliance and each faction within the Pashtun? I don't have this fully worked out in my mind, but I do believe that there should be an integrated A plan that provides a fair amount of assistance to the central government and allows the central government to be involved in disbursing it, but also quite a bit of assistance at the regional level, and the level of regional aid could be conditioned on the behavior of those regional governments. You are going to want to set standards for their behavior in human rights, in economic policy, in working with a central government to ultimately develop an integrated national security force. To the extent they're cooperative they could receive greater amounts of aid. To the extent they're less cooperative you limit the aid more to simply relief efforts and you do not provide as much for more ambitious economic development projects. That would be a general philosophy that I think we need to seriously consider as we start our thinking about how to help a future government in Afghanistan. I'm just not sure it makes a lot of sense to work exclusively through Kabul in this context.

Obviously NGOs are going to be providing a lot of help at the grass roots level, but I'm thinking also about working with regional governmental structures, whatever they may be, and whoever they may be, and that's going to take a lot of work to figure out just how to do that even if we take that philosophy.

The third point I would make, just to put these three items on the agenda and then get to discussion, is not to think so much about reconstruction but to think about the more immediate problems, getting relief to the Afghani people. I think it would be inappropriate to have this whole discussion without thinking about what I consider the immediate agenda item in Afghanistan today, and that's helping the humanitarian relief effort go forward, and this cuts right to the issue of whether there needs to be international peacekeepers in Afghanistan in the near term.

On this position let me quickly say I think the Bush administration's instincts are understandable but wrong. I think that there is a reason to worry that military operations need to continue vis-a-vis the priority, must not be interfered with by the presence of too many foreign troops. However, there are ways around this in my judgment. I think having NATO soldiers provide relief for, excuse me, protection for relief efforts in the north is a very, very smart idea. The north is generally under control of the Northern Alliance now. It's not going to be a place where you have the problems you had in Bosnia with peacekeepers essentially being sniped at from three or four different directions. It's also a place where starvation is still a real worry and where aid disbursement is not happening very well because of problems with banditry and general lawlessness, even if the war itself has largely been ended in most of the northern half of the country.

So I think the Bush administration needs to listen to its European allies and consider seriously the idea of allowing them to lead an international effort to protect roads, relief convoys, and certain safe areas.

There are ways to avoid making this a problem for our operation and for the political reconstruction efforts that are going on. For example, as the Bush administration I would ask our British and European friends in no uncertain terms to stay out of Kabul with this force until there has been agreement among the Afghan parties. I don't think you want to get into the business of trying to change the basic politics on the ground with this kind of a peacekeeping force, but I think providing humanitarian relief and protection for those who would do so in the north makes good sense.

You could also work out an arrangement where if we need a military base to do a rapid operation, to do a refueling of helicopters en-route to a commando raid, everybody else gets out of the way. And by the way, they have to be our allies at this point because we have to have people that we have complete confidence in and very good operational security with. But thankfully it's the British and Germans and French who are offering the forces, and I think we have no reason to think that we would not agree to this kind of an arrangement. Where if we need to use an airfield somewhere in the country they get out of the way. The humanitarian relief temporarily takes second place while the military operation goes ahead.

I think you can work through some of those details and get the forces on the ground to protect the relief operation and that's the real humanitarian imperative right now, because as important as reconstruction is and is going to be in the near future, the immediate agenda item is to make sure people don't starve in Afghanistan this winter, and that problem has by no means been solved so far in this general effort.

I'll stop there and look forward to your discussion.

MR. STEINBERG: Thank you.

Let me open the discussion by asking Bob a question about the civil administration issues in Afghanistan. You said in your comments that you thought this was different from Kosovo and Timor and that there was not a need for a UN administration, and in the paper it suggests that in terms of coordinating the assistance that you would look to the World Bank and to what's called the Afghan Reconstruction Agency to deal with this.

The question to you is, given the intense politicization of the situation among the different factions and the like, how confident can you be that a civil administration can be put together that wouldn't be just paralyzed by fighting over who gets to run which agency, which department, and even the kind of in-fighting we saw in Kosovo among Albanians about how to control the cities and who was going to be in charge was a major problem in terms of getting basic kinds of civil activities forward. Is there not some need to have some kind of neutral administration to get things underway? All the kinds of urgent priorities that you identified?

MR. TEMPLER: In an ideal situation, yes, it would be better to have that, but there's absolutely been no willingness in the U.S. to even discuss any sort of UN administration in Afghanistan. And the Afghans themselves have sort of said it that way. I (inaudible), but there isn't the political willingness for it, and then see what can be done. I agree with the point you heard about working with local groups. There are more coherent local administrations and the capacity to build local administrations than there is a great capacity to build a coherent central administration, which is I think going to be exactly ravaged by all of the problems that we've seen elsewhere and that Afghan's showed in the past, in particular the Rabbani/[Licud] government and the (inaudible) government in Kabul in the early '90s.

I think to deal with it you're going to have to deal with a lot more regional authorities. We still don't know exactly what those regional authorities are and I think they're going to differ in the degree of represents (inaudible), how they're structured. I think in a lot of Pashtun areas there may well be more traditional shuras of elders. In other areas, Hazara areas, for example, there may be more open, more responsive groups of people. But I think there are ways to do that, but it's going to have to be more or less problem-by-problem, and in some cases a village-by-village administration.

I think there will be a need for a sort of central technocratic coordinating body of some kind which I think should be manned by a mixture of foreigners and Afghans, as many Afghans as possible, but I don't see any possibility of a major UN administration or anything like the East Timor... [Brouhimi] has already said that his plan is a very small footprint. A UN administration essentially not much bigger than there was for the pre-Taliban days.

Q: Hi. David Isby. Question for Professor Cohen.

In Pakistan, how would you see Pakistan reconciling its interests with that of the other neighboring participants who look more toward minority rights, Persian speakers in Afghanistan, and also the idea which we just heard of a decentralized Afghanistan. Pakistan has been suspicious of decentralized Afghanistan and it may become moreso within the next week if the Indians show up rebuilding Taloqan airport. So how do you see that working out and getting away from Pakistan's insistence on a chosen instrument in Kabul?

MR. COHEN: I'm very concerned that... I agree with Mike that Afghanistan is going to have decentralized governments and administrations for some time before a central authority can be established in Kabul which resembles anything like they had in the '60s. But I'm very concerned that there's going to be a rush by the Pakistanis and also perhaps by the Iranians and other countries to establish political and even military ties, economic ties, with various provincial leaders in Afghanistan. Then we're back where we started from. In a sense there has to be a concordance among the Pakistanis, the Iranians, the Russians and the Indians that they will let Afghanistan be Afghanistan. That they will not try to again carve up Afghanistan into spheres of influence.

The temptation for the Pakistanis will be very great. They've had a lot of contact and experience, especially with the Pashtun tribes. I'm not quite sure what American policy should be on this except we do have this leverage of a massive assistance program and that could be tied to good behavior on the part of the Pakistanis in Afghanistan. But they'll insist on good behavior on the part of the Indians and the Russians and the Iranians. Again, this involves some kind of larger strategic framework.

There's been a proposal for a larger treaty arrangement that would treat Afghanistan very much the way Austria was created. Declare it a non-aligned or neutral state with certain conditions for outside states involving themselves in Afghanistan. I think that's appropriate and I think that the U.S. should be in the forefront of getting some kind of international statement or consensus about the rules of the game in dealing with Afghanistan.

Q: I'm Jim Matlack with the American Friends Service Committee.

There's very wide agreement in this town and even in the White House that the role of women is a critical factor in this next stage of however Afghanistan is stabilized and reconstructed. Could those of you with some experience in watching this process elsewhere and in the special obstacles that face us in Afghanistan say a little about how we actually implement that in terms of do we condition aid and if they don't cooperate they don't get the aid, and then the good things we need the aid to do don't get done? How do we play that role to be sure the role of women is advanced?

MR. TEMPLER: I think the role of women is immediately advanced by a significant [posting] of them in the humanitarian process. Beyond that, [posting] of them in the education and health process which they're always, in all countries they are the key people that need to be (inaudible), in part because they essentially raise children and socialize children and have that key role.

I'm not necessarily sure I'd want to see aid conditioned on this in Afghanistan because I don't think we're going to change the society overnight. It's going to be extraordinarily difficult to get people into political roles, to get them to have full participation in their society. This may be asking way too much.

You often see this in these sort of discussions where people want to condition, put an array of conditions on freedom of speech and expression and association on all these countries, but then these same things don't exist in, for example, Singapore. And we're expecting some country like Afghanistan to have them. So in the scope of development there are expectations that occasionally get too high. But I do think there are ways of building in concern for the qualities across not just gender but also ethnic groups and religious groups into whole elements of the future political development of Afghanistan in such a way that people are given greater protection without necessarily making more traditional Afghans feel incredibly threatened by some external agenda to improve the rights of women. I think it has to be a matter or improving the rights of everybody, of all Afghans, and maybe diminishing the power of the warlords and the more oppressive groups and that's a way to do it.

But I think it almost needs to be, if it's going to be successful, I think it possibly needs to be phrased less as an agenda purely for women and more as an agenda for people including women.

VOICE: Let me just say, one of the things it seems to me, Jim, is that the organizations that are going to be tasked with carrying out and managing the development process, they themselves, NGOs particularly, have the option of hiring women, local Afghan women, to play key roles in the management of the process. We know that there are organizations of women that have been formed in the past that can be supported in the development process. I would assume that the World Bank which has that as well, the UN, the USAID, that they would all be attempting in designing their programs to ensure that women are participating at the local level in the management of the program, and that they can do. That doesn't have to be done from a requirement from the government side. As they're carrying out and designing the programs they can ensure that that happens.

VOICE: Can I add just one brief point to that?

The Afghan constitutions of '64 and '77 really had a role, really are models in a sense. They treat, all Afghan citizens were treated equally. And there is in Afghanistan, in the constitutional history of Afghanistan, ample provision for human rights, not just necessarily a special role for women. And I think many Afghans, at least in the United States that I've talked to, are eager to return to those aspects of those earlier constitutions.

Q: My name is Divya Kumar and I represent a small non-profit called WordSoundAction, as well as the Center for Arts and Culture here in Washington.

I guess I have two comments for the entire panel. They have to do with the idea of creating civic spaces out of tribal spaces.

I think that it's really important to recognize that many people from the area that you're referring, the South and Central Asian area, really do not lose their tribal or regional ties until they have been racialized in another context. That is outside of their home countries and in other countries, whether that's America or Europe or other parts of the world.

I think in terms of building civic structures that actually work in these lands it becomes really integral to reintegrate these personalities who have an experience of what it is to not be from a specific region of that place, but also identify with that place and put them back into the administrative central, national development thing that you're building so that you can actually have a real person-to-person relationship that develops.

Also I think it will help to develop the same lack of civic society within this country and other countries among those very populations.

VOICE: In general, my understanding is that both the UN and the World Bank are attempting to identify Afghan expatriates who could be brought back to participate in the development structure.

Q: My name is Lee James Irwin from the State Department's South Asia Bureau.

Related to the same question, there are a lot of talented, educated people in the diaspora, in Pakistan, in Europe, in the United States. I'm wondering if perhaps Robert would like to address the question of the likelihood of these people who have picked up and really established new homes for their children and their families and themselves, the likelihood of their providing a talent corps to go back and provide the leadership either in government or NGO activities.

MR. TEMPLER: I think that's always a huge problem with this issue, why would you give up your nice life in California to go back to Kabul for the moment. These people won't go back unless there's some very considerable security. Security's got to be the first priority in order to facilitate this process.

It's very difficult. How do you tackle, for example, the income gap between what an Afghan or Afghan origin would earn in the United States, and then what they're likely to earn back in Afghanistan, to go back. Do you have a separate salary structure? Then what happens to the sort of envy and resentment that that engenders when you go back?

I have to say the track record in a lot of places that I'm thinking about like East Timor and various places for the diasporas to go back is not really that good or that promising. Cambodia as well. When they do go back there are lots of resentments and problems and all the issue of having not necessarily been through the 20 years of horror or not stayed on.

There are no easy answers to getting people to go back. I think it depends on individual commitments, I think it depends on security.

There are certain sort of legal things that can be addressed down the line such as dual citizenship, the rights of people who are going back with different passports and the sort of protection they can expect, the possibility of their role... What happens to Afghans who become American citizens and they want to go back and operate there? That something for both the U.S. government and future Afghan governments to deal with.

I think there is a huge talent pool out there. Whether it can be really harnessed for the people of Afghanistan I think is another matter.

But there is of course a large number of people in Iran and Pakistan as well who want to go back much more readily than say those living in Europe or the States.

Q: I'm Frank Method. I work with UNESCO, the strategy group and some other entities on foreign conflicts.

My understanding from your report and the comments here is that people are converging on the assumption that we're likely to have a fairly decentralized governing system for some time, and that most reconstruction will be fairly local initiatives supported by NGOs and the international community and it will be some time before you have a central entity that is capable of managing national programs and being accountable for serious international money.

So the question initially is, is that a fair characterization?

But the reason for my question is, my experience in looking and being involved in other parts of the world with post-conflict situations—I'm talking about Uganda, Namibia, to some extent Zimbabwe, Ghana, some other places, it's been exactly the opposite. These countries use the restoration of the social services system, including education, health delivery systems, etc., as the armature or the infrastructure within which to begin to build a government. It's a way in which they began to get the money moving around, to test some accountability issues, to force some changes in the logistics and distribution system, etc. And the governance then grew up around that.

I'm wondering, I'll put it as a question, I'm wondering how we get that choice on the table for strategic planning for Afghanistan. It may very well be that you can get some agreement on how to manage education funds faster than you can get agreement on the political structure to (inaudible) a government.

MR. TEMPLER: One thing that would be something of an ideal scenario is a government in Kabul that was much more about delivering services and much less about politics and ethnicity and regionalism in the country, and whether that can be achieved depends on the degree to which Afghan leadership allow it to happen. It's something I think that's being discussed, is who's going to be in the government perhaps and represented.

I think in an ideal situation what you're saying is a great idea to start rebuilding the central structures by virtue of providing these services. I'm sort of skeptical that it will happen in Afghanistan because of the long history of squabbling over the tiniest thing. The vision of everything as a zero sum game, whereby nobody is willing to give up anything.

Maybe it's changed. Maybe this is the opportunity to do something like this. But my fear is if too much emphasis is put on that, then what will happen is that those that don't get channeled through the government will simply block everything and squabble over it and nothing actually happens down the line.

But it might be necessary to approach it from both sides. To start building the central structures and start going out from there, but also to ensure that something is getting through and that things are happening and that Afghans are starting to see the benefits. I think it's absolutely essential that Afghans see this money and they appreciate where it goes. I think it's a source of resentment for... I live in Brussels which is one of the most squalid cities in Europe, and yet I pay enormous taxes and I do have this incredible sense that I have no idea where my taxes go. Well they go to the decentralized state, actually in Brussels where every little problem has autonomy in its own foreign ministry and everything else.

But I think unless they can see where this money's going and appreciate what's going to happen, they're not going to be willing participants in the situation. Therefore I'm a bit hesitant about channeling too much into any central structure.

Q: Kristine Herrmann with the U.S. Institute of Peace.

Earlier Mr. Templer had mentioned the need for security for expatriates to return to the country. And I'm wondering what rule of law would look like in Afghanistan and how that would be established.

MR. TEMPLER: That's a sort of overwhelming question in some ways.

Well, it's going to be established very slowly, step by step, and it's going to be an enormously complicated process. It's going to have to take into account sort of customary law and religious law and also a sort of more centralized secular law. It's going to have to balance the sort of local and central interests.

I think nobody really has a clue how this is going to emerge from this. (inaudible) better ideas.

But I think getting from a situation of long term conflict, warlords and everything that's happened, to a centralized legal system and the rule of law is a process of decades of work and again, considerable expenditure.

VOICE: I'm not quite that pessimistic. I think before Afghanistan was hijacked first by the Afghan communists supported by the Russians and then by the Taliban supported by the Saudis and the Pakistanis it was, I won't say it was a peaceful, quiet country, but there was a sense of traditional law which was very effective. The substructure was a tribal system, but the tribal system had evolved over a thousand years. Major disputes, there were mechanisms for resolving many important major disputes, and the Kabul government sat very lightly on this. It was not an oppressive government. Only when it became a powerful oppressive government did Afghanistan become derailed.

I think there's some hope for restoring that traditional system. The Afghans have been Muslims for 1300 years, but only recently were they forced to become fanatic Muslims. And I think that a lot of the damage can be undone fairly quickly. And I see, and my contact is mostly here but also in Pakistan, a new generation of Afghans emerging many of whom have been exposed to the rest of the world but see Afghanistan interests in terms of Afghanistan, not in terms of a particular tribal concern. I think out of this, I won't say I'm optimistic, but I'm less pessimistic than others perhaps about the emergence of this system whereby there's a reasonable kind of law and order established in the country.

I still think it's critical that the instruments of security be established quickly and effectively and that they not simply be highly regionalized because I think that's a formula for the intervention of outside powers into Afghanistan. Kabul needs an army of some sort, but an army that's fairly representative of all of the country which is a counterpart to a civilian government in Kabul which is also representative of the entire state. The impetus for this will have to come from the international community, and I think the chief leverage will be this mass of [pinata] of assistance, foreign aide, sort of sitting up there. They won't be allowed to break the [pinata] unless they agree to certain kinds of rules about the future of the state.

Q: Joris Vos, I'm the Dutch Ambassador.

We seem to be talking a lot about money and Michael O'Hanlon it seemed in passing mentioned the necessity of a higher foreign aid budget in the United States. To what extent is that a realistic expectation? To what extent might say Afghanistan and 9/11 really have shocked, amongst others, Congress into realizing that this is really a necessity?

MR. O'HANLON: My answer would begin by noting that there's been an absence of even individual congressional advocates in a prominent way and until that begins, we can't even think about this becoming a political battle with some hope for the side that I would like to see prevail having a decent shot at it. Until you get at least a few of the big guns, the Daschle's and the Kennedy's and the Edward's and the Biden's, until a few of those people are prepared to start making this case and some of the retired members of Congress and the Senate who are prominent in this area like Lee Hamilton and Sam Nunn. Until you get some of those people making this pitch it's going to be tough.

I'm a little disappointed frankly they haven't been focused on this. I think obviously they've been overburdened this fall but it's time to think about what Congress can do to reduce the odds of future terrorism. The administration's sort of taking care of the war. Congress doesn't have a big role in the war. Maybe Congress needs to start thinking more about how you prevent future terrorists recruiting from being successful, and you deal with some of the hearts and minds problem through the power of the purse—at least at some level.

So I guess the conversation needs to begin by finding Tom Daschle in the corner of some room, if you see him at a party over Christmas and suggesting that maybe he make this one of his issues for discussion in the next few weeks. And that kind of person needs to begin this conversation. Otherwise there isn't going to be even a realistic chance of being proposed and prevailing in a Capital Hill debate.

VOICE: Can I just add on that that one of the questions will be whether or not the government of the United States, executive and legislature, begin to take the steps now to ensure that the funds area available for reconstruction later. That means really that an emergency supplemental has to be put together now and not wait until next spring. If they wait until next spring it won't be available until next fall, it won't be on the ground until later. Our experience in Hurricane Mitch, we waited until February, we didn't have the money approved until June, we weren't able to get it on the ground until the summer. That's too late.

This is the time when that money has to be made available outside of the existing budget for foreign aid so that it's on top of, doesn't come out of. While I think steps are being taken they have to be accelerated. And also you the EU has to do the same. The money has to be pledged now and there has to be steps taken now to provide additional resources that will be available in the spring, assuming that we have a security situation that permits us to begin work. I think humanitarian first, but yes, we have to have the resources planned and available now to get reconstruction as soon as you can. Both for food security, and for quick employment at the community level.

AMBASSADOR VOS: My question was not is it necessary, we agree about that. But how the initiatives (inaudible).

VOICE: It's not out of the question because it's a smart idea, and there are also ways to counter this traditional argument against foreign aid. There was a little bit of a debate in I think the Washington Post in maybe early November between Jeffrey Sachs and the CATO Institute. Jeffrey Sachs forgot to inoculate himself against the standard critique of foreign aid which is that it doesn't work. He forgot to point out, even though he knows very well, that there are conditions under which foreign aid does work and we've learned a lot about them. And you have to essentially assist on good governance. If you don't get good governance you just provide relief. You don't provide development aid on a large scale, and we need to reiterate that point at the same time we ask for more resources.

If we do, I think there's a real chance it will happen but so far there's been silence.

Q: Patrick Smyth, Irish Times.

I wonder what happened to the idea and what the panel thinks of the idea of a multinational force led by the Turks and other Islamic Muslim nations. Has this just disappeared completely off the radar screen?

MR. TEMPLER: ...being an Islamic force.

It hasn't disappeared off the radar screen. The likelihood is it's being discussed at the United Nations as a hybrid of a multinational force, not necessarily led by Islamic countries but possibly initiated by the British and the French and the Germans and then transferring after about a three to six month period to Bangladesh, Turkey, Jordan, a number of other countries. But these are all the countries that do consistently provide large numbers of troops. It would not be a blue helmet operation but a multinational force, a coalition of the willing. There are some very serious problems over financing because the financing would then have to be paid for by the individual countries. Countries like Bangladesh would have to have up-front guarantees that they would be paid for their contributions because they can't afford to do it themselves.

At the moment there hasn't been sufficient attention towards this issue. There's been no attention, really, on it because again, somebody's going to have to pay for it and wherever that sentence occurs, (inaudible) in terms of the U.S. government to cough up for it.

But there is some notion of this, although I think it will be quite a small force and it will probably coexist with some sort of attempt to rebuild an Afghan security force simultaneously and to try and rely on elements of Afghan force.

Q: Marc Kaufman with the Washington Post.

To get back to the money question for a second, you had said that there was no congressional will at this point. I'm sure that's correct. But in conversations with Senator Biden has proposed a billion dollars as kind of an initial down payment and what he said is that there has been no initiative coming from the administration and that's why he's concerned by that, that unless George Bush gets out and very actively promotes this then there won't be support in Congress.

I guess my question to you folks is, is there any indication that this administration is interested in the extensive nation building in Afghanistan?

VOICE: I'll start by saying that I think clearly the administration wants to limit its own on-the-ground presence and it's skeptical about political nation building, but it has been in my judgment solidly behind the idea of helping Afghanistan rebuild itself in a more economic sense.

Now there may be contradiction in those two positions, but nonetheless I think his willingness to provide resources is on the record and established. The question is can you really sort of wait until some future date to take the idea seriously and just pay it lip service in the short term? I think that's the mistake the administration is making and that's where I would encourage Senator Biden to go ahead and make this partly his issue. I don't think he should wait. Maybe he's politically nervous about when you are a Democrat on Capital Hill asking for more foreign aid you sound like sort of a politically predictable beast that wastes the taxpayers' dollar and otherwise engender resistance to your next Senate reelection campaign, but I think that's wrong in this case.

I think that if you make a strong argument for why foreign aid is essential and can work and needs to be discussed now, people will take it seriously. Everything's a little bit different these days and I think Democrats are too nervous about arguing for foreign aid. Democrats and Republicans, but especially Democrats.

VOICE: Tomorrow in Berlin the Afghan Support Group meets. While this is sponsored by the German Minister of Cooperation and with all of the World Bank, UN agencies and major donors, the U.S. delegation is headed by an Acting Assistant Secretary. My assumption is that they're going to be talking specifically about these amounts of money. The U.S. obviously has made major commitments on the humanitarian side. And everything that we know indicates that they do recognize the need to participate in the reconstruction process in order to avoid the situation deteriorating again. The question is whether it will be soon enough and whether it will be of a magnitude sufficient to pull others along. We'll just have to wait and see, but I think the point is well taken. Now is the time for people to be speaking out. That is what is needed.

I think everybody knows how terrible things are in Afghanistan so I think it's admirable that we're all working to help it, but everybody thought I was an idiot a couple of years ago when I first started saying the Talibans were damn liars claiming it was based on the Muslim religion. Now I'm not a Muslim, I'm a Buddhist Catholic, but the thing I wondered is now that people are sensible enough to realize that we should all help Afghanistan, then if everybody will help Kashmir, because I have been trying to help Kashmir for the last couple of years and people think I'm crazy. But every day in Kashmir is a September 11th. So I keep thinking that now maybe people will begin to understand, my God, let's solve the Afghanistan problem and then solve the Kashmir problem. So do you think all of you will put your energy and dedication... That's really more important than the money. It's just that it's a hard situation for me because I love both India and Pakistan and Kashmir, but like I said, for the last couple of years I'm the unofficial special envoy to Kashmir, so I'm really glad that people are working so hard to fix Afghanistan, but then I wondered if maybe all of the same people that were smart enough to realize that we should help Afghanistan would then say ah, let's help Kashmir and stop the darn problem up there.

MR. TEMPLER: I agree, I think it's essential for the overall security of the region. I think, again, the U.S. and European governments do need to say to both India and Pakistan that it's going to be difficult to have a very good relationship with both countries unless they do much more on both sides to make progress on this.

It's incredibly difficult to get past the philosophies on both sides. But I think maybe this is an opportunity to do that. I certainly think there needs to be much more attention. Although both sides are very reluctant to have any international attention on it, and I think we need to get through that barrier first of all.

Q: Gary Mitchell, a freelance writer.

Whenever I listen to a discussion like this I sort of begin by asking myself where have we done this before successfully and what did we learn from it? In particular it raises two questions here for me, the first of which is however one characterizes this, nation-building, nation-rebuilding, has it been done successfully anywhere without the presence of a strong, charismatic leadership from the country in question itself? And is there anything of the sort in Afghanistan today? That's question number one.

Question number two, I've been struck from the outset by the general agreement of the people on the panel here and the two institutions, but that agreement raises the question for me of whether or not there are competing perspectives about how to do this successfully that would be helpful. I'm thinking really in terms of almost a scenario, a planning approach to this that says there are three different ways to do this, three different scenarios, lay them out, what are the strengths and weaknesses of each so that out of it might come something that would be effective.

VOICE: I'll take the first part. I think historically the cases that have worked without strong central leadership are Germany and Japan after World War II. Now you could argue those are countries that had a much different tradition. They had a much stronger government right up until the time when they were defeated. But as Steve points out, Afghanistan has had some level of order at previous points in its own history. Clearly Germany and Japan after World War II there was no legitimate leadership in the immediate aftermath because we insisted on that leadership being out of power and we tried to rebuild the country's politics. That's the best analogy I can give.

take your point that in the cases of Taiwan and South Korea, which I think are in many ways the best models in economic terms, there were strong indigenous leaders who helped the process along greatly. But on the other hand, sometimes you do something for the first time and it works.

But I think there are a number of historical models that should give us some reasons for hope.

MR. TEMPLER: For every, there are a lot of examples of countries much firmer where you have a fairly strong central government in some ways, but a total lack of development and progress in a multiethnic country. In very diverse countries, very strong central governments present an enormous problem—legitimacy and ability to enact policies overall without being extremely repressive.

The Taliban in many ways were an extraordinarily effective government for Afghanistan. They did a lot of the things that we would like to do like disarming people and creating stability and everything else. But they did it at the expense of jobs and human rights and any sort of accountability and responsiveness towards the people. So there's got to be some balance. I'm not necessarily sure... I don't believe Afghanistan needs a strong or will tolerate a strong central government.

VOICE: Using the American analogy, I think Chicago is a well-run city and doesn't have a charismatic leader. Neither of the Mayor Daley's would fall in that category.

I think we're actually in pretty good shape in Afghanistan. Imagine what we would be talking about if Mullah Omar had turned over Osama bin Laden and he remained in power? What kind of country would it have been then? With Pakistani and Saudi support. We wouldn't be worried about Afghanistan at all because it would still be essentially a Pakistani/Saudi operation with the Afghan people suffering. So I think the slate has been wiped fairly clean. I think we have a chance to help them rebuild a system which would have a reasonably strong government in Kabul eventually, but still with powerful provincial leaders in authority.

MR. MASAHIK KIYA: I'm Masahik Kiya of the Embassy of Japan now in charge of reconstruction of Afghanistan.

I have a question about the assistance in the field of education. I think education is one of the fields where we can build up the long term civil society, as an immediate means of inducing diasporas and expatriates back to Afghanistan to take part in the post-reconstruction of Afghanistan.

What do you think will be the most effective way of improving educational system in Afghanistan? Which organization, which donors? And whether or not the U.S. will be actively taking part in this education assistance as President Bush's main agenda is education in domestic terms?

MR. TEMPLER: The education needs sort of assistance at all levels, from primary up to (inaudible) education. I think one of the areas that might need some focus is adult education and basic literacy. That should be an important component of pretty much all aid programs. There are groups, the French (inaudible) have done quite a lot of work in mostly the mountains in northern Afghanistan in which they get women to come into workshops where they sew clothes for refugees and during the day there are a few hours of basic literacy and health care education. And in exchange for this they get food. Initially there was a lot of resistance to this from men who didn't want their wives leaving their houses. Then eventually what they found is a lot of men were actually bringing their wives along and trying to get them enrolled in these programs.

I think that can be expanded across the board so that for example you may train men in demining, give them basic literacy and also possibly sort of broader political skills. Discuss with them sort of political possibilities, participation, and also get them trained in demining and maybe trained in doing some sort of work in exchange for food. But I think education needs to be incorporated quite broadly into a lot of different aid structures and work structures in Afghanistan.

VOICE: If I could, this sort of raises a general problem that is going to have to be resolved by the international community with the Afghanistan political leadership that develops and that is how you coordinate cooperation in the both the humanitarian, particularly in the reconstruction period. It seems to me that you're likely to have to have what you've had in some other places which is sector coordination where you have some donor leadership in each of the sectors working with the, both at the national and the local levels, working with the local Afghan organizations that develop to carry out some kind of coordinated effort. My assumption is education is going to be one. Refugee return, there has to be an education component. Anything related to DDR, the disarmament and demobilization, it has to have an education component. Add literacy in relation to your quick employment programs, you want to incorporate that as well.

Then you have a massive construction need with respect to schools to begin an elementary school program for the nation as a whole. The statistics that I saw were that prior to September 11th 39 percent of school-age boys were in school and three percent of school-age girls. That's probably only in urban... That's probably only statistics coming from the urban areas. And probably in the rural areas it's zero. So there's a massive need for just the basic minimum in terms of construction, teacher training, materials, and I think that gets you... When you look at each sector that brings you to Michael's point which is what we indicate, the levels of need over a ten year period are going to be very, very significantly larger than people are looking at right now.

Q: Anita Sharma, Woodrow Wilson Center.

Following on the rule of law question, what would you suggest needs to happen with the non-Afghans in the region, meaning primarily the Arab fighters? And who should be responsible for that justice, whether it be expulsion or military courts?

MR. TEMPLER: I'm not sure I've thought an awful lot about this. It seems at the moment they're being spurred on their way to (inaudible) in most cases.

I think this is a huge problem that isn't being addressed yet and there's not much sort of desire to address it. But it's going to cause a lot of problems if they simply get shipped back to Pakistan or wherever. None of the Arab countries are going to want them to come back. There is simply no place for them to go. I don't see at the moment how exactly you resolve this. A lot of these people were sent off by Arab governments to empty their jails and things, so they aren't going to accept them back.

If Pakistan accepts them back India is going to be furious, which they feel they're all going to end up in Kashmir.

I think they've got to have a sort of rehabilitation in some way. That may have to take place in Afghanistan. There may have to be some sort of internment. But I think if that is going to happen that it needs to be done in a sort of humanitarian way and it needs to be done in conjunction with the Geneva Convention and it needs to involve a process of education and rehabilitation in some way. Otherwise I don't see how you deal with the problem unless... It has to be dealt with initially within Afghanistan. I can't see any country necessarily accepting them back.

VOICE: In the old days they would have been sent off to join the French Foreign Legion where they would have been properly, put under proper discipline. Maybe there should be a, I have no particular [conclusion]. I certainly wouldn't suggest that and I don't think the French want them in their Foreign Legion.

It's a bad precedent but it may turn out to be the realistic precedent, the hundreds of thousands of so-called Biharis who are stuck up in Bangladesh left over from the 1971 civil war and the war with India. They sit in Bangladesh without being citizens of either Pakistan or Bangladesh, and they're now in their third generation. I don't think that's going to happen to the Arabs and the Pakistanis. I suspect the Pakistanis will be reincorporated into Pakistan. Slowly, but they do need to have some sort of rehab and reeducation program. Perhaps they could be put to work teaching, school teachers, an appropriate end to their military career.

MR. TEMPLER: I would just say on this question about aid and the willingness here to do this. I do think it's important to get into the debate here the next dimensions of the security problem, and the fact that aid and conflict prevention in this region is going to be a vital component of ensuring the security of the United States and the Western world in general, and therefore ensuring your security is always expensive and it always requires a significant commitment of funds. But I think this is to do with a broader security issue, and unless people are willing to start telling people that in a political manner and building public support which I don't see happening in this country and I don't see happening in the European Union either, I think there's going to be another failure. It will be another half-hearted attempt in Afghanistan which may well just fizzle. Then there are still a lot of uneducated men with guns in that country who may or may not cause significant problems in the future. But beyond that there will be a continued destabilization of Pakistan and possibly Iran. Pakistan's already a nuclear power and Iran may well become that way. Central Asia is surrounded by nuclear powers—China, Russia, India, Pakistan, Iran in the future. The whole region is going to be a very significant concern to the United States and to Europe for a long time to come unless we take the opportunity, and there does seem to be an opportunity, and I think in this environment there could be a real willingness to sell these ideas to the public and to win broader support and to overcome some of the ignorance and to get beyond...

I was recently at a meeting in the European parliament and the Danish Commissioner for Humanitarian Aid spoke and he's notorious for giving speeches which are essentially ten reasons why the European Union can't do anything about this. And if that sort of political attitude prevails everywhere then we'll just be left with another festering security problem down the line.

Irrespective of that, I think we do have a common bond with the Afghanistan people and a certain responsibility as well. I think as much celebration of the end of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War, it's the Afghans who really paid the price for that much more severely than anybody else and that's why I think it's probably a global responsibility to help them now

MR. STEINBERG: With that, thank you all.

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