Unifying Our Approach to Conflict TransformationCarlos Pascual,
Ambassador
Remarks at the Association of the U.S. Army Annual Conference
Washington, DC
October 4, 2005(3:15pm EDT)
It is a real pleasure to join you here today on such an incredible panel. We’ve been a tremendous beneficiary of the U.S. Army and I’d like to take a moment to say thank you to a whole range of people who have been engaged with us, including General Gordon Sullivan for the invitation to participate today. To Col. John Agoglia. John, thank you for your partnership in our work together with the Peacekeeping and Stability Operations Institute at Carlisle. General Dayton, you’ve been a great partner to us throughout, as well. We had an excellent exchange the other day at the Eisenhower Series.
General Strock, your work with us at the Corps of Engineers has been fantastic. We’re appreciative of the staff that you have detailed to us in our office. I have Col. Fitz Lee on my staff who is the Senior Military Advisor. I have Lt. Col. Jim Ruf, who is working with us on logistical issues. Previously, I had Col. Doug Morrison, who worked with us out of the J-5.
My point is that there has been a tremendously strong partnership with the uniformed military, and in particular with the U.S. Army, who have played a leadership role in stepping up to these challenges and helping us to define what a stabilization and reconstruction capability for the U.S. Government is about. Thank you very much for the work we have been able to do together.
One of the things I wanted to highlight was the nature of the national security challenge. Obviously, with Iraq and Afghanistan, it underscores the importance of having a stabilization and reconstruction capability. But it’s much broader than that. It’s Haiti and Kosovo and Somalia and El Salvador and Nicaragua and Cote D’Ivoire and East Timor, and how many other engagements have we been involved in.
How many times have we stood up these operations and taken them down, and failed to build up the institutional capability? And on top of that, how long did it take us to learn that in fact, one of the poorest countries in the world could become the base for the most significant strike against the territory of our country? What we have come to understand tragically and painfully is that if there are ungoverned spaces, those spaces will be filled with terrorism, organized crime, trafficking in people, trafficking in narcotics, things that are a threat to our national security. This is particularly acute in post-conflict environments, where governments have failed, and have to be reconstructed again.
Hence, we were given that mandate to create and institutionalize the capability to be able to prevent and prepare for conflict – prevent when we can, and be able to respond rapidly on stabilization and reconstruction when we have to. And to do this while asking the question, what is necessary to help put a country on a path toward being a sustainable, peaceful, market-oriented democracy.
It is not that my office is going to do all of those things. We can’t sustain those capabilities over time. But we have to ask the long-term questions from the outset or we will get the wrong answers. And we have to have the capacity to develop in the civilian world and between the civilian world and the military a joint operations capability around the issues of conflict. I think the joint operations analogy is appropriate, especially after Mike’s presentation [Mr. Mike Hess, USAID Asst. Administrator for DCHA], and some of you are wondering, how do we fit in here? Think about the Joint Staff. When you have the Joint Staff you create the overall U.S. Government strategy for how to conduct a military operation that gives you the capacity and the interoperability among the Army, the Navy, the Air Force and the Marines.
In other words you have the ability within a given theater to be interoperable. We need to extend that to the world of conflict, so that we have an overall U.S. Government strategy that allows interoperability between the capabilities that we see in USAID, the Department of Defense, the Treasury Department, the Justice Department so we’re achieving one unified goal – all understanding how to attain it, and all able to operate in a unified and constructive way with one another.
The office that I was asked to set up is in the State Department. I report to the Secretary of State. We have over 50 people in the office. It is probably the most unique office, I think, in the U.S. Government. We have people from State, USAID, Joint Staff, the Office of the Secretary of Defense, the U.S. Army, the Corps of Engineers, the CIA, the Treasury Department, the Justice Department, and the Department of Labor. It is crucial that we have all of these capabilities within the office for the skills that they represent, but also for the ability to reach back to their agencies and try to reinforce and develop the kind of joint operating capabilities that I mentioned before.
We were given a mandate by the National Security Council Principals to be the focal point for the U.S Government on stabilization and reconstruction planning and operations. I had an opportunity to bring that back to NSC Principals to lay it out for them in December. They decided at that point to establish the development of this capability as a Presidential Initiative. It was highlighted as that in the President’s budget that went up in February. Many of you may recall that the President underscored the need for this kind of U.S. Government capacity in a speech he gave to the International Republican Institute in May.
The point I want to underscore is that creating this capacity is no longer an issue of interagency debate. It’s not a question of tension between the State Department, the Department of Defense, USAID and other agencies. We have come together to recognize that if we do not unify to create this capacity we are putting our national security at risk and that is unacceptable. We must have a uniform capacity to make this work.
Some of you might wonder why we have this capability in the State Department. Michele [Ms. Michele Flournoy, CSIS] is probably going to say a few words on this and she is going to make a very strong pitch on ensuring the importance of the White House and the National Security Council. I agree with her on the importance of the National Security Council role. The reason it has come to the State Department is that we have a tremendous spectrum of issues that we have to work with. It can start with coordination of military operations, to international peacekeeping, to the development of international civilian police, to deployment and development of indigenous police, to the development of the rule of law, to peace agreements, to transitional governance, to economic security, to humanitarian issues, to the development of civil society, to transitional justice – a phenomenal spectrum.
It is something that transcends any individual office in the U.S. Government. It’s bigger than Mike’s office, it’s bigger than what’s in the Pentagon, it’s bigger than my office. But it was put in the State Department to give us the responsibility of coordinating that full spectrum of issues that are at the heart our foreign policy and national security interests on issues related to transition in governance.
One might argue that the NSC would be a critical partner, and indeed it is. We have been working extremely closely with Steve Hadley and his staff throughout this process. But in the end, we feel we’re going to need about 80 people to have the capacity to work on conflict prevention issues, on the preparatory issues, on the exercises, on the training, on the operational mobilization capabilities that are going to be necessary. Obviously, if you put another 80 people in the NSC you’ve actually doubled the size. So, we have to have a balance between that policy coordinating role and a practical operational role. So that was how we came back to the State Department.
Over time, what we’ve been seeking to do is put in place a number of tools and innovations and capabilities to allow us to do this work. Let me highlight ten innovations and tools that we’re putting in place.
Number one is an early warning system. We’ve been working with the National Intelligence Council. Every six months they are putting together a list of countries at risk of instability. They are taking information that is coming from Mike’s office and injecting that into the system; from the intelligence community. But the most important thing is not the early warning list – we’ve had a lot of lists in the past – it’s how we use it as a management tool. We’ve been taking that back to the interagency community, and the State Department at a level of the Under Secretary for Political Affairs and the Regional Assistant Secretaries. We’ve been engaging with every single bureau, saying, of those countries that are being highlighted by our intelligence experts as ones that are at risk of instability, where do you need help and support? Where can we engage together? Where can we conduct conflict prevention activities? In this process, one of the things we’ve been able to do is bring in the Conflict Management and Mitigation office from Mike’s office, and giving that unit a window into the State Department policy-making process, as well, so they have an opportunity to be integrated into that process.
Some of the things we’ve been doing is injecting some of the basic tools that in the military you’ve been using them for a long time; but we simply have not been using them in the civilian policy world. For example, on the elections in the Democratic Republic of Congo, we helped the Africa Bureau simulate what could go wrong in those elections, and what they would do to respond to what could go wrong. Then work backwards and ask the question, "What would we do differently today if we had gone through this experience?" You do that kind of work in the military all the time. For us, it was an innovative policy exercise, this form of gaming and policy roundtables. If we can apply that on a consultancy basis and help our mainstream policy process become more sensitive to ways they can creatively deal with potential conflict and mitigate it in advance, then we’re providing a service to everyone throughout the foreign policy world.
A second tool is the development of a common planning framework that can be used throughout the military and civilian worlds. And we’re deeply indebted to work that was done by CSIS and the Association of the U.S. Army. We’ve developed now what we’ve called an Essential Tasks Matrix, and it’s available on our website at www.crs.state.gov. This was developed off the basic framework in Winning the Peace, where you highlighted a number of areas that are critical to post-conflict stabilization and reconstruction, and where the Association of the U.S. Army and CSIS indicated key actions for immediate impact for transformation from an international lead, to an indigenous lead, to long term sustainability. We brought this back to the interagency. We vetted it. We expanded it. It has grown from an outstanding product to something that I consider an essential checklist. It’s not a cookbook, but it’s a checklist of all of the things we need to be asking ourselves to be able to deal effectively with this post-conflict process.
To this, we have added a planning template that will help us extract from that general checklist those things that are critical to an individual country situation. We’ve already started using that in Sudan. We’re starting to put one in place in Haiti. We are using it to work on Cuba to understand how we would manage that transition process between Fidel’s death and a democratic Cuba, because we know that at some point that is going to happen. As a result of this, we will have in the civilian world experience in utilizing this framework.
We’ve been working with Joint Forces Command, and I would say in the next month or two, we’ll be able to launch an experimental pamphlet that will go out to all the combatant commands and will be put into experimentation in those commands to give us input from the military world. After about a year, we’ll be able to bring that back together, take it to Principals, get that blessed, and then inject it into doctrine and training programs throughout the system.
Finally, the third piece of this is the critical portion of metrics so that we can have a more standardized package that helps us assess whether we’re making progress or not and making a difference in the hearts and minds of the people that we’re trying to influence. I think sometimes we’ve been guilty of turning our policy-makers into construction engineers by forcing them to review kilometers of road established and the number of school houses built. It’s important to review that to get a sense of the progress, but it doesn’t give you a sense of whether or not the people of a country have started to buy into whether, for instance, the province of Kandahar is truly a part of Afghanistan, and whether they see that province as truly integrated (inaudible). These are the kinds of things that we need to continue to work on over time.
The third key tool is an agreement in principle that we now have to be able to deploy to the regional combatant commands the interagency civilian reconstruction and stabilization team that will engage with the combatant commands and take responsibility for reconstruction and stabilization planning when you’re instructed to develop a war plan. This is a new innovation that we have not had in the past in the civilian world. Participating in these teams will be people from Mike’s office and other parts of USAID, from the State Department – from my office, from the regional bureau, from INL – from the Treasury Department as necessary, so that we truly have that full set of interagency capabilities that can be applied to a particular problem.
Let me make an important point as a distinction between this and the JIACG. The JIACGs are an important, positive and on-going coordination capacity that the combatant commands are seeking to establish. When they’re focused on a specific issue, you can get people with a particular capability to work on those issues in a combatant command. But looking at the full spectrum of developing stabilization and reconstruction strategy for a country, there’s no way that one individual from one agency can represent the full set of technical and regional views that have to be addressed, so we have to supplement it with a team that has that capability, and a reachback capability to Washington where you can get guidance.
Hence, a fourth point, we are creating what we call a Country Reconstruction and Stabilization Groups that focus attention at an assistant secretary level on an individual country for stabilization and reconstruction when we need to focus on that country. This isn’t rocket science. We usually figure it out three or four months down the road. We need to do it upfront. When we have to focus the energy of the U.S. Government around a country we need a group that can serve as a coordinating point, that brings together all the different elements of U.S. Government policy and strategy; that uses the planning framework that we have been developing to do this in a systematic way; that links our goals with the institutional responsibilities with resources necessary to get the job done; and is able to put that forward to Deputies and Principals in a way that gets that blessed to give us a mandate from the top on how we proceed in a unified U.S. Government strategy on how to move forward.
One of the first examples is on Sudan. We were able to bring together what the USG is doing on humanitarian assistance in Darfur and the South; for peace and stability in Darfur; for the transformation of the SPLA in the South; to work with the Government of National Unity; working on the capacity-building and economic and reconstruction activities that need to happen in the South; the development of the rule of law and having a capacity to develop a response to flashpoints throughout the country. For the first time we can look at that in an overall U.S. Government framework, and actually recognize that we invested $1.2 billion in Sudan on this package of issues in this Fiscal Year 2005. Until we were actually able to bring that together in a unified strategy, we didn’t have the tool or capability of linking what we were seeking to do with the resources that we were investing.
The fifth innovation is the development of what we call Advance Civilian Teams. These were strongly influenced by two sets of actors. One are some of the brigade commanders that were in Iraq. One person in particular was Marine Col. Chris Conlin. Chris was in Najaf. He said, "I was there trying to figure out how we were going to establish political relations with local leaders; how to balance ethnic differences; how to establish a municipal government; how to establish some form of civilian security; how to restart jobs; how to restart services; how to deal with health care issues. I looked at myself in the mirror one day and realized I’ve never been trained to do this. What Chris said was that, "We were out there with 3500 troops, and if we had had 5-20 civilians with us to give us these capabilities and understand how to approach these different issues, it would have not only given us a better capacity for a more effective response, it would have allowed us to also focus our attention on things that we in the military knew how to do.
So we came up with the concept of the Advance Civilian Teams working in particular with Mike’s people in OFDA and OTI. The intent is to have a platform that can build in the capabilities for the humanitarian response that AID has; adding the capabilities that we have in the State Department to deal with political transitions, with ethnic groups, with civilian security. Add to that political and economic reporting to get information back into headquarters and capitals on what’s happening on the ground so that we can understand how to build those on-the-ground realities into our practical and evolving plans for a response. It’s now been blessed in principle by the NSC. We’re in the process of fleshing it out. The next step will be to eventually take that back to something that can be expanded into doctrine.
The sixth capability that we’re developing is what we call an Active Response Corps in the State Department. We have not had in the past the capability of deploying people to the ground quickly without destroying some other diplomatic operation around the world. We have to go and find the individuals with the skills and capabilities who can be deployed. So, with the creation of an Active Response Corps, we are eventually seeking to have 100 civilians with a range of skills – political, economic, diplomatic security, admin, information technology capabilities – that would train together, be based in our regional and functional bureaus when not deployed; but in advance, have made the decision that they are deployable anywhere. Those individuals can then become an immediate foundation for diplomatic operations in a Baghdad or a Kabul, or if we need to increase our diplomatic operations in Sudan or Haiti, that we have a pre-designated and trained team that we can draw upon. In addition to that, as people move on from those assignments, we would have a Standby Reserve Corps that would be up to 250-300 people to be the team of second responders.
Now, to this, we are also working with agencies, such as USAID, the Treasury Department, the Justice Department, on how they also build up their capabilities, because in addition to the diplomatic platform that we establish, we need those individuals with the technical skills and capabilities to design programs on economic reconstruction or the development of small businesses or humanitarian relief or the provision of justice, which have to come from other technical agencies so that as the U.S. Government, we have the ability to provide diplomatic leadership, to design programs, and to manage them effectively.
The seventh tool that we are putting in place is the technical capacity to implement these programs. There are two aspects to this. One is using the existing authorities that we have across the interagency, and building up a database of indefinite quantity contracts that exist in USAID, in Treasury, in Justice, in the Corps of Engineers, et cetera so that we know what skills and capabilities are out there that can be tapped immediately, and expand out as effectively as we can. In addition to that, thanks to some funding that we’ve gotten from Joint Forces Command, we’re also doing a feasibility study on the creation of a civilian reserve. That civilian reserve would start with an initial phase with indigenous police trainers, rule of law experts. It would go to a second phase of civil services, and eventually a third phase of civil administrators. We’re doing the feasibility work now because it’s critical that when we put this before the U.S. Congress, we can give them the most cost-effective mix of when you use reserves and when you use contracts and how you facilitate a mix.
What we have come to understand is that we have to have the capacity to have individuals that are drawn into the U.S. Government, that are trained and exercise regularly, who operate on the basis of a common doctrine, so that when they are deployed to the field, that they are not hitting the ground for the first time trying to figure out what they are doing – that they have a background, and base, and foundation to do this effectively with the kind of impact that we need to have.
Eighth, we’re putting in place a much stronger international coordination capability, and we’ve been working very actively with the UN, the EU, our partners in the UK, France, Germany, the Nordic countries; building regional capabilities in the AU. What is fascinating is that virtually every single one of those organizations is now in the process of building a parallel response capability to what we’re developing in our office, which we think is essential. When we get into one of these post-conflict engagements, it’s not just a question of what the United States can do, but what the international community can do to maximize their skills and capabilities, and in addition to be able to sustain the credibility that we get from a broad multi-lateral response.
We’re putting in place mechanisms to capture lessons learned – that’s the ninth key function. And the tenth that I wanted to mention was the importance of the Conflict Response Fund, which we have before the Congress right now. The idea would be to have a relatively small fund -- $100 million in cash; $200 million in transfer authority from the Department of Defense, which has been offered by the Pentagon. The intent would be to be able to put targeted resources into specific sectors. For example, international police deployments, the development of indigenous police, and rule of law experts that can go out into the field and begin the deployment in critical areas that are the long-pole in the tent in being able to establish an indigenous stability and order capability to maximize our capacity to withdraw our military and peacekeeping forces on an earlier time basis.
It’s a relatively modest operation. This is going to take time for all of this to take root. When I started talking about this with Secretary Powell, one of the things that we reflected on was that with Goldwater-Nichols, we had legislation, we had money, we had a hierarchical structure in the military. Here we have the civilian world, and engagement between the civilian world and the military world, and we don’t have these. It is going to take time to get this right, but at the same time, the imperative is in front of us to make this happen. I would just underscore the payoff. The most important payoff is in lives – the lives that can be saved.
Even if we think about this in financial terms, if we had a capacity like this to get on the ground quickly, to make a difference to allow us to withdraw just one division from Iraq just one month early, we would save $1.2 billion, which is about ten times the amount that we are requesting from the U.S. Congress for one fiscal year. An amazing difference. And it underscores, once again, why for our national security we have to have this mix of capabilities between the military and civilians so that we can allow our troops to get out of harm’s way, and we can put countries on a path towards sustainable peace. Thank you.
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