Institutionalizing Conflict Transformation: Signing of Presidential Directive and Launch of Planning Framework

10:00am EDT)

Let me begin by saying thank you to all of you here, and in particular, let me start with USIP. Dick (Solomon), you have really been a true partner throughout this process in building up a capability on stabilization and reconstruction within the government. You’ve been an intellectual partner. You’ve been a partner on practical operational issues. You’ve had a willingness to sit down on tough questions, like how do you handle metrics, or how do you deal with transitional security questions, to working with the broader constituencies that we need to be able to help bring along on these issues. I want to thank you very much for the role of the Institute and all of the staff here. I can’t even begin to name individual names because the reality is that we have really reached out throughout the Institute and it’s been a fantastic partnership. Thank you very much for that.

For me, it’s a real pleasure to be able to be here as the last public event that I’m involved in in this particular capacity. In this exercise, I just wanted to give specific thanks to Joint Forces Command. They really have been a partner as we’ve been trying to develop the capability of creating integrated civilian and military capabilities. And I consciously use that word "integrated" because when we look at the kinds of challenges that we face on security today, if we can’t integrate, we’re not actually going to succeed.

Early on, when I took this job, one of the first trips I made was the short trip down to Suffolk to meet with Admiral Giambastiani. He infused me at that point with the concept of jointness and gave me my purple sticker saying, "Go for purple." Indeed, that has been very much our underlying concept that we’ve been working toward in achieving this. General Wightman, I’m really pleased that you could be with us here today. There has certainly been a tremendous number of people out at Joint Forces Command who have been engaged with us throughout the process – General Soligan, General Gallinetti, General Wood, General Luck, Col. Conlin, in particular, who has been one of our best interlocutors throughout the process. We’re really grateful to you.

There are in this room so many people from the non-governmental and think community, and it’s almost impossible again to begin thinking about individuals and names because there has been so much intensive engagement with all of you on issues related to the role of the NGO community in humanitarian responses, dealing with humanitarian space, thinking about what an integrated planning process is, to an intellectual dialogue about what is actually critical in a response in individual countries. I know before I leave here today Mark Schneider is going to buttonhole me on something related to Haiti – it’s a passion (Laughter). We’re going down on Monday; we’ll be there on Tuesday. There has also been so much underpinning work out of the think tank community that all of you are familiar with, and I just wanted to thank so many partners that we have had there.

And again, in the interagency community, there has just been tremendous cooperation. Even in those moments where there are differences and tensions on issues, in fact there is a recognition that we have to advance the capability to be able to work effectively as a team, and I just wanted to note in particular, the role of the National Security Council, and Clint Williamson, who’s been my principal counterpart at the NSC. Clint, it’s been great to work with you.

Among all the various agencies, certainly the most extensive partnership has been with the U.S. Agency for International Development. Tom (Baltazar), I’m glad you could be here because AID has just been there throughout in that process of developing the operational models, the conceptual framework, grappling with issues of fragile states, how to deal with them, how to analyze incidences of fragility.

What, to me, is really exciting, in reviewing that broad scope is that in getting here that this has very much been an integrated process that has been traditional U.S. foreign policy groups, the U.S. military, the non-governmental and think tank community, the development parts of our community, the humanitarian parts of our community, all pulling together and saying that we need to change the way we do business. That’s exactly what it’s going to take to achieve success in this area.

What I want to do today is in effect celebrate two sets of issues – one is the signing of the Presidential Directive on stabilization and reconstruction and the launch of this Planning Framework. And if you’ll bear with me, I also wanted spend a couple of moments on some of the accomplishments we have had as an office, and where that puts us as we move forward.

I just saw Ann Vaughan back there. Ann, when I saw you just now, one of the things that hit me was that I didn’t mention the role of the U.S. Congress throughout this process. The role that the U.S. Congress has played as a consultative partner, as a friend has also been tremendous. Congressman Farr has been amazing. The work we did together at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey has been extremely helpful. Senator Lugar and Senator Biden on the Senate side have been especially engaged. I’m extraordinarily thankful for the guidance and the support that you’ve given us throughout.

Let me start with the Presidential Directive that was just issued. Its focus is to improve coordination, planning and implementation for reconstruction and stabilization assistance for states and regions at risk of, in, or in transition from conflict or civil strife – it’s a pretty broad mandate. What it does is it affirms that the Secretary of State will lead and coordinate for the Administration reconstruction and stabilization operations, which may be done either with the military or without the military, foreseeing that there are going to be a range of circumstances.

The rationale for this is that it is very much as Dick underpinned – a connection to our national security. Indeed, today our National Security Strategy says that we are threatened less by conquering states than we are by failing ones. Secretary Rice further elaborated on that in her op-ed that many of you I’m sure saw in the Washington Post this past weekend, where she said that the greatest threat to our security are defined more by the dynamics within weak and failing states than by borders between strong and aggressive ones, which implies that if there is a void in sovereignty, there is a need to think about how to address it. So, maybe we’re not nation-building, but we’re working with those states to build their capacity to exercise sovereignty over their own territory. You can put whatever words you want next to that. But that’s what we have to do and I think there is a recognition that it is critical.

This Presidential Directive is also grounded in experience. What we have seen is that in post-conflict environments, states are particularly at risk of state failure because their own institutions are weak. They are dependent on outside support, which at times, is slow in getting there, and it takes time. It simply takes time to build up the indigenous capacity for states to effectively exercise sovereignty over their own economies, their political systems, their security systems.

What the Presidential Directive does is it says that the Secretary of State is responsible for a range of functions, and that she may work with a Coordinator – me – to undertake and support her and assist her in a range of functions. So, let me give you a sense of what some of those key functions are:

 • To develop and approve stabilization and stabilization strategies for use of U.S. assistance;
 • To develop detailed options for integrated U.S. Government responses;
 • To coordinate responses with U.S. Departments and Agencies;
 • In the case of military operations, to ensures that there is coordination with the Secretary of Defense to harmonize stabilization and reconstruction and military operations;
 • To coordinate with the international community, the NGO community, the think tank community, and the private sector;
 • To lead building of a civilian response capacity;
 • To lead the interagency process for planning for conflict prevention and mitigation; and
 • To coordinate with Agencies on budgets and the resources that are required to achieve these ends.

So, in fact, it gives her a very strong and broad mandate.

In practical terms, what I would suggest is to think of this as creating a joint operations capability across civilian agencies, and between civilian agencies and the military on issues that are related to conflict – to prevent conflict when we can, to respond more effectively when we have to. I find it helpful to look at this as an analogy to the roles of the Joint Staff, where, in effect, what they’re seeking to do is promote interoperability among the Services to achieve a common U.S. strategy within any given theater. To do that, you need all of the Services – the Army, Navy, Air Force, and Marines. But to be effective, they have to be able to operate in a way that is fully integrated with one another.

Similarly, what this Presidential Directive does is it calls for us to create an integrated capability among U.S. Government Departments and Agencies for stabilization and reconstruction. It does not replace the functions of any given agency. It does not displace any given agency. It means that if we’re going to be effective that we have to be integrated, we have to be faster, we have to have a common strategy, and we have to have a common approach. And we have to do that with our partners outside of government so that we bring in all of the capabilities that the United States can bring to bear, not just the U.S. Government, but the broader capabilities that we can bring to bear in any given situation.

It says then that the Secretary of State is going to be responsible for the development of this overall framework and ensuring that we’re coordinated within that framework. It asks individual Departments to establish capabilities for planning and coordination so that they can strengthen their own capability, and then reach out more broadly to the interagency community.

Specifically with the Department of Defense, it says that the Secretary of State and the Secretary of Defense will develop a framework to coordinate stabilization and reconstruction with military operations at all levels. Now some of you recently have seen, or certainly read about in the papers, Department of Defense Directive 3000.05, which focuses on security, stabilization, transition, and reconstruction. I had to look down to read that because it was originally stability operations. It was specifically Admiral Giambastiani who wanted to make sure that he put it in a broader context.

So, what that Directive does is it says that this is how the Department of Defense is going to relate to these broader challenges on reconstruction and stabilization, as well as some issues beyond that that involve direct security actions on the part of the military. So, in effect, the way to think about this is that the Presidential Directive signed by the President creates the broader umbrella. What the DOD Directive does is for those elements that are related to stabilization and reconstruction for direct action, or even support to stabilization and reconstruction, that those fall within that broader umbrella created by the Presidential Directive.

Similarly, other Agencies will work within that broader umbrella. The Directive reinforces the importance and the unique role of USAID in leading U.S. Government humanitarian initiatives. Similarly, USAID has been focused on developing a Fragile States Strategy, which again, is complementary to the broader strategy that is being developed for the U.S. Government.

So, we don’t see these things as contradictory. In effect, what we’re saying is that if we’re going to be effective as a government, we need an overall strategy as a government. The individual components have to have their own strategy that is consistent with the broader one. Our mandate is to try to make sure that all of these things are brought together in an effective way.

Now, specifically on issues related to planning. One of the things that the Presidential Directive calls for is to coordinate an interagency process to identify states at risk of instability; lead interagency planning to prevent or mitigate conflict; and develop detailed contingency plans for integrated United States Government responses on reconstruction and stabilization efforts. So, it gives a very explicit mandate and acknowledgement of the importance of planning in that process. If we’re going to be effective on that, then there needs to be a framework to allow that planning to occur. Hence, the work that was done in the development of the Planning Pamphlet that Barbara (Stephenson) and General Wightman are going to go into in more detail in a little while.

What it recognizes is that there will be a range of circumstances. The rationale for this is to promote sustainable peace. We can work on variants of the word. We can maybe use viable peace, as Mike and Jock and Len have proposed in their book. We can use another phrase that we have, which is accurate, but cumbersome – locally led nascent peace. But the point is that we are all looking for that point where peace is sufficiently sustainable, so that the role of the international community can change from being the one that is imposing or ensuring that peace is even present on the ground, to one where local actors have the ability to continue that process.

In order to do that, it implies that we have to be able to do two things effectively. Again, I commend Mike’s book to you. They outline this very well there. One is you have to build local institutional capability. That is absolutely critical. But the other part of it is that you have to drive down the drivers of conflict. You have to control the drivers of conflict, and deal with some of those causes of conflict. And if you don’t do both, you don’t succeed, because you can have lots of institutional capability, but if all of the factors that led to the conflict in the beginning are still there, you’re still going to end up with another conflict. You can try to deal with the drivers of conflict, and do that from the outside, but we all know that that’s absolutely unsustainable. There’s no way that the international community will be able to stick there for the long haul. Kosovo is the best example of that. But of course the international community can maintain peace and stability in Kosovo. It’s strong enough and big enough for this tiny little territory. But can you actually sustain that over time? No.

So, you need to do both of these pieces together, and the planning framework is intended to help us grapple with that in a systematic way. It basically gets us to be very clear about how we define our goals, what the major mission elements are – the strategic objectives that are necessary and sufficient conditions to achieve those goals. Who has the institutional responsibilities, what the resources are that are available to achieve this. So that in the end, when our nation comes out and says this is what we are going to seek to achieve in a given environment, we can trace that down to how it’s going to be accomplished, who’s going to do, what the resources are.

Quite frankly, if there’s no plausible linkage between that goal and that train of logic that brings you back to who’s going to do it and how are you going to get it done, it can force us to rethink and re-evaluate what we’re seeking to achieve, or put additional resources into it. So, I think that what it will also lead us to is not only more effective policy, but more responsible policy because it will force us to ask some of those critical questions upfront.

Dick, I agree with the kinds of issues that you outlined that we’re going to have to be grappling with. Just as we’ve been in the process of not only developing the framework and beginning to test it, there are some things that we’re still not completely clear on and we need a lot of help on like how to best address the question of sequencing and timing in a framework like this, because we still don’t have absolute clarity on how portray that.

There are issues that we’re going to face in implementation. The common military phrase is any plan is only good to the point of actual combat engagement. We’re going to find the same thing. So the reality is we need to build in those feedback loops of those that are involved in the actual implementation of programs so that we can adjust the strategies and their focus as we go. We need to be able to work on that and test that.

I think the resource issues are going to be important, but not just the resource issues for this office, for S/CRS. But broadly, the resource issues for the civilian world. What we’ve seen in Iraq and Afghanistan is major efforts that have been funded by supplementals. But look, an $18.4 billion supplemental for Iraq – what’s the entire Foreign Operations budget -- $21-22 billion? You can’t repeat that same level of effort under the same kind of funding parameters and scenarios. Similar situation in Afghanistan, to a lesser extent, but $4-5 billion for an individual country when we’re looking at $22 billion for all U.S. foreign assistance – everything that USAID does, Foreign Military Financing, everything we do in Egypt and Israel. So those are the parameters that we have to work within, and we have to recognize that the resource constraints are going to be serious and we’re going to have to work on that.

This planning framework is one piece of a package that Barbara and her team have been working on. That package includes this framework, it includes the Essential Tasks Matrix, which many of you are familiar with, and really started with work done by CSIS and the Association of the U.S. Army. We’ve expanded that in our interagency group. That gives us a foundation, or a checklist of asking the right questions in a country environment; who’s doing what on critical things that need to be done immediately to move from international leadership to indigenous leadership to long-term sustainability. The planning framework helps us move from that broader checklist to apply the relevant points to an individual country.

There’s work that’s being done on more focused guidance on what kind of assessment tools are necessary in order to underpin the planning process. Finally, there is another piece that we’re bringing together on metrics to help us assess progress and the effectiveness of our programs, and in particular to help us get at these questions of are we making a difference in a particular country, so we don’t just get sucked in by what is easier to look at – the inputs and outputs of an individual project – but whether you’re actually making a difference in the hearts and minds of individuals and the mindsets of people in that particular country.

If you’ll bear with me another moment, what I’d like to do for just a couple more moments, what I’d like to do is review for you where we are as an office. We’ve existed for about eighteen months. In that time, I think a great deal has been done with the support and help of a lot of people in this room. We certainly on the question of authority, now have a Presidential Directive, which makes clear the role of the Secretary of State, the office, and the role of civilians in stabilization and reconstruction. I think that is a major policy foundation for us to continue to build on.

We’ve put in place a framework for early warning and conflict prevention. We have a semi-annual watch list. We’ve been looking at how we make a stronger link between early warning and early response. Again, USIP has been a partner in this, in a session that we recently had with the NGO and think tank community to actually strengthen that. We’re starting to look at individual cases where we can have some form of exercise between the government, NGOs, and the think tanks to get more specificity on what that early response means, and how we relate to one another.

On the planning side, we have the Essential Tasks Matrix, which I mentioned, the planning framework that has been developed that will allow for civilian and military integration. And, Dick you mentioned this point, we have had considerable international engagement on that planning framework. I think we’ve seen a great deal of hunger on the part of our counterparts in the UK, the EU, some within the UN, Nordic countries, the Australians, the Canadians, who have all been trying to figure out how to grapple with these questions so that you don’t just get individual agency responses to a problem, but a national response, and you have a national response that can be integrated into a multilateral response. That’s exactly what we’re trying to get to.

In terms of integrated interagency responses, again, I think we have made a fair amount of progress. We have agreement in Washington now for a Washington management tool called a Country Reconstruction and Stabilization Group. It is essentially a PCC-level body, and with Clint’s leadership in the NSC, one of the things we’ve been able to do is establish that as a framework for the central coordinating group when we have a reconstruction and stabilization effort to pull together the planning process to put forward recommendations to Deputies and Principals, and once those decisions are made, to use that as a foundation to push the implementation out through the interagency. We’ve been able to get agreement on models for joint civilian and military planning in the context of Combatant Commands, and for the deployment of civilian teams integrated with the military at a division or brigade level. We’re now elaborating on those models and specifically testing how they’re going to work.

In terms of our integration and work with the military, in addition to these operational models that I mentioned, one of the things that has been extremely important has been dedication of a number of military officers on our staff. So, on a day to day basis, there’s just a constant integration, and working with one another. If nothing else, Alan, helping me with vocabulary. But it’s much, much deeper than that because there’s a great deal that the civilian world needs to learn about how the military operates, and why the military operates in certain ways, and the wisdom behind that. And vice versa, there are, amazingly, some things that we do in the civilian world in the way that we do them for a reason, and Alan and others are helping to communicate that back to our military colleagues. Chris Farris, another military officer in our office is in the back of the room today. We have formalized an exercise agenda, and Chris was observing the other day in one of the lead up events to one of these exercises that it was one of the first times that we saw more civilians in the room than military officers, which is a reflection of the fact that we’re bringing in many, many more people from the interagency community into this kind of a process.

Finally, again, with the help of USIP, and also the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, we’ve been able to get quite a jump on addressing some of these questions of how the military and humanitarian organizations work together. There’s still a lot we need to do, but I think we’ve got a more structured process for dealing with these questions of humanitarian space, neutrality, and impartiality, and how to deal also with the complexity of what they mean in an environment of dealing with terrorist organizations.

For our own response capabilities in the State Department, we have gotten approval for what we call an Active Response Corps. These are diplomats that will be dedicated and trained for rapid response. The Secretary has allocated fifteen positions for us to do a pilot program with this and to get it launched by the summer. We’re backing that up with what we call a Standby Response Corps of individuals who will have gone through advance training and will be available as second responders. Our goal is to get that list of individuals who have been identified and at least moving toward training programs up to 100 by the summer, as well.

Thanks to help we have gotten from USAID, and others in the interagency community, we will have in the coming months a database up and running, for the first time, that actually has in one place all U.S. Government contracts that are related to stabilization and reconstruction. By contracts, I use that word broadly, to include grants and cooperative agreements, as well. For the first time, we’ll be able to go to one place and say, if we need certain skill capabilities, where can you actually get them across the U.S. Government, and are those contracts actually authorized to work in certain places so that we can get that information much more readily.

We’re in the process of developing – in fact, in the final stages – of a feasibility analysis of a civilian reserve corps. We’ll have to look very carefully at how to move forward on this. But the intent is to possibly have a civilian reserve parallel to the military reserve that, in particular, can help jumpstart operations and can provide complementary capabilities to what we can get on a contractual basis, as well. We have training programs that are now starting, and we have now, out of our office, been able to sponsor two sets of training programs that will lead to a broader set of interagency training. We’re extraordinarily pleased by that because we have to keep remembering the importance of building that kind of institutional and human capability.

We’ve been in the process of applying these tools to individual countries, Sudan and Haiti where we’ve been using the planning framework for an integrated U.S. Government response. Cuba, looking at what happens after Fidel and how to support a transition to a democratic Cuba that is run by the Cuban people. On conflict prevention, on a number of countries, we’ve been looking at future scenarios and looking at what might happen, what could go wrong, and how do we use that to improve our policy now.

Finally, on funding, it’s not as robust a picture as I’d want it to be. But at the same if we think about starting with absolutely zero resources, we’ve had about $8.5 million that we’ve had available to us between the supplemental that was approved last April and funds that we’ve reallocated within the State Department. For ’06, we’re still in the process for the State Operations budget, of examining how we’re going to allocate that. There were not any specific earmarks for the State Operating budget, so we’re a part of that overall allocation and trade-off process that we have to go through in the entire Department. But I’m pretty optimistic that we will end up in a fairly strong position.

We did not get a Conflict Response Fund. That’s a problem. We’ll have to keep working on that because it is absolutely critical that we have those resources to be able to move quickly. We still have a possibility of getting up to a $200 million transfer authority from the Department of Defense. It was put into the Senate version of the bill. It’s being considered in Conference. That bill, as all of you know, was held up as a result of the debate on the detainee issue. Hopefully that will move forward quickly. So, that will be a very, very important authority that could be added to us. That is really live now, between today and what’s going to happen on Christmas, and hopefully that will be done before then.

As we move ahead, there are five things that I would underscore that will be important for us to really keep focusing on:

Institutionalizing staff. We have been working on creative arrangements, with details. We still want to have those details, but we need to have a core staff that is institutionalized and is there, and is not so dependent on ad hoc arrangements as we have had in the past.

We need to be able to operationalize our response capability, and that means both people and the resources that we need, such as the Conflict Response Fund.

Thirdly, this planning framework is a phenomenal tool. The process that Barbara is going to outline is absolutely key to developing it further, and using it as an interagency management tool as we move ahead.

On early warning, we’ve put the concepts out there. We’ve created a basic framework on how to use them. But, the link between early warning and early response is still weak, and we have to strengthen it much more.

Then, finally, the fifth issue that I’d outline is one of transitional security. If there’s one substantive area where I think everybody recognizes that – we know the theory of the interlinkages between military and peacekeepers, and international civilian police and developing the rule of law framework, and how all of these should be integrated with one another. But, to get it to work in a timely way is still something that is not quite within our grasp, and we’re going to have to keep working on it much more.

This is a process. It’s going to take time. But at the same time, I think over a period of a year, year and a half, we’ve made a tremendous amount of progress. I feel very proud of being able to leave a foundation that, I think all of us, and I very consciously still use the word us, will continue to build on because it is a central challenge to the national security of the United States. It is something that is fundamental to maintaining peace, to advancing the conditions of so many people throughout the world, and of allowing us to have a much more secure and global environment, which is going to serve our long-term goals as a country and in the international community. I thank you all for your contributions you have made to this.