TRANSKRIPT 🔗
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Identifying vulnerability and ambiguity in the US.
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The Great, both the civilian and military world just loves models, mathematical models.
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But the problem is that they're not capturing the nuance.
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And because they're not capturing nuance, if you only have good data going in, then you're understanding what's happening.
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If you don't, if you have limited data or siloed data, then there's big problems.
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So I've seen that as a huge problem and not only in the US, but they're particularly vulnerable to that with mathematical modelling.
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But elsewhere as well. We focusing on transitions, developing effective responses for different volatile environments,
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a non cookie cutter approach and avoiding unintended consequences.
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Let's see how this is going to play out.
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That vulnerability and ambiguity in crises civilian perceptions of personal security is an under-discussed issue.
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What do people in the country really think will keep them safe?
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And there's been a few attempts at understanding that, but mostly it's been an external view of security.
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It's either been a military version of security, it's been a human rights aid organisations version of security.
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But usually that often the people in country are not really asked use on a generosity of force.
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And they're it's about their exposure to formal and informal armed groups.
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And early on, long before Iraq and Afghanistan, I understood that communities could be,
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if you want to use the term occupied or are would be visited by formal forces during the day.
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It's could be security forces, could be army, it could be policing who would then leave at night and then be visited by informal forces,
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militias, rebels, terrorists, whoever at night and civilians would be caught in the middle.
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So I'd be asking, who did you see? What are they saying? But they're caught in the middle there.
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It's their lives at stake. They're the ones in true danger and they feel unprotected.
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Different roles of civilians, of complex crises. Well, as far as I'm concerned,
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you got some role play the Bible on that and killing civilians about depicting the many roles of civilians in these situations.
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I also found victim and perpetrator were often the same person
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it depending on timing
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a victim could a victim defined as individuals and communities often were targeted,
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had the most horrific incidents happened to them,
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but could later in the right circumstances and act exactly the same on the group that originally attacked them.
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So there a cycle of revenge that was being perpetuated complicit supporters in
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communities and areas who just would allow groups to come in and never say anything,
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would see things happening and never say a word.
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Then a truly tragic, innocent bystander overtaken by events.
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This is really the real sad, sad situation of of individuals and communities who have no interest in conflict.
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Trying to live their lives are in the wrong place and time and then community advocate not activists
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are are highly visible people individuals so on who understand that they can be targeted,
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who have an understanding of the risks, the different roles of formal informal security forces and complex crises.
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Unfortunately, as we have seen, both state forces, formal forces and informal militias,
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rebel forces can both uphold law and order and protect civilians,
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and they can enact agendas and kill civilians depending on the situation either or in a conflict.
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And a real understanding of that by external civilian and military groups is essential.
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Refocusing on transitions is developing and communicating strategies for addressing major shifts within a country region caused by conditioned events.
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Time. Everyone was woefully unprepared for what happened in North Africa, really unprepared for Syria.
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If there's any way to anticipate and begin to understand that this the transitions that are the hard part
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stop stopping fighting or preventing fighting or securing an area is might very well be the easy part.
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But assisting an area in transition in a region transitioning is difficult.
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Refocus civilian military interventions on conflict transformation, prevention, mitigation, they said,
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protecting individuals and communities also in addressing the legitimacy of the judicial and political systems that exists in that country or region.
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Whether they're perceived to be legitimate or not is makes a huge difference.
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Host Nation Ownership and capacity. Is there an infrastructure, institutional infrastructure?
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Is there not? That requires two very different approaches coordinated efforts to civil, military and regional engagement.
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I still hear people say a conflict, talk about a conflict.
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So it's local, though. It's isolated. I really don't think there's any such thing as a isolated conflict anymore.
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And a local conflict can become global really quickly with the right motivation and technological tools.
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And it needs to be looked at that way if it stays local and stays local, because that's the decision of all parties to keep it that way.
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Developing effective responses. Re-examining ways to achieve high impact and low visibility cost effective operations.
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Cost effective is the key phrase now.
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Budget constraints for the ERA, certainly for the US, have trillions of dollars.
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This is absolutely gone and I see that certainly in Europe and other places as well.
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And there are many ways to achieve really good results without spending a lot of money.
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But it didn't seem no one seemed to be bothering with that because there was so much money.
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So it requires a rethink about how to do this effectively.
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And in small, small footprint, developing a better understanding of distinct responses and roles required by different global crises.
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A mali will require a different response than perhaps a crisis in a part of Latin America or the Asia-Pacific.
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It's not that they're so different, it's just the context may be slightly skewed.
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Maybe reform may reformatted,
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so certain action in one place may produce an unintended consequence and another incorporating constraints caused by local domestic geopolitics.
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I think of politics as a player in all of this, almost a person, almost an entity, but it needs to be figured in any equation.
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I don't think there's any way around it. Better understanding of the impact of international criminal syndicates and cartels.
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If you want to know how people, how terrorists, insurgents, rebels, arms their narcotics, money is flowing.
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Just watch the flows of human trafficking.
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Human trafficking is the number one most profitable resource in the criminal world, and on the back of that flows everything else.
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So those are mafias.
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When people are doing good research on that and you'll see how everything else is flowing globally, avoiding unintended consequences.
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This is so difficult when you see civilian organisations and military organisations.
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We're trying to help with help people have good intentions and then don't understand why their good intentions aren't rewarded with good outcomes.
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But there needs to be a better understanding of the advantages and pitfalls of waging war by proxy.
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This is part of the regional conflict dimension. We're seeing that with Iran in the US, for instance.
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Now in various areas in the Middle East, you're going to see it with China and the U.S. You'll see that with other countries in Europe
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and the superpowers in different parts of the world who are really it's really nothing new.
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The Cold War, that's really what was going on in the Cold War as well.
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Need more communication between civil military individuals and organisations in the virtual around.
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There are some attempts to do this, but there really needs to be more communication and the civilian military cross training on
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concepts of provocation and deterrence in volatile environments when it's affected by external,
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by virtual and external events. And just think of the Koran burning in one country and how many people are killed in another country because of it.
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And within the same day and you begin to picture the sort of the issues that are going on and why they need to be addressed.
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Looking ahead, developing international civilian military protocols for rapid and deeply thoughtful responses.
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This is aspirational, of course, to decision timelines affected.
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Salary by information technologies.
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There really needs to be and I think there's a lot of good people really beginning to think about this in various parts around the world.
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How can everyone communicate with each other?
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We have amazing technologies at our disposal now, but how we use them are using them to really communicate.
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And none of the I have found personally, and I think others as well have found that none of the issues have really changed the core issues.
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It's dealing with them in a more global way, a sort of a macro micro view,
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simultaneously increased international civilian military coordination and communication for effective response.
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And the US role is rapidly changing. As everyone knows. I think America is slowly coming to terms with this.
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Anyone, any Americans who work outside that country understand that America's power and affect and effective role influence has diminished greatly.
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And so while they have great, great military capacity, their ability to influence has changed a great deal.
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And that's directly connected to Iraq and Afghanistan, which I recently heard on a major political show in the US.
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A foreign correspondent returned and said, Africa, Iraq and Afghanistan are considered catastrophes by the rest of the world.
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There's a sort of silence, but no argument. Seek ways to better support internal groups seeking peaceful mitigation of conflicts.
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Again, that goes back to individual perceptions of security.
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Often those are linked conflict mitigation.
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There are usually groups really trying to peacefully settle problems that are often overlooked and ignored.
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And then as violence began to take hold or are just sidelined until much later.
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And then finally, in Iraq in 2012, I had the privilege of going back to Erbil in Kurdistan and Baghdad with the U.S. Institute of Peace.
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I then working with them on writing their history in Iraq from 2003 to 2011, and it was a good time to go back as an American.
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The military was gone, the trillions of dollars were gone, and they were not coming back.
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It was the new beginning of a new world, so to speak.
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And I spoke to a number of Iraqis and this comment about we talked about civilian and military organisations in general,
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as well as USAID, his role and this comment stuck, stuck with me.
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And I think I want to leave you with this on the value of civilian organisations versus military.
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And this was said this was told to me by a senior politician of a minority background in Iraq.
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Civilian organisations, if they do things that arms and forces cannot do, prevent the conflict and save $1,000,000,000.
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Security is not peace and the target must be peace.
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Security is everywhere because there's no peace. So thank you very much.
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Moving on to other questions.