at point b. think, of course that's the way it works. when i -- send a tweet, things will happen. someone had to invent the intellectual architecture for that. that's the field of information theory. >> watch the communicators monday night at 8:00 eastern on c-span two. next, national security and military experts discuss the future of warfare. speakers included journalist peter bergen discussing jihadist terrorism, and the former deputy commander of cyber commander to talk about the state of military readiness. posted by arizona state university and you america, this is just under two hours. ♪

>> good morning everyone. welcome to the ambassador washington center event series. we are delighted to have you here. our program will get started momentarily. a reminder for all of those in the audience, we will be broadcasting live via c-span and also via facebook live so all of our friends and colleagues in tennessee and around the world can tune in for this wonderful event. to kick off our event series you will have a panel discussion on u.s. national security. the research unit of the college of arts and sciences at arizona state university. i will turn it over to our panelists to get started.

>> welcome everybody. i'm daniel rothenberg. this is a partnership, we are one of the largest universities centers. you would think there would be many formal institutional relations between the big university sent think tanks that create programs that work together and share teams and

develop new and innovative ideas but there really far fewer than you would imagine. we are thankful to be able to allow this experiment to move forward. >> daniel and i have had this relationship for the past four years. it has deepened with every passing year. we've a number of our fellows in the room here. we will hear from them. it is an exciting partnership. we will have our fourth annual conference on april 9 and hopefully everyone in the room will be there as well. it will feature general hr mcmaster and general wilson, the vice chief of the air force and many others. so let's move to the next panel. daniel will introduce the next panel. we will have a two hour program this morning. thank you for being here so early in the morning. daylight savings time was not working our favor. we will proceed to the first panel. >> a quick rundown of the center. we have over 100 and two-affiliated faculty who run an online global security ma. we've recently hired a number of people.

there is a lot going on. we are committed to an interdisciplinary approach to addressing questions of global security. let's move to the panel with peter w singer and lieutenant general robert schmidt a anna eshoo, a senior fellow with our center. [applause] >> i could not imagine more exciting time for this kind of conversation so i am very excited. i would like to introduce a professor from asu. he is a background with the marine corps where he served and

has more than the 700 hours of tactical experience in flight. he served as first a feeding commander of u.s. cyber command where he was responsible for helping to started up also while doing full spectrum operations. his background is unique. he brings the perspective of a phd in philosophy also. he is a deep thinker in all of the ways you could define that term. so before i ask you to wrestle with what will be the future of work, i would like to ask you how do we go about it? how should we frame our thinking

about trying to predict the future and importantly, trying to predict the future something like warfare. >> thanks, leader. i think if i were to start to try to imagine how i would think about the future, one of the first things that occurs to me is that in order for me to have any context in which to think about what might occur, i need to have some understanding of the way things have occurred in the past. which is not to say i'm going to simply study history because i think it is going to be like the future. but it is to say if i do not understand the historical land cultural factors that have

driven people to warfare in the past, than i am never really going to be able to understand what potentially might happen in the future. the only thing, as has been said many times, that we know about the future is that we are generally always wrong. so, how is it that we are the least wrong that we can be? one of the things i think we can look at us war in itself is not a discrete phenomenon, right? and couple we sometimes treated that way. we sometimes treated as a technical phenomenon. we get all rep depth about, will the future of war is going to involve this kind of technology -- >> give us an example. >> for example, if every time we come up with a new weapon that was supposed to redefine warfare, whether it was the airplane, machine gun, a tank -- at the end the day, it did not really redefine warfare. what it did was, it had a tactical effect that was mitigated by a countermeasure. i mean, you could even argue that the one thing that people seem to think changed everything we think about it warfare, which was the dropping of the atomic

bombs in japan, was maybe not that unique in terms of the history of mankind and our ability to find different ways to kill ourselves. we did manage to kill tens of thousands of people in tokyo as well is in dresden with firebombings. in some cases, we actually had higher casualties than we did in the areas where we dropped atomic weapons. so i think the things that really, i think, help us to think about the future of war is thinking about the culture in which we all operate and the societies that are the

background for the way that we think about this. as an example, to borrow from two of my friends here in the world of french philosophy. there is a notion of societies as sovereignty and societies of discipline, into use them of a way to try to figure out in the society of sovereignty -- think about a medieval society -- what the king does is the king taxes the population. that is one of the ways he gets his power. he also gets it from this sort of divine myth he has created round himself. the next society would be a society of discipline. in, society of discipline if you think of something from post-napoleonic wars, thing about the industrial revolution when we begin to have societies about disciplining the population in order to do something. so had we fight wars? in order to have a society of discipline, we fight wars with

soldiers rather than mercenaries purchased by the king. so you necessarily had -- with the exception of things like religious wars and the worse of the roses and such -- we had kings fairly conservative in the ways they use their forces. of the army was destroyed, their power was also. what happens with napoleon in the beginning of societies of discipline, you have large armies and you find that kings and rulers are much more inclined to fight longer and with much higher casualty rates because the population is now being captured by an ideology that they weren't before. how does that change the way we think about conflict and the way we think about wars? it does because those wars create large numbers of people, and they create things, machines

that deliver energy. the combat airplanes, tanks, artillery. i would suggest since the 1950's, we are under the sway of what we could call a society of control. and, societies of control are no longer interested in disciplining their population. they are interesting in controlling the population. it does not require physical and closures anymore. when you drive into the pentagon, regardless of how many badges you have, there is always a gate. the gate has a bar that comes down to keep your car from going through. the bar is nothing more than what you can break over you your need. but everybody stops there and swipes their card and the bar opens and you go through. just an example of how society is controlling what you do. if you see the drift away from enclosures and prisons to

putting aphids, and glitz on people seek and monitor their activity. it will not be long before those bracelets will control the activity of that person. we'll be able to sense when they are doing something society does not approve of. so understanding that kind of movement, if you will, seems to me to be very helpful in giving us a way to think about the future as opposed to diving right into trying to understand the things we're going to fight with. we confuse at our peril the tactical future of warfare from the strategic work cultural tactic. the cultural tactics are the new things we're going to use to fight those wars but it is important to remember those things have never been the things that allowed us to win

wars at the end of the day. it has always been something else at the strategic level that has enabled that. >> so if you have this continuity throughout history that you reference, what about five or 10 years from now, what will be different? how will the battlefield look different? how will the experience of those fighting where those civilians, what would be changed? or will it all just be continuous? >> ok, so a couple of things come to mind. let's go back to the language we use to 10 about warfare.

we have tended to -- and i use the word "we" about the uniformed military. we like to talk about the distinction between the nature and character of war. we like to define this as such. we define the nature of war is the enduring things that are what were fair is all about. those things will never change. whenever we get into discussions with our counterparts or the civilian side, that is taken as a human. look, we in the military understand that. that is elitist. what changes is the character of war. we say that without much reflection. there are couple things with that we're thinking that are wrong. the first is -- words are important, right? so there is a large point made in philosophy by lichentstein that words have no intrinsic value. for example, the word "war" or "warfare," it means the picture of the history channel, and means a lot of things. it could mean men running around in crimea. the point is, the moment and the more you use the word "war" in changes.

every time we do that, we're altering the meaning of the word "war" and by altering the meaning we are in effect changing the nature of what we believe the word to mean. it is same token, we look at the characteristics of war and we say the character of war will change. we will play it differently with tanks, guns, airplanes, but i think that we ought to look at another model here. that other model to be, we ought to think about what it is that is the essence of warfare, right? and, the essence of warfare in my mind it is trying to understand what it is that holds sway over us in warfare. how does war administer violence? how is it administered in that context? how does a war develop? how does a war decay?

when you understand the essence of something, and very much the greek essence of this, you will sort of the history of this construct if you will in the way that it is used. you look at it as a phenomenon. as something. because war is administered differently. what if that is not in fact the model we ought to be thinking about?

in the future perhaps, we should think about war is being simply an increase in the level of violence, right? and, that is something that one of the commentators on another speech had made about that. >> define that for the audience. it is important for this discussion. unpack the discussion, the importance of the word "cyber war." it has different meanings to different people at different points in time. can you sort of unpack for us what you see the future of cyber war, or at least how we will define it relative to war?

>> that is a great question. let me see if i can do justice to it. so, a couple of historical data points. in mid-19 94, two colonels were going to write a piece called "unrestricted warfare." and this was their project going through college. the fascinating thing about this book, 25 years ago, at that point they were advocating for the use of all parts of national capabilities integrated in a way that was unrestricted and the

model they used was unrestricted were from the first world war when we said we would never do that, but in fact we did. they were talking about economic warfare. they are talking about what we now referred to as cyber warfare. that that was simply part of what it nation would do going to war. if we come back to the beginning, the definition of warfare, if their definition of warfare is an increase in the level of violence and that it can be interpreted in many ways as other than physical violence on a battlefield, then one might argue that as the chinese created greater and greater capability in the world of cyber, that their vision of this cyber war began to extend to the intrusion into networks and the mining of intellectual property as well as other data. it is just all part of unrestricted warfare.

what happens, the next data point is in 2013. the then-head of the russian military is going to give a speech at a war college and it is variously interpreted it as him trying to explain to the students what the americans were doing but it came across as the way we, russians, ought to think about war in the future. and one of the things that were that speech was the beginnings of the doctrinaire integration of information ops into conventional operations. for those of you that have been through this, traditionally we think about conventional operations and someone raises their hand and says -- what he is saying and the distinct difference between what we do and what a do, they are

doing it now, is integrated from the beginning. if you look at what they did in crimea and the ukraine, you see the results of this kind of integration. to peter's very good point, the challenge with cyber is it can do two things, right? it can provide a venue to move all of this information or disinformation and it can move it into places with the speed and velocity and scale that was heretofor unheard of. and it can have an intrinsic effect on things.

so, let's say you are involved in the network of country x. you have access to that. you can add or extract information. you can push information in that is true or not. or, you could manipulate the information that already exists inside of those databases. so would we talk about cyber warfare, i think it is important to realize there is, in addition to some of the more science fiction-type things you could do with those capabilities. when i was the deputy of cyber command whenever i would speak publicly -- because my boss was not really into speaking publicly so i got to do it all the time -- i would be asked questions all the time. like, what can the united states do?

the answer i would give would be, the things you can do if you are proud to be an american. if you can imagine it, probably can happen. that is not the fascinating thing. the interesting thing is how you might do it. but by the same token, the 1950's we had a whole cadre of people that were civilians that studied and knew and understood military nuclear theory that created a lot of our theories of defenses, etc. in some cases, they didn't have an idea how to build the commonwealth. need to know -- the national security environment. you have to get beyond, how does that work, to imagining if it did work. what kinds of opportunities and options are out there?

idea that you can hack into a network, the information of that network. russia has been able to pull off, not the american traditional realm, but pushing on two different networks. social networks. we were looking in the wrong place. not on facebook and twitter. that leads to the next question. are we organized properly for the future of war? >> secretary mattis said do you have the right boxes, the right people, what would you suggest? answering this question

-- ok. >> couple of things occur to me. it secretary mattis were to say do we what is it, what not have today that we need going into the future? i would be inclined to steer him away from things, programs, platforms. passed the level, we will always continue to develop. important for us is to have some kind of intellectual incubator. in the venture capital world, we have various ways to think about how to push technology, a bright idea forward. , or is it i believe,

wars are not won by weapons. ideas.e wion by they are one by ideologies. people to do things, may be exceptional. when you think about how we think about the future of the thingsstates, one of the we think about, or should be is the interconnectedness of all of the parts that the u.s. government deals with. are we organized to do that? i will give you an example. our command who is generally organized around geographic boundaries, or cyber command, which is -- is going to be elevated to fully functional trade i don't know it will make a huge difference. you have a command that is

capability that littlelly no, has very relevance, geographic boundaries. policiesthat we use, we make are in many cases driven by the way we see geographic boundaries of countries, our interpretation of the sovereignty we assigned to a particular nationstate. the capabilities we have in the for example, i-- had a conversation once think doing something for country x to countrywide. between those two countries was another country. in the course of this "ifersation, someone said you do that, you're going to violate their sovereignty." i very calmly said "ok, but

here's how the internet works. routers, you've got the sky in san jose on a router. you get packets of information everywhere. that's based on an algorithm. who is making a decision about that? policy, diplomacy. so if that's the case, is it e packet or two packets that dominates someone's sovereignty. i think it's gone so quickly we're thinking in terms of rather traditional conventional ways about that.

i look at one example tactically which is the special operations world, so special operations command, as you all know is created after the mess at desert one and they've been thinking about it for a while and opposed by -- nobody wanted to do it or stand up a separate command. but the impetus was so strong to sbe great and cross all these people from the different services into a command that would have a national mission force, etc., etc., so i think that model may be helpful for us in the future. the challenge is every one of us in the world of cyberstuff touches things. every one of you is not a

special opposite. you're not going to run down the street and intercept some terrorist but yet you log on the computer every morning, if you hit this thing that says i'm going to open this link i got from somebody's email you very well could infect this entire system. so one of the problems we've had, the challenges with the way we've designed our networks is we've pushed all of the risk to the end users. and the end users are us and we know we're the ones that make the most mistakes. so maybe when we rethink how we're designing pentagon structures to deal with this new threat one of the things we need to think about are ways we can bring that risk into the network itself, that we can accept that risk at a place different from where the end user is, which is where we know we carry the greatest amount of

risk today. >> you've referenced examples of how the new technology of submarine creates new debates around unrestricted submarine warfare and then we have new examples, for example, the internet and packet based communications introduces legal questions that surround sovereignty and the like. ake us further on that tour. what will be the other debates we'll have in the future of war similar to the ones in the past, can you use a submarine to attack civilian shipping or can i launch a cyberattack on country x by going through country y, why will be some of the other debates we'll be aving?

>> autonomous weapons, influenced by a.i. or machine learning and other things. the notion of autonomous weapons. we've had weapons with some form of autonomy in the pass. we've had air-to-air weapons and an airplane i flew for many years, the f-18, we had a mode for a weapon to come off and literally find the first thing that had any closing velocity. and we rarely used it even in training because it was so difficult to distinguish between the closing velocity of you to your neighbor. i think that autonomy is going to offer us -- force us to think about issues we haven't before in terms of the relationship to the technology. let me give you an example. so let's just say -- i'm making this up, we create an

autonomous weapon that's going to be driven by a series of al gore rhythms that's going -- algorithms which is going to inform the convoy that has the terrorist in it we're looking for and the algorithms have been written in such a way it does facial recognition through windows and looks at all manner of things and looks at the terrorist of the last hours. so the weapon is zooming around and gets near this convoy and dives in and blows up this car. turns out it's not the car with the terrorist in it but a car with a family on the way to church or something. so here's the question, who is it that owns that now? who owns that risk and who owns that ethical decision? because in the past we've had a commander that would make the decision. we've had some one person that

was responsible for saying and the vehicle condoning, if you will, a predator strike. but if that's not the case anymore and we're allowing autonomous weapons to do this on their own, is it the person that wrote the code for the algorithms? i doubt it. some guy with multiple body piercing and purple hair in silicon valley wrote the code or algorithm for some other set of reasons and probably were written for reasons of efficiency and effectiveness inside certain design parameters. who gave him those design parameters? i don't know, some nameless bureaucrat in the pentagon, i don't know. the point is as weapons become more autonomous and autonomy becomes more pervasive, it seems to me there's an increased amount of responsibility that must be taken on by the policymakers and decisionmakers and they

must be involved in the creation of those algorithms. so as a al gore rhythm is developped -- so as an algorithm is developed that tells me terrorist 1 or air resist b, this is not my job, you bring my the capability. then i'm advocating my moral responsibility to that -- to make that decision. so that's what is about autonomous weapons that makes us uncomfortable. we like to believe if there's a decision that will be made about killing another person it will be made by another human. so that's just an example. and another example is in the world of cyber, there are some attacks that will occur with such speed and velocity that if you tried to put that into a conventional decision chain and say ok, i'm going to run this

into the general, generals are great for that, coffee and stuff, and you run into his office and lay it on the table and say here's all the information, general, what are we going to do? and you sit at the head of the table and feel very important and knowledgeable and 5 a decision and of course by then the network is gone and shut down for hours while you've been going through this whole dance. how do we create autonomous agents to deal with those kinds of things and what kind of authority do we give it? let's say i create an agent that stops the denial of service attack. do i then allow the agent to attribute the origin of that attack with some degree of certainty and then do i allow the agent to perhaps do something against the people that are attacking it? do i give them a present to take home? those are all decisions that

have to be made prior to the creation of the weapon. >> we have a colleague who refers to this difference of you used to have a kill chain where you could move through time and identify the role of each decisionmaker and now we have a kill web or kill network where everything is coming in. we have time for some questions from the audience. so please raise your hand and wait for the microphone to come to you if you have any questions or comments as well. over here. >> i'm from new america. you have a great resume. you're a war fighter, pilot, philosopher, but of course pentagon insiders know you as something else that no one outside understands, you were the military director for cape which is a really important internal office of making budget decisions. so could you talk a little bit

about what you think about the current national defense strategy and the budget the president has presented in light of everything you've been talking about? >> ok. let's see if i can get through this without making the front page of "the washington post." so before i state -- a quick story. in my world there was sort of a mythological tale that would sound like this, if you're a general officer in the pentagon, how do you know you're about ready to have the worst day of your life? here's how you know. when you walk in the office in the morning and your secretary tells you, sir, of 0 minutes is on the phone. that actually happened to me. this hopefully won't be like that. so i would tell you two things about it. there's an interesting phenomenon that has to do with budgets and innovation. the more money you have the less incentive you have to innovate. fascinating. when there's an embarrassment of riches, it tends to

reinforce the world view of the services that want to buy these things. and it becomes more difficult to do that when there is more money available because now everybody goes to the trough and gets everything that they want. the hard thing to do is to continue to do the kind of research and development that might not necessarily yield some tangible thing in the near term. one of the most difficult things in the budget we'd fight for all the time were the sort of science projects that were out there that were actually where people were looking at interesting things. because they generally don't have a strong constituency, and you know, it's well known that readiness, for example, doesn't have a strong constituency whereas platforms and programs

do. so it's interesting if you look at the periods of greatest amount of experimentation and innovation and creative thinking in the u.s. military beginning after the first world war, you find they're always in times of very scares resources. >> i'm not going to let you get away with this. i'm going to ask you to identify one sacred cow that fits this aspect of reinforcing what we already don't need and you one science experiment can speak to, not to the classified world but one experiment innovation that excited you. that magine if you will there is a military threat that you're concerned about and this threat involves a integrated air defense which is extraordinarily capable which has weapons that can reach out

quite a ways and there are the conventional way of dealing with that is dealing with it in terms of surface-to-sea ad it's called, using airplanes to deliver ordnance against these emitters and weaponry. imagine if you will you had a surface-to-surface rocket used by one of the services as a long-range artillery piece. and if you discover by looking at the problem i can make the warhead slightly smaller but the rocket would have an increased range that would take it right up to the treaty ranges we currently deal with, and that would give you an ability to suppress enemy air defenses without having to use airplanes to do that. and you can imagine that failed because the service that was buying the rocket for their artillery had no interest in

buy something other variant that would be used by the air force to suppress air defenses and the air force had no interest in buying it because it wasn't an airplane. i got it. that's an example of something that's difficult to do. an example of something that i think was very successful and was pretty much -- not terribly popular with a lot of people is you can imagine when you launched weapons, missiles against an airplane, they generally come from the ground or they come from another airplane. well, imagine if you could do that same thing from something under water? now you have no idea where it's coming from. if i'm a bad guy flying around, i have no idea. all of my traditional ways of thinking about air defense are suddenly irrelevant. and so that could be something that you can imagine would have some rather interesting

pplications. >> another question from the audience. >> good morning. i'm a lifelong civilian. fascinating. when you talk about the future of war, tactical versus strategic slash cultural, can you give us an example of when the u.s. has employed strategic/cultural tactic to win a war and how does this apply to some of the conflicts we're mired in now in iraq and syria and afghanistan? >> ok. let me give you an example -- i can do that. let me give you one of the most glaring examples of how not to do that. during the vietnam war, the end state of that war was the democratization, if you will, of south vietnam.

it was to create a free democracy in south vietnam. the military strategy to do that as developed by westmoreland and the pentagon at the time was attrition. the thought was we can kill nough vit congress -- vietcong and the country will be pacified and that didn't turn out swimmingly. the end result of all that was there was a focus at the tactical level on winning these tactical battles, and the way they -- the metric was the body count. if we killed more enemy than they killed of us, we must be winning. so at the end of the war, a couple years after the war there's an army colonel named arry smors who is going to write a book on strategy, a knockoff of klasovitz.

he has become the guiding intellectual light of military in the 20th century and most people that subscribe or klasovitz quote didn't read the book and don't understand where he came from to get there. long story. he write as book on strategy and goes to vietnam 1976 or 1977 when they had the first one of these openings, you if you will, and meets general gap, the guy that won, if you will, the vietnam war. and he says to gap at one point and there's a number of people around him and it's a very famous story and well footnoted and he says to him, you know, this is to gap, the retired army colonel summers, he says you know, you never defeated us on the battlefield and general gap looks at am and says, you're right but that's completely irrelevant. so what does that tell you?

it tells you there's a relationship between tactical victory and strategic victories in terms of end states but tells you the relationship isn't always what it appears to be. if you look at the second world war, most people will agree that the german infantry army was an extremely tactically relevant force yet because of hitler they made some extraordinarily bizarre strategic decisions in addition to everything else that would cause the downfall of it. so it's difficult to put those two things together, a success story, ok. so at the end of the second world war we have defeated the germans and defeated the japanese. eisenhower is the one that is in charge of germany and mcarthur is the one in charge of japan. they actually go about this very differently. eisenhower is going to maintain a lot of the german

infrastructure and german army to maintain order and he's going to issue an order against frat earnization between american troops and german women. on the other side of the world, mcarthur is going to rewrite or write the constitution of japan. why? because he can. and he's going to give women the right to vote and won't issue an order against frat earnization. and was asked by a reporter why don't you issue an order against frat earnization like general eisenhower did, because every order i give i can't enforce decreases my authority. so there is no easy answer except to say the cultures are different and understanding them is different. the japanese needed their ideology of fighting was inform the tactics we used against them. the germans, again, were dealing with the russians and a bunch of other things so it

to be there needed different ways in dealing with both of those that was sensitive to the way we in the united states wanted to fight, and you know, when eisenhower made the decision to allow the russians to come into berlin, a lot of it was because he didn't think that we would be able to survive, that the country would put up with the casualties it would take to do that. >> we're running out of time so i want to thank you for joining us and thank the audience for some great questions. please give him a round of applause. [applause] >> we're really excited about the opening of the new building and am thrilled to have am board bear -- ambassador barrett here with us and she'll say a few words before we move on to the panel. >> thank you very much.

this is a bit spontaneous. my prepared text has not yet been prepared. so i thank you very much. it's a great privilege to be here. and i think like me, you will value this new asset in this community that represents arizona and arizona state university but gives an opportunity to convene knowledgeable leaders who have been thinking about topics such as the important topic of where we're going with the future of war and national security. this certainly is a timely matter when we think about what's going on globally, even ust this week, and everybody is long familiar with the asymmetry of some of our enemy and the geography of others of our enemy or folks we have to worry about, adversaries and potential adversaries. but we now have to think beyond geography and beyond the global

world into what's going on in space and cybersecurity. there's so much new thinking we have to do, we really hope that this building and this relationship will be one that will make it possible to advance our thinking and advance our capabilities and advance the opportunity for not war but for more security and we'll hope that that continues far into the future as the lead where security is what we have and war is what we avoid. it's great to be here and wonderful to have the opportunity to be a part of this convening gathering, and i'm pleased to have a chance to welcome you on behalf of arizona state university. thanks so very much. >> bring the panel up, everybody.

>> so this panel, what we're going to do is go over the different research initiatives going on at the center on the future of war. a big thanks to ambassador barrett and craig barrett for being here and our proceed voast for being here. and even though we're called the center for the future of war, our concern is not war, per se, our concern is conflict, security and in some ways war as a term as something that the general brought up is a very useful way to engage issues that are not just classically war. as we try to make sense of what war is we inevitably end up talking about things that isn't the traditional understanding of war but we'll talk about three different research initiatives related to our efforts and mr.bergen at the school of politics and studies at a.s.u. thinking of the future of jihaddist terrorism and a new faculty hire in global politics and senior

fellow at our center, person formerly of the u.s. secretary of peace and before that bureau chief of "the washington post" in afghanistan and pakistan and sharon burke, previously assistant secretary of defense and now senior advisor at new america and then i'll also speak -- eve of the subjects will speak about the future of afghanistan, something she's done work in and i'll speak about the future of fake news and sharon will speak about the future of security landscape. >> thank you, everybody, for coming and thank you to the barretts and to a.s.u. for making the future of war initiative possible. and i wanted to pick up on something the general said. henstein said ic -- we attach ourselves to how we interpret them ourselves and

to drill down this, talking about the future of jihady terrorism. we in the united states had a interesting choice on the morning of 9/11 which is how to describe what just happened. i want you to think of a full experiment, instead of 3,000 people were killed, 17 people were killed. it wasn't clear to al qaeda that the operation would work. now, why do i pick the number 17? because that's the number of people who are killed in the u.s.s. cole just a year earlier and we didn't treat it as an ct of war and in fact both the administrations and george bush administrations did nothing to respond. why is this important? because how we describe things, of course, helps determine how we react to them. and we described 9/11 as an act of war. but i think we don't -- and chenstein theory,

this wasn't a state attacking us but a nonstate group and we got ourselves into a huge pretzel as a result of this, for instance, in guantanamo which was both a prisoner of war camp but also where we put people on trial and don't traditionally try people in a prisonner of war camp, you just keep them for the duration of hostilities. but the interesting question about this is this was not the kind of war we previously encountered but was more similar to the wars in the 18th century or 19th century and probably the american equivalent was the war against the barbary pirates and was not a state but involved crimes and warlike activities. so this brings us to the question of the future of jihaddist terrorism and the general also mentioned something about the nature of idea and i hadology and the way they determine conflict. now, there's an american political scientist called david rappaport who shortly after 9/11 made an interesting

observation and he said in the last century there have been four ways of terrorism, and they usually last a generation before they burn themselves out. the first wave was the anarchist wave and an anarchist killed president mckinley and an attack on wall street and that wave ran itself out probably because anarchy wasn't offering much in the way of ideas. the second wave was the anti-colonial wave and the way terrorism actually achieved its goal, jewish terrorist groups forced the british out of palestine. irish terrorists in ireland got the british to pull out of southern ireland. algerian militants got the french to pull out of algeria in 1962 and this way burned itself out because it achieved its goals. then you have the marxist waves, the leftist wave, the black panthers, the red army faction.

this wave burned itself after because its ideas were not particularly good and the class of the soviet union put a big pause on these ideas. and now we're in the religious wave so the big question is how long will that go on? and it started in 1979 with the fall of the shah being confirmed by a secular american backed group by revolutionaries osama destructive for in laden and that is what he wanted, overthrowing secular auto kratz. and you had the invasion of afinogenov -- afghanistan by the soviet union in the same year. what i'm concerned about and if i had this discussion five years ago with the death of bin laden and basically the clutching of al qaeda center, the group that attacked us 9/11 and the arab spring, all of which happened with al qaeda's

ideas or people, i would have said -- i would have said, you know, terrorism is really going to be a second order problem. this thing seems -- we seemed to have contained it. i now have a much less optimistic view because the arab spring turns into the arab winter and you know the history of the growth of isis and i'm concerned this religious wave of terrorism will be much arder -- it actually wilburn itself out, if you believe gold is on your side, the soviet union can be collapsed but gold can't be abolished. and people in these

group and these groups, they firmly believe god is on their side. a son of isis and grandson of isis is virtually guaranteed and briefly there are several reasons for that. one is we're in the middle of a sectarian civil war in the middle east. go back to osama bin laden. he never mentioned the -- it was mostly about israel/palestine and secular dictators in the middle east. now this is the issue and it is powered by deep pockets and consumed yemen and iraq and syria and add that to arab governance, from libya to yemen, failed states. the point about this is these groups are not strong of themselves, they feed on weak hosts. the stronger a muslim country is, the weaker the groups and libya are doing well in yemen and then add in the collapse of arab economies and youth unemployment, 27%, now 30%. then add to that the massive wave of muslim immigration into europe, unprecedented. a million refugees and asylum seekers in germany alone and add to that -- extremely marngginal now the second party or the

ruling party and european countries and add to that the alienation of muslims in europe. american muslims are as educated as the average american and don't live in get toes and have the same average incomes. everything i have just said in europe is not true. in france, 8% of the population is muslim an estimated 60% of the prison population is muslim. you can understand isis -- isis like ideas has great purchase amongst certain elements in this population that it doesn't have in this country. for all of those reasons and then you add social media which speeds up everything i've just described, whatever the group is that succeeds isis, maybe isis -- parts of isis regrouping with al qaeda or some other group whose name we don't know. it will learn from the isis example and may not as immediately successful and population the size of switzerland as i did in the summer of 2014 but they will continue. and i hate to be a possesscy mist because by nature i'm an

optimist but i strongly believe we'll see successor groups and probably certainly in the rest of the lifetime before this particular wave of terrorism burns itself out. >> thanks, peter. >> it's hard to come after peter but it's a thrill to be here. thank you very much for having me. come up with the things peter said, afghanistan is the birth place of jihadist terrorism in many ways not just because bin laden was there but because of that clash of cultures that arose in the 1980s invasion of afghanistan by the soviets and this question of god and sort of god's role in forming the state has been sort of the fundamental issue in not only afghanistan but in large parts of the middle

east and even central asia for a very long time. it's difficult to unpack the future of afghanistan in ten minutes because the conflict has been going on for a very long time but i'll do my best to try to hit the highlights. today i think we look at afghanistan and we see kind of a two-three proposition where we have two strategic challenges that will define the future of afghanistan and three tactical challenges that feed into those two strategic pillars. the first strategic pillar centers on whether or not the united states and afghanistan, the governments in kabul and washington can redefine what it means to win in afghanistan. and the second strategic pillar really rests on whether or not in that redefinition of winning, washington and kabul can convince other stake holders in

the region particularly iran, india and russia and pakistan, china and so forth, whether or not that vision of winning is in fact compelling enough that they will actually jump in and buy in to that vision. there's a big challenge obviously. if you look today at afghanistan, i think the story that we've been telling ourselves has been largely defined by the violence over the last 17 years. you -- every day practically now there's a bombing, one way or another in kabul, near kabul and there's clearly evidence that the taliban grabbed a lot of territory or control and can test that territory today, 40% of the country in fact is controlled or contested by the taliban. how did we get here? that's the big question that we often look so much at the violence. we focus so much on the violence itself, the battlefield and the number of troops and whether

we're up or down. but we forget the political piece. and that's where this redefinition of winning needs to come in, right? the political integration of the strategy the electoral process, to look at the institution building and look at the social change that has been wrout over the last 17 years is a really critical part of redefining our definition of winning in afghanistan. so that brings us to the tactical issues that i see and probably redefine the future of afghanistan for the next five years maybe longer possibly. the first question of course is negotiations with the taliban. and lately there's been sort of a lot of discussion about talks of the taliban and on and off, there have been back channel talks between the members of the leadership body for the taliban and the u.s. government and interlock years. for many, many years going back as far as 2001 with the first

initial invasion, where we've seen back channel contacts between the taliban, via pakistan pakistan. what's chanched in the last year or so, that there is a greater desperation on the part of the ghani administration to try to kill the violence because it is getting out of control and deteriorating the situation in terms of institutional strength and obviously it has resulted in millions and millions of displaced afghans both within the country and outside where we have millions now traveling across europe through these trafficking channels. so this deterioration of course has led the ghani administration to begin very seriously considering the prospect of negotiations with the taliban and just two weeks ago, for first time we heard specifics. when hamid karzai was president, there was a lot of talk about welcoming the taliban brothers back into the fold and extending the olive branch. but there wasn't a lot of action. and there wasn't a lot of specifics on offer. this time, we heard ghani two weeks ago during the kabul process, may a prover that was

quite interesting. we heard the president of afghanistan talk about a ceasefire, first time we also heard the president of afghanistan talk about extending the travel ban on members of the taliban who participate in negotiations and also the first time we heard talk of changing the constitution to accommodate by former members of the taliban. this is very interesting, of course. the question is how did the taliban react and so far it's a little bit iffy. we heard from a taliban spokesman relatively low ranking individual with very little authority that the taliban rejects this offer. but we haven't seen an official statement from quetta or where the taliban has an office. that's sigtd for a couple of different reasons. the lack of an initial statement might suggest there are in fact

elements within the taliban that want to continue to talk. that are interested in arriving at some sort of settlement. but two, there's a second subtext that's very important. during that same frame when ghani was talking about this offer, saudi arabia was exerting some pressure on kabul to move the office, the taliban office out of qatar into another location, possibly kabul, maybe rih rihad and this continuing sectarian cast of conflict in the middle east and also in south asia is evident everywhere and this is one of those moments. the saudis exerting pressure on the kabul government to move the office and the taliban out of qatar really suggests that they

are upping the ante and want to be involved and they are not convinced in fact by our vision of winning. that's very troubling and i think certainly does not bode well for the future. that's negotiations and the second pillar of course is elections. and we really have to talk about this because i think it's sort of off the radar right now. but this summer, elections in afghanistan will be right front and center on the radar and we have the parliamentary elections scheduled for july of 2016, which of course have been postponed for many years now and there's been a lot of sort of fighting over the for mat of the elections and the prospect of course that there would be more fraud and we have some 21 million voter registration cards floating out there which represents 300% of the eligible vote in afghanistan today. it's quite a remarkable number. and so the question is how do we

deal with this? and ghani does not have very many answers and under a great deal of pressure from a large number of political parties to come up with a solution and come up with a solution fast. that is remarkable and is said there -- that is the only measure of progress.

it is progress. and it is something to take note of. states or not the united is engaged on the election issue is unclear. i think there is a lot of hesitation given the experience of 2014. but from my perspective and others, the electoral process is something that the united states needs to be engaged in and support. because that ultimately will determine the stability of the government in kabul. it has to do with the imminent opening of a criminal investigating war

crimes on all sides uniquely, unlike situation in bosnia or israel/palestine there's a very distinct cast to this particular request by the prosecutor in so much as it's looking at potential war crimes not only by the taliban and afghan forces but u.s. forces and then support for war crimes from some allies including romania and poeland and lithuania. it is serious and the peace settlement itself, individuals

who are now looking to get elected, i know, in afghanistan, as well as individuals looking to do a deal in doha are all implicated in these potential war crimes. so the outcome of this investigation will really for sure determine ways people come to table when it comes time for negotiation and the way they played out in electoral politics. it's a wait and see game.

the other issue for the united states, it's clearly how to position itself in response to allegations that has been responsible for war crimes in afghanistan. that will impact all of the details. i'm sure there's questions about it but i will simply say in the past the united states has a very a.m. bif lent relationship with the icc. sometimes hostile. and i think there will be a great temptation by this administration or possibly even others to be very resistant and aggressive in in response to the icc's investigation which we believe is eminent, with 1.7 afghans ss launching complaints, we ask expect this will go forward. the question is how should the u.s. respond? many of them caution that an aggressive response could undercut the human rights, could undercut the united states in terms of its positioning even at the negotiating table with the taliban.

there's also the risk obviously that a failure to respond the right way could mean it could unravel a lot of the byilateral agreements that the united states has put in place to protect its military members from prosecutions of this kind. so big questions there. all of this to say that the future of afghanistan is sort of cloudy with a few bombs and we can expect that the complications will continue but if the united states can take itself out of this battlefield focus and reinsert more focus on the politics, there's a good chance that things could stabilize. >> i'm here to talk about the future of fake news -- one thing you hear from all of the dirvet folks speaking is concern for language and the idea we're at a moment when coming up with the rye ways to describe the world around us is one of the core challenges related to war or security. it's a time of a certain uncertainty in that regard. peter and i -- we ask our students in the class to write

about what it means for them to be members of a war generation. they are 18 to 22 roughly. their entire lives, certainly the entire lives we've been paying attention before they were paying attention in the world, the country has been formerly at war, deploying troops as the military says and one of the most interesting takeaways and maybe not surprising is how complex students respond to the idea they very rarely if they are not from military families, have ever thought of themselves as a war generation. and when asked to conception you'llize that, they respond with some level of either they slough it off or embarrassed or they -- the take away is what war generation -- what are you talking about? yet, the country is kind of at war, it matches the classic understanding of war and in a

way does not. this is one of the challenges of making sense what war is and to some degree what the furtture of war it. we've been hearing about the new terms for public discourse, fake news, echo chambers, alternative facts and all of these ideas that now become sort of -- open a newspaper or not reference to all of this. what it is and how this plays into understanding war and conflict and even what we're talking about are pretty serious questions. there's a -- a lot of reporting out of m.i.t., most consistent review of twitter feeds to try to make sense of how twitter feeds get shared based on whether what they are presenting is truthful or not truthful. and the takeaway was that falsehood consistently dominates truth. this is to say those tweets that are present being things that are not true turn out to

proliferation six times the speed get greater interest and turn out to dominate the kind of twitter universe, which is one sub set of a universe but not nothing and the question becomes why is this and what's going on? the researchers came up with several preliminary expectations, these sort of stories are more novel, sort of more interesting, the fake news is compelling and draws you in. the other is that which is related, these are emotion alal ee vok tif claims, you're outraged and read this thing and pass it on through your network. i want to offer another idea, something that we've been working on. i've been working on at the center, there's often a misunderstanding and failure in raiding this universe that has to deal with being over invested in a divide between what is true

and what is false. that one of the ways to better understand this eco system 23 weif we want to call it that, think of narratives for a place holder, as a mechanism for what we're talking about in terms of the communication of information. so the narratives that are dominant -- let's take an example. one of the classic moments that i think define recent u.s. politics was the birther movement. the point of the birther movement is extraordinarily simple. basically the idea is something that could not be more factually concrete, whether or not a president obama was a u.s. citizen born in the u.s. something for which all of us are submitting paperwork to show some version of our status and it comes from somewhere and you present it and it works. you get your driver's license

and get your passport, et cetera. so the claim was strange claim to build a to build a set of political concerns because it's so evidently disprovable and that was the point. the point of that story is not whether or not there's a factual basis because the presentation of the state of hawaii presented the birth certificate in various different modes, that god endless coverage and none of it matters. there's arguably still a posse trying to get to the bottom of the story, whether or not then president obama was actually a u.s. citizen. what's really going on. it's a window into something

which is it's not about the factual status whether or not obama was born in the u.s. or not, it's about a story and something evoked by bring gs that up as problematic. one thing from the discourse, the presentation of counterveiling facts as official and formal and sure as they could be, that is to say the same piece of paper all of us use to show who we are, didn't work, didn't count. what this is really about, what i call a narrative of mistrust. the real story is a fundamental evokation and narrative presentation of profound mistrust in a system. some talk about the racial elements and that's exactly right but there's something deep in the story. if in fact, you can't trust that piece of paper and if in fact you can't trust that purveyor of information, things are -- things are un -- this is a profound issue because we really rely on social institutions for producing basic relationships of order and society. if we want to rely on the concept of war and conflict, one part of war and conflict has something to do with our lived experience of legitimacy of the order we live in.

we know that actual kinetic wars are won and lost not just by weapons but understandings of the legitimacy of where people sit and a social system that's supposedly empowered to address their interests and needs. i don't think the right way to look at the fake news debate is to say there's all of this terrible fake news and what we need is to provide the real news, there's all of these false things being said, hoop here are the true things. we know folks drawn to things that are not factually verifiable or drawn by lots of reasons. i would suggest they are drawn to them because the narrative power of how they are presented is the real draw, not the data in -- that is discussed. that you can't fight fake news with real news, that the do main of contest is actually won that involves trust. that trusted sources and where there are trusted sources and always trusted sources are -- lie at the key to addressing the

problem at hand. and that even if this issue itself may not seem like something that plays off the future of war or war at all, it does. it's at the heart of what the contestations are now and will be in the future andener elements of the present, the way technologies are evolving that are specific to this moment and present new challenges. i would suggest the challenges new as they are are not necessarily challenges that are so distinct and different and unheard of in our time period. i'll leave you with one thought. there's a longstanding concern about rumor in social science and u.s. policy during the second world war. the u.s. was enormously concerned as rumor as seen as only one thing, dangerous. there were programs created to track rumors and counteract rumors the point being that rumors would undermine the war effort. as the literature got more mature in making sense of what rumors are, it moved to a different state and more interesting reflections to be a little bit oversimplifying,

rumors are some sort of improvised news or means through which people seek coherence when there's a dominant situation of uncertainty. they create ideas and come up with stories to explain their circumstance and they pass that on from place to place and the greater the uncertainty, the more the rumors pass through the population. we need that same sort of attitude, not one of outrage and hisysteria towards fake news but one that seeks to understand what's really going on. thanks so much. i want to start by the center and why it's so important. the pentagon department of defense is constantly adapting

to changes in the external environment but also a conservative institution it is a place where there's a very strong pull of conventional wisdom. to have a center like this, that's bringing together a diverse mix of scholars and prags tigsers and shake things up and coming at the issues from different vehicle torectors is o important and valuable. thank you both. i find it as a nameless bureaucrat a really important endeavor. we get people like doug, our colleague who's here who's a former army officer and lots of great scholars in this space. it's a really important mix and it's more important because of

the times we are in, which is there's so much change going on in what the threat environment is and what our internal environment is, what the weapons are war are, tactics but also what the nature of war is. there's a lot of people inside the community who are saying those things are crossing in a way that's somewhat unprecedented. what i'm going to do today. when you're a pentagon official, you have to speak from prepared text. absolutely everything you say goes through a fish ladder of approval. and now that i'm not an official i really enjoy saying what's on my mind without all of those approvals but today i'll speak from a prepared text if you'll forgive me. i want to talk about a new initiative. i haven't had a chance to talk about it in public yet. i took the opportunity to gather my thoughts. i'm an adviser to the global security initiative and global institute of sustainability, an interesting mix and i really value my role in both of those places and the xmank i have with them. thank you for your support and the benefit it provides in my own institution. i thought it would be great to start with a quote from a flossill loss fehr.

one called air and earth and water, arenas of destruction in the natural state of perpetual agree. i don't know i agree we're in perpetual war. i think it's prudent to be prepared. i'm a practical optimist. but i do agree that air, earth and water are the natural world is the arena for war. it is the battlefield but it's also the fuel and fodder of conflict, the tangled roots of war with history and politics and many other factors, air earth and water are also the elements of peace and prosperity and no nation can ever recover from war without the restoration of resources of economic activity. and i think you see all over the world today and certainly throughout history that war has a pernicious legacy and you tend to be caught in cycles of poverty when you can't -- and environmental degradation in the aftermath of war. ultimately that's the whole point of war, it's not about the fight, but it's about the

aftermath. it's about getting to a better peace. with almost two decades of a career in the pentagon and also the daughter and daughter-in-law of veterans, i would have never met anyone in uniform who doesn't know that, that war is about peace and aftermath, not about the fight itself. so as our country country and united states marks a sharp depart tour from the past and looks at changing future of war at new means of organized violence and revisionist adds verse sarryes, what role does natural resources have in securing the peace.

so let me suggest that it's going to be more than just a passive arena for lethality. here are a few numbers to think about. at the turn of the 19th century, the world population hit the 1 billion mark for the first time at the turn of the 21st century, it was 6 billion. by the middle of this century, it would be almost 10 billion.

of that first billion, more than 90% lived in extreme poverty. today less than 10% of the global population in extreme poverty. 140 million people are joining the global middle class every day. every year. that's a good thing, of course. that means more people are getting to enjoy a quality of life and dignity of life and it also means there are more people who need more and more people who expect more, more food, more water, more land and homes and

cars and smartphones, everything from more natural gas and solar panels to more copper and rare earth elements. can the earth meet all of these needs? i would say that the jury is out on that mission. humans are remarkably genius and find ways to use things better and more efficiently to use new things and get what we need. and i think there's no guarantee of that. there's also no free ride. you have to make tradeoffs, everything involves tradeoff, this is not a question of absolute -- although that may happen especially when it comes to water but resources are not always well managed and there's room to improve. nor are they evenly distributed. the united states is now the world's largest energy producer which no one would have guessed 15 years ago, no one would have guessed no matter what they say now. while china in the largest net importer, on the other hand, china produces almost all of the world's rare earth elements and many other critical materials that are absolutely indispensable to the modern age. a consequence of our resource consumption and rising standard of living globally will make tradeoffs more stark and pressures on resources more severe or at least more unpredictable. so does that mean that climate change which a lot of people in my community, the climate

security community would say will become a primary cause for war in the future? i'd say no, it doesn't. but, climate change is going to interact with natural resources and demographics and with poor governance and corrupt governance and with poverty and historical -- and other root causes of war that are really hard to foresee and that's why we started the new project, in collaboration with asu, to see if we can anticipate better what the tradeoffs might look like and where the united states might be able to adopt strategies to make investments that will promote is heresilience jens, a rising tide of natural disasters or how climate change may affect china's resources, energy, water food and people and the investments it makes around the world in those things. so the project is cause phase zero. it is a reference to something that the pentagon phases of conflicts. you see a conflict shaping and you deter it. phase two, you start to move troops in and phase three is active combat where you want to defeat your enemy. phase four is conflict restoration and restoration of civil order. about a decade ago the pentagon added phase zoerero, the time before a war starts when there's time to shape the strategic landscape and avoid conflict all together. so to some extent today i think this phases of war concept is a on absolute, because war is clearly not sequential at this point, not even clear what constitutes combat sometimes. is the russian attack on our form of government an act of war. is syria a civil war or proxy war for great powers? how about the south china sea or ukraine or yemen, what are the wars and all being fought in phases at all times, maybe phases of war was a concept

better oriented at the more black and white time but phase zero is perfect for today's shades of gray. and indeed i would argue that the united states needs to be far better equipped for this gray zone where conflicts are not clear what they are. so that means we need a lethal military, sure, which is for anybody who's not picking it up, the natural defense strategy that secretary mattis just released and that's important. but we also need the means to build security, whether that's deterrence or diplomacy, special operations, trade or development and natural resources given all of the pressures in the 21st century, will be a important part of shaping that strategic landscape. i was listening to you and it was interesting that you referred to japan. so i was just there a few weeks ago and i spent most of my

career in the pentagon and i think it's hard not to become what people would describe as a hard core realist. you become -- your trade space of what's going to work becomes limited. when i was in japan, i thought it would be good tore me to challenge my own conventional wisdom and see hiroshima. because like you said, nuclear weapons are just another weapon and other weapons can be equally

destructive. going there, it's a little different. seeing firsthand and especially as an american and few americans there in a bank holiday, it was very crowded, to see what a nuclear weapon does to a city is really something else and sobering. the numbers that they have there that 90% of the city was destroyed. 140,000 people died and lucky ones are the ones that died right away, not the ones that died within first ten days of the two waves of radiation that hit when you drop a weapon like this. it made me think too about -- that bomb was a 15 kiloton weapon. which in the new nuclear posture review, as a whole class of weapons we're going to rehabilitation. we need to think carefully about that. one of the things that really struck me is that's -- that kind of destruction and seeing the photographs and hearing the eyewitnesses talk about it is overwhelming but at the same time hiroshima is pretty much a normal city now. it's got trees and farms and people are driving around in

their cars and looking at their smartphones and it's a reminder that the natural world that arena of destruction, even ultimate destruction like that is pretty resilient and that people are pretty resilient. ut i would i say that's not something we cannot afford to take for granted for the 21st century. >> so, we have time for questions. >> this question is for the afghan expert, re-dow? am i pronouncing that correctly? what are the odds with negotiation with the taliban going forward given thus far the u.s. refused to engage in the taliban and the taliban says

unless u.s. engages they won't speak to ghani's government? the example of course is the release of bergdahl and the deal made for his release out of taliban captivity. the conversation has been going on for quite some time. now is the challenge that there is no home for negotiation in the state department or in the places where you would expect to see it, there used to be a special representative for afghanistan and pakistan which started under time.d holbrook's

since his death, that has tailed off and has been re-consolidated into the regional bureaus in the state department. there is no home now for negotiations. there has been an attempt by the white house and h.r. mcmaster is a veteran of afghanistan who knows that territory quite well. can tove done what they try to create a home within the butonal security council there is still not a focus. a lot depends on whether the u.s. is willing to accept this opportunity that has opened up and really see it as an opportunity. , he is not out there saying that he would offer a cease-fire without talking to someone in washington. whether there is a formal approval is another story but i hardly inc. the cease-fire offer is coming out of the blue.

he is not as erratic as his predecessor. the question is now, can we stand up a team that has the focus not onded to fixing afghanistan which unfortunately i think was one of the mistakes of the earlier group. were focused on whether pomegranates would be shipped out to afghanistan. it was a scattered approach. we need the u.s. to focus on what it would mean to make a deal. there are a couple of things we might need. one thing is not just an understanding of the regional processes because there is processes going on for a long time. this needs to be a more considered approach to what the taliban has raised.

one, accountability. , currentudes members and former of the afghan government who have been implicated in war crimes. we need to be prepared to have an answer for that. is the roleestion askeligion in the state of -- of afghanistan. this is not going to go away. we cannot wish it away. it is embedded in the culture. and we need to have someone in the team who has an understanding of the different debates around the role of islam in ordering the state. if we do not have that, if we continue to focus on the technical and stodgy approaches to the negotiation process. we risk allowing this to go on and on. there is a lot of investment there.

u.n. probablye needs to make some investment in standing up a team that has a similar array of expertise. the reality is there are too many players in the game. and there needs to be a neutral that can define the shape of the table, set the table, and make sure that the dishes are taken away at the right time so that we can come to an agreement. the taliban is 30,000 people in a country of 30 million people. this is not an enormous group of people. it goes back to the question of a week government and a small

force that is doing well against a weak state. have you create a strong state? there is a great deal of literature on that and it is not something that happens overnight. we can guarantee that the 2019 , if it isal election not regarded as free and fair, the whole experience will fail. this insurgency could go on for decades. and the problem about negotiating with the taliban is what do they want? they have not really said. ?ho are they there are multiple parts of the taliban. we have also run a controlled experience about what negotiations with the taliban would look like.

remember, back in 2009, they were 70 miles from islam abide. after when of these negotiations. the u.s. government should negotiate with the taliban. we talked to the soviet union throughout the cold war. we should always be talking to our enemies but the expectations should be low and what we have should be certain. it will be very hard for president trump or any american political leader to say -- we are going to keep sending people here to prop up the system that keeps producing these bad outcomes. i am a great skeptic that we are going to get this right. the u.s. government should be thinking about this election and how to support it. say that break-in and that is a very important point, peter.

risks twoion really thinks. not just the failure of negotiations and continued violence. but we could be looking at the beginning of a path toward the partition of the country. for saying controversial things about afghanistan and it has gotten me into hot water but i believe this time it is different. governor the north the province a prosperous who has been in power for 17 over, resisting his firing corruption allegations. afghan circlesin in washington, there is a big debate on what to do with him and this rebellion. on the one hand you have a camp that says he should not be stirring up trouble before the elections. that this is an inopportune time

to be pressing for greater accountability around the corruption issue. on the other hand, there is a camp that says the fundamental problem that washington needs to deal with. again, you find the leader of -- again come you find the leader of the country between problems. what this says is that he is prepared to become a challenger and he represents very large portions in the north that i think would be tempted to support him. that he feelso us comfortable doing that. and that there is a sense that kabul is weak enough that it can be challenged. and that is very dangerous for a lot of different reasons. i do not think we are risking that situation that we would go

back to the soviet times. theseinely think that if elections are not handed in a way that people are satisfied. if we do not figure out if postponement plus reform is a best answer or reform immediately and then elections is the best answer, we are going nosee a situation where it longer becomes possible for the north to meet the south in afghanistan. and so we could be looking at a south sudan situation in the coming years. >> thank you and congratulations on the center. diane perlman, george mason school for conflict and resolution. first, regarding the issue of fake news, i agree with you that the way to stop a bad guy with wrong facts is not a good guy with rightfax. not just about the content but the process and the emotional meaning.

i think what we need to do is teach people how to know when they are being manipulated. my kids learn this in fifth grade. don't be a sucker and how to be aware. and the second thing, i really zero.he concept of phase being from the school of conflict analysis. i know your center is also dealing with conflict. way that we approach it -- what is the underlying conflict about, what do the parties want, how to reduce tensions, what are legitimate goals including identity, it dignity, sovereignty, security, and safety. roosevelt idea about talk softly and carry a

big stick. i wonder if the future of war -- i think that should be in the background. i would like to know what you think about that. >> i think you are right and i do think that is a normal part sense -- we have to be able to do it all, not just build security and fight wars. we need our diplomats and development if we are going to have security. not how americans tick, unfortunately. as a polity, we are much more comfortable putting money into defense than building organizations. i think it is incumbent upon the defense department to think that

way. i am not saying that we have to every kind of engagement that we have in the world but the department of defense needs to think about a more sophisticated way to build security. that is think understood by this administration but the rhetoric is trending towards a more traditional platform centric. one of the things we're looking at is the explosion of technology and were fighting where you have data and machine assisted satellite learning. we can also use them to preventnd peace and wars. we are looking at how to apply some of these analytical tools to understand what creates conflict and what kinds of investments are most likely to create peace. that is what the project is

actually looking at. anare looking right now at entire landscape survey about every decision support rule that kindt there that does that of analysis. understanding where the trends are. early warning indicators. and other research tools. >> the u.s. national security system talks about the three d's. i was wondering about diplomacy and development. just to throw one factor out the oneghanistan -- most effective thing that one woman had said in afghanistan -- had seen in afghanistan was project are that had been sponsored by embattled --

ambassador there it from thunderbird. >> and the person asking that question is a former high-ranking usaid official. we are in an interesting time where it is not so sequential. it is hard to pull apart. you cannot have security without economic -- economic activity but you cannot have economic activity without security. how do you do all of these things at the same time? particularly when you are facing these adversaries. we need to develop a more sophisticated way as a country and make that question that assessment. i agree with your question. perspective of someone that used to work at the institute of peace, we used a

deal quite often with the two d's. what of the challenges the aunt the pullback that we see with this administration, we have pendulum swinga away from development and diplomacy. made provide some opportunity for the aid community and the diplomatic community to really think hard now. innovations are big, is less likely. and the real question you have in a place like afghanistan, syria, and yet been -- and yemen is the absorption capacity of these countries. something we have grappled with for a long time. how to solve the problem of

dumping billions of dollars into a place that does not have a central bank system. what does that mean for corruption? for organized crime? it is something we need to address. in some ways, while i think the halloween out of our diplomatic corps is a tragedy in many ways, we may come to regret that in the same way that we did under senator helms and his cuts in the 1980's. but, it may be an opportunity for those to stay in and fight the good fight especially on how to get aid delivery so it is more efficient, more effective, and less wasteful. i have a question about the level of trust. and i would like any panelist to comment on that. particularly on the importance

of trust when it comes to the future of war, national security -- you mentioned that you think today's situation is worse. pastwhen i think about the , the level of trust in society seems worse and what can we learn about the past times >>. i happen to think trust is one of the most important aspects of anything that functions in a society, especially a democratic society. the social glue. in the absence of trust, it is difficult for even the simplest things to happen. this is even true in your own personal relationships. where there is a lack of trust, the feeling is resistance, defensiveness and then unwillingness to be a party to that relationship. thatnot necessarily think

mistrust is worse now than it has been in the past -- there have been focuses of mistrust that we can show quantitatively is worse. that is one metric of trust. but i do not think people trust their neighbors less. trusts interesting about is that in its absence it is enormously difficult to do things but where there is trust, it is substantially easier to manage tensions. a talk about resilience as hot term to understand the source of challenges that a larger society faces. true that the key element of social resistance of anything that happens whether it is a devastating hurricane or any other social and stressful event, there are have to be

levels of trust in the social order. how you establish trust with your friends and family -- it six not have a tick box of things that you do and suddenly everyone trusts each other. lives, the most important relationships are founded on trust. >> what rattled us about these elections is that the american public did not seem to invested in our place in the world. and things that we took on a matter of faith. we have allies. this is good. protecting your position in the world means piece and prosperity at home. it is clear that that is not the case anymore across the country -- that people feel that way. i think that translates into a lack of trust.

we as a community are doing a lot of soul-searching on our role and that we should be as focused on home as we were abroad. interesting dilemma. as daniel said, at the same time, the military remains the most trusted institution in the country and that is a strange tension. americans have a lot of face in their armed forces but not a lot of faith in our place in the world and our investment in the rest of the world. that is something i find very troubling and is the focus of the work we are doing. >> we have come to the end of our event. thank you so much for joining us here. and we look forward to seeing you again. [applause];

q&a,night, on c-span's colorado college professor tom cronin talks about his book "imagining a great republic and the idea of america." the idea of reading american political classics is in no bling and empowering in terms of q&a, colorado college professor tom this country stands for something very special and the are reminding -- they were storytellers saying i tried once to be something special, not just a city on the hill but a city that cares and loves one another.

and understand that politics is indispensable to bringing about progress for as many people as possible. >> q&a, tonight at 8:00 eastern on c-span. on c-span this morning, washington journal is next. live with your phone calls and a look at today's headlines. that is followed by newsmakers with democratic congressman john yarmouth of kentucky and later, the senate judiciary committee takes a look at school safety proposals in response to last months deadly shooting in parkland, florida. coming up on today's washington journal, jeffrey edmonds from the wilson center talks about russia's role in the poisoning of a former spy living in the u.k. and the u.s. response to russian interference in the 2016 election. and later, we