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This is an archived USAID document retained on this web site as a matter of public record.
Remarks of J. Brian Atwood
Georgetown University
"Conflict Prevention in Today's World"
Washington, D.C.
October 14,1998
It is a real privilege to be asked to deliver a "lecture" anywhere, but doubly so to be invited to Georgetown University. Your School of Foreign Service offers the premier program in international studies -- the right blend of academic rigor and exposure to practitioners.
When one has had over 30 years of experience in foreign policy work, one presumes the right to offer a lecture. That is usually the first mistake. Thirty years of experience is barely sufficient to tell you what you don't know about international relations.
The second mistake is to presume to lecture up as if you were a newspaper columnist or a college professor. I am sure the President and the Secretary of State have ample access to critical commentary from both quarters, so I will refrain from lecturing up.
If you read my background closely, you will see that I have spent time as a career foreign service officer and that at one time I pretended to train foreign service officers as Dean of FSI's School of Professional Studies. That was an easy job because foreign service officers already know everything they need to know! At other times I have worked for and with the Congress. As transition leader at State, Under Secretary and AID Administrator, I have tried my hand at reorganizing and reforming large bureaucracies.
In all of these incarnations I have thought long and hard about the role of foreign service professionals in the policy process. One memory of my tenure as Dean of Professional Studies continues to both haunt me and strengthen my conviction that we can do better.
We were attempting to teach the techniques of objective analysis to FSOs, insisting that the role of the professional was to convey the best possible political and economic analysis to the decisionmaker. One of the officers was asked by his fellow classmates to see me to offer a protest. "You are going to get us all into trouble with this approach," he said. "Everyone knows that our job is to do what our political bosses tell us to do, not to present objective analysis."
That officer is today an Ambassador. Maybe he had it right in terms of getting ahead. That is also perhaps why the contemporary world and its frequent crises seem to confound us so, and that is perhaps why there is such strong resistance within the bureaucracy to the notion that we can do a better job of organizing ourselves to practice crisis prevention.
I hope I am not getting cynical, but sometimes it seems that people in our business would rather keep searching for that elusive new paradigm than to look for ways to strengthen the capacity of our existing governmental institutions to prevent crisis. Whatever the reason, we have thus far failed to change in any significant way our approach. One consequence is that our political leaders -- indeed, the entire international system -- seems overwhelmed by crises.
`In my humble opinion it is long past time to stop celebrating the end of the Cold War and the "end of history" and to start doing what Americans do best -- take history by the neck, wrestle it to the ground and begin to shape the future. Forget about leaping across the current realities to a new paradigm as if, like Einstein, we can somehow create the new theory without experiencing the reasoning that flows from doing. The realities cannot be glossed over, for collectively they represent a complex set of very threatening variables.
Consider that since the fall of the Berlin Wall, over 4 million people have been killed in conflicts -- over three quarters of them civilians. You are all familiar with the litany of hot spots -- Kosovo, the Congo, Sri Lanka, Algeria, Afghanistan, Sudan, Iraq, Angola. Every day around the globe the hard work of diplomats and developers is undone in an instant by the fury of directed violence.
There are so many of these low-level crises, the American people cannot be blamed for putting them out of their minds. Yet, these conflicts have come at great cost to the United States. Since the mid-1980's, the number of man-made emergencies requiring a U.S. Government response has doubled. Since the Gulf War, the United States has mounted 27 military operations, mostly the result of ethnic conflicts or the collapse of nation states. Today about 90 percent of USAID's disaster relief account is spent on so-called complex emergencies, meaning man-made conflict. A decade ago we spent only 10 percent on complex emergencies. The costs of peacekeeping operations, reconstruction programs, refugee relief and emergency food aid are soaring.
All of this is destabilizing the world around us, destroying opportunities for economic growth and the continuing evolution toward democratic governance and open market systems. I would not suggest that this level of conflict is a principal cause of the global financial crisis, but it has contributed to the crisis just as the financial collapse of nations will add to the violence.
The word "contagion" has been used to describe the pressures that have been brought to bear on the newly emerged markets by speculators and investors of short-term capital. Contagion accurately conveys the notion of irrational fear ... it produces a sort of domino effect that results in a global crisis.
The same phenomenon has an impact on the movement toward democracy. As crises increase, fears build, and the psychology of defeat begins to permeate the international community. This definition then begins to replace the psychology of victory that dominated a few years ago when the Berlin Wall fell, when apartheid was ended in South Africa and when a peace agreement was signed between Israel and the Palestinians.
Each conflict and crisis makes it harder, not easier, for the international community to respond effectively. Each crisis further stretches limited political and economic capital. Each conflict risks creating new fatigue that will force citizens and their legislators to throw up their hands and turn their backs on the world.
The case is overwhelming: this chaos is threatening our national self-interest. It is undermining global stability and it is making a mockery of our efforts to promote democracy and open-market systems. It is time to act. But will we?
Our commitment to a prevention strategy has been repeatedly recognized in government and the private sector; by the Administration and Congress; at the leadership and working levels; in the field and in headquarters. In perhaps his most memorable act as Secretary General of the United States, Boutros Boutros Ghali called on the nations of the Security Council to practice preventive diplomacy. His words, spoken some six years ago, have fallen into a void.
Several prevention initiatives have been undertaken in the last half decade. There has been some progress, but overall these efforts have failed to forestall the number, magnitude and frequency of the crises we currently face. The reasons why we still have failed to embrace the diplomacy of conflict prevention are complex, but let me list a few.
First, there is no "culture" of prevention within the foreign affairs agencies, including my own. At the State Department, the NSC, USAID, and even the Pentagon, far more attention is given to response and resolution of conflicts, than to preventing them.
Generally, we deal with the big problems right in our face. We remain very much averse to trying innovative approaches to something that might be a problem "later on." In the current bureaucratic structure it takes much too much courage for an individual to stand up and offer an objective analysis that relates to a problem that may emerge next year if left unattended.
Second, the prevention work that now takes place lacks integration, focus and a clear sense of strategic planning. We have developed some tools that help us anticipate problems, but, in the vertical systems we have created, we rarely advance the information to a place where action and resources would actually mitigate the problem.
Third, there are constraining clashes of organizational cultures when we try to work across agencies and with outside organizations.
Different organizations look at the world, its problems, and the U.S. role, very differently. These differences should be helpful. They should help us define more options, but often the turf wars and clashes of culture inhibit the flow of ideas.
Fourth, prevention efforts are often put aside because of a perceived lack of political will. But the "political will" argument is too often just a convenient whipping boy. Too often poor planning or a failure to be proactive is excused on this basis.
My own experience has been that a well-developed case for preemptive action will generate enthusiasm from senior political leaders. I took a case for preemptive action to prevent a famine in East Africa to the Vice President and the National Security Advisor, Tony Lake. They arranged a briefing for the President and the President's Greater Horn of Africa Initiative was born. There was no absence of political will.
Fifth, there is skepticism about getting involved in prevention when you cannot "prove" that your efforts are effective. It is the age-old problem of being called upon to prove a negative. That is why fire departments have a harder time getting minor funding for fire prevention than they do for expensive fire engines.
A non-event is difficult to proclaim a success. Some bureaucrats resist undertaking prevention on the grounds that they are required to quantify results. People naturally resist being set up for failure.
Likewise, we haven't yet figured out how to hold people accountable for failing to anticipate significant conflicts. And I can assure you, government officials do not wish to be held to such a standard.
Sixth, the lack of resources -- money, staff and time -- is frequently cited as the reason earlier preventative efforts failed. All three of these resources are shrinking to the point where it is admittedly a challenge to do routine foreign policy work, much less aggressive prevention efforts. USAID's total staff has been cut by one-third since 1993. The State Department has a hard time getting enough funding to keep its embassies open, much less embark on bold new initiatives.
These six obstacles add up to a very large mountain that is blocking creative change within the Executive Branch. They combine to limit American leadership within the international community as well. The United Nations systems should be better equipped to practice crisis prevention, but how can we promote reform when we fail to reform ourselves and then fail to pay our bills?
I have attempted at USAID to advance the prevention cause with some success, though I cannot claim to have created a "prevention culture." Development assistance has to be a significant part of the answer to this challenge. As the President said in his UN General Assembly speech a few weeks ago, "We must work harder to treat the sources of despair before they turn into the poison of hatred."
Development is the antidote of despair. It creates hope and opportunity. It is not international welfare; it helps people help themselves.
This has always been true. But we have tried in recent years through our strategic planning process to highlight and treat societal problems that can lead to conflict. Let me give you a few examples.
In South Africa, our democracy and governance programs played a key role in the peaceful transition from apartheid to a non-racial democracy. We helped train 200 mediators to facilitate a problem-solving dialogue and to help people negotiate differences. 2,600 grassroots workers were trained in conflict resolution for the same purpose. We supported the development of indigenous NGOs to help nurture a civil society that could support democratic rule. Despite the skeptics, South Africa made it through its transition without the bloodbath many predicted.
Development programs can help address explosive social issues. While many people may not see the link between literacy, environmental, economic, or health programs and conflict, when you work on the ground these links become self-evident.
For example, we deal with property rights and land tenure issues. This may seem like an obscure issue to some, but when you go to a place like Zimbabwe -- where wars have already been fought because of the explosive combination of land rights and race -- you can easily comprehend the volatility of this issue.
We see a similar pattern with many environmental and health issues. To people in the United States, the environment means dealing with national parks and clean air. But to people in the developing world, these issues are crucial to their livelihoods and their way of life.
In Jordan and West Bank/Gaza the scarcity of clean water and the absence of sanitation have been major irritants to populations who already feel that they are unfairly treated. In Southern Africa, we have seen escalating border tensions between Botswana and Namibia over water diversion and wildlife management. Fortunately, these two democracies have learned to settle their disputes peacefully, but development programs have helped.
USAID has been actively dealing with all of these issues, and I think it again demonstrates that the root causes of conflict can often be traced back to very meaningful, but more pedestrian, aspects of every day life in the developing world.
Investing in development can occasionally produce unanticipated benefits in terms of easing societal tensions. Our work to increase women's literacy in Nepal -- where only 22 percent of the women were literate in 1991 -- has also resulted in increased awareness of women's legal rights.
Nepalese women, who learned about their basic legal rights as an outgrowth of the literacy program, objected to the fact that they had no legal right to inherit property. These newly literate women convinced the Nepalese Supreme Court to overturn existing inheritance laws because of gender bias.
The ultimate effect of some of these changes will continue to play out for decades to come. Women in Nepal will contribute more to economic growth, democracy and overall stability. They have become an instrument of crisis mitigation.
USAID has also taken the lead in helping nations emerge from conflict. This is an important aspect of prevention, in that so many nations slide back after halting moves toward peace. We started an Office of Transitions Initiatives six years ago. Since then, it has supported efforts to: demobilize former combatants; promote independent media; generate community work programs; demine large tracts of farmland; and support human rights monitors and electoral systems. The transition measures have been designed to move rapidly to show war-weary citizens the tangible benefits of peace.
Other donors and international organizations have begun to replicate this model, and clearly it is filling a much needed void among our tools to promote conflict prevention.
We have had some successes, but we have just begun to create the institutional capacity to prevent crisis. What more can be done?
The first step would be to improve our analytical understanding of the forces that, left unattended, can precipitate crisis. We need to create inter-disciplinary embassy teams on the ground who can effectively note warning signs. These "country teams" need to be rewarded for brutal honesty.
The new Mission Programming Plan system wherein country teams analyze U.S. interests in countries and present their annual programming plan are a good vehicle for identifying areas of potential crisis. Resources and plans would then be directed at mitigating the problem.
We also need to push back the time frame of early warning if we hope to head off crises. Currently, we begin to receive early warning indicators three to six months from an expected crisis. This is not enough time to implement a prevention strategy.
Many of the root causes of crisis are complex and deeply rooted in a society. The momentum of a potential crisis is usually such that it is beginning to peak in the final 90 to 120 days. At that point, one can often only do damage control or preposition supplies for a pending humanitarian tragedy. Instead, we need to push the window outward, and attempt to deal with crises 12-48 months out, a far more realistic timeframe for addressing root causes.
In general, we need to make crisis prevention decisions earlier, in a more collaborative fashion and at a lower level in the bureaucracy. Too often these important decisions get pushed up the hierarchy, greatly slowing the process. When they land on the desks of principals, they fall victim to the crisis of the moment. It is unrealistic to think that senior officials can individually be involved in multiple problem solving on potential problems that are one to four years off when they have today's crisis to manage.
We need to delegate authority to lower- level officials who are usually the country experts in any case. They should have the power to act and the resources to expend as they see fit. We tried to accomplish this goal in the State Department reorganization of 1993, but authority is difficult to delegate downward at State -- it seems to defy the rules of gravity!
None of these efforts to make prevention a reality will work if we continue to be penny wise and pound foolish in funding foreign affairs. Spending on foreign affairs is approaching historic lows in terms of real dollars, and this is simply unacceptable when we face such a dangerous and seemingly unpredictable world. Resources for prevention must be given a higher priority and this funding must be flexible enough to deal with real world contingencies.
We can continue to procrastinate and worry about the absence of the new paradigm, but the stakes are growing. We are already close to being overwhelmed by today's many crises. Our grand design of a world of democracies engaging in free trade in a growing global economy is still valid, but it is a threatened concept. The international system is close to broken and we must examine our own responsibility for its state.
Some things we cannot control, but we can get better at this job of preventing crises. We can organize ourselves better and we can insist on objective analysis. We can fund our development programs and our diplomacy more generously to mitigate and eliminate the root causes of crisis. If we take history by the neck, as we naive Americans have done so often in the past, we can even create a culture of prevention.
The stakes are very high. If we fail to act now, we could relegate future generations to a world of unmanageable chaos. Thank you.
This is an archived USAID document retained on this web site as a matter of public record.
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Last Updated on: July 18, 2001 |
