173: Achieving post conflict stabilization with Prof. Beatrice Heuser (Pt.2)

Recently, I partnered with SMA's Mariah Yager to talk with Professor Beatrice Houser about post-conflict stabilization. 

“In Kuwait, preparing for the Iraq invasion, I asked the leadership, ‘Could you give us a little more detail about after we get to Baghdad and topple the regime? ' [The answer] was more than inadequate.’” -David Petraeus, speaking at Carnegie.

The U.S. and the West recently suffered monumental failures in planning and implementing post-conflict stabilization, resulting in massive corruption, instability and loss of foreign policy goals.

[Charley Wilson’s War]. “These things happened. They were glorious, and they changed the world... and then we fucked up the endgame.” -Charley Wilson’s end-of-film quote.

In this session, we turn the corner from commiserating on past failures to discussing solutions to planning and implementing the transition from conflict to post-conflict stabilization. To help partner nations regain their stability, security and partnership in the international community.  

To help, we have brought in Professor Beatrice Heuser, renowned Chair in International Relations at the University of Glasgow and second to the General Staff Academy of the Bundeswehr, as Head of Strategy.

Dr. Heuser recently published a paper on post-conflict Gaza stabilization and reconstruction and wanted to discuss strategies for building an effective post-conflict strategy and operation.  

Jack Gaines, showrunner and host of the One CA Podcast, is joining SMA to co-host the discussion.

In this session, Dr. Heuser, Jack Gaines, Mariah Yager and the audience will try to address three themes:
1. Planning the transition from conflict to post-conflict. How should the military shape the end of an active conflict to help the transition to post-conflict stabilization?

2. How to support the post-conflict stabilization. Typically, during stabilization, insurgencies rise, popular movements grow, and extremist groups attempt to usurp the transition for their political ambitions; how does conflict stabilization work with the military to minimize usurping groups while spotting and enabling popular movements?

3. Spotting and supporting the post-conflict transition and transitioning a post-conflict state that depends on aid and support to become independent. How can the military, diplomacy, and development workers manage the process to ensure a successful transition to becoming an independent partner in the international community?

 

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and brings in people who are current or former military, diplomats, development officers, and field agents to discuss their experiences on the ground with a partner nation's people and leadership.

We aim to inspire anyone interested in working in the "last three feet" of U.S. foreign relations. 

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00:00:03    Introduction
Welcome to the 1CA Podcast. This is your host, Jack Gaines. 1CA is a product of the Civil Affairs Association and brings in people who are current or former military, diplomats, development officers, and field agents to discuss their experiences on ground with the partner nation's people and leadership. Our goal is to inspire anyone interested in working the last three feet of foreign relations. To contact the show, email us at capodcasting at gmail dot com. Or look us up on the Civil Affairs Association website at www .civilaffairsassos .org. I'll have those in the show notes.

00:00:39    MARIAH YAGER
Hello, everyone. I'm Mariah Yeager, and welcome to today's SMA speaker session entitled Building Solutions to Post -Conflict Stabilization. I'd like to thank Professor Beatrice Huser for taking the time to speak with us today. And I'd also like to welcome back Major Jack Gaines of the 1CA podcast as our guest host.

00:00:57    JACK GAINES
I partnered with SMA to talk with Professor Beatrice Hauser on post -conflict stabilization. What you will hear on this show is the edited version. If you wish to listen to the full uncut version, I will have a link to it in the show notes. This is part one of two. The second half comes out next week. So enjoy.

00:01:17    MARIAH YAGER
So with that, please keep your video and audio off for the duration of the event so we have a nice clear line for our presentation today. All right, let me introduce Professor Beatrice Huser. She holds the Chair in International Relations at the University of Glasgow. She has degrees from the Universities of London and Oxford and a habilitation from the Phillips University of Marburg. She has taught at King's College London and at universities in France and Germany. Previously, she has worked on the international staff at NATO headquarters in Brussels as well. She has numerous publications. from nuclear strategy, history of strategy, insurgencies, and counterinsurgency. But today we're talking about post -conflict stabilization. And with that, I'm going to turn the floor over to Leijer.

00:01:59    JACK GAINES
Thank you, Mariah. And thank you, Professor Huser. Personally, I see a market gap in post -conflict stabilization. And to describe that gap, I forwarded Professor Huser three challenge questions to help her shape her presentation and the discussion. Those questions were, the military drives conflict to an end state. what conditions do we need to achieve to successfully transition a conflict into post -conflict stabilization? Second, during post -conflict conditions, how does the military and lead agencies spot and support legitimate efforts while also spotting and filtering out groups trying to derail recovery for their own benefit or spoilers or those who use instability for personal gain? And third, How do we work to transition a nation from post -conflict dependencies to becoming a self -sufficient member of the international community? These came to me after listening to retired General David Petraeus speak at Carnegie. He talked about when he was a division commander preparing to go into Baghdad and asking leadership about the plan after toppling the regime. The response was, leave that to us, which he states was inadequate. General Petraeus described the market gap. We needed to know the instate to achieve post -conflict conditions and then how to deter instability to support stabilization and transition. So that is the challenge for Professor Huser to answer. But I also wanted to use this talk as a call to action. We should take chalk to the State Department CSO strategy to either update our current plans and operations so they achieve the conditions for post -conflict stabilization and transition or Build operational templates that staff can plug into the back of any strategy or operation so planners can sketch out the steps to drive a conflict into a successful post -conflict environment with stabilization and transition. So with that, Professor Huser, good morning.

00:04:00    BEATRICE HEUSER
Thank you very much indeed. I'm very honored to be with you. If you can stop sharing your screen, I will flash mine up straight away and start. with a disclaimer that I am a very small and modern armchair strategist, and I'm standing on the shoulders of lots and lots of giants, which means that I'm going to introduce you in the first part of this whole talk to the ideas and the thinking of some very interesting and very important people of the past who've had plenty of experience. But at the same time, what is driving my interest is, of course, the present. And you will see all along, I think, like me, how these ideas that were developed by people a long time ago impact on the present. More still, there's a big debate about how much war changes and how much technology impacts war. I think particularly when it comes to insurgencies, peacemaking, counterinsurgency, intervention in foreign wars, there is a particularly strong continuity. even with allowances made for some of the modern technology. All the themes I'm going to be running past you today very quickly, I have got a very important role to play still in the present. So without further ado, let me plunge into the subject and I promise to you that I'll become more modern as at the very end during questions and answers. But I don't think it would make much sense if I simply ran you through. the NATO AGP 3 .28 contribution to stabilisation, let me take you back instead to a lot of ideas that have been around for a long time, some of which have found their way into this new NATO document. So these are the points that I'm going to be addressing. What happens when we're still at war affects everything else, then the difficulties of the transition to peace, post -conflict stabilisation, and how then to wean a polity from this foreign intervention. And then I have a big philosophical question at the end, which you will have to bear with me for, because it is very, very difficult and very morally problematic in every way. And I hope that I will not be misread when coming to this last point. So very briefly, let us look at what happens while we're still at war and how that influences the outcome and the intervention and the outcome of a stabilisation. process afterwards. One of the things that I've discovered trying to look into the subject of how to end wars is that causes of wars and war aims could be the same really, but they're not. Simply because during a war, particularly if it's more than seven days, more things can appear that will change the aims of the war. In theory, the causes of the war are grievance that you want to address. So if you've addressed the grievance, the war's over. But in fact, during the development of the war, things change. Existing causes and war aims can wax and wane in that context. The question is, in trying to make peace, what is at stake? Is it something like secession of a state or a part of a state? Is it to have better rights? Or is it something much bigger? Is it in fact something like... a world order that lurks behind that particular conflict. Is the war about ethnic tensions with interstate, as it was in Bosnia, Herzegovina and Kosovo? Is it about picking out a foreign occupation power, a colonial power, as in Indochina and Algeria on Indonesia? Is it about religion, as it was for the Iranian Revolution Phase II, the Arab Spring Phase II, Afghanistan in its last phase? Is it about kicking out, overthrowing a government that is non -democratic and corrupt and is trying to perpetuate its power as South Vietnam in Iran, the Shah and phase one in Iraq, in Niger? And one of the important things there was a realization by one of my heroes about you, whom you're going to hear more, a Spaniard called the Third Marquis of Santa Cruz de Mascinado, who lived in the early 18th century. and who even then said that a state rarely rises up without the fault of its governors. And a Welshman who was Catholic and therefore escaped Protestant England and Britain in the 18th century, the first cause and object of a revolt is to repel injuries, real or supposed. The second is to provide for future security, which can never be effectually done other than by destroying the sovereign authority. There is no alternative. Freedom or slavery is the result of it. Very interestingly enough, during the first phase of the American War of Independence, but this stark way he put it is very modern. Therefore, the sovereign in conducting such a war should, by a moderate conduct, diminish the idea of danger and leave room to a solid and hearty reconciliation. So reconciliation is already a very important idea to take away from the idea of how to... end the war and stabilize that result of war. The effects of the conduct of war will polarize warring parties even more, particularly if the war is conducted in a way perceived as being exceptionally cruel. Ukrainians cared little about Russians before 2014. By now, it is pretty unlikely that there are a lot of Ukrainians still around who have positive feelings about Russians and the many things we hear about Ukraine, about how they suddenly... ban Russian books from bookshelves and from the school curricula seem to suggest that. Equally, the feelings of people in Gaza, I imagine, are much worse now towards Israel than even when the war started in October last year. Christina Pizal, who is the only woman strategist I've ever come across in the early 15th century, wrote that cruelty increases and multiplies the number of enemies by making many people die. for their children are kin succeed them in hate. That is to say, for one enemy slain, several others spring up. This has got a path to reconciliation when, for every enemy slain, several others spring up. A very brief note about bombing. The idea in the immediate post -World War I period that you could end wars faster by bombing civilian populations. Pressing them to put pressure in turn on their governments to surrender has been proved to be quite unworkable. So in the Second World War, as a number of authors have shown, this was quite counterproductive because it created more solidarity, both in Ukraine and in Gaza. It has not turned the population against its own government. I think in both cases, the bombing from the air has had very adverse effects on the chances of making a good peace. making it soon and then stabilizing the situation. Let me touch briefly on the question of which external actors might be the best to intervene in something that is a civil war of a country, a non -international armed conflict. There are configurations in which somebody very, very external to the conflict might have been a good side to intervene. For example, I used to go around in the 1990s before the Easter agreements and the Good Friday agreements were signed in 1998, saying that in fact it would have been a good idea to bring in German forces because they weren't sympathising with either side and they weren't seen as enemies by either side. In the Yugoslav wars it was clearly an external multinational force that was the best. In African conflicts what seems not to be a good idea is to bring in previous colonial powers. There's a lot of atheistic reaction to say, ah, they're just neo -colonialists now, they're just trying to get back to their colonial rights. In the Gaza conflict, Israel conflict, I think it would be best to have other Muslim countries coming in. I don't think it would be very good to have lots of European countries coming in and doing anything there. But having a Muslim coalition intervene would, I think, be a very interesting avenue to explore. One of the things that is incredibly difficult or can be a great obstacle to making peace is if the conflicting parties have something very different in mind for that peace, for that peace order. And if you look at past peace settlements going through history, the ones which were particularly difficult to arrive at were ones where the different parties to the conflict not only quarrel over particular rights within their country, a particular piece of land or anything like that, in between countries, but about a larger order after the peace. And that was true before the Westphalian peace negotiations. It was true for the end of the Napoleonic Wars, the peace negotiations in Vienna. It was true for the Paris Peace Conference after the end of the First World War. And after the Second World War, it was so tricky and so difficult because particularly the Soviet Union and then the Western powers had such diametrically opposed ideas of what the world order should be like that you didn't really have a peace settlement before you had the Helsinki Final Act of 1975. So this is part of the problem, I think, for Ukraine today. And it is part of the problem for Israel -Palestine. In the case of Ukraine, there's the question of the world system as we have it at the moment, the world order, which bans war as the instrument of state power. If Russia gets away with doing this, the world order is seriously undermined. For Israel -Palestine, it is the Middle Eastern order that is seriously undermined or can be changed in some way or is something that is seen very, very differently by both sides. both denying each other's existence, definitely on the case of Hamas vis -à -vis Israel, and bringing in all the other great powers indirectly or directly into this conflict. So the greater peace afterwards also plays an enormous role in making peace settlements very difficult. The transition to peace has already, in the past, been very slow and difficult in some cases. We've heard an awful lot recently about how neither the First World War nor the Second World War really ends with the date that we always celebrate. Both in the First World War 1918 and the Second World War 1945, in fact, were followed by long -drawn -out conflicts, particularly in Eastern Europe and partly also in the Middle East. in what Timothy Snyder has called the bloodlands, where simply all sorts of vendettas continued. And when, of course, with the Russian Revolution, then the Russian war against Poland and the Baltic states, etc., war simply carried on. It wasn't a simple, neat transition to peace. In those regions, there seems to be something more at stake other than the Christian of how to settle it legally that we have more in Western Europe and some other parts of the world. The same is true for Yugoslavia. Libya, as we know, was not simply ended by our Western military intervention. And if you look at Sudan and South Sudan, another very volatile area which hasn't settled down and where peacemaking hasn't really worked particularly well. One of the things that seems to have been very important in the past has been planning for the transition. This is where the UK Coast Hostilities Planning Committee of the Second World War was exceptional and had an enormous role in determining what Coast Conflict Europe was going to look like. It started in 1943 and by 1944 was signalling very heavily that there was a great danger that the Soviet Union would turn from ally into the new confederator. So this is then in stark contrast. through Iraq 2003 and the total absence of planning there. The question Major Gaines put to me was, how should the military shape the end of an active conflict to help transition to post -conflict stabilisation? I think some of the answers there are that it is very, very important that you get the indigenous powers and the local powers on board so that they can control all armed forces and police forces within the country. and that if a foreign power intervenes, it really must be in sufficient numbers. Those, I think, are two points to keep in mind that you find from a number of previous examples that might be cited to show where something went a little bit better than Iran 2003.

00:17:04    BEATRICE HEUSER
Here's a number of points that I'd just like to raise with regard to interventions that aim at ending the fighting phase of a conflict, when you intervene specifically to stop the fighting. Again, we're talking about the recommendations to the military on shaping the end of an active conflict to help the transition to post -conflict stabilizations. What are the lessons here from two cases that worked particularly well, which in many ways are exceptional? These two cases of Germany and Japan in the Second World War. What worked well there was that there was one government among the Allies that was firmly in command and coordinated all the others. which was the United States after the Second World War. So have one lead power and all the others really orient themselves towards this lead power. And then really have an overall plan for how to proceed and implement it with every tentacle of the great octopus of governance and not have different tentacles do their own things, being stuck in little silos of their own and doing different things. One of the reports coming out is a Bundestag on why Germany failed so badly also in Afghanistan. There were many, many, many reasons, but one of them was that different allies in the intervention in Afghanistan really had different priorities and were fully coordinated. Have the same rules of engagement. I think that's a lesson to be taken away from Bosnia -Herzegovina. That would really, really help. Arrest the leaders, give them a fair trial and do not make them martyrs. And then to see if there is a government in exile that is seen as legitimate. This can be very helpful if it can be seen as legitimate, if it has been there all along, and not necessarily simply as a puppet of the intervention forces that are then appointed by their might rather than by any older legitimacy. This was so helpful in the case of France that there was this government in exile. Turning to post -conflict stabilisation. This is where I want to introduce you again to Santamu, who is not only a soldier but also a diplomat, and had a whole series of ideas that he developed on how to prevent insurgencies and how to quell them once they have broken out, and how to pacify an area that has been at war in some way, mainly as an insurgency, but as in civil war, anything like that. One of the things that he put forward, which is, I think, much in keeping with our own fashion at the moment, is to say that one should stick to the rules of law and the customs of the particular country concerned. One should preserve for the whole state and each individual citizen the unhampered enjoyment of their commodities, laws, freedoms and the religion, not to try to change the customs and religions. The false charges swell the ranks of the malcontents. Often a man becomes a rebel just because he has been falsely suspected. Make sure the criminals are kept in prison and not freed by the rebels. Ensure that the unemployed are employed so that they don't become insurgents. Have proper tribunals and let the culprits be judged there. Keep your own troops very disciplined. Do not use excessive force and do not seek to change the religion and customs of the country. He went on to say that inflation's food scarcity are to be avoided if at all possible. Very important. Create prosperity, markets, trade. This is already for the stabilization post -conflict. Disarm the population and outlaw military exercises. And then one which I think is so sweet. He was all for educating the population and even creating universities. And then all disputes and core rules have to be settled and eradicated by the roots. Only among the rebels should one foster disagreements, but one should suppress them among one's subjects. So this is an amazing piece, and he had a whole series of other pieces of advice. I once asked General Petraeus whether he actually knew of Santa Cruz's writings, and he said never heard of him. I thought it was quite interesting how much that has come to the fore again. I'll run quickly through some more historical examples I had. The French General Dichemin had a whole spiel about how rebels will only prosper if the situation is really poor. And you have to approach the evil plants of piracy, as he called it, rebellion, by ensuring that they can't take root in an environment and the soil that is favorable to them. Establish a military belt. and then reconstitute the society within that area of surrounded by your own soldiers. The French Marsal and Joté was another one who wrote very strongly about the need for a combined application of force and politics. We must always treat the country and its inhabitants with consideration since the former is destined to receive our future colonial enterprises, and the latter will be our main agents and carburetors in the development of our enterprises. This was still from a colonial point of view. The importance that Lyoté saw in political action being more important than military action. There's a whole series of American field manuals that are very, very good. The motive in small wars is not material destruction. You could see that equally for wars of intervention. They're usually projected dealing with the social, economic and political development of the people. It implies a serious study of the people and their culture. Sir Joel Templer talked about really the hearts and minds of people. There were many other American feed manuals that had lots of wisdom on the subject. Let me turn to the question of weaning the polity from external stabilization measures and return again to the examples of why things worked in Germany after 1945. And I said earlier that this was an exceptional case because Germany had been a democracy before, very much unlike many of the other countries that have had Western interventions in. They had no further interest in fighting. They were exhausted, and they did see themselves as quite, quite defeated. Unlike after the First World War, in which there hadn't been an occupation before Germany, Germany in the Second World War hadn't been occupied, and everybody saw that Germany was defeated. There could be no stab -in -the -back legend about how Germany had in fact been undefeated. Hitler was dead. National Socialism was discredited. There was a pretty high rate of occupying forces in relation to the population, far more than in Afghanistan. Among the occupants, there were many people who were German speakers, or at least units had German speakers with them. It was quite different from that point culturally from intervening in a country where there are very few people in our own countries who have those languages and use them.

00:23:56    JACK GAINES
This is part one of two. The second half comes out next week. Thanks for listening. If you get a chance, please like and subscribe and rate the show on your favorite podcast platform. Also, if you're interested in coming on the show or hosting an episode, email us at capodcasting at gmail .com. And now, most importantly, to those currently out in the field working with a partner nation's people or leadership to forward U .S. relations, thank you all for what you're doing. This is Jack, your host. Stay tuned for more great episodes. One CA Podcast.

 

00:00:39    BEATRICE HEUSER
The only area of Germany where there was a lot of continued hostility towards British and Americans because of their bombing was in fact East Germany, which had not been occupied by Americans and Britons, but by the Soviets.

00:01:11    BEATRICE HEUSER
So it's interesting that the fact that people then got to know real Americans and real British people on the ground meant that they dissociated the bombing with the people that occupied them. The occupation forces were pretty harsh in many areas. They kept discipline among the population, etc., but also could be seen to be quite fair. There was little inter -societal hatred in Germany. The occupation forces had the strength that they could distribute the food. Of course, very soon after that came martial aid. And very quickly, Germans felt more prosperous. They felt they were getting out of the misery of the war itself. And by 1948, when you had the Berlin brocade, so very soon after the war, everybody moved their attention from Germany as the old enemy, the enemy that might stand up again, to a new enemy, and the public was much more focused on the Soviet Union, and Germany turned, in a very short period of time, into a potential future ally. It was a very particular situation, and it's important to keep in mind that there's no universal recipe that can be deduced from any of these, particularly not when you want to transfer them to countries without democratic experience, countries that don't see themselves as entirely defeated, countries where there are leaders in exile that will go against the occupation forces' policies, particularly when you have very small occupation forces that can't really relate culturally with the language, etc. When there is no new enemy that can just attract the attention and when there is no economic foundations for quick turnaround into a prosperous country.

00:02:54    BEATRICE HEUSER
And now comes a really, really difficult issue. It's enormously difficult, but I think central to what we're seeing, not so much in Ukraine, but very, very much in Gaza. And that is the question of innocent civilians. As you know, the Israelis have a different perception of what an innocent civilian is. And for the Israelis, even those who are just hiding arms or carrying a missile from A to B, something like that, are seen not as innocent civilians. It would remind you that the innocent meaning wonders who does not harm. To what extent do all those who protect Hamas, to what extent are they not doing harm? through Israel, and the Israelis see them as also contributing to the harm. And this question of how innocent civilians are goes back again to Nazi Germany when the majority of people voted for Hitler, even in the last three elections. To what extent can you say that people who voted for Hitler therefore had absolutely nothing to do with what then happened? There are different categories, I would put it to you. There are those who really cannot do any harm. There are the citizens of a totalitarian system who might be willy -nilly contributing to a war effort simply because they might be afraid that they'd be put behind bars if they don't do a minimum of contributing. Then there are those who are somehow voluntarily enhancing the war effort. Those who are actually the combatants. So for the present discussion, leave aside the question of whether it is physically possible if in war, to differentiate between the four categories. And nevertheless, because one could take from that that there are degrees of responsibility. Those who voted for a party that had already proclaimed war to be its aim, are they really innocent of what that political party does once in government? Those who do not protest against the government as it embarks on a war during its tenure of office, to what extent are they innocent? Those who morally support such a government's war surely are not entirely innocent. And then there are those who are actively supporting this government's work by working in the economy and the defence sector itself. And I'd just like to confront you with two different views on this, both curiously by women, one of them being this early 15th century person I've mentioned to you before, Christine de Pizan. It is in the context of the Hundred Years' War between the King of France and the King of England, both wanting to be King of France. And she somehow assumed that the populations affected by the war had some sort of choice of either supporting the King of France or supporting the King of England. She was on the side of France. And so she said, if the subjects of the King of England do nothing to support the King of England, we shall not harm them. But if they support their own king... then we can pillage their houses, we can take the prisoner, we can seize whatever we can find. And this curiously supposes that in the early 15th century, people had the choice of whether to support their local king or the king of the area in which they lived, or to come over to the other side. So this idea of a democratic choice is quite surprising. To the contrary, there was a Catholic philosopher at Oxford University, G .M. Anscombe, thought that you could differentiate in war between those who are not fighting, not engaged in supplying those who are with a means of fighting. A farmer growing wheat, which may be eaten by the troops, is not supplying them with means of fighting. So she thought you could really differentiate between those who are fighting and those who are not. And anybody contributing to the war effort should be seen as civilian and innocent, therefore. And she was very strongly against the bombing. to which she owed her town Oxford because people admired so much that she went against the entire mood of the time. Interestingly, in the Potsdam conference, and I'm already coming towards the end of my talk, when this is about settlement of Germany after the Second World War, the Allied countries came together and talked about what they wanted to do with Germany. They wanted to punish the Germans. And they came up with the idea that the German people have begun to atone for the terrible crimes committed under the leadership of the Nazis, to whom they gave open approval and blind obedience in the hour of their success. Yet it was not in the intention of the Allies to destroy or enslave the German people, it was their intention to give the German people the opportunity to prepare themselves to rebuild their lives later on, on a democratic and peaceful basis. But as I've already said, this was possible in Germany because the way of life were already there. But you see how that people were thinking about that nexus between how they had approved of and in blind obedience obeyed the Nazi regime. And I'll just point out without condoning it, that this is also the argument made by Islamist terrorists inciting Muslims the world over to kill Americans and their allies because they had supported governments. who in turn had been slaughtering Palestinian people or slaughtered the children of Iraq. This is why the American people are not innocent. The American people are active members in all these crimes, said Osama bin Laden in inciting people to use violence for them. We've also found a British IR theorist, Barry Buzan, in the context of the Kosovo War and the bombing of Serbia. The problem is in the democracies, electors get the government that they deserve. The Serbians turned themselves into human civilian shields by occupying key bridges in order to prevent NATO from blowing them up. He thought they were legitimate targets. And another philosopher, David Luban, brought up this idea of war as a punishment. Democratic states may be even more collectively guilty of international crimes than undemocratic ones precisely because their regimes rely more heavily on popular support. But we, he thought, should reject the conception of collective guilt that can lead to the death of maiming or loss of possession of anyone in a guilty population. Nevertheless, injustice arises from the fact that the disasters of war are distributed among the enemy population without regard to their individual guilt. So this throws up really, really difficult questions about the... guilt and the innocence of civilians. Has it ever worked to put pressure on civilians to overthrow their governments? And so in what circumstances? I'm not sure it has. Will we consider Russian citizens innocent of Putin's war? What non -violent means could one use to increase numbers of Russians opposing Putin? Would limited violence be warranted? And finally, What other legitimate ways could be found to exert pressure on civilian populations with a political result we want, namely a rebellion against the government? But that really goes beyond the question of the post -conflict stabilization that I've been given. Thank you very much for your attention.

00:09:58    JACK GAINES
Thank you. That was excellent. And I appreciate that you brought up the three questions that I had sent you as a preamble, because that's three questions I don't have to ask directly in the Q &A session. So it'll make it a lot easier. Mariah, are you unmuted?

00:10:13    MARIAH YAGER
Yes, I'm standing by. All right,

00:10:15    JACK GAINES
right, great. So I come from a civil affairs community. Our job and goal is to take people who don't want to be in a conflict out of the battle space. But with issues like Hamas and Palestine, to pull everyone out of Gaza so that they can figure out a solution is tough.

00:10:33    BEATRICE HEUSER
That gets us back to this question that David Luban put up, which is, you know, if it were possible to differentiate, that would be nice. But if you can't, the wrong people are suffering.

00:10:41    JACK GAINES
Right.

00:10:42    BEATRICE HEUSER
And this is the conundrum that you can't distinguish, particularly not in bombing, not with the technology we have today, between the people who are really guilty. We have horrible examples of the Second World War, of course, you know, people hiding Jews being killed in the Hamburg firestorm, or American prisoners of war being killed in Nagasaki. The wrong people are then... suffering from what you're trying to do. So we don't have the means of discrimination at the moment. And at the same time, it's quite likely that people who feel neutral and are innocent at that stage are going to feel more strongly moved to the other side when they feel that they have been wronged and they have been bombed and they've been treated very badly in that war. So this is why I was emphasizing the importance of their treatment even while the war is still on.

00:11:26    JACK GAINES
Right. And I can only imagine... Hamas's reaction if we pulled up with four cruise ships to take the population out of there. They would probably fire on the cruise ships and the public who was trying to cross because they want everyone in the fight. So to address what I feel is a market gap in post -conflict stabilization for the military, and we discussed this earlier in the warm -up,

00:11:41    JACK GAINES
what I feel is a market gap in post -conflict stabilization for the military, and we discussed this earlier in the warm -up, and that is General Petraeus went to... And he talked about when he was a division commander in Kuwait and his preparation for going into Iraq to overthrow the government, that when he asked, what is the goals of post -conflict? And they said, leave that to us. We'll take care of it, which is wholly inadequate. And that's what he said as well. And the reason is we need to know the post -conflict strategy and the end states, the goals that we want to achieve in order to drive the conflict to those goals, as well as as we achieve post -conflict standards. to manage that post -conflict environment so that they can be successful. As you were saying with dealing with people who are populists that want to rise up and build that government versus those who are opportunists that want to derail it for their own good and others, people who are criminals that want to take advantage of the chaos in between to further their personal gains. Have you seen any... clear indications of how a force that's working either with a country to build stability or manage conflict, or like in Afghanistan and Iraq, have actually flipped a government and they're trying to build stability. Do you see any ways in which they can manage the population in a way to spot the people who are trying to actually do the right thing versus those who are not?

00:13:09    BEATRICE HEUSER
So one of the things that comes up at the time and again, is in the writings on counterinsurgency. Counterinsurgency in particular are in the intervention in such wars in particular when you're dealing with a criminal regime and the population going along with that regime. And the criminal regime we see as criminal, the population may not yet at that stage see it as criminal. One of them is really, really important. It comes back again and again. It comes to the idea of the trial of the leaders. Make sure that the population themselves understand fully that by the laws, ideally of their own society, their regime was criminal. That's a very, very good first step. And this is why there's been all this criticism of the Nuremberg and the Tokyo trials that they said, well, this is victor's justice. People could have been tried by some of the crimes of their own legislation. So make sure that the leaders are seen as criminals by these trials. Don't make them martyrs. That's actually a very nice one. I don't know to what extent people listening here have ever heard about Beethoven's Egmont Overture. Egmont was a leader of the Dutch Rebellion against the Spanish, and he was executed in Brussels Square, the main big square that every NATO person knows that is the big, beautiful square in Brussels. Egmont became martyrs because they were executed but not tried properly, and the population didn't see them as criminals. They were seen as martyrs. And this is something that Santa Cruz de Macinado had in mind when he said, do not make enemy rebel leaders martyrs. Make sure that they're seen as criminals. Treat them fairly and justly. Give them a trial. So that's one. The other one is, and this has worked for a number of different cultures, it's the amnesty for the many. Quotation goes all the way back to Livy, which says you can either kill the entire population, which is not very realistic, or you must pardon them. So this difference between the big population other than the mass of the population and the criminal leaders, harden the rest, bring them over to their side by clemency and forgiving. And then make it quite clear that you're doing this because you need them, you're being benign and you showing yourself in a benign role. Footnote to that, one of the things that I've been regretting all along as we're talking about very concrete cases here, particularly with regard to the Israeli responses to the 7th of October tragedy. is that they haven't made much more of a show of doing something positive for the population of Gaza. The point is, we're living in a world of media presence and spin doctors, etc. But I see no effort of this, no effort at all of, say, rescue people in hospitals. Only very lately have we seen any aid given to hospitals and the very recent food aid that ended in disasters that we had last week. It seems to be very exceptional. So for months and months, they could have been doing this, even if it was just done in very small amounts. You could have made so much more out of it if that had happened. So do something and we cannot have publicity over it. The martial aid was an enormous success, not only because it happened in very large quantity, but because every single pack of flowers said, this is where martial aid helps, martial aid for you. It was a huge propaganda thing. And propaganda, I think, is very important in this context.

00:16:20    JACK GAINES
I think propaganda gets undersold on these type of issues, especially with the aid delivery. It seemed like it was almost staged to look bad, depending on which camera angle you came from. But most of what I see coming out of areas like Gaza is that people are trying to create the visibility to support the operation versus what you're talking about, shifting populations. from being in total support to either being neutral or even those in the neutral getting out of the way. So Maria, I saw you unmuted. You got something?

00:16:54    MARIAH YAGER
Yeah, a couple of things came up in this idea of talking about the idea of biases and the narratives. We all have biases in our reporting to support our own narratives. How do we rely on these different kind of reports, whether it's from the hospitals or do we have UN observers from NGOs? How does this play into the overall narrative and how we look at these? A problem that has clearly become worse with modern technology,

00:17:18    BEATRICE HEUSER
that has clearly become worse with modern technology, but one which is not altogether new. Rumors have been the enemy of every army that was trying to pacify an area since time immemorial. There's been rumors of a massacre about to happen when the occupation of power was simply benign. So it's not an altogether new thing, but how to verify and to be sure that information you get is actually accurate is, I think, one that you have to leave to technologists that are much more knowledgeable about this than I am. But it's clearly a huge problem.

00:17:50    JACK GAINES
We got Mariah.

00:17:51    MARIAH YAGER
First, I want to throw out a question from Dr. Todd Beesey. So he said, the 1945 conditions and context is important. And as you said, exceptional. Many inside the U .S. and abroad continue to hold firmly the notion of hyper power, perhaps greatly exaggerating its ability to succeed. So this very principle is weighing heavily in our presidential election, as many citizens hold the U .S. president can drive the course of wars in Ukraine and Gaza. Do we need to reframe our understanding about the deprivation and application of power to match the reality of increasing power diffusion in this century?

00:18:28    BEATRICE HEUSER
Thank you very, very much for that very, very incisive question. It's happening. First of all, if you look at all the national security strategies that has come out over the last couple of years, all of them seem to have taken a step back from the idea that was there so strongly after 1945. that we can change the world in our image and ultimately everybody will be democracies, an idea that, of course, had a big surge after the Soviet Union collapse at the beginning of the 1990s. I think there was a lot of optimism, even so far that you had this extraordinary text that was adopted by NATO when ISAF took charge of Afghanistan in 2003, which was to say that they were trying to make Afghanistan a democratic and self -sustaining government. There is no trace of this any longer. in more recent documents. And I was interested to see that, for example, this Allied Joint Doctrine for the military contribution to stabilisation, the word elections or the word democracies are not mentioned. So I think we've taken a step back from that. And I think that ambition, that was probably always over -ambitious. And how to reframe is the question. And the reframing is in part already in that document, I think, accurately to say, one tries to have something that is seen as legitimate by the population there. a government that is legitimate in the eyes of its own population. And as long as you can do that, you're already a lot better off than in a war with people tearing each other apart.

00:19:52    JACK GAINES
This is Jack. You know, that reminds me of Korea, Singapore, and in some parts, Colombia, which were successful in transitioning from conflict to post -conflict. And Singapore and Korea, they had dictators for a while that actually released power into a more democratic state. Rwanda is very similar to that, too. Even though it's a one -party system, they do have some openings for opposition.

00:20:16    MARIAH YAGER
So I was also intrigued by talking about this idea of self -determination, but then also getting into what is innocence. We only have a few minutes left, so I don't know how far we're going to get into it. But how important is self -determination? And I bring up the idea of these different... levels, if you will, of innocence or how you determine that. Because I've heard people say they voted in Hamas. And I'm not an expert, but if I remember correctly, there was either them or someone who was even more hated at the time. And also there was very low turnout. So what is this idea?

00:20:52    BEATRICE HEUSER
You can take it a step further and you can say that this was 2007. In 2007, to what extent could people in Gaza, what the Hamas was going to become like? I think a lot of people would tell you that they could have known, one could have known, but then take aside the 2007, a lot of the younger people around were either not born or definitely couldn't vote. So there's a lot of people who literally weren't responsible for this respect. And then you get to the next point, would you expect them now to turn over their neighbor's son, who they know is from the Hamas? To what extent do you expect them to do this? Could they get away with it? Would the Hamas themselves punish them? Are they still in a situation to punish them? I mean, this was one of the things that was always said for Germany in the Third Reich. Lots of people who didn't do anything because they were so afraid for themselves. And again, this can be looked at very differently. And there's just so much research has been done on particularly the German society then. One of the things that research has shown is that very few Aryans were ever really killed and punished unless they were seen as communists. So there was a perception that they would be punished, that dreadful things would happen to them or their family, but it didn't necessarily happen. So does that mean that the perception was wrong, but still people acted under the fear that something would happen to them? To what extent can you work against that fear? So a horribly difficult area, but at the moment, very concrete terms, we're not sure that there are many people anywhere in Gaza who would be happy to cooperate with anybody bringing in food in a peaceful way.

00:22:21    MARIAH YAGER
So we are actually getting to the top of the hour. I want to turn the floor over to Jack, if you have any final questions and then offer any last few minutes to Professor Huser.

00:22:30    JACK GAINES
I just want to thank you again, Professor, for coming on. I think that DOD has an opportunity through your talk to further its planning on conflict to post -conflict and transition. We need to get on it because the world needs it. The international community, the plan you had are a great start, but we have to do our homework on it and get prepared.

00:22:50    BEATRICE HEUSER
Yeah, I would say thank you very, very much for having had me. But I think this idea of the post -hostilities planning while hostilities is still being carried on is absolutely vital. And we've learned at the expense of lots and lots of lives and great disaster that we should have done so much more for Iraq, but also for Afghanistan. So I'm all with you there. Thank you very much again for having invited me.

00:23:09    MARIAH YAGER
me.

00:23:11    JACK GAINES
Thank you.

00:23:12    MARIAH YAGER
All right. And thank you both. And everyone, thank you for joining us today. Enjoy the rest of your day.

00:23:17    Close
Thanks for listening. If you get a chance, please like and subscribe and rate the show on your favorite podcast platform. Also, if you're interested in coming on the show or hosting an episode, email us at capodcasting at gmail .com. And now, most importantly, to those currently out in the field working with a partner nation's people or leadership to forward U .S. relations, thank you all for what you're doing. This is Jack, your host. Stay tuned for more great episodes. 1CA Podcast.