The new president of the International Rescue Committee, David Miliband, has taken on the challenge of the largest refugee crisis in recent history. The former UK foreign secretary talks with CISAC affiliate Anja Manuell about the most pressing refugee issues today, including those in Syria, Iraq and South Sudan.

The International Rescue Committee has worked closely in the field for CISAC and FSI's UNHCR Project on Rethinking Refugee Communities, hosting and coordinating a visit to Ethiopia last year by Stanford students researching ways to improve conditions at refugee camps via technology and design.

Manuel interviewed Miliband at the World Affairs Council of Northern California.

Research by CISAC's Joseph Felter shows that insurgents try to derail government-delivered aid programs in poor areas because they fear successful programs will boost the government's credibility. Preventive measures include providing greater security around aid projects and limiting advance knowledge about them.

A research paper, published in the American Economic Review, involved an analysis of a large community-driven development program in the Philippines. In 2012, the World Bank supported more than 400 of these projects in 94 countries with about $30 billion in aid.

Conventional wisdom assumes that development aid is a tool to help reduce civil conflict. But some aid projects may actually exacerbate the violence, the research showed.

In an interview, Joseph Felter, a senior research scholar at Stanford's Center for International Security and Cooperation, said, "A 'winning hearts-and-minds' strategy for disbursing development aid may lead to an increase in insurgent attacks in the world's poorest areas. The study's takeaway is not to stop aid delivery, but to appreciate and plan for the possibility of unintended consequences."

Felter co-wrote the article, "Aid Under Fire: Development Projects and Civil Conflict," along with Benjamin Crost of the University of Colorado-Denver and Patrick Johnston of the RAND Corporation. Their research relied on conflict data from the Philippines military from between 2002 and 2006 that allowed them to precisely estimate how the implementation of aid affected violence levels in ongoing insurgencies against the government.

Spotlight on the Philippines

These issues are particularly important in poor and conflict-ridden countries like the Philippines, Felter said. The Philippines is home to some of the most protracted insurgencies in the world. Islamic separatist groups struggle for an independent Muslim state; a communist group continues to wage a classic Maoist revolutionary war; and the extremist Abu Sayyaf Group conducts kidnappings and terrorist attacks.

The aid program Felter and his colleagues studied was the Kapit-Bisig Laban sa Kahirapan Comprehensive Integrated Delivery of Social Service – or KALAHI-CIDSS – the largest of its kind in the Philippines. Through it, poor communities receive projects to address their most pressing needs. According to Felter, this typically involved funding for projects like roads, schools, health clinics and other infrastructure.

"This is government funding for projects that citizens in these areas have expressly asked for," Felter said.

The researchers noted that community-driven development projects, also known as "CDD" projects, are popular because evidence suggests they enhance social cohesion among citizens. But sometimes they draw the wrong kind of attention from anti-government groups, as the research illustrated.

Felter and his colleagues found an increase of 110-185 percent in insurgent attacks in communities where aid projects commenced, the authors wrote. If this effect is extrapolated across all of the Philippines' municipalities, the authors estimate that the program resulted in between 550 and 930 additional casualties during three years.

"Taken together, this detailed evidence sheds new light on the mechanisms that link aid and conflict, which may eventually help design more effective aid interventions that alleviate poverty without exacerbating conflict," they wrote.

When the insurgent groups destroy such a project, it has the effect of weakening the perception that the government can actually deliver on community projects, the scholars wrote. For example, the communist rebels in the Philippines have issued public statements denouncing the KALAHI-CIDSS program as "counterrevolutionary and anti-development." If a successful aid program shifts the balance of power in favor of the government, it reduces insurgents' bargaining power and their political leverage.

As a result, insurgents tended to engage in conflict in the earlier stages of a project in order to keep it from succeeding, according to the research. In fact, conflict increased when municipalities were in the early or "social preparation" stages of publicizing an aid program, Felter and his colleagues wrote.

Sometimes rebel groups divert aid to fund their own operations – aid shipments are often stolen or "taxed" by these groups, according to the paper.

The Next Step

What can be done to prevent attacks?

"Greater security around the aid projects and limiting advance knowledge of the particular projects are good measures to start with," Felter said.

He noted that governments and aid organizations need to be discreet in how they identify aid projects and their locations, and how they disburse the aid itself. More research on this issue needs to be done, Felter said.

"One lesson is not to give insurgents too long a lead time to plan attacks," he said.

Unfortunately, as the researchers noted, poverty and violence are often linked: "The estimated one-and-a-half billion people living in conflict-affected countries are substantially more likely to be undernourished, less likely to have access to clean water and education, and face higher rates of childhood mortality."

Continued progress – in the form of international aid – is urged toward eradicating poverty. "To help achieve this, governments and multilateral donor organizations are increasingly directing development aid to conflict-affected countries worldwide," Felter and his co-authors pointed out.

Felter, also a research fellow at Stanford's Hoover Institution, retired from the U.S. Army as a colonel in 2012 following a career as a Special Forces and foreign area officer. He has conducted foreign internal defense and security assistance missions across East and Southeast Asia and has participated in combat deployments to Panama, Iraq and Afghanistan. In 2010-11, he commanded the International Security and Assistance Force Counter Insurgency Advisory and Assistance Team in Afghanistan.

"I saw this dynamic (insurgent attacks on aid projects) firsthand in Afghanistan and Iraq. This research paper confirms it," Felter said.

He devoted much of his Stanford doctoral dissertation and his work at CISAC and Hoover to build what he hopes will be the largest and most detailed micro-conflict database – the Empirical Studies of Conflict – ever assembled.

Felter said there is only so much that the military can do to win over people in areas ravaged by war and conflict.

"The military can 'lease' hearts and minds by creating a safe environment for aid projects," he said, "but ultimately it's up to the government to win them over."

Karl Eikenberry  Photo Credit: Rod Searcey

President Barack Obama has announced he will send several hundred troops to help secure the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad as militants aligned with the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria - known as ISIS - take neighborhoods in Baquba, only 44 miles from the Iraqi capital.

Former Ambassador to Afghanistan Karl Eikenberry, the William J. Perry Fellow in International Security, is interviewed by the Australian Broadcast Corporation. He says the advances by Islamic militants in Iraq in the last week "have been absolutely stunning." The retired U.S. Army Lt. Gen., however, thinks the ISIS advancement will end quickly. "The bigger worry that we have though is ISIS crossing over to the Iraqi and the Syrian frontier and the possibility of them establishing a sanctuary for international terrorists," Eikenberry says.

You can watch Eikenberry's interview here. and ready an interview in The Australian here.

Martha Crenshaw  Photo Credit: Rod Searcey

Martha Crenshaw, a senior fellow at CISAC and its parent organization, the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, is one of the world's leading experts on terrorism. She joined a panel on the public radio program KQED Forum to discuss the political situation and what the militants envision for an Islamic state.

"The ISIS is a group that is even more radical than al-Qaida itself," Crenshaw says. 
"Syria provided a launching board for them, which allowed them to become sort of a caliphate linking Syria and Iraq."

Crenshaw estimates there are between 5,000 to 6,000 members of the ISIS fighting in Iraq and that new recruits are coming in all the time. "But the source of their strength is not merely in numbers," she says. They have gained strength through discipline and communicating what an Islamic state would look like.

Listen to KQED panel discussion here.

Arash Aramesh, a national security analyst at Stanford Law School, discusses the crisis through the prism of Iran on Al Jazeera English.

The United States and Russia should keep working together to stop the spread of nuclear weapons even while disagreeing on issues like Ukraine, Stanford scholars say.

In a recent article in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, Professor Siegfried Hecker and researcher Peter Davis advocate continued U.S.-Russia collaboration on nuclear weapon safety and security.

"The Ukraine crisis has exacerbated what had already become a strained nuclear relationship," Hecker said in an interview. "As one of our Russian colleagues told us, nuclear issues are global and accidents or mishaps in one region can affect the entire world."

Hecker is a professor in the Department of Management Science and Engineering and a senior fellow at CISAC and the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies. Over the past 20-plus years, he has worked with Russian scientists to help stop nuclear proliferation. He and Davis returned from a trip this spring to Russia, where they met with nuclear scientists.

"We agreed that we have made a lot of progress working together over the past 20-plus years, but that we are not done," they wrote in the journal essay.

Hecker and Davis described Moscow as a reluctant partner in talks on nuclear proliferation. As for the United States, it actually backed away from cooperation first. A House of Representatives committee recently approved legislation that would put nuclear security cooperation with Russia on hold. And though the White House has opposed this, the Energy Department has issued its own restrictions on scientific interchanges as part of the U.S. sanctions regime against Russia.

But, Hecker said, "Cooperation is needed to deal with some of the lingering nuclear safety and security issues in Russia and the rest of the world, with the threats of nuclear smuggling and nuclear terrorism, and to limit the spread of nuclear weapons."

Washington does not have to choose between the two. It still can pressure Moscow on Ukraine while cooperating on nuclear issues, Hecker and Davis wrote.

They called for further nuclear arms reductions between the two countries, rather than a resumption of the nuclear arms race that took place in the mid-20th century.

Changing relationship

Hecker and Davis acknowledged that the U.S.-Russian relationship overall is changing.

"We realize … that the nature of nuclear cooperation must change to reflect Russia's economic recovery and its political evolution over the past two decades," they wrote.

For example, due to the strained relationship, nuclear proliferation programs must change from U.S.-directed activities to more jointly sponsored collaborations that serve both countries' interests.

As they noted, one huge problem is that Russia still has no inventory or record of all the nuclear materials the Soviet Union produced – or where those materials might be today.

"Moreover, it has shown no interest in trying to discover just how much material is unaccounted for. Our Russian colleagues voice concern that progress on nuclear security in their country will not be sustained once American cooperation is terminated," Hecker and Davis said.

Iran is a flashpoint

America needs Russia to help in its effort to stop Iran from building a nuclear weapon, Hecker and Davis wrote. Russia is a close ally of Iran: "Much progress has been made toward a negotiated settlement of Iran's nuclear program since President Hassan Rouhani was elected in June, 2013. However, little would have been possible without U.S.-Russia cooperation."

In a June 2 interview in the Tehran Times, Hecker said that the only way forward for Iran's nuclear program is transparency and international cooperation. He suggested that the country follow the South Korean model of peaceful nuclear power.

"In my opinion, South Korea will not move in a direction of developing a nuclear weapon option because it simply has too much to lose commercially. That is the place I would like to see Tehran. In other words, it decides that a nuclear program that benefits its people does not include a nuclear weapons option," he told the interviewer.

Hecker said that it is not in Russia's interest to have nuclear weapons in Iran so close to its border.

"Washington, in turn, needs Moscow, especially if it is to develop more effective measures to prevent proliferation as Russia and other nuclear vendors support nuclear power expansion around the globe," Hecker said.

In February, the Iranian government republished an article by Hecker and Abbas Milani, the director of Iranian Studies at Stanford University. The story ran in Farsi on at least one official website, possibly indicating a genuine internal debate in Tehran on the nuclear subject. Hecker and Milani described such a "peaceful path" in another essay on Iranian nuclear power.

Hecker is working with Russian colleagues to write a book about how Russian and American nuclear scientists joined forces at the end of the Cold War to stymie nuclear risks in Russia.

Media Contact

Siegfried Hecker, Freeman Spogli Institute: (650) 725-6468, shecker@stanford.edu

Clifton B. Parker, Stanford News Service: (650) 725-0224, cbparker@stanford.edu

U.S. Army Col. Tracy Roou is a senior military fellow at CISAC this year. She is researching security cooperation with challenging governments and preparing for her next assignment in the Office of the Secretary of Defense for Policy. She recently met with former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld in Washington, D.C., at the headquarters of the Rumsfeld Foundation. They discussed military cooperation as a tool of foreign and defense policy. Here, she shares her thoughts about that meeting and what it meant to her personally as a military officer, as well as to her research.

CISAC has given me the platform to learn from two former U.S. Secretaries of Defense, William J. Perry and Donald Rumsfeld. They happen to be the first and the last secretaries of defense to visit Uzbekistan, where I recently served as defense attaché. Their deep insight into the complicated world of policymaking and the military’s ability to provide capabilities and build relationships as a tool of foreign policy in the former Soviet Union, has added greatly to my understanding of strategic thinking in that part of the world.

The chance to meet with Rumsfeld to discuss military cooperation with challenging governments was an incredible opportunity for my research, but also a true honor and a highlight of my Army career. I was well aware of his reputation as a tough interview. The meeting started with his questions about me, my career and family, and my year at CISAC as a U.S. Army War College Fellow. After I described the depth of expertise at CISAC and Stanford about strategic thinking and military policy, he jokingly asked why I needed to meet with him.

It was clear that Secretary Rumsfeld still keeps an intense battle rhythm. But he was gracious, generous with his time and open to all of my questions. A large bust of Winston Churchill sits in the corner of his conference room, where we met for an hour.

Our session covered many areas, but mostly focused on the former Soviet Union and U.S. military cooperation in that region. In the context of foreign policy with challenging governments, Rumsfeld said: “Linking U.S. diplomacy and the military – even when powers will try to pull them apart – is very important.”

Rumsfeld has been back in the news, with a new documentary about his work and leadership in public service, especially overseeing the Iraq War. Though some are saying he was evasive and impenetrable in the documentary, “The Unknown Known,” I found him to be open and engaging when discussing U.S. foreign policy in the former Soviet States and Russia, which is the focus of my research.

Few remember that as a young U.S. congressman, Rumsfeld was a co-sponsor of the Freedom of Information Act, a landmark tool granting American citizens and reporters the ability to push for government transparency. With his memoir, “Known and Unknown,” his declassified papers give insight on many tough policy decisions with challenges to the to the government, many of which can be found on his website, The Rumsfeld’s Papers.

I learned that the Rumsfeld Foundation helps young leaders in government, business and academia in Central Asia and the Caucuses better understand the concepts of a market economy, a civilian-led military and a free and open government. The foundation helps microfinance organizations working with the world’s poorest people and it grants fellowships to graduate students interested in public service.

“I had spent a lot of time in Central Asian Republics and felt that they did not have a good connection among themselves, nor did they have much connection or awareness of the Unites States,” Rumsfeld says in a video on his foundation website. “So we’ve established a fellowship program to bring over 10 or 12 Central Asian fellows, mid-career people so that they’ll develop relationships and go away with a better understanding of what the United States of America is all about and the kind of opportunities that free systems offer.”

Following our meeting, I was given a tour of foundation offices, which are filled with photographs and presidential letters of various periods in his life in public service, starting as a U.S. Navy pilot. As I left, I noted the two cabinet chairs from his two terms as secretary of defense sitting at the entryway.

I came away from my meeting with Rumsfeld with the realization that our 13^th and 21^st secretary of defense is as nuanced and complex as many of the policy and security issues he tackled in his extraordinary career. At the end of our meeting, he agreed to a photograph together, next to the Churchill bust, as well as another meeting.

In his book, “Rumsfeld’s Rules,” he refers to a quote by Churchill: “The inherent vice of capitalism is the unequal sharing of blessings; the inherent virtue of socialism is the equal sharing of miseries.” 

In a rare and exclusive interview in the Tehran Times, CISAC and FSI Senior Fellow Siegfried Hecker tells Iranian journalist Kourosh Ziabari that the only way forward for the country’s nuclear program is transparency and international cooperation.

The interview comes during an unprecedented period of rapprochement between Washington and Tehran. Several days after his inauguration last August, President Hassan Rouhani called for the resumption of negotiations with the so-called P5+1, a group of six world powers using diplomatic efforts to monitor Iran’s energy program.

In September, President Barack Obama called Rouhani, marking the highest-level contact between the United States and Iran since 1979 hostage crisis.

The P5+1 and Iran are drafting a comprehensive nuclear agreement to ensure that Tehran is not building a nuclear bomb, but trying to expand its nuclear energy program. The International Atomic Energy Agency has given Iran until Aug. 25 to provide more details about the possible military dimensions of its nuclear program.

In the interview, Ziabari did not pull any punches with Hecker.

“You’ve argued that Iran doesn’t possess sufficient uranium reserves like Japan, and its uranium enrichment program is not cost-effective,” Ziabari asks. “However, you know that Iran’s nuclear program was first launched in 1950s as part of the U.S. President Dwight Eisenhower’s Atoms for Peace program. At that time, the United States thought that it’s beneficial to help Iran with its nuclear energy program, because Iran was an ally, but now, Iran is a foe, and does not need nuclear power anymore. Is it really like that?”

You can read Hecker's response and the entire the Q&A in its entirely on Ziabari’s website.

In Feburary, the Iranian government republished an article in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists by Hecker and Abbas Milani, director of Iranian Studies at Stanford University. The story ran in Farsi on at least one official website. That could reflect, the scholars say, a genuine internal debate in Tehran regarding the future of its nuclear program.

President Barack Obama announced this week that the United States would complete its pullout of troops from Afghanistan by the end of 2016, leaving 9,800 troops by the end of this year and cutting that in half by 2015. A small force will remain to protect the U.S. embassy in Kabul and help with local security. The president said this would free up combat troops for emerging terrorism threats in the Middle East and North Africa and effectively put an end to the longest war in U.S. history.

Ret. U.S. Army Lt. Gen. Karl Eikenberry, who was U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan from 2009-2011, answers a few questions about the way forward. Eikenberry is the William J. Perry Fellow in International Security at CISAC.

Critics say the drawdown is too dramatic and rapid and could seriously diminish the progress NATO and its allies have made in the country. What is your view?

I think the drawdown schedule is militarily sound and responsible. First, the commander on the ground has indicated his support for the timelines. Second, by the end of 2016 – the announced target date for completion of the military drawdown – our armed forces will have operated in Afghanistan for over 15 years. It will be time for the Afghan government, with continued U.S. and international material and security assistance support, to take full responsibility for the defense of its country. In fact, the president's announcement represents the culmination of combined U.S., NATO, and Afghanistan planning that began in 2010.

Third, militant extremists in distant lands often effectively exploit the presence of U.S. armed forces serving in their county to rally support for their cause. At some point, large scale U.S. military deployments can become counterproductive, undermining efforts to develop accountable responsible governance and security forces.     

Are the Afghans ready to take over the security operations in their country?

U.S. and NATO military forces have been complimentary about the performance of the Afghan National Army and Police since they began in 2012 to assume greater responsibility for securing their country. Certainly, the Afghan security forces did well protecting the recent April 5th presidential election. Their major challenges will be ensuring adequate international monetary support (perhaps $3 billion a year for some years to come) and adapting to a tactical environment in which they will not have access to U.S. and NATO firepower, logistics, communications, and intelligence. Combat against the Taliban will be more equal contests.

There are concerns that the Taliban is sitting in the wings, just waiting for the withdrawal of American troops. Are those concerns valid?  

I have heard this argument since I first served in Afghanistan in 2002. I don't buy it. By 2016 we'll be in the 15^th year of a military mission that began in 2001. Will another 15 years be adequate to prove we can "wait them out?" It is time for the Afghans to take charge of their own destiny. Furthermore, the Taliban are not a cohesive movement; there is not a centralized Taliban command "waiting in the wings." Last, the Taliban are not the primary threat to Afghan stability.The greater challenges are Pakistan's policies towards Afghanistan, Afghanistan national political reconciliation, and massive government corruption. 

What is the legacy that the United States leaves behind?

Most Afghans have told me over the years that the greatest U.S. legacy will be democracy and all that has brought. If Afghanistan is able to strengthen its political institutions and stabilize the country in the years after foreign forces return to their homes, I would agree that the introduction of democracy will be what we are remembered for.