Good afternoon. I hope everybody enjoyed lunch. Im the Senior Vice President here at the director of the middle east program. One of the great joys of being in washington is sometimes youre in an environment where you get to be the dumbest guy in the room. I think im here as the dumbest guy on the panel. The people that we have talking now, and we envisioned this sort of as a way to capture some of the strategic wisdom, are just three people for whom i have tremendous respect. Lieutenant general mike negata. Your title it has it is the most difficult title, the director of the directorate of Strategic Operational planning. Word name ever. But the job is incredible. He was the commander of the special Operations Forces in the u. S. Central command and now is with the National Counterterrorism center, thinking all of the strategic do thought that i think we have been struggling with in many ways. Were very grateful for you to take the time to be with us. John maclachlan, as many of you know, was the acting director of central intelligence, was the Deputy Director for intelligence at the cia. I have grown reliant on him for the personal who comes to our small meetings and is able to distill the strategic points that everybody has been struggling to articulate and he mansion to capture it in a way that i find breathtaking. Christine, an old and valued colleague of mine here at csis. Whenever we had the internal things to work through, having christine on my team was always a sign we were going to be successful. She is currently directing the adrian arch center for resilience at the atlantic council. So what we have are people with tremendous intellectual ability and government experience to help us think about, where is all of this where are we trying to take it . Where is all of this going when we talk about counterterrorism in north africa . How much should we care about it . What should we be doing about it . When should we stop focussing on it . When should we start focussing on it . Because its very easy to take something small and to say this is the problem, but what we have here is a panel of people who have thought and acted worldwide. And i think they can help us both contextualize whats happening in north africa and think about what it is that were all trying to do. So i think well start with the general if we can and then work down. Do we have any benchmarks for strategic success or failure . Can we conceive a benchmark for strategic success or failure when were thinking about a problem Like Fighting terrorism in north africa . Well, first of all, thank you for inviting me to be here today. I think you should always start with me because whatever i say is going to be improved on by the other two panelists here. And, unfortunately, ill start with ill demonstrate that with the way im going to answer your question. In order to describe a benchmark, you actually have to know where youre going, otherwise you dont know whether or not youre looking at is actually a benchmark on the road to your destination. I know that were here to speak principally about the maghreb, but what im about to say i think you can conflate to virtually everything we confront when it comes to countering terrorism both as the United States and as a member of the International Community. I was recently asked on another panel a very kind of similar question. I wasnt asked about benchmarks, but i was asked a more simple question about what are we winning . To know what youre winning, you have to hit your benchmarks. Here is my basic answer, i would argue the world is still struggling with inconsistency about what our goals are. The United States does articulate certain goals when it comes to countering terrorism and countering violent extremism. The problem is in too many cases our definition of what constitutes sufficient success is often very different from what other actors, other nations, other communities are describing as their goals. And so long as that is true, the search for benchmarks proves to be pretty elusive. Now, so that i dont completely come across like im trying to dodge your question, ill float a couple of ideas that may be of some utility to you or the people that are observing this event. One might make the argument that our goal is as the United States, this is specific to the United States, is to avoid another 9 11. Its a commendable goal and so far we havent had a repeat of that awful event. If that is our goal then we i would potentially describe some benchmarks for this part of africa that help us pursue that goal, but the real problem with having a repeat of 9 11 as our goal is we will have to do that forever. There is no end to preventing another 9 11 unless there are some other things were willing to do that dont involve preventing a catastrophic attack but avoid the creation of the ability and the desire to conduct a catastrophic attack. Another way to define our goals is by characterizing the capabilities that we think we need. An example, ill use this as an example because as a military officer its the one im most familiar with, but should the United States, should our partners in this particular part of the world have the ability to identify a danger, a threat, a malign actor who intends to do harm, track that individual or that group of individuals and then ultimately use the appropriate capability to arrest, to detain or if necessary take military action against those actors. Sure. Thats necessary and weve done a great deal of that along with our International Partners around the world, but it has the same basic problem that preventing another 9 11 has, and that is youre going to have to do it forever. Where this really drives us to and i would argue this is particularly appropriate for a conversation about africa is should our goal be undoing the root causes, the drivers, there are many different descriptions that you can hear both publicly and privately about this, but its basically removing the causes, the drivers that propel vulnerable individuals and vulnerable groups into the path of radicalization and ultimately mobilization to violence. I would argue thats the best goal. But identifying the benchmarks for that journey is actually much harder than the benchmarks for taking physical action because this has to do with what people believe, this has to do with what people perceive, this has to do with what this has to do with deep ceded emotional, psychological, societal drivers that often big governments are not in a good position to generate a lot of skill against. At the end, it probably sounds like ive dolked your question, but identifying benchmarks without a consistent definition of what were trying do has never struck me was a particularly useful endeavor and frankly it ends up being few tile. One of the problems with trying to promote Economic Development abroad is weve been trying to do it as a u. S. Government for 70 years with kind of checkered success. Mr. Maclachlan, save us from ourselves. Im glad weve switched to game of thrones here. I feel good about that. Thank you for inviting me. And this panel. You gave us about ten questions and im going to take a look at maybe four of them. One of them is one you just asked about benchmarks. The others have to do with what priority this should have in american policy. Whether the right thats number one. Whether the right structures are in place to deal with it. What is the trajectory of terrorism in this part of the world . And whether, well, whether the right benchmarks are there. And let me start by saying that listening to the panelists today and thinking about the problem, i think this area and this set of problems deserves the highest priority in u. S. Attention to counterterrorism. And i think its because there are at least four characteristics here that i dont see present in the same measure in any other part of the world. First, you have linkages among these groups that are very pronounced. Im going to come back to that with a case study. Second, you have very weak borders. Third, you have something that reenforces that problem, which is vast ungoverned spaces or loosely governed spaces. And, finally, you have what i think general nagata was referring to in his last remark which is a set of, you know, socioeconomic cultural conditions that are challenging to say the least when it comes to a formation of attitudes and so forth. You have all of those things kind of converging in this area in ways that i dont see them converge in, say, europe, Southeast Asia or certainly not in our own hemisphere. So i will tell you my perspective on this is shaped to a large degree im not a north africa specialist. Ive spent a lot of time on counterterrorism, but i did delve into a north african problem in conjunction with the president of csis, john hamery, when we were both on a panel to advise a norweigian oil company, stat oil, with regard to a terrorist attack that it had experienced in algeria. Where they were managing a natural gas facility in conjunction with the algerian oil company and bp. So three of them. This occurred in 2013. And to refresh your memory, this facility, which is about 40 kilometers as i recall inside the algerian border from libya, was attacked by a gang of terrorists led by Mokhtar Belmokhtar and close to 40 hostages died. This was a really major event which was briefly noted in the International Press but not given the kind of attention that it deserved as a kind of benchmark, if you will, for a variety of things. And among the things i took away from it was the first point i made about linkages among these groups. Because when we looked at the terrorists who had attacked this under belmokhtar, i counted at least eight nationalities involved. I dont know that i can list them all but there were egyptians, tunisians, canadians, believe it or not, at least two canadians, martainians, malians, and im leaving somebody out but there were at least niger. There were at least eight. And what i took from that was you can assemble a pretty strong terrorist group that crosses a lot of lines here very easily in that part of the world and you can move across a border. When i looked at the satellite imagery, commercial imagery of that border between libya and algeria, i said to someone, not to make a joke about terrorist attacks, but i said give me a land rover and i can probably organize a group here to go and attack something. I didnt see any controls along that border that were at least visible from space. So that sort of affected my perception of the problem in this area. And that takes me to my second point that i wanted to talk about, which is so first point is a lot of things combine to make this a more fertile environment for terrorist development, plotting and activity than most parts of the world and part of the first point again, i think it makes classic counterterrorism much harder than it is almost anywhere else. Again, coming back to general nagatas point just a moment ago about the difference between action on the ground and harder things to get at, my sort of thumbnail way of thinking about counterterrorism, a little simpleminded, but sometimes you have to be, is you need to do three things to defeat a terrorist phenomenon. You have to destroy the leadership. You must deny it safe haven and you must change the conditions that give rise to the phenomenon. What general nagata was talking about is number three, i think. Its one thing to attack the leadership, its another to deny it safe haven, and, by the way, i dont think weve done those two things in this part of the world, attacked leadership to agree but certainly havent denied it safe haven. Though there are pockets where that might be true, for example, along the algerian moroccan border. But that third one changed the conditions. Thats something that my old profession, intelligence, cant do by itself. We can work the first two. But changing conditions means an all of government approach but really an all of government multiple latera multiple multilateral, multinational approach. The dimensions are impressive. Go to my second point, are the right solutions and are the right structures in place . Given that terrorists can cross boundaries so easily in this part of the world and clearly share legitimates and other things and are all as one of the earlier panelists mentioned intwined with other phenomena such as corruption and organized crime and smuggling, i cant think that the right structures are in place to substantially attack the problem. In part because and here im just drawing on my own experience in our hemisphere and in europe. The key to this is fusion of data. Not just fusion of kinetic capability, but fusion of data. That requires information sharing at a sophisticated level and thats hard for us to do here. Were dramatically better at it than we were at the time of 9 11, but i see our european counterparts with much longer history of working this still struggling with it as they attempt to cope with the kind of attacks that weve seen in europe over the last several years. So im not familiar enough with the inards of this area to know how hard it is, but i suspect its very difficult because to do it successfully you need trust, you need Information Technology that is multilateral, you need joint operations to build that trust and you need ways of what we call sanitizing the information in order to pass it without revealing sources. Thats all hard stuff to do. So i think that some things are underway. The sahil multilateral Planning Group may be a nascent model. It values a number of the mediterranean countries on the european side plus tunisia. And Something Like that seems to me to be needed in greater measure. Ill make two other quick points because ive gone on longer than i intended, but two other questions i wanted to answer were oare military solutions helpful . And, yes, of course. There has to be a military component. Ill just shorthand this by saying the danger but in my judgement ought to focus, and general nagata should speak to this, i think it ought to focus primarily on the fusion of special operations and intelligence versus what we call large military. I think when big military gets involved you run the risk, particularly in a part of the world like this, of driving moderates underground. So the military component here needs to be stealthy almost to the point of invisibility, in my judgement. And finally you wanted to talk about the trajectory of terror in this part of the world. I think i would just say is in shorthand, i think its even though some of the earlier panelists had cited some data about decreased number of incidents in 2017, i think we cant put too much weight on one years data. If you look at the data over the last lets say since 2001. In 2001, the data im familiar with is that there were a little over 20 terrorist incidents in north africa, sahil and Subsaharan Africa to a point, and in 2016 i think there were 235. Depending on who is doing the counting, i suppose. But the trajectory has been up, and given the conditions i just walked through, i would if i were a betting person, and it turns out i am, i would say that the trajectory is going to continue to be up but with the potential of it struck me from the panelists speaking earlier that there is acute awareness of the problem and many efforts underway to combat it. So its not a hopeless situation but its a tough one. So i would leave it there and turn to christine. Thank you. Its always fun to bat cleanup at the panel, but im also delighted to be here, john. Its really nice to be back. And general nagata, its great to see you. We had the pleasure to Work Together in difficult circumstances, but that was always lots of fun. I wanted to say a few things about add a little bit to what john had to say about strategy for counterterrorism in the region, add a few thoughts about what i think success looks like and then close with a couple of comments on priority and timeframe. I think i had originally envisioned the ct strategy as being sort of a threelegend stool. I think john has made me think its more of a chair now with four legs. If one leg is going after leadership, another leg is the denying of physical safe haven, a third leg is the one i think i didnt hear john mention, which is denying the virtual safe haven where we see so much of the counterradicalization happening and where i think weve seen, you know, a lot of these groups develop very Sophisticated Media strategies to get out their narrative to do recruitment that sadly has been very effective, and then the fourth leg of the chair, which i think is arguably the most important one but also the most difficult one to work on is what general nagata was talking about, which is addressing the underlying conditions that can lead to violent extremism and terrorism. And thats really about getting at governance and getting at rooting out corruption, building the capacity of ministries to be able to provide security, to provide services, to provide economic opportunities. That is a very, you know, longterm effort and i think its a critical one that often doesnt get as much attention because i think certainly in my experience in the last administration, there is a tendency to reach for that military tool in the tool kit. Its a very developed tool. Its a very proficient tool. Its a very wellresourced tool. And so policy makers tend to reach for that very often, and really, if we really want to be successful, i think we need to be reaching for those for the diplomatic tools, the development tools, the economic and trade tools and, you know, we dont do that as much. I think in part because they arent as wellresourced and we in the United States government doesnt have the same amount of capacity there, but also those, you know, using those tools, applying those tools i think the fruits of that labour takes much longer to become evident and certainly, again, in the United States, i think our public, our politicians are anxious for results and want to see things sort of now, now, now. Anyone who has ever had the opportunity to testify in front of Congress Knows that its all about, you know, show me how this is working now. And if you you know, there is a not a lot of patience or appetite for give us two years, give us five years and then youll r