Journal of International Peace Operations
Volume 7, Number 4 – January-February 2012

A Conversation with the Rt. Hon. Jack Straw, MP

Rt. Hon. Jack Straw is a British Labour Party politician and has been the Member of Parliament for Blackburn since 1979. He served as Home Secretary from 1997 to 2001, Secretary of State for Commonwealth and Foreign Affairs from 2001 to 2006, leader of the House of Commons from 2006 to 2007, Lord High Chancellor of Great Britain in 2007, and Shadow Secretary of State for Justice in 2010. As of April 2011, Straw has worked with E. D. & F. Man Holdings Ltd.

JIPO: It is evident that 2011 saw a severe deterioration of relations between Pakistan and the United States, and to a lesser extent Pakistan’s relations with the U.K. Do you have any suggestions for ameliorating this situation?

Straw: I wish I did. In my electoral district, about 15,000 people or 15% of the population are of Pakistani heritage, so I live with Pakistani politics. It is a tragedy what has happened to that country and it is not functioning properly. I really worry about Pakistan more than I worry about any other in the world. It is a country with over 187 million people, so it is big in terms of population compared with Afghanistan or other countries in the Middle East. It could be as rich as India is becoming; they started at the same level 60 years ago. So, it requires, just bluntly, staying close to them, trying to spot the good guys, and building them up. But it is painstaking work I am afraid — three steps forward and two back, if you are lucky.

Journal of International Peace Operations
Volume 7, Number 3 – November-December, 2011

THE Honorable Michael Chertoff is chairman and co-founder at The Chertoff Group and senior of counsel at Covington & Burling LLP’s Washington, D.C. office. He previously served as secretary of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (2005-2009). Secretary Chertoff also served as a federal judge in U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit (2003–2005) and as Assistant Attorney General for the Criminal Division of the U.S. Department of Justice (2001–2003).

JIPO: Drawing on your experiences as secretary of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), what were your greatest accomplishments and challenges?

Chertoff: We had a relatively new department at that time — about two years old — formed out of a number of different agencies drawn from different departments that had never worked together. The challenge was to bring them together into a single union, given that it was the government’s third largest department at the moment of its birth. I think we succeeded in getting it quite mature in terms of joint planning and joint operations, and generally raising the level of security in the domains which were part of DHS’s responsibility including borders, domestic infrastructure, domestic transportation, and communications.

Journal of International Peace Operations
Volume 7, Number 2 – September-October, 2011

ANDREW Natsios a Distinguished Professor in the Practice of Diplomacy at Georgetown University’s Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service. Previously, he served as U.S. Special Envoy to Sudan from October 2006 to December 2007 and as Administrator of the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) between May 2001 and January 2006. Natsios has also served as Special Coordinator for International Disaster Assistance and Special Humanitarian Coordinator for the Sudan in the Bush Administration. He retired from the U.S. Army Reserves in 1995 with the rank of lieutenant colonel after 23 years as a civil affairs officer. Natsios is author of two books with a third forthcoming book, Sudan, South Sudan, and Darfur: What everyone needs to know, to be published by Oxford University Press.

JIPO: What were your greatest accomplishments as Administrator of USAID?

Natsios: The first accomplishment was the reorganization of USAID to focus on the challenges of the post-9/11 world, specifically with the creation of the Democracy, Conflict, and Humanitarian Assistance (DCHA) bureau. In DCHA, we created the Office of Conflict Mitigation and Management and the Office of Military Affairs — sister agencies for the Office of Foreign Disaster Assistance, Food for Peace, and the Office of Transition Initiatives. These are all are sort of the humanitarian assault troops or Marine Corps of USAID. And by creating the Office of Military Affairs we established a coordination mechanism with the Pentagon and combatant commands to deal with the military in conflict situations. In the Office of Conflict Mitigation and Management, we also developed some very important templates for assessing the developmental causes of conflict and how they can be remedied. The purpose of DCHA was to focus on fragile and failed states, which I view as the principle development and foreign policy challenge facing the international community.

Journal of International Peace Operations
Volume 7, Number 1

MAJOR GENERAL Arnold Fields, USMC (ret.) served as Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR) from July 2008 to February 2011. He previously served as Deputy Director of the Africa Center for Strategic Studies, Department of Defense, and as Chief of Staff of the Iraq Reconstruction and Management Office (IRMO) while assigned to the Embassy in Iraq as a member of the U.S. Department of State. Major General Fields retired from the United States Marine Corps in January 2004 after over 34 years of active military service, which included various assignments such as Deputy Commander of Marine Corps Forces in Europe; Director of the Marine Corps Staff; Commanding General of Marine Corps Base Hawaii; Commander of U.S. Central Command’s Forward Headquarters Element; and Inspector General of U.S. Central Command.

JIPO: What worries you the most about the way in which stabilization and reconstruction operations are currently understood and executed?

Fields: There are multiple issues about which I worry, but the one that I think is foremost in my mind is that when the international community sets out to assist other nations in reconstruction, be it the result of natural disaster or political unrest in a country, I worry most about the extent to which the international community includes the host nation in the planning for such an intervention. I say this because of my personal experience in Iraq with the Iraq Reconstruction and Management Office (IRMO) as well as in Afghanistan as the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR). One of the most significant and commonplace complaints that was brought to my attention was that the international community had failed to include the host nation personnel at all levels — governmental, civil, contractor, and so forth — in the reconstruction of their country.

Journal of International Peace Operations
Volume 6, Number 6 – May-June, 2011

Stuart W. Bowen, Jr., has served as Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction (SIGIR) since October 2004. Prior to this post, he served as the Inspector General for the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA-IG) in 2004. Previously, Bowen also served as Deputy Assistant to the President and Deputy Staff Secretary and Special Assistant to the President and Associate Counsel in the George W. Bush Administration. He also served four years active duty as an intelligence officer in the United States Air Force.

Journal of International Peace Operations
Volume 6, Number 5 – March-April, 2011

Sir John Holmes, GCVO, KBE, CMG, is director of The Ditchley Foundation (September 2010 to present). He recently served as Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs and Emergency Relief Coordinator at the United Nations (January 2007 to August 2010). A career diplomat, Sir John previously served as British Ambassador to France (2001 to 2007) and as British Ambassador to Portugal (1999 to 2001).

JIPO: What are the greatest long-term challenges that the United Nations (UN) will face over the next decade?

Holmes: That is a big question! Every subject on earth is a priority subject for the UN system, in a sense. There are many major, fundamental challenges that the UN is going to have a key role in, like climate change, energy scarcity, water, food security, nuclear disarmament and so on.

Journal of International Peace Operations
Volume 6, Number 4 – January-February, 2011

Ambassador John E. Herbst is currently director of the Center for Complex Operations at the National Defense University in Washington, DC. Previously, he served as Coordinator for the Office of Reconstruction and Stabilization (S/CRS) in the United States Department of State (2006 to 2010), Ambassador to Ukraine (2003 to 2006), and Ambassador to Uzbekistan (2000 to 2003). Herbst joined the United States Foreign Service in 1979 and retired in 2010.

JIPO: Drawing on your experiences as Coordinator for the Office of Reconstruction and Stabilization (S/CRS), what were your greatest accomplishments and challenges?

Ambassador Herbst: My work in S/CRS was overwhelmingly – 85 percent or 90 percent – on building capacity for stabilization operations. We had to create the concepts for running stability operations and for developing and standing up a Civilian Response Corps (CRC).  In doing this, S/CRS had no budget and little support.

The most important thing done during my tenure in S/CRS was to establish a CRC – first building support within the Bush Administration back in 2007 and 2008 to develop the CRC – and persuading Congress to resource it. When I left S/CRS in September 2010, the number of CRC personnel was over 1,200. While still too small, this is a  significant national security asset.

Admiral James G. Stavridis is Commander of the United States European Command and NATO Supreme Allied Commander, Europe (2009 to present). Previously he served as Commander of the United States Southern Command (2006 to 2009) and commanded the Enterprise Carrier Strike Group in the Arabian Gulf (2002 to 2004).

JIPO: As NATO’s top commander, what major security issues currently challenge the alliance?

Admiral Stavridis: At the top of the list is Afghanistan, which is our number one operational issue. We are also continuing work in Kosovo – in the Balkans – where we still have almost 10,000 troops. Thirdly, we operate extensively at sea, in counter-piracy operations; typically half a dozen ships are involved in that off the coast of Africa. And fourth, we maintain operational focus on Article 5 of the North Atlantic Treaty, which is simply monitoring the borders of NATO and ensuring that all our nations are protected under Article 5. So I would say that those four things are probably at the top of what we are doing operationally. And in summary, we have almost 150,000 troops operating on three continents at the moment.

JIPO: How must NATO evolve to better address these security threats of the future? Can we count on NATO countries to provide the necessary forces and long-term commitments in the future for operations similar to Afghanistan, or does there need to be a reassesment of NATO’s capabilities and role?

Journal of International Peace Operations
Volume 6, Number 2 – September/October, 2010

Acquiring focus.

The Honorable Jacques S. Gansler, Ph.D. is Roger C. Lipitz Chair in Public Policy and Private Enterprise at the University of Maryland School of Public Affairs. Previously, he served as the Under Secretary of Defense forAcquisition, Technology and Logistics (1997 to 2001); Executive Vice President and Corporate Director for TASC, Inc. (1977 to 1997); and Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Materiel Acquisition (1972 to 1977). Dr. Gansler also served as chairman of the Commission on Army Acquisition and Program Management in Expeditionary Operations (2007).

JIPO: The 2007 Gansler Commission report, “Urgent Reform Required: Army Expeditionary Contracting,” may be the study most frequently cited on how to repair government contracting. To what extent has the U.S. government acted on the report’s findings and recommendations? In hindsight, is there anything you would modify?

Gansler: The most important and most visible reaction to the report has been the Army’s action to establish an Army contracting command, divided into two pieces — one for domestic contracting and one for expeditionary contracting. The creation of this new contracting command, and the assignment of senior personnel to the command, is a major step forward. In addition to that, though, the Congress and the Administration recognized a deficiency in the number of people with a contracting acquisition background. So there has been a major initiative to hire people, organize some training developments and even plan some internship programs.

Another thing that happened was we found that there was no document that taught people how to do expeditionary contracting. That document now exists. Additionally, the Pentagon recognized that there was no “reach back” computer capability, so that a contracting person in the field did not have the ability to access expertise here in the U.S.; that has just recently been set up.

Journal of International Peace Operations
Volume 6, Number 1 – July/August, 2010

CAROLYN McAskie, OC, is currently a Senior Fellow in the University of Ottawa’s Graduate School of Public and International Affairs. She previously served as Assistant Secretary General for Peacebuilding (2006−2008), Special Representative of the Secretary General and Head of the U.N. Peacekeeping Operation in Burundi (2004−2006), as well as Assistant Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs and Deputy Emergency Relief Coordinator at the U.N. Secretariat in New York (1999-2004), and Emergency Relief Coordinator (1999−2001). Ms. McAskie is an Officer of the Order of Canada and a Director of Canadem and the Pearson Peacekeeping Centre.

JIPO: How can a peacekeeping operation proceed when there is no apparent peace to be kept?

McAskie: The concept of modern peacekeeping has changed so much that there is very rarely a peace to be kept. There is often a situation in countries where there is a combination of peaceful areas maybe in agreement with the government, but fighting still going on in other parts. Modern peacekeeping goes way beyond just patrolling the line of two parties who find a peace agreement. Modern peacekeeping forces now need to be prepared to work with the local authorities to stabilize parts of the country. You could say that most current operations fall into the category of where there is no peace to keep — so it is not unusual at all.