Stability Operations Magazine
Volume 8, Number 4 – January-February, 2013

Jim Bullion, Director, TFBSO

James L. Bullion is the Director of the Task Force for Business Stability Operations (TFBSO).  Prior to joining TFBSO, Mr. Bullion was President of Phoenix Global Services, LLC, a strategy and management consulting firm.  Earlier in his career he held senior executive positions in international telecommunications companies.  He began his career in commercial banking and investment management.

Mr. Bullion is a retired colonel of the United States Army Reserve and served two tours in Iraq. Mr. Bullion earned a B.A. in Economics from Dartmouth College and an MBA from the Amos Tuck School of Business Administration.

Stability Operations Magazine
Volume 8, Number 3- November-December, 2012

Mark Kroeker

Mark Kroeker is Senior Vice President for Justice and Rule of Law at PAE. Following thirty two years of service in the LAPD, Mark served as Deputy Commissioner of the International Police Task Force in the UN’s Mission in Bosnia and Herzegovina.  He later became Portland Oregon’s Police Chief.

SO:  How has the quality of UN police training evolved over time?

Paul Williams

PAUL WILLIAMS  is Associate Professor in the Elliott School of International Affairs at George Washington University.  Dr. Williams also serves as a Non-resident Senior Adviser at the International Peace Institute and as a Visiting Professor at the Institute for Peace and Security Studies at Addis Ababa University in Ethiopia. His recent books include War and Conflict in Africa (Polity, 2011) and (with Alex Bellamy) Understanding Peacekeeping (Polity, 2nd edition, 2010).

SO:  Overall, has the AMISOM mission been successful thus far? What has changed that has allowed the recent successes in the field against al-Shabaab?

Williams: It depends how one defines “success.”  After a generally traumatic five years, AMISOM has succeeded in achieving its mandated aim of protecting key figures in the Transitional Federal Institutions, albeit with the loss of some ministers.  After four and a half years of bloody fighting, AMISOM also succeeded in removing the vast majority of al-Shabaab’s forces from Mogadishu.  The mission has also provided considerable amounts of medical aid and humanitarian relief to residents of Mogadishu.  On the other hand, AMISOM has suffered large numbers of casualties and there was a period when it was accused of being responsible for many civilian deaths and injuries through its heavy-handed response to al-Shabaab attacks.  Moreover, its biggest strategic problem has always been its inability to push forward the political processes of peacemaking and reconciliation within Somalia.  The forced withdrawal of al-Shabaab forces from Mogadishu in August 2011 followed the rebels’ failed offensive against AMISOM in late 2010, after which al-Shabaab suffered the backlash of a sustained counter-offensive by AMISOM forces in early 2011.  This bloody campaign eventually succeeded in removing most al-Shabaab forces from Mogadishu.

Stability Operations Magazine
Volume 8, Number 1- July-August, 2012

Mark Bartolini

SO: LOOKING at high profile disasters in recent years, from hurricanes to tsunamis to tornadoes to earthquakes, what trends have emerged in disaster response, both positive and negative?

Bartolini:  Looking back at recent high profile disasters, I can say that the humanitarian community has learned from past mistakes and, as a result, we’ve become stronger in several ways. At USAID’s Office of U.S. Foreign Disaster Assistance—USAID/OFDA for short—we’re doing a better job of implementing best practices. We’ve improved technically, with better processes in place to assess and meet critical needs during a disaster. A lot of progress has been made in incorporating innovation and technology into disaster response, which has affected almost every sector we work in, from agriculture to nutrition, and health to protection. But although we’re getting stronger, we unfortunately have less access to the places and people that need our help. Right now, we’re seeing humanitarian workers barred from Syria. In Somalia, the radical Islamist group al-Shabaab has denied access to aid groups responding to a devastating drought that left millions in need of immediate assistance. What this has done is make aid organizations more cautious about sending in their teams, and organizations who have suffered the loss of a staff member understandably find it harder to bounce back.

Journal of International Peace Operations
Volume 7, Number 6 – May-June 2012

Fishing boats at Island Bay, Wellington, New Zealand.

A conversation with E. Benjamin Skinner

E. BENJAMIN SKINNER is a Senior Fellow at the Schuster Institute for Investigative Journalism at Brandeis University and the author of A Crime So Monstrous: Face to Face with Modern-day Slavery.

JIPO: Having devoted much of your professional life reporting on human and labor trafficking across the globe, what do you see as the current trend – is the problem of trafficking lessening or worsening?

Skinner: There are no concrete statistics on what the numbers are doing. That should be the first response to that question. These are not people who stand in line, raise their hands, and wait to be counted.  They’re in many cases victims that are convinced that their very survival relies on keeping their victimization hidden.  It is a very hard population to measure. That said, I think there have been some positive trends, like the fact that in the last 12 years, really since I’ve been working on this issue, there have been more than 100 countries that have passed laws against human trafficking.  Now all but, I believe, one American state has state-level laws against human trafficking.  There is a general consensus that this is a real phenomenon globally. There is a general consensus that slavery is a crime against humanity and must be resisted. That’s something that of course has been happening over the past 150 years.

Journal of International Peace Operations
Volume 7, Number 5 – March-April 2012

Afghan National Security Forces train in Afghanistan.

A conversation with Minister Ali A. Jalali

Ali A. Jalali is former Interior Minister of Afghanistan (January 2003-September 2005). He currently serves as both a Distinguished Professor at the Near East South Asia Center for Strategic Studies (NESA) and as a researcher at the Institute for National Strategic Studies (INSS), at the National Defense University in Washington, DC.

JIPO: You took office during a turbulent time for the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan. What were your greatest accomplishments and challenges as Interior Minister?

Jalali: We started building the Afghan National Police (ANP) and also streamlined the local government, and we started almost from scratch. The police actually ceased to exist during the long civil war in Afghanistan, so it was a very difficult job because after the removal of the Taliban, those who filled the ranks of the police were former guerilla fighters and the only thing they knew was to fight. Therefore it was challenging to build this institution and train the new officers, and at the same time provide equipment. The most difficult challenge was to do all this in the context of state-building with other institutions, because no institution on its own can be developed unless it is part of the larger picture of building the security sector.

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

Insights on International Affairs: A conversation with the Right Honorable Jack Straw

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.

Secretary Chertoff addresses the troops in Afghanistan

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

Arnold Fields, former SIGAR

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.