Mr Secretary, thank you very much. I think many in this room will have noted the emphasis that you placed in your remarks on the need to find new and innovative ways to connect the states of Central Asia to those of south and east Asia. Also, you appeal for the countries represented in this room to share their knowledge on security sector reform, counter terrorism, narcotics control and on the training of ministers and civil society. I think it was also important to have heard your optimism about the potential progress in US-China military to military relations.

 

Mr Secretary, first of all thank you for a broad spectrum and thoughtful speech. In your presentation, you very naturally talked about Iran and the threats posed in terms of nuclear proliferation. For a number of years now, the United States has had – at least according to the press – a national intelligence estimate foreseeing the possibility of Iran crossing the nuclear threshold within a period of around 10 years – sometimes less, sometimes more. That estimate doesn’t appear to have changed much over the years, although from what I understand and you have reiterated that, Iran has actually been doing stuff.

 

If I believe the latest newspaper reports concerning the IAA’s assessment of Iran’s progress in terms of deploying and running centrifuges, the arithmetic would tend to point towards a threshold date much, much closer than the 10-year timeframe which the United States has been putting forward. The IISS itself has been talking about a three-year timeframe. What is the current estimate?

 

I think that the general view of American intelligence is that they would be in a position to develop a nuclear device probably some time in the period 2010/2011-2014/2015. There are those who believe that that could happen much sooner, in late 2008 or 2009. The reality is, because of the way that Iran has conducted its affairs, we really don’t know and it puts a higher premium, it seems to me, on the international community coming together in terms of strengthening the sanctions on Iran so that they begin to face some serious trade offs in terms of their economic well being and their economic future, for having nuclear weapons. I do not think anyone begrudges Iran the capacity to have peaceful nuclear power under proper safeguards and supervision.

 

The key is whether they will have nuclear weapons. So I think that there is a way to move forward in this, but it does require all of the nations in the world to come to an agreement that Iran having nuclear weapons is a dangerous prospect and increasing the pressure on Iran to try and make them answer some very difficult questions in terms of the role they want to play in the international community and the impact on their own economic well being. I think probably everybody in this room wants there to be a diplomatic solution to this problem.

 

Having to take care of this problem militarily is in no-one’s interests, but it does put a premium on unanimity in the international community, especially in the UN Security Council in terms of ratcheting up the pressure on the Iranians – not next year or the year after, but right now, in line with the uncertainty about when their capability actually will come online.

 

Secretary Gates, thank you for a comprehensive and optimistic assessment of this region and beyond. Dr Chipman announced last night an agreement with the government of Singapore to extend its dialogue at least until 2011. I wonder if I could invite you to speculate on what you or perhaps your successor would regard as the key strategic issues and challenges in the US-Asia Pacific relationship in 2011?

 

I think that the key challenges that will face these nations in 2011 are very similar to the challenges that I just described. It is how do we work together to strengthen newly emerging independent states to ensure that they move in a direction of responsible government, towards greater democracy and help their economic and governance development. How do we integrate them into the international community in a productive way so that they do not become failed states and potential sources of disruption or extremism?

 

Clearly working out our security and economic interests where many of us are both competitors and partners, and doing that in a productive and constructive way I think will remain a continuing challenge. There will be new areas where we are going to have to pay attention and work together. Clearly the whole arena of the environment and I think by 2011, global warming will be a much more central part of an agenda for a group like this in terms of security interests.

 

In my view, we will still face the challenge of radical extremism in many of these countries, and the need to work together to prevent it from creating new failed states that are sources of difficulty for all of us.

 

Thank you very much, Mr Secretary, for giving us a broad idea of international military affairs. Thank you for not neglecting Asia. About North Korea – do we have a resolution or opposition, and how long should we be prepared to wait if North Korea fails to shut down Yongbyon?

 

I think the unexpected development that has delayed going forward has been a technical one, having to do with the return of some monies to North Korea as part of moving forward. As best I can tell, this is really more the Secretary of State’s business than mine, but as best I can tell, the Secretary of State is still quite optimistic that this technical problem will be solved and that North Korea will fulfil its commitment in terms of denuclearisation, but we have made pretty clear that our patience is not unlimited in terms of getting this technical problem solved.

 

Secretary Gates, the fact that you are here I think is testimony that the United States does pay attention to Asia. We are very heartened on that. I have just come back from a semester teaching in the Southeast Asia department, and I would just like to make two observations. First, from your speech, you liken the current conflict against extremism and so on to an ideological conflict, similar to the conflict during the Cold War. Here, I think we need to be much more cautious, where we can delegitimise communism and a whole nation can forget about it and move on, but clearly this is not the case when one talks about extremism and terrorism related to one of the world’s religions.

 

Unfortunately we clearly need to have much greater knowledge and expertise about how to isolate the extremist groups without alienating the vast majority of the people. My second observation: I notice that there is a severe lack of regional expertise – at least around the Washington DC area. There are a lot of policy think tanks and so on, but people who are working on regional issues – particularly on Southeast Asia – are severely lacking.

 

I was very alarmed to hear from a colleague that when the crisis hit Indonesia in 1998, there was in fact no senior official knowledgeable about Indonesia, either in the National Security Council or in the State Department. A relatively junior colleague was promoted straight away to take up that position. I do not know what the United States is planning to do in the future to ensure that whatever decisions are made that impact the rest of the world, they are based on well-informed decisions with sufficient expertise that give input to the kind of policies you would like to make?

 

The latter point that you make is clearly an issue that I have thought about and worried about for a long time, both as Director of CIA and then as president of a huge university and now as Secretary of Defence. This is a problem that has been a long time developing. It is a problem that will take quite some time to fix. A number of initiatives are underway in a number of different areas to try and begin to remedy the lack of regional expertise and linguistic capability that you described. The Director of National Intelligence, Admiral McConnell, is here. He is changing the way people are brought into the intelligence community, to try and create an environment in which it is easier to get first-generation Americans who come from Arab countries or come from Southeast Asia and elsewhere, into our intelligence organisations to bring that kind of expertise.

 

We are looking at new initiatives in terms of how to encourage young people to take more foreign languages. As many of you know, we have programmes in many universities across the United States for the Reserve Officer Training Corps (ROTC). One of the initiatives that I am pursuing is how we can add a financial incentive for those students in ROTC to take specific languages, whether it is Arabic, Chinese or other languages, so that we have a growing cadre of young officers in the American military with bilingual or trilingual capabilities a few years from now.

 

It is a reality, however, that many of the privately funded efforts that supported foreign language studies, foreign studies and regional studies in the United States dried up during the 1970s and 1980s. We have a unique situation, I suspect, in the United States right now in that both the Secretary of State and the Secretary of Defence have doctoral degrees in Russian and Soviet history. I am not sure how much that advances us, but both of us have that kind of background. It is a serious problem, but it is a problem that is frankly beyond the capacity of the government alone to resolve. It is a problem that business needs to confront, because they need people who are bilingual and who understand other cultures and regional issues. Obviously, those people can move in and out of government.

 

All of that is simply to say that you have put your finger on a real problem in the United States. It is one a number of us are concerned about. It is one a number of universities and a number of government agencies are looking at, to see what we can do in terms of trying to encourage young people to move into these areas and gain expertise.

 

Mr Secretary, thank you. As professional soldiers, we see – with not a little admiration – the tremendous job being done by the US forces in Iraq and also in Afghanistan. It is a difficult job under demanding conditions. But if there is one issue that comes out of that, it is the changed nature of conflict, to which you have referred as ‘asymmetric war’, where overwhelming technological and military power by itself is found to be not sufficient to obtain the political aims that are required. That is likely to be the nature of conflict and war in the decades to come.

 

Therefore, there seems to be a contradiction in applying military force in resolving issues of failing states or, for that matter, states riven with ethnic or sectarian conflicts. With your own great hands-on experience as a military officer and as an intelligence head, and now as Secretary of Defence, what lessons would you have to offer to this audience of serving and retired senior military officers?

 

I think the principal lesson of our experience in both Iraq and Afghanistan is one that has been articulated repeatedly, and over some protracted period of time, by our senior military leadership. It is that these conflicts cannot, as you suggest, be won purely by military action. These are fledgling societies, fledgling governments. They lack capacity. They lack the ability to extend services to their people. They often lack infrastructure. They usually lack any experience or a cadre of experts in the government who know how to make things work, whether it is a power plant or fostering greater agricultural productivity. I think one of the lessons that certainly the United States has learned in both of these places is the need to partner whatever military force may be required to take care of the irreconcilables in a country or in a situation like this, while at the same time trying to help build a government and an economy that serves the interests of the people.

 

Quite honestly, this is one of the areas where the United States pretty much unilaterally disarmed itself after the end of the Cold War. When I left the government in 1993, the Agency for International Development had 16,000 employees. Today it has 3,000. We had a strategic communications arm in the United States Information Agency. That has largely been eliminated and folded back into the State Department in a much reduced way. If anything, I think it is our military officers on the scene who have the best appreciation of the importance of economic development, social development, building schools and providing services as part of creating a population that is supportive of a moderate approach and of moving forward, as opposed to moving toward extremism.

 

I think the challenge that we all face is figuring out how to strengthen the capacity of each of our governments and how we can work together in building those capacities in places like Afghanistan and Iraq. One of the things I think is most heartening in Iraq is that we have 42 foreign governments and 12 NGOs all working together. Many of them are focused in these provincial reconstruction teams, in these efforts to build the kinds of institutions and capabilities that I have just been talking about. My own view is that we need to do a much better job of sharing with each other what we are doing in a place like Afghanistan and coordinating those efforts so that we can benefit from the experience that each has had, both in the positive and negative lessons learned.

 

You have put your finger on a huge problem. It is one that I think the military recognises more than anyone. Our Congress is interested in trying to help solve this problem, but in trying to figure out the best way to do this in the American government, there are obviously different points of view. One of the proposals of the President is to create a civilian reserve that would have people who are agronomous, who are engineers and others who are critical to the kinds of capabilities I am talking about, who – like our National Guard – could be mobilised in the event that we have to go in and work situations like this. The fact is many of the problems that the international community has confronted over the past 15 years involve the kind of issues you are talking about. It is not just Iraq and Afghanistan; it is the Balkans; it is Haiti; it is a variety of places. We all need to think about how better, for both the public and private sectors, to build capacity to deal with these challenges.

 

Mr Secretary, you mentioned in your presentation that the multilateral relations between China and the United States has made some very encouraging progress recently, but you still have some concerns about the Chinese military’s lack of transparency. You also mentioned that you think some of the Cold War approaches are still relevant in coping with today’s security threats.

 

My question is: do you think there are still any Cold War approaches that are valid or relevant in coping with US concerns about China in general and about the Chinese military in particular? Also, do you think there are other approaches, post-Cold War approaches, that the United States should adopt in dealing with multilateral relations between China and the United States? Thank you.

 

The reference that I made to some lessons learned from the Cold War really were directed more at how we combat radical extremism than in dealing with state-to-state relationships. What I was referring to, among other things, was recognition that like during the Cold War, it is an ideological struggle against these radical extremists; it is a struggle that will take many decades; and it is a struggle that will require many nations working together. It seemed to me that those were the principal lessons that can be drawn from the Cold War in terms of dealing with radical extremism. That was the context in which I described it.

 

My own view is that one of the ways in which conflict was prevented during the Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union was a steadily growing range of interactions, first diplomatic and then in the military sphere. I have always believed that the years-long negotiations on strategic arms limitations may or may not have made much of a contribution in terms of limiting arms, but they played an extraordinarily valuable role in creating better understanding on both the Soviet and American sides about what the strategic intentions of each side were; what the strategic thinking was; what their motives were; where they were headed.

 

That dialogue, which continued intensively for something like 20 years, built a cadre of people who were accustomed to working and talking with one another, people who were on opposite sides of a major conflict. While we have no conflict at this point, this kind of transparency, this kind of discussion, is the kind of thing that prevents miscalculation and helps each side understand where the other is headed and what its intentions are. That kind of dialogue, whether or not it involves specific proposals for arms control or anything else, I think is immensely valuable. I think it is one of the great assets of the developing military-to-military dialogue between the United States and the People’s Republic.

 

Mr Secretary, thank you very much for a most thoughtful presentation this morning. You mentioned this morning the struggle against international terrorism. I would like to draw you out a little bit on this. In particular, I wonder if you would be prepared this morning to just give us a frank assessment of how you think we are progressing. How much progress has been made in the struggle against international terrorism? Are we winning or are we losing? What need to be the key priorities as we seek to win this struggle?

 

I think that we are still early in this contest. I think that in the short term there are some heartening developments. Certainly from the standpoint of an American, the fact that – contrary to what I think almost anyone would have envisioned – the United States has not suffered another terrorist attack since September 11^th 2001, god willing. I think a degree of international cooperation has developed that in many respects would have been unthinkable prior to September 11^th. There is a wealth of sharing of information among almost all countries. We have eliminated one sanctuary for Al Qaeda, in Afghanistan. We still have to deal with their activities elsewhere.

 

Clearly, they are continuing to expand. I had a map prepared that basically showed in one colour all those countries where Al Qaeda had cells, in a different colour all those that had Al Qaeda affiliate terrorist cells, and then in a third colour those that had cells that wanted to be affiliated with Al Qaeda but had not yet earned the secret handshake. It is a lot of countries. The challenge is there. It is significant. The fact that a number of different countries have been hit by the terrorists makes clear to a broad range of countries the need to work together on this. I would say that the positive aspects, on the positive side of the ledger, include the growth of cooperation and partnership in trying to deal with these terrorist threats, in bringing them to justice, and in preventing terrorist acts from happening; a growing understanding of the need to work together in places like Afghanistan to prevent failed states, or states that are in trouble from becoming failed states, that may become safe havens for extremist terrorist groups. I think all of those things are on the positive side of the ledger.

 

On the negative side of the ledger, I think that we have not made enough progress in trying to address some of the root causes of terrorism in some of these societies, whether it is economic deprivation or despotism that leads to alienation. One of the disturbing things about many of the terrorists that have been caught is that these are not ignorant, poor people; these are educated people, often from professional families, so dealing with poverty and those issues is not going to eliminate this problem, but it certainly can reduce the pool of people prepared to give their lives for this cause.

 

I would say we are early in the struggle. Some very positive things have been accomplished, but I think the danger remains very great and is going to require even more intense collaboration among most of the nations of the world, if not all the nations of the world, to deal with this problem – including some creative thinking about how we address the root causes of this phenomenon over the longer term and how we try to reduce the pool of those prepared to give their lives for this purpose.

 

Thank you, Mr Secretary, for your very comprehensive presentation. Just now, you mentioned the Department of Defence’s report on the PLA and gave a very good analysis that intent is more important than capability. The intent is a more important issue to regional security than the capability. Certainly, you advocated transparency. Very recently, a new approach has been initiated by some countries in Asia Pacific. The United States, Japan, Australia and India have tried to organise cooperation based on common political values. It is called the ‘same values cooperation’. My first question is a very simple one. What is the intent of this cooperation, or this initiative, in security work? Is it open to other Asian countries? Just now, you emphasised that America is an Asian country. Is the ‘same values cooperation’ open to all Asian countries?

 

Secondly, what is the intent of this kind of political values cooperation in terms of security? Is it aimed at any country in particular?

 

First of all, I would have to confess that still being relatively new in the job, I am not deeply familiar with the background of this cooperation, but I would tell you that I think it is entirely appropriate for the militaries and navies from democratic countries to exercise together, to work together and to develop common capabilities. In terms of whether other countries can participate, I think we would have to look at that and see. I certainly think there should be no secret about what its intentions are. I think the same principles of transparency about the purposes of this cooperation should exist as I am calling for in other areas.

 

In terms of whether this is the right group for others to join or whether there are other bilateral opportunities for joint operations, joint exercises and things like that, is something that has to be looked at. But I think the key in all of these things, including the group that you mentioned, is transparency – particularly with respect to intentions.

 

Mr Secretary, welcome to Singapore and to the Shangri-La Dialogue. I have a question about the United States, China and Japan. One of the unresolved legacies of World War II is the bilateral relations between China and Japan. There is a view in Asia that a historic reconciliation between these two great countries will not take place until the United States gives its blessings and urges these two great countries to do so. What is your view on this?

 

Mr Secretary, I too would like to thank you for a very wide ranging and very thoughtful and enlightening talk. I think it was also very refreshing to hear a Secretary of Defense speak as supportively of the important role of nation building in this constant battle against the new insurgents and Al Qaeda. The problem, which I am sure everybody realises, is the role that nation building can play in making a country resistant to insurgency and terrorism is equally understood by the insurgents and the terrorists themselves and can only really take place behind a very effective military commitment.

 

The question remains as to whether that commitment, both by the United States and its coalition allies, is big enough and will be persistent enough to construct the wall behind which nation building is free to take place.

 

With respect to the first question, I would say that the United States would be very supportive of efforts related to reconciliation between Japan and the People’s Republic of China. That is, at the same time, it seems to me a matter for those two sovereign nations to address. Obviously we would be supportive of such a thing, but it’s really up to them. With respect to the second question, the honest answer is I believe the United States is prepared to commit the resources necessary and we have done so, both in Iraq and in Afghanistan and in the Balkans, and in Haiti.

 

I think that we have demonstrated our willingness to do this because as I indicated, it is our military commanders on the ground who understand the need to have both the capability to provide security in a nation that is trying to develop, in order to create the breathing space, as I said, for institutions and economies to develop. I would tell you quite honestly that there are not very many other countries in the world that are prepared to make that kind of a commitment who understand the need for both the ability to provide security and the need for the civilian side of nation building.

 

One of the concerns that we have in Afghanistan right now is here is the world’s most powerful military alliance, and we have in NATO, apart from the United States, something like 2.3 million soldiers. We are having trouble finding 3,000 people to go to Afghanistan, mainly to train the Afghan national police. What is the disconnect here? So I think there really is a concern that the heads of all of the NATO nations have made commitments, both on the security and nation building side, but even those who have provided troops in many instances have put limitations on the use of those troops in ways that make it difficult for them to contribute to building a secure environment.

 

There are other nations that are fully prepared to step up and play their part. The British, the Australians, the New Zealanders – people you would not think of in terms of providing these capabilities. The Georgians, the Macedonians, the Estonians – El Salvador is in its eighth rotation in Iraq. There are a number of countries that understand the importance of this connection. Unfortunately there are too many who do not. My view, and the view that I expressed at Munich, is that we have divided countries into categories of east and west, old and new and this and that for too long. It seems to me the only division that matters today, when it comes to dealing with these kinds of problems, are those countries that live up to their commitments and those who do not.

 

Mr Secretary, thank you very much for posing so many challenges for yourself and for the states of the Asia Pacific, and for expressing so clearly your willingness to meet those challenges with force where necessary, but as often as possible with tact and diplomacy. Thank you very much for sending us this message today.