Johns Hopkins SAIS to host "Afghanistan from 9/11 to Present: Where Do We Go From Here?" on September 10
MEDIA ADVISORY
Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS) will host "Afghanistan from 9/11 to Present: Where Do We Go From Here?" on Friday, September 10. This event, presented by the Dean’s Office at SAIS, will focus on the U.S. withdrawal from the war in Afghanistan and the 20th anniversary of the September 11 attacks.
The event will feature Johns Hopkins SAIS faculty experts who will examine topics ranging from political and strategic decisions and implications that led to the United States’ longest war to refugee resettlement and ongoing security concerns in the region and beyond.
Agenda
Panel #1
11:15 a.m. EDT
Opening Remarks
Kent E. Calder
Interim Dean of Johns Hopkins SAIS
Panelists
David Barno, Visiting Professor of Strategic Studies and retired Lieutenant General in the U.S. Army who commanded U.S. forces in Afghanistan from 2003 to 2005.
Nora Bensahel, Visiting Professor of Strategic Studies whose research focuses on the future of warfare and military strategy and operations.
Eliot A. Cohen, Robert E. Osgood Professor and former Counselor at the State Department during the George W. Bush administration.
John McLaughlin, Distinguished Practitioner-in-Residence at the Philip Merrill Center for Strategic Studies and former Acting Director of the CIA.
Craig Osborne, retired U.S. Army Lieutenant Colonel, five-time bronze star recipient who was deployed to Afghanistan and Iraq during Operation Enduring Freedom; former Special Assistant to the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
Panel #2
12:30 p.m. EDT
Panelists
Adria Lawrence, Aronson Associate Professor of International Studies and Political Science and Middle East scholar who is currently researching foreign rule and resistance in the colonial period and the contemporary Arab world.
Carter Malkasian, Adjunct Lecturer of Strategic Studies and served as a State Department political officer and district stabilization team leader in the Helmand Province in Afghanistan.
Vali Nasr, Majid Khadduri Professor of International Affairs and Middle East Studies and former Senior Advisor to the U.S. Special Representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan from 2009 to 2011.
Charles A. Stevenson, Adjunct Lecturer and served on the State Department’s Policy Planning Staff and as a Senate staffer on defense and foreign policy.
Closing Remarks
Kent E. Calder
Interim Dean of Johns Hopkins SAIS
Time and Date
11:15 a.m.-1:30 p.m. EDT
Friday, September 10, 2021
Registration
This event is open to the public and media, with registration.
Media Contact
Jason Lucas
Communications Manager
Johns Hopkins SAIS
+1 (202) 663-5620
[email protected]
About the Speakers
David Barno is a Visiting Professor of Strategic Studies and Senior Fellow at the Merrill Center of the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS) and a retired Lieutenant General in the U.S. Army. He is also a contributing editor and columnist for War on the Rocks, and an Adjunct Research Staff Member at the Institute for Defense Analyses. In 2020, he co-authored Adaptation Under Fire: How Militaries Change in Wartime. Barno currently serves on the Secretary of Defense’s Reserve Forces Policy Board and is a member of the U.S. Army War College Board of Visitors. He is also a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and the International Institute of Strategic Studies.
Barno completed a thirty-year active duty Army career where he commanded at every level, serving as an infantry officer, Ranger and paratrooper. He completed three tours in special operations forces, serving with Army Ranger battalions in combat during both the Panama and Grenada invasions. In 2003, he was selected to establish a new three-star operational headquarters in Kabul, Afghanistan and take command of the 20,000 U.S. and coalition forces in Operation Enduring Freedom. For 19 months as the senior American commander, Barno was responsible for overall coalition military leadership of the war in Afghanistan, implementing a new counterinsurgency strategy in close partnership with the U.S. embassy and coalition allies.
Nora Bensahel is a Visiting Professor of Strategic Studies and Senior Fellow of the Merrill Center at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS), and a contributing editor and columnist for War on the Rocks. She is also an Adjunct Research Staff Member at the Institute for Defense Analyses. Her work focuses on the future of warfare and military strategy and operations. In 2020, she co-authored Adaptation Under Fire: How Militaries Change in Wartime. Bensahel currently serves on the Executive Board of the Leadership Council for Women in National Security (LCWINS).
Before joining SAIS, Bensahel was a Distinguished Scholar in Residence at the School of International Service at American University and a Non-Resident Senior Fellow at the Atlantic Council. Prior to that, she was a senior fellow and co-director of the Responsible Defense Program at the Center for a New American Security. Her early career included over 11years at the RAND Corporation, where she rose to the position of senior political scientist. She also spent more than a decade as an adjunct professor in the Security Studies Program at the Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service, Georgetown University, where she taught graduate classes and received the Alumni Leadership Council Teaching Award.
Kent E. Calder is Interim Dean of the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS). Calder, who also directs the Edwin O. Reischauer Center for East Asian Studies at SAIS, previously served as the school’s Vice Dean for Faculty Affairs and International Research Cooperation from 2018 to 2020 and as director of Asia Programs from 2016 to 2018. Prior to SAIS, Calder served as special advisor to the U.S. Ambassador to Japan, Japan Chair at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), professor at Princeton University, lecturer on government at Harvard, and as the first executive director of Harvard University’s Program on U.S.-Japan Relations. Calder received his Ph.D. from Harvard University, where he worked under the direction of Edwin O. Reischauer.
A specialist in East Asian political economy, Calder lived and researched in Japan for 11 years and across East Asia for four years. In 2014, he was awarded the Order of the Rising Sun, Gold Rays with Neck Ribbon. Calder's publications include: Global Political Cities: Actors and Arenas of Influence in International Affairs; Super Continent: The Logic of Eurasian Integration; Circles of Compensation: Economic Growth and the Globalization of Japan; Singapore: Smart City, Smart State; Asia in Washington; and The New Continentalism: Energy and Twenty-First Century Eurasian Geopolitics.
Eliot A. Cohen is the Robert E. Osgood Professor at the Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS) where he has taught since 1990. He served as Dean of SAIS from 2019 to 2021. Cohen received his BA and PhD degrees from Harvard University and after teaching there and at the Naval War College founded the Strategic Studies program at SAIS. His books include The Big Stick, Conquered into Liberty, and Supreme Command. In addition to public service in the Department of Defense he served as Counselor of the Department of State from 2007 to 2009. He writes frequently for major newspapers and is a contributing writer at The Atlantic.
Adria Lawrence is the Aronson Associate Professor of International Studies and Political Science at Johns Hopkins University, a joint appointment by the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS) and the Political Science Department at the Krieger School of Arts and Sciences (KSAS). She is a scholar of Middle Eastern and North African politics. Lawrence studies colonialism, nationalism, conflict, and collective action. Her current work examines foreign rule and resistance in the colonial period and the contemporary Arab world.
Her book, Imperial Rule and the Politics of Nationalism: Anti-Colonial Protest in the French Empire, provides an analysis of the violent and non-violent mobilization for national independence that confronted European colonial empires during the decades following World War II. The book won the 2015 J. David Greenstone Book Prize for best book in history and politics, the 2015 L. Carl Brown Book Prize, and the 2014 Jervis-Schroeder Best Book Award. Imperial Rule and the Politics of Nationalism was also named one of the best books of 2013 on Foreign Policy’s Middle East Channel.
Carter Malkasian is an Adjunct Lecturer of Strategic Studies at Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS). He is the author of the recently published book, The American War in Afghanistan: A History. Malkasian served as the Special Assistant for Strategy to the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Joseph Dunford, from 2015 to 2019. Malkasian possesses extensive experience working in Afghanistan through multiple deployments throughout the country. The highlight of his work is spending nearly two years in Garmser district, Helmand province, Afghanistan, as a State Department political officer and the district stabilization team leader. He is also the author of War Comes to Garmser: Thirty Years of Conflict on the Afghan Frontier and Illusions of Victory: The Anbar Awakening and the Rise of the Islamic State.
John McLaughlin is the Distinguished Practitioner in Residence in the Merrill Center for Strategic Studies at Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS). McLaughlin, also a 1966 SAIS graduate, served as Acting Director of Central Intelligence from July to September of 2004 and as the Deputy Director of Central Intelligence from 2000 to 2004. Prior to that, he was the Deputy Director for Intelligence at the Central Intelligence Agency, Vice Chairman for Estimates and Acting Chairman of the National Intelligence Council.
Earlier in his career with the CIA, which spanned three decades, McLaughlin focused on European, Russian, and Eurasian Issues in the Directorate of Intelligence. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, he served as Director of the Office of European Analysis during the period marked by the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. Then, four months after the break-up of the Soviet Union, he became Director of the CIA office – Slavic and Eurasian Analysis – that was responsible for CIA’s analysis of the fifteen independent states that emerged from the USSR.
In early 2010, McLaughlin led, at the request of the Director of National Intelligence, a task force on the failed terrorist attack on a Northwest Airlines flight at Christmas 2009 and developed a series of recommendations for improving intelligence collection and analysis on terrorist plans. From 2013 to 2014, he served on the Advisory Board that assisted Norway’s Statoil (now Equinor) in its “lessons learned” following a terrorist attack on its Algeria-based facility.
Vali Nasr is the Majid Khadduri Professor of International Affairs and Middle East Studies at the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS) and a Non-Resident Senior Fellow at Atlantic Council’s South Asia Center. He served as the eighth Dean of SAIS between 2012 and 2019 and served as Senior Advisor to U.S. Special Representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan, Ambassador Richard Holbrooke from 2009 to 2011. Nasr has advised senior American policymakers, world leaders, and businesses, including the President, Secretary of State, senior members of the Congress, and presidential campaigns. He has written for New York Times, Foreign Affairs, Financial Times, Wall Street Journal, and The Washington Post, among others.
Nasr is the author of The Dispensable Nation: American Foreign Policy in Retreat; Forces of Fortune: The Rise of a New Middle Class and How it Will Change Our World; The Shia Revival: How Conflicts within Islam will Shape the Future; Democracy in Iran: History and the Quest for Liberty; Islamic Leviathan, Islam and the Making of State Power; Mawdudi and the Making of Islamic Revivalism; and Vanguard of Islamic Revolution: Jama'at-i Islami of Pakistan; and numerous articles in scholarly journals.
Craig Osborne is a retired lieutenant colonel in the U.S. Army. He served as Chief of Staff of Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS) from 2019 to 2021 after completing a 30-year military career. As an Army infantry officer, he led various units across the spectrum of conflict – operating in humanitarian crises, peace-enforcement actions, and several combat deployments to Afghanistan and Iraq. His senior staff assignments include serving on the Joint Staff; a Combatant Command; a Combined, Joint, and Interagency Task Force deployed to Afghanistan; and a NATO command overseas. Osborne served as a Deputy Executive Assistant and then Special Assistant to the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff in the Pentagon. In his most recent assignment, he worked as Chief of Staff to the Provost and then Executive Officer to the University President of the National Defense University in Washington, DC.
Charles A. Stevenson teaches courses in American foreign policy at Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS). Previously, he was a longtime professor at the National War College, where he was director of the core course on the interagency process for national security policy. Stevenson has executive branch experience, including service on the Secretary of State’s Policy Planning Staff, and served for 22 years as a Senate staffer on defense and foreign policy. He has written the following books: Congress at War; Warriors and Politicians; and SECDEF. His latest book is America’s Foreign Policy Toolkit: Key Institutions and Processes.
Johns Hopkins SAIS
A division of Johns Hopkins University, the School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS) is a global institution that offers students an international perspective on today's critical issues. For more than 75 years, Johns Hopkins SAIS has produced great leaders, thinkers, and practitioners of international relations. Public leaders and private sector executives alike seek the counsel of the faculty, whose ideas and research inform and shape policy. Johns Hopkins SAIS offers a global perspective across three campus locations: Bologna, Italy; Nanjing, China; and Washington, D.C. The school's interdisciplinary curriculum is strongly rooted in the study of international economics, international relations, and regional studies, preparing students to address multifaceted challenges in the world today.
For more information, visit sais.jhu.edu or on Twitter @SAISHopkins
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Date:
Thursday, September 2, 2021