Can Still Fix It???

How We Can Still Fix Libya

Contrary to what people think, we were neither naïve nor ill-prepared when we intervened, says one of Obama’s former Libya advisers. And the story is not over.

By Ben Fishman

Looking back today, five years after Libya’s improbable February 17 revolution, most pundits treat the U.S. intervention in that country synonymously with failure, as yet another American misadventure in the Middle East. This election season and especially the politicization of the Benghazi tragedy have only reinforced the accusation that members of the Obama administration—especially the president and then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton—should have known better. Conveniently, these critics draw a straight line between President Barack Obama’s decision to conceive of and execute a U.N.-authorized and NATO-backed civilian protection mission to the rise of the Islamic State in Libya today.

That well-worn story may sound authoritative when reduced to soundbites, but as a former National Security Council official who worked on Libya policy under President Obama, I can attest that this narrative is misinformed and rife with simplicities. And Libya is not yet lost; the Libyans are even now striving to form a new unity government, and calibrated U.S. and international assistance can still help to stabilize the country and reduce the Islamic State’s presence.

Let’s review the facts. First and foremost, the narrative of U.S. failure in Libya downplays the role that the Libyans had in determining their own future. Five years ago, the Libyan people united in the face of a heavily armed regime with deep pockets. With the assistance of a NATO-led coalition, they ousted the Qadhafi regime in October 2011. But even while the Libyans were extremely grateful for NATO’s contribution to their revolution, they were adamant from the outset of the transition that they themselves should determine the country’s future. They rejected out of hand any prospect of an international force to provide security until the government was appropriately formed and the army and police reconstituted, ignoring examples from Bosnia to East Timor.

The international community was never going to impose such a force on Libya without its consent, so the U.S. and its European allies offered an array of security assistance programs (as well as economic and governance assistance) to help reconstitute professional security forces to protect the government and the Libyan people. Unfortunately, few of those programs took root in the chaos of post-Qadhafi Libya (with the exception of an important but little-publicized multinational effort to destroy Qadhafi’s remaining chemical weapons).

What had much more impact was the decision by the newly elected government to add thousands of militia members to the public sector payroll rather than find a way to demobilize them after the revolution and reintegrate them into civilian positions. Once the precedent was set to pay the militias who only contributed to Libya’s insecurity, it was nearly impossible to reverse. Any time a militia sought to extort something from the government, they would simply storm the relevant office, most famously holding the parliament hostage until it passed a poorly understood law limiting the role prior regime members could play in Libya’s future governments (comparable to Iraq’s harmful de-Baathification law). In other words, the government became beholden to the militias instead of commanding their authority.

Second, we had good reason to believe that Libya had a reasonable chance to begin to stabilize after the revolution. It was an oil-rich country (unlike the other Arab Spring states) with billions of dollars in the bank and a small population that had none of the sectarian divisions of Iraq or Syria. It established an interim government in December 2011 and organized a free and successful election in June 2012 that global experts praised for its conduct, enthusiasm and lack of security incidents. Importantly, the National Transitional Council, which served as the interim authority during the revolution until the election, gave up power to the newly elected body, the General National Congress.

It is important for critics of the administration’s Libya policy to keep these 2012 dates in mind. The election was held in June. The GNC elected its president in early August. Ramadan was in August, when little official work occurs. Fitting into that mix was the Benghazi tragedy that occurred on September 11, taking four American lives including our Ambassador Chris Stevens. Beyond the profound loss the attacks left on the families, friends and colleagues of the deceased, our Libya policy was irrevocably damaged as a result. The ambassador’s job was to work with Washington, the Libyan government, and our international partners on the ground to formulate a policy to support the newly elected government to strengthen its governance and adopt necessary institutional reforms, including on the security front.

We were in the process of developing precisely those plans when they were derailed by a devastating blow from which we never fully recovered.

The political climate at home spurred on by the endless Benghazi theories left us with few options to help strengthen the nascent Libya authorities. Without the benefit of American troops (which no one in Washington or Libya wanted to see) providing security to diplomats working closely within the walls of Libyan civilian ministries, we had very limited capabilities to help the Libyan government. And our efforts to provide assistance through a U.N.-coordinated process fell flat. Adding to the difficulties was an inability of any Libyan government to define what assistance it wanted or to follow up with seemingly minor bureaucratic necessities like signed documents or payments for projects it claimed that the government of Libya would fund itself.

As the Libyan government grew weaker from 2013 to mid-2014, exemplified by the kidnapping of the prime minister, the political climate was becoming more intense. When another election occurred in June 2014, it led to intense militia violence and forced most of the international community, including the United States, to leave Tripoli. Violence has continued since then between the so-called Dawn and Dignity coalitions of militias, resulting in approximately 1,500 deaths in 2015, according to the website LibyaBodyCount.org. The U.N. has engaged in political negotiations for the past year and a half that have shown promise in the past couple of months, but a new unity government still needs the backing of key Libyan factions and it remains in Morocco until it gains that support.

Today, it is true that Libya resembles a failed state. It features a dangerous combination of Islamic State terrorists, militias of varying strength and loyalties, as many as three dysfunctional governments, and a deepening economic crisis due to decreasing oil production, declining global energy prices and irresponsible spending. But it should be made clear that the Obama administration was neither naïve nor ill prepared when it became involved in Libya. It was always going to be a very difficult problem for U.S. policy and none of the choices were good or easy. Yes, we underestimated the extent to which Qadhafi deprived the country of functioning institutions and created a complex among officials where no one wanted to take responsibility for approving key decisions. More resources from the international community might have helped significantly, but that was not in cards due to Libyan intransigence and American politics (Congress refused to support assistance for oil-rich Libya in 2011-2012, and certainly not after Benghazi).

Some have argued that we should never have intervened in Libya and simply allowed Qadhafi to crush the revolt in Benghazi. That is also a convenient counterfactual. Aside from ignoring the impending humanitarian catastrophe in Benghazi, which we had little doubt would occur due to Qadhafi’s troop movements, there is little reason to believe the dictator could have returned stability to Libya. If anything, the existing Islamist-oriented militias in Libya would have gained strength, launched an insurgency and served as a magnet for other foreign fighters even before the Islamic State was formally declared in 2014. In other words, the situation could look very similar to how Syria has played out today, just on a smaller scale.

The tragedy for the Libya people today is that the initial promise of the revolution has evaporated. Civil society activists, who were among the bright spots of the post-revolution period, have been driven away by a spate of executions. Politicians seeking to adopt incremental change don’t have the authority or ability to enforce their policies. And in the midst of all this is an-ever enlarging terrorist quasi-state based around Qadhafi’s hometown of Sirte that is importing ISIL recruits from Syria, Iraq, Tunisia, Sub-Saharan Africa, and elsewhere.

After months of failed negotiations, the U.N. managed a breakthrough late last year when representatives of Libya’s competing governments and parliaments agreed in principle to a plan outlining a unity government and a path to resuming Libya’s broken political transition. The parties nominated a prime minister to head a nine-member “presidency council,” which is in the process of proposing names of cabinet members for parliamentary approval (one proposal was already rejected because it contained too many positions). If this sounds confusing and multilayered, it is, possibly even incoherent.

In the best case, the new government will be approved, and it can be seated in Tripoli (the presidency council is operating out of Morocco). Then it will be able to resume control of Libya’s ministries and try to operate as a normal government. Its priorities should be reestablishing security, confronting terrorism, reestablishing governance, rebuilding infrastructure and adopting a budget that eases Libya’s massive deficit spending. In ideal circumstances, the U.S. and its international partners would readily assist the new Libyan government, especially in a collective fight again terrorism.

Unfortunately, as we have seen time and again in Libya and the Middle East, Plan A is rarely realized. While the diplomats continue to press for a positive outcome during the talks, it is worth considering what Libya means to U.S. policy now and where our priorities lie in the country. While it would obviously be ideal to see Libya emerge with a unified democratic government, our priority now must be halting the spread of the Islamic State, which has already established a beachhead 400 miles from Sicily. Last year, its fighters struck two popular tourist sites in Tunisia, killing dozens of Europeans and dealing a crushing blow to Tunisia’s vital tourism industry.

Ultimately, establishing a stable, unified and secure government should be the goal of a long-term Libya policy. But if the government takes several more weeks to form and even more time to request and shape counter-Islamic State support, is that a risk we can afford to take given the possibility of continued threats against Tunisia, or to European or American interests abroad? By striking an Islamic State training camp west of Tripoli on February 19 and apparently killing a top Islamic State leader responsible for planning the Tunisia attacks, the Obama administration signaled that it would not wait for a unity government to establish itself before taking at least some action. It did so against the advice of many Libya watchers who argue that any outside intervention could pose a devastating setback to the unity government formation process.

An initial anti-Islamic State campaign that is scoped carefully and involves the right mixture of local forces, regional actors, with key contributions of U.S. air, intelligence, and Special Forces assets, is far superior to letting the Islamic State continue to expand with impunity. The Pentagon has already confirmed that U.S. Special Forces have been conducting reconnaissance for potential targets and to identify friendly local forces. In response to the news that the February 19 strike resulted in the deaths of two Serbian diplomats, the Pentagon spokesman said, “Our forces watched this training camp for weeks leading up to the operation,” suggesting that at least some U.S. personnel had been involved in reconnaissance on the ground. They should continue to do so and serve as forward air controllers, developing a series of targets that would deal ISIL a serious blow within the city of Sirte, making clear to the delicate blend of tribal and regional loyalists that the true targets of the international strikes are against ISIL and its foreign fighters—not against the Libyan people. In addition, limited numbers of U.S. forces should support local forces willing to take on ISIL and support the unity government. Not only would this help put a legitimate Libyan face on the counter-Islamic State campaign, but it could also help establish more reliable units who could help protect the government in the future.

If sold effectively to the Libya people by Libyan and Arab voices, most of whom reject the ISIL presence out of hand, there is the possibility that the unity government can actually be strengthened. In order to gain real credibility, though, a new Libyan government would have to execute concurrently a quick development agenda, for example, restoring oil production, improving basic services such as regular electricity and health care, rebuilding critical infrastructure and providing public security where possible. That’s where Libya’s supporters in the international community should be poised to contribute from Day One.

The Obama administration is not responsible for the rise of the Islamic State in Libya, but the February 19 airstrike was an important first step in taking the terrorists on. The key question for long-term success against the Islamic State in Libya is whether we can develop more effective and reliable local partners there than in Syria and Iraq. We should continue to try.