Can Libya still be saved?

CAIRO, Egypt — When four-decade autocrat Muammar Gaddafi was deposed in 2011 by a NATO-backed rebellion, the international community congratulated itself on a job well done and withdrew. Wary after the quagmires of Iraq and Afghanistan, Western leaders were happy to heed Libyan calls for limited international help and for their sovereignty to be respected. Even the UN sought to preserve a “light footprint.”

Libya was a country with a large Western-educated elite and no institutions — a blank slate, people thought. But after a brief period of relative peace and a sense of euphoric goodwill among the country’s various factions, for the last two years Libya has been seized by spasms of violence and unrest. Today the country is again split by conflict, with two loosely aligned blocs fighting each other in the country’s two largest cities, and two separate government bodies vying for recognition.

Some suggest that Libya is turning into yet another cautionary tale of Western intervention spun into chaos. But according to many Libya experts, that’s not quite the full story.

What went wrong

“A lot of the leadership was in a sense a leadership in our [Western] image,” says Dirk Vandewalle, associate professor of government at Dartmouth College. “I think in the back of our minds was, they’re Western educated, you know, so how can this go wrong?”

But “too many times the West and the international community think of symbolic issues [like elections and constitutions] as indicating progress,” he adds, even when there isn’t a political culture that supports them.

The international community, experts now agree, didn’t press hard enough for disarming the militias that had sprung up during the conflict. In any other country, a strong central state might have imposed its will and forced the hundreds of armed young men to return to their homes. In Libya, there was no such structure. Furthermore, many of the militiamen considered the army and police tainted by their affiliation with the old regime and refused to join their ranks.

Had a NATO force stayed for six months or a year and disarmed the militias town by town, says Karim Mezran, senior fellow with the Rafik Hariri Center, the current conflict could have been avoided. Even without foreign help, Mezran says, the Libyan government might have disarmed the militias if it had been a priority.

Inside Libya itself is a working example of how things might have gone: In the eastern city of Tobruk, local leaders chose to maintain the security structures that existed under the old regime, according to Mohamed el-Jarh, non-resident fellow with the Rafik Hariri Center based in Tobruk. Similarly, in el-Baydha, the city decided to disarm its militias early on. As a result, there is now police and army presence in both.

Elsewhere, however, the militias are frequently overriding the democratic process when it doesn’t go their way.

Today's conflict

The current conflict, which is the culmination of growing polarization over the last two years, has displaced an estimated 76,000 to 102,000 people from Tripoli and another 6,000 to 10,000 from Benghazi, according to the UN. It boils down to a power struggle between two loosely affiliated blocs: The first, led by the militia from the city of Zintan in the west, consider themselves “nationalists.” They call for inclusion of former Gaddafi supporters and claim to support democracy and reject political Islam. They are loosely allied with rogue General Khalifa Haftar, who declared war on the Islamists in eastern Libya on May 16.

The second bloc is split between Libya’s two largest cities. In the capital Tripoli, militias from nearby Misrata who call themselves “revolutionaries” and fight under the name Libya Dawn support the political exclusion of everyone affiliated with the Gaddafi regime. The Islamists, a broad group that ranges from moderate to extreme, many of them Muslim Brotherhood, support the Misratans. Their alliance represents similar interests rather than ideologies.

In Benghazi, also fighting the so-called nationalists is a far more hardline Islamist group, Ansar al-Sharia. Ansar al-Sharia and the Muslim Brotherhood are not natural allies: Ansar al-Sharia have called the latter apostates for even participating in the democratic process. However, when General Haftar, fighting with much of the army, declared war on the Islamists earlier this year in what he called “Operation Dignity,” the two had a common enemy. 

Both blocs function as broad umbrellas and neither has a clear leader. Both have pushed out the moderates. At present, none of the factions are strong enough to rule outright; “no single group in Libya can actually win,” says el-Jarh.

Bizarrely, the militias on both sides are also still on the state payroll. Instead of disarming the militias in 2011, the Libyan government started paying them salaries. The two groups fighting each other thus have the same funding source.

The opportunity for the international community

Some say the international community still has a chance to do what it failed to accomplish in 2011. On Aug. 27 the UN Security Council passed a resolution tightening the arms embargo on Libya that also mandated economic sanctions and called for immediate political dialogue.

The resolution isn’t likely to do much on its own, and as usual for UN resolutions may mean different things to different people. But Vandewalle says “it’s not too late”: there could be a second international attempt at political intervention that “corrects a lot of the mistakes of the first time.”

If hostilities continue, the international community may yet have some leverage to pressure the warring blocs into talking to one another: both sides are still eager for recognition.

The elected parliament in Tobruk does not control much of the country’s territory, and it announced Monday that it had lost control of the ministries and most of the state institutions to militias. The Misratan-Islamist forces controlling the capital are now seeking to show they can maintain stabilitly: They have invited foreign governments who evacuated to return.

Mezran thinks the international community should refuse to choose sides, forcing both to the negotiating table. Sanctions and embargoes could follow.

A strong incentive to act

Though there seems to be very little enthusiasm to apply significant pressure on the Libyans to end the conflict, that could change.

“Ninety minutes away from Rome you have … a country that is completely destabilized, that in turn is destabilizing an entire region,” says Vandewalle. “So the question is, how much longer … before the international community says enough is enough?”

In addition to concerns about the potential extremist haven on its doorstep, the Europeans are very worried about a deluge of immigrants and refugees if the conflict continues. Already this year almost four times the number of Libyan migrants have arrived in Italy than in 2013, according to the UN refugee agency. And although President Barack Obama has his hands full with domestic issues and the Islamic State in Iraq, he recently said that leaving Libya too early was one of the biggest foreign policy regrets of his presidency.

If the international community does not take this second chance to intervene,analysts say the country could enter a state of prolonged conflict, with potential ramifications far beyond Libya’s borders.

Toufik Shehabi, a former member of Libya's General National Council, says Ansar al-Sharia “are the Islamic State in Libya, it’s the same thinking.” He warns that in the near future, Ansar al-Sharia could gain support from groups such as Al Qaeda and the Islamic State. They already fly the Al Qaeda flag rather than the Libyan one. If the conflict continues Libya could become a launching place for terrorist attacks, deeply destabilizing the region.

Neighboring powers have already intervened in an attempt to staunch the spillover at their borders. Egypt and the United Arab Emirates launched airstrikes against the Islamists in the west and have likely provided other support, while Qatar reportedly arms and funds the Islamists. Libya could prove the next battleground for a proxy war — between Egypt, the UAE and Saudi on one hand, and Qatar and possibly Turkey on the other.

A small silver lining, if there is one, according to Libyan political analyst Ghaith al-Shennib, is that in Libyathe antagonisms don’t run very deep. With the support of the international community, he believes the situation could still be turned around. After all, he says, the Misratans and the Zintanis broke into Gaddafi’s headquarters together in 2011.

But old alliances may lose their significance as the body count grows and regional powers continue to intervene.