Following a bloody revolution and a couple years of transition, Libya confronts a range of challenges to its security and stability. Over the past three years, the international community—be it NATO, the UN, the G8, or other actors—has committed itself to help move along the transition and address Libya’s security issues, through such programs as building a General Purpose Force or encouraging a National Dialogue. Yet, the political process is at an impasse, political assassinations and kidnappings are on the rise, and the government remains unable to secure its desert borders or rein in militias.
So, what can the international community do to help address Libya’s mounting security challenges; what should outside actors do to help Libyans achieve long-term stability?
Four experts on Libya weigh in on the issue; each offers a different perspective on the role of international actors.
Please join the discussion by sharing your own views in the comments section.
Patient, Incremental Adjustment
Peter Cole
Peter Cole, lead editor, The Libyan Revolution and Its Aftermath (London, Hurst, 2014).
It is hard to talk about what the international community should do in Libya without reflecting first how it, and Libya, got here. During the revolution and the transition, both NATO’s member states and the UN (and Libyans themselves) sought an international “light footprint” in Libya. Interestingly both parties were using the same language to learn from different experiences. UN figures, learning from Somalia, Kosovo and Afghanistan, advocated for smaller, politically-led missions with coordinated international assistance working through local staff and NGOs. Military strategists, learning from costly, bloody and indefinite nation-building projects in Afghanistan and Iraq, sought better relationships with locally-trained partners, supported by special operations and air power.
Both the UN and NATO were able to pursue “light footprint” approaches in Libya because they had a political entity—the National Transitional Council (NTC)—that was credible and assertive enough to set the terms of intervention. Both Mustafa Abdul Jalil and the Executive Office resisted, for example, “boots on the ground” or large multinational stabilization teams. But at the same time, the NTC did not have the mechanisms to prevent competition by local Libyan entities and networks for arms, territory, and training. It could, and did, absorb and incorporate these networks; indeed it was pressured to do so by Libyans and foreign diplomats. But, it thereby became less able to register and direct weaponry and ammunition (some foreign, most captured locally) through what remained of the armed forces.
As with the war, so with the peace. Abdul Jalil and Mahmoud Jibril moved the NTC to Tripoli and governed through existing ministries rather than other transitional mechanisms, for sound reasons such as avoiding Iraq’s “debaathification” scenario. But these ministries had very limited capacity. The army and police, which deconstructed themselves during and after the 2011 conflict, were limited not just by capacity, but because they lost officers, political legitimacy, and weaponry to revolutionary fighters. The Kib administration, under direct pressure from those fighters, got the UN to release frozen state funds to pay them. These were the best of bad options, but defined the government’s future scope of movement on the security sector, while NTC and General National Congress (GNC) politicians accepted and sometimes promoted multiple, competing security entities on the state payroll for political reasons.
What the international community “should” do, then, is bound up with where Libyans are at. For example, initiatives like the General Purpose Force can inject much-needed new blood and training into the armed forces, but must proceed tentatively—for reasons of political legitimacy (it exists at the request of the Prime Minister of an interim government), vetting, and government capacity to pay for that training and monitor and absorb trained fighters.
In the meantime, the practical and patient training and capacity building requested by the Libyan government under the rubric of the Justice, Security, and Defense program agreed in Paris in February 2012 is unglamorous but vital. This work should be politically informed and appropriate to the still-changing political and communal character of Libyan institutions and those who staff them—and well-coordinated with the United Nations Support Mission in Libya (UNSMIL) and Libyan government. Parts of the program, such as border security, have suffered when this has not been so.
It is a question of patiently and incrementally adjusting and improving mechanisms of governance, listening to all Libyans while they are having broader political debates around that governance (on federalism, for example). Those debates can be facilitated by the UNSMIL-supported National Dialogue, but need not be fully resolved. The most developed states contain profound political division, but such debates must be housed within institutions that can accommodate them without politicians or local communities’ resort to allies in the security sector, as has variously happened in Libya’s debates over political isolation, federalism, Islamism, army and police reform, and the Prime Ministership. Accommodating these debates is a goal best achieved by competent and impartial mechanisms of the state, not politicians.
The Army’s Role
Frederic Wehrey
Frederic Wehrey, senior associate in the Middle East Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and co-author of “Building Libya’s Security Sector.”
In Libya these days, no other concern seems as pressing and dire as basic security. People clamor for formal security institutions to take the place of militias—even those that have been nominally co-opted by the government. Last November, the country witnessed its deadliest day of violence since the 2011 Revolution when militiamen opened fire on protesters in Tripoli. When, in the following weeks, the regular army and police deployed across Tripoli and the militias retreated, the applause was thunderous. In Benghazi, there were similar outpourings of support for the local Special Forces unit and its charismatic commander during clashes with Ansar al-Sharia.
Outside powers are stepping into this vacuum with plans to train and equip a national army. The U.S. Congress was recently notified of a request for the U.S. to train up to 8,000 Libya soldiers for a “general purpose force” (GPF) for a period of eight years. Britain, Turkey, and Italy are also contributing. The project has been in the works since at least last summer and seems sound in theory.
But in conversations in November with Libyans from across the spectrum, numerous challenges and pitfalls became apparent. Many of these pertain to the force’s civilian oversight, actual purpose, and inclusivity. AFRICOM officials tell me the force is meant to protect government institutions and elected officials, to give breathing space for the troubled democracy. After that, they say, it will need to replace the role currently played by the so-called Libya Shields—militia coalitions acting on the authority of the Chief of Staff—to secure the country’s periphery. As a national army, the GPF’s officer corps and enlisted ranks should draw from all of Libya’s regions and tribes.
Islamist leaders in the east told me they agree in principle to foreign training for Libya’s army. But they oppose foreign control: a narrative has taken hold about the United States’ exclusive focus on counter-terrorism in Libya. Some see the force as serving only the interests of the National Forces Alliance or Prime Minister Ali Zeidan himself. For their part, some senior officers in the Libyan army oppose the integration of militiamen, especially Islamists, seeing them as unruly and ideologically tainted. Events in Egypt have had a subtle but discernible ripple effect on civil-military relations in Libya.
All of these tensions will need to be resolved to ensure the success of the new army. Government officials have convened multiple working groups and inter-ministerial committees to address the GPF and its future. U.S. officials and partner nations seem cognizant of the pitfalls. But a parallel effort is needed to overcome deep-seated political distrust and the absence of national reconciliation. Rivalries within ministries, within the General National Congress (GNC), and within the fragile security institutions threaten to derail the project.
Aside from dialogue, Libya needs to address the social, economic and political drivers behind the militias’ persistence. The young men in the militias’ ranks must be given incentives to leave and rejoin society. A sustained program for demobilization, disarmament, and reintegration is essential. A national-level project, the Warriors’ Affairs Commission, is a good start. But much of the actual progress is being made at the local level, at the direction of local councils and respected tribal elders.
Such efforts point to an important truth in post-revolutionary Libya that outside patrons and donors would do well to heed: the specificity of many of Libya’s challenges demand a case-by-case approach, tailored to towns and regions. Relying exclusively on a top-down, overly centralized solution, like the GPF, could well inflame an already tenuous environment.
A Sound Political Foundation
Dirk Vanderwalle
Dirk Vandewalle, associate professor of government at Dartmouth College and author of A History of Modern Libya.
Libya continues to face grave political difficulties that will ultimately have an impact on how secure the country will be. The attempt to create a National Dialogue in the face of faltering political institutions (like the General National Congress, or GNC) reveals that without the creation of meaningful institutions capable of solving the country’s lingering political difficulties, the reform and reconstruction of the security sector will only lead to continuing instability and chaos in the country.
The United Nations Support Mission in Libya (UNSMIL) keeps prodding political parties and a host of informal political actors to engage in a dialogue that it hopes will result, Tunisian-style, in some sort of compromise and will lead the way toward shared political goals. The last few months have indicated how complex and arduous this process continues to be. In Libya there are, as yet, no commonly accepted rules of the game, and very little sense of political accommodation. The country also lacks functioning civil society organizations or institutional arrangements, making the inability to compromise an enduring and prominent feature of the country’s political life. Although perhaps understandable from a practical point of view, the government’s use of the country’s financial resources to keep a number of competing groups balanced has, unfortunately, not provided any further impetus toward compromise either.
The ongoing institutionalization of the country’s political life has masked the fact that the major political institution created by the national elections—the GNC—has become a hollowed-out body that is valued more for what it can deliver in terms of patronage to different groups than as a national political institution that mediates citizens’ concerns. As the GNC’s decline demonstrates, an important bifurcation seems to be taking place in Libya. On the one hand the country’s political institutions are being constructed, but, on the other hand, they carry increasingly less relevance and meaning within the country. What must provide ultimate security for Libya as a country and as a political system—an institutionalized state that enjoys the legitimacy of those it governs—seems to be slipping away.
The idea of a National Dialogue was in part an attempt to remedy this growing alienation between politics and the reality of life in Libya, by bridging the gap between the country's formal political framework and those groups that have been excluded. Some observers have pronounced the National Dialogue a stillborn exercise; others are more optimistic that it can still have an important role as an intermediary in Libya’s fractious political life.
Bringing the security sector under government control is a sine qua non for the country’s stable future. But unless Libya can also create the political institutional arrangements that are ultimately needed for long-term stability and legitimacy, reform of the security sector will not be sufficient. We would do well to extend all the help we can as Libya struggles with the political aspects of its state-building effort. Political reconstruction will prove to be as significant to its security as the reform of its security sector.
The Roots of the Problem
Tarek Megerisi
Tarek Megerisi, London-based independent analyst specializing in Libyan and Arab politics and governance.
Developing a strategy to temper, let alone solve, Libya’s myriad security issues can appear overwhelming. However, highlighting the conditions that allowed these conflicts to start can help the international community identify ways to address structural issues behind Libya’s endemic insecurity.
Two of Libya’s infamous issues—the insecurity of the South, with its porous borders, and the blockade of Eastern oil terminals—serve to highlight the common base of the country’s current instability. Southern groups mainly demand tangible commitments to their region’s development and greater representation in the creation and implementation of local policy. The Eastern movement is driven by two groups: those demanding federal status for the East, believing this would guarantee future financial security, and those claiming the transitional authorities are criminally misreporting oil sales.
Due to the harsh experiences of Libya’s recent past, the transitional period has been viewed locally as a zero-sum political re-positioning where each region and group must assert itself to secure developmental rights. This was reinforced by the actions of Tripoli’s policy makers, who consistently failed to be inclusive, transparent, or effective. The driver of the Eastern and Southern conflicts has been the authorities’ lack of real diplomacy and their reliance on destructive stratagems.
The absence of centrally driven diplomacy initiatives, trusted conflict mediation forums, or mechanisms to allow the public to influence policy has created an environment of paranoia. This, in turn, has encouraged a vigilante approach to criminality, dispute resolution, and fuelled each group’s quest to secure their own rights. International assistance to help Libya replace existing political structures is paramount to solving national insecurity.
Such assistance could focus on collective problem resolution, create an inclusive political environment, and begin to train Libyan politicians in representative and transparent governing methods. The most effective way to inspire such changes is through the creation of (and support for) initiatives aimed at strengthening the rule of law, promoting transparent and inclusive governing practices, and putting in place transitional conflict mediation systems. This approach represents not only the most comprehensive but also the most sustainable solution to Libya’s security problems.