Ali Zeidan’s first official visit to Washington and the
then-Libyan prime minister had an urgent request: help us build a new
military force, he implored American officials, that can solidify a
fledgling government’s legitimacy and buy us time to put our country on
track.
Back home, things were going badly. By early 2013, a year
and a half after Libyans poured into the streets and declared an end to Moammar Gaddafi’s 40-year rule, the post-revolution dream had veered violently off course.
After
widespread looting of Gaddafi’s arsenals, the country was awash in
heavy weapons. Militias, reluctant to give up power, had begun to turn
their guns on one another. A separatist movement was gaining steam in
the country’s east. And in 2012, Islamist militants had killed
Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens and three other Americans in Benghazi.
“We
would like an alliance against terrorism,” Zeidan told President Obama
and other world leaders as he made his case. “That [was] our target,” he
said in an interview.
But Obama
administration’s plan to help the country rebuild its military, joined
by other NATO governments, instead came to symbolize the shortcomings of
the West’s approach to post-revolution Libya. Undermined by insecurity
and political divisions there, the flagship assistance program revealed
not only the hollowness of Libyan institutions but also how different
parts of U.S. govt worked at cross-purposes, dooming a project
that Obama selected as a personal priority
Envisioned
as a low-cost, low-risk means to stabilize Libya, the planned force
became a case study in the limits of American power to shape events
following the upheaval of the Arab Spring. It also showed how a
protracted planning process and a strong aversion to risk bogged down
what was supposed to be Obama’s signature effort in Libya.
U.S.
officials spent more than a year trying to develop the military
training. But they were ultimately unable to compensate for the many
weaknesses in Libya’s fledgling democracy and come up with an efficient
way to find, train and equip recruits.
As the country became increasingly consumed by violence — driven by
militias and the rise of Islamist groups — the Obama administration
quietly abandoned its plan and with it any hope that it could keep a
functioning Libyan government intact.
“There was plenty of blame to go around on all sides,” a senior U.S. official said.
A force to stabilize Libya
After
Libyans, inspired by the revolutions in neighboring countries, rose up
against Gaddafi in early 2011, Obama committed American military power
to ensuring that the strongman couldn’t follow through on promises to
destroy his opponents.
After five months of U.S., NATO and Arab
airstrikes, rebels advanced into Tripoli in August 2011, signaling an
end to the Gaddafi era. For the Obama administration, it was vindication
of a different approach to foreign policy, one that gave European and
Arab allies a more significant military role and ensured that the United
States would not carry the burden of a foreign intervention alone.
Equally
important in shaping Obama’s approach to Libya was Iraq. An early
opponent of George W. Bush’s war there, Obama was determined to avoid
another Middle Eastern quagmire. Unlike in Iraq, where American
taxpayers spent more than $20 billion rebuilding Iraqi forces, the Obama
administration would provide limited support to Libya but let neighbors
such as Algeria and Egypt and EU with historic links
take the lead in safeguarding stability.
For
at least a year after Gaddafi’s ouster, American diplomats focused on
governance and economic issues, not security, in their support for
Libya.
Stevens, who became Washington’s first post-Gaddafi envoy
to Libya, recommended that the United States direct its limited military
assistance toward helping Libya rebuild its air force and improve its
naval capacity.
Benghazi attacks, and the images of Stevens’s
limp body being carried out of a burned U.S. safe room, were a turning
point. When the American compound was overrun, it at once illustrated
the dangers of Libya’s post-revolution course and made it more difficult
for a risk-averse White House to correct it.
After Benghazi, aid and diplomatic programs were put on hold for
months. Scrambling to ensure that no more American personnel would be
harmed, the Obama administration temporarily removed most staff members.
When they returned, their movements were severely curtailed, making it
harder for them to meet with Libyan officials and oversee assistance
programs.
Benghazi attacks also crystallized another lesson
for American officials: Helping Libya achieve a modicum of security was
paramount.
Obama administration invited Zeidan, a former
human rights lawyer who became Libya’s first democratically elected
leader in decades, for talks in Washington. White House officials seized
on Zeidan’s proposal, which called for outside assistance in building a
military force that could contain militias and form the core of a new
national army, as a manageable means to stabilize Libya.
In June
2013, Zeidan traveled to Lough Erne, a lush golf resort in Northern
Ireland, to discuss the proposal with leaders from Group of Eight
nations. They endorsed Zeidan’s plan, which became known as the General
Purpose Force (GPF).
USA, Britain, Italy and Turkey
together agreed to stand up a force totaling about 20,000 Libyan
troops. The Pentagon would train and equip 6,000 to 8,000 Libyans in a
program lasting up to eight years.
Some in U.S. military were
skeptical from the beginning, particularly at U.S. Africa Command,
based in Germany. In early discussions, Africom officials raised
concerns about what would happen to troops once they returned to Libya
after training. What units would they join? Who would command them? Who
would pay them? Gen. David M. Rodriguez, the Africom commander, seemed
especially leery of the plan, multiple current and former officials
said.
After all, only a rump Libyan army remained after the 2011
revolution, heavy with generals and lacking in key military
capabilities. No one even knew how many people the army comprised. A
NATO official was told that Libya was paying salaries for 112,000
people, including people who had fled the country. But fewer than 5,000
people might show up on any given day.
“Africom said, ‘If we’re going to do this, we need to do it right —
we need a real army,’ ” said a former State Department official who,
like others, spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal
deliberations. “The problem was
. . . this was more than the U.S. was willing to do.”
The White House declined to comment about the program on the record.
U.S.
military officials were especially concerned about the difficulty of
vetting recruits, most of whom would come from militias, and worried
that someone might turn on American trainers. Screening trainees was
made more difficult by intelligence agencies’ limited understanding of
armed groups within Libya.
To keep trainers safe, and because
many of Libya’s military facilities had been damaged in the war,
officials decided early on that the training would take place outside
Libya. At first, the officials discussed bringing the Libyans to USA. But even getting the Libyans authorized for U.S. entry
would be hard. Eventually, officials settled on Novo Selo, a training
facility in Bulgaria, a neutral site across the Mediterranean.
Plans never implemented.
By
late summer 2013, Obama concluded that the United States hadn’t done
enough to keep Libya on track. “Libya at that time was seen as a country
that had a chance to succeed,” said Derek Chollet, a former senior
Pentagon official. With its small population, oil resources and
proximity to Europe, there was no reason the nation should devolve into
chaos.
Obama asked his national security team to redouble its
efforts, with a special focus on governance and security. That resulted
in a frenzy of activity — white papers, rounds of interagency
brainstorming, White House meetings.
But U.S. officials were
stuck. The White House wanted more activity, but it thought Europe
should be in the lead. The GPF was a priority for the president, but the
White House wasn’t willing to risk more American lives in Libya.
Agencies
disagreed about the best approach. Africom was ambivalent about the GPF
concept. The State Department supported the proposal, but some feared
that a major military program would crowd out the diplomatic agenda.
Security officials would allow very few U.S. personnel on the ground.
Most of what was discussed was never implemented.
Meanwhile,
Libyan officials were struggling to find recruits who were ready to go
overseas for training. American officials wanted Libya to send a
battalion-size cohort, at least 500 men, to each training venue. But few
Libyans were accustomed to the rigors of military life, and the
militias afforded better pay and more freedom than life in the
barracks, so attracting candidates was hard.
“It was like, ‘Why should I go to the army when I can have an easier life in a militia?’ ” one Libyan official said.
When recruits were sent to Turkey for training in 2013 and 2014, almost half dropped out, in part because they
found it too hard.
Many of them had never left Libya before and seemed to struggle in a
more permissive foreign environment. Zeidan said recruits procured
alcohol and drugs in Turkey.
“We thought they picked the wrong people,” one former senior U.S. official said.
For
months, American officials also struggled to identify which Libyan
officials were empowered to make decisions, sign documents and execute
tasks required for the training program. “To get the same two
interlocutors at a meeting two weeks in a row was nearly impossible,” an
Africom official said.
Virtually no Libyan official, no matter
how senior, seemed to use a government e-mail address. To track down key
officials, foreign diplomats had to show up at Libyan ministries, which
one American official described as resembling “mausoleums” — empty,
echoing buildings with few government workers in sight.
In an
untested bureaucracy, establishing legal powers and administrative
authorities for various ministries and officials often resulted in
conflict and delay. “We can’t sign the paper for them. We can’t deposit
the money in the bank account,” Chollet said. “They have to do this
themselves.”
When Zeidan took over in late 2012, officials in
Washington were hopeful that he would increase public trust in the
central government by providing services, increasing oil production and
taking steps to rein in militias.
Zeidan had spent decades living
in Europe and elsewhere as an opposition activist. He hoped to ensure
that Islamists, who had gained influence after Gaddafi’s ouster, would
not monopolize decision-making. He also had plans to build up a
military with strong international ties, whose officers would be sent to
other countries to gain education and experience.
“He
presented very well, and I think people were desperate to see something
positive happen,” the senior U.S. official said of Zeidan, noting his
fluency in European languages and his liberal disposition.
In an
interview near Munich, where Zeidan now lives, the former premier
described a host of difficulties he faced in advancing his training
plan. There was resistance from those within the GNC, the country’s interim legislature, and within his own
government who feared that the initiative would empower Gaddafi-era
figures. Others believed the new force would go after Islamists, many of
whom had been persecuted or jailed by Gaddafi.
“They said: ‘This is the secularism prime minister. He wants to [create] an army against the revolution,’ ” Zeidan said.
One
key Islamist was Khalid Sharif, who was Zeidan’s deputy defense
minister. Sharif, who had been a senior member of the Libyan Islamic
Fighting Group, which had fought to overthrow Gaddafi in the 1990s, was
already well known to USA. In 2003, Sharif was arrested in
Pakistan and placed in U.S. custody in Afghanistan, where
Human Rights Watch
said he was subjected to severe abuse. In 2005, the United States sent
Sharif home to Libya, where he spent five more years in prison before
Gaddafi released him.
Now, US’ flagship assistance
program for Libya fell under Sharif’s authority in the Defense
Ministry. Various Libyan and U.S. officials said that Sharif, who had
headed an earlier initiative to stand up a new national guard, was
suspicious of the GPF and did not advance the initiative.
But
Sharif, speaking via phone from Libya, said he supported the program and
blamed political divisions for its failure. “There is no country
without an army,” he said. Sharif also said such an army would require
broad participation from across Libya. Many Libyan Islamists feared that
Zeidan’s initiative would exclude them.
Several U.S. officials
said Zeidan was unable to build support from legislators and skeptics
within his own government, leading to a dispute among the prime
minister’s office, the Defense Ministry and the army chief of staff over
who had legal authority to oversee the program.
It took U.S.
officials time to realize how Zeidan’s proposal papered over such
political differences, and how his increasingly precarious position
affected seemingly routine tasks such as making Libya’s first payment
for the program.
From the start, the Obama administration
insisted that Libya, which was getting its oil industry back on its
feet, pay for the training. But executing a large contract like the one
the GPF required proved difficult in Libya, where decision-making had
been concentrated at the top for decades and officials were struggling
to adjust to the new system. For months, U.S. officials waited for a
first installment for the $600 million program.
“Zeidan would
say, ‘Oh no, we’re going to pay for it — the check’s in the mail,’ ” the
former State Department official said. “But we didn’t get the check.”
Only
in 2014 was Libya able to make an initial payment of several hundred
thousand dollars to compensate USA, not for training but
for planning costs.
Zeidan’s position grew more tenuous as time went by. In October 2013, militiamen
briefly abducted
him from a hotel in Tripoli. After that, he lived under militia
protection. In March 2014, when the rebel takeover of an oil tanker laid
bare the limits of government power, the legislature
voted to oust him. He was replaced by Abdullah al-Thinni, the defense minister and someone Zeidan once tried to fire.
“In
retrospect, it’s clear the reason Zeidan was unable to sign documents
for months was because, on one hand, he had people trying to stop [the
creation of a national army], and second, he probably was not in command
of the funding,” another senior U.S. official said.
A quiet death
That same month, a four-person
Africom team was on the ground in Tripoli, meeting with Libyan
officials and working to set up a system for gathering and vetting
enough recruits to begin training that summer. But according to multiple
U.S. officials, the plans that Africom put forward were so elaborate
that they seemed certain to ensure the program never got off the ground.
Although
the British, Turkish and Italian governments sent small teams to do
screening work required to send troops overseas, Africom envisioned a
much larger military footprint to get the program going, a major task
given security requirements for putting any U.S. personnel in Libya.
“They
turned a training program into a massive program that required all
kinds of infrastructure, all kinds of security, all kind of bodies,” the
first senior U.S. official said. “They were selling us a Cadillac when
what we needed was a Ford.”
Africom defended its management of the program.
“We
took the same prudent measures that we would take training any foreign
partner,” the Africom official said. “I’d say probably the biggest
reason that we stuck to our guns
. . . was that we were doing [the training] in a partner country,” Bulgaria.
Rodriguez
said Africom had done what it could to speed up the training. In
November 2013, he traveled to Tripoli to make sure that Libyan officials
ended a delay in signing a letter needed for the training, a move that
normally would fall to a much less senior official. The next spring, he
took the unusual step of sending a general to head the forward team on
the ground in Tripoli. But they were limited by time and again by a
barely functioning Libyan government, Rodriguez said.
“We all
have plenty of scar tissue, all the countries do, from doing these
things,” he said in an interview. “We want to do them right.”
But allied countries moved ahead faster.
In summer of 2014, more than 300 Libyan recruits began their course at
Bassingbourn Barracks in Cambridgeshire, England. In the initial
months, a third were sent home, and others claimed asylum. That fall, British officials
sent the entire group home early after a number of troops, allegedly drunk,
went on a spree of sexual assaults in the nearby university city of Cambridge.
Only Italy, which put about 250 Libyans through
a 24-week training course in 2014,
seemed to emerge unscathed. Brig. Gen. Cesare Marinelli said
Italian military had taken care to make the Libyans feel comfortable,
responding to requests about lodging and food. But he acknowledged that
he didn’t know what happened to the recruits when they returned to
Libya.
In fact, virtually of those trained by foreigners scattered once they returned home, U.S. officials said.
At
the same time, fighting among rival factions intensified in Tripoli.
The Africom team was pulled out in May as the embassy shrank to a
skeleton staff. In July, amid what Secretary of State John F. Kerry
called “freewheeling militia violence” near the U.S. Embassy, the State
Department announced the hasty evacuation of remaining U.S. personnel.
A
senior U.S. official said the Obama administration was committed to
U.N.-led talks seeking to broker a political deal between Libya’s two
rival governments and would resume support once a unity government was
set up. “Ultimately, the Libyans have to create an environment that
allows for the international community to reengage
. . . for any programs to be effective,” he said.
The
closure of the U.S. mission consigned the GPF program, like most other
assistance initiatives for Libya, to a quiet death. “The impact has been
that of a leaf on a pond,” the first senior official said. “I think
what people saw is that we are this huge clanking bureaucracy that has
standards that are impossible for others to meet, and we’re really not
capable of agile training missions.”
END
