Month: March 2011
Post-war plans are needed, urgently
Tonight the President will clarify what we are doing in Libya and tomorrow a London diplomatic conference will assemble to congratulate itself on what we have achieved so far. But I doubt either one will seriously address post-war planning, which is needed right now. The President can’t call attention to it because his message will be that we aren’t going to spend much money on Libya, which Secretary Gates has already classified as “not vital” to the U.S. The London conference won’t do it either, because the Europeans should lead on support to Libya but they are still in their all too usual disarray.
So let me offer some guidance about the elements I would consider important in a post-war plan. The first thing to lay out is a satisfactory end-state, as Gideon Rose so eloquentlysaid in the Washington Post last weekend. Let me borrow from the ill-fated lexicon of George W. Bush and suggest that a Libya (note the singular) that can govern itself, sustain itself and defend itself would be a satisfactory outcome.
I don’t mean to suggest that this is a U.S. responsibility; only that Washington should be happy if that is the outcome. I fully expect the U.S. to avoid responsibility for the post-war efforts, which in my view should fall mainly to Libyans and Europeans. Libyans because it is their country. Europeans because it is their neighborhood (and a major oil and gas supplier).
There is no cookie-cutter approach, but post-Cold War state-building efforts have generally focused on five broad objectives. Here they are, with some pertinent questions (with thanks to my SAIS class for our discussion of several weeks ago):
1. Safe and secure environment: Libyans seem to quickly organize themselves for community protection, but in the aftermath of this war the big problem is likely to be the Gaddafi loyalists, who may conduct the kind of stay-behind operation that plagued the Americans in Iraq (and troubled Benghazi just 10 days ago, when Gaddafi appeared on the verge of taking the city). There is also likely to be a serious rash of revenge killings, especially targeted against Gaddafi’s mercenaries. Preventing emergence of an insurgency and blocking the revenge impulse will require serious leadership on the part of the Libyan rebels. Failure to prevent revenge killings will incite further resistance from Gaddafi loyalists and haunt the New Libya for years to come.
There is also a need to secure whatever chemical and other weapons of mass destruction Libya may still have, as well as an eventual effort to collect first heavy and then lighter weapons still in the hands of rebels and Gaddafi’s forces. Failure to do this will mean a constant threat to the state from well-armed organized crime, which will grow naturally out of whatever smuggling operations both the Gaddafi regime and the rebels have been enjoying. The objective should be to establish the state’s monopoly on the legitimate means of violence, with all deliberate speed.
2. Rule of law: Libya’s police force will need vetting and reform–this is something the Europeans have assisted in many other places and should help with in Libya, at Libyan invitation. I know precious little about the judicial system in Libya, but as the head of the Transitional National Council is a former Justice Minister I trust we can rely on him to ask for what the judicial system needs. Some prisons seem to have been emptied during the fighting, releasing extremists. They will need to be recaptured, before they begin to wreck havoc in Libya or get to Somalia.
3. Stable governance: This will be a big challenge. Libya under Gaddafi was a “republic of the masses” and lacked many functioning state institutions. The Transitional National Council (TNC) will presumably be the seed from which other governing institutions–a parliament, ministries, a presidency, local governments–will grow. The TNC needs to remain broadly representative of all elements in Libyan society if it is to have the legitimacy required. As the rebels move west, this will mean enlarging or changing its composition, a difficult maneuver while trying to keep so many moving parts in place.
Of course it is possible that a new strongman will emerge to replace Gaddafi and he’ll decide what happens next. But experience elsewhere suggests that once people taste freedom it is hard to reimpose dictatorship. The UN has extensive experience helping to reform and reconstruct governing structures, not to mention holding elections and writing constitutions. The Libyans might do well to look there for help.
4. Sustainable economy: Libya has the great benefit, and curse, of oil and gas in sufficient quantities to make its 6.4 million or so citizens reasonably well off. Nothing of that sort happened under Gaddafi. It is hard to imagine where all the money went, though the freezing of about $30 billion in Libyan assets by a single U.S. bank gives a hint. The oil and gas companies will get in and fix whatever is physically broken once a safe and secure environment is in place.
What the Libyans need to focus on is making sure they have the fuel they need for their own consumption and establishing a system for oil revenue that makes citizens better off. They could do worse than consult with Norway, which uses its oil revenue to fund an endowment and spends only the earnings on the endowment, but that is just one option. Alaska’s approach, which provides per capita payments (much like welfare, but don’t tell Sarah Palin I said that) to each of its citizens, is another. The worst approach is the most likely one: giving the revenue to the government, which will then have no need to establish a rapport with citizens to fund its voracious desires.
5. Social well-being: The most immediate problems are food, water, shelter and health care for the hundreds of thousands of internally displaced people. But Libyans have been through four decades of a reality-defying dictatorship, one that ultimately divided them into loyalists and rebels. National reconciliation does not come naturally and will need care and attention. It will be easier if those revenge killings are few.
Again: I don’t mean to suggest that all this is a U.S. responsibility. It is not. The Libyans should take the lead. But Washington needs to think hard about ensuring that the necessary assistance is available. That doesn’t cost much–we’ve already paid for the nation’s diplomats, at least until early April–but it is vital if Libya is to get where we want it to go: govern itself, sustain itself, defend itself.
PS: Those who are going to want to vaunt the Libya operation as a triumph of responsibility to protect should be particularly concerned about the lack of post-war planning. The ultimate judgment of whether this was a wise humanitarian intervention will depend not only on the military outcome but also on the civilian results.
PPS: Steven Metz discusses the insurgency issue.
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Who said bombing would not work?
The headlong retreat in response to bombing occurring now in Libya is familiar to those of us who followed the Bosnian war, at the end of which the Bosnian Serb Army collapsed due to NATO bombing of its communication nodes. The rebels are not really winning the war, they are just filling the vacuum created when Gaddafi’s loyalists hightail it west. My guess is the retreat will continue until Sirte, Gaddafi’s home town, where he will try to have his loyalists make a stand.
This raises two important questions:
- How will order be maintained and services delivered in the liberated areas ?
- What will happen when the loyalists arrive back in Tripoli?
My hope is that the Libyan penchant for local councils will continue to manifest itself. While there is certainly some possibility of abuse, broadly representative local committees that include tribal, religious and secular community leaders committed to restoring order and providing services would be an appropriate way to fill the governance gap until something else can be arranged.
The stand at Sirte is not likely to last long if the bombing campaign continues at anything like its current ops tempo. The impending return of the loyalists to Tripoli raises several issues. Will there be a rising there that will put a quick end to the Gaddafi family’s rule? Will the loyalists clamp down even harder on a capital that has already seen a great deal of regime violence? In either event, there is a real possibility of heightened tragedy for the capital. The diplomacy to get Gaddafi out of Libya should by now be in full swing, even if invisible. Let’s hope it is successful in the next week, which is likely the amount of time before the rebels are at the outskirts of Tripoli.
There is another urgent issue: protection of the Gaddafi loyalists, including the mercenaries responsible for a good deal of the worst violence against civilians. If the past is a guide, they will face ferocious revenge. Likely some already have. It is important to prevent “eye for an eye” retribution, because it will set the new regime off in a bad direction. Accountability is important, but it will take time and fair process. The New Libya should not start with murder.
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Sure non-violent resistance can work in Iran
Problem is, there is no telling when.
The question “Can Non-Violent Resistance Work in Iran?” was posed Friday by Karim Sadjadpour to a panel at the Carnegie Endowment featuring former Italian ambassador in Tehran Roberto Toscano and Iranian political philosopher (and former political prisoner) Ramin Jahanbegloo.
No surprise the panel thought non-violent resistance might work and is not naive. Jahanbegloo emphasized that it is a strategic (not a moral) imperative, in particular if civil society is to win the day. Regime oppression of the Green Movement is a sign that it is a real threat.
Toscano agreed, saying that violence and politics are alternatives. Violence may achieve quick results, but at the cost of longer-term problems, because it undermines the legitimacy of the revolutionary movement. Violence divides people, and the resulting revolution has to defend itself from those who did not support it. Nonviolence enhances legitimacy by widening support. Iran, Toscano underlined, is autocratic, not totalitarian, rather like Italian Fascism.
Jahanbegloo thinks the Green Movement still has a good deal of capability, as it is a civic movement with real, indigenous, grass roots support. It needs to focus on undermining media and military support for the regime. Because of its dispersed leadership, the Movement is hard to decapitate. Women have been particularly important among the Greens, and more of them are in prison than men.
Agreeing that the lack of a clearly defined leadership structure strengthens the movement, Toscano noted that the regime also lacks a single target–it is an oligarchy that relies increasingly on the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) and its recycled alumni, and far less than in the past on the clerical establishment, who are not united in supporting the theocracy. The Greens need to build a more democratic political culture–to some degree they already have–by emphasizing human rights.
Jahanbegloo noted that the Greens have lost the enormous mass support that they had in the past. They need to rebuild, maintaining nonviolent discipline and establishing a better rapport with the security forces. They are also lacking support from “the bazaar,” business interests. But they are correct to define themselves as a broad civic movement and need to learn from their failures, as the Czechs did.
What can outsiders do to help the Greens? They need to maintain a consistent, principled approach and target human rights violators. At the same time, they have to realize that on the nuclear issue and on Iran’s regional role as a great power, the Greens do not disagree fundamentally with the regime.
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Endgames: local legitimacy is key
It is easy to get caught up in the drama and thrill of events as people throughout the Middle East lay claim to inalienable rights, but we shouldn’t forget that revolutions don’t often end well. What can and should we be doing to try to ensure that the hopes and aspirations of so many don’t end up serving the interests of a few? And what vital U.S. interests need attention?
Libya. Hillary Clinton will be attending a meeting Monday in London to talk about the future of Libya, which is a particularly difficult case because the country largely lacks a state. What it has though is a strong tradition of local councils, most evident in Benghazi but also apparent in other places that have been liberated. If these local councils can gain a degree of legitimacy by being inclusive, they could become the foundation for a decentralized post-Gaddafi regime. My guess is that this would be far better than building the new Libya from Tripoli outwards, which won’t be possible in any event until Gaddafi departs.
As for U.S. influence, the most obvious way to guarantee it is to provide arms to the rebels, as Blake Hounshell suggests. There are many downsides, not the least of which is eventual misuse of the weapons to commit atrocities. Revenge killings are more than likely in the aftermath of Gaddafi’s fall, which is one of the reasons he and his minions hold on so tenaciously. That said, I would opt at least for the rocket-propelled grenades the rebels need to defend themselves against Gaddafi’s armor. The bigger question is whether supplying them is done
- without changing the existing UN Security Council resolution (1973) on grounds that they are part of the “all necessary means” required to protect civilians (either overtly or clandestinely), or
- by adopting a new UNSC resolution that recognizes Gaddafi’s failure to comply with 1973 and adopts additional measures required to unseat him.
If arms supplies are to get there in a timely way, the former is obviously preferable to the latter. But the latter is far better from the perspective of maintaining legitimacy of coalition operations against Gaddafi.
Yemen. President Saleh’s days are numbered, but he is insisting on an orderly transition of power. That is not a bad idea. It would certainly be preferable to the kind of mess we are seeing in Libya, and it really does not matter much whether it occurs this month or next.
To whom should Saleh hand over? The parliament is little more than a rubber stamp, some of the army leaders who have gone over to the protesters are arguably worse than Saleh when it comes to cozying up to terrorists, the political opposition is undistinguished and the protesters are still an amorphous mass. Here is both challenge and opportunity for the Americans, in whose interest it is to guarantee an orderly transition to someone who will be at least as good as Saleh in pursuing Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, which is not saying much. Here, too, they might look to grassroots tribal, religious, political, civil society and other leaders outside Sanaa for at least a validation of legitimacy. Part of the Yemen problem is that the current regime really has little or no support beyond the capital. Building a new regime that has serious representation from both north and south would be preferable to just finding another headman like Saleh.
Syria. It has indeed gotten serious, as I’ve already suggested, with widespread demonstrations yesterday met with regime live fire, killing how many dozens no one knows:
This time it will be hard for President Bashar al Assad’s spokesperson to claim that he ordered no firing on demonstrators, though that won’t stop them from trying, but the protests have so far stopped short of asking for his ouster. Bashar is still regarded by many Syrians as above the wrongdoing they associate with the regime, though it is hard to believe that his personal immunity will last much longer.
Bashar has been no friend to the Americans, even if Senator John Kerry thinks we owe him rather than the other way around (at least that is what he said in an appearance at Carnegie Endowment last week). But again orderliness is next to godliness, now that we’ve got the U.S. military preoccupied with two and a half wars. Bashar can still survive, but he needs to get serious about the reforms he promised this week, and stop the live fire on demonstrators. I can’t for the life of me think what it is about the events of the last couple of months that would convince an autocrat that firing on protesters would help him survive. It seems to me the evidence is all on the other side of the proposition: let them demonstrate and adopt reforms to meet their legitimate demands, then you might survive.
The others. The Moroccans seem to have understood that proposition, and until yesterday the Jordanians as well. The Bahrainis, with Saudi support, seem ready still to test the effectiveness of regime violence and in the process turn popular protests into sectarian strife between a Shia majority population and a Sunni regime. Their success is unlikely to be long lasting. It is hard to think of anything worse for Saudi Arabia than linking its fate to the survival of the Al Khalifa monarchy in Bahrain, but that appears to be what the Saudis are determined to do.
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Statebuilding in Libya is not optional
While top officials scramble to straighten out how NATO will handle Libya, the situation on the ground there is getting much less attention than it merits. Our new-found rebel friends are not doing well, either in their military efforts or in their attempts to create a proto-governing structure. Heather Hurlburt writes at The New Republic:
I am less frantic about the endgame than many observers, not because I am more sanguine but because very often planners who have a clear endgame in mind are deluding themselves anyway. (The architects of the Iraq War believed they had thought through how everything would play out).
She certainly has a point about the architects of the Iraq war, but that is no reason for not planning now for the end of the Libya war, which will pose difficult problems, whenever it happens.
Libya is a country with less than a complete state, a condition that is readily exploited for nefarious purposes (in the past colonial ones, in this century usually extremist ones). No one should imagine that the state is going to emerge magically from the ashes, ready to accept whatever new leadership we decide it deserves. That in fact was the thoroughly flawed plan for “decapitation” at the end of the Iraq war that she refers to so disparagingly.
Nor should we be imagining that building a Libyan state is somehow a U.S. responsibility, though it is not unreasonable to expect the Americans to contribute in some way to the effort. Arab League? Doubtful. UN? Lots of experience, limited means. EU? Decent experience, lots of means, geographic proximity. It seems to me there are ample options–the important thing is to decide who will lead (I’d obviously opt for the Europeans) and then try to ensure that whoever does brings to bear the necessary resources.
Leaving state-building after this war to chance is dangerous. It could mean a partitioned Libya, or one that collapses like Somalia, or one that becomes a haven for extremism. To be fair, Heather also says,
We should be skeptical, frantically collecting information, hedging our bets and figuring out what the various forces are in Libya and how we can promote better outcomes and hedge against worse ones…
That does not go far enough: we need to ensure that Libya after this war is stabilized and develops the kind of state that will not allow it to go off the rails again. Less than that would be irresponsible. The effort can, indeed should, be led by the Libyans, but they will need help. If someone forgot to tell the President that state-building was part of the package, that was a big mistake. Focusing on the end-state may not seem urgent, but it is more important than the NATO scholasticism that has preoccupied the Secretary of State for days.
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Mil ops are clear, what about civ ops?
The U.S. military is clear enough about what it is doing in Libya (sorry the slides are not all shown in the video):
It is good Coalition partners are picking up about half the burden. I’m not a mil guy, but I am particularly interested in hearing that they are hitting communications. Experience in Bosnia and Kosovo suggests that is important in shifting the strategic balance. Once Gaddafi’s forces are cut off from his command and control, it is doubtful whether they will continue the fight.
That said, this effort has a civilian dimension as well. Relief supplies are starting to move into rebel-held areas. Hillary Clinton says Gaddafi loyalists are in touch with the State Department:
The most important civilian pieces are the ones we are not likely to see any time soon:
- What is being done to ensure that the Transitional National Council is fully representative of the whole country and ready to take over governance if the opportunity presents itself;
- Intelligence cooperation with the rebels;
- Discussions with Gaddafi-friendly places about offering him refuge;
- Diplomatic efforts to keep the Arab League on side, or at least not too loudly opposed to the intervention;
- Planning for the difficult post-war stabilization and reconstruction phase.
The only diplomatic piece that has been visible the last couple of days is the quarrel over who will command and control the Coalition operation, a role the U.S. wants to pass off. It seems now that will go to NATO. You don’t want to delve into the intricacies of that debate, which involves French, Turkish and NATO scholasticism that would please only medieval monks.
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