Tag: Libya
Nation-building isn’t a four letter word
Donald Trump yesterday followed in a long tradition of American presidential candidates and presidents who have forsworn nation-building.
George H. W. Bush said he was sending the marines to Somalia in 1992 to restore order and enable feeding the population. When Washington discovered that we couldn’t get out without leaving chaos behind, we turned the nation-building over to a UN mission (run by a US Navy Admiral) that failed. We are still fighting insurgent terrorists in Somalia.
Bill Clinton said in 1995 we would send US troops to a NATO mission to Bosnia and Herzegovina for only a year, to oversee implementation of only the military aspects of the Dayton peace agreements. He discovered the obstacles to peace implementation didn’t divide neatly into civilian and military components. US troops stayed for almost 10 years and some still remain. They likewise have stayed in Kosovo much longer than initially projected. In both Bosnia and Kosovo, their presence has had positive effects.
George W. Bush declared during the 2000 election campaign that US troops don’t do nation-building. But once he had invaded Afghanistan and Iraq he discovered that we couldn’t get the troops out without it. He then launched the two biggest and most expensive nation-building efforts since the Marshall Plan after World War II.
Barack Obama has been more disciplined than his predecessors: he pulled US troops out of Iraq almost completely (in accordance with an agreement and timetable negotiated and signed by his predecessor) and has tried to get them out of Afghanistan. The negative consequences of failure to build an inclusive state in Iraq, including Prime Minister Maliki’s turn to sectarianism and the rise of a Sunni insurgency, are documented in the Washington Post this morning. The consequences in Afghanistan are all too obvious: the Taliban are back in force and the Islamic State is trying to gain traction. Obama has said that one of his worst mistakes was failing to provide adequate assistance to Libya after the fall of Qaddafi.
When Trump yesterday declared an end to nation-building, he was repeating what his predecessors have said, and mostly regretted. The American people are reluctant to govern others, even if they are quick to tell others how to govern. Trump followed that tradition too, by announcing that he would somehow make sure that lesbians, gays, transgender and queer people are treated with respect abroad and honor killings stopped.
It is of course unfair to blame all the consequences of reluctance to do nation-building on American presidents.
First, because they are reflecting the real preferences of their constituents. Americans want their resources expended at home, not abroad. Many believe that 25% of the Federal budget is spent on foreign aid, even though the actual figure is less than 1%. If I thought one-quarter of my tax money was going overseas, I would want foreign aid cut too.
Second, because the task they are trying to avoid really is difficult and expensive. It is properly called state-building rather than nation-building, a term presidents prefer because it sounds pejorative. But what we needed in Somalia, Bosnia, Iraq, Afghanistan, and Libya is a legitimate organization that could govern on a particular territory. The people on that territory might or might not constitute a “nation.”
Given what we know about terrorist groups and their affinity for weak or fragile states that cannot fully control their territory, state-building is not optional. Without it, post-war Syria or Yemen will, like post-war Iraq and Afghanistan, provide haven to people who wish harm not only to their own state but also to us.
That doesn’t mean the US has to be responsible for the state-building. You break it, you buy it is the prevailing rule. The Russians and Iranians in Syria along with the Saudis and other Gulf states in Yemen should be thinking about that as they bomb with abandon. The UN is already stuck with the job in Libya, where it appears to be making slow headway in gaining traction for a national unity government.
But what kind of state-building will Russia and Iran, or the Gulf states, do? Not the kind of state-building that even Donald Trump says he wants. What presidents call nation-building may not be what they want to do, but it is not a four letter word either. If you want to keep America safe, you are going to have to figure out how to get it done.
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The race isn’t over
Donald Trump delivered his much-ballyhooed Islamic State speech today. He began with a lengthy account of extremist attacks aimed at doing exactly what the Islamic State intends: scaring people. Beyond that, the speech was mostly a rehash of well-worn ideas:
- If you won’t call your enemy Islamic extremism, you can’t fight it.
- Guantanamo has to remain open.
- Immigration has to be restricted, and from some unspecified countries stopped.
- We should ship people home who don’t share “our” values.
- We should continue using drones and amp up intelligence but also capture a few more bad guys.
- We shouldn’t do nation-building, but
- We should somehow protect LGBTQ people and prevent honor killings abroad.
- We should have kept the US military in Iraq to hold on to its oil.
- Clinton and Obama are responsible for the rise of the Islamic State.
- We should convene an international conference to form a coalition to fight it, including NATO [sic] and Russia.
I suppose the relatively restrained tone of this hodge-podge and absence of any unfortunate adlibs will generate a new barrage of people saying he is now on track. But we are not likely more than 24 hours from one more outrageous remark intended to attract the media attention this speech is unlikely to get.
What Trump did not offer were any serious new ideas about how to deal with the Islamic State and other Islamist extremists. Nothing in this pale recitation comes even close to something anyone would call a new strategy.
I don’t really think there is one to be had. As Benjamin H. Friedman suggests, there is more danger in overreacting to international terrorism than from the phenomenon itself. It might even be said that is the purpose of many terrorists. Despite his even tone today, Trump is clearly willing to take that risk, at least so far as domestic policy is concerned. But he did not suggest he would do anything different about the wars in Syria, Libya and Yemen than what Obama is already doing. Even his suggestion that we work with the Russians is nothing new. John Kerry has been pursuing that idea for months without much visible progress so far.
The sad fact is that this guy is not ready to be a Congressman from Wyoming, much less president of the United States. The polling, as interpreted by 538, has him with an 11.1% chance of winning. There is even informed talk of a Clinton landslide.
Trump didn’t do himself a lot of good today, even if he avoided any big mistakes. But these are early weeks in a long campaign. Frightening as it is to me, I suspect at least 40% of voters will vote for him. Clinton is winning because Trump is losing. She has not overcome the trust and likability deficits that have plagued her candidacy. No one should imagine the race is over.
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Stability rather than integration
I was a fly on the wall yesterday and overheard a discussion of Libya. Here are some of my takeaways:
- The UN-sponsored political process has gotten about as far as it can get under current circumstances. The Presidential Council is in Tripoli and the country’s two expired legislatures are more or less defunct.
- General Haftar, who leads the so-called Libyan National Army headquartered in Benghazi, will not be able to displace the Presidential Council, but he also isn’t prepared to accept the subordinate role (as foreseen for the military chief in Article 8 of the UN-sponsored Libyan Political Agreement).
- So the most likely outcome is divided governance for now, superimposed on an elaborate array of municipal and tribal arrangements that are far more important to most Libyans than those claiming national authority.
- Legitimacy in Libya does not stem from elections but rather from effective and inclusive governance. The international community has to do what it can to help Presidential Council Chair Sarraj deliver the goods.
- Over the long-term, subnational dialogue and structures will also be vital to stability in Libya, which should be the international community’s relatively modest goal.
- The next step at the national level should be a Libyan/Libyan dialogue on security issues, mainly between the Misratan militia and Haftar. This should aim to determine practical arrangements for security, in particular in Sirte once the Islamic State is defeated there as well as for the oil fields and pipelines.
- Power-sharing is not as good an idea as defining the territory on which different militias will hold sway.
- The Egyptians and United Arab Emirates have provided support to Haftar, but they can’t “deliver” him, partly because if they try he will turn to Moscow. The Russians would like an opportunity to gain a toehold in North Africa.
- Haftar could be more of a problem if his sponsors abandon him than if they maintain their support and try to influence him.
- The Turkish role in Libya is in doubt in the wake of the coup attempt. Erdogan, who had already begun to reconfigure Ankara’s relations with Russia and Israel, may also revise his position vis-a-vis Syria and Libya.
- So long as the international community gives priority to fighting ISIS, it will be difficult to gain attention to the more fundamental and long-term problem of how Libya is to be governed.
- Prospects for a major international intervention in Libya have dimmed, though the threat of mass migration persists: as many as 800,000 people in Libya are thought to be intending to cross the Mediterranean.
- Europe is increasingly turning its attention to preventing sub-Saharan migrants from reaching Libya by strengthening economies and governance in Mali, Niger and elsewhere.
- US and European special forces engagement on the ground in Libya, which aims principally at fighting ISIS, could also be useful in informing international efforts at promoting Libyan/Libyan dialogue and stabilizing the situation.
- The key to success is gaining an improved understanding of what motivates different actors: how can they be incented or disincented?
- While Libya’s revolutionary aspirations have largely been dashed and its polity badly divided, the society still has indigenous tribal and civil society capacities that could prove vital in stabilizing its three main regions (east, west and south) now and eventually re-knitting them into a single state.
International goals for Libya should be modest. Resources are limited. The “international community,” often divided, has lost a lot of clout and credibility in Libya, even if the UN plan has gone farther than some might have expected. Stability rather than democracy should be the immediate objection. Deconfliction rather than integration.
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Liberal democracy at risk
The handwriting is on many walls. Liberal democracy and the world order it has built since World War II are at risk. Equal rights, political pluralism and rule of law are being challenged from several directions.
We see it in Brexit, which aims explicitly to restore borders, reject immigrants and implicitly to end the liberal democratic establishment’s monopoly on governing power. We see it in Trump, who aims at similar goals. We see it in Putin, Erdogan and Sisi, who are selling the idea that concentrated power and restrictions on freedom will deliver better and more goods and services. We see it in China, which likewise aims to maintain the Communist Party’s monopoly on national political power while allowing markets to drive growth. No need to mention Hungary’s Orbán, Macedonia’s Gruevski, Poland’s Szydło and other democratically elected leaders who turn their backs on liberal democratic values once in power, in favor of religion, nationalism or ethnic identity.
Among the first victims are likely to be two bold efforts at freeing up trade and investment and promoting growth by removing barriers and encouraging globalization: the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership between the European Union and the US as well as the Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP), which was intended to do something similar in the Pacific Basin. Both Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump have said they are opposed to TPP. It is hard to picture TTIP proceeding while the EU is negotiating its divorce from the United Kingdom.
We have seen assaults on liberal democracy and its associated world order in the past. Arguably that is what World War II was about, at least in part. Nazi Germany, Imperial Japan and Mussolini’s Italy offered Fascist, autocratic responses to relatively liberal democracy in Britain, France, Germany and the United States. The Soviet Union, which fought with the Allies against Fascism, offered a Communist alternative that survived the war and engaged in the Cold War standoff with liberal democracies for almost 45 years thereafter, one that involved proxy wars, Communist and anti-Communist puppets, and the enormous risk of nuclear holocaust. The history of fights between liberal democracy and its antagonists is fraught with war, oppression, and prolonged authoritarianism.
It wasn’t that long ago, when the Berlin wall fell, that liberal democracy seemed overwhelmingly likely to win worldwide. The end of history didn’t last long. The two big challenges liberal democracy now faces are Islamist extremism and capitalist authoritarianism. These are both ideological and physical challenges. Putinism is an authoritarian style of governance that sends warplanes, naval ships and troops to harass and occupy its neighbors and adversaries. The same can be said of Xi Jinping’s China, which is making the South China Sea into its backyard and harassing its neighbors.
The Islamist extremist challenge comes above all from Al Qaeda and the Islamic State, which are competing with each other even as they destroy fragile states like Libya, Yemen and Syria. Iraq appears to be winning its fight, though it is likely to face a virulent insurgency even after it ends Islamic State control over parts of its territory. The outcome is unlikely to be liberal democratic. Many other states face that kind of insurgent Islamist threat: Afghanistan, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Egypt, Somalia, and Tunisia, to name but a few.
But the biggest threat to liberal democracy today comes from inside the liberal democracies themselves. Islamist terror has killed relatively few people, apart from 9/11. Popular overreaction to Islamist threats, immigration and globalization could bring to power people with little commitment to liberal democratic values in the United States, France, Sweden, the Netherlands, Denmark and elsewhere. They will seek to reestablish borders, slow or end immigration, impose draconian laws to root out terrorists, and restore trade barriers in the hope of regaining lost industries.
Another challenge, peculiar to the US, seems to be emerging: black insurgents with guns who think they are retaliating against police for abuse of black citizens. This is bound to elicit a law and order response the could even bring a real threat to liberal democracy in Washington: Donald Trump in the presidency. If the protests in Cleveland this week are not disciplined and peaceful, it could put real wind in his sails.
The menace to liberal democracy is real. If we want pluralism, human rights and the rule of law, we are going to have to take some risks. I find it an easy choice, but many of my compatriots seem inclined to lean in the other direction.
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28 pages, the Turkey coup and Nice
Those are the issues dominating the headlines this morning. The common thread: they all reflect in one way or another the secularist reaction to Islamist politics.
Islamism has become the main political event of our time, because we have made it so. The Nice attacker, like the Orlando one, seems to have been only loosely, if at all, affiliated with the Islamic State or any other extremist movement. Both were more loser than Islamist. Until fairly recently, we might have attributed their acts to mental illness rather than politics. Today, it would be hard for a Muslim in the West to commit mass murder without its being attributed to Islam.
Turkey’s coup attempt likely originated within the anti-Muslim Brotherhood currents of Turkish politics, including the Gulen movement. Its failure will enormously strengthen the hand of President Erdogan, whose Muslim Brotherhood-affiliated political party will continue to broaden the powers of the presidency as it reduces the opportunities for political dissent. There is nothing like an attempted coup to give an aspiring autocrat more opportunity to gain control over the levers of power.
The 28 newly published pages of preliminary investigative material on 9/11 shed little new light on possible connections between Saudi Arabia and the plotters of the attack. Despite the efforts of the Kingdom’s American public relations consultants, they will nevertheless stimulate the appetite of anti-Muslim forces in the US, who have already entertained us for several days with their approval of Newt Gingrich’s proposal for a Shariah litmus test for American Muslims. Like the attempted coup in Turkey, this Christian chauvinism is bound to strengthen those they attack.
We need to stop helping our adversaries. Islamic extremists are a real threat. But mistaking Erdogan, the Nice and Orlando attackers, and even the Saudis for the real thing is foolish and counter-productive. That lumps together apples and oranges and labels them extremists. It magnifies the problem and reduces our own capabilities to deal with it, by spreading them far too thin. We need to keep the focus where it belongs: on the weak states of the Middle East that are breeding social pathology, calling it Islam and killing mostly Muslims.
Iraq, Syria, Libya and Yemen are cases in point. These are the weak states whose collapse has made room for extremism to flourish. The Islamic State and Al Qaeda that exist there are not a bunch of crazed individuals, but rather well-organized insurgencies against the existing state system. They are doing far more damage in the Middle East than the occasional sympathizer or wannabe causes in France or Florida.
Erdogan should not be counted among the Islamist extremists. He an Islamist, but democratically elected. He proposes autocracy as the response to all threats, as does Egypt’s President Sisi. They are peas from different ideological pods, but peas nevertheless. As we have seen already in Egypt and will now see in Turkey, their answers to the Islamist threats will not be adequate. Autocracy may squelch secularism, but it is unlikely to stamp out Islamic extremism, as Sisi should by now have discovered. Islamic extremism has far deeper roots in the Middle East. It is there that it most needs to be fought, not only with military means.
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The road to Tripoli goes through Cairo
There is multi-dimensional irony in Libya’s recent progress. The militias that have plagued security for years are delivering success against the Islamic State forces in Sirte, at high cost. A country that notoriously resists international intervention has begun to accept a UN-imposed Presidential Council as its highest governing authority. A state notorious for lacking substantial institutions has somehow preserved through years of chaos a precious few vital to delivering future services to its population: the national bank, oil company and investment authority. Some of their divided bureaucracies still need reunification, but they have not been obliterated.
The biggest roadblock in Libya today is General Khalifa Haftar, who has refused to pledge loyalty to the Presidential Council, blocked such a move by the expiring Tobruk-based House of Representatives, and still gets support from Egypt, the United Arab Emirates (UAE), and perhaps Western governments. Even that has its ironic side: Haftar has been less effective against the Islamic State than his archenemies the Misrata militia. His resistance won’t last long if his sponsors can be convinced to turn him in the right direction. Western support for Haftar, if it exists, is aimed at defeating the Islamic State and likely won’t outlast that objective.
Egypt’s support for Haftar aims to defeat Islamists in its western neighbor, much as President Sisi has sought to do inside Egypt as well. The Egyptians do not make much distinction among Islamists. It views all of them as threats to the President’s hold on power and therefore terrorists. Russia, which has been flirting with Haftar, has a similar attitude. Haftar reflects this absolutism: he wants to obliterate the Islamists physically, not just marginalize or defeat them politically.
This objective is unachievable. A large portion of the opposition to Qaddafi was Islamist. Islamists won a significant minority of seats in Libya’s first free and relatively well-run elections in July 2012. They continue to have the support of many Libyans as well as armed groups. Even the kind of restored autocracy that Sisi has achieved in Egypt would not eliminate the Islamists in Libya. It would only drive them underground and create the conditions for the kind of terrorist insurgency that Egypt already faces.
The UAE’s position is less absolute than Egypt’s. The Emirates face little or no Islamist threat at home. They want Libya to separate mosque and state in the fashion of secular societies. Western influence is likely strong on the UAE, which would not continue to support Haftar if Egypt stops.
So the Libyan quandary increasingly depends on ending Egyptian support for Haftar and preventing Russia from stepping in to replace it. The Western powers will also need to convince the Misrata and other militias to accept some role for Haftar in a more unified Libyan security force. These are diplomatic and political issues, not military ones. The Americans, who have lost clout in Egypt with the autocratic restoration, have been shy of asking for more than the essentials: military access through and over Egyptian territory as well as maintenance of the peace with Israel. Washington has largely abandoned pressure on human rights issues.
But if Libya is to continue progress in the right direction, the Americans need to do more to block or coopt Haftar and solidify the authority and legitimacy of the Presidential Council and the Government of National Accord it appoints. The road to Tripoli goes through Cairo.
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