Tag: Libya
Libya and Yemen: forgotten civil wars resurface
A C-SPAN recording of the event can be accessed here.
While the conflicts in Syria and Iraq may be making most of the headlines in the Middle East recently, the conflicts in Libya and Yemen still simmer under the surface. On Wednesday, a panel discussion at the Brookings Institution, moderated by Daniel Byman, sought to revisit these conflicts. The panel was timely, in light of recent escalation of violence in both countries.
The discussion was kicked off by Carnegie’s Frederic Wehrey, who recently returned from a visit to Libya. The renewed conflict there, he argued, is an aftershock of Gaddafi’s legacy of divisive politics, which the post-2011 transitional government failed to overcome. The civil war has now turned into a conflict between two large coalitions: the anti-Islamists in Tobruk and the Islamists in Tripoli. However, the real dividing line is not between Islamists and anti-Islamists, but between elements of the old order and revolutionary forces. Both camps have engaged in demonization of their opponents, polarizing the political environment.
At the same time, the coalitions are facing fragmentation, which is both encouraging and worrisome. While fragmentation allows for identification of moderates supportive of a peaceful solution, it also opens up the possibility of spoilers that could undermine the ongoing peace process.
A particularly worrisome development is the rise of the Islamic State in the country. Jihadism has been a factor in Libya since before the revolution. A number of post-revolutionary jihadist militias have been formed – most notably the Al-Qaeda affiliated Ansar al-Sharia. Anti-Islamist forces have now weakened Ansar al-Sharia, opening up space for ISIS recruitment, particularly among the groups younger cohorts.
If no peace deal materializes in the current round of Geneva talks, the international community needs to consider its options. One suggestion has been to cut off Libya’s state revenues – a significant portion of which is held in Europe. While this might be a powerful measure, as both sides rely on state revenues to fund their allied militias’ sophisticated weaponry, there is also the possibility of blowback in the form of further fragmentation, making European policymakers unwilling to move forward.
A UN force has also recently been floated, but large uncertainties remain, including the size of the required force. According to some estimates around 30,000 troops would be necessary. Meanwhile, intervention by Libya’s neighbors – most notably Egypt – would likely inflame the conflict rather than bring about a solution.
Ending on a cautiously positive note, Wehrey argued that there is a growing sense of exhaustion among segments of Libya’s population, resulting in emergence of pragmatists in both camps. Identifying and bringing these pragmatists into the national dialogue process is likely the best way to ensure that the conflict is peacefully resolved.
Yemeni blogger Sama’a al-Hamdani of Yemen-iaty provided a somber account of the recent developments in Sana’a. Yemen, which was only a few years ago compared to Tunisia as a success of the Arab Spring, is now increasingly being compared to Libya and Syria. According to al-Hamdani, the conflict is today playing out between the Houthi movement, a significant but uncoordinated Southern secessionist movement and remaining supporters of the outgoing Hadi government. Tribal actors and the Yemeni branch of Al-Qaeda are also playing important roles.
An important cause of the current conflict is the unjustified extension of the political transition, which cast doubt on the legitimacy of the Hadi government. Al- Hamdani also blamed Western governments for failing to engage Yemeni society beyond the government itself. As a result, they have no pan B. Going forward, al-Hamdani warned against isolating the Houthis since this would likely push them more firmly into the hands of Iran. Instead, the West should reengage with the authorities in Sana’a and push all parties to pursue a peaceful solution to the crisis.
Former ambassador to Yemen, Barbara Bodine, echoed al-Hamdani’s points, criticizing the policy failures of the West. A key failure of Western analysis is the tendency to frame Yemeni politics in a static pattern bound to misrepresent the country’s kaleidoscopic political dynamics.
Bodine also pointed out that the crisis in Yemen is not a failure of intelligence, since many of the events that have taken place since September were predictable. Rather, the crisis is a policy failure that resulted from single-minded pursuit of counter-terrorism objectives rather than broader political goals necessary to stabilize Yemen. If Washington is to play a constructive role in the country, it must go beyond its drone strategy.
Deputy director at Brookings’ Doha Center, Ibrahim Sharqieh, attempted to draw some parallels between the two conflicts. On a positive note, Sharqieh pointed out that the current levels of instability in Libya and Yemen were not entirely out of norm for transition processes at the early stage. The conflicts may still be contained before they turn into full-fledged civil wars. On the other hand, both conflicts have become self-sustaining. In Libya, the high number of displaced numbers almost a million in a country of six million inhabitants. The plethora of militias benefits from the continuing conflict.
Sharqieh also pointed out that spillover effects are giving both conflicts regional and international dimensions. In Libya, the recent involvement of Egypt is negatively affecting prospects for stability. Both conflicts also have the potential to disrupt oil markets: while Libya’s civil war has caused a drop in production to about one third of capacity, Houthi control of Bab al-Mandeb, the narrow straight linking the Red Sea with the Bay of Aden, may cause significant disruption of oil transportation from the Gulf.
In conclusion, Sharqieh argued that both countries suffer from legitimacy challenges. Uncertainty about who represents the parties to the conflict, whether it be the non-Houthi parties in Yemen or the Dawn coalition in Libya, has made negotiations more difficult. Moreover, in Yemen UN over-management of the process has weakened local ownership and thereby legitimacy of the transition process. Moving forward, the UN in Libya should take note of this lesson by leaving the parties with clear ownership of both the process and the implementation of a peaceful solution.
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Sources of fragility in West Africa
Min Kyung Yoo, a master’s student in my post-war stabilization and transition class, writes about a presentation yesterday on drivers of violence in West Africa by Alexandre Marc, Chief Technical Specialist of Fragility, Conflict, and Violence at the World Bank:
West African countries have experienced robust economic growth in the past decade. Since 1990, there has also been improvement in democratic consolidation, which seems to hold better than in other parts of Africa. Most governments in the region are elected and many people resist constitutional changes. In addition, West Africa has one of the most mobile populations in the world, hosting 7.5 million intra-regional migrants, and demonstrates strong regional cooperation through the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS).
Despite these positive signs, the Ebola crisis, the Nigerian war with Boko Haram, Mali’s fragility and the Burkina Faso revolt show the region is still fragile. Intra-state civil wars dominate in West Africa, including long-standing ethnic conflicts that disrupt national and regional economies. Politics in West Africa is ethnically oriented and political institutions are very weak. Political and election-related violence is a growing challenge. The nature of violence and conflict has shifted in the past decade, with new threats such as illegal trafficking, religious radicalization, and piracy. Piracy is more rampant along the coast of Guinea than off Somalia.
Marc discussed in depth five drivers of conflict and violence in West Africa:
1. Drug trafficking
Protracted conflicts and political instability, corruption, porous borders, and geographic location all contribute to making West Africa attractive to traffickers. While physical drug trafficking takes place in Guinea and Guinea Bissau, Senegal and Ghana are drawn into the business as they have more reliable and functioning banking system in which drug traffickers perform financial transactions. Drug trafficking has potential to compromise officials and security agents, destabilize governments and weaken states, erode the region’s social fabric and damage economic development.
2. Religious extremism
Religious extremism in West Africa is largely home-grown, and has developed in areas with strong grievances—unemployment, corruption, and perceived marginalization. Increasing traditionalization, intergenerational crisis, disillusionment with the state, as well as external factors such as civil wars in Algeria and Libya, have accelerated radicalization.
3. Challenges of youth inclusion
West Africa hosts a rapidly growing population, but lacks capacity to address the needs of youth. Challenges include poor quality education and few employment opportunities. Unemployment is rarely a main or direct cause of conflict. But youth tend to have high expectations and seek to assert themselves outside both traditional and modern institutions. Meeting the expectations of youth has been a big challenge, leading to frustration and alienation. Gender dimensions and rapidly changing gender roles should not be neglected.
4. Migration
Tensions surrounding migratory flows—including discriminatory notions of citizenship and foreigner, political and social marginalization, competition over land, resources, and employment—have contributed to violence and conflict in West Africa in past decades. Rapid urbanization across the region and the influx of migrants into urban center is another source of instability. Informal settlements populated by unemployed and marginalized youth intensify perceptions of inequality and increase the risk of violent crime and gang activity.
5. Fragility of political and land institutions
Competition for control over political processes that guarantee access to resources has been at the core of much conflict and violence in recent decades. The high incidence of military coups in the region reflects this trend. Almost every conflict in the sub-region features land: ambiguities around legal pluralism (customary and statutory land tenure), ineffective land management, and unequal distribution.
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Drums don’t win wars
A president who was trying to extract America from wars in Iraq and Afghanistan is now preparing to escalate the war in Ukraine and the campaign against the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria. Yesterday, his nominee for Defense Secretary made it clear he supports sending lethal armaments to the Ukrainian government to fight off Russian aggression, a position also advocated by former officials. The White House is also preparing to send Congress a request for an authorization to use military force (AUMF in Washington parlance) against ISIS, something the administration is already doing.
Both these moves fall in the inevitable category. We’ve pretty much run out of alternatives.
ISIS is universally regarded as not only a threat to vital interests but also one with which it is impossible to negotiate. They seem intent on proving that with the immolation a month ago of a Jordanian pilot whom they then feigned being prepared to exchange for an Al Qaeda terrorist. If we are going to fight ISIS whenever and wherever, it is certainly proper that there be a Congressional authorization. Hawks will want it broad. Doves will want it narrow. But both will want it, even though it will make little difference to what the US actually is doing.
In Ukraine, the government is losing control of the southeastern Donbas region and could lose control of even more of its territory to insurgents fully backed by Russia’s substantial military might. I’ll leave to military experts assessment of whether American assistance with lethal but defensive weapons will have a serious impact at this point. It could take a year or more before any significant materiel and training is deployed on the battlefield. In the meanwhile, Moscow will use any American decision to arm the Ukrainians as an excuse to redouble its own efforts.
So neither of these noisy headline issues is likely to have any quick impact. Drums don’t win wars. And these two wars are not only conventional force-on-force clashes between organized military forces, even if they involve some battles of that sort. Both involve counter insurgency, the kind of war (known in the Pentagon as COIN) the US loves to forget.
I’ll leave to the COINistas the analysis and policy prescriptions on the military side. The important point for me is that COIN necessarily involves an important civilian component. You win the war against insurgency by protecting the civilian population. You have to win the peace over a decade or more by ensuring a continued safe and secure environment, establishing the rule of law, ensuring stable governance, growing the economy and meeting social needs. If you fail to do those things in the aftermath of war, you end up with Libya: a weak state that has collapsed now into civil war, leaving breeding grounds for extremists.
The civilian efforts required are in the first instance the responsibility of the governments involved. But their capabilities are at best limited and at worst nonexistent. In Ukraine, even a government victory would likely require peacekeepers to ensure stability in Donbas and avoid reignition of conflict. In Iraq, it is hard to picture the Baghdad government’s security forces welcomed in Anbar and Ninewa provinces. Some kind of local governance with its own security forces (the proposed National Guard?) will be needed. In Syria, Bashar al Asad has shown no sign of willingness to govern fairly or effectively in areas the government retakes. There too some kind of local governance will be needed.
The international capacity to contribute to these efforts is also limited. The State Department has shrunk its civilian conflict and stability operations capability, which was never substantial. The European Union has grown weary and leery of deploying its much more substantial capacity. The UN is stretched thin. OSCE is doing a yeoman job of observing the much-violated ceasefire in Ukraine, but it is a giant step from that to peacekeepers and monitoring implementation of a peace agreement.
We are embarking on another long period of war. We should be strengthening not only our military capacities, but also our civilian ones.
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Couphobia
Fear of coups (couphobia?) has broken out in all too many places. Turkey’s President Erdogan is cracking down on the Gulen movement members for fear they are plotting against him. Russia’s President Putin has done the same with foreign funding of nongovernmental organizations. Egypt’s President Sisi fears the Muslim Brotherhood will do to him what he has done to their (former) President Morsi, who languishes in prison.
Even in Macedonia, an EU candidate country, the Prime Minister says the opposition was plotting to oust him. Then again, the United States is said to be orchestrating an anti-Victor Orbán coup d’état in EU member Hungary.
I can’t be sure all these claims are as baseless as that last one. Washington just doesn’t care enough about Hungary to engineer a coup there. My guess is that Sisi has plenty to worry about, as he has vastly overdone the repression, creating a growing reservoir of resentment that might fuel an effort to oust him one day, though Egyptians are so tired of disorder (and the army so satiated) that it is unlikely a coup there would be popular. Erdogan and Putin are likewise doing their best to fulfill their own prophecies by making life hard for their legitimate opponents, whose natural reaction will be to think about their options. A coup might be one of them.
Then there are the guys–and they are guys–who really should fear a coup. Syria’s President Asad has destroyed his country in order to prevent anyone else from challenging his hold on power. North Korea’s Kim Jong Un presumably thinks he protected himself, but who knows which uncle or cousin still alive might make the attempt?
Yemen’s President Hadi is facing a coup in everything but name. The Houthi rebels who have him trapped don’t want to displace him, partly for fear that would end military assistance against al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula from the Americans the Houthis love to hate. Libya can’t have a coup because it is unclear who has power. It is having a civil war instead.
All the couphobiacs should remember Nouri al Maliki. He was so afraid of a coup that he appointed cronies to command his army and grabbed as much direct control over the other institutions of the state as he could. The result was collapse of the Iraqi Security Forces when faced with the Islamic State and his removal from power because even the Iranians and his own Dawa party turned against him. It doesn’t always work that way, but the example should serve to illustrate the perils of concentrating power too much.
The couphobiacs are unlikely to be chastened however. Once they start down the road of repression, it is hard to turn around or back out. They fear removal from power means they lose their lives as well. What Erdogan, Putin and Sisi need more than anything else is assurance that they can retire gracefully and live out their natural lives. Not everyone can afford to keep autocrats in power well into senility, as the Saudis do. But countries that want their autocrats to retire need to follow the Vatican’s lead and provide funding and protection (before they start committing war crimes and crimes against humanity). Come to think of it, that’s America’s solution too.
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Can the Libyans find peace in Geneva?
After the first round of talks earlier this month left observers cautiously optimistic, key Libyan stakeholders were back in Geneva today to continue to negotiate a peaceful resolution to the bloody conflict in the country.
The main objective of the Geneva talks is creation of a national unity government, as well as solidification of the ceasefire declared by a number of armed groups following the first session on January 14-15. A boycott of the negotiations by the Tripoli-based General National Congress (GNC) and sporadic outbreak of violence in Eastern and Southern parts of the country has perturbed the meager successes of the first round of negotiations, but the majority of delegates are now back at the talks.
The UN-sponsored mediation track still faces a number of difficulties. The most serious is the failure to bring all the relevant actors to the table. The GNC boycott means that only one of the two main political parties to the conflict, the Tobruk-based government, is fully represented. Tripoli is indirectly represented through a number of boycotting members of the Tobruk-based House of Representatives and other civil society members (including Nihad Maiteeq , the sister of former prime minister Ahmad Maiteeq). There have also been consultations between UN envoy Bernardino Leon and the GNC leadership. Nonetheless, the lack of formal participation by the GNC arguably harms the legitimacy of any agreement in Geneva – particularly any agreement about a national unity government.
A related problem is the perceived preference by the international community for the Tobruk-based government. The basis for this preference is an election in which fewer than 20% of Libyans participated, the results of which were voided by the Libyan Supreme Court. That government’s close relationship with general Khalifa Haftar, whose military campaign against the entire spectrum of Libyan Islamists has greatly contributed to the polarization of Libyan politics, makes this one-sided recognition difficult to defend.
Jason Pack, a Cambridge University researcher and analyst of Libyan political affairs, points to the problems of this one-sided approach in a recent New York Times Op-Ed:
Western governments are reluctant to acknowledge the implications of the Supreme Court ruling because many of them are secretly cheering for the Tobruk faction to either reconquer the country or dominate a national unity government. After all, the Tobruk government claims to be fighting Ansar al-Sharia in Benghazi — the very same group that killed the American ambassador, Christopher Stevens, in 2012. Perversely, the West’s ability to act as a neutral party and promote compromise is hindered by the fact that it has already recognized Tobruk as Libya’s sole sovereign.
Western backing of the Tobruk regime also seems to rest on a simplistic narrative of the Libyan conflict as a clash between republican secularists and radical Islamists. This binary perspective fails to identify the multiple forces that operate and gain from the conflict and, as one analyst has pointed out, empowers the hardliners on either side that have most to lose from a negotiated settlement.
Even more problematic than Western one-sidedness, however, is the strong support afforded to the local adversaries by regional allies. The Egyptians and Emiratis support Khalifa Haftar’s anti-Islamist campaign. Qatar and Turkey support the Islamists in Tripoli. This has aggravated the conflict, fueling a destructive polarization of Libyan politics. Instead of bringing the parties to the table, the foreign support has emboldened these forces, while simultaneously eroding the legitimacy of both parties in the eyes of ordinary Libyans. Further military support is likely to aggravate the situation further. The dangers of a longer term proxy war in Libya should not be taken lightly.
In spite of the monumental difficulties that the UN mediation efforts are facing, some indicators point in the right direction. Bernardino Leon and his team at the UN Support Mission to Libya (UNSMIL) seem to have made up for the GNC’s non-participation with the engagement of a wide spectrum of political actors and civil society representatives. Following the current round, representatives of Libyan municipal councils will meet on Wednesday to discuss confidence building measures at the community level. Although no date has been provided, it is hoped that this will be followed by discussions between key militia leaders. This multi-track approach may help the UN instigate results that can be implemented on the ground.
The political and economic situation should provide a sense of urgency that may help ripen the conflict for a negotiated settlement. The bloody fighting that characterized much of the second half of 2014 has now turned into a stalemate, with no one side appearing to have a decisive advantage. Tripoli and Tobruk are rapidly running out of money. In both cities the politicians know that Libyan state revenue is the glue that holds their militias together. Once these revenues disappear, many militias might find it more advantageous to pursue their own agendas, further fragmenting the Libyan political landscape.
The great challenges of the current Libyan conflict cannot be resolved in a few days in Geneva. But progress in the talks could stop the situation from deteriorating.
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Less force, more diplomacy
The Middle East Policy Council’s 79th Capitol Hill Conference yesterday provided an overview of issues of concern to US policymakers with regards to the current conflicts in Syria and Iraq, as well as the broader issues facing the region. The topic was particularly pertinent in light of recent signals from the Obama administration of a shifting approach to Syria’s president Assad, as well as the president’s call for congressional authorization of the current anti-ISIS campaign.
A common theme was the need for the US to scale down ambitions in the Middle East while diverting more of its resources to non-coercive methods of conflict management. Michael Hayden, former Director of the Central Intelligence Agency, called for more intelligence cooperation with U.S. allies from the region, who possess greater understanding of the cultural and political dynamics on the ground. He also argued that a scenario in which the Assad regime remains in power is the best possible outcome as the situation is today.
Daniel Bolger, retired Army Lieutenant General, argued for a de-escalation of US military objectives in the Middle East. He also called for an authorization from Congress if the Administration intended to continue the current campaign against ISIS. On the flip side, Dafna H. Rand, Deputy Director of Studies at the Center for a New American Security, argued for escalation of non-coercive methods of conflict management, with a greater focus on multilateral diplomacy. She also argued that more support for the Syrian opposition should be directed towards strengthening good governance.
This argument was also reflected in the presentation by Ambassador Francis Ricciardone, Vice President and Director of the Atlantic Council’s Rafik Hariri Center for the Middle East. He advocated the same kind of financial and political backing to the diplomatic and development corps as is provided to the US military, so that these forces can effectively assist in the formidable challenge of regenerating a stable and legitimate system of states in the Middle East.
A summary of the event is available on MEPC’s websites.
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