For over a year, the United States has been disengaged from Libya’s turmoil, with President Donald Trump saying the US had “no interest” in its interminable civil war.
That all changed on December 1 when the President abruptly announced a rethink in a meeting with the head of Libya’s UN-backed Government of National Accord, Fayez Serraj, to declare his “commitment to helping the Libyan people realise a more stable, unified, and prosperous future”.
For some, the engagement of the world’s only hyper power in Libya’s chaos is just the shot in the arm that the UN’s Libya envoy, Ghassan Salame, needs as he struggles to end the fighting but the US must beware of a potential for a military mission creep.
However noble Trump’s intentions are, the UN-chosen Government of National Accord is a dog that doesn’t hunt.
Its creation was spearheaded by the Obama administration two years ago this month, putting support behind the Muslim Brotherhood-friendly UN named Serraj and eight other Libyans nominated, by a UN commission, to run the country and end the civil war.
The GNA has done no such thing. Two of the nine presidency members have quit and the GNA itself, having no national legitimacy nor popular support, is a government in name only, occupying the Tripoli naval base because the city itself is held by all-powerful squabbling militias.
These are Serraj’s army, paid mercenaries who are a loose coalition of militias.
Those militias, which seized power from the legitimate parliament back in 2014, are fighting among themselves, one reason why in the past 12 months they have endured a string of defeats against the eastern army of Field Marshall Khalifa Haftar.
Haftar’s Libyan National Army is bigger, better armed and trained than the militias and has been rolling them up in a series of offensives that have captured the eastern oil crescent, home to most of Libya’s oil, along with Benghazi, the eastern capital.
Those successes have crushed Islamist militias, some aligned to the Muslim Brotherhood which the Obama administration favoured as a key bulwark to Libyan stability, never mind that most Libyans long since rejected them. Not forgetting many Arab countries designate the Muslim Brotherhood as a terrorist organisation, including US allies UAE, Egypt and Saudi Arabia.
The UN and some European Union powers still cling to the myth that the GNA, unelected and unloved, can become a true unity government, forgetting that Haftar, and a rival government in the eastern city of Al Baida, now control most of the country along with its oil.
Neither is willing to cut a deal with the GNA, Serraj or the Islamist and Misratan militias that control Tripoli and western Libya. Instead, they are demanding that the militias who have dominated the capital since the 2011 revolution, disband and hand over to regular police andarmy formations.
The oil ports are operating again, and eastern Libya is sorting itself out, even as Tripoli and western Libya plunges ever deeper into chaos
Trump’s statement backs joint actions against terrorist formations, with the US continuing to launch episodic air strikes against Islamic State formations in Libya’s central desert. But it is naive to call for “bilateral engagement in several areas”, with the GNA which is a government in name only.
Is military engagement in yet another country by US forces what the American people want?
Other powers have come to realise that Haftar and the east now call the shots in Libya. In January, Russia treated the field marshall to a full-dress parade aboard one of its aircraft carriers.
In July, France, which provided special forces intelligence operatives to help Haftar battle Islamists in Benghazi, invited him for peace talks with Serraj in Paris, on the understanding that those talks must work towards regular security forces and away from armed brigades.
Serraj has not missed his chance, inspired by his US visit to call for the UN to lift the international arms embargo on Libya but he stated they are for “his forces” not Haftar’s LNA, which means giving weapons to militias. Given that Serraj controls nothing outside a square mile of the Tripoli naval base, all such weapons will quickly find their way to militias, and a portion will be sold on to terrorists, even Isis or Al Qaeda.
Equal pie-in-the-sky has come from Salame who declared Libya will be ready for elections early next year. To which the only sensible response, giving that civil war is raging, is “dream on”.
In response, Haftar’s LNA spokesman Ahmed Al-Mismari reiterated that in the end, if Tripoli militias don’t disarm, regular forces must take action. “They [regular army and police] will end the Libyan crisis by decisive military action by the end of this year.” That is a very emphatic statement.
With Benghazi free, courtesy of Haftar and not Serraj, the city is rebuilding itself after three years of battle. Flights and shipping can only be to and from Benghazi by order of Haftar. Down the coast, the oil ports are operating again, and eastern Libya is sorting itself out, even as Tripoli and western Libya plunges ever deeper into chaos.
The answer is clear: American positive engagement is a good thing, if that engagement recognises where the power lies in Libya and not by helping to militarise the militias that Serraj calls his forces. That only exacerbates the situation in Libya.
There is massive public support for both Haftar and his allied parliament, Libya’s only elected body, in Tobruk, for an end to militia violence and legitimate security forces to be established.
Now Trump seems to want to engage the US in Libya. He and Washington bureaucrats could do themselves a favour by recognising that the time for militias, military intervention and chaos is over.
Libyans yearn for stability.