Libya: The Unravelling," by Jon Lee Anderson, New Yorker Feb 2015
Letter from Libya February 23, 2015 Issue
The Unravelling
In a failing state, an anti-Islamist general mounts a divisive campaign.
By Jon Lee Anderson
Early last year, General Khalifa Haftar left his home in northern
Virginia—where he had spent most of the previous two decades, at least
some of that time working with the Central Intelligence Agency—and
returned to Tripoli to fight his latest war for control of Libya.
Haftar, who is a mild-looking man in his early seventies, has fought
with and against nearly every significant faction in the country’s
conflicts, leading to a reputation for unrivalled military experience
and for a highly flexible sense of personal allegiance. In the Green
Mountains, the country’s traditional hideout for rebels and insurgents,
he established a military headquarters, inside an old airbase surrounded
by red-earth farmland and groves of hazelnut and olive trees. Haftar’s
force, which he calls the Libyan National Army, has taken much of the
eastern half of the country, in an offensive known as Operation Dignity.
Most of the remainder, including the capital city of Tripoli, is held
by Libya Dawn, a loose coalition of militias, many of them working in a
tactical alliance with Islamist extremists. Much as General Abdel Fattah
el-Sisi has boasted of doing in Egypt, General Haftar proposes to
destroy the Islamist forces and bring peace and stability—enforced by
his own army.
Haftar greeted me in a spotless office with a set of beige sofas and a matching carpet. Wearing an old-fashioned regimental mustache and a crisp khaki uniform, he looks more like a retired schoolteacher than like the American-backed tyrant his enemies describe. In a deliberate voice, he told me why he had gone back to war. After participating in the 2011 uprising against Muammar Qaddafi, he tried to find a place for himself in Libya’s new politics. When he didn’t succeed, he said, he went home to Virginia for a time, “to enjoy my grandchildren.” All the while, he watched as Libya floundered under a succession of weak governments, and the country’s militias grew more powerful.
Last summer, Islamist extremists moved to seize Benghazi; in a merciless campaign aimed at the remains of civil society, assassins killed some two hundred and seventy lawyers, judges, activists, military officers, and policemen—including some of Haftar’s old friends and military colleagues. “There was no justice and no protection,” he said. “People no longer left their houses at night. All of this upset me greatly. We had no sooner left behind Qaddafi’s rule than we had this?”
Haftar reached out to contacts in what remained of Libya’s armed forces, in civil society, in tribal groups, and, finally, in Tripoli. “Everyone told me the same thing,” he said. “ ‘We are looking for a savior. Where are you?’ I told them, ‘If I have the approval of the people, I will act.’ After popular demonstrations took place all over Libya asking me to step in, I knew I was being pushed toward death, but I willingly accepted.”
Like many self-appointed saviors, Haftar spoke with a certain self-admiring fatalism. But his history is much more complex than he cares to acknowledge. As an Army cadet in 1969, he participated in Qaddafi’s coup against the Libyan monarchy, and eventually became one of his top officers. “He was my son,” Qaddafi once told an interviewer, “and I was like his spiritual father.”
In 1987, as Libya fought with Chad over a strategic strip of borderland, Qaddafi chose Haftar as his commanding officer. Haftar’s base was soon overrun in a Chadian attack—part of a conflict that became known as the Toyota War, for the Land Cruisers that Chad’s troops drove into battle. The Chadians killed thousands of Libyan troops, and took Haftar and four hundred of his men prisoner. When Qaddafi publicly disavowed the P.O.W.s, Haftar was enraged, and called for his men to join him in a coup. By 1988, he had aligned himself with the National Front for the Salvation of Libya, a Chad-based opposition group supported by the C.I.A. Soon afterward, he was released from prison.
Haftar’s work in Chad did not bring him glory. His enemies like to recall that Chad’s government accused the Libyan forces of employing napalm and poison gas during the war. Afterward, two of Haftar’s fellow-prisoners reported that those who refused to join his coup were left behind in their jail cells. As military commander of the Salvation Front, he plotted an invasion of Libya—but Qaddafi outflanked him, backing a disruptive coup in Chad. The C.I.A. had to airlift Haftar and three hundred and fifty of his men to Zaire and, eventually, to the United States. Haftar was given citizenship, and remained in the U.S. for the next twenty years.
For a time, Haftar stayed involved with the C.I.A., and with the Salvation Front’s abortive efforts to topple Qaddafi, including a plot in which a number of Haftar’s fellow-conspirators were captured and executed. According to Ashur Shamis, a former leader of the Salvation Front, Haftar lived well in Virginia, though no one knew how he made his money. But he did not return to Libya, fearing that he would be executed.
After the U.S. invaded Iraq, in 2003, Qaddafi, who had been among America’s most vitriolic enemies, suddenly agreed to give up his nuclear-weapons program and attempt a rapprochement. By then, the C.I.A. had evidently loosened its ties with Haftar, and, when he returned to Libya, in March, 2011, he was on his own. Nevertheless, Haftar’s enemies accuse him of being a C.I.A. plant, a traitor, and a vicious killer, and of seeking to install himself as a latter-day Qaddafi.
There is no overstating the chaos of post-Qaddafi Libya. Two competing governments claim legitimacy. Armed militias roam the streets. The electricity is frequently out of service, and most business is at a standstill; revenues from oil, the country’s greatest asset, have dwindled by more than ninety per cent. Some three thousand people have been killed by fighting in the past year, and nearly a third of the country’s population has fled across the border to Tunisia. What has followed the downfall of a tyrant—a downfall encouraged by NATO air strikes—is the tyranny of a dangerous and pervasive instability.
For
Haftar, the east was the obvious place to begin his offensive.
“Benghazi was the main stronghold of terrorism in Libya, so we started
there,” he said. An old Libyan maxim holds that everything of importance
happens in Benghazi. In 1937, Benito Mussolini came there to solidify
his colonial power. In 1951, the newly crowned King Idris I broadcast a
radio address from the city to proclaim Libya independent. When Qaddafi
launched his military coup against the monarchy, he was a young officer
based in Benghazi. In February, 2011, the uprising against his rule
erupted there, and the following month the West intervened there to
prevent him from massacring the city’s revolutionaries and its civilian
population.
Lévy said that he returned to Paris and told President Nicolas Sarkozy that humanitarian intervention wasn’t enough. “The real objective had to be to topple Qaddafi,” he told me. Sarkozy agreed, and Lévy became his emissary. Lévy accompanied a Libyan opposition leader to meet Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, to lobby for U.S. involvement.* “It was hard to convince the Americans,” he said. “Robert Gates was totally opposed. Obama as usual was hesitating. But Hillary got it.”
Late that month, as Qaddafi dispatched a convoy to attack the rebels in Benghazi, French warplanes began bombing. The U.K. and the U.S. followed, in an arm’s-length operation that the Obama Administration described as “leading from behind.” From warships in the Mediterranean, they launched a withering strike of a hundred and twelve Tomahawk missiles, but within days Gates had announced that the French and the British would take the lead. The coalition kept fighting for seven months, with American forces in a lower-profile role. In the end, Lévy was pleased with the intervention. “The NATO mission, as far as I am concerned, was as it had to be.”
On September 11, 2012, the country’s history again turned in Benghazi: a mob of extremists set fire to the U.S. consular compound and attacked a nearby annex, killing the Ambassador, Christopher Stevens, and three other Americans. In the United States, a rancorous debate began about the circumstances of Stevens’s death, with Obama’s opponents in Congress assailing him for the lack of security at the compound and accusing him of a coverup. The U.S. wound down its diplomatic presence and essentially abandoned its role in the international efforts to rebuild Libya and foster democracy.
“The killing of Chris Stevens had the effect of helping the terrorists acquire greater power,” a senior Administration official told me. “The bad guys were trying to get the West out, and they succeeded. Because of the politicization of that episode in the U.S., the government paused to make sure no one else got hurt, and reduced our geographic scope and presence in the country.” A senior government official said that Stevens’s death had brought a “broader chill” in efforts to influence events in Libya. “We had a pilot training program, for instance,” he said. “Suddenly, we were being accused of supporting terrorism.” For Lévy, the West’s abandonment of Libya was a dismaying moral failure. “Having done what we have done—France, the U.K., and the U.S.—we have a duty to Libya,” he said. “It would be a disaster if Libya does not rebuild itself.”
In
a sense, Libya’s unravelling began even as the country achieved its
“liberation.” On October 20, 2011, after nine months of fighting, a
group of thuwar—battle-hardened militiamen—from the port city
of Misrata found Qaddafi hiding in a drainage pipe and killed him on the
spot. Afterward, his mutilated body was taken to a cold-storage room
and left there for several days as thousands of people came to view it
and take pictures. Another group of Misratan militiamen massacred
sixty-six of Qaddafi’s last loyalists in the garden of a Sirte hotel,
after they videotaped themselves tormenting their captives.
As Qaddafi fled Tripoli, in late August, the city was swarmed by two militia forces: one from the western city of Zintan and the other from Misrata. The two groups had been allied in the effort to oust Qaddafi, but as they raced to occupy key positions in Tripoli a rivalry began. The militias ransacked Qaddafi’s well-stocked armories, and the Misratans made off with hundreds of Russian-made tanks. The Zintanis took over the international airport. Several other armed Islamist groups also seized positions for themselves.
The profusion of young men with guns alarmed Rory Stewart, a British M.P. who had come to Libya to gather information for Parliament. I was in Libya at the time, and Stewart joined me for a couple of days in Tripoli; after one confrontation with armed men at a roadblock, he asked, “What I want to know is, who is going to disarm these militias?” More important, he wondered, who was going to put Libya back together again, and create jobs for all the armed young men?
Stewart returned in March of 2012, and noted that NATO was doing little to help. “There was a single British policeman assigned to the Ministry of the Interior—and that was the U.K.’s disarmament-and-demobilization program!” he said. “There were those in the Libyan parliament who were asking, ‘Where’s the post-intervention plan?,’ but my own instinct at the time was that we’d been burned very badly by nation-building in Iraq.” The Western powers seemed to be placing their hopes in a less committed program. Stewart told me, “You get a U.N. resolution for humanitarian intervention, you get rid of Qaddafi, you don’t put boots on the ground, you get regional players like Turkey and Qatar to sign generous checks, and you step back. You imagine that it’ll be tricky, but no one could imagine it would be this bad.”
As the country tried to
rebuild itself, there were some reasons for hope. In July, 2012, Libyans
voted for the first time in six decades, electing a national assembly
called the General National Congress. A loose consortium of liberal and
centrist parties outpolled candidates affiliated with the Muslim
Brotherhood, which had surged after Qaddafi was deposed; the new Prime
Minister, Ali Zeidan, was a human-rights lawyer. But the elections did
little to diminish the influence of the militias. Indeed, Libya’s tens
of thousands of thuwar became increasingly powerful: rather
than finding the fighters jobs and forcing them to disarm, the
government put them on the state payroll. Frederic Wehrey, a Libya
analyst at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, told me,
“Probably only about a third of the militiamen actually fought in the
war. The problem is that when the government started funding them it
created more and more of them. No records were ever kept, so people were
double- and triple-dipping.” Westerners started to come under attack
with troubling frequency. In January, 2013, gunmen in Benghazi fired on
an Italian diplomat’s car, but he emerged unharmed. In April, a car
bomb, claimed by Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, severely damaged the
French Embassy in Tripoli.
Haftar watched the country’s decline with growing anger. On February 14th, he appeared on television to announce the unilateral dissolution of parliament and the creation of a “Presidential committee” and cabinet, which would govern until new elections could be held. His move had the hallmarks of a coup, yet Haftar had no apparent way to enforce it, and he was publicly taunted for his hubris. Prime Minister Zeidan called the attempt “ridiculous.” But Haftar had a strategy. He had embarked on a series of “town hall” meetings around the country, while he secretly built an army, with the support of old comrades from the military. In May, he launched Operation Dignity, with attacks against Islamist militias in Benghazi, which he said were intended to “eliminate extremist terrorist groups” in Libya. Not long afterward, his forces occupied the parliament building in Tripoli.
Haftar’s offensive resonated with many Libyans, who had grown frustrated with the G.N.C. and the violence that had flourished during its rule. At around the same time, the G.N.C. agreed to convene a new legislative body, the House of Representatives. The Islamists performed poorly in the elections, in June, but, before the new parliament could take office, the Islamists, strengthened by militiamen from Misrata, attacked Tripoli’s international airport, in an attempt to seize it from Haftar. The airport, including one and a half billion dollars’ worth of aircraft, was destroyed, and about a hundred fighters were killed. With Tripoli a battlefield, the U.S. pulled out of Libya entirely, moving its Embassy to Malta, separated from the besieged capital by two hundred miles of water.
Libyans
gradually learned to navigate the violence. A young Tripoli businessman
who asked to be called Mohamed told me of getting a call last July,
telling him that two militias were fighting on the road to the airport.
“The morning it started, my partner tried to drive to our office and got
turned back,” he said. Mohamed headed to the office anyway; their
employees’ payroll money was held in a safe there, and he wanted to
retrieve it before it was destroyed or looted. “There were literally
bullets flying right overhead,” he said. He managed to get the money and
leave the city, negotiating the militia roadblocks using a credential
that a highly placed friend had given him. “All along the airport road,
there were no-go zones, with separate battles going on, and both sides
ransacking people’s houses.”
Last August, Libya Dawn took control of Tripoli, effectively dividing the country into east and west. The Islamists who had lost power in the newly created House of Representatives insisted that the G.N.C. was the country’s only legitimate government. With the country increasingly unstable, the H.O.R. established itself in the city of Tobruk, eight hundred miles to the east. There the members proclaimed themselves Libya’s “true government”—even as they retreated for a time to a Greek car ferry moored offshore. The U.N. and most of the international community recognize the H.O.R., but Libya’s Supreme Court ruled that the G.N.C. was the national legislature. Effectively, the Libyan state has collapsed, replaced by a series of warring city-states.
As the standoff worsens, regional powers have stepped in. Haftar’s army reportedly receives weapons and financing from Egypt, led by the vehemently anti-Islamist General Sisi; from Saudi Arabia; and from the United Arab Emirates. (The Emiratis and the Egyptians have gone so far as to covertly bomb targets on Haftar’s behalf, eliciting an unusual public rebuke by the U.S. government.) Libya Dawn is backed by Qatar and Turkey, which support the Muslim Brotherhood. Their involvement has given the conflict the dimensions of a proxy war.
The regional implications of Libya’s breakdown are vast. The southern desert offers unguarded crossings into Algeria, Niger, Chad, and Sudan, where armed bands—including human traffickers and jihadists from Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb—roam freely in four-wheel-drive convoys. Huge numbers of migrants, mostly Africans but also some Middle Easterners, are being smuggled through Libya. At the Mediterranean coast, they are placed in overcrowded boats and pointed toward Italy, where the fortunate ones are picked up by the coast guard or by passing cargo ships. Last year, the number of migrants reaching Italy in this fashion rose to a hundred and seventy thousand; more than three thousand are believed to have drowned at sea. In early February, another three hundred died.
Libya has long
been an isolated and constricted place, and the revolution has done
little to change that. Since July, Tripoli’s only functioning airport
has been Mitiga, a former U.S. airbase that Qaddafi took over in 1970.
Then Haftar’s bombers struck Mitiga, and for a time there were no
flights there, either.
Despite Qaddafi’s taste for grandiose gestures, modern Libya has never valued aesthetic beauty. New homes are built out of cement block and left unpainted; trash is dumped in the streets. The revolutionaries bulldozed Qaddafi’s palace and smashed many icons of his regime, and extremists are despoiling the rest. In Tripoli, there was a statue of a bare-breasted woman nuzzling a gazelle; extremists blew a hole through her belly and hauled the statue away. At the Greco-Roman ruins of Cyrene, almost all the statues of gods have been disfigured. Under a line of vandalized bas-reliefs, I saw a spray-painted message in Arabic script: “Destroy the stone idols, no to restoration.”
The Muslim Brotherhood and the Misratan leaders have spoken out against jihadist atrocities, but a significant and growing extremist element remains active on the battlefield. In Benghazi, where Haftar’s soldiers have been fighting Islamist groups for control, the combat has caused widespread destruction and a steady stream of casualties. Haftar claims to hold most of the city, though he says that snipers have slowed his advance. The main enemy is Ansar al-Sharia, the group implicated in Stevens’s death and widely suspected of leading the assassination campaign that devastated civil society in Benghazi. In late January, Mohamed al-Zahawi, the leader of Ansar, died from wounds suffered in battle, but his forces have kept fighting.
After Qaddafi’s overthrow, hundreds of fighters from Derna, a city long associated with Islamist extremism, travelled to Syria to join the war against President Bashar al-Assad. Many fought alongside Jabhat al-Nusra, the Syrian affiliate of Al Qaeda, and some joined ISIS. In recent months, a sizable number have reportedly returned home in order to fight against Haftar’s forces. In October, a Derna-based jihadist group declared its allegiance to ISIS, and, a few months later, another ISIS unit claimed responsibility for the execution of a dozen Libyan soldiers. In an audacious daylight assault in late January, a third group of ISIS gunmen raided the Corinthia, a five-star hotel in downtown Tripoli, killing at least eight people. A few weeks later, ISIS took over a village near the coastal town of Bin Jawad.
Haftar says that he intends to take on Derna’s extremists once he has conquered Benghazi. “We will use all the means at our disposal to exterminate them,” he assured me. Haftar possesses a small air force—an advantage he holds over Libya Dawn, which has only one or two aircraft—and every few days his fleet of vintage MIGs carries out bombing sorties over Benghazi, or, farther afield, in Ajdabiya, Misrata, Sirte, and Tripoli.
Haftar said that he planned to bring the war to Tripoli, and to Misrata, but dismissed the possibility of widespread carnage. “Tripoli will be overrun quickly, because the people will rise up, and we have forces inside the city,” he said.
“What about dialogue?” I asked.
“There will be no dialogue with terrorism,” Haftar replied. “The only thing to say about terrorism is that we will fight it until it’s defeated, and we have purified the country.”
In
Washington, Haftar’s absolutist tactics have caused discomfort. The
senior Administration official told me emphatically, “The U.S.
government has nothing to do with General Khalifa Haftar. Haftar is
killing people, and he says he is targeting terrorists, but his
definition is way too broad. Haftar is a vigilante. And the predictable
result of his vigilantism is to unite the others”—giving common cause to
extremists and non-extremists within Libya Dawn. “It is almost as if
one part of Libya were controlled by White Russians—that’s Haftar—and
another part were controlled by Bolsheviks.”
Rhodes was one of the aides who, along with Clinton, Susan Rice, and Samantha Power, helped persuade Obama to join the intervention. In spite of the chaos that followed, he stands by that decision. “We saved a lot of lives in Benghazi and the rest of the country,” he said. “If Qaddafi had gone into Benghazi, I think Libya would look more like Syria today.” He added, “What did we do wrong? Even the President would acknowledge that it’s been extremely difficult to fill the vacuum in Libya. We were keen for the Libyans to take the lead. Everyone knows the dangers of a completely U.S.-owned postwar environment. We might have used a heavier hand, but there’s no guarantee it would have made a difference.”
Other officials were more blunt about the limits of the intervention. The senior Administration official believed that three failures had led to the fiasco in Libya: “The lack of a single national-security apparatus, replaced by militias; a real terrorist problem, which was small but has gotten much worse; and a proliferation of arms. How does the world respond to all this? The U.N. gets a mandate, goes there, and finds out there’s no one to work with—the ministries are Potemkin. The I.M.F. goes in, says what’s wrong, and doesn’t do much about it. The World Bank hardly does anything. Vast numbers of people came to Libya to look for contracts, but nobody got any money, so they went away. NATO tried to design a national-defense system, but the Libyans failed to engage with them. The French were going to train three thousand police. Instead, they trained thirty. Then some cadets were sent to Jordan for training, but the Jordanians kicked them out after they burned down a sports facility, because they were angry about a flight delay.” In November, the official noted, three hundred Libyan soldiers being trained in the U.K. were expelled after half a dozen of them ran amok in an English village, sexually assaulting several women and raping a man. “The Libyans defeated everyone,” he said. “It didn’t matter whether you were Gandhi or Stalin. It didn’t matter how hard we tried, they defeated us all.”
When I asked the official to explain the current U.S. policy toward Libya, he said, “It’s a sensible one: a ceasefire, an inclusive government, no way forward but political.” He detailed the way a ceasefire might play out. “Will this work?” he asked. “Maybe, maybe not. But what I am telling you is that it is the best policy the U.S. and other Western powers can come up with.”
I spent two weeks in Libya, crossing it from east to west, and the only other Westerners I encountered were a few British security consultants and two German journalists. Everywhere I went, Libyans stared at me. Occasionally, young men asked where I was from. When I said that I was American, some joked about jihadists and the possibility of my being abducted and beheaded. At the entrance to the town of Sousa, near Derna, officials admonished my Libyan companions for bringing a Westerner there, asking, “What if something happens to him?”
Unlike
many other cities and towns in Libya, Tripoli presented an image of
normality. Traffic flowed, and groups of young men wearing Italian
sportswear hung out drinking coffee from paper cups. Here and there, at
government ministry compounds, I saw groups of bearded men with guns,
but none of the tanks and battlewagons that had traversed the capital
after Qaddafi’s fall. Yet Tripoli’s air of calm belied an underlying
tension that was evident as soon as I came into contact with the men who
were running things.
Zubia compared the allegations that Ansar had committed terrorist acts with the Algerian military’s efforts to prevent Islamists from coming to power in the early nineteen-nineties. The Algerian intelligence services had framed the Islamists, he said: “They imported a container of beards to put on and go kill people and then said they were Islamists.” He added, “This is true. You can’t deny it. It’s on YouTube.”
Zubia said, “If Haftar says he wants to fight terrorism, logic says he should go to Derna, not Benghazi. In Benghazi, they have never belonged to Al Qaeda, while in Derna, anyway, there are fifty people who say they are with ISIS.” Zubia wore a derisory expression. “As for the hundreds of people Haftar says were killed in Benghazi, where is the proof? You will find that Haftar is responsible for all those killings.”
Until 2005, he claimed, Haftar’s family had received an annual stipend of two hundred thousand dollars from Qaddafi—“You can go on YouTube.” (Haftar has acknowledged that, as a former P.O.W., he got a stipend from Qaddafi, but says that it ended in 1993.) More recently, Zubia said, Haftar had “come to Tripoli and tried to form a militia, but failed.” And, he added, one of Haftar’s sons had been wounded trying to rob a bank. (In fact, Haftar’s son Saddam was shot by Zintani militiamen outside a bank.) Zubia described Haftar and his family as a kind of criminal enterprise. “I ask you to use your intelligence,” he said.
Indisputable information is difficult to come by in Libya. Everyone feverishly monitors Web sites where pictures are posted and things proclaimed and discussed, but most of what passes for news is political propaganda, pure and simple. Dignity has a TV station, which broadcasts footage of Haftar on inspection tours of the Benghazi battlefield, set to martial music, along with gruesome clips showing the victims of the other side’s violence. Libya Dawn has a similar channel, presenting the opposite view of the conflict. Each side discounts the other’s reporting, and, in the absence of news, outrageous gossip is quickly accepted as fact. In a meeting near Benghazi, an economist soberly relayed to me the preposterous claim that Bernard-Henri Lévy had been paid forty million dollars to lobby for the Muslim Brotherhood’s interests in Libya.
Many of Haftar’s supporters in eastern Libya believe that the Muslim Brotherhood is engaged in an international conspiracy, backed by the U.S., to take over the Middle East; when I asked for evidence, the answers tended to start with Obama’s June, 2009, speech in Cairo, in which he announced a “new beginning” for relations between America and the Muslim world. Haftar, in his office, speculated that this was the real reason that the U.S. was not supporting him. “Maybe it’s because of the Muslim Brotherhood,” he said. “They have a lot of clout, and a factory for producing lies.”
Perhaps
the only point of agreement between Dignity and Libya Dawn is the
primacy of oil in the country’s future. As the two sides have struggled
for control of oil fields, production has plunged, from 1.6 million
barrels per day to barely three hundred thousand. A couple of days
before I met Haftar, his jets had bombed an armored column from Misrata
as it advanced on facilities held by his proxies, and he described the
advance as a kind of moral affront. “You will hear of our response in a
few days,” he promised. Two weeks later, his MIGs carried out air
strikes against Misrata’s airport. Of the Misratans, he added, “If they
do anything more than they have already done, they will pay a heavy
price.”
In the following weeks, according to the analyst Frederic Wehrey, the fight devolved into a stalemate: “fixed lines of static warfare, with both sides lobbing rockets.” As the fighting goes on, the country’s remaining oil money flows through the central bank, where it is disbursed without discrimination to militias and criminal gangs on both sides.
When I asked Ashtar how Libya’s conflict would end, he suggested that there was no choice but total victory. “There is no chance the country will split,” he said. “The country is one.”
“What about Haftar?” I asked.
“He will suffer the same fate as Qaddafi.”
Ashtar smiled, and so did his men.
Libya’s
best hope of a bipartisan political solution is its constitutional
assembly, in the provincial capital of Beyda, a small city of
Qaddafi-era apartment blocks—unpainted concrete structures surrounded by
uncollected trash. The assembly building provides an exception to
Beyda’s ugliness; built in 1964, for Libya’s parliament, it is a modest
domed edifice surrounded by lawns and trees. Since April, a group of
assemblymen have been working there to draft a constitution; among the
fifty-six members are both Dignity and Libya Dawn supporters. The
president of the assembly, Ali Tarhouni, is one of the country’s most
respected public figures. It is Tarhouni’s job to keep the assembly on
task, and to make sure that the conflict stays outside the building.
When I visited Tarhouni at his Beyda apartment one evening, he chain-smoked Marlboro Lights and reflected on what had happened in Libya. “I still can’t figure out what brought us to this,” he said. “We thought with the revolution we had brought about new green spring shoots, but what we came up with is thorns.” Like Haftar, Tarhouni wanted most to go back to the U.S. and spend time with his family. But, when things started falling apart, he felt that he “had to do something,” and agreed to head the constitutional assembly. Although he remained committed to his job, he was not optimistic that the assembly would achieve much. “To keep this group of people safe and away from the national split is a daily struggle. And, even if we come up with a constitution, what can you do with a constitution in a situation like this?” He looked dismayed. “Qaddafi was around for forty-two years—that’s a really long time. One of his legacies was to show that things are settled only by force. It was the one policy he had that was constant. This created a culture of ‘with or against,’ and that is a problem.”
Since
September, a U.N. diplomat named Bernardino León, flying in a small
plane from a base in Tunisia, has been shuttling between the warring
factions. León told me he knew that he was running a precarious
initiative, “with only one chance of success, compared with many paths
to disaster.” So far, he has had little luck. After early talks in Libya
stalled, he announced a round in Geneva, but neither Haftar nor his
foes agreed to take part. At the House of Representatives, Abubakr
Buera, a senior parliamentarian, ticked off a list of unacceptable
interlocutors: the Tripoli government, the G.N.C., and anyone from Libya
Dawn. “If any of them come, we won’t go,” he said. “We don’t want the
international community to intervene,” he added. “Now is not the right
time to stop fighting. It’s the solution.” Even the levelheaded Ali
Tarhouni reluctantly favored a resolution through combat. “A lot of
people are waiting for Haftar,” he said. “The only moderates in this
country are the ones who are forced to be. The military situation has to
mature more before the conditions are ripe for a dialogue.”
After Qaddafi fell, Obama appeared in the Rose Garden to congratulate the Libyan people on an “opportunity to determine their own destiny in a new and democratic Libya.” Then he added an ominous disclaimer: “We are under no illusions. Libya will travel a long and winding road to full democracy.” Haftar is not fighting for democracy; he is a military man at heart. But, in a country full of militias and increasingly hospitable to Islamist extremists, his offensive may yet provide a small hope for stability. If military pressure can persuade the moderate members of Libya Dawn to break with the extremists in their ranks, it might help to create two mainstream factions that are at least willing to agree on the terms of negotiations. But, many Libyans told me, if Haftar does not prevail over the jihadists in Benghazi and Derna, the country will lurch closer to being what the British special envoy Jonathan Powell described to me as a “Somalia on the Mediterranean.”
On January 22nd, Haftar’s men made a sudden advance in Benghazi, taking over the city’s central-bank branch and most of the port. When I saw Haftar at his base, he had spoken confidently about his plan to “purify the country.” But there was more fighting ahead, and he lamented the lack of help from the United States. The aid from Egypt and the U.A.E. and Saudi Arabia had been modest, and, as his army grew, its demands were outstripping supplies. “We are a very rich country,” he reminded me. “We want our people to have good homes, good schools. We had hoped for Libya to be God’s heaven on earth. But we need infrastructure, new buildings, factories. We have oil, gold, uranium, and seas of sand. We need a superpower to help us develop these things. It is impossible for Libya to stay on this planet alone.” He added, pointedly, “There are great benefits to those who stand by us in our time of need.”
When I asked about his personal ambitions, he said, “My ambitions are the people’s needs.”
“Once you’ve purified the country and it’s at peace, if the people asked you to run for President would you agree?”
“I would have no problem with that,” Haftar said, and smiled. ♦
*An earlier version of this article misstated where Lévy met Clinton; they met in Paris.
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