The Long Game (15 page)

Looking back, the tougher question is not whether the US should have intervened, but if it could have done so more effectively. Did the US miss opportunities to end the war sooner or on different terms? And did it mishandle the postwar, failing to give Libya a greater chance to achieve stability?

H
OW TO DEFINE
success was one of the biggest challenges. Obama intervened in Libya while making explicit that the
military
objective was not Qaddafi's departure. But the United States, Europeans, and Arab League had all signed on to regime change as the broader political goal that they would seek to achieve through other means—pressure, isolation, and diplomacy. Once in, it was hard to reconcile these limited military goals with the maximalist political objective that Qaddafi must go.

The civilian protection mission—and the difficulty of defining what exactly needed to happen for those innocents to be “protected”—put the policy on the slippery path of mission creep. This mattered in terms of the targets hit (such as Qaddafi's palaces, military headquarters, and other instruments of the regime's authority) as well as the assistance the coalition provided the opposition. The military campaign evolved into more than preventing Qaddafi from threatening civilians. It became about helping the opposition win. As
Gates recalled, we maintained the fiction that the operation was only about degrading Qaddafi's command and control, but “I don't think there was a day that passed that people didn't hope he would be in one of those command and control centers.”
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Although the US-led airstrikes were indispensable to enabling the opposition, perhaps we should have been willing to provide even more military support by deploying special forces on the ground or more weapons to assist the opposition (as we only later learned the full extent of what our partners like the French and Qataris had done). Doing so may have shortened the conflict and given us valuable leverage over the various militias after Qaddafi's ouster.

But it is hard to reconcile a more robust American military role with the goal of not “owning” the Libya War outright. After all, as the conflict dragged on, many partners were tiring and would have taken advantage of American escalation to head for the exits. For example, Norway, one of the leading strike partners whose planes had destroyed Qaddafi's residence in Tripoli, pulled out because of strains within its governing coalition, and several other key countries found themselves running low on ammunition and having difficulty sustaining their aircraft.
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Moreover, American military escalation would likely have required obtaining authorization from Congress. Obama had justified US involvement on an unusual, and controversial, legal theory that such a limited, “unique capabilities” operation was not the kind of “hostilities” that required congressional approval. Since we had (wrongly) assumed that the bulk of the US military role would be over in just weeks, we did not seek an explicit authorization from Congress. Some believed this argument was already tenuous, but it would have been impossible to defend if we had started doing more. And since most of Capitol Hill had soured on the operation, it was unlikely the administration could have mustered enough support to escalate even if it wanted to.
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I
F MILITARY ESCALATION
wasn't the answer, could we have intensified diplomacy and done more to cut a deal on Qaddafi's departure? As the military campaign dragged on, and as concerns mounted about keeping the military coalition together (and as the Europeans started to run out of ammunition), we were very focused on what more we could do to negotiate an end.

There was no shortage of global envoys trying. Despite a plethora of efforts by a motley crew of diplomats—including from the United Nations, an African Union initiative, a Russian chess player, and several others who purported to speak for the regime—Qaddafi showed no signs of leaving. The longer he refused to leave peacefully, the more likely his end would be a violent one.

My own direct but brief experience with the Libyans suggests a negotiated outcome was unlikely. Although we were initially wary of talking directly to the Qaddafi regime for fear of undermining other negotiators and allowing him to exploit any differences, several months into the bombing our allies were telling us that Qaddafi was misinterpreting our unwillingness to engage him as a sign of ambivalence about his future. So we decided to make a direct overture (it was supposed to be a secret but the Libyans soon leaked it to the press). In a July 2011 meeting with Qaddafi's representatives in Tunis, I joined the assistant secretary of state for the Middle East, Jeff Feltman, and the exiled US ambassador to Libya, Gene Cretz, to make one last attempt to offer a way out if Qaddafi stepped aside.

Meeting for nearly three hours at the seaside residence of the American ambassador to Tunisia, we went round and round with the Libyan delegation (which included Qaddafi's chief of staff and interpreter, who had become one of the strongman's trusted advisors) on everything from the origins of the crisis and who was to blame to the nature of the opposition and the regime's future. We had fundamentally opposing narratives about what was happening; whereas we saw Libya as another chapter in the Arab Spring with an indigenous
revolt against a crazy dictator, they saw a foreign intervention unjustly overthrowing the existing order. So instead of exploring the terms of a deal, the Libyans blustered that the rebellion was driven by “foreign agents” and al-Qaeda, and that the United States should be “protecting” them instead of bombing them.

The Libyans seemed in genuine disbelief, thinking that since the reopening of ties in 2003, the United States would be their unconditional friend. They were understandably concerned about their well-being. “You bombed my office at 2am!” one of them shouted at us. After the war, some of these Libyan officials admitted that at no point during the bombing did Qaddafi's family or inner circle think they would be defeated—that, in the words of one of Qaddafi's closest confidantes, they suffered from “supreme arrogance and miscalculation.” As Gene Cretz, who knew the Libyans as well as anyone in the US government, recalled, “[T]here was never a serious offer from Qaddafi to step down from power. I firmly believe that none of those characters around him ever had the gumption to raise the issue with him personally.”
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A
LTHOUGH NEGOTIATIONS PROVED
fruitless, perhaps we could have pushed for a ceasefire without conditions, deferring the question of Qaddafi's future. This would have been similar to the 1999 NATO air campaign in Kosovo, which was also aimed at protecting civilians and ended with Milosevic still in power (only to see him overthrown in a revolution the following year); or the 1998 “Operation Desert Fox” air campaign in Iraq, where the US military bombed Iraqi targets for four days but deferred Saddam Hussein's fate for the future. Gates later argued, “I think if we could have prevented a massacre in Benghazi and basically held there, we would have been better off.”
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However, neither the Libyan opposition nor some of our European and Arab partners would likely have accepted this approach. Even if the United States had ended its support for the bombing,
with Qaddafi still in power the rebels would not have stopped fighting (nor would their most fervent supporters like Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, and even the Europeans have cut the opposition loose). Moreover, there was no reason to trust Qaddafi's regime to negotiate in good faith and uphold their end of any bargain.

Therefore, even if we had ceased bombing and allowed Qaddafi to stay in power, the war likely would not have ended—and it is reasonable to think we would have seen even more bloodshed in Libya as a result. It is hard to imagine Libya (and by extension, the region) being worse than it was by 2016, but that may very well have been the case had Qaddafi, like Assad in Syria, remained at war with his own people.

C
OULD WE HAVE
done more to prevent Libya's postwar troubles? Nobody thought determining a post-Qaddafi future would be simple. After all, the uncertainty about what would come next was the main reason the administration hesitated to intervene in the first place. We understood the risks all too well. As Obama said at the time, “it is a huge challenge to get a country rebooted.”

However we also believed that, especially compared with places like Iraq and Afghanistan, Libya had a lot going for it. It had a relatively small, homogenous population (fewer people than Tennessee) with a professional class; rich energy supplies; proximity and close ties to Europe; and a vast amount of international support and enthusiasm to help. There was reason to hope that, with some concerted yet modest assistance, Libya could lift itself out of the swamp decades of Qaddafi's rule had left. We were wrong.

In preparing for postwar Libya, we were determined to maintain the “unique capabilities” approach that had defined the US role in the military campaign. This would not be post-Saddam Iraq or post-Taliban Afghanistan, where the United States would effectively run the country. The administration did not want to “own” Libya; the
president said he wanted to “cabin” the US role. But restraining our system's momentum to do so was not always easy.

S
INCE A POLITICAL
transition was always a goal, we started planning for post-Qaddafi Libya even before the air campaign started. This included working with our allies and the Libyan opposition to prepare them to take charge. Yet one unexpected challenge was the bureaucratic machine for postwar efforts that had been developed in Iraq and Afghanistan. Having been caught entirely unprepared for postwar reconstruction in those countries, the US had amassed vast experience in how to do nation-building, with thousands of experts and significant resources ready to offer assistance. The bureaucracy's muscle memory was for the United States to go in big, offer the Libyans help on everything, and if necessary be ready to do the job for them.

But the president remained determined not to allow Libya to morph into a massive American-led effort, draining resources and attention. This was reinforced by many in Congress, who resisted our modest requests for assistance for Libya (demanding that the Libyans pay for everything themselves) and, after becoming very skeptical about the war, would have erupted if the president had decided to put a postwar US force on the ground unilaterally.

More importantly, even if we had wanted to go in heavy, we would have had to override the wishes of those we were trying to help. Outsiders engaging in nation-building is not what the Libyans wanted. Fiercely independent and proud, they saw this as their struggle, not ours. As my former colleague Ben Fishman, who was the White House point man on Libya, recalls, “While the Libyans were extremely grateful for NATO's contribution to their revolution, they were adamant from the outset of the transition that they themselves should determine the country's future.”
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We did not fully understand Libya and only slowly perceived its endemic dysfunction.
Because of years of diplomatic isolation—the US did not have an embassy in Libya from 1980–2006—there were few experts on Libya either in or out of government. We had not grasped how weak its institutions were or appreciated the internal disunity that, as Robert D. Kaplan explains, was the “underlying cause behind Qaddafi's unruly tyranny.”
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P
OSTWAR
L
IBYA PRESENTED
a difficult conundrum we could never resolve: the Libyan people and their new leaders simultaneously insisted on doing things their own way while demanding that we do more to help. Often the Libyans did not even know what they wanted, but weren't interested in us telling them what to do. We looked to the United Nations to help chart a path forward, yet even it tread a careful path and was limited by Libyan demands to do things on their own.

Libya also illustrates the limits of what outsiders can accomplish without a significant military presence to provide security, logistics, and organizational support. Libya was never going to be Iraq or Afghanistan or even Bosnia or Kosovo, with thousands of foreign troops deployed to keep the peace and a massive international civilian presence to manage things. Contrary to the assertions of some who criticize Obama's “small footprint” approach and desire to keep American troops out, there was never a realistic option for establishing an international peacekeeping or post-conflict security mechanism. Indeed, there were no viable candidates to lead or comprise such a force. Despite a lot of talk, the Europeans never stepped up to help in the way Obama expected. And even if they had, the Libyans didn't want it.

Even with these limitations, for a time the security situation seemed manageable. Senior US officials, including Hillary Clinton and Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta, traveled to Libya to encourage the interim government. Numerous European leaders also visited
Tripoli for a victory lap. The United States and its partners diligently worked with the new leadership in Tripoli to help with reforms in key areas like energy, justice, and security.

But letting the Libyans “own” the process meant we had to grapple with inexperienced decision-making, where even the most mundane tasks, like getting contracts signed or money deposited into bank accounts, proved exceedingly difficult. Their leaders were disengaged and often absent, spending a lot of their time in places like Qatar. Looking back, the Libyans weren't in a position to absorb huge amounts of our assistance, and the militias weren't interested in giving up any of the authority they had grabbed. We also struggled with such thorny issues as obtaining the necessary legal protections for our personnel working in Libya (with echoes of the Iraq SOFA negotiations that were happening at the same time).

There were some successes. With the international community's assistance, in 2012 Libya held its first democratic election in fifty years. Perhaps most important, the United States worked with the Libyans to address two urgent security concerns: to find, secure, and destroy leftover chemical weapons from Qaddafi's undeclared arsenal; and to help secure thousands of shoulder-fired anti-aircraft missiles that we worried could be a threat to civilian airliners (although we could not ever account for the whereabouts of all of them).