The Cipher Brief spoke with Ambassador Deborah K. Jones, former U.S. Ambassador to Libya (2013-2015) about the state of play in the country, who wants what and why it matters to the U.S.
The Cipher Brief: How did Libya get to where it is today?
Jones: My theory on Libya has always been that it was an unfinished revolution and that we moved too quickly to recognize the National Transitional Council because we were impressed with Mahmoud Jabril, who served as interim Prime Minister during the civil war.
The U.S. didn't realize at the time that he really wasn't in a position to lead the country. He lacked the kind of strength that one would have assumed. But everyone was so pumped up about the results of the 2012 election, and I think naively approached Libya as a simple equation. Libya has six million people and produces 1.2 million barrels of oil a day. What possibly can go wrong? As it turns out a lot can go wrong. I said one time to one of my bosses, whose instruction to me was essentially, "Don't let Libya fall into the Syria column. What can be so hard?". I said, "Sir, If you take a two-year-old orphan (I arrived two years after Gaddafi fell) with a trust fund, and put him in a bad neighborhood with no wealth manager, what do you think is going to happen to him?"
On the other hand, having elections without having a constitutional framework or any sense of how a government should work in terms of executive authorities and other factors, metaphorically speaking, it's like having an ink pen, that you put ink in, but there's no nib, there's no bladder to hold the ink. So, what's it worth? It’s very messy. You need all the parts of the pen for it to work. We (collectively) got caught up in the endorphins of revolution, during that period of time and I don’t think we fully realized the depth of the fissures within Libyan society.
And there’s the fact that Gaddafi had run it pretty much like El Chapo ran his cartel. Gaddafi kept Libyans at each other's throats and very divided, constantly shifting the rules of the game and people and positions often enough so that no one else gained any power. But he essentially kept them all fed, and kept the money flowing, which is one of the things that drives many observers and non-Libyans crazy now.
They say, "Why does the Central Bank continue to pay salaries to militias on both sides?" It's because if there's one thing that Libyans understand, or were inculcated with, by Gaddafi, it is that they are all entitled. This is particularly at the municipal level because while it is true that Gaddafi did cut off all political discourse; he made sure that everyone got their share of the pie, whether it was in the city municipalities, or the tribal areas, or by allowing people to smuggle in the south. They didn’t get the whole pie, and not as much as Gaddafi got, but it was there.
When I was in Libya, we knew we had a long job ahead of us in knitting together some consensus amongst the urban areas, tribal areas, and the oasis and nomadic areas in the south of Libya because this had really never been done. Libyans had never engaged in a national dialogue, and they'd never really had a country that had civil society, or any kind of institutional basis for that.
I often remind people that the issue with Libya is not that there are militias, foreign powers, or mercenaries. If you look at our own history, we had militias, foreign powers and mercenaries. The problem is that Libyans don't have a unifying idea of what they want to be, and how their government should work.
The only way that comes about is if you have some sort of foundation; call it constitutional, call it a pact, or a national idea of some sort, certainly in the absence of a charismatic leader, that is accepted by people. That dialogue, when I left, had already cracked because we withdrew when it became very clear that Haftar's people were not interested in any kind of compromise or participation in the agreement that had been signed in Skhirat, Morocco.
It's no secret to anybody that foreign actors, particularly the UAE and Egypt, have been extremely opposed to any kind of inclusion in a government in Tripoli, of what they consider to be Muslim Brotherhood elements, or political Islamists, who they believe, rightly or wrongly, would use Libya's wealth to fund movements that are threatening to their own rule, and their own order in the Gulf and elsewhere. Of course, Egypt has always been an important bulwark for those elements, and we now know that the UAE has been, I think, pretty open about admitting that they helped in the overthrow of Morsi because of their fear about his ideological push.
And then there is Turkey, which is - I don't know how you describe Turkey anymore - democratically autocratic- I served there as well, and I had high hopes for the AK Party, but I’ve have had to revise my opinions on that.
And, Russia loves sticking it to the U.S. in the eye, there’s no question about it. And showing us that we were wrong and that we shouldn't go poking our nose around in anyone else's business.
And I believe that had the United States been more assertive and backed with actions what we said in words, i.e. that we supported the U.N. process; that we might be in a different position.
I don't know that we have that kind of leverage anymore. And I don't know that the whole process of establishing sovereignty in a nation state, which is really what we're talking about in Libya, works the way we’ve believed it to work in the past. If you adhere to classic political philosophy, Max Weber always said there were two things that were essential, or very important for the nation state. One of them was a monopoly on the use of force and violence. You need to compel adherence to the ruler. And then ideally you need a charismatic leader. And the problem now is that the physics of that formulation have been thrown off by social media and the cell phone, because force equals mass times acceleration.
There were no ‘leaders’ of the so-called Arab Spring. There were cell phones and instant messages passed. Social media is an accelerant in the hands of the masses and creates a force that is quite challenging and overwhelming to most governments now. We've seen that everywhere, in social media’s ability to organize and disrupt, although it’s not necessarily proven in its ability to organize for productive or for purposes of governance.
As a side note, I would just say that I don't agree with our current president on many things, but he has brilliantly understood that he's got to control social media and dominate it with his Twitter account. Otherwise, he doesn't have the power, the force. And that's given him much more influence over his followers than any White House press briefing would do in terms of explaining what's going on.
So, we have this kind of a free-for-all now. We had a process, wherein in the United States was very active in keeping our EU and the permanent members of the Security Council and others in line, because we didn't have the same kinds of interests in Libya.
Italy has an existential relationship in terms of energy, and also concerns about refugees because of its proximity. And the U.K. has a historical relationship in the east, in Cyrenaica. The French have deep security interests in the south because of Chad and Algeria and Mali. They all have different issues that are driving them, and the U.S., which does have an interest in counterterrorism and energy, also maintains a certain detachment compared to the other countries just mentioned. That detachment enabled us to play a different kind of role in our engagement. But the problem was it came to a point where the U.S. could no longer come up with a unified position within our own government, with respect to sanctions on Haftar, where we go, et cetera. There was also, by the way, deep frustration with the process and the time the process was taking. The mentality of the quarterly profit that we have seen take over our stock market and businesses, has also seemingly taken over our political agendas, where if people don't see quarterly profits or something that's immediate, they decide the enterprise is failing or is not as successful as it should be.
So, we tried all kinds of things to build consensus and knit together a cohesive framework. That process did succeed in bringing everyone tenuously on board with a charter for governance. But there were also outliers supported by people who paid lip service to the process, but in fact were working to undermine it. Now we're increasingly close to a kind of naked competition. I'm wondering at what point the current situation, drones, attacks on civilian areas, and mayhem that’s coming to Tripoli and other population centers, becomes something anyone can do anything about. And if Haftar thinks that there is a military solution to this, i.e. that he's going to be able to pull off some kind of victory that makes everyone bow to him, I think he's hugely mistaken. There is both deep support and deep opposition to Haftar. Libya is perforce because of its experience under a dictator and Libyans tend to be somewhat transactional and opportunistic in their alliances.
Another thing I worry about is that no one has the leverage over certain groups to make them pull back, or at least create an even footing. And as long as you have the oil flowing (I think that's why Haftar showed up uninvited in Berlin, having shuttered some of the oil fields) and the bank producing, there may lack sufficient leverage by any one group to force a negotiation.
When one is learning the basics of conflict resolution and negotiation in Libya, there used to be the old axiom that parties will not come to the table unless one or the other of them is sufficiently impoverished, exhausted, or mortally wounded. But again, we’re in different times now. When was the last time we saw a formal surrender? World War II? That's just not the way the world works anymore. I think it’s a misunderstanding that somehow you can compel a solution with violence, instead of really trying to co-opt people and to also create a situation where there is transparency.
This is certainly the case in Libya in terms of distribution of national wealth. I have always thought that unless and until there is some kind of oversight; possibly by the U.N., of their national wealth, where Libyans are educated about where the oil comes from, how it's transported, how it's sold and distributed, and what their particular share is, and feel assured that it's going to them; also in a way that these external powers understand that it's not being used to fund movements that will disrupt their own rule in other places, that we won’t achieve closure in Libya. Oil is the thing that actually holds the country together, because it's deposited in the south, in the deserts, in the oases. And just like the water that comes from the aquifers, it travels through pipes, through the tribal areas and is sold through the urban centers.
This is Libya. This is who they are. So they better figure that out, or else this is going to go on and on and on, and we're going to basically have feudal states and the ugliness of a medieval period in parts of Europe: with little principalities and cities fighting against each other and skirmishes all the time, and people living behind walls.
The Cipher Brief: Let’s discuss what happened in Berlin. Expectations ahead of the meeting were muted; I think it would be fair to say, on all sides. We've seen some public statements that appear to show agreement that foreign influences acting in Libya aren’t productive. The parties in Berlin agreed in principle to honor the U.N. Arms Embargo, and then there was a broad commitment to work towards a cease fire. What’s your assessment of the Berlin summit?
Jones: Well, I wish I could be more enthusiastic, but this is a movie we've seen before. I really have a lot of respect for Ghassan Salame, the Special Representative and Head of the United Nations Support Mission in Libya (UNSMIL). I think he's really doing all that is humanly possible to bring turn the situation around. But I see some of the same things that have been discussed and agreed to before, I see the same players agreeing to support the process and to not violate the UN Arms Embargo for example, but they're the same people who were violating it in the past.
I don't see that we, the U.S. ,have much leverage over the foreign actors in Libya, because of our other relationships and foreign policy objectives. Some of the foreign actors in Libya partner with us in other parts of the world doing other things, they also buy arms from us, and with whom we also have all manner of competing agendas. I believe that some of them also have decided that the U.S. has lost interest in applying any kind of influence in the region, apart from hit-and-run assassinations, and I'm not just talking about Qasem Soleimani.
When I read Secretary Pompeo's press exchange that followed Berlin, I couldn't believe it. I didn't hear any enthusiasm in it or commitment from him. He even started the briefing off with an anecdote of sympathy for something that happened in Colombia. I found that briefing a bit bizarre. If he really felt strongly about any of this, he would have come right out of the box and said, "I've just come from Berlin. We just agreed to these points. The U.S. is firmly behind it." But again, he uttered the same old points about the U.S.’ two concerns, which are, to keep the oil flowing, and to keep ISIS out.
As an aside, we need to call ISIS by its true name, which is a Sunni- Salafist Nationalist Movement. It is Sunni Salafis who feel that they have been removed from their position of privilege and authority in Iraq and in Syria. They're resentful, and it was no surprise that these extremist movements came out of the places where we took down the Sunni leadership in Iraq. I served in Baghdad back in '84 to '86. Also, in Syria. It's no surprise that all these groups emerged from places like Al-Hasakah, Deir ez-Zor, and Raqqa because those are centers of Sunni young men and men who always felt the capital had dispossessed them.
In Libya, that’s not the case. Libya is a 98- 99% conservative Sunni trending toward Salifi, society. They don't want other people using them and getting their oil. And as I said, the Libyan people have really been indoctrinated to believe that Libya’s resources and wealth is theirs and they don't want others to come from the outside and take it. That's why I've always rejected binary definitions that label Libyans as either Islamist or pro-western. Libya is a conservative society across the board. When I was there for example, there was widespread agreement that Sharia is an acceptable basis for the Constitution, to an extent. Just the same way that Judeo-Christian beliefs are a basis for our own Constitution, or for our laws in our states. But the conditions inside of Libya are significantly different than those found in Iraq or Syria. Is it true that the U.S. is worried about the southwestern part of Libya becoming a playground, and free rein for all sides in the Maghreb? Absolutely. But it would have been nice to hear some kind of comment about bringing peace to the Libyan people from Secretary Pompeo. I found his comments very half-hearted.
If there is one thing that Barack Obama and Donald Trump share, it is an understanding of the fatigue of the American people in these ongoing engagements in what seemed to be hopeless conflicts in the Middle East region. The difference in their approach, though, was that Obama, some would say naively, believed that the way to get around this was to make deals like the JCPOA or to compel people by saying, "You guys have to learn to share the region and get along. There has to be a dialogue. There has to be some kind of cohabitation between all of you." Trump's view seems to be, "I'm going to stand back and let them all beat the you-know-what out of each other, and then whomever is left standing, we'll deal with, because they've proven they're strong enough to be our partners."
The Cipher Brief: What do you see happening in Libya near term?
Jones: I think things are already happening. The fact that Haftar showed up in Berlin like a grand prima donna, to quote one of the U.N. officials who was there told me, to announce that he was holding up the oil production, does not bode well for anyone. I have to wonder, how much influence, or how little, his sponsors have over him. He's almost like an unguided missile sometimes. But then, on the other hand, I was told, and we've all been told, that one of the reasons that he did not sign the agreement when they met earlier,in Moscow, was that there were members of the UAE mission who were providing guidance to him.
My biggest issue with him, I have several, is that he's incompetent. And this has been my position all along. The guy has done more damage to Benghazi than the revolution did. He's bringing more damage now to Tripoli than the revolution did. Of course, there's incompetence to share and go around on all sides. Let's be clear about this: there's corruption and everything else there. But I don't know what we can expect to see that demonstrates that there has actually been a change in Libya, especially since there's no truce per se.
We'll have watch what all sides are going to work on, and we'll see where that goes. Some have recently commented to me, "The biggest success out of Berlin was that we were able to bring about peace in the U.N. between France and Italy”. For the west, sadly, as long as the oil and energy flows, I don't see where they see any value in sticking their toes in anymore, as much as they say they support the process. I don't even believe that Turkey, despite their commitment to support, is interested in significantly supporting Libya with troops. Turkey, given its issues with Syria right now, its tenuous relationship with the Russians and a shared a border with Iran, has a lot of other strategic issues to manage.
And, internal to Libya I just don't see that there is currently any incentive for those who are absolutely determined not to have any kind of a democracy of a Muslim bent, of an Islamic bent - namely Haftar and his sponsors - to compromise. I think the current stalemate and violence could go on and on, and there's likely going to be more bleeding. I think the major foreign actors have really got to be looking at this now and saying, "Okay, if this doesn't work, where do we go?" Because they really don't want to get involved in the mess. I think they were all hoping and calculating that various things would turn the tide.
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