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The Libyans could see off Isis if only they were empowered to do so. But UK fence-sitting is undermining the forces of democracy and civil society

Wed, 18 Jan 2023 16:21:34 GMT

Where the West went wrong in Libya.

Arriving in Benghazi by RAF military transport in May 2011 in the early days of the Libyan revolution, we never envisaged the aftermath of our intervention could be this bad.

Recent weeks have seen the gruesome murder of Egyptian Christian Copts and devastating suicide bombings (one last month in the eastern town of Qubbah killed 51 people and injured upwards of 80 more); all following the continuous discovery of countless headless security officials and the long list of murdered civil-society activists in Benghazi and Tripoli.

Central authority is crumbling and risks collapsing altogether. Amidst the confusion, extremist groups are proliferating; Islamic State has established an aggressive franchise, Egypt is conducting air-strikes against them, business is at a stand-still and the West has all but walked away.

Can it be turned around? I believe it can. But to do so, we must learn from our mistakes. Succeeding in Libya requires greater knowledge, determination, planning and overwhelmingly greater resources than our governments have so far devoted.

As in Iraq in 2003, we were led to believe by political émigrés back in Britain and elsewhere that Libya would be relatively simple, Muammar Gaddafi was finished, the army was useless and the tribes were broken. A new state was to be built on fresh and firm foundations. How mistaken we were to believe them.

During the early days of the rebellion, those who waved the black flag, then associated with al Qaeda, were a few hundred, fighting on the wings of the mixed civilian and military rebels and their foreign advisors. They have since expanded both in number and variety to include several other brand names including Islamic State.

Some of the Western advisors — both military and civilian — noted in private that, were these extremists only a few degrees longitude further to the east — in Afghanistan, say — we would be targeting them as opposed to coordinating with them.

Now they are in the ascendant. Following their losses in last year’s general election, an Islamist militia backed administration has seized power in Tripoli, displacing the elected Parliament to the easterly port city of Tobruk.

Libya’s official Army, Police and Oil Protection Forces have predominantly remained under Parliament’s authority while the less popular but increasingly better financed, armed and organized Islamist led militias have sided with the Muslim Brotherhood backed regime in Tripoli.

These Islamist groups are not content with just a share of the newly minted State, they want to own it entirely.

From the beginning, I and my superiors urged the National Transitional Council, which took power immediately after Gaddafi’s fall, to contain and counter these extremists. It was clear that they would expand, otherwise. They now number, including UN proscribed Ansar al-Shari’a, several thousand and are increasingly shaping and leading the fight against the elected authorities.

Initially, some in government, including civil rights lawyer and NTC spokeswoman Salwa Buqaiqis, viewed them as fellow revolutionaries fighting the tyrant. The week before her murder at their hands last June, however, Buqaiqis told me she had realised that they were a real existential threat to the country.

Former Libya PM Ali Zeidan with former US Secretary of State John Kerry and former British Foreign Secretary William Hague before his ousting in March 2014.

By last summer, Libyans were trying to resolve their differences by returning to the polls in an effort to correct an elected but broken congress. It had become partisan, an instrument of militias demanding a purge of the country’s previous officials. However, further to the east, a movement emerged, led by General Khalifah Hafter, which aimed to bring together what remained of the victorious army that had helped remove Gaddafi.

Those Libyan security forces had joined the broad-based revolt only to find themselves subsequently on the receiving end of an assassination campaign led by the Islamic extremists.

Buqaiqis told me one week before she was killed that she “hated the general, hated what he had stood for” as a former officer in the army under Gaddafi. However, he was now “the only hope” of containing the militias and extremists who, following their three consecutive losses in Libya’s general and constitutional elections, were now seeking power through force of the gun.

Hafter is not the man to lead the country; that must be done by the elected parliament and the government it appoints. However, the army and the police, who he is helping to corral still under the democratically appointed government, are the only organizations capable, with the right support, of containing and ultimately defeating the Islamist militants.

A unity government is the only internationally acceptable — or reasonable — way forward. That must mean a common purpose: most pressingly, the defeat of the Islamic State, re-establishing law and order and salvaging the economy.

This is something the Parliament in Tobruk could deliver but the Muslim Brotherhood-backed administration in Tripoli is incapable of doing, preferring to condemn the Egyptian strikes that targeted Islamic State.

At present, outside involvement in Libya risks making it ever more fragmented. Egypt’s military rulers hate the Brotherhood almost as much as IS. Other regional states, however, particularly Qatar, take a rather different approach. The West, meanwhile, simply wrings its hands.

We need to change course on Libya and more tangibly back the democratically elected legitimate authorities. And we must free the Libyans’ hands to solve their own problems by allowing them access to their own resources and supporting the resumption of oil production to source arms and outside expertise.

There are complexities. The tribal militias in the coastal town of Misrata, for example, have sided with the Islamists in part over concerns over other ethnic groups. But they could be won back.

We don’t need foreign boots on the ground. As a senior tribal figure and leading Army officer fighting more heavily armed and better financed extremists in the East told us in 2013, we should just “give them the tools, they would finish the job.”

A version of this column first appeared on the Guardian website on Friday, March 13, 2015 and subsequently on the website of the Project for the Study of the 21 Century (https://projects21.org/2015/03/19/where-the-west-went-wrong-in-libya/)

It’s time to be honest about Saudi Arabia and to match its Vision 2030 with one of our own.

Wed, 18 Jan 2023 15:56:38 GMT

It’s time to be honest about Saudi Arabia and to match its Vision 2030 with one of our own.

During an extraordinary Board meeting held within the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia last year, HSBC’s outgoing CEO was reported to have said, “the two main areas of global growth over the next ten years are China’s ‘one Belt one Road’ policy and… Saudi Arabia.” And he is right. The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia is gripped by a proactive and progressive reform movement that is encompassing the Government, people and culture and is unrelentingly focussed on creating new economies. The architect and driving force behind this socio-political and economic transformation plan, Vision 2030, is Crown Prince Muhammad bin Salman; known colloquially as MbS. His visit to the UK is intended to be part of a month long foreign tour which will also take him to France and the United States. Top of the agenda are trade, security and regional developments as well as discussions on how the UK can support the implementation of the Kingdom’s Vision 2030.

Saudi’s burgeoning youth population and continued low oil prices, set against major upheavals across the Middle East, are presenting an almost perfect storm of challenges for the Saudi Government. In tackling these challenges with economic diversification, localisation and on-shoring of production and continued progress in ‘Saudisation’ of the work-forces, Vision 2030 is seeking to lower unemployment, increase the role of small and medium sized enterprises and dramatically expand the role of women in the workforce and society; all measures for which many have been calling for decades.

Saudi is also increasingly meeting its responsibilities amongst its Sunni Muslim allies and is ever more assertive in articulating and defending their regional interests against a growing crescent of Shi’a Islamic revolutionary influence stretching from the Persian Gulf through geographical Mesopotamia, the Levant and Mediterranean. Unlikely alliances are evolving with Israel and previously close alliances are in the doghouse as Saudi, the UAE and Bahrain continue their blockade of Qatar; Qatar’s reportedly close relations with Saudi’s longstanding Persian rivals and the socio-revolutionary Islamists of the Muslim Brotherhood remain unacceptable to the Kingdom. These conflicts have not been contained within the Gulf, but regularly spill out across the wider region in proxy wars as well as across our own Media, as various Gulf-aligned interests duel with each other in a phony war, a communications war, a war for our hearts and minds.

Cutting through this noise, MbS’ visit comes during a period of significant upheaval for the UK as well. Brexit is providing both a major challenge, as it sucks up bandwidth across Whitehall and Westminster, as well as a significant opportunity for long overdue trade deals with the likes of the Saudi-led Gulf Co-operation Council. And, it is the trade part of the Saudi-British relationship that is critical. Trade adds billions to both of our coffers and employs thousands of British workers. Our cooperation with Saudi in security and defence keeps the region’s extremists in check and helps maintain a rare piece of regional stability.

MbS has spoken highly of the UK’s Thatcherite revolution upon launching Vision 2030 and is rolling out a similar transformation of the Saudi economy, smashing vested interests (most recently with the enforced sojourns for many of Saudi’s king-makers and breakers at Riyadh’s Ritz-Carlton), empowering Saudi’s own human capital and rapidly increasing in the role of women in the work-place. The UK can and should play a more intimate and productive role in all of this, or we risk irrelevance in the face of more personal, focussed and effective engagements from France, America, Russia and China.

As Stuart D’Souza, CEO of AEI Saudi and the leading Riyadh based veteran of British-Saudi commercial relations, neatly summarises, “the City of London has a lot to offer as a future home of Saudi Aramco’s upcoming international listing; an event that is not without its risks but which is central to the long-term funding of Vision 2030. In defence, we have two long-running Government-to-Government programmes that will provide a solid foundation upon which to launch a British-flavoured transformation of the Saudi defence sector. Our Health and Education systems provide useful benchmarks for future development and a wealth of much-needed insight and expertise.”

Whilst neighbours continue to suffer conflict and disorder, Saudi Arabia remains an anchor for British policy in the region, a pivotal regional power broker and now, if we are honest, a peer. However, our current relations were largely set in the 1980s, a wave we have been riding ever since but from whose crest we have gradually fallen. For those who claim we should exert more influence on the Kingdom and take a tougher line on their already improving human rights record and equally evolving social conservatism, I would point them towards the old diplomatic adage that ‘to have influence, we must matter.’ And, frankly, it is trade which matters. It is about jobs in the UK and Saudi. It is about the future prosperity of the UK and Saudi. It is about the shared security of the UK and Saudi.

Vision 2030 is aimed at creating an economy that does not exist today; one fit for the upcoming generations and which will offer them a life with dignity and work with pride. It is about the young thrusters in Saudi and so it needs to be matched with an equally energetic and vibrant response from the UK; a British Vision 2030, perhaps, that communicates clearly our shared aspirations, interests and values post-Brexit and which recognises and places future trade at the heart of our allied engines of growth and social development. In preparing to receive MbS, we should remember Lawrence’s observation that “the Arabs believe in persons, not institutions” and ensure he knows who owns this critical bi-lateral relationship right from the first moment he sets foot in the UK.

Joseph Walker-Cousins

Riyadh