He helped Gaddafi seize power in before falling out with him in the s and going into exile. He returned amid the uprising against Gaddafi to fight against his former boss - and in the aftermath cast himself as the main opponent of the Islamist militias in eastern Libya. For three years he battled various Islamist militias, including groups aligned to al-Qaeda, in the eastern city of Benghazi. However, his critics accused of him of labelling anyone who challenged his authority as "terrorists".
He is undoubtedly the most-powerful general in Libya, with his forces controlling most of the country, including Benghazi and Sirte, the birthplace of Gaddafi and a former stronghold of Islamic State IS group jihadists.
He is also believed to control most of Libya's oil reserves. Observers say he has set his sights on the top job, but the main bone of contention has been a clause in the UN-brokered agreement that prevents a military figure taking political office.
Yes, he has long had the support of Egypt and the UAE - and made a visit to Saudi Arabia a week before he launched the offensive on Tripoli in April Turkey has also accused Russia of sending about mercenaries to strengthen his forces, an allegation Russia denies. At the same time, Libya's UN-backed government is suspected to have hired Syrian fighters, which the prime minister did not deny in a BBC interview. Turkey has deployed troops to support the UN-backed government, but President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and his Russian counterpart, Vladimir Putin, have come together to try and broker a ceasefire fire.
They have had limited success, with Gen Haftar leaving talks in Moscow in mid-January without signing a deal. Observers said it showed that Gen Haftar was not heavily reliant on Russia, for as long as he had the backing of regional superpower Egypt and the UAE.
The latest mediation effort came from Germany, which hosted a summit of foreign leaders in Berlin on 20 January. The leaders promised to uphold a UN arms embargo on Libya, but little else was achieved and the chances of a ceasefire taking hold still looked far-fetched. Germany's Foreign Minister Heiko Maas warned that Libya could become a "second Syria" and the "scene of proxy wars" if peace was not negotiated.
Most Western nations back the unity government, but there have been suspicions about France's relationship with the general. Although France denies taking sides in the conflict, French President Emmanuel Macron was the first Western leader to invite Gen Haftar to Europe for peace talks, and France launched air strikes in support of his forces in February They targeted Chadian opposition forces fighting against the LNA in the south. This may be the way the world should operate, but as a set of driving assumptions, this part of the Obama doctrine has proven to be wrong at best, and rather dangerous at worst.
The U. Even President Obama himself would eventually acknowledge the failure to stay engaged. According to the Libya Body Count, around 4, people have so far been killed over the course of 22 months of civil war. In Syria, the death toll is about times that, with more than , killed , according to the Syrian Center for Policy Research. Would that undermine support for the original intervention? It was wrong because the decision to intervene in the first place was not justified, being based as it was on faulty premises regarding weapons of mass destruction.
Presumably not, even though we would all be happy that Iraq was on a promising path. The near reverse holds true for Libya. The justness of military intervention in March cannot be undone or negated retroactively. This is not the way choice or morality operates imagine applying this standard to your personal life. Was the rightness of stopping the Rwandan genocide dependent on whether Rwanda could realistically become a stable democracy after the genocide was stopped?
The idea that Libya, because it had oil and a relatively small population, would have been a relatively easy case was an odd one. Qaddafi had made sure, well in advance, that a Libya without him would be woefully unprepared to reconstruct itself. For more than four decades, he did everything in his power to preempt any civil society organizations or real, autonomous institutions from emerging. Paranoid about competing centers of influence, Qaddafi reduced the Libyan army to a personal fiefdom.
Unlike other Arab autocracies, the state and the leader were inseparable. Americans are probably more likely to consider the Libya intervention a failure because the U.
He was a threat to his own people, and that was about it. And as the Mootwa comment above suggests, some Americans are likely to see peacekeeping as beneath the dignity of American warriors. You might think that the widespread distaste for nation-building would deter the United States from regime-change missions.
But U. And so America goes to war with an extremely short-term mindset, quickly toppling the bad guys but failing to prepare for the later challenges to come. All eyes are on smiting the oppressor because this is the kind of war people want to fight. The problem is that societies like Libya, Iraq, or Afghanistan are deeply traumatized by years of dictatorship, sectarian division, or civil war.
Thomas Jefferson is not going to suddenly pop up when the wicked rulers are dispatched. These countries require years of international assistance that must tread the fine line between providing necessary help and avoiding neo-colonial control. In war, there are two good options for the United States. The first is regime change with a viable plan to win the peace. The second option is not to go to war at all. There is no point in toppling a tyrant if the result is anarchy.
Skip to content Site Navigation The Atlantic. On March 28, , U. It sometimes takes a long time. Sometimes it can happen very fast, but it was never part of the military mission. Gates said. This is scarcely believable. Just as the dictator somehow survived the attack on his personal residence in , he also did in Later that day, Vice Adm. In fact, not only was the Western coalition not limiting its missions to the remit of the U.
Security Council resolutions, but it also actively chose not to enforce them. Resolution was supposed to prohibit arms transfers to either side of the war in Libya, and NATO officials claimed repeatedly that this was not occurring.
Yet, the most damning piece of evidence comes from a public relations video that NATO itself released on May 24, In truth, the Libyan intervention was about regime change from the very start. Afterward, NATO began providing direct close-air support for advancing rebel forces by attacking government troops that were actually in retreat and had abandoned their vehicles.
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