Stimson Experts Respond to Events in Libya

August 22, 2011

Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon is sending his special envoy for Libya, Abdel-Elah Al-Khatib, and his special adviser on post-conflict planning for Libya, Ian Martin, to Doha, Qatar, to discuss how the United Nations might support the multi-faceted transition from Moammar Qaddafi's eccentric rule to a new political, social, and economic order. Ban has offered support in the realm of security, rule of law, social and economic recovery, constitution-making and electoral processes, human rights and transitional justice, and coordination of support to Libya from its neighbors and the international community. All of these are subjects that UN peace support operations (PSOs) have addressed elsewhere, with varying degrees of success. None of them have been in the Middle East, however, although the region is the cradle of traditional peacekeeping - the kind that monitors ceasefires between states, but stands apart from the political process. Although such an operation in Libya would be a first for the UN in the region, the politics involved are distinct from the region's other political struggles and the operation could be deployed without crossing any lines or confronting issues related to those struggles.

Most UN PSOs have implemented peace accords growing out of battlefield stalemate in long-running conflicts and thus power-sharing agreements between former adversaries. Other places have suffered relatively brief but intense conflict that has ended, like Libya's, in the equivalent of military victory - although not necessarily at the hands of a principal domestic political player. Thus, NATO air action pushed Serbian security forces out of Kosovo, while international pressure induced Indonesia to pull its occupying forces and their affiliated militias out of East Timor. In both of these cases, the UN itself assumed temporary administration of these territories. In both cases, however, internal factions fell upon each other, in Kosovo almost immediately and then five years later, taking NATO (and the UN) by surprise both times. In Timor, it happened six years after the initial intervention, taking a downscaled UN operation by surprise.

In Libya, the NTC is the recognized, if interim, governing authority. Its win is due in no small part to NATO dominance of the air, its willingness to share intelligence with the NTC, and its use of force against Qaddafi. But NATO ground forces will not move into Libya to provide high-end security, as they still do in Kosovo, nor will a sequence of coalition, then UN, forces provide it, as was the case for several years in East Timor. The winning side(s) in Libya will wish to see to the country's security themselves. Threats to that security may persist from pro-Qaddafi diehards but the greatest threat will likely emanate from the tendencies of semi-professional fighting forces to split along ethnic, regional, or egotistical lines, or to engage in reprisals against erstwhile enemies. Since, in Qaddafi's case, many of his forces appear to have been imported, they may be at risk of reprisal, as are immigrant workers from the same countries or those who bear resemblance to them.

If the UN deploys a PSO to Libya, it may face some difficult choices or at least some difficult to implement, but mandated, tasks. One of these may be monitoring the peace with unarmed observers. Another may be disarming, demobilizing, and repatriating expat Qaddafi fighters. A third may be protecting civilians - a logical extension of the mandates laid down by Security Council resolutions 1970 and 1973, this time focused on the NTC and its forces - but the UN is unlikely to be allowed to field armed forces to do so, and certainly could not do so in sufficient numbers or agility to confront triumphant militias. Libya, nonetheless, will need modern police to maintain public safety. Militias, or militaries of any stripe, are blunt and awkward instruments of law and order, and poor substitutes for police - at least the sort focused on protecting communities rather than rounding up and torturing opponents of the regime. History testifies that such institutions take a decade or more to build to a sustainable level of professionalism, as do their necessary counterparts in courts and corrections. The UN's record in building such institutions is mixed - as is the record of most other outsiders who have tried. In the meantime, Libyan public safety and security will be assured by...what?

Constitution-building, democratization, and especially elections are elements of political transformation with which the UN also has experience. It is better at elections than in the other two areas, since constitutionalism and democratization may require both political and cultural transformation. Libya, then, offers a kind of test case for the thesis that governing institutions - the apparatus of the state and the public services it generates - should precede electoral politics; that legitimacy should be earned first by action and then ratified by vote. Elections can be messy and divisive, but the unanswered question that accompanies this approach is: what keeps the apparatus from stopping short of elections? And who will raise their voices if it does?

- Bill Durch, Senior Associate and Director of Future of Peace Operations Program

The imminent collapse of the Qaddafi regime adds an important new dimension to the Arab revolt.  Unlike the largely peaceful uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt, Libya's change has been achieved through armed conflict between the forces of the Libyan state and an impromptu rebel army supported by NATO air action.  Also unlike Tunisia and Egypt, which are still working through legal, political, and constitutional changes (leading some to judge that those "revolutions" are incomplete or have failed), the outcome in Libya cannot be seen as anything other than complete regime change.  The idiosyncratic policymaking of the Qaddafi era will be replaced by new institutions and processes.  The Libyan case in both its means and its outcome is more dramatic and more comprehensive than what has transpired so far in Libya's two neighbors and elsewhere in the Arab world.

For the United States, the decision to work through the United Nations and to have NATO allies take the lead has proven right.  Despite the criticism that NATO forces, absent a more robust American leadership role, were taking too long to finish the task, US policy has been validated on several scores.  First, the Libyans themselves determined the pace and the strategy for ousting Qaddafi.  Ground action and shifts of loyalty by key communities and groups were critical in causing the collapse of the regime.  The NATO contribution, focused in particular on protection of civilians, contributed to but did not determine the outcome.  Second, the US stuck to its position that allies with a greater stake in Libya should shoulder more of the burden for taking action.  It is a clear message about a more sustainable distribution of responsibility and resources for international security.

For the region, change in Libya is a great opportunity.  Libya's population and weight in regional politics are modest, but it is rich in natural resources and can, over time, achieve social and economic stability that its poorer and more populous neighbors might envy.  But Tunisia and Egypt have much to offer Libya in transition, and outside actors seeking to support democratization efforts would be wise to work on a regional level and promote strong Libyan ties to its more politically advanced neighbors.  In fact, once Qaddafi goes, the outlier in North Africa will be Algeria.  From Morocco to Egypt, only Algeria's leaders are resistant to the spirit of reform.  Their own tragic and failed experiment in democratization in the early 1990s led to a decade of violence and civil war.  Many efforts at regional integration across North Africa have foundered on the divergent politics of the distinct nation states.  Change in Libya creates an opportunity for greater similarities in the political cultures of the region, so that economic and political cooperation could be less prone to the deep rivalries and competition of the past. 

- Ellen Laipson, President and Director of Southwest Asia Program

Photo credit: Crethi Plethi, Flickr. http://www.flickr.com/photos/44866093@N05/5466890626/