Daily Times

The former Libyan ruler, Muammar Gaddafi, served an important function in North Africa: keeping a lid on Islamic extremism. As a pan-Arabist and Nasserite, Gaddafi was wary of and quickly muzzled any Islamist groups that mixed religion with politics. He also kept neighbouring economies afloat by direct investments and employing their citizens in Libya’s oil fields. After a NATO-backed revolt upended Gaddafi in 2011 and later took his life, the Sahel region he effectively policed slid into militant chaos.
In November, terrorists connected to al Qaeda stormed an upscale Malian hotel, leaving 21 people dead. Earlier the same month, Boko Haram, an Islamic State (IS) affiliate, bombed two marketplaces in Nigeria with over 50 fatalities. The US’s missionary zeal to impose democracy in tribal societies has backfired again, a story replayed across the Middle East after the so-called Arab Spring of 2011. Gaddafi was in power for over four decades but that was no reason to dump him, claims former US Congressperson Pete Hoekstra, ex-chair of the House Intelligence Committee. Sure, there were allegations that he had previously funded the Irish Republican Army (IRA) and ordered the Lockerbie bombing, but Gaddafi, Hoekstra believes, was a changed man after Saddam Hussein’s execution.
He subsequently helped the US gather intelligence on Islamic radicals, gave up his nuclear programme and paid reparations to the victims of Lockerbie. The White House, Hoekstra rues, “snatched defeat from the jaws of victory” when it decided to dislodge Gaddafi because he was “doing everything we had asked him to do and had been doing it for eight or nine years”.
Four years on, post-Gaddafi, Libya looks like a quadrangular death-match between former rebels of the National Transitional Council (NTC), militias loyal to former general Khalifa Haftar, fighters from the Tuareg and Toubou ethnic groups, and IS militants. NTC partisans now call themselves Libya Dawn, rule Tripoli and western parts of the country, while Haftar’s internationally recognised Operation Dignity government controls east Libya from Tobruk. IS, meanwhile, has staked claim to tracts around the port of Sirte, while tribal militias control swathes of the southwest.
IS in Libya has its roots in Islamist rebels who, upon overthrowing Gaddafi in 2011, went off to seek deadlier pastures in the Levant. There, they fought the Syrian regime and Hezbollah alongside US-backed militias before returning in 2014 to wreak havoc at home. Now called the Islamic Youth Shura Council, these rebels pledged allegiance to Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi and dove into the Libyan civil war with perfect timing. Sirte, Gaddafi’s hometown, was especially ripe for conquest in the midst of growing local frustration with both the NTC and army for hastening Libya’s slide.
The group has so far avoided a media blitz for two reasons. First, all warring parties in Libya have taken to murder and pillaging with equal gusto, so IS does not stand out in comparison despite its 5,000 strong roll call. Moreover, even though a US airstrike felled the group’s senior leader, Abu Nabil, on November 13, the hit was opportunistic and not a result of an active manhunt. Two, other IS affiliates have stepped up headline-grabbing attacks against coalition targets of late, like the Russian plane and Paris bombings, and eclipsed the mischief of their Libyan cousins for now.
IS in Libya made headlines in February when a propaganda video showing the mass execution of 21 Egyptian Coptic Christians went viral and sparked international outrage. A few months later, Tunisian authorities revealed that terrorists trained in Libya carried out the Sousse and Bardo Museum attacks, killing over 50 civilians. Still, runaway success eludes the group. Local militias kicked IS out of the eastern city of Derna in June and it is, at present, only able to mount hit-and-run attacks on oil fields.
The reason could be a “superabundance of armed groups” in Libya, who, “for the most part, are busy fighting each other, but could potentially be harnessed to eliminate Islamic State,” claims Geoff Porter from West Point’s Combating Terrorism Centre. His assessment ties into US President Barack Obama’s policy on combating IS. “If you do not have local populations that are committed to pushing back against ideological extremes, then they resurface,” Obama stressed at the recent G20 meeting in Turkey.
Even as vengeful France and Russia begin another round of jihadist whack-a-mole in Syria by upping the tempo of airstrikes, Obama is right to caution against putting boots on the ground. Ethnic and sectarian cracks mar the Middle East and any attempts to reboot the regional status quo will smack of neocolonialism. Unilateral force did not work in Afghanistan and Iraq, and it will not work in Syria unless local stakeholders are strong enough to take charge. More bombs, after all, only leave bigger craters and angrier locals.

The writer is a freelance columnist and audio engineer based in Islamabad