Monkey Cage: Is Libya a proxy war?
By Frederic Wehrey October 24 at 5:00 PM
Recent reports of Egyptian military aircraft bombing Islamist militant positions in the eastern Libyan city of Benghazi have highlighted once more how the Mediterranean state has become a contested site of regional proxy wars. The projection of Middle Eastern rivalries onto Libyas fractured landscape has a long pedigree, dating back to the 2011 revolution and perhaps even further, when Moammar Gaddafis propaganda apparatus portrayed the country as a plaything at the mercy of predatory imperialists. During the uprising, the United Arab Emirates and Qatar jostled for influence, with their respective special forces supporting disparate revolutionary factions with intelligence, training and arms. Initially, the choice of actors had less to do with ideological affinity and more with expediency, history and geography. Libyan expatriates residing in each country shaped the channeling of funds and weapons.
As the revolution wore on, these interventions had a profound effect on its trajectory and aftermath. The availability of outside patronage reduced incentives for factional cooperation and consensus-building on the ground. It sharpened preexisting fissures in the anti-Gaddafi opposition: Revolutionary factions competed for arms shipments, withheld foreign intelligence and targeting data from one another, and tried to outmaneuver one another in the revolutions endgame the liberation of Tripoli.
But the intra-regional tussling of the 2011 revolution pales in comparison to the intensity of todays proxy war. Back then, the factions and their foreign backers were at least united in the common goal of toppling a universally despised tyrant. Today, the outside powers are engaged in a struggle far more divisive and consequential: awar of narratives.
A dangerous scenario looms ahead. Backed by Egypt and the UAE, the Libyan government is extending the narrative of its counter-terrorism struggle against jihadists in Benghazi to include what is effectively a multi-sided civil war in Tripoli and the western mountains of which Islamists are only one player. It is a multifaceted struggle that is only partially understood, and for which the literature on proxy interventions does not fully account.
Political scientist Karl Deutsch forwarded an early definition of proxy wars as: an international conflict between two foreign powers, fought out on the soil of a third country; disguised as a conflict over an internal issue of that country; and using some of that countrys manpower, resources and territory as a means for achieving preponderantly foreign goals and foreign strategies. Recently, Andrew Mumford criticized this definition for being too state-centric, arguing instead that proxy wars are conflicts in which a third party intervenes indirectly in order to influence the strategic outcome in favor of its preferred faction.
In the Libya case, however, neither definition is satisfying because they leave out the crucial element of narrative.
The inflection point in Libyas post-revolutionary narrative arguably came from outside the country, in the rise of now-President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi in neighboring Cairo. Without meaning to intervene, at least initially, the Egyptian strongman cast a long and ultimately polarizing shadow over Libyas unsettled politics. In both word and deed, he was an exemplar to embattled and desperate segments of the Libyan population: The ex-regime officials, key eastern tribes, federalists and younger liberals, who began idolizing the military uniform, the proverbial man on horseback, as the salvation for the countrys worsening violence and, less nobly, a way to exclude their ideological opponents from power.
To be sure, the maximalist positions and immaturity of Islamist politicians in Libyas dysfunctional parliament, and especially their channeling of funds to revolutionary militias and, in some cases, U.S.-designated terrorist groups like Ansar al-Sharia at the expense of the regular army and police, bear much of the blame for this desperation. But the narrative shift imparted by the Sisi Effect meant that previous debates in Libya about dialogue, disarmament and reintegration were replaced with the more toxic and unyielding discourse of a war on terror. And perhaps most importantly, the rise of Sisi created a new part in Libyas narrative script, waiting for an actor to play it.
That actor, as is well known, is Gen. Khalifa Hifter, the septuagenarian commander of Libyas disastrous intervention in Chad, defector, and 20-year resident of northern Virginia who returned in 2011 in an unsuccessful bid for military leadership. In May 2014, Hifter announced the launch of Operation Dignity, a coalition of eastern tribal militias, federalists and disaffected military units, which began shelling the positions of Ansar al-Sharia and Islamist militias in and around Benghazi. In both tone and action, Hifter tried to align himself early on with Egypts military regime, which has been fighting its own Islamists in Egypt. Hifter also directly called on Egypt to use all necessary military actions inside Libya to secure its borders. At the same time, he declared Operation Dignity to be aimed at preventing Islamists from threatening our neighbors in Algeria and Egypt, further emphasizing the regional aspect of his campaign. There were echoes of neo-Nasserism in his rhetoric. He claimed that he and Sisi agree that fighting terrorism is a way to emphasize our Arab identity. He pledged that he would not permit any anti-Egyptian militants to exploit Libyas eastern border asa safe haven.
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Monkey Cage: Is Libya a proxy war?