May 9, 2012: Today’s local prestige newspaper, the Washington Post, brings two items on Libya, one a short news clip and the other a column by a well-known commentator—in this case, David Ignatius. Taken together, the two items furnish further evidence that all is not well either in Libya or in parts of the western Sahel as a direct result of the Western campaign to overthrow the Qadaffi regime. Don’t say I didn’t warn you. I did, here,here, here, here, here and here.
As to the news item, it made the Digest on page A8 of the Post. There are six items in today’s Digest, the first four with red headers and large-type headlines, the latter two without either. The very last one, apparently considered by the editor to be the least important of the group, reports that one person was killed in a clash near the Libyan premier’s office. It turns out that Libyan militia members armed with machine guns and mortars tried to storm the Prime Minister’s office. This triggered a gun battle with security forces. The militia members were demanding money. The government, such as it is, has offered salaries to fighters who helped topple the old regime, but only if they become integrated into a national military force. Apparently, some militia leaders think they are owed the money regardless of their intentions with respect to any new Libyan national army.
The story did not say how many people were involved, or how long the battle raged. But there is only so much you can say in a news bulletin consisting of only two sentences.
The same incident got considerably more play in the New York Times: afive-paragraph article on page A6. Here we learn that entire truckloads of armed men attacked the Prime Minister’s office, and the dispatch was not shy to state what this actually amounted to: “a new demonstration of the lawlessness pervading the capital just weeks before scheduled national election.” Exactly right. In the Times story four people were killed, not one. We also learn where the attacking militia came from: the Nafusah Mountains, southwest of Tripoli. That is not a coincidence, for those who understand the tribal geography of the recent war.
The Times article also gives relevant context. Municipal elections in the capital that were to have taken place last Saturday were postponed until after next month’s voting for a national assembly. The reason for the postponement appears to be the almost complete lack of security in the capital. Armed groups from rival neighborhoods and towns frequently open fire at one another for reasons that are no longer entirely clear to most residents of the capital. The Times also usefully brings a quote from a member of the Transitional National Council: “With an antiaircraft gun mounted on a pickup truck you can do whatever you want—nobody can stop you.”
And that provides a perfect segue from the New York Times back to theWashington Post, and specifically to columnist David Ignatius’s “Libyan Missiles on the Loose.” Ignatius is concerned not about anti-aircraft guns mounted on pickup trucks, but about MANPADS. During the protracted if mostly low-level warfare that brought down the Qaddafi regime, huge numbers of weapons of all descriptions disappeared from government armories into private hands. (ahem.) Some of these were shoulder-held antiaircraft weapons, in the Libyan case of Russian manufacture. According to Ignatius, some of these weapons have made their way to an African jihadi group called Boko Haram. His information comes from two former CIA counterterrorist officials, who explained to Ignatius their futile attempts to alert their compatriots in Langley as to what was going on. According to Ignatius’s account, the CIA ignored this information for weeks and months despite the fact that one former CIA officer warned an FBI contact very specifically that Libyan missiles were moving south into the Agadez region of Niger.
Ignatius’s article raises all sorts of interesting questions. We will get to some of them in a moment. But the most interesting connection, one that Ignatius never mentions, is that the region-wide Tuareg uprising that got its recent catalytic boost from the Libya war is behind all this. As I have already written in this space, it is not likely at all that Tuareg rebels in Mali, some of them affiliated at least loosely with al-Qaeda, would have been able last month to seize the northern part of that country and to declare the independent country of Azawad had it not been for fellow Tuareg, laden with stolen weapons, who came to their assistance from southwestern Libya. As with Mali, so logically with Niger, where Tuareg rebels have also been fighting for years against the central government. With northern Mali under Tuareg control, it is very likely that the rebellion in northern Niger, in the Agadez region in particular, will gain strength. If that region can pull away from Niger as the northern part of Mali did, then we will have witnessed the beginnings of a fairly sizable Tuareg state, the rolling back of which may prove impossible. All of this comes from the fact that the Libyan Tuareg lost their protector and sponsor when the Qaddafi regime fell.
Why does Ignatius not mention what happened last month in Mali and why does he not make the connection with Niger? I don’t know; I have not asked him. There is only so much information one can put in a single newspaper column, so maybe that is part of the reason. But one has to wonder if maybe Ignatius is not so keen on explicitly linking the increasingly dangerous mess in the western Sahel to the campaign in Libya because Ignatius was one of the chatterati’s premier champions of that war. An earlier Ignatius column crowed vindication of the Obama Administration’s policy in Libya. I can see why such a stalwart supporter of the war in Libya might not want to call undue attention to its nasty aftermath, which, if anything, is growing in both geographical scope and perhaps also in general danger.
Because yes, the MANPADS problem is indeed quite serious. One of these shoulder-held items can bring down a commercial airliner, even if operated by a fighter with modest technical skills and training. As Ignatius points out, a State Department official said a few months ago that of the 20,000 weapons in the Libyan arsenal, only about 5,000 had been secured through a measly and belated $40 million program to buy up loose missiles. That leaves about 15,000 on the loose. When I was in the government the cable traffic had plenty to say about the danger of loose MANPADS in places like Iraq, Afghanistan, Somalia, Yemen and elsewhere. It was a high if not publicly announced priority to find and neutralize these things, pretty much by any means necessary. But the numbers we were worried about then were nowhere near 15,000 in a fairly concentrate area, or in the hands of one or two affiliated radical groups like Ansar ud-Din sand Boko Haram. So, as I say, this is a real problem and Ignatius is right to emphasize it.
I would probably be remiss if, after having mentioned Yemen and MANPADS and promising to address other interesting issues raised by the Ignatius column, I did not dwell for just a moment on the big news from the Middle East in today’s paper: that, it now turns out, the CIA, using a Saudi double agent, foiled a plot hatched by one of al-Qaeda’s cleverest bomb technicians, Hassan al-Asiri. The media coverage of this story raises more questions than it answers. But, brushing away all of the side points, what seems to emerge is that the CIA, using local regional allies, basically managed to entrap some bad guys. Without the CIA effort, it is not clear that any plot would’ve existed in the first place. So it might be that this story is a great deal less than meets the eye, rather like when the FBI entraps clueless radicals in the United States and then tries to make hay out of foiling their plans—again, plans that probably would never have existed had it not been for the entrapment plan to start with.
I am not saying that Mr. al-Asiri was not and is not still dangerous. He probably is. But in this case U.S. officials had been monitoring matters from the inside, and, as we were assured by various officials yesterday, there was never any danger to American commercial aviation or to U.S. nationals. So if there was never any danger, why is the CIA making such a big deal preening over this? Like I say, there are way more questions than answers here.
Now what does this have to do with the frustration expressed by Mr. Ignatius and, through him, his former CIA informants? I suppose the obvious way to put it is this: If the CIA can claim to have done such terrific things in foiling sophisticated bomb plots, why can’t it take seriously important intelligence from the field when it hears it? If it comes off like James Bond in the morning, why does it act like Inspector Jacques Clouseau in the afternoon?
It would take a long afternoon to exhaust a reasonably complete answer to this question, but an answer does actually exist. Part of the answer would point out that there is a difference between the analytical and operations parts of the Central Intelligence Agency. The latter can be quite good at what it does without reference to the former.
Another part would point out that there has been and still is ferocious bureaucratic warfare going on among offices within the Agency. Even within the CIA, not to speak of the intelligence community as a whole, information is sometimes not shared and perspectives are not aligned. It’s a big sand box, and not everyone plays well within it.
Still another part of the answer would point out, as did TAI’s special feature on intelligence craft in a recent issue, that a relatively young and inexperienced analytical group is very good at collecting information, but not nearly as good at figuring out what it means. In the case of goings on in Azawad and Agadez, most ground-floor analysts have no context within which to understand information about the Tuareg in this region even when they see it. In the firehose-like flood of information they have to pour through each and every day, very little of it concerns remote places like these. So unless analysts understand enough about the region and its recent history to make reasonable inferences about the meaning of key data points, chances are they are simply not going to pay attention unless someone in the policymaking community above them has asked them to do so. Now ask yourself, how likely is that these days? As the late British anthropologist Mary Douglas once said, ”Information is just not going to rub off on those who think they have no use for it.”
I don’t for a minute claim that what happened in Libya, or in Langley, or in Yemen and Saudi Arabia yesterday exhausts the news from the region. It has been a very lively time. Kofi Annan warned yesterday that civil war in Syria is possible, and that his peace plan is not faring so well. Thank you, Kofi, for that newsflash. Good grief, another BFO from Turtle Bay. Interpol decided that Tariq al-Hashimi, an Iraqi vice president and a Sunni, who has been accused of terrorism by Prime Minister Maliki, may in fact be a bad guy. The result is that he may have to stay where he is, in Turkey, where he has been welcomed by his Sunni coreligionists. And of course in Israel, just the day before yesterday, Prime Minister Netanyahu pulled off a brilliant tactical political move, broadening his governing coalition without recourse to an election. I haven’t even mentioned Egypt, where everything and at the same time nothing is going on pretty much all the time lately. (I could explain that locution, but I won’t for now.)
What a fun part of the world, an unmatched collection of rifts that keep on giving. So stay tuned; there will be more soon.
No comments:
Post a Comment