Category Archives: Official Documents

Official List for Prime Minister Abduraheem El-Keib’s Transitional Executive Board

Prime Minister: Abduraheem El-Keib
Deputy Prime Minister: Mustafa AbuShagur
Minister of Religious Affairs: Hamza AbuFaris
Minister of Justice: Khalifa Ashour
Minister of Telecome: Anwar Fituri
Minister of Labor: Mustafa Rujbani
Minister of Health: Dr. Fatima Hamroush
Minister of Interior:  Fawzi Abdela’ali
Minister of Energy: Awad Beroin
Minister of Trade and Commerce: Sharkasi
Minister of Education, Sulaiman… Read More

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I have spent most of my adult life working on, and in, interventions. I began as a junior diplomat with East Timor, served in the Balkans and in Iraq, then spent a few years in Afghanistan. But none of this made me feel I could predict the future of Libya as I entered Tripoli in August. There were echoes of Baghdad in the masked men holding on to truck-mounted anti-aircraft guns and shouting Allahu Akbar at an angry crowd outside the bank. Was this the prelude to a sudden flurry of looting, then, after a few months, sullen resentment, riots, roadside bombs and rockets falling into the foreign compounds? Would Libya, like the Iraq or Afghan interventions, eventually suck in billions of dollars, thousands of lives, and achieve little more than trauma, corruption and insecurity?

Or could it be, like the Balkans, a success? After all, in 1995 there was a civil war in Bosnia in which 100,000 people were killed; there were three ethnic armies and 419,000 men under arms. Then the west intervened. Today it has a single army of fewer than 15,000. A million refugees have returned and more than 200,000 homes have been given back to their owners. Karadzic, Milosevic and Mladic have been caught and tried as war criminals. You can drive from one end of Bosnia to the other: the checkpoints are gone. The war has completely ended. And all this was achieved at a cost of zero American and Nato lives. Are there lessons from the last two decades that could guide us to success in Libya?

Two dominant theories of intervention have been studied by those responsible for “post-conflict strategy” in Libya. The first – championed by one of the world’s most influential thinktanks, the Rand Corporation – emphasises resources and planning. It holds that the Balkans succeeded because of sufficient troops, money and good management. Iraq failed because there was “no postwar plan”; Afghanistan because of insufficient resources (“We were distracted by Iraq”). The implication for Libya is to plan better and, if necessary, to “surge”. The new US theory of counterinsurgency, of General Petraeus, is this view on steroids. He and countless American politicians, from the president down, emphasise strategy, leadership and above all resources.

The second – equally influential – lesson stresses the need for heroic nation-builders. For former high representative in Bosnia Paddy Ashdown, the key is to “go in hard”, establish the rule of law rapidly, through bold and charismatic international leadership, then “avoid setting deadlines and settle in for the long haul. Peacekeeping needs to be measured not in months but decades.” In 2003, Ashdown wrote to secretary of defence Donald Rumsfeld, suggesting the postponement of elections in Iraq until the rule of law was established. In 2008, he warned that in Afghanistan there was a need to find “a single person to head up the international effort, with the authority to bash international heads together”.… Read More