Ignored By The West Libya Has Become A Failed State

Libya Crumbles As The United States Looks The Other Way -- Washington Post editorial

THREE YEARS after U.S. and NATO forces helped liberate Libya from the dictatorship of Moammar Gaddafi, the country is beginning to look a lot like another nation where an abrupt U.S. disengagement following a civil war led to chaos: Afghanistan in the 1990s. In Libya, heavily armed militias are battling for control of Tripoli and Benghazi as well as the international airport. The United States, France and other Western governments involved in the 2011 military intervention have evacuated their diplomats and abandoned their embassies. A U.N. mission that was supposed to help broker political accords also left.

Last month in Benghazi, the Ansar al-Sharia militia, which has ties to al-Qaeda and was involved in the Sept. 11, 2012, assault that killed the U.S. ambassador there, stormed a military base and then declared the city the seat of an “Islamic emirate.” That’s what the Taliban called Afghanistan. According to The Post’s Karen DeYoung, some U.S. counterterrorism officials believe Libya’s Islamists could seek to align themselves with the Islamic State, the al-Qaeda offshoot that controls western Iraq and eastern Syria. Whether or not that happens, it’s not hard to foresee eastern Libya becoming a launching pad for terrorist attacks against nearby Europe or even the U.S. homeland.

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My Comment: To put it bluntly .... Libya is now a failed state. The crisis is further compounded by the lack of interest from the U.S. and other Western powers to get involved .... not surprising when one realizes that any intervention would involve tens of thousands of soldiers, billions in maintaining such a force, and billions more to repair Libya's infrastructure and political institutions. To say that this is a disaster is an understatement .... especially since Libya is sitting on hundreds of billions of dollars in oil, and is only a short distance away from the enormous markets and population centers of Europe.