Angry Planet - Libya Is the Future of War

Episode Date: August 3, 2019

Libya. Dictator Muammar Gaddafi ruled the country from 1969 to 2011. The Arab Spring led to a Civil War and the deposition and death of Gadaffi in 2011. The country never quite recovered and remains in the throws of a violent Civil War. One most of us in the West, myself included, have not paid much attention to.Someone who did pay attention is today’s guest Robert Young Pelton. Pelton is an author and documentarian with extensive experience covering conflicts. He’s just back from Libya.You can listen to War College on iTunes, Stitcher, Google Play or follow our RSS directly. Our website is warcollegepodcast.com. You can reach us on our Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/warcollegepodcast/; and on Twitter: @War_College.Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/warcollege. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Love this podcast. Support this show through the ACAST supporter feature. It's up to you how much you give, and there's no regular commitment. Just click the link in the show description to support now. People think war is sort of two guys fighting and one guy wins and the other guy surrenders, right? No, what we're seeing is that the homostaceous conflict is to have conflict, is to have places like Yemen where you can't even figure out who's who and what's what and who's fighting. and who's not fighting, right?

You're listening to War College, a weekly podcast that brings you the stories from behind the front lines. Here are your hosts. Hello, welcome to War College. I'm your host, Matthew Galt. Libya, dictator Moimar Gaddafi ruled the country from 1969 to 2011.

The Arab Spring led to a civil war and the deposition in death of Gaddafi in 2011. The country never quite recovered and remains in the throes of a violent civil war. One that most of us in the West, myself included, have not paid much attention to. Someone who did pay attention is today's guest, Robert Young Pelton. Pelton is an author and documentarian with extensive experience covering conflicts. He is just back from Libya.

Sir, thank you so much for joining us in attempting to explain all of this to us. Matt, let's see if we can do that. Okay. So in our pre-show conversation, you told me that Libya is very complex. and also very important. To start us off, can you kind of give us a broad overview of the conflict at the moment? You know, what are the sides? Who are the major players?

And why is this such a, why is this country of so much regional importance? Well, Libya should not be at war. You know, it had a revolution in 2011, which overthrew Qaddafi. And it was at that time considered to be part of the Arab Spring. And this was now going to lead to some kind of Democrat. structure. That that structure was deliberately prevented from evolving by outside actors, which would include Saudi Arabia, Egypt, the Emirates, and to a certain degree, Europe, and festered. And so now what we have is what looks like a sort of an east-west conflict,

meaning that the oil rich east, which is centered in Benghazi and Tobruk, is now attacking Tripoli, which is, of course, the western capital. And the narrative coming from the east, which is ruled by Haftar, is that Tripoli is in the grip of terrorist militias and that he is the rightful ruler of Libya and that, you know, should he prevail, then, of course, there will be some kind of agreeable structure. That's neither true nor false.

There's a much more complex war happening. side, Libya. What is the nature of that complex war? Let's just dive right into it. Well, you have, at its core, what people consider to be a tribal structure. And these are groups of people that form together after the revolution for self-interest. And of course, they're supported by militias. And militias were initially started by Gaddafi because it was not happy with the traditional military.

and they tend to be regional or tribal structures. These militias control thousands of weapons, hundreds of trucks, and they're manned by mostly sort of 17 to 35-year-old males, and they're all representing their particular region, whether it's Mizrata or Zentanis or even within the traditional government military now that's made out of militias. So you have all these groups hoping that when the muslims, music stops, they have a chair to sit on.

So that's at its most complex. And many analysts go into that tribal structure. On the next level up, you have what is rather humorously well-functioning and normal, and that's the municipal and city structure. You know, the people that take out the garbage and run the schools and do the mundane things, and these tend to be technocrats, educated. They're not driven by any kind of religious or tribal fervor. and they're just wondering why the outside world doesn't sit down and talk to them.

And there was a mayor structure at some point trying to pound some sense into the outside world. And then there's a higher level part of this war, which are outside players using various forms of manipulation to stir up resentment and anger. And this would be the Emirates, which does not want to see Libya become a major focal point for European trade and oil sales. Saudi Arabia, which has the same concern that they don't want to be overshadowed. Egypt, which of course is a neighbor, wants to have their influence inside so that the Muslim Brotherhood, which is essentially centered in Turkey now, doesn't take over. And then you have other players on the other side. Some of them play both sides, by the way.

You have France who want to have control over the oil that comes in. you have the U.S. to a very tiny degree, and you have Turkey, which is getting very aggressive, protecting what they call the GNA, which is the government of National Corps. That's the official government. So you have the potential right now for a proxy war like Yemen in which the actual participants are wondering why they're fighting because it's a war waged by outside forces. So depending on which we want to dive in and analyze it, the war in Libya is very important and very much worse. looking into. What's stopping it from turning into a proxy war right now? Well, technically it is a proxy war because most of the heavy hitters, most of the drone attacks, the air attacks, are being provided by outside suppliers. So, for example, if you remember, the Russians sent about 35 technicians to fix up the old Russian fighters for Haftar. You had the UAE providing American IOMax planes, which are essentially air tractors that can drop bombs.

You had people like Turkey now providing their version of the Chinese wingloon that the UAE provides, actually testing it in the battlefield to see if it works. So you're seeing multiple players, and you also have the guy sitting on the ground, talking on the radio to their friends across the front lines who fought together in the revolution, who are now facing off against each other. And, of course, then you have ISIS and al-Qaeda sprinkled around. So there's just different levels of conflict there. And you just got back.

How long were you there? I was there for about three weeks, and my goal was to interview General Haftar, and I was invited by his people to come over and interview him. So I basically ended up cooling my heels and tripling going out to the front lines and interviewing some of the major players and military folks. So I think I got a pretty good idea. Plus, don't forget, I've been in and out of Libya for almost four years. I set up a ground network there tracking human smuggling and various things that went on there.

Now, let's talk about, set these three layers aside. I want to talk about one of the personalities before we kind of jump back into that. Who is Haftar? Where did he come from? What does he want? And why is he important to all of this? Well, that's a six-hour show, but essentially, Haftar is a 75-year-old American citizen who used to live in Falls Church, and he has consistently trying to insert himself into the Libyan conflict. Now, he is a fantastically colorful background because he actually goes back to the Gaddafi area, where he was a junior officer that took part in the revolution in the late 60s.

He was trained in Soviet military colleges. He fought in the Yom Kippur War. And then he was part of a disastrous attempt by Gaddafi to wage war against Chad. And we just happened to be on the side that he was fighting against. And if you remember the Toyota War in the late 80s, he was using old Soviet tactics of enforced military bases with landmines and rocket launchers. and he got completely screwed over by the Chadians who took him and about 300 of his closest men captive. Now, they were more captives, but they were returned to Libya. The CIA decided to do something rather bizarre.

I think it was called Operation Mount Hope. They bought all the captured equipment. There was about half a billion dollars of captured Libyan equipment, including hind helicopters and weapons. And they flew it with Chinooks out of Chad. And they flew Haftar around from various venues like Zaire at the time and then into Kenya, then finally into the States. And he and his group were labeled the Libyan Comptrev. If you remember the Reagan area, they were desperate to find insurgent groups in various countries that they felt had Soviet influence.

So Haftar was sort of this government and exhaled guy. And he actually did interviews in the late 90s and early 90s. He was involved in a minor coup attempt, which he was involved in a minor coup attempt, which he was failed. And then during the revolution, he was inserted back into Libya, sort of our guy, sort of the chalabi of Libya. And it didn't go over very well because nobody wanted him because he's a Gaddafiist. And of course, the revolution was about getting rid of these people. So he kind of slunk home and waited until about 2014. And magically, he became the guy that was going to save Benghazi. And if anybody remembers the Benghazi.

incident in 2012, September 11th, we suddenly realized that these militias also included members of al-Qaeda-linked groups. And so he was sort of given free reign by the U.S. to wage war in Benghazi and Dernah. There's a lot of moving targets in Libya because, you know, we supported people for a certain window, then we didn't support them, and then we had government changeovers, etc., etc. So, you know, we always have to remember to go back to. to what's happening in Libya now, which is quite different than Libya in 2001. You teased the question of his legitimacy. What exactly did you mean by that?

Well, again, one of the reasons why I find the Libyan conflict so fascinating is that we take the media's version of it as sort of black hat, white hat or two sides fighting, and we put a leader on one side on the leader on the other side. Now, Fais Saraj is the official UN appointed leader of the GNA. Haftar was not appointed by anyone to go and attack Tripoli, but he was made the head of the military by the parliament in Tobruk. So you basically have a bicameral or bipolar nation that has a parliament over on the east. side and then the leadership over on the west side. And these militias you're talking about literally reacted to Haftar trying to take over Tripoli

and ended up being in control of the region. They're not normally in control of. So you have Salafist-related militias who are not terrorists. You know, they provide security in control Tripoli. And you have Haftar's army, which is made out of some very strange components, including Janjouid and Chadians, controlling the east. East. So the term of legitimacy comes up all the time because people relied so heavily on the UN to broker some kind of peace. Haphtar has continually had conversations to insert himself and then

used military force to just take control. So people will point out that in the Libyan military, you can't be a prisoner of war and be in the army. And that secondly, that he's a U.S. citizen and he can't run the country. And thirdly, he's 75 years old. He should be at home. watching TV eating spaghetti as one guy told me. So there's a number of reasons why they don't feel he's legitimate. But more importantly, is he's dealing with some of the most brutal elements

of the Libyan militias. And if you know the story of Commander War Folly, who after Haftar said there'd be no prisoners taken, dressed up a bunch of people in Benghazi in blue jumpsuits and shot them in the back of the head and made a video and then the ICC issued an arrest warrant,

et cetera, et cetera. we'll have to just promoted that guy. So you're seeing an absolute disconnect between what we would view as legitimate leadership and what's going on in the east of Tripley. I believe that video was posted it on social media, I think. And it was one of the first ICC cases that was built on evidence that had been uploaded by the person in question. But that's a whole other tangent.

Okay, what is the United Nations doing? What's their presence? What's their dog in the fight? Well, United Nations is taking a shattered country, essentially one that began to tip over and then we sort of kicked it over in 2011, is trying to get all these different players around the table to come up with some framework so they can hold elections. Now, keep in mind, the most silent, most abused people in this entire war are the Libyan people. educated people are six million of them most of them are used to a bureaucratic administration most of them are used to subsidized living you know gas is point one five of a dinar which is only worth a quarter

they're used to 42 years of rule under kadhafi it was very good at giving people free things to make them compliant so libyans are not at heart extremely aggressive divisive people They eagerly want some kind of structure in the UN is what they think is going to give that to them. And then you have people like Haftar who kick over the table or people like Saraj who are giving funds to do things in certain areas and then don't provide those funds to people. So you have both sides not living up to the promise. But their remit is over in September, correct? Technically, and they can be re-upped or they can go away. I mean, right now, there is no peacemaker.

This has said over and over again. There is no responsible adult in the room in Libya. There's no one to brush back after. There's no one to stop the importation of all these weapons under the arms embargo. There's no one to crack down on Saraj to make sure that these promises he makes are kept. And so people just keep to themselves. I mean, each tribal group, each regional group is deeply disappointed in what's going on in Libya. Yeah. Well, it doesn't sound, you make it sound as if these are people that don't want to be fighting each other, but there's outside forces that are kind of stoking them to it. Is that a correct assessment?

Yeah. Okay. So imagine a country in which people had a living wage, a subsidized existence, and had some kind of bureaucratic or business life that really didn't generate much drama or conflict. you destroy the government and now don't forget oil revenue is what drives all this so there's no reason for them not to have a good subsidized life so what happens is that these people don't have funds the people that hang out with the katibas are supposed to get paid but they're not they have to be integrated into the government to get that government salary so they have not yet fully what they call ddirred you know demobilized and retrained these people to not be militarily members. So you've got thousands and thousands of young men who essentially are working for warlords, and then you've got thousands of men who are actually on the government payroll. And then you have this inequity in which Haftar's LNA actually gets paid more money than the people defending Tripoli. So it's an economic thing. Is it fixable? Yes, and very easily. The sad thing is that the UN was actually set up by a responsible adults to prevent spoiled children from killing each other.

And I'll give you an example. In 2016, there was a guy from Mizrata, Gawil, who made a move on Tripoli. And he literally launched his catibas and they went in to take over the bank and a bunch of other areas. And they failed. And they were instantly sanctioned by the U.N. In other words, their bank accounts were sanctioned. You can't do business with them, et cetera, et cetera.

Haftar has been doing this now since 2014 and nobody sanctioned him. And when I say sanctions, I mean shut down he and his family's money. And you have to remember, Haftar is borrowing money to pay for all this. His kids are also plundering the economy while he's doing this. And there is no reason why he should not be sanctioned because he meets every single requirement for sanctioned. whether it's violating the arms embargo or human rights violations, you name it. So my point is the UN has the tools. They don't use them.

Well, let's do some big picture talking. You know, again, kind of before we'd really started digging into this, you'd said that we were talking about how the West isn't really paying attention to this conflict. And I think, you know, what you're talking about now, the UN has the tools, but they're not using them. Why aren't we paying attention to what's going on here in why? aren't the tools being used? Well, okay, so this is a good question, because I believe that Libya, like Syria, like Somalia, is a model of wars going forward, where they become so obscure, so complex, so infixable, that we don't care anymore.

And yet the regional players deliberately create these wars to extend their interest. So, for example, in Libya, there are multiple institutions that, that can be given money, whether it's education, whether it's military training, whether it's hygiene, you name it. I mean, the country is full of bureaucrats, and people are eager to just sit down and do normal jobs. These contibers and turn them into actual jobs. Secondly, the reason why the UN is not moving quickly is because people have special interests, whether it's France, whether it's the United Emirates Republic, or whether it's Egypt, continually block their efforts to either swat away Haftar or stop the fighting.

So you see players running amok. And you saw this in Somalia. You remember Eric Prince had a program to defeat piracy. And it was an absolute violation of the UN arms embargo. And all he had to do was write a letter to the Security Council and get approval in five days. Again, you're seeing all these major players completely ignoring the UN, which is something we've seen under the Trump administration of trying to sort of neutralize these global agencies and make them toothless.

So I would say this, and I'm not a hippie, I don't believe that the UN can fix anything, but they provide a lot of the aid and the basically emergency response. We as Americans are actually expected by the Libyans to step in and stop this regional squabbling. consistently, every Libyan I talk to will tell you two things. We don't want outsiders meddling in our affairs, but we need someone like the U.S. to stop these people like Saudi Arabia, like the Emirates, like Turkey, you know, who they look at this, Ottoman Empire, like Israel, like France, like Italy, meddling and stirring up

regional conflict. We just heard the name Eric Prince, and he's got his fingers at this too. Well, let me tell you some interesting. I have the flight log. People wonder how did Haftar become so well known. And I was given these flight logs from Frontier Services Group that showed that Eric Prince's jet, a Cessna Citation, flew Haftar to socialize him to Saudi Arabia, to the Emirates, to Jordan, and also to Egypt.

And then it was after that socialization tour the next day in Mark Second, 2015, that Haftar was appointed as head of the military. And as you know, Eric Prince got busted for promoting his, you know, migrant border control PowerPoint by the intercept. And he was also involved in some other activities that I became aware of. Again, these are outside players injecting their personal agendas to the detriment of living civilians. I'll ask a cynical question.

Is there a lot of money to be made? for a person like Eric Prince in a place like Libya? No. So the one thing the UN did there was basically lock up all the money. So Libya is probably one of the most wealthiest. I guess maybe next to Iran, one of the most wealthy nations that can't get their hands on billions and billions and billions of dollars worth of funds, right?

And it's all managed out of Malta by an investment fund. And everybody's trying to unlock that money. Now, the other funny thing about being in Libya, being an American and going out to the front lines and meeting all these commanders, they just assumed that I was going to sell them weapons, training. And I said, what? I kept thinking that because I was American, I could get them night vision and all sorts of military equipment. And I kept thinking, why are you asking me that? And again, there's no money for that, but they're hoping that maybe you'll find some money and they'll get a piece of that. That's how desperate people are there.

So my point is that it's full of carpet baggers like Somalia, like Mozambique with their tuna fishing deals, et cetera, et cetera. They're all trying to roust up some kind of chunk of money and get a piece of it. All right. Another thing that you kind of lighted on that I want to talk about is Benghazi. And I can hear some people in the audience groaning and other people getting wound up. But I think it's important for the way America views Libya and the conflict. Do you think that that attack changed the American mindset about this? Or do you think it even factors in it all anymore?

No, no. It's very important. It's twofold. One is Benghazi was an event, a very minor event that happened in a foreign location during which an attack by a group led to casualties. The deaths of Stevens and the other Americans, they were not shot. They were not kidnapped and had their heads got up. They died in a fire.

In other words, I don't think the goal of a NAT attack was to kill anybody. On the annex, on the CIA annex, that was a very major operation of collecting weapons and shipping them to Syria. And it was targeted. Members of al-Qaeda essentially shut that down. So it was a military action. And unfortunately, the guards took the brunt of that attack. Now, from that came a controversy about the security of embassy personnel and CIA personnel overseas. And this is where it bifurcates because the State Department had reduced their budgets from their leaning forward period in Iraq,

which, of course, back to Eric Prince again, where people were getting paid billions of dollars out of the WPPS system. But nobody cut any money back on the GRS, the Global Response. system, which is the CIA version of that. In other words, you know, armed contractors protecting CIA personal basis. But it was an unfortunate incident because there was no response. There was no ability to get aircraft there or support. Now, you have to remember how big Africa is. You know, Libya is not Somalia. It's not Kabul. And they should have had more resources there, but they didn't expect that kind of conflict or that kind of violence. From that came a very strange event, which was the Clinton emails, which people then may not connect, but it led to

the Wiener laptop, which led to the nine points that Clinton lost on the election. So it has this weird historical linkage to America, but not necessarily for the reasons you think it does. What you're seeing is an incident occurs in a remote place that is reported sort of by remote control. There's nobody on the scene at the point, right? And then it gets picked up as a viral or sort of interesting topic and then gets politicized. And as you read today, Facebook got their hand slapped and they did something about it.

They pulled down the Saudi disinformation campaigns, which also include Libya. When you're in Libya, everybody looks at their smartphone, obviously, for news. And you see thousands of fake news sites. They look like news sites. They have generic names that are reporting completely false. fictitious things about Haftar invading this. Haftar is going to take Tripoli at zero hour, blah, blah, blah, blah. But nothing's actually happening, and there are no journalists on the front line.

So we're now looking at events that seem to be obscure and remote, and they now become part of global disinformation campaigns. And going forward, I certainly believe, and it sounds like you do, too, that, like, these global disinformation campaigns are now just a big part of the way conflict is conducted. Yeah, again, it's the seven stages of conflict. The first one is to create chaos and division. And this is what we're seeing in America. This is the weaponization of social media, which is what my friends do in places like Afghanistan and Somalia to stir up trouble, you know, working for the DIA and other groups like that.

But this information is now being targeted against Americans and they're looking for things that are sticky. And Libyan explained this to me very succinctly. He said they don't report on a new school being built. They don't report on some pothole being fixed. They find or invent some bizarre thing like a woman being raped, a 13-year-old girl being raped by the other militia. And this becomes talked about. And people hear it being talked about. And then they see it in the news and they figure this is a real thing because how would they know if it isn't?

Because there's no news coverage. Right. And that's the way the attention economy works. That's the thing that everyone's going to want to look at. There's the idea that nobody wants to see good news, right? Yeah, but remember, that's stage one. So stage two are violent events that actually do occur that are attributed to those bad people who you read about. And, you know, in special forces training and counterterrorism.

I mean, these are the stages of warfare. And as you ramp them up, then people go after each other. And again, remember I told you, I'm sitting on the front lines and they're talking on the radio to their friends, you know, a thousand yards away trying to kill them. And they all know each other. And they call it the Brothers War. And they're thinking, why are we fighting each other? Like, why are we assaulting Tripoli?

We could drive into, like, you can literally drive into Tripoli and go shopping and go back home. That's how bizarre this war is. So my point is that we're creating fictitional wars. They're actually being fought by local people. They don't actually know why. That's so odd. Can you talk a little bit more about that second layer, the technocrats, the people that that are kind of running the country.

And I think you said that they're running it well. Things are going okay. And they want people, Western journalists, to come in and talk to them about what's going on. Yeah. So if you go to small towns, for example, I talk to the mayor of Garia. It was a fascinating story.

He's a young guy. I think he's 32 years old. Very smart. He was in Garian, and this was the town that Havtar poured into, in the initial assault. And they have no allegiance. to Haftar. They have no legions to anyone. He's, he's a technocrat. And so he was forced out of the city

because they were worried about these people going door to door, killing people. And he came up with a plan. And what he did is he called up all his friends. And he said, look, get all your friends, get all your guns. And at 8 o'clock tomorrow, let's just shoot the hell out of these people. And that's how he pushed Haftar out of the city. And by shooting at him from the inside. and they repulsed these people. When I went to Zia, which is a major smuggling center, I talked to these very nice, well-dressed people in the city council who were explaining to be very carefully how smuggling works

and how to stop it and pointed out all the apartment buildings they wanted to finish building and all the medical and education needs they had. And they're not jihadis. They're not affiliated with any sort of weird group. And they say, we have budgets and we do things and we're accountable to the people. Why aren't we part of the political process? And I agree with them.

So every city you go to, you find these nice, normal people who will explain what they need. But they're ignored in the political system. All right. Can we talk a little bit about what the fighting actually looks like? If it's kind of the surreal war and you can go into Tripoli and go shopping, what does the actual exchange of fire look like, or is there one? But no, so I went out to the front lines And I went out a couple of times

And I went to the counterterrorism folks I will talk to the general I said look What does Nick Nolte say? I want to get into the shit I want the real stuff He goes okay Show up tomorrow So I said well tomorrow's my last day

He said no problem come early So I show up early And we drive out to the front lines And the battle where I was is fought in the suburbs. They're very nice houses with little backyards, and the houses, of course, were all abandoned. And so we went into a safe house where their command center was.

And as we drove up, you could hear, they use anti-aircraft guns on the back of Toyota pickup trucks. They're quite loud. And they sort of fire at buildings, and they sort of fire in the direction of the noise. And it's sporadic. It'll build up and go down. So I heard mortars as much.

We were driving in, and that's not unusual. So we get to the house, and all of a sudden there's a big bang. And I say to the five or six fighters, I said, you know, that one was much closer than the one when we drove in. And then about two minutes later, there was another one that was about 20 yards away. And I said, well, you know, they're bracketing us. And they probably saw us come in. Now, you've got to remember there's drones flying above you all the time. You know, it sounds like a small commercial propeller aircraft, but it just buzzes all the time.

So the guy walked out to show me where the drone hit. And I said, I don't know if that's a good idea. And then bang, they dropped a drone mortar on the other side of the wall. And I said, see, they're trying to trick you. Now, what's weird is that I have more combat experience than all these people combined. They're just young kids. And I said, you know, the drones can also pick up your cell phone. And they're like, really?

I'm like, yes, you can hide inside the building, but all your cell phones together create a cluster. And they were quite impressed by this. And then another one blew through the door. I said, okay, the next one's going to be right on top of us. And you can see in the video where all of a sudden, I just stepped behind the wall and a mortar lands right in the room. Boom. So it injured the sniper on the roof.

I said, look, can we go to the front lines now? Because I think they know we're here. So I went to the front lines and they sit in these houses with little holes punched out in the walls. And they sit and look for any kind of movement. Now, because of the drones, all the trucks and the positions are spread out and they're under blankets and under trees and whatever. but that's not the scariest part.

So the scariest part is that when the drone actually gets somebody, hits a fighter, they track the ambulance back to the medical centers, and then they wait for the medics to come out once the truck is stopped, and they fire another missile and they kill the medics and the wounded person. So about an hour and a half later, after all this cacophony, we decided to take the wounded sniper into the medical center. And I thought, okay, well, here it's not even noon, and I'm doing the second most dangerous thing in Libya, was driving with a wounded fighter to a medical center.

And then I left that evening, and two hours later they fired a drone at the airport, shutting down the airport, which I guess is the third most dangerous thing. So it's not a traditional war in that there's sort of land being taken and fortifications. they're literally in the suburbs, in the industrial and suburban areas, in fixed positions using vehicles that are supposed to be for maneuvering. So I had many conversations with the soldiers and the commanders. Do you have tactics for using your Toyotas and your anti-aircraft guns? He said, no.

Do you have any counter-dron tactics? No. Do you have any strategy or tactic of any kind? He said, no, we hold the line. And when they push, we push back. And sometimes we have to retreat, push them back again. And this is exactly what they're doing. And they're not gaining more than maybe 500 yards at a time.

It sounds like, I don't know, that's so strange. It sounds, are there operational goals at all? Yeah, it's like chess beating. I mean, you remember, Haftar is a Soviet era general who wears multiple. nice pressed uniforms who make speeches that you would almost think come from 1962 and he tells people the hour has come to rise up we are in the final moments of our conquest and you're in Tripoli on the roof of a hotel enjoying yourself watching the fireworks and you're thinking am I smoking something is there something going on that I'm not aware of

but that media that that sort of image and that sort of those threats get amplified into social media so that people are terrified. And of course, the drone is probably one of the most terrifying things you can imagine because the drone doesn't hit everybody, but it's there all the time. And there's about, I don't know, half a dozen, if not more supplied by the UAE. And the Turks have a bunch that they keep at the airport in Mizrata and also Matiga, that they sort of mechanically and methodically take out, you know, cargo planes and front lines or whatever. But there's no major military activity.

Do you think that what do you think this pertends for the future of warfare in the region? Do you think we're going to see this kind of model elsewhere? Yeah. Okay. So people think war is sort of two guys fighting and one guy wins and the other guy surrenders, right? No. What we're seeing is that the homostaceous conflict is to have conflict, is to have places like Yemen where you can't even figure out who's who and what.

what's what and who's fighting and who's not fighting, right? Where journalists go in and they can't even figure it out because they can't get on the front lines and if they do, they're thinking, well, who are these people and why are they fighting here? So think about a campaign by, and I'll call them family dictatorships, Saudi Arabia, and the Emirates, to destabilize the areas around them so that no democratic sort of backslash Arab Spring groups rise up to oppose them. and look at Egypt. You know, Egypt was sort of the promise of Arab Spring and suddenly it's run by a dictator.

You know, Libya is going to be the same thing if Haftar and the UA get their way. And again, it strengthens the UA's position by saying, hey, we're in charge here. We control this guy. If we say jump, he jumps, you know, we can't deal with an elected and democratically elected government in Libya because they don't like dictatorships. So we're talking about the instability in this country. one of the things that's also been a key factor in Libya, or I guess a feature of this conflict, is that it's become kind of a major transit point for migrants and refugees coming through. And amongst that, we've also seen what appears to be a real reemergence of the slave trade with scenes that look like they're out of the 19th century with people getting sold in marketplaces. How does that fit into this whole scene here?

Well, first of all, you're giving me a very Western optic on this thing. There's no slave trade in Libya. What happens is that Africans come up into Libya because there's work there, construction work and agricultural work. A small percentage of those people are on their way to Europe. And there is a business, mostly out of the West, in places like Zawiya, Sabratha, in that they provide Egyptian-made boats using Chinese materials, and they charge a certain fee, and those people then cross into the Mediterranean,

and then they get picked up and taken to Europe. These people are paying for this willingly. They're not being, you know, the word smuggled is correct if you're crossing a border illegally, but many of those border crossings are not illegal. Secondly, the slave trade, which is an interesting term, is what we call indentured servitude. So when these guys get rolled up, these Africans, they don't travel with money. They come, they work, and then they've done. pay their way. They essentially get rolled up by these smugglers who keep pressing them for more

and more money. So they basically owe money. And once they realize, once the smugglers realize that these Africans can't pay this money, their debt is sold. Now, we can argue all day long about what slavery is, but the point is that they want to make money off these people. They don't own them per se. So this was started by a CNN story, and I met the guy that gave the video. And it's a terrible thing to focus on something that's not real when in actual fact the whole plight of migration is a business and remember I run a ground network I research migration I know the smugglers I sit with them I sit with the migrants and the detention centers blah blah blah this is a reality that we see in our own border in the US you know it's a business people pay money to be taken from one country to

another yes it's criminal yes it's illegal yes they're abused but they willingly enter into that agreement. Now, you could argue that once Hispanics that cross the border get into the states, they also become slaves. In other words, indentured servants, because they owe money. They have to pay back that money. So we could have a whole other show on migration and slavery, and I'd love to have about it. We should do that, actually. But, yeah, but it would be a whole other separate conversation. That was the first time you were on the show, actually, was talking about the migrant crisis in Europe years and years ago. Yeah, and I don't want to diminish what you're saying. I'm saying that Libya does have established routes for smuggling.

But we're talking about the Sahar Desert here. It's not like there was a legal route for moving people across borders, right? Everything from cigarettes. Anytime you have an inequity, for example, think about Libyan fuel, how cheap it is, right? There's a huge business running this stuff into Europe on ships. There's a huge business running cigarettes in and not. I mean, the Saharan Desert is latticed with smuggling routes. and people that run these borders.

Did you ever get your interview? No. So my article. And I'm still waiting, by the way. It's not like I've given up. But in the time that I had to wait for my interview, I got to do copious research. I mean, deep, deep, deep research on Haftar and his background. And he's almost a comedic figure.

His background is so much so that Gaddafi disowned him and made fun of his name and said, I've never heard of this guy when he was captured. in Chad, you know, the CIA kept trying to use them for something. They couldn't figure what they use them for. And so now he's the Emirates buddy. And he's failing terribly because he's supposed to take Tripoli. Remember, he was supposed to go sweeping in on a blitzkrieg and seize the town. You know, I talked to Khalifa Gawail about his attempt to take over Tripoli. And it's a daunting task to take over a city of two million people. And as I told you about the Garian story, there's also the very real possibility that once they're in that town, people may just start shooting at them because they're pissed off.

So I don't think Hafter is going to make his move. He's going to have to somehow negotiate himself out of that corner. And it would be nice to see responsible adults involved in that negotiations, but I don't think there will be. All right. Kevin, do you have any other questions or do you think we covered it? I guess I have just one final thought just as somebody who just got back from Syria. and this has been on my mind in talking to people here. We mentioned Western Optics just a few moments ago. And one thing I've run into a lot in talking about a lot of these conflicts, post-Arab Spring, is the idea that the reason all of this got messed up is because young people in these countries and a few other people made the mistake of trying to demand rights and it destabilize the region.

and what they really need is an authoritarian to tuck them in at night. And I'm just not sure how I feel about Westerners talking that way. And when you look at a place like Libya, when you have people saying, you know, maybe they were better off under Gaddafi, and maybe they'll be better off once they don't have all this instability and just have that strong authoritarian. What do you think of that? Well, you raise a very good point. I was in many of these countries before they were overthrown.

And it's like being on your Facebook page. Iraq, Syria, before the fall, were bubbles. Everything was wonderful. You only saw state media. You didn't really think that there was a problem, right? You got your bread for five cents and you got your gas for 10 cents and you had your job in some ministry pushing paper. When the Internet came about, it also coincided with a massive youth boom.

In other words, the bell curve changed dramatically from these people who were happy to just have a post-colonial stability to people who are now on the internet looking at what people were doing in America and China and other countries and asking questions. And then what happened is that you had problems with providing those services. In other words, that free bread, that medical supply, that education, et cetera. And people began to get angry. there is no happy ending for Arab Spring, meaning that just because a lot of young people get upset about something, it doesn't mean that there's a solution at the end of that getting upset. And what happens then is once you have chaos in the country,

you now have the manipulators that come in. And Syria is a good example of that. Libya is a good example of that. They're harnessing that anger, which doesn't have a focal point, and they're saying, hey, focus on this, get mad about this. And here's a gun, and here's $500. and go shoot that guy. And this is what we're seeing more and more,

where we don't even know what they're fighting about. We don't even know the subtexts of religious, tribal, whatever, but it gets amplified by local players. Should America get involved in those wars? This is really the question. So we can't win Afghanistan. We won Iraq because it was more of a bureaucratic structure. But in the end, could we win Libya?

Could we win Syria? So these are questions that have to be analyzed by people who have solutions. So first of all, we need to focus on these wars because they're coming our way, meaning the same dynamics that drive these conflicts are going to be coming into this hemisphere as we see in Venezuela. Secondly, social media is absolutely a weapon and it needs to be put back in its holster. And thirdly, we don't have any news coverage of this stuff. So we need to start thinking about how do we make decisions? How do politicians make decisions? What data are they using?

I mean, Donald Trump virtually ignores the intelligence community. So how is he deciding whether to take troops out of Afghanistan or why did he call Haftar after talking to Sisi? I mean, we're doing bizarre and weird things that aren't based on logic. So really, that's my rant, you know, and that's why we should pay attention to places like Libya because there are normal people there that want to normal society. Robert Young Pelton, thank you so much for coming back onto War College and walking us through this complicated but important topic. Well, it's always my pleasure. You know that, man. That's it for this week, War College listeners. War College is me, Matthew Galt, and Kevin Nodell.

It was created by myself and Jason Fields, who just got a new job working for an honest-to-God conspiracy theory. As always, if you like the show, please leave us a review on iTunes. It helps other people find the show. We're on Twitter at War underscore College. Don't visit Facebook.

It's bad for you. I promise we'll have a real website one day. Coming up, we're going to talk about the INF Treaty, the recent scandals, shaking America's special operations community, a conversation about the YPJ with Jake Hanrahan. and I promise the metaphysically prescient politics of Metal Gear Solid. Stay safe until then.