Out of the Mountains (38 page)

The world didn't end, at least not that day: the regime's assault never reached the city center. While the armored columns were still on the city's outskirts, NATO intervened with massive air strikes, launching more than a hundred Tomahawk cruise missiles from ships offshore, and sending strike aircraft to attack Libyan army units, Gaddafi's compound in Tripoli, air defense systems and other regime installations. The NATO operation was a classic example of evolved, light-footprint littoral warfare in an urbanized environment. It used a mix of amphibious ships, submarines, and aircraft carriers in the Mediterranean, a sea blockade, Predators operating overhead, land-based aircraft flying from Europe and the Middle East, sea-based attack helicopters from ships offshore, and a limited ground presence in Libya's coastal cities. NATO ground forces kept an extremely low profile during the operation, inserting only a very small number—a few dozen at most—of special forces operators, military advisors, intelligence personnel, search-and-rescue personnel, and joint attack controllers (specialists in directing air and naval strikes) from several NATO and Arab countries.
113
Ultimately, over
222
days, NATO and allied aircraft from fifteen countries flew
9
,
600
strike missions against more than six thousand targets.
114

These strikes helped the rebels push back and ultimately defeat the Gaddafi regime. This took months, with many ups and downs—towns such as Brega and Ajdabiya changed hands several times, there was a long and brutal siege in Misurata, and fighting in the Nafusa Mountains (around towns including Yefren) seesawed back and forth for many weeks. The fighting consisted almost entirely of battles to control coastal cities and petroleum infrastructure, and of fighting on the coastal highway and the inland connecting roads between these cities and port facilities. The intervention wasn't without its problems—NATO forces bombed rebel columns in error on at least one occasion, and accidentally struck a critical trans-Sahara water pipeline on another.
115
But NATO air support changed the balance of the conflict within days, relieving the rebels of pressure from Gaddafi's tanks and aircraft, leveling the military balance between the regime and the rebel fighters, and allowing them to gradually expand their initial footholds.

By mid-June, the rebels had significantly improved their position; by August
28
, after a three-pronged offensive from the east, west, and south, they'd captured Tripoli, declared an end to Gaddafi's regime, and formed an interim government that was recognized by the United Nations on September
16
. Gaddafi retreated to the town of Bani Walid, which, along with his home city of Sirte, continued to hold out for several months. During this time the regime launched several counterattacks, and Gaddafi continued to taunt NATO and the rebels on radio and television, even as his family and supporters fled to Niger, Algeria, and Tunisia. The stronghold of Sirte finally fell, after an intense urban battle, on October
17
,
2011
—eight months after the first protests in Benghazi. Three days later, on the morning of October
20
, Gaddafi was captured on the outskirts of Sirte as he tried to flee the city. The man who had called the rebels “rats” was found skulking in a drain under the roadway, seeking refuge after NATO missiles disabled his fifty-car convoy, and rebels encircled and attacked his escort as they tried to continue on foot. Groups of rebel fighters, mounted on weapon-carrying technicals and using similar self-synchronizing swarm tactics to those of the Somali fighters I described in Chapter
2
, flocked toward the scene from as far away as Tripoli and Misurata. They were drawn by cellphone calls and text messages from fighters who had been alerted to Gaddafi's presence by members of his escort whom they'd captured in the firefight, and were now frantically searching the area for the dictator they called “Callsign One.”
116

They found him within an hour. Grainy cellphone video showing Gaddafi as a blood-covered captive, begging the mob for his life—before being beaten, hauled onto the hood of a Toyota technical while jubilant fighters photographed him with cellphones, then killed (off-camera) and his half-naked body dragged through the street—was uploaded in real time. The video reached al Jazeera and YouTube only forty minutes after the dictator's death; within another ninety minutes, it was being shown on all major international cable and satellite news channels and carried on Twitter, Internet news sites, and radio stations.
117
Thus, in the uprising's final moments, it was globalized digital connectivity that gave a fleeting incident on the coast road outside Sirte an instantaneous national, then global, political impact.

Faced with incontrovertible evidence of Gaddafi's humiliating demise, the regime's resistance collapsed within hours. Further videos followed, showing Gaddafi's body, with that of his son Mutassim, lying uncovered for four more days. “Hundreds of ordinary Libyans queued up outside a refrigerated meat store in Misurata, where the dead dictator was being stored as a trophy. A guard allowed small groups into the room to celebrate next to Gaddafi's body. They posed for photos, flashing victory signs, and burst into jubilant cries of ‘God is great.'”
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The transitional government declared victory, and NATO called an end to military operations on October
31
,
2011
.

Benghazi: Urban-Networked Intifada

As I said earlier, this isn't the place for a full description of the Libyan civil war. But several aspects of the uprising were relevant to our look at the future environment. Firstly, virtually all the fighting in Libya was urban and coastal. In part, this was an artifact of Libya's geography, with a narrow, relatively fertile, urbanized coastal strip backing onto the largely unpopulated Libyan Desert (which, at about 425,000 square miles, covers most of the country); the vast majority of Libya's population is sandwiched between the Mediterranean to the north and the Sahara to the south. But it's also clear that urban discontent—especially in Benghazi—was the mainspring of the intifada.

Benghazi, in fact, is an excellent illustration of the way in which population growth, urban sprawl, and rural-to-urban migration can stress a city's metabolism, leaving it with insufficient capacity to process the toxic by-products of urban overstretch. Along with the economic marginalization of populations within Benghazi, the political marginalization of Benghazi within Libya contributed significantly to the violence of the uprising when it came.

As a focus of Italian power during the colonial period, and a coequal city with Tripoli under the monarchy in the
1950
s and
1960
s, Benghazi has impressive art deco and midcentury modern buildings, open squares, wonderful beaches, an important harbor, and a historic claim to greatness. But the city is run-down after decades of official neglect, unplanned urbanization, and rapid population growth. Outside the urban core, streets are muddy and filled with rotting trash, and only the main roads are paved.
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The city has one sewage treatment plant, built more than four decades ago. “Waste is just flushed into the ground or the sea, and when the water table rises in winter, the streets become open cesspools.”
120
The anger this generated among Benghazi residents is clear from media interviews conducted during and after the uprising:

“Why do we have to live like this?” says Rafiq Marrakis, a professor of architecture and urban planning at Benghazi's Garyounis University, Libya's oldest. . . . “There's no planning, no infrastructure, no society. Gaddafi has billions and billions in banks all over the world. But he's left us here with nothing.” “There is a severe, chronic housing shortage,” he continues. “Young people can't own their own homes, can't get married, can't start their lives.” . . . And what social welfare projects the regime did undertake, such as a medical center with the pompously literal name “One Thousand Two Hundred Bed Hospital” became white elephants. “They've been building it for more than 40 years and it still isn't finished,” says Marrakis.
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The Libyan government had in fact made enormous efforts to improve Benghazi's water supply through the Great Manmade River Project of the 1980s, which brought underground water from the Nubian Sandstone Aquifer in the Libyan desert to towns such as Tripoli, Benghazi, and Sirte via a network of trans-Sahara water pipelines.
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But other systems within the city's infrastructure (including governance, housing, public sanitation, and traffic flow) had been neglected. This lack of capacity made it hard for the city to cope with an inflow of population and housing growth over several decades, and ultimately “became one of the major reasons why Benghazi turned against the government.”
123

As the regime relaxed some restrictions on contact with the outside world and grew more integrated into the international community after giving up its nuclear program in
2003
, people in Benghazi became better connected with Libyans in the diaspora and with other populations in the Mediterranean basin and the broader Arab world. This was not always a positive thing: many young men from Benghazi went to Iraq to fight the coalition after
2003
, for example, contributing to a radicalization of the city's youth. Al Q
 
aeda documents captured in Iraq in
2006
showed that the two cities of Benghazi and Derna (the next town to the east along the Cyrenaican coast road) together accounted for almost
85
percent of Libyan foreign fighters entering Iraq.
124
More broadly, satellite television and the Internet showed Libyans how the rest of the world lived, making people realize how badly “they were being shortchanged. The example of the rapid development of the Persian Gulf countries, particularly the Emirati city-state of Dubai . . . was particularly galling.”
125
Libyans could suddenly see how people in the Emirates—with a harsher climate, a smaller population, and a similar degree of coastal urbanization—had prospered under their government's policies. They could look around and see their own city falling apart. “[Then] young people get YouTube and see how one of Gaddafi's sons spent a million dollars to have Beyoncé perform at his party.”
126

Oil revenues drove Libya's economic development over the second half of the twentieth century. Funded by oil money, government policies—including free education and public health—lowered maternal and infant mortality (thereby contributing to an urban youth bulge) and created a literate population. Libya recorded the highest literacy rate in the Arab world in
2006
, and the UN Human Development Index (which assesses standard of living, social security, health care, and other development factors) ranked Libya at the top of all African countries in
2007
.
127
But in the same year, the country was struggling with overall unemployment of
20
.
7
percent, and far higher youth unemployment—largely because Libya's education system simply didn't generate graduates with skills the country's labor market actually needed.
128
Thus the economically vital oil sector depended on foreign labor, while Libyan high school and college graduates tended instead to seek jobs in the government bureaucracy, which was already full of older Libyans and therefore couldn't absorb them all.
129
And because the bureaucracy's main function was as a jobs program for otherwise unqualified Libyans, ministries became bloated, inefficient, and unresponsive. They enforced unnecessarily complex regulations and processes in an attempt to justify high staffing levels and create opportunities for corruption and rent-seeking, and officials demanded bribes to supplement their meager salaries. In this sense, the problem in Libya's cities wasn't so much a lack of governance as a surfeit of inefficient and predatory bureaucracy.

All this, combined with a lack of economic opportunity for young people, meant that Libya's cities—especially Benghazi, because of its marginalization by the central government—gradually filled with educated, politically aware, unemployed, radicalized, alienated youth, with little opportunity to improve their lives within the existing system. There was massive resentment against foreign workers, the government in Tripoli, the repressive police and Mukhabarat, and local bureaucrats. When the Arab Awakening began, “although unemployment was not the only source of the grievances that led to the
2011
uprising, Libya's chronic youth unemployment problem was a major reason behind the instability.”
130

When the intifada did break out, the Libyan army failed to play the restraining role that the military had played in Egypt.
131
The regime's hyperviolent response turned an uprising that began in a similar way to Tunisia's and Egypt's—with peaceful pro-democracy demonstrations and street riots by unarmed protestors—into full-scale civil war. The army's inability to exercise a mitigating influence resulted from the fact that Gaddafi had deliberately kept the national army weak, creating local militias personally loyal to himself, as well as a network of secret police informers and a strong armed police presence in all major cities and towns. The core of the Libyan regular army consisted of four mixed armor-infantry brigades, mostly drawn from tribes loyal to the Gaddafi family, and in some cases commanded by Gaddafi family members (including Al-Saadi, who led the special forces, and Khamis, who commanded the feared
32
nd Brigade, one of three well-armed “regime protection units” similar to Saddam Hussein's Special Revolutionary Guard in Iraq).
132
The proliferation of militias, armed police, and mercenaries working for the regime meant that the army, while perhaps first among equals, didn't have a monopoly on the use of force, and thus lacked the coercive edge it needed to effectively compete with the other groups. Dozens of officers defected to the rebellion, a few units switched sides, and upward of
130
soldiers were executed for refusing to fire on their own people, but the army as an institution remained loyal to the regime for most of the uprising.
133