 My name is Maths Byrd-Arlemann, a professor in the Department of War Studies, and it's a very great pleasure to welcome all of you out there to this session dedicated to an assessment or reassessment of international intervention in Libya in 2011. And we're very fortunate to have with us today, also in the department, Ian Martin, who is a senior visiting research fellow at King's, but who was also of course a special representative of the United Nations Secretary General for Libya and head of the UN support mission in Libya in 2011 and 2012. After he has spoken, we are also very fortunate to have two very good discussions for this session. We have Matthew Preston, who is deputy head of research analysts in the foreign Commonwealth and Development Office, and we have Maul Fridbroud Heghammer from Norway, joining us from Oslo, from the Department of Political Science. And she was also of course a member of the Norwegian Board of Inquiry into Norway's role and involvement in the Libya operation. You will have seen further details about our speakers on your invitation, so I'm not going to say much more. All I would like to add, though, is that we are going to do this, we are going to record this session, so be mindful of that when you pose your questions, but also we're going to do this on Chatham House rules. And Chatham House rules, just to remind you, means that you are free to use the information received in the course of this presentation and seminar, but neither the identity nor the affiliation of the speaker may be revealed. And I think this is in order to make sure that we get a free and as open discussion as possible. When it comes to asking questions, please put your questions in the question and answer box, and I will do my level best to get to all of them. And you can start, obviously, putting those questions up in the course of the presentation. So without further ado, I invite Ian to present and thank him once again for agreeing to do this. Ian, the floor is yours. Thanks Matt. It's nice to be a Visiting Research Fellow, although unfortunately not much visiting going on at the moment. Today is a good day to be thinking about Libya, because today the Libyan Political Dialogue Forum is beginning in Tunisia, yet another attempt to work towards a real end to a conflict that's been going on for nearly 10 years. Next February, of course, being the 10th anniversary of the Libyan uprising. I'm not going to reflect on the full 10 years, nor am I going to say what should be done now. My own involvement with Libya ended in 2012 after Libya's first election. But I do think that a re-examination of the international intervention of 2011, with a lot more information, at least that I wasn't aware of at the time now available, and the immediate aftermath tells us something about how Libya got to where it is now, and has some relevance to debates past and future about international interventions. I'm going to try to concentrate on aspects which I think have not been fully or correctly understood or sufficiently known in what is becoming the conventional wisdom about Libya 2011. I'm going to try to give concise sort of personal answers to four rather big questions, any of which we could discuss for quite a long time. First, was the intervention justified? How did it come about? Second, did NATO and the countries which intervened abuse the Security Council mandate to protect civilians by seeking regime change? Thirdly, was there ever a possibility of a negotiated political transition rather than a fight to the end? And fourth, was there a failure of realistic post-conflict planning? And if so, whose responsibility was that? So to begin with, the question of was the intervention justified? These days, one sometimes hear Iraq and Libya coupled together as cases of unjustified and failed Western interventionism. One hears that from Russia and the UN Security Council quite often these days. But whatever one's judgment about either of the interventions, there is an absolutely fundamental difference. Iraq was a gratuitous decision by Bush and Blair. Libya was a response to an uprising by Libyans themselves in the context of what was then being called the Arab Spring. I can see no evidence of an intention to get rid of Gaddafi on the part of the countries that ended up intervening before the uprising. Indeed, the Western countries were in quite a comfortable and today rather embarrassing intelligence relationship with Gaddafi's Libya. It was the peaceful demonstrations, the violent repression of those demonstrations, the fact that that quickly turned into a civil war with appeals from Libyans for international intervention that posed the international community with a question as to what it should or shouldn't do. The response to that situation is often told here at least as a kind of Sarkozy Cameron Obama story. That doesn't, I think, take sufficient account of the early appeals that were by civil society across the Arab world, nor in particular to the leading role of Arab states, especially the Gulf States, especially Qatar, which ensured that there was early response from the Gulf Cooperation Council, the Organization of Islamic Cooperation, the League of Arab States. But of course it was indeed France and the UK that took the lead at the UN, first in putting through a resolution 1970 that got unanimous support in the Security Council throwing almost everything peaceful at Libya, financial sanctions, travel ban, arms embargo, referral to the international criminal court. And then when there was little response in terms of checking the violence, began to table a resolution to impose a no-fly zone. Initially France and the UK, but quite crucially joined by Lebanon after the League of Arab States had called for a no-fly zone. And the narrative then is that Cameron Sarkozy convinced a reluctant Obama, and indeed it's true that they tried to get the US to support a no-fly zone and met with initially great reluctance. But what I think the accounts often omit is that it was the US rather than the UK and France that was crucial in the form that the Security Council mandate actually took. Obama was finally required to take a decision with his administration very much divided as Gaddafi's forces came closer to an attack on Benghazi. And we now have multiple accounts from those who were around the table in the US National Security Council as to how that final decision was made. And they're interesting I think because Obama began by asking how far Gaddafi was carrying out his attacks from the air to be told that that was negligible. And then in quite an irritated way he said a no-fly zone doesn't solve the problem, so why is that the only option you're giving me? And he required that by the time he reconvened his National Security Council later that evening he had some real options. And it was then that he decided that the US would target heavy weapons and ground forces of Gaddafi as well as in force a no-fly zone if there was a Security Council mandate, if there was Arab participation, and if the Europeans eventually would carry the load. Bill Gates, the Defense Secretary, who was opposed to that intervention records that Obama told him there had been a 51-49 call for him. And maybe it's interesting today to recall that Joe Biden was one of those who were with the military was against that decision. Well that meant that then the US, France and the UK together with Lebanon could get a Security Council majority, the abstentions of Russia and China from using their vetoes was crucial, so was the support of the African states on the Council including most significantly South Africa. That decision was taken in the context of warnings or claims that there would be a massacre in Benghazi and there's been a fair amount of re-examination of how far those warnings were well founded. There's no doubt that there was a great deal of exaggeration, there was talk of genocide which was never appropriate, there were overblown comparisons with Rwanda and Srebrenica, there was exaltation by Al Jazeera of the extent to which there were attacks from the air on demonstrators. But on the other hand there was Gaddafi's own rhetoric, his own human rights record, his hatred of Benghazi and I think good reason to fear not genocide or massacres but serious violations had he taken Benghazi. And although I say the references to Rwanda and Srebrenica were overblown it's quite striking when one reads the discussions as to how real those were in weighing on the policy makers, certainly the Western policy makers, and I don't believe the fear of a massacre was a pretext, however far it may have been, based on exaggerated information. What is striking when one looks at the way the decision was taken is the lack of any medium or long-term thinking, indeed there wasn't in my opinion a strategy of regime change partly because the expectation was that Gaddafi would go quickly just as Ben Ali had gone quickly in Tunisia and Mubarak had gone quickly in Egypt, so little thought as to what would happen thereafter. So let's answer the first question, my answer, the second question did NATO and the intervening countries abuse the Security Council mandate? It was a very expansive Security Council mandate and it had one important qualification, it was a mandate to use all necessary measures to protect civilians and civilian populated areas under threat of attack, while excluding a foreign occupation force of any form on any part of Libyan territory, which was in there on the insistence of Lebanon on half of the Arab states. Another example of how Iraq and Afghanistan conditioned people's mindsets. When France, the US UK began military action, there was an immediate outcry claiming it went far beyond enforcement of the no-fly zone, so it did, but Susan Rice, the US permanent representative, quoted back what she had said in the Security Council about how we were not talking about a simple no-fly zone, but to take out Libyan air defences, heavy weapons, tanks, artillery, aircraft, and halt advancing columns of soldiers and that's what they did. So then as NATO took on what became Operation Unified Protector, there were repeated statements about the limitations of that operation by NATO spokespersons and by leaders of NATO countries. The objective, they said repeatedly, was not regime change, Gaddafi was not a target. There would be no military boots on the ground, NATO interpreted the reference to know for an occupation force to mean that it would have no military on the ground. There would be no communication with the rebels, since the mandate was to protect civilians, not to support the rebels in a civil war. NATO did say that it would attack not only those Gaddafi forces that were threatening civilians, but also command centres and what they called second echelons. And very quickly, there was pressure most notably from France and the UK to expand the targeting. France and the UK began to provide attack helicopters which could intervene much more effectively at lower altitudes. And as one follows the NATO operation, one can see NATO strikes moving from resisting attacks from Gaddafi forces to supporting rebel advances. But beyond what NATO itself did, I think the least known aspect of the campaign is the extent of bilateral operations of intervening countries outside the NATO operation. I think that included some air operations, probably mainly by France, but it certainly involved very significant boots on the ground, deployment of special forces. And one can now increasingly piece together from open sources the extent of what was a secret operation. The most significant deployments were by Qatar and the UAE, the UK, France and Italy. They began in the east supporting the NTC National Transitional Council there. But a key moment was when the stalemate of the war in the east resulted in a strategic decision to shift to the west. And what was then done is described by David Cameron in his memoirs. He says, it's with our allies, France, Qatar and the UAE, we ended up steering the Ramshaka Libyan army from a secret cell in Paris, providing weapons support and intelligence to the rebels planning an assault on Tripoli. And that secret operation cell in Paris was referred to at least in number 10 Downing Street as the operation of the Four Amigos, which has some irony in some of the latest state of relations among those countries. The story of the arms supplies to the rebels is also a fairly complicated one. The main supplier was undoubtedly Qatar, which is said to have supplied something like 20,000 tons of weapons. The UK and the US stayed out, I think on the basis of their own legal advice from directly providing lethal weapons, preferring to have it done and encouraging it to be done by Qatar and the UAE. France, on one occasion, did drop arms directly and told the United Nations that these were self-defense weapons for the civilian population. NATO stuck to its position, that it was having no direct communication with the rebels, but the special forces and the operation rooms that they set up with the rebels fed intelligence to NATO, so it increasingly coordinated airstrikes with the rebels as they advanced. And the special forces involvement was crucial in ending the siege of Misrata and in the advance on Tripoli. And it continued, the NATO operation and the special forces involvement continued after the fall of Tripoli as the rebels advanced on Gaddafi, on two remaining pro-Gaddafi strongholds, Bunny Willead and Sirt. Sirt, of course, is where Gaddafi was eventually found to be and his fleeing convoy was hit by a US predator zone and two French fighter jets leaving Gaddafi to be murdered by fighters from Misrata. NATO maintained that it never went beyond the mandate of resolution 1973, that assertion was supported by UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon to whom under the resolution NATO was required to report. My own view is that one can only accept that if one accepts the argument that regime change was the only way of protecting civilians from Gaddafi. And even then, I don't believe that at the limit, the support of rebel advances, NTC advances into Sirt and Bunny Willead after Gaddafi's clear defeat could be justified in terms of protecting civilians and indeed by then the civilians who needed protecting were probably pro-Gaddafi populations. There was at least one significant massacre by the rebels of pro-Gaddafi people in Sirt. But whatever legality, and I'm not an international lawyer to pronounce on that, what is very clear is serious questions of accountability. Nobody can think that the Security Council would ever have authorized what actually occurred. NATO dutifully submitted the regular reports it was required to do, but they didn't allow any real scrutiny of the extent of its operations. The secret special forces operations were not notified to the UN, so they couldn't claim to be authorized by resolution 1973. And they raised, I think, important questions of domestic as well as international accountability because they're not subject even when one looks at the House of Commons Select Committee. There's no frank account of what that operation actually was. The arms supplies were in breach of the arms embargo and began a contempt for the Security Council's arms embargo on Libya, which has continued to this day. Qatar flatly denied that it had provided arms and the UE failed to reply. So to move to the third question, could there have been a negotiated transition rather than a fight to the end? As the sort of seriousness of the situation they faced was realized by the circles around Gaddafi, including his family, including his son, Saif al-Islam, Gaddafi, there were a number of approaches to various governments, and it's very hard to know to what extent they represented Gaddafi himself. But there was three serious and sustained mediation efforts. There was a UN Special Envoy, Mr. Al-Khatib, a former Foreign Minister of Jordan appointed by Ban Ki-moon. There was an AU African Union high level panel. Both of those efforts are well documented by reports of the Security Council and the African Peace and Security Council. And there was a much less well known, in fact really rather little known and remarked upon Norwegian mediation effort. They all started before the authorisation of the use of force, but Gaddafi's refusal to pull back his forces left I think in reality no real time for mediation before military action began. But a question which isn't asked enough I think is why after showing their intent, the intervening countries and preventing the attack on Benghazi, the interveners didn't then more seriously attempt diplomacy. It's interesting that then-General Sir David Richards, the UK Chief of Defence staff, now Lord Richards, said in evidence to the House of Commons, and some of this is in his memoir as well, that he had tried to build into the military campaign checkpoints he said where politics could have reasserted itself. I felt that my political masters and those in American Europe should at least have had an opportunity to pause, perhaps have a ceasefire and have another go at the political process. But he says I didn't get much traction in London and wasn't accepted by our allies, which I guess most obviously means France. It must be said that despite the Gaddafi regime saying that they accepted the ceasefire, they never stopped their attacks on Misrata and elsewhere. As far as the African Union high-level panel is concerned, it was consisted of five heads of state, including perhaps most significantly Jacob Zuma of South Africa. They had gathered and were poised to go to Tripoli when the bombing began, and they were furious when they were told that the imposition of the fly zone meant that they could not proceed, so it was some time before they got to Tripoli. I think the seriousness of the African Union effort has been underestimated, and I think it has been rather unfairly alleged to have wanted to rescue Gaddafi. In fact, they were the ones, particularly Zuma, who had the greatest chance of influencing Gaddafi to leave power. But all efforts founded on Gaddafi's refusal to leave, he would not leave a certain motion of transition as a condition of the ceasefire, and the National Transitional Council would refuse to agree to a ceasefire unless he had agreed to leave as part of it. So I think the question regarding whether there could have ever been immediate outcome boils down in particular to the question as to if France, the UK and the US had put pressure on the National Transitional Council while the AU and Russia, which did indeed weigh in to tell Gaddafi to go with the AU, if they put the maximum pressure on Gaddafi, was a negotiated transition possible. In fact, France and the UK were, although voicing support for UN efforts in the Security Council were essentially dismissive and on some occasions even undermined AU and UN attempts, when the war seemed stalemated, France and the UK did get interested in a negotiated outcome, at least a negotiated victory, and they largely used their own intelligence agencies. And there were efforts to see if Gaddafi could be found somewhere to go into exile, Equatorial Guinea, which was outside the jurisdiction of the ICC, was contacted by the DFID Minister, or whether he could stay under guard, insert. But Gaddafi, I think, was always adamant he wouldn't go, and as a rebel victory became possible, then the interest of others in the mediated outcome went away. So we shall never know whether that was possible, just as we shall never know whether it would have led to a better long-term option for Libya. So my fourth and final question was a failure of realistic post-conflict planning, and if so, whose responsibility was that? One answer might be that it was my responsibility, since I was the UN Secretary General's advisor on post-conflict planning before I went to Tripoli on the fall of Tripoli. And some of you will recall Obama's statement that while intervening in Libya, he said it had been the right thing to do. Failing to prepare for the aftermath of the ousting of Gaddafi was the worst mistake in his presidency, he said. Certainly true, as I've said, that there was no medium or long-term strategic thinking by the policymakers when the decisions to intervene were taken. It's also true that there was extremely limited understanding of Libya, a consequence in particular of the 40 years of isolation under Gaddafi. There was also a very strong determination not to follow the path that the West had taken into Iraq and Afghanistan and become responsible for what happened thereafter. So almost at the outset, there was a decision that the United Nations would be responsible for post-conflict efforts. I believe the UN took that seriously. We launched the process to try to understand where Libya had been under Gaddafi, what were the likely effects of the conflict, what post-conflict needs would be. We did that in conjunction with the World Bank, so far as the economic issues were concerned, we tried to draw on serious Libya expertise. We have, I must say, very limited knowledge of what at that point in 2011, how things were developing on the ground and what the consequences of that would be. In the UK, the responsibility was given to DFID, which established an international stabilisation task force, again, supposedly to apply the lessons of Iraq and Afghanistan. It went and worked with the National Transitional Council in Benghazi, although it wasn't very well received by the NTC. It involved other countries, including Italy. In the US, despite the view that this was to be mainly a European responsibility, they set up what they called a post-Q. They spoke Gaddafi with a Q, post-Q high-level task force and did Pentagon tabletop exercises. The National Transitional Council itself designated a former Libyan World Bank official as their de facto minister of reconstruction and he chaired a Libyan stabilisation team that operated out of the UAE and those various efforts that I've referred to all interacted. But there were some very serious flaws in that. One flaw was that the external actors were over convinced of the capacity of the Libyans, who were in many cases very highly qualified people, but most of whom had been out of Libya in exile. And the Libyans, as many of them today will acknowledge, were over convinced of their own capacity and were fiercely resistant to a strong international role, Iraq and Afghanistan influencing things again. And that resistance applied in particular to boots on the ground, happy as they might have been to have the special forces boots on the ground to help them to victory. There was strong opposition to any kind of international military presence thereafter, as I can testify because I had to talk to them about the possibility of military observers if a ceasefire had been arrived at. There are people who in retrospect say that there should have been a big peacekeeping mission or international stabilisation force and that the intervening countries could have imposed that on the Libyans despite their reluctance. I don't believe that myself. I don't believe anyone who was really in contact with the Libyans during that period believe it and certainly there was absolutely no interest or external willingness. The further inhibition is that Libya, while being institutionally extremely poor, was resource rich. So nobody was interested in allocating donor resources to Libya and yet Libya was resistant to technical advice which it almost certainly needed. If there had been a more realistic recognition of that then probably more could have been done for institutional development. But at the end of the day here the development of the capacity of government was not the central issue. The central issue on which things have found that ever since was the security sector and in particular the proliferation of armed groups. Libya's first interim government made serious mistakes putting armed groups, all of them pretty much on the payroll. But it's a very tough question as to say what could and should have been done. But what I do feel quite strongly is that the central responsibility was with the external actors who had built up those armed groups who had done so directly with the groups rather than outside any political chain of command who had done it in a way which sowed divisions particularly between Qatar and the UAE supporting different groups. And instead of the four Amigos and others coordinating efforts as they had to Al-Sqaddafi they failed to use their relationships with the armed groups that they had trained, armed, directed to assist the new Libyan government to get them to stand down or integrate into the national army. And in the case of Qatar and the UAE in particular they contributed and contribute to this day to a divided Libya. So nearly 10 years later the legacy of 2011 remains and that question regarding armed groups is one of the central questions confronting the 75 Libyans who are meeting in Tunisia today. I'll leave it there. Thanks Matt. Thank you very much. I'll just post straight onto Matt. You go ahead. Thank you very much both Ian and Matt. Thank you very much indeed. So I mean Matt sort of introduced me. I just want to say a quick word before I start. I mean look I worked for the British government. I was working for the British government at the time and was involved to some degree, quite a significant degree I suppose in the Libyan situation in 2011 and thereafter. I think the first thing to say just to sort of preface my remarks is first of all clearly I have to be slightly cautious about what I say as a government official but I think more than that an awful lot of what was going on at the time was extremely murky and very rushed and I don't mean murky in the sense of ill-intentioned. I just mean unclear. We were operating in 2011 in sort of a period of high frenzy and I mean that both domestically and internationally vis-à-vis Libya and the wider region which I'll come back to. So while I've got a couple of perspectives on what went on in 2011 and very much enjoyed Ian's presentation of it, my own view is necessarily partial from where I sat in the situation because I only ever saw a piece. I think very very few people saw the whole piece and that's even within one government like the British government let alone internationally. So I think that's an important caveat. I wanted to draw out four areas myself. Actually most of which mirror Ian's point or Ian's headings and in no particular order. I mean let's jump in straight away if we may to the point about Gaddafi and the question of intent. I have never seen any suggestion of ill-intent on the part of certainly any of the Western actors in Libya and not for me to ascribe ill-intent on girl factors or African, sub-Saharan Africans either. I know a lot was made at the time and since about oil and prior relationships between Western governments and Gaddafi both recently but also going way back to the 1980s but I never saw any of that in my involvement in the situation. What I saw was actually quite a straightforward situation of a crisis and the key point for me is Gaddafi's rhetoric. Actually I think what speared Gaddafi more than anything else was the rhetoric he used and rhetoric which so mirrored that people have become attuned to over Rwanda and had said never again. In some ways I don't want to say it doesn't matter what he would have gone on and done because you don't know at the time what he would have gone on and done but his use of rhetoric of referring to the inhabitants of Benghazi as cockroaches or rats made it almost impossible for people not to react. I don't think Ian mentioned explicitly the responsibility to protect in the context of Libya. I'm always slightly cautious about ascribing the Libya intervention to the responsibility to protect as agreed at the World Summit in 2005 but that strand of thinking and of that commitment to respond to atrocities to threat explicitly threatened atrocities particularly through the Security Council which was done I think made it very very difficult for the British government for example and I just mentioned that because that's where I work not to respond to what was felt to be happening. That then leads into this question of negotiation. I think one of I mean and this may be standing back a bit from Libya but I think one of the fascinating things around the responsibility to protect the R2P debate to have is well what happens if you do an R2P intervention and it was not something that you could discuss into governmentally because it was always too sensitive but we have this problem is you're engaged now in an intervention to protect civilians at threat of you know that the four highest international crimes there are and now you've got the question oh so do you negotiate with the perpetrator and I think that the whole R2P debate certainly then and possibly still now hasn't quite come to terms with how you do this and so Ian referred to the idea of negotiated surrender I think that was on the table at various parts during 2011 but the idea of a genuine compromise solution that Gaddafi might have been happy with or accepted reasonably was was practically for the birds it was simply not going to happen once the intervention was underway. So second point the regional point and again I would probably put a little bit more emphasis on this than Ian did. The extent to which the Libyan uprising took place against the background well more than Batman the immediate background of uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt and a sense that this was spreading across the Middle East. Now it's easy to look back and say well that was a forlorn hope now but at the time I don't think it was seen as that and what they were seeing very clearly was a sense that if we do not act if we do not protect the Libyan rebellion revolution movement call it what you like then this will be the end of the Arab Spring. We by our failure to intervene by our failure to act will be setting the whole region back now you can say that's justified you can say that's unjustified but that sense of not just it's easy to look at policymakers and go well you know why how could you do this I think many of them were facing the question how could we not do it how did we have any other option and I think a lot of policymakers felt their options to a degree closed off and I think we saw that again over Syria of a sense that we're not sure this is going to work but if we fail to come to the aid of protesters of people standing up for civil rights for democracy in the Arab world if we fail to defend them when their own governments are shooting them then we will be responsible to some degree for the end of the Arab Spring and I think our politicians our decision makers were not prepared to do that. Third point the UN Security Council and just a couple of reflections I've got nothing to contradict what Ian just said but maybe just a couple of points that are that I would sort of add to it and of the dynamics from my perspective and you know I work on the UN in particular the initial intervention was marked by a sense of how do I put this throw as many tools as we've got and see which of them stick we didn't know what was going to work we didn't know what we would be able to agree when you look at resolution 1970 for me what's so interesting that the initial resolution which condemned what Gaddafi was doing that imposed the arms embargo the financial sanctions refer the situation to the international criminal court we the UK went into that assuming we were going to have a really tough negotiation the Gaddafi had announced his intentions he was marching on get Benghazi and we thought the Security Council was really important to take that to the council to do it very quickly but suspected feared that we would have a really tough job getting anything through the council and what actually happened is we got it all through the council and we got it all through the council overnight much to our surprise to be perfectly honest and so what we ended up with right from the start was a jumble of measures that probably what on reflection we've had calls to look back and go not sure that was necessarily a good idea or done in that way but the Security Council is and was a very poor forum for managing this sort of intervention not because it can't but because its members didn't agree or at least didn't agree enough and I think for me that's one of the really important points about the council and to understand about the council's response to the Libyan intervention and to how we and others then use the Security Council we had a Security Council whose divisions were extremely high on the back of I mean you can date it whenever you like but certainly you can date it back to Kosovo through the Iraq intervention of 2003 and more during the later 2000s where trust within the council was extremely low and so repeating a sort of Bosnia like I mean not the Bosnia was a great success but nonetheless a Bosnia like situation where the council would oversee the international approach to intervention in Libya on a regular basis past numerous resolutions increased the ratchet down on the people it decided were the perpetrators or were in the wrong was simply not possible in the Security Council of 2011 and so when as Ian says the Americans came in with they called it no fly zone plus plus and resolution 1973 was passed it drew on existing council tropes around protection of civilians and existing council language around protecting civilians and all necessary measures but tweaks there was a very clear sense I think right from the beginning that you weren't going to get any more out of the Security Council not because the council was institutionally unable to but politically unable to agree and so it was clear right from the beginning that faced with the situation of an intervention that you've started that you haven't got a very clear sense of where it's going to finish under an authorization from a body that was almost never going to agree anything more I think the intervening powers found themselves in a bit of a bind in terms of how do we manage the international dynamics of this and so I think what you saw was to be fair as Ian described it which was a sense of right now we need to get this done and different people took different views of what getting that done involved but don't underestimate I suppose is my key message just how divided the council was right throughout this process and therefore how basically impossible that made it to have a consolidated international response and the reasons for that were way beyond Libya they weren't to do with Libya to be honest although Libya then set in train more final point about post-conflict and post-conflict planning I think I agree with Ian I agree completely that capacity building was not the issue I think Ian and I probably described the same problem in just slightly different ways when he talks about the security actors in Libya I talk about the failure of outsiders justified or unjustified to broker a sustainable political settlement in Libya after Gaddafi's fall I think we're actually talking about the same thing because when I talk about brokering a political settlement I would involve in that the various armed actors involved in Libya by summer autumn 2011 for me they are political actors by definition but I think this is a problem writ large and it is a problem that we and other international actors have never solved is this we've got as far as knowing that a sustainable political settlement that has enough people on the inside of the tent is utterly key to effective intervention well whatever the motives of your intervention but I think what we've not managed to get to is to work out how you achieve that particularly after intervention and so we talk about Libya but for me it's important not to talk about Libya in isolation we can talk to to a frankly significant degree about Somalia or Mali or Afghanistan or Iraq even the more successful international invent interventions in Kosovo in Central African Republic in Bosnia to some degree even as we're seeing in the news right now in Cote d'Ivoire have massively struggled with this issue of if you use international forces under any in any capacity whether justified or unjustified whether lawful or unlawful it doesn't really matter because irrespective of how you do it we have not solved the problem of how you then as outsiders broker a situation where the local political security actors agree with each other enough on the trajectory of their country not to fall out and fight for power and I would I for me this is a timeless lesson we've known this for a very long time it's not unique to the post 9 11 era or the 21st century or anything like that I think it's a very very long standing and we have swung we have oscillated back and forth between the the big footprint and the heavy footprint and the light footprint as people were calling it in the in the later 90s early 2000s between going in and doing an iraq style occupation to a much lighter footprint no we'll leave it to the locals to decide and all sorts of things in between and for me this remains the unsolved the critical unsolved problem of international intervention is what happens afterwards because what we found and I suppose this is my final point is however much international resource whether that's political resource financial military you name it into an international intervention the locals have agency I mean quite rightly so it's their country but they have significant agency and the ability of outside actors to tell locals to leverage locals local actors into agreeing with each other has proved consistently very limited and I would argue that's true of western actors it's true of non-western actors it's true wherever we've done it and in one whatever capacity and I'm afraid we're we're rather seeing the consequences now thank you thank you very much Matt terrific I'll pass straight on to Maulfrid thank you very much thank you for the invitation to be part of this conversation it's it's an important moment to reflect on Libya and the lessons from Libya and I've certainly enjoyed this very insightful discussion what I would like to do is to highlight some of the dilemmas that have I think emerged in the comments already and that I've thought a fair bit about when it comes to Libya and lessons from Libya and lessons that as we've heard were not necessarily unique to to this context but our dilemmas that we may well face again and to take this opportunity to try and learn some lessons from the particular context of of Libya so starting with with the first cluster or the first dilemma relating to this to the mandate and the interpretation of the mandate and its scope it was clear fairly early on that regime change would be almost an inevitably an inevitable consequence of the intervention of the coalition it wasn't however clear what kind of regime change that would be and it seems to me that one of the perhaps missed opportunities in the political track associated with the Libya intervention was to think more to take more time to think more carefully through those different options in the course of the spring and summer of 2011 and as we heard in them in the first presentation there was also this issue of the NATO operations on the one hand and then these bilateral operations if you like on the other hand which points to the first dilemma which for a smaller partner in a coalition along these lines how do you handle that that problem where you're engaged in one operation and yet your coalition partners may be engaged in activities that go beyond your own interpretation of that mandate so it seems to me that particular dilemma is one to to take out of the Libyan context and and think carefully about for the future the second cluster male sorry oh sorry so the second cluster of issues I wanted to address in my comments was this lack of medium or long-term thinking which I very much agree with as a diagnosis of of where we were in 2011 and it's clear to me at least that there was a general underestimation of the duration of the operations from the from the outset that there was an underestimation of the post-conflict difficulties as we've heard and it also seems to me that there was a pulverisation of ownership and responsibility towards the end of the military phase when it came to preparing for the post-conflict situation from the perspective of smaller members of this intervention this coalition it seems that there was a clear sort of lack of enthusiasm for among the main protagonists of the military phase to take the lead and take ownership perhaps of the preparations for the post-conflict phase I would say that it seems to me that the political track was very much underdeveloped compared with the military track of this operation and that this I think is an issue that deserves a bit more attention there has been a lot of attention and deservedly so to the military campaign and how it was conducted and the role of these bilateral operations but I do think that the the lack of perhaps momentum or investment in the political track in the course of this is something that also deserves more attention as a lost opportunity the third issue or the cluster of issues relates to what we we just heard from from our colleagues regarding the post-conflict preparation how to prepare for this and the sort of the critical problems that often emerge in these kinds of settings regarding preparing for the post-conflict and how to how to engage with local partners and stakeholders I think it comes through quite clearly in the Libyan context that there more could have been done by international partners to to engage local stakeholders and set certain expectations beyond what happened of course there is always a difficult perhaps or a balancing act that we have to take into consideration in in preparing for these local stakeholders to take more ownership etc it doesn't mean that it's impossible to place certain expectations or requirements in place it seems to me that perhaps several Libyan stakeholders would have appreciated that so I think I'll round it off with those three dilemmas that come out of the the Libyan context and perhaps also to say that I think it's it's an important exercise to to revisit this case and also perhaps to remind ourselves that we we don't often think about the counterfactuals in the scenario regarding other kinds of regime change or regime transitions that could have happened in the process but also the counterfactual of not having intervened at all and I think that this is an important part of what we need to discuss when we talk about Libya in 2011 so thank you again I think I'll leave it there