An article in AL Monitor discusses a Libyan effort to promote more US involvement in Libya towards nation-building.The article is based on a recent interview with Libyan Chargé d’affaires to Washington Wafa Bugaighis.
The lesson here, the country’s envoy to Washington warns, is that focusing on narrow goals will bring neither stability to the region nor security to the West. “We know that Daesh [the Islamic State] is there because of the chaos,” not the other way around, Chargé d’affaires Wafa Bugaighis told Al-Monitor in a late June interview at her Watergate office. “You need to treat the cause. Otherwise, you will have terrorist groups multiplying by different names and agendas.”Bugaighis is hopeful that the chaos since Moamar Gadhafi’s fall may finally be subsiding following the international recognition of the GNA [Government of National Accord] earlier this year. Now unity is needed in Libya itself, where a number of warlords and politicians have so far refused to get on board.Top US officials have acknowledged the trade-offs between military strikes to eliminate immediate terrorist threats and the longer-term work of helping rebuild Libya. The US, Director of National Intelligence James Clapper told Congress in February, faces a “dilemma ... in terms of a more robust military intervention in Libya, and the potential jeopardy that imposes to a very fragile evolving political process.”
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