In my capacity as Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman of the Subcommittee on the Middle East and South Asia, I have spent the last several days in Libya and Egypt, and as I finish this week’s blog, I’m on my way to Kenya. And in my ongoing effort to keep you, my loyal blog readers, up to date on the important issues facing the United States at home as well as abroad, here’s a summary of the current situation in the above-mentioned three countries.
First, a little background on Libya. This North African nation is quite large, about the size of Alaska, and has the 17th largest known oil reserves on earth. Since 1969, when Moammar Gadhafi led a coup and overthrew the previous leadership of Libya, the country was a basket case. Gadhafi, a truly bizarre individual, ruled with an iron fist, and brutally tortured and executed anyone who got in his way.
Then last year, Libya was swept up in the so-called Arab Spring, and after 30,000 Libyans lost their lives in the ensuing revolution, a NATO air campaign, logistically supported by U.S. air power, assisted rebel forces in toppling the Gadhafi regime. Gadhafi was ignominiously and summarily shot to death after being pulled from a sewage pipe. And thus, Gadhafi and his cronies were no longer in power. The question remains, what will follow in Libya and how will it affect the United States.
I met in Tripoli (Libya’s capital) with the current Prime Minister, Abdurrahim El-Keid. I have to say that I was very impressed with this former University of Alabama professor of electrical engineering.
According to the Prime Minister, one of the most serious challenges facing today’s Libya is disarming the 100,000 or so militiamen still remaining in Libya, and finding constructive work for them to do now that the revolution is over. One particularly alarming fact is that it’s estimated that there are thousands of shoulder-fired missiles which haven’t been accounted for and could be in the hands of virtually anyone, including al-Qaeda-connected individuals. Just one of these sophisticated weapons could be sold on the black market and used to take down a commercial airliner. It’s critical that each and every one of these serious threats to civilian air travelers be tracked down and neutralized.
Another challenge Libya faces is that 75% of the people employed in Libya work in the public sector (the government) rather than in the private sector. This is a leftover from the Gadhafi regime that must be dealt with.
On the bright side, Libya recently held elections for their National Congress, and unlike Tunisia and Egypt where elections resulted in Islamist, Muslim Brotherhood-types receiving a majority of votes and thus taking over, secular non-Jihadist candidates won the majority of seats. It’s important that we support and work with these new Libyan leaders who share our values and traditional views of tolerance for different religious beliefs, equality of rights for women, and rule of law.
Next, Egypt. I arrived in Egypt at a particularly critical time, as the newly elected President of Egypt, Mohamed Morsi had just announced that he was sacking the head of the Egyptian army, General Tantawi and the Defense Minister. Since the fall of former President Hosni Mubarak, there has been a standoff between the Egyptian military (the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces) and the newly elected civilian government, headed by President Morsi. Speculation is that President Morsi used the deaths of 16 Egyptian soldiers at the hands of an unknown group of terrorists in Gaza, as an excuse to fire the top military officials in Egypt, and thus gain control over Egypt’s armed forces. Only time will tell how all this plays out.
The disturbing thing about the election of Mohamed Morsi in the first place, is that he is the leader of the Muslim Brotherhood coalition. And the Brotherhood has traditionally pushed for implementation of Sharia Law, an Islamist government, and a number of other policies anathema to the United States’ way of looking at things.
Since the U.S. has been providing about $1.5 billion of military and development aid to Egypt per year (since Egypt’s signing of a peace treaty with Israel back in 1978), the United States Congress and the Administration have some decisions to make. Do we continue to financially support a nation that may adopt Sharia Law? And what do we make of the fact that 85% of the Egyptian population have a negative view of the United States? And how much of a priority should it be that we have a working relationship with a country that has 90 million people, and that’s traditionally looked upon by so many other countries in the Middle East as the de-facto leader of the Arab world? I would welcome your input on these critical foreign policy issues at any time.
And finally, Kenya. As I’m putting the finishing touches on this week’s blog, I’m on an 11 p.m. to 4 a.m. flight from Cairo to Nairobi, Kenya. The principal purpose of the Kenya leg of the journey is to meet with U.S. embassy personnel and Kenyan government officials to assess the current security threats in Kenya, and how such threats affect the United States. It’s important to remember that the U.S. embassy in Kenya was one of the two embassies targeted and blown up by al-Qaeda (the other being in Tanzania) three years prior to the attack on September 11th.
Secretary of State Hilary Clinton was in Kenya in recent weeks in her seven country trip through Africa. Kenya is considered an important regional ally of the United States, and has suffered a series of attacks recently in Nairobi, Mombasa, and in the northern Kenyan town of Garissa which have killed dozens and wounded scores more. The attacks were at the hands of al-Qaeda-connected Al Shabaab terrorists who infiltrated from neighboring Somalia.
Kenya has also been an important ally in combatting Somalian pirates who have been a scourge on international shipping in the area for some years now. Even though we haven’t heard a lot in the U.S. lately concerning Somalian pirates (it’s been a while since a U.S. ship was seized) pirates continue to seize vessels and demand millions in ransom which drives up insurance rates and shipping costs which hits all of us in the wallet, whether we realize it or not. It’s important that the United States continues to work closely with our Kenyan allies to clamp down on this continuing threat to international shipping and the world economy.
I’ll just mention one other issue briefly. There is a refugee camp in northern Kenya (Dadaab) which contains an estimated 600,000 refugees (the largest refugee camp in the world) who have fled the chaos, instability, and famine in Somalia. Despite the fact that international NGO’s (non-governmental organizations) such as Oxfam and Save the Children are active in the camp, there are up to 164,000 children who are receiving no education at all. This leaves many of the young boys in the camp vulnerable to being lured into terrorist-connected armed militias (like Al Shabaab) or pirate gangs. This is a threat to Kenya, the region, and U.S. interests.
Well, that will have to do it for this week’s blog. I hope to catch a few hours of sleep on this flight before landing in Nairobi at around 4:00 a.m.
See you next week.
