How the west rode in to save Libya, then abandoned it to its fate

Quizzed by my editors about Cameron and Sarkozy’s plans, I remember saying they seemed “unthought through”. I was in Tripoli at the time, and it was hard not to feel sympathy for the Libyans who had risen against Gaddafi’s ludicrous and nasty rule; nowhere, even in the Middle East, was the thuggishness of the regime so immediately obvious as on Libya’s streets. A couple of Gaddafi’s men, employing the traditional, rather than up-to-date, media relations playbook, had already stuck me in a cell, put a pillow-case over my head and accused me of being a CIA spy. So I tried to reassure myself with the thought that our masters, armed with the experience of Iraq, must this time have a plan for what came after.
MI6 knew Libya well; they had worked with the exiled opposition groups chomping to take over. The SAS had even worked in Libya, training Gaddafi’s special forces, as a bizarre side-effect of Tony Blair’s Middle East policies. But, as with Iraq, it turns out there was no such plan. When Tripoli fell, we could not even secure the water supply, which fleeing Gaddafi soldiers managed to turn off for a week. In the corridors of the city’s hotels, British diplomats and spies and their semi-liberal Libyan allies were overwhelmed by squads of renegade army officers, jihadists and rural rebel leaders of whom no one had previously heard, all seeking backing from self-appointed regional and other powers, like Qatar, whose envoys arrived to seek their stake in the new country.
Hampered by hypocritical “no boots on the grounds” orders, Western military advisers could do little as Gaddafi’s vast arms stocks were pillaged by all comers. One day I, along with colleagues, tried to alert the “authorities”, whoever they were, to the presence of 100,000 landmines, boxes of Semtex, anti-tank and anti-aircraft missiles lying unguarded in a field and adjacent warehouses in south Tripoli. Nothing was done, and within days they had been pilfered, to fuel further conflicts.