Lobbying 2016: Libya seeks nation-building partner in Washington

Julian Pecquet

Pro-UN-backed government protesters hold placards and shout slogans during a demonstration in the Libyan capital Tripoli on April 1, 2016.
Hundreds of supporters of the Government of National Accord (GNA) rallied in the capital where the unity cabinet is striving to exert its authority, calling on a rival administration to depart. / AFP / MAHMUD TURKIA (Photo credit should read MAHMUD TURKIA/AFP/Getty Images) — Pro-UN-backed government protesters hold placards and shout slogans during a demonstration calling on a rival administration to depart in the Libyan capital Tripoli, April 1, 2016. — MAHMUD TURKIA/AFP/Getty Images

The United States is back in Libya to kill terrorists after deposing a dictator.

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 [Islamic State] is there because of the chaos,” not the other way around, Charge 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 has been trumpeting that message to US decision-makers for the past year and a half, first as an employee of the Tobruk-based House of Representatives and now with the newly minted Government of National Accord (GNA). She took her post in December 2014, the same year her cousin, human rights activist Salwa Bugaighis, was murdered in her Benghazi home on the day of Libya’s general elections.

Lobbying 2016: Libya seeks nation-building partner in Washington

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