Afghanistan and "insider attacks" on US personnel have not taught the lesson they should have

If only the mighty nation of the USA would avert her focus from the Middle East and North Africa, the dismally poor in other parts of the African continent might be able at long last,  to step into our century.  Although, the Obama administration is taking baby steps to wean America away from the sheikhdoms and the madness of the Middle East,  the people who either have their own agenda or are vastly shortsighted, will continue putting obstacles in the initiative to do so.  

In my opinion, NATO or even American on her own, stepping into the mess of Libya, will be a huge mistake.  Training Libyan military inside Libya or outside Libya, will only have dire consequences.  A "good" Libyan today, will become a "terrorist" tomorrow .... a terrorist trained in the art of killing by no other than the country he will target for destruction in the near future. 
Get ready for a future that will have well trained "Al Qaeda Libya" just like the well trained "Taliban Afghanistan" we are still dealing with to this day.

It amazes me no end that people in high places don't see things more clearly than people like me from the depths of my basement.

Frederic Wehrey writing at ForeignAffairs:
Last month, discussing the Obama administration’s plans  for a more modest Middle East policy, National Security Adviser Susan Rice noted that Washington “can’t just be consumed 24/7 by one region, important as it is.” From now on, she implied, countries in the region, including Libya, would be relegated to second-tier priority.

As she spoke, the U.S. military’s Africa Command (AFRICOM) was preparing to step up its assistance in Libya to help the country rebuild its weak security sector. Over the summer, AFRICOM, along with the militaries of Italy, Turkey, and the United Kingdom committed to train, advise, and equip a new Libyan army -- a “general purpose force,” in formal military terms. The plan seems reasonable on paper. Trained at overseas bases outside Libya, the new force will allow the government to project its own authority, protect elected officials and institutions from the militias operating within the country, and compel the militias to demobilize and disarm. Washington sees the effort as a crucial step in Libya’s democratic transition and as a way to halt extremism and prevent the country’s lawlessness from spilling over its borders.



But the force’s composition, the details of its training, the extent to which Libyan civilians will oversee it, and its ability to deal with the range of threats that the country faces are all unclear. And the stakes are enormous. There are signs that some militias within Libya are trying to bloody the new army’s nose before it even enters the fight: a campaign of shadowy assassinations against military officers, particularly in the east, is likely half vendetta against representatives of the old order and half attempt to deter the central government’s monopolization of military force.

The case of a separate and underreported U.S. effort to train a small Libyan counterterrorism unit inside Libya earlier this year is instructive. The unit, set up by U.S. special operations forces, was hardly representative of Libya's regional makeup: recruitment appeared to be drawn overwhelmingly from westerners to the exclusion of the long-neglected east. In addition, the absence of clear lines of authority -- nearly inevitable given Libya’s fragmented security sector -- meant that the force’s capabilities could just have easily ended up being used against political enemies as against terrorists. 

Things came to a head in August, when a tribal militia launched a pre-dawn raid on the poorly guarded training camp near Tripoli. No U.S. soldiers were there, but the militia did make off with sensitive U.S. military equipment. And that spelled the end of the mission; the effort was aborted and U.S. forces went home. (The Libyan government and U.S. special operations forces are currently searching ...........