BENGHAZI, LIBYA—When Americans think about Benghazi, they remain frozen in 2012, when the Ansar al-Sharia, a militia tolerated if not supported directly by Turkish intelligence, attacked the U.S. Consulate in Benghazi and murdered U.S. Ambassador Chris Stevens. For too many Americans, Benghazi is Beirut 1983 or Mogadishu 1993.
Such impressions are wrong and, frankly, were also wrong then. While news crews filmed smoldering buildings and gun battles, residents point out that Americans remain blind to the aftermath. Benghazi civil society was aghast at Stevens’ murder. Civil society leaders publicly condemned the Islamists, even as militias rampaged through the streets. Benghaziwiya laid their lives on the line. General Khalifa Haftar led Operation Dignity. More than 5,000 Libyans died in a block-by-block push to force the Islamists and militias out of the city. Fathers and mothers disowned sons who had embraced the militant groups. Today, the only region that tolerates militia violence is in and around Tripoli and Misrata, where Abd al-Hamid Dbeibeh continues to protect them.
Today, the only region that tolerates militia violence is in and around Tripoli and Misrata, where Abd al-Hamid Dbeibeh continues to protect them.
In Benghazi, Haftar’s son Saddam took charge of a transformation that is evident today. When I first visited Dubai in 1994, it was a shadow of its current self. There were some office buildings in Deira, and construction projects along the new Sheikh Zayed Boulevard, but it was not the landmark it is now. Burj Khalifa, the world’s tallest building, did not exist, nor did the Marina or iconic Burj Al Arab hotel. Most buildings were bland concrete and just a few stories high. The Dubai airport still relied on an old terminal that had opened in 1971; the three terminals that today make Dubai one of the busiest and most famous airports were not yet even blueprints. Still, there was an energy to Dubai that foreshadowed its rise as it built infrastructure and developed the pro-business attitude that set the investment climate for Dubai’s rapid growth. Today, Benghazi has much the same energy.
That transformation is evident in Tika, a dusty suburb southwest of Benghazi where a $1.3 billion airport is taking shape. Its scale is impressive: The airport is more than nine square miles, with a 2.3-mile-long runway, longer than the runways at Chicago O’Hare and Los Angeles International. The airport will be able to accommodate 15 million passengers per year, roughly equivalent to the Louis Armstrong New Orleans International Airport, but can accommodate all aircraft, including Airbus 380s.
What is most amazing is not only the ambition but also its speed. Construction began in early 2025; it is on pace to be completed in March 2027. The Tosyali-SULB Mega Complex, a 380-hectare steel production facility, replete with its own port and power station, will begin production just a couple of months later. When it opens in May 2027, it will be the world’s largest Direct Reduced Iron steel plant.
Nor is Benghazi’s growth focused only on megaprojects. Historians oversee the reconstruction of Old Benghazi, which took the brunt of the fighting during Operation Dignity. There is hardly a block without a construction project, though, while crews dig trenches in major arteries to lay sewer lines that the Qadhafi regime neglected.
Outside of Benghazi, the Haftars’ philosophy to let actions speak more than words is also evident. Sirte, the last outpost of the Qadhafi regime and subsequently the Islamic State capital in Libya, was decimated by years of fighting and repression. Today, its shiny new airport looks more like a European facility than a North African one. Its new “small” convention center can easily hold more than 1,000 people, while the nearly-completed Ouagadougou Conference Center across the street can handle 5,000 people.
Whereas Libyans once had to go to Egypt or Tunisia for medical care, the Ibn Sina hospital in Sirte—looted and leveled by the Islamic State—is now a center for excellence for kidney transplants and increasingly finds Egyptians and Tunisians coming to it. A new paved toll road has cut transit to the Nigerien and Chadian borders by several days and now leads directly to a refurbished container port that will likely open formally by year’s end. The radio station not only broadcasts but streams live to the Sirti diaspora in the United States and Europe. University of Sirte lecture halls seat hundreds and appear better equipped than their U.S. counterparts.
Libya is not the first country to try such a transition. The Iraqi Kurdistan region once billed itself as the new Dubai. But leadership matters. The corruption of the ruling Barzani and Talabani families led Iraqi Kurdistan to become, in the words of one activist there, “a land of first-world restaurants and third-world hospitals.” Eastern Libya is the opposite. Baghdad, meanwhile, is only now seeing the infrastructure development that Benghazi sees, albeit 23 years after Saddam Hussein’s ouster. Its slow pace reflects Iraqi corruption and statist policies.
While the Dbeibeh government whines that all such infrastructure development should channel itself through the state, his complaints only highlight his own incompetence.
What is even more amazing is that Benghazi and Sirte have undertaken their transitions without support for the central government. Instead, the Arkenu Oil Company—Libya’s first private entity to authorized to export crude oil—has pumped its proceeds into the public coffers rather than diverting its profits to private bank accounts abroad.
While the Dbeibeh government whines that all such infrastructure development should channel itself through the state, his complaints only highlight his own incompetence further, especially as there is not corollary reconstruction and development in cities like Tripoli and Misrata that are under his direct control.
Too often, the United States punishes success. The State Department still seeks to force successful and democratic Somaliland into the fold of Somalia, which, after Sudan and South Sudan, is the world’s most corrupt and dysfunctional state. President Donald Trump and Secretary of State Marco Rubio should not make the same mistake in Libya.
Libyans want unity, but they do not want unity to absolve failure and corruption. Rewarding Dbeibeh for simultaneously wasting billions of dollars and protecting extremist militias would be self-defeating. It is time to tell Dbeibeh that he needs to follow the Benghazi model or to get out of the way.
