Jay Ulfelder captures it:
There’s a chicken-and-egg quality to the state-building problem. To establish itself as a functioning national government, Libya’s [Transitional National Council] needs to build up trust in its authority. To build that trust, the TNC needs to get the country’s disparate militias to start obeying its writ and, in so doing, to demonstrate that it deserves their trust. Those militias are going to be reluctant to follow the TNC’s writ, however, as long as they are worried that the TNC or other rival factions might take advantage of them if they do. So which comes first: obedience, or trust?
Yezid Sayigh sees clearly defining the role of the national military as a critical task for each of the Arab Spring states.
(Photo: National Transitional Council forces load a tank from the Drua military base hit by NATO bombing on November 1, 2011. By Philippe Desmazes/AFP/Getty Images.)
The Dish 
