Marc Herman wonders how well the US will be able to keep tabs on the weapons it has committed to Syrian rebels. He notes that we’re still trying to figure out how many foreign weapons “ended up in Libya in violation of their original terms of purchase”:
Scholars who study small arms proliferation have looked at the 2011 war in Libya as a guide and found evidence of illegal arms transfers and poor tracking of weapons. More than a year after the war ended, no overall accounting exists of the total amount of lethal material allies like France and Qatar imported to Libya.
The doesn’t mean the same will be true in Syria. And the U.S., which has some of the world’s most stringent weapons tracking rules, was not a key supplier of lethal material to Libyan rebels.
But the parallels worry scholars. In a series of interviews begun last year, several investigators who follow small arms transactions argued that weak international rules for tracking transfers make it nearly impossible to account for weapons sent to non-government actors—like rebel militias in Libya and, now, Syria.
The Dish 