There's a "must read" piece from Anthony Shadid in the NY Times today, "Libya Struggles to Curb Militias as Chaos Grows". It describes the interim Libyan government as paralyzed by its lack of power to control competing militias with local grievances and an abundance of arms. "This is destruction! We're destroying Libya with our bare hands," says one militia commander trying to restore calm after a firefight with another militia in Tripoli.

But Tripoli is relatively calm, absent the nightly firefights, compared to elsewhere in Libya.

The militias are proving to be the scourge of the revolution’s aftermath. Though they have dismantled most of their checkpoints in the capital, they remain a force, here and elsewhere. A Human Rights Watch researcher estimated there are 250 separate militias in the coastal city of Misurata, the scene of perhaps the fiercest battle of the revolution. In recent months those militias have become the most loathed in the country.

Residents say some of the fighters have sought to preserve law and order in the midst of government helplessness. Militias from Benghazi and Zintan are trying to protect a refugee camp of 1,500 people driven from their homes in Tawergha by fighters from Misurata, who bitterly blamed them for aiding Colonel Qaddafi’s assault on their town. Since the Tawerghans arrived in the camp, which once housed Turkish construction workers in Tripoli, Misurata militiamen have staged raids five or six times there despite the presence of the other militias, detaining dozens, many of them still in custody.

“Nobody holds back the Misuratans,” said Jumaa Ageela, an elder there.

I really can't hammer on this point enough: this is exactly what those who were opposed to the Libyan intervention said would happen. Anthony Cordesman, along with many other FP luminaries, predicted "A divided group of rebel factions, neutrals and former Gadhafi loyalists with no experience in politics, democracy and governance takes over with almost totally predictable effects." The signs were there early enough. Last february a BBC report had this:

As mercenaries, reputedly from Chad and Mali fight for [Gaddafi], a million African refugees and thousands of African migrant workers stand the risk of being murdered for their tenuous link to him.

One Turkish construction worker told the BBC: "We had 70-80 people from Chad working for our company. They were cut dead with pruning shears and axes, attackers saying: 'You are providing troops for Gaddafi.' The Sudanese were also massacred. We saw it for ourselves."

Libya's new forces for change have simply picked up where the colonel left off his bloodletting.

There are over 8,500 mostly dark-skinned detainees in militia-run camps in Libya right now. Many have been tortured. Today, the NYT reports that:

“People are turning up dead in detention at an alarming rate,” said Peter Bouckaert, the emergencies director at Human Rights Watch, who was compiling evidence in Libya last month. “If this was happening under any Arab dictatorship, there would be an outcry.”

Shashank Joshi of the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI) in London tweets: "For me the key question is, what is going to compel these militias to go home? Elections? Nothing?" The central government certainly seems powerless either to force the militias to stand down or to cajole them into compliance with money. Shadid's report in the NYT has one government official admitting that the Libyan government has "no idea how to channel enough money into the economy so that it would be felt in the streets".

Thus the aftermath of Libyan intervention seems set to get a lot worse before it gets any better. Still, advocates of intervention have already moved on to Syria, for reasons that have little to do with humanitarianism and a lot to do with Iran. many watching the situation there warn that the aftermath if Assad is toppled is unlikely to be any less messy than in Libya as the opposition presents the same problems: fractured political groups with competing agendas and a proliferation of armed militias in a nation awash with small arms. Again, those warnings are being ignored.