on the b one hand you have the camp in the east that is led by general heftar. an excellent profile of him in the new yorker this week. that is using the counterterrorism card to paint his domestic opponents as terrorists. and on the other side i was in tripoli on the islamist side, you have this camp saying that this is a conflict about the return of the deep state. we don't want the old officer core coming back. gadhafi part ii, and we're stuck in the cycle of mutual delegit mization. i think one worrisome development we've seen in the last several weeks is the fragmentation of authority on both sides. we speak about these two camps. the dawn camp in the west the dignity camp in the east. these are loose coalitions of militias, different power centers and they're fragmenting. and on the one hand that fragmentation is encouraging because it allows you to identify moderates that you can peel off and bring into a dialogue. that's what's happening with the u.n. sponsored peace talks underway. but at the same time, that's worrisome. you have spoilers. just as these

after the revolution, you had the growth of al qaeda affiliated groups, and, indeed general heftar's campaign was designed to root out those groups. i think what you've had in the wake of the campaign is not the decisive defeat of those groups, but rather their mutation. and this is what we're seeing now with isis. isis in libya is really peeling away a lot of members of these older post revolutionary jihadist groups that had affiliation to al qaeda. you've had the influx of volunteers that went to iraq and syria to fight with isis, libyans that went started returning last spring and last summer. and that formed the nucleus of isis. you had isis spread to all three of libya's major provinces. i think one of the things that makes this problem so confounding is we're faced with a terrorist problem in libya. that is embedded in a complex civil war. there's no government to work through. there's two competing factions. so the question again, and we face this obviously in iraq and syria and yemen is what partner do we assist on the ground. how do we work with forces on the ground? there's