The title of Horace Campbell’s book on NATO’s 2011 Libyan intervention, Global NATO and the Catastrophic Failure in Libya , is an allusion to a Guardian article by Seumas Milne entitled, “If the Libyan war was about saving lives, it was a catastrophic failure.”

Echoing Milne’s use of “catastrophic” is apt. Claudia Gazzini of the liberal NGO International Crisis Group points out that, if the casualty figures provided by Libya’s National Transitional Council are accurate, “the death toll subsequent to the seven-month NATO intervention was at least ten times greater than the tally of those killed in the first few weeks of the conflict” before NATO intervened.

As Campbell shows, while NATO claimed to be protecting human rights, it bombed Libyan civilians and enabled the Libyan opposition to persecute black African migrant workers and ethnically cleanse the black Libyan town of Tawergha. Less than four years after NATO attacked Libya, Bernadino Leon, the United Nation’s special envoy to Libya, says the country is “close to the point of no return.”

Perhaps as many as two million Libyan refugees have fled to Tunisia, though the exact figure is in dispute. In November, militants claiming affiliation with ISIS secured control of the Libyan city of Derna, where they have carried out public executions and assassinated activists.

Nicholas Pelham reports that almost all of the exiles who returned to Libya after the overthrow of the government have left; that more would have left had European consulates remained open; that warlords have taken power in several parts of the country; that “a once relatively homogenous society has splintered into multiple bickering armed groups”; that separatism has gained traction in Cyrenaica, which has just a third of Libya’s population but two thirds of its oil fields, most of its aquifers, and the country’s gold mines; that cafes and power stations have been burned; that embassies and assorted other targets have been car-bombed; and that airports have been attacked. Tripoli’s population, Pelham writes, is “distraught,” and Libyans “feel even more isolated than when the UN imposed sanctions on Qaddafi.”

At the time of writing, negotiations are underway to end an ongoing civil war. There are two rival seats of government, each with its own institutions. One is the Tripoli-based General National Congress (GNC), which was set up when the capital was seized by Libya Dawn after it did badly in parliamentary elections.

Libya Dawn is an umbrella organization made up of assorted Islamist groups, including the Salafist group Ansar al-Sharia, which is backed by US ally Qatar, as well as various militia from Berber towns. Many of Libya Dawn’s leaders are former fighters from the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group, a jihadist organization that, before trying to kill Qaddafi in the 1990s, fought the Soviet Union in Afghanistan alongside Osama bin Laden. That group was backed by another US ally, Saudi Arabia.

The other seat of government is the Tobruk-based House of Representatives. They have allied themselves with what remains of the Libyan state’s armed forces and with troops loyal to former army commander Khalifa Haftar. The latter helped Qaddafi overthrow the previous regime in 1969 but fled Libya upon falling out with the colonel after Haftar led a failed war with Chad.

Haftar, who is believed to have been a CIA asset, returned to Libya during the war against Qaddafi . Haftar’s forces are backed by Egypt and the United Arab Emirates, who have bombed parts of Libya. Haftar has shelled apartment blocks, Pelham reports, and bombed Tripoli’s airports as passengers were about to board planes.

According to Libya Body Count, nearly 3,000 Libyans have died violent deaths since the beginning of January 2014. As Pelham writes, the “scale of the terror and destruction” carried out by both Libya Dawn and Haftar’s forces “far surpasses that of Qaddafi’s last years. One wonders how many of the Westerners who cheered on the war against him recognize this.”

That Egypt and Qatar — both staunch US allies — are on opposing sides of the conflict suggests that the United States is effectively backing both sides of the Libyan civil war.

Campbell’s book is a helpful guide to how Libya got to this point. At the outset he explains that, before the tumult in Libya began, “he had taken the position that though Gaddafi should be opposed, it was equally necessary to oppose the NATO intervention.” While Campbell worried about how Qaddafi would respond to protesters, he regarded the social forces in Libya as politically underdeveloped and knew that the British and French “were up to mischief” once French President Nicolas Sarkozy began to champion the Libyan opposition, given that Sarkozy was “no friend of progressive African movements.”

Campbell’s view of the Libyan crisis is consonant with the one put forth in an open letter signed by two hundred African intellectuals, a document to which Campbell repeatedly returns. It expressed “our desire, not to take sides, but to protect the sovereignty of Libya and the right of the Libyan people to choose their own destiny.” Towards the end, the letter stated:

Those who have brought a deadly rain of bombs on Libya today should not delude themselves to believe that the apparent silence of the millions of Africans [sic] means that Africa approved of the campaign of death, destruction and domination which that rain represents. . . . The answer we must provide practically, and as Africans, is — when, and in what ways, will we act resolutely and meaningfully to defend the right of the Africans of Libya to decide their future, and therefore the right and duty of all Africans to determine their destiny!

As Campbell’s book makes clear, he and the signatories of that letter were justified in their suspicion that imperialist states and their allies were motivated to intervene in Libya by concerns other than the welfare of Libyans. In that sense, Campbell’s book is an ideal companion piece to Maximilian Forte’s important Slouching Towards Sirte . While Forte’s book is notable for its meticulous detailing of how events played out in the Libyan affair, Campbell situates these in the larger context of the international capitalist dynamics driving them.

While it is not perfect, anyone with an interest in NATO’s 2011 intervention in Libya should read Campbell’s book. At times it meanders, and several claims that should be supported by citations are not. What he offers, however, is both an illuminating account of how Libya was torn asunder and an extremely useful contribution to efforts to understand precisely how militarized imperialist capitalism operates.

Campbell’s central premise is that NATO, and its allies such as Qatar and Saudi Arabia, took advantage of and exacerbated the crisis that emerged in Libya following the protests that began in February 2011. The ruling classes in NATO states exploited the Libyan protests to assert Western military and economic control in Africa and to curtail efforts to create African unity and autonomy from the West.

Wikileaks cables show Qaddafi’s government was seen as a barrier to these aims, and NATO’s Libyan expedition was also propelled by frustration in the elite sectors of Western states over their inability to control Libyan assets in the financial sector.