Portside

The decision to send home Libyan recruits being trained in Cambridgeshire by British forces after a series of criminal charges and convictions for sex offences has shattered David Cameron’s strategy for helping the strife-torn country.

Cameron touted the plan, in which the UK, the US, Italy and Turkey would train a 15,000-strong Libyan force as one of the major achievements of the G8 summit hosted by the UK at Lough Erne in Northern Ireland in 2013.

But the strategy has had the makings of a disaster since the beginning. It is partly because of infighting among the trainees – fuelled by ideological, political and tribal differences – over events back in Libya. But it was always going to teeter on the verge of collapse because of a standoff over money.

The Guardian learned that although Libya paid the first tranche of cash to Britain for the training, £2.5m, the rest of the money has not been forthcoming.

The lack of money has turned out to be an even bigger issue for the US, which was supposed to be training Libyan forces first in Libya but then in Bulgaria. But this summer, a year after agreement had been reached in principle, not a single soldier had been trained by the US because the Libyan government failed to provide promised cash.

Cameron had a personal interest in Libya, having been a prime mover along with then French president Nicolas Sarkozy of the Nato boming campaign that brought victory for Libya’s rebels in their uprising against Muammar Gaddafi.

But the country quickly descended into chaos with former rebel militias fighting each other while the army, shattered by Nato bombing, was in no condition to impose order.

Stung by criticism that the alliance had “walked away” from Libya, Cameron announced agreement at the G8 summit to train the Libyan force.

This so-called general purpose force was planned to become an embryonic Libyan army, allowing the elected government to disarm militias and restore order. Britain’s contribution was to train 2,000 Libyan recruits at Bassingbourn, an army training base in Cambridgeshire.

But Libya failed to keep up its agreed payments. An initial £2.5m was paid by former prime minister Ali Zidan to renovate Bassingbourn, but he later complained that further payments were being blocked by Libya’s Islamist-led congress.

In April, Cameron wrote to Zidan’s replacement, Abdullah al-Thinni, urging him to make the payments. In the letter, seen by the Guardian, Cameron assured him of the UK’s “continuing support for Libya”.

Cameron, in the letter, said he asked the UK’s special envoy to Libya, Jonathan Powell, to visit to see if there was more the UK could do to help, given his extensive experience as a mediator in the Northern Ireland peace process.

He then gets to the meat of the letter. “I understand that you have been working personally to take forward the General Purpose Force Programme and that plans are now advanced for some 360 recruits to come to the UK in May. I hope that it will be possible to resolve quickly the remaining issues relating to contract and payment, given the overall importance of this programme to our shared goal of improving stability and security in the country.”

No payments were made initially, but the training went ahead anyway with Britain agreeing to temporarily front the costs.

Money apart, there were other early warning signs. Training at Bassingbourn was delayed from February to May after arguments broke out last year among rival groups within the recruits selected in Tripoli over who would go to the UK.

When training finally began, the then UK defence secretary Philip Hammond hailed it as a major step. “Over the next 24 weeks the British army will deliver world-class training to the Libyan soldiers, which will better prepare them to support Libya’s transition to a stable and open democracy,” Hammond said.

In June, Libya’s elections saw sharp losses for Islamist parties, with their allied militias taking Tripoli by force and the new parliament decamping to Tobruk as civil war engulfed the country.

In Bassingbourn, some recruits claimed asylum. One-third were sent home, though army sources say this was in line with expectations from any basic training programme, and instructors said the remaining recruits responded well to training.

But Cameron’s Libya envoy Powell had failed in previous weeks to persuade Thinni to pay for the training, leaving the programme in doubt even before the recent disorder saw the recruits sent home.

The new defence secretary, Michael Fallon, announced in the Commons on Tuesday that the programme has had to be curtailed, leaving open the prospect of training at a later date. “As part of our ongoing support for the Libyan Government, we will review how best to train Libyan security forces – including whether training further tranches of recruits in the UK is the best way forward,” Fallon said.

Colonel Ali El Karom, the military attache at the Libyan embassy in London, apologised for the bad behaviour of some of the Libyan troops during the training. “We are very apologetic and also very disappointed that a few people have made stupid choices and ruined things for everybody else,” he said. He, too, left open the possibility of further training, though in Libya.

The US programme initially began in Libya, with US special forces providing training at Camp 27 outside Tripoli, but it had to be abandoned after an attack by tribal milia. Training was switched to Bulgaria but, as with the UK, money has proved a problem. The cost was estimated at around £3m – with hundreds of millions more for equipment – but not a penny has been paid.

Turkey has been training police, as has Italy which has also been training soldiers.

Italy has trained 1,320 Libyans in Libya and 185 in Italy.

But the US reported that many of these, on returning to Libya, joined militias rather than the army.

[Chris Stephen is a Guardian reporter and Ewen MacAskill is the Guardian's defence and intelligence correspondent.]