At 50 kilometers (31 miles) from the frontier lies the barracks of Jweibya, halfway between the Arab city of Zintan and the Berber city of Nalut. At the very beginning of the war, Gaddafi’s first defeated battalion left 200 tanks like these behind as they fled. Except that there is one thing about these tanks that left the insurgents perplexed when they took possession of them—all of them are lacking the same firing pin necessary to function. What happened? Was it sabotage on the part of an army adept—as everywhere in the Jebel—at scorched-earth tactics, and who found the time to remove the 200 firing pins before they retreated (we were shown 20, fished out of a pond at the outskirts of the camp)? Or were the tanks always like that—Gaddafi, not trusting his own troops, accumulating a store of sophisticated arms like so many wonderful but broken toys (or like so many decoys and phantom weapons, absurdly tampered with and, at once, never really operable)? I don’t know.