TEL AVIV - In 1973, the United
States Congress overrode the veto of
then-president Richard Nixon and passed the
so-called War Powers Resolution, requiring a US
president who has launched a military campaign
without authorization from congress to terminate
operations within 60 days.
This deadline
can be extended by an additional 30 days "if the
President determines and certifies to the congress
in writing that unavoidable military necessity
respecting the safety of United States Armed
Forces requires the continued use of such armed
forces in the course of bringing about a prompt
removal of such forces."
Last Friday
marked the expiration of the deadline for the two
months-old campaign against
Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi, but no written
request was received by congress from US President
Barack Obama. Presumably, such a request would not
make sense, because there would no need to guard
withdrawing US forces, and indeed there are
(officially) no US forces on the ground in the
country.
Nor is there any intention to
scale back military operations. "We will not halt
our current operations, which are limited and in
support of this critical, NATO [North Atlantic
Treaty Organization]-led humanitarian operation,"
Tommy Vietor, a National Security Council
spokesman, told The New York Times as the deadline
came up.
On the contrary, NATO is
expanding operations significantly. On Monday,
French Foreign Minister Alain Juppe announced that
12 attack helicopters were headed toward Libyan
shores on board of the amphibious assault ship
Le Tonnerre, while French Defense Minister
Gerard Longuet told al-Jazeera that Britain would
send helicopters as well (the British declined to
comment). This is a new development which, barring
an unexpected success in taking out Gaddafi and
his forces, could well be a prelude to a ground
war.
The arrival of combat helicopters
will already bring the fighting closer to NATO. So
far, the alliance has dodged any tactic that would
carry a significant risk of casualties. Not so
with helicopters. While they can hit their targets
with precision that fighter jets cannot afford,
they are also a lot more vulnerable to ground fire
and portable anti-aircraft missiles in stock with
Gaddafi's army. "[A helicopter] can be hit by
small arms fire, it could be hit by a
shoulder-launch portable missile, and all of that
means there is a risk now of NATO personnel being
shot down," a prominent defense analyst told
al-Jazeera.
In part as a preventative
measure (though NATO has avoided such framing),
for several weeks the alliance has been bombing
fiercely Command, Control, Communications, and
Intelligence (C3I) structures of the Libyan
government, and conveying "messages" through
repeated attacks on Gaddafi's (now likely empty)
headquarters at Bab Al Aziziya in Tripoli.
This strategy seems right out of the cook
book of the Kosovo war in 1999. As Robert Haddick
writes in Foreign Policy:
NATO's bombardment strategy is now
likely more focused on applying political and
psychological coercion against the regime rather
than inflicting battlefield damage against
military forces. Repeated attacks against the
compound are designed to erode Qaddafi's
prestige. NATO strikes on the compound and other
possible leadership locations may also be aimed
at frightening Qaddafi's inner circle.... But it
may not be working fast enough for some NATO
leaders. Gen. David Richards, Britain's top
military commander, called for expanding the
list of acceptable targets. Richards wants to
add "infrastructure" targets to NATO's lists….
Richards may be hoping to reprise the strategy
used effectively against Slobodan Milosevic
during the 1999 Kosovo air campaign. As I
discussed in an earlier column, NATO faced a
similar stalemate during its bombing campaign
against Serbia. It then expanded its attacks
against Milosevic's lieutenants and the economic
assets inside Serbia valued by those
lieutenants. This change in tactics created
enough pressure inside the ruling inner circle
to force Milosevic to succumb. Richards'
definition of "infrastructure" may have these
regime leadership assets in mind. [1]
Parallels with the Kosovo campaign do
not begin and end here. Some sources have
speculated that mercenaries from the former
Yugoslavia are fighting on Gaddafi's side in Libya
alongside African mercenaries; influential
American think-tank Stratfor claims that it could
not verify this information (neither has the
presence of any mercenaries been confirmed), but
points to the recent arrest of Libyan citizens at
the Serbian-Croatian border as possible indirect
evidence.
On NATO's side, the practice of
arming and training rebels and (allegedly) using
small teams of special operations forces as
spotters for air strikes mimics closely tactics
used in the former Yugoslavia. The tenuous
international support behind the expanded air
campaign adds to the parallels.
Although
no Western leader acknowledged it at the time, the
Kosovo model was on the table from the very start
of the Libyan intervention, as was the option of a
ground incursion. As Stratfor wrote back in March:
The question then becomes the extent
to which this remains an air operation, as
Kosovo was, or becomes a ground operation.
Kosovo is the ideal, but Gadhafi is not Slobodan
Milosevic and he may not feel he has anywhere to
go if he surrenders. For him the fight may be
existential, whereas for Milosevic it was not.
He and his followers may resist. This is the
great unknown. The choice here is to maintain
air operations for an extended period of time
without clear results, or invade. [2]
It must be noted that toward the end
of the 1999 war, plans for a ground invasion were
being laid down, strikes against Yugoslav C3I
structures intensified with the unstated goal to
soften any possible resistance, and all of this
contributed to Milosevic's decision to withdraw.
It seems that NATO has reached the point
where its flawed strategy is forcing it to
rethink. I have reported previously that bad
strategy is leading to a stalemate [3], and my
assessment matches that of other analysts, such as
BBC's Jonathan Marcus [4]. French
intelligence-analysis website Intelligence Online
explains:
During a visit to Paris last week,
Rear Admiral James G Faggo, operational head of
the US 6th fleet in charge of G3 (intelligence)
said that 60% of the Libyan army's potential was
still operational. This assessment from US
military intelligence concerns the regime's
shock troops, as well as the 32nd Brigade, the
special forces brigade loyal to Muammar
Gaddhafi. These elements, which were at the
forefront of the military operation against the
insurgents are currently being spared and kept
away from the most recent clashes, in particular
in Misrata.
Among France's military top
brass, generals say there is a discrepancy
between the alliance's political goals and the
military operations. The very complex chain of
command [is] ill-adapted to dealing with very
mobile targets…. According to several sources,
ground attack planes are regularly obliged to
touch down because they have run out of fuel
while waiting for a target to be designated [5].
Why NATO got entangled in this way is
a subject for a wider debate that will continue in
the future. A gentle way of framing it would be
that politicians failed to take into account what
security analysts openly foresaw; this does not
detract in the least from the hypocrisy underlying
the campaign, and means that NATO leaders
pretended not to see the obvious.
There
could be any number of reasons for such a lapse,
mostly related to diplomatic and domestic
considerations. A source who advises US senators
once complained to me that politicians often
listen carefully and then promptly proceed to
ignore sound advice. The air campaign strategy,
while expedient diplomatically (it is an extension
of the no-fly zone that was the only bill which
could pass the United Nations Security Council),
was flawed from the start. What NATO seems to be
doing now is patching it up on the go. It is
uncertain, to say the least, that this will bring
the desired results. If the helicopter strikes
prove ineffective or if they incur too many NATO
casualties, a new revision of tactics and strategy
would be required, and save for a ground invasion,
the alliance is running out of options.
International opposition to a ground
invasion in Libya has also mounted, but the
coalition has ignored all criticism so far and
promptly proceeded to stretch UN Security Council
Resolution 1973, authorizing the no-fly zone, so
thin that there is currently little reflection of
it in the military campaign. There seems to be no
inclination to stop now, despite the uncertainties
inherent in further escalations.
Indeed,
the only significant rebel progress reported in
the last weeks - around the port city of Misrata
in the west - has served to perpetuate the war
rather than to alleviate the plight of civilians.
As The New York Times reports, "The strategic
significance of Misurata has not been lost on the
crew of [rebel supply ship] Al Iradah 6. For
months, rebels trapped in the city, 130 miles [209
kilometers] from Tripoli, provided Libya's
opposition movement with a powerful argument
against any discussion of the war's end that
called for national partition."
To go back
to the Kosovo parallel, we should remember, with
all due bitterness, that Serbia is a European
country that is populated by white people. Despite
that Eastern-Europeans are still often considered
to be second-class Europeans, all this matters in
the minds of European publics, and thus also in
the minds of European decision-makers. In Kosovo,
NATO was willing to bend its demands in order to
accommodate a Milosevic withdrawal from the
province, and to avoid a ground campaign. Even so,
the war was enormously costly in terms of civilian
life.
Libya, on the other hand, is in
Africa, and is populated by people whose
immigration to Europe has caused a wave of racism
and anti-immigration sentiments. Though nobody
would admit it, their lives are almost certainly
cheaper in the minds of Western politicians than
are Serbian and Albanian lives. Thus, in Libya we
could expect not just a Kosovo, but also the
continuation that never materialized in Kosovo; a
Kosovo on steroids.
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