TEL AVIV - Should the North Atlantic
Treaty Organization (NATO) disband the Libyan
security forces and army, like the United States
did, controversially, in Iraq, or should it
preserve them and hope that their loyalties will
switch? Apparently, this is a question worrying
top British officials, as Bloomberg reported
recently [1].
That contingency plans for
Libya's future, once Colonel Muammar Gaddafi is
removed, have advanced so far, is hardly a
surprise; neither is the indirect suggestion that
the Western-led alliance would then face a
quagmire trying to pacify the country. What is
significant is that those discussions are now
becoming increasingly public, indicating a
surprising confidence that Gaddafi's fate is
sealed.
Given the realities on the ground
and the ever-increasing signs of
NATO's desperation, this show
of confidence could mean one of two or three
things. It could be a bluff, perhaps designed to
put pressure on Gaddafi to "retire" [2]. Such a
bluff is strengthened by the thus far
unsuccessful, but also increasingly public,
campaign to assassinate the colonel. Not long ago,
American Admiral Samuel J Locklear became probably
the first NATO official to admit that the alliance
is actively targeting the Libyan leader [3].
Russian newspaper Kommersant reported on
Tuesday that Gaddafi had indeed agreed to step
down. However, so far there has been no other
confirmation of this, and meanwhile the rebels
retracted their offer for him to stay in the
country if he surrenders power [4].
It is
hard to imagine such an agreement being
implemented successfully, particularly after the
International Criminal Court (ICC) issued arrest
warrants for crimes against humanity for him and a
couple of others. The fate of Liberia's Charles
Taylor, who went into exile under similar
circumstances but was eventually betrayed by
Nigeria, is surely fresh on Gaddafi's mind.
Louis Moreno-Ocampo, ICC's chief
prosecutor, promptly poured oil into the fire.
"Gaddafi will face charges," he said soon after
the warrants were announced. "The arrest warrants
are not going away ... I don't think we will have
to wait for long."
A bluff could also
serve to pay lip service to hardliners among the
alliance (the French government comes to mind) and
the rebels, while preparing to settle for much
less. In this scenario, a partition of Libya would
be in the works, into a western part ruled by the
colonel and an eastern part under the rebels'
control.
However, this option also faces
considerable obstacles. In the long term, it suits
neither the rebels (who do a poor job of covering
up their weaknesses and who would thus constantly
feel threatened) nor Gaddafi (who would likely
wait for an opportune time to try to retake the
east by force), and can be expected at best to be
a temporary solution, a way for NATO to cut its
losses. Western officials are unlikely to be
thrilled by the idea, either: for, once they
declared that Gaddafi "must go", accepting
anything less will mean acknowledging a defeat. We
can expect France - playing the bad cop in this
arrangement - to resist this outcome vehemently.
It does not help that the battlelines are
far from neat, and there are considerable pockets
of rebel territory in the west, specifically
around the coastal city of Misurata. This would
make any division of the country difficult and
messy, to say the least. It would increase the
chances of a subsequent flare-up of violence.
Alternatively, NATO could be in the final
preparation stages for a ground invasion of Libya;
numerous analysts, including Russian government
officials, have speculated for months that this is
where the war is going.
A week or so ago,
the air campaign passed the 100-day mark, and
significant cracks are already visible in the
coalition. Italy has threatened to pull out,
ostensibly due to the heavy toll on civilians that
the bombings are causing. The heated congressional
debates in the United States betray little overall
political appetite for further military action.
Reports claim that some British officials, too,
are becoming hesitant about the war. Costs are
mounting. According to most assessments, it would
be difficult for NATO to continue the campaign
much past the end of the summer.
On the
ground, the stalemate continues. Despite frequent
reports of advances, the rebels seem unable to
pose any significant threat to Gaddafi's rule in
the capital Tripoli. Time is not on their side,
and not only due to NATO's constraints: a growing
number of reports question their own credibility
and war crimes records as well as those of
Gaddafi. If the deadlock is not broken relatively
soon, they risk being both defeated and
discredited, and their Western backers face a
thorough humiliation.
In a so far vain
attempt to break the stalemate, in the past weeks
and months NATO has steadily increased its
involvement, undertaking a series of steps that
critics say threaten to eventually drag it into a
ground operation. First it came out that former
British special operations soldiers, privately
hired by Qatar, were on the ground helping the
rebels and guiding NATO aircraft onto targets.
Rumors have it that current special
operations forces are active as well. Then the
alliance sent in attack helicopters. Finally, last
week France confirmed that it had air-dropped
weapons to the rebels, "so that civilians would
not be massacred" [5].
The supplying of
weapons is a particularly problematic step, since
the United Nations resolutions that address the
Libyan crisis include an arms embargo on the
country that arguably includes the rebels. The
latter point is subject to intense debate, and
NATO has enlisted several legal experts who claim
that the weapons transfer is legal as long as the
arms are used for defense, but parts of the
international community reacted furiously. The
African Union accused NATO of destabilizing Libya
and neighboring African states [6].
Legal
subtleties aside, the weapons drop in the Nafusa
mountains seems anything but benign and defensive.
Suffice it to mention that this is the only front
where the rebels have been clearly successful in
the past weeks, if mostly because Gaddafi's forces
pulled out without much resistance. The mountain
rebels are very different from their
brothers-in-arms in the two other rebel enclaves
(around Misurata in the west and in the eastern
part of the country), and it is likely that
Gaddafi judged them not to have much incentive to
threaten him.
In early June, the
influential American think-tank Stratfor wrote:
The Nafusa Mountain rebels are
oriented more toward Tunisia for their line of
supply than toward the sea, as rebels in
Misurata and Benghazi are. STRATFOR sources in
Libya report that although a supply network
connects Benghazi to the rebel positions in the
mountains - using Tunisian ports and land routes
as a conduit - the sheer distance and logistical
difficulty makes the connection tenuous. The
Berbers historically have had poor relations
with Gaddafi, an Arab who sought to suppress
their ethnic identity. Therefore, they openly
support the cause espoused by the Benghazi-based
National Transitional Council - to oust Gaddafi
and reunify the country with Tripoli as its
capital - but their primary focus is on
maintaining autonomy in their home territory,
not seizing Tripoli.
In light of
this, the French air drop looks very much like
incitement, even a bribe - a far from subtle push
on the Nafusa Berbers to attack Gaddafi harder.
The suspicions are strengthened further by the
fact that the mountain rebels launched an
offensive against Tripoli around the same time as
the French announcement was made, only to be
beaten back last Friday near the town of Bir
al-Ghanam.
There is nothing defensive in
such a scheme. Not only does it appear to be a
brazen violation of the UN mandate for the
campaign, but it would signal France's desperation
and willingness to go to any length to take
Gaddafi out.
If the rebels do not defeat
the colonel soon, as they seem to be incapable of
doing, the only way to remove him would be to
insert NATO troops on the ground. This would be an
even clearer violation of the UN mandate, but it
would be only a short step further legally from
what the allies are currently doing.
The
colonel also seems to be preparing for this
eventuality. A few days ago, he issued a pointed
threat. "We advise you to retreat before you face
a catastrophe," he said in a telephone address
broadcast to a large crowd in Tripoli. "If we
decide, we can also move it [the war] to Europe,
to target your homes, offices, families, which
would become legitimate military targets, like you
have targeted our homes." [7]
In light of
all this, it seems that a ground invasion of Libya
is a very serious, even likely possibility. The
question of what would happen afterwards,
addressed in part by the debates on the fate of
the government's security forces, is a legitimate
one. In fact, it can be argued that NATO's real
Libyan quagmire would only begin once Gaddafi is
removed.
"I think Gaddafi's removal is
inevitable, but I haven't heard much about what
comes after," writes Harvard's renowned
international affairs expert Stephen Walt. "Given
that our stated motivation was humanitarian,
doesn't NATO have a responsibility to ensure a
benevolent aftermath? And how much will that
cost?" [8]
It is far from clear that a
rebel rule of Libya, particularly if it comes at
the barrels of NATO guns, will serve the
humanitarian cause well. Even if we assume the
rebels to be well-intentioned and disciplined, we
can expect a protracted, if low-intensity at best,
civil war.
There are so many weapons of
different calibers circulating freely in the
country that pacifying it would likely be a
Sisyphean task. NATO officials have already
acknowledged that the alliance may need to send in
peacekeeping forces after Gaddafi goes.
Nor is the assumption that the rebels are
benign a safe one. A recent report by two French
think-tanks claims that they are undemocratic and
extremist [9]. The UN has accused them, as well as
Gaddafi, of committing war crimes in the fighting.
[10] There is evidence that they have used land
mines in their operations. [11]
Other,
unconfirmed reports, make even more extravagant
claims, [12] raising the possibility that NATO's
desperate actions may in fact be an attempt to
silence the evidence of war crimes committed by
its own rebel allies. Whether this is true or not,
the Libyan quagmire is complete, and there are no
signs of it getting better in the foreseeable
future.
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