The Citizen (Dar es Salaam)
Evarist Kagaruki
24 April 2011
opinion
At the Nato foreign ministers’ meeting in Berlin in mid-April, the main objective of the Western powers’ intervention in Libya was made clear: to continue and sustain the Nato mission (backing the rebels fighting the Tripoli government) until the Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi goes. The alliance resolved to intensify the air strikes against Libyan forces and increase the level of assistance (weapons and cash) to the rebels to enable them to keep up the fight. They pledged that as long as Gaddafi is in power, Nato must support the insurgents’ “cause”.
But the allies are facing two harsh realities about the Libyan conflict, which they have yet to come to grips with. One is that the rag-tag rebel “army” they are supporting (illegally) has proved unable to defeat Gaddafi’s military forces which show no sign of collapsing, despite the heavy Nato bombardment. That means the rebels can’t dislodge the Gaddafi regime on their own.
The other, as the experience of the West’s onslaught on Saddam’s Iraq in the 1990s and the post-September 11 Iraq war can remind us, is that no air power can be decisive in a war. In 1991, Kuwait was liberated from Saddam Hussein’s aggression basically by the US-led coalition of ground forces after the no-fly zone and bombing strategy had failed to bring down the Baghdad regime.
And in 2003, Saddam was ousted by the allied forces on the ground, not by the US high-tech air bombardments. Those two predicaments mean that the difficulties of the Western allies’ plan to overthrow Gaddafi under cover of the UN Security Council resolution 1973 now seem to have been grossly underestimated.
The optimism of early April, when the Nato bombing campaign began with the hope of a “quick fix”, has vanished.
The pervasive pessimism that now pervades the ranks of the Nato forces which are frustrated at their miserable failure to push Gaddafi’s troops out of besieged Misrata, for example, impels the alliance to focus on two options:
The first is to arm the rebels, which means sending Nato military advisors to help the insurgents with the logistics of the war, something which we are now informed the British and French governments are already doing (illegally).
But that means also breaking the embargo on Libya and going against resolution 1973 which forbids foreign troops on Libyan soil. The second option, which is more controversial, is to effectively occupy Libya by sending Nato troops there.
It has been reported that France has been toying with such an idea, which raises the grim prospect of a full-scale war.Although resolution 1973 rules out foreign forces in Libya, Nato could still put its troops on the ground through a new resolution.
Observers say this is possible because the Security Council now operates at the whims of the major Western powers, notably the US, Britain and France. However, the idea of sending allied ground forces to Libya might split the Nato family and it certainly won’t go down well with most citizens in America and Europe, who are already fed up with the war in Afghanistan, which Nato was losing to the Taliban.
Should they fail to secure another resolution, the Western powers were most likely going to resort to bending resolution 1973 to suit their game. And this is also possible because details of implementing this resolution are so far not clear. One reason for this is that some clauses are vague. For example, while the resolution prohibits occupation of Libya, it authorizes the “use of any means necessary” to protect the Libyan people from Gaddafi’s air power.
Analysts think this creates a loophole which the Western powers could use to deploy ground forces in Libya.Already there is talk within the alliance of sending a robust humanitarian force that would be used as a cover for some “modest military operation” on the ground – something along the lines of the disastrous 1993 US “humanitarian” mission in Somalia, code-named “Operation Restore Hope”.
In the coming few weeks, we might see dramatic scenes at the UN over the Libya conflict, similar to those which preceded the US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003.
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