Allies join fight for Libya city
By Shashank Joshi Associate fellow, Royal United Services Institute
Pro-Gaddafi supporter in ruins of bombed-out building inTripoli. 22 March 2011
Col Gaddafi's supporters remain defiant in the face of coalition air strikes
There is a familiar and worrying rhythm to humanitarian interventions.
First, intervening powers insist to sceptical electorates that the campaign
will be wrapped up in days. Second, they pound the low-hanging fruit - obsolete
air defences and tanks on desert roads - with expensive missiles. The regime
slinks into the shadows, and safe havens are carved out under allied air cover.
What follows is usually less simple - in 1990s Iraq, a dozen years of constant
air patrols costing $1.5bn (£915m) annually; in Afghanistan, a decade of
ongoing loyalist insurgency; in Kosovo, a protracted air war culminating in the
further vivisection of the Balkans.
Much of this experience suggests that it is crucial to understand the
strategies employed by the targeted state.
In degrading Muammar Gaddafi's heavy armour and air power, the coalition can
rightly claim to have stemmed both the assault on urban areas and the prospect
of retribution against civilians that prompted the historic UN resolution.
Human shields
But sustained air strikes run into diminishing returns, and Gaddafi's strengths
are not rooted in such easily crippled conventional forces.
In using human shields to protect key installations, for instance, Gaddafi
emulates a favoured tactic of crumbling despots the world over.
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It is worth recalling that Europe's worst post-war massacre - at Srebrenica
in Bosnia-Herzegovina - occurred under a no-fly zone. "
But their deeper purpose is strategic. In ratcheting up the risk of civilian
casualties, Gaddafi is pitting the more committed members of the coalition
against its warier participants.
Britain and France, convinced that military action must eventually point
towards regime change, want to hit a wide range of targets. The United States
insists that regime change, though desirable, is not the purpose of this attack.
This is a neat reversal of alliance dynamics during Nato's intervention in
Serbia and Kosovo in 1999.
Washington grew increasingly frustrated by having to approve target lists with
Nato's lumbering bureaucracy, and eventually began a virtually independent
bombing campaign.
Today, it is French concern over American circumspection that explains their
hostility to running the war through Nato channels.
But the dramatic imagery of missile attacks has already frayed Arab support,
the sine qua non of America's involvement. All this means that a single stray
bomb landing on a hospital or school will fracture the alliance along these
fault-lines.
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Libya in maps
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Gaddafi will seek to hasten that process. He will do so not just by placing
military assets next to sensitive sites but also through using plain-clothes
soldiers to attack civilians deep inside urban areas, out of the reach of
ground attack aircraft.
In 1999, Slobodan Milosevic accelerated his ethnic cleansing in Kosovo after
intervention began. That kicked off a bitter coalition debate over the need for
ground forces.
Similar atrocities in Gaddafi-controlled areas would sow discord between those
advocating for an expansion of war aims, and those - like the influential US
defence secretary Robert Gates - fighting to tightly constrain the war.
It is worth recalling that Europe's worst post-war massacre - at Srebrenica in
Bosnia-Herzegovina - occurred under a no-fly zone.
Gaddafi's forces continue to punish civilians in Misurata, and remain in
striking distance of urban areas in the east. In short, Gaddafi's greatest
strength is his ability to force an unwelcome choice between escalation and
leaving civilians in harm's way.
Clan loyalty
The rebels, in turn, are not yet a viable military force.
Even if they can retake Brega and Ras Lanuf, it is unlikely that the rebels
would sweep Sirt - let alone Tripoli and its surroundings.
Gaddafi's security forces - bound by ties of clan, family and history rather
than professional obligation - show no sign of peeling away.
The asymmetry in forces has been lessened by the no-fly zone and degradation of
the government's heavy armour, but rebels control minimal artillery and tanks
of their own. Arms supplied by Egypt are likely to be lighter weaponry.
In any case, their severest problem was one of organisation.
French refuelling plane at the Istres air base, France France has found itself
at the forefront of the Libyan operation
In both Kosovo and Afghanistan that problem was eased by US-led special forces
who fashioned rebels into proxy armies under the cover of American air strikes.
In Libya, the US is unsure of the opposition's intention and has no appetite
for serving as the rebels' air force and high command. Rebel fighters are not
civilians and do not therefore enjoy protection under the terms of the UN
resolution.
One of their options is to engage in combat in built-up areas and tempt
loyalists to use artillery.
This might compel patrolling aircraft to supply "close air support".
Additionally, subversion of oil installations could hit the government's purse
strings, but this probably cannot be done on a meaningful scale.
What this suggests is that neither the rebels nor the "maximalists" in the
coalition - those who see Gaddafi's departure as this intervention's endgame -
have no good strategy to produce that outcome.
The best attainable conclusion may involve the irreversible degradation of the
regime's firepower and the injection of Arab League and African Union
peacekeepers.
Unless detailed planning for a managed stalemate begins now, Gaddafi may
succeed in his effort to chip away at UN forces until the Franco-British rump
collapses under the weight of its own contradictions.
Shashank Joshi is an Associate Fellow at the Royal United Services Institute
(RUSI), a defence think-tank in London, and a doctoral student of international
relations at Harvard University.
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