http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/MC31Ak03.html
Mar 31, 2011
Colonel Gaddafi goes Mao
Victor Kotsev
Muammar Gaddafi's purported Long March from Benghazi to Tripoli, which began on
Friday, was cut short on Tuesday as his army routed and then - almost as if
carried by inertia alone - chased the rebels back across a few small towns
along the Mediterranean coast. The opposition performed so poorly in its
advance on his town of birth, Sirte (which it claimed - falsely - to have
captured on Monday), that Gaddafi did not even get to use the full gamut of
asymmetric warfare tactics he had in store.
As he struggles to hide his considerable forces from increasingly powerful
coalition air attacks but nevertheless holds sway on the ground, the Libyan
leader is very likely to be spicing up the long hours of hiding by brushing up
on legendary Chinese communist leader Mao Zedong's experiences in using mobile
warfare against the Kuomintang and the Japanese.
''Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me,'' a famous Chinese
proverb goes. Even without testimonies, the opposition advance that began on
Friday resembled much too much the initial phase of the rebellion that captured
much of Libya before crumbling under the strikes of Gaddafi's forces. As
first-hand accounts started to emerge from the rebels themselves, this
suspicion deepened. ''There wasn't resistance,'' Faraj Sheydani, 42, a rebel
fighter interviewed by The New York Times, said on Monday. ''There was no one
in front of us. There's no fighting.''
Where did the army go? A few days earlier, it had posed an urgent threat to
Benghazi, a city of over 500,000 inhabitants and full of rebel fighters.
''People coming along the coastal road from Sirte said Gaddafi forces were
gathered around 60 kilometers outside the city, positioned in trees,''
al-Jazeera reported on Monday.
An army of trees waiting for the enemy - to a civilian, it is an image almost
out of Shakespeare's Macbeth. Not that it is something completely unusual -
ambush is very much a part of standard military operations - but it certainly
signals a shift of tactics for Gaddafi.
Mobile warfare, Mao's specialty, can be loosely interpreted as a cross-breed
between positional warfare (defense and conquest of territory, what regular
armies usually do) and guerrilla warfare (hit-and-run tactics; small units that
melt into the civilian population or disappear into the surroundings).
It is designed for regular units with certain permanent bases, but it draws
heavily on guerrilla tactics: battle lines are blurred, the forces use surprise
to strike quickly and regroup, exploiting specifically the overextended
communication and supply lines of the enemy. To quote one of Mao's speeches in
the compilation On Protracted War (1938):
Our strategy should be to employ our main forces to operate over an extended
and fluid front. To achieve success, the Chinese troops must conduct their
warfare with a high degree of mobility on extensive battlefields, making swift
advances and withdrawals, swift concentrations and dispersals. This means
large-scale mobile warfare, and not positional warfare depending exclusively on
defense works with deep trenches, high fortresses and successive rows of
defensive positions. It does not mean the abandonment of all the vital
strategic points, which should be defended by positional warfare as long as
profitable. But the pivotal strategy must be mobile warfare.
It is hard not to see the similarities with what is currently happening in
Libya:
The rebel pick-up truck cavalcade was first ambushed, and then outflanked by
Gadhafi's troops. The advance stopped and government forces retook the small
town of Nawfaliyah, 120 km (75 miles) east of Sirte. (Reuters, March 29)
Several [rebels] also described a ruse in which pro-Qaddafi forces stationed
about 12 miles west of Bin Jawwad waved white flags to lure them close and then
opened fire. (The New York Times, March 28)
Fighting is ongoing at Nawfaliya, about 180km east of Sirte, where opposition
forces say they have come upon a heavily mined road. Pro-Gaddafi forces have
dug into positions near the front line, and are shelling opposition fighters .
The speed of the rebel advance has stretched lines of communications and
created logistical problems, said [Al Jazeera's correspondent] Bays. One
problem is a lack of electricity, which means that petrol pumps do not work ...
''At petrol stations they're using plastic bottles on strings down into the
tank below the station to pull up fuel," said Bays. (al-Jazeera, March 28)
Strategically, Gaddafi faces a broadly similar challenge to Mao's in 1938: he
has a considerable force at his disposal and can achieve local superiority on
the ground, but nevertheless he is confronted with superior fire power and, for
the moment being, is unable to achieve victory in a decisive confrontation.
The Libyan leader, moreover, has a long background in both positional and
guerrilla warfare: the commander-in-chief of a standing army for the last four
decades, he also supported actively numerous rebel movements that took the
latter tactics to extremes of violence across Africa. According to some
reports, prior to his attack on Benghazi 10 days ago, he was able to plant
undercover forces and hide equipment, even tanks, in the city. By all accounts,
he understands mobile warfare very well and is well prepared for it.
In Libya, there are some peculiar twists: firstly, the rebels on the ground are
hardly a match for Gaddafi's army. Patrick Graham, writing from the ground for
Foreign Policy, describes them as a disorganized and undisciplined group of
mostly ''young volunteers'':
It is not much clearer who is running the rebel army - or even who is in it
... As courageous as they are undisciplined, the fighters' simple tactic is to
make quick, abortive jabs at Qaddafi's forces, drawing fire from various kinds
of artillery. At the front, it is rare to come across anyone who presents
himself as a commander, let alone an officer ... A real military is unlikely to
be organized by the rebels for some time ...
On the other hand, the powerful air campaign currently compensates for this
weakness. The American and North Atlantic Treaty Organization onslaught on
Gaddafi is intensifying, featuring strategic air strikes and what looks
suspiciously like close air support. According to a report by think-tank
Stratfor:
[One March 28-29] Coalition airstrikes continued unabated, with individual
military operations being flown against targets in Tripoli, Tajoura, Surman,
Sirte, Sabha, Harawa, Garyan, Mizdah, Misurata, and the mountain area west of
Tripoli. In addition, U.S. forces attacked three Libyan ships firing at
merchant vessels in the port of Misurata.... An unnamed top U.S. military
official said March 29 that in addition to the A-10C Thunderbolt IIs, which
specialize in close air support and targeting armor on the ground, U.S. Air
Force AC-130 gunships - devastating and increasingly precise platforms for
attacking ground targets - were employed over the weekend of March 27-28.
Despite the increased use of aircraft tailored for the close air support role,
U.S. Vice Adm. William Gortney denied that the United States is coordinating
attacks with the opposition.
Air power, nevertheless, is subject to tactical and political limitations - in
this case, the mandate ''to protect civilians'' given by United Nations
Security Council Resolution 1973. The administration of US President Barack
Obama and its international allies has already gone a long way in interpreting
the text selectively to justify a wider mandate than specified, and this has
produced some international backlash. To unleash a massive bombing campaign on
a city where the population supports Gaddafi, just so that the rebels can
capture it, is pretty clearly a gross violation of the resolution, and would
cause a storm at the United Nations.
Thus, when Gaddafi fights ''on his own turf',' the efficiency of the air
strikes against him is reduced, and this has a similar effect to that of
overextended supply lines in ground operations. It is pretty clear, moreover,
that the Libyan leader has a ''turf'': in a recent report, Reuters quotes rebel
fighters as saying that residents of the town of Nawfaliyah had fired at them,
and that the population of some towns near Sirte had formed local militias
allied with the government forces.
Besides, even strikes on Gaddafi forces laying siege on rebel cities have their
limitations. They worked for now in Benghazi (the attackers withdrew), but have
not had much success in the third-largest city of Libya, which is in the
Gaddafi-dominated western part of the country. In the past few days, the
government army captured large parts of the city despite the continuing air
campaign.
Intelligence-analysis website Debka File interprets Gaddafi's withdrawal as a
signal to the West, and underscores that the Libyan leader has other options
left in store:
Qaddafi offered Washington a way out. By pulling his troops out of the
eastern towns, he gave the Americans a chance to chalk up a rebel victory - or
at least a standoff - and leave it at that.
.
However, should the Obama administration decide to persist in its active
military support for the rebellion, the Libyan ruler may consider three
counter-steps: One, to carry out the threat he made prior to the coalition
campaign against his regime to strike back at American, British and French
targets in the Middle East and Europe; Two, to activate Libyan undercover
terrorist networks in Europe against US targets as well as local ones; Three,
to retreat along with his family to a secret sanctuary among loyal Saharan
tribes and from there to fight for his survival against both the Americans and
al-Qaeda which he accuses of penetrating the opposition and turning his people
against him.
Despite that Debka is known for occasionally publishing wild rumors, this
analysis makes a lot of sense, and different parts of it concur with the
observations of other experts; the three ''counter-steps'' outlined could as
well be right out of Mao's handbook. Whether the coalition intends to settle
for a standoff, however, is another matter.
In a meeting in London on Tuesday, 40 ''global leaders'' resolved to continue
with the air campaign, after today under NATO auspices. This is nothing new,
and the vaguely formulated end goal - until Gaddafi stopped his attacks on
civilians - does not clarify much. A day earlier, in a televised address from
the National Defense University in Washington, Obama defended the military
operation, even as he claimed that removing Gaddafi from power was not one of
its goals. Previously, he has said that removing the Libyan leader is US
''policy,'' not a military ''mission goal.''
At least some of the European governments taking part in the operation have
indicated that their goal is to see Gaddafi ousted. How they hope to accomplish
that, short of a ground invasion, is uncertain. Some - for example, France -
have suggested arming and training the rebels, but the idea caused ''fierce
debate'' in Washington, over worries that the arms might go to Muslim
extremists such as al-Qaeda. [1]
In all, Gaddafi seems to be in a good position right now to wait patiently
while consolidating his control in the west. His enemies are in a bind - as
NATO chief Anders Fogh Rasmussen put it on Tuesday, ''Clearly there's no
military solution, solely, to the problems in Libya.''
It is unlikely that, even if it tries seriously, NATO can train and equip the
rebels well enough to take on his army in the next few months. Meanwhile, as
the air campaign draws on, costs for NATO will pile up and backlash against the
operation will grow. Equipment failure - if not anti-aircraft fire - can even
bring down a few warplanes, hurting the morale of the allies.
At a later stage, according to Mao's doctrines, mobile warfare turns again into
positional warfare, and the enemy is conquered. The Libyan leader, who left
most of the oil infrastructure intact even as his forces withdrew over the
weekend from key oil towns such as Ras Lanuf and Brega, appears confident that
this is how his battle will develop as well. The burden is on the coalition and
the rebels to prove him wrong.
Notes
1. Washington in Fierce Debate on Arming Libyan Rebels, The New York Times,
March 29, 2011.
Victor Kotsev is a journalist and political analyst based in Tel Aviv.
(Copyright 2011 Asia Times Online (Holdings) Ltd. All rights reserved. Please
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