Victory in Libya is Closer than We Think

Source: The Telegraph
May 24, 2011

Colonel Gaddafi’s regime has been fatally weakened – now the West must prepare for its collapse, writes Paul Smyth.

The advancement of technology has so reshaped our lives that we expect actions to have instant effects, inquiries to receive immediate answers, decisions to achieve rapid results. We don’t like or understand delay – so, as the Nato campaign in Libya has dragged on, it has been viewed increasingly as a failure. When David Cameron and Barack Obama issue joint statements of resolve, as they did yesterday, they are seen as empty words. The idea that the situation has become a stalemate – or worse, a quagmire – has become accepted truth. 

Yet fixated as we are with the shortest of time frames, we have overlooked the steady shift of power that is under way in Libya. With each passing day, the regime grows weaker and the rebellion grows stronger. The rebel heartland in eastern Libya is militarily secure. As long as it can generate or receive enough funding, its future is assured – and these should hardly be a problem, given that it has control of some oilfields, access to the sea and sympathetic foreign governments on its side.

Critics may argue that even if the east is secure, Colonel Gaddafi’s hold on power in the west remains intact – so the best we can hope for is for some sort of partition into two separate areas. But this idea, too, is increasingly unsustainable. If the Gaddafi regime believed it could control the rest of Libya, that hope has evaporated with the relief of Misurata. With the rebels’ training and organisation improving, and Nato’s continued engagement, Gaddafi’s forces will be unable to retake the operational initiative, struggling to retake lost territory or suppress new outbreaks of insurrection. 

When it comes to Nato’s role, the precision with which its attacks are carried out tends to mask the extent to which it has degraded the regime’s capabilities. As of last Saturday, Nato claimed to have hit more than 860 targets, including 98 tanks, 72 artillery or rocket systems and around 40 armoured vehicles. 

Equally important, the target list included more than 300 ammunition stores. Even if some of the targeted bunkers were empty, or contained non-essential supplies, the extensive surveillance and intelligence material available to Nato should have ensured that the attacks significantly damaged Gaddafi’s ability to sustain military operations. Certainly, the performance of the regime’s troops on the eastern front, and then at Misurata, suggests that Nato has seriously limited their ability to conduct protracted offensives.

Then there is the impact that repeated defeats, increasing casualty numbers and equipment losses will have on the morale of the regime’s troops and its foreign mercenaries, which has been ignored. The sense of gloom can only be reinforced by their inability to prevent Nato action. The result will be a slow erosion of confidence in their leaders, which can only have been accelerated by the stepping-up of attacks against “command and control” assets: of the 53 hit since operations began two months ago, 75 per cent were attacked in the past three weeks. 

For Gaddafi’s troops, in other words, this is not a stalemate at all, but a one-sided conflict against an enemy they are incapable of opposing. The devastating recent attacks against Gaddafi’s warships, or the concerted air raids this week against targets in Tripoli itself, provide ample illustration of that. The increasing damage to such cardinal elements of the regime’s infrastructure may undermine loyalty to Gaddafi among senior military officers, as they are a much clearer illustration of the severe and enduring penalty of remaining loyal to the dictatorship. There will also be a limit to how long mercenaries, with only monetary interests in Libya, and Gaddafi’s troops, who lack effective leadership, will keep fighting. 

To make matters worse for Gaddafi, the fighting is only going to grow more unequal. With the announcement that France and the UK will use attack helicopters in Libya, the military imbalance will become acute. Attack helicopters such as the Apache AH-64 used by the British Army are extremely capable weapons systems, which could either devastate Libyan forces with their own armaments or provide pinpoint targeting information for other combat aircraft. 

While the use of helicopters flying at low altitudes does raise the possibility that Nato crews could be shot down, using their ability to operate at night minimises this risk. 

The real danger, in short, is not of a protracted stalemate, but of a sudden regime collapse: as the campaign goes on, and the capability of Gaddafi’s dictatorship to intimidate the population is eroded, the true extent of support for him among the Libyan people will be exposed. If it turns out to be shallow, the regime could suffer an abrupt end. 

It is therefore essential not just that Nato retains its resolve, but that the coalition is prepared for a sudden crumbling of the regime’s forces, and that it puts the plans and resources in place to deal with the aftermath. If we allow our disappointment at a lack of immediate results to convince us that Libya is locked in an inevitable stalemate, we may be caught out – with adverse consequences both for the Libyan people, and for ourselves.