The rebels captured a small village south of Sebha on Monday. The fall of Sebha, one of Col. Gadhafi's three regional power centers, would be a huge symbolic and strategic blow.
The city of 130,000 is a logistics hub for the regime, channeling food, fuel and other war supplies northward from southern farmlands and neighboring Algeria, Chad and Niger, said rebel leaders.
This is the map the article provides:
I'm sure Western advisers had a hand in suggesting and organizing that move. Austin Bay notes the significance beyond the logistics impact:
The political effects of the attack may be even more important. Sebha is the hometown of many Gadhafi political and military loyalists. It now requires protection -- Gadhafi faces a seventh front.
If the loyalists had followed through with efforts in the deep southeast outside of our no-fly zone, they wouldn't have had this setback.
The rebels are making real if painfully slow progress in the war (and are making progress on the eastern coastal front, snuffing out loyalist resistance in Burayqah/Brega), and Khaddafi is slowly losing. With NATO efforts to achieve some sort of political agreement, I can only assume that the alliance worries it will fall apart faster than Khaddafi's side will.
The sad thing is that if Libya is de facto partitioned, it will look like a Khaddafi victory to have survived the attack of the world's greatest military alliance, even in a rump Libya largely centered around Tripoli.
But if we had--as I wanted early on--simply helped the eastern rebels survive without making Khaddafi's immediate defeat our goal (although I admit it would have required direct intervention in the air as we did, rather than mere diplomatic and material support as I wanted), we would have viewed our intervention to allow a "free" (whatever that would mean in practice) East Libya to emerge as a victory.
"Leading from behind" would have looked brilliant; Britain would have gotten important diplomatic advantages over Germany in regard to French friendliness; and France's Sarkozy would have gotten a small but glorious military victory to ease his path to election victory.
But we go to war with the strategy we have and not the strategy we would like to have, I guess. Deep desert raids are neat and all, but we arent' willing to commit the forces to achieve victory so we are unlikely to get victory.
