The National Transitional Council, the interim body recognized by the United States and most U.N. members as Libya's highest authority, suffers serious credibility problems. Political grandstanding and the lack of clear military command have fueled a pattern of disinformation that exposes cracks in the council's veneer of leadership.
Unless the interim authorities improve their reliability fairly quickly, they run the risk of seeing the United States and other once-eager Western and regional allies distance themselves. Their honeymoon at home already is drawing to an end, with many Libyans upset over unfulfilled promises from the council and its semi-allied military commanders.
Remember the dripping scorn the anti-war side had for our invasion of Iraq with "too few" troops?
But at least we had some assumptions going in. We thought that with the Kurds with us and the Shias oppressed, the major population in need of pacifying would be the 5 million Sunni Arabs who backed Saddam. We thought the basic police would stay in place and do their jobs. We thought we'd get army units to defect. We thought Syria and Iran wouldn't dare intervene. We thought the Baathists were a spent force and incapable of resisting after the fall of the regime more effectively than they resisted before the fall. We failed to recognize the vast amount of money and weapons that Saddam had scattered around Iraq to fuel the insurgencies and terror campaigns.
When our assumptions failed, we proved to have too few troops for a while until we could build up Iraqi strength. And we at least had sufficient strength to start a new government and new security forces that would become sufficiently large to prevail. For the most part, I thought we had the numbers to win. We certainly had enough troops to win, it should be clear. But critics of the war loved to say we had too few troops--until the surge when they said we were doomed and shouldn't have added more troops (same thing for Afghanistan, now that you mention it).
During the Libyan civil war and our intervention, I kept asking what army was going to defeat the loyalists and win? Well, the western rebels--with NATO air power--were eventually enough of an army to defeat the regime. But it isn't enough of an army to build a new regime.
Will NATO provide the numbers to pacify the country until Libyans can stand up? Or will small competing forces within vast spaces battle each other in a longer civil war where nobody has the numbers to win, pacify, and rebuild?
So what were our assumptions for the post-war stability operations? How did we think that the new Libyan government would have the numbers to set up a new government? And who will condemn our government and NATO for going in with too few forces to win the post-war?
UPDATE: Ah, NATO is "confident" the Libyan alliance (former rebels) can establish a democracy:
Libya’s new leadership faces huge political challenges, the secretary-general said, “but basically we’re confident that the National Transitional Council can manage a peaceful transition to democracy.”
Well then, never mind. As long as we are "confident." Move along. We clearly have a post-war plan for building a new alliance government. We've assumed it will be done. That's much better than the much-maligned Iraq situation.
But perhaps it is too soon to speak of post-war as the former rebels have failed to follow up their capture of Tripoli by mopping up the loyalist remnants holed up in various redoubts around the country:
Consensus exists among NATO members about how to decide when to end Operation Unified Protector in Libya, based on guidelines that can be used to evaluate conditions on the ground there, Defense Secretary Leon E. Panetta said today.
At his final press conference of the Oct. 5-6 NATO defense ministerial here, Panetta listed the four guidelines, which ask the following questions:
- What happens in Sirte? This is the hometown of former Libyan leader Muamar Gadhafi and heavy fighting is underway there.
- Does the Gadhafi regime maintain the capability to attack civilians?
- Does Gadhafi maintain command capability with his regime’s remaining forces?
- Are opposition forces able to provide security and confront challenges that may arise?
"What happens" in Sirte? What does that even mean? Does it mean that Sirte has to fall to the alliance forces?
And our responsibility to protect civilians only applies to Khaddafi's loyalists? What if the alliance gets a little over-eager in attacking Sirte?
Revolutionary fighters are shelling Moammar Gadhafi's hometown of Sirte ahead of a renewed push on the city, one of the last bastions of support for the fugitive leader.
Gosh, it seems like only March when the government shelling a city was a capital offense justifying NATO attack missions. Perhaps the Russians will introduce a Security Council resolution authorizing NATO to protect civilians in Sirte.
The third one seems rather odd. What if someone else assumes command of loyalist forces? Isn't a radio or phone link enough of a command capability?
And ho, ho! Number 4 is quite the statement given that we seem so reluctant to stay in Iraq or Afghanistan until friendly local forces can "provide security and confront challenges that may arise".Time to slap those "No Endless
Oh well. Once again we see that it is much more difficult to end a not-a-war than it is to start a not-a-war. Which is why it would be nice only to start those that are in our national interests. Which is why I favored letting the Europeans handle this one. It surely was not morally wrong to wage war on Khaddafi. But let's just scratch that "time-limited" part right now. We shall see how the scope goes. What was the Pottery Barn Rule again? "We break it, we buy it?" That used to be a big thing in anti-war circles. (Oh, I just discovered Thomas Effing Friedman coined the expression. Figures.)
