Lead role ceded to UN Contact Group
NATO planners are drawing up options for a possible alliance role in Libya after the civil war ends, officials said yesterday (Slobodan Lekic, Associated Press, 24 August).
NATO's governing body — the North Atlantic Council — has told its military staff to come up with ways to support a future UN mission to stabilize the country.
"The council provided the NATO military authorities with a set of political guidelines for a possible future NATO supporting role in Libya ... in support of wider international efforts," NATO spokeswoman Oana Lungescu said.
Options are expected to be presented to the alliance's political leadership within the next week. These might include air and sea deliveries of humanitarian aid as well as setting up training programmes for Libyan security personnel. The alliance asserts that it has unique know-how in the reform of armed forces from autocratic nations, based on its work with East European military and police forces after the 1991 collapse of the Soviet Union. However, NATO’s record of supporting security sector reform in the Middle East and North Africa is less impressive. Other assistance to the UN mission could consist of logistical support, or reconnaissance aircraft and unmanned drones to provide surveillance over Libya.
Lungescu said the North Atlantic Council had agreed that any possible future supporting role for NATO must "satisfy the criteria of a demonstrable need, a sound legal basis and wide regional support". Another condition was that NATO would not have any "sustained" troop presence on the ground in Libya. This hints at a slight softening of NATO’s earlier “no troops on the ground” mantra, which Lungescu herself reiterated in the NATO press briefing only the day before.
The relatively successful post-conflict scenarios in Bosnia, Kosovo and East Timor suggest an early deployment of international peacekeepers will be required in Libya. But if NATO refuses to participate in a peacekeeping force (as looks likely at the moment), this will place an increased burden on the already overstretched UN peacekeeping framework. One option might be for a combined EU/AU peacekeeping force, although this may take some time to assemble.
At that earlier press briefing the NATO spokeswoman also said, for the Gaddafi regime "the end is near. And events are moving fast. What's clear to everybody is that Gaddafi is history. And the sooner he realizes it, the better. The Libyan people should be spared more suffering and more bloodshed. The remnants of the regime are desperate, they may be trying to fight back here and there, but they are fighting a losing battle".
Lungescu stressed the need to sustain the mission to protect civilians citing the launch of another Scud-type missile against Misrata. How Gaddafi managed to retain some of his Scud missiles is itself an interesting story (discussed here), while others, including the UK Foreign Secretary, William Hague, warn that desperate members of the collapsing regime could yet try to unleash Libya’s stocks of chemical weapons.
NATO’s operational activities over the past five months in Libya were summed up by Longescu as having “steadily degraded a war machine, built up over more than 40 years. Today, we'll past the milestone of 20,000 sorties flown. We have damaged or destroyed almost 5,000 legitimate military targets, including over 800 tanks and artillery pieces. And we have done so with unprecedented precision and as much care as possible to minimize the risk to civilians”. But the campaign has exposed deep splits within the alliance, with only eight of the 28 member states taking part in the military action.
In particular, the issue of civilian casualties from NATO air strikes continues to raise concerns, with one US congressman calling for NATO’s top commanders to be held accountable through the International Criminal Court for all civilian deaths resulting from the bombing. Both Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch issued statements calling on all sides to protect civilians amidst the fighting in Tripoli, while UN Secretary General Ban Ki Moon called for a smooth transition and gave assurances that the UN would assist in post conflict planning including security and rule of law, social-economic, human rights and transitional justice.
NATO officials say the campaign is unlikely to be seen as a template for further intervention in the Middle East. The Libyan campaign had UN backing, giving it a legitimacy that is unlikely to be bestowed too readily on other humanitarian or ‘responsibility to protect’ (R2P) interventions. In part this is because NATO is widely seen as having exceeded the UN mandate by taking sides in a civil war. In addition to using its air power in aid of the rebels cause, NATO officials now concede that special forces teams from Qatar, France, Britain and some east European states, as well as US intelligence assets, provided critical assistance in an undercover campaign operating separately from the NATO command structure.
Further reading:
After Libya, the question: To protect or depose? Philippe Bolopion, Los Angeles Times, 25 August
Why Libya sceptics were proved badly wrong, Anne-Marie Slaughter, Financial Times, 24 August
We have proved in Libya that intervention can still work, David Owen, Daily Telegraph, 23 August
Don't Call It A Comeback- Four reasons why Libya doesn't equal success for NATO, Kurt Volker, ForeignPolicy.com, 23 August
Foreign policy: intervention after Libya, The Guardian – editorial, 23 August
A Solution From Hell - The perils of humanitarian intervention, the editors of n+1, Slate, 17 August
Libya and the State of Intervention, Tim Dunne, R2P Ideas in brief: Vol. 1 No. 1, Asia-Pacific Centre for the Responsibility to Protect, August 2011
Libya, Syria, and the Responsibility to Protect (RtoP), ICRtoP Blog Post, 9 August
The Crisis of Humanitarian Intervention, Walden Bello, Foreign Policy in Focus, 9 August