Victory In Libya Is Closer Than We Think

 

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.