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Longer and Worse Than Kosovo

NATO has flown 12,000 sorties and hit more than 2,400 targets since launching strikes against Libya under a United Nations mandate to protect civilians. The attacks are small compared with those in the 78-day Kosovo campaign that defeated Serbian aggression in 1999 [bold mine-DL]. The total number of NATO sorties flown then was 38,000. “NATO […]

NATO has flown 12,000 sorties and hit more than 2,400 targets since launching strikes against Libya under a United Nations mandate to protect civilians. The attacks are small compared with those in the 78-day Kosovo campaign that defeated Serbian aggression in 1999 [bold mine-DL]. The total number of NATO sorties flown then was 38,000.

“NATO has not yet achieved the result it did in the Kosovo campaign. But it is using only a third of the number of aircraft [bold mine-DL]. Deploying small teams of air controllers or special forces on to the ground could allow air attacks to better co-ordinated with the rebel forces,” said Ben Barry, land warfare fellow at the International Institute of Strategic Studies. ~The Daily Telegraph

I have said something along these lines before, but one of the huge flaws of the Libyan war has been that the U.S. and its participating allies have been attempting to achieve a much more ambitious goal of regime change with far fewer resources than they used in Kosovo. Unsurprisingly, the Libyan war has already dragged on for almost a month longer than the Kosovo war did, and there is no reason to expect it to come to an end very soon. Obviously, the limited U.S. role in the war is one of the main reasons for the lack of resources the article describes. Meanwhile, U.S. and NATO forces have been operating under much greater restrictions on what they are allowed to do, and they are supporting a force on the ground that is even weaker and less effective than the KLA.

These comparisons are valuable, but they are also potentially misleading in that they suggest that it was the air campaign that forced Milosevic to withdraw Yugoslav forces from Kosovo, when it was Russian diplomatic pressure that made Milosevic yield when he did. The stakes for Gaddafi are much higher, and he has every incentive to fight on, so it would be wrong to expect a Kosovo-like “success” even if the U.S. and NATO were devoting greater resources to attacking Libya.

Despite all of this, we are treated to optimistic claims that “all the trends favor the rebels.” This is not obviously true, as renewed rocket attacks on Misurata show, and it is also the wrong way to measure whether or not the Libyan war has been worthwhile and justified. If the war is being fought to protect Libyan civilians, it loses its justification if it can’t do that or if it makes things worse than it would have been otherwise. As the war has dragged on, the entire civilian population has been suffering from shortages, and the intervention is prolonging the conflict with no end in sight. This is one reason why Italy has broken with the other intervening governments in calling for a cease-fire to facilitate humanitarian aid. Earlier this month, the International Crisis Group issued an extensive report on the Libyan war, and strongly recommended negotiating a cease-fire to make humanitarian aid available to the population.

The ICG report’s executive summary stated the following:

Although the declared rationale of this intervention was to protect civilians, civilians are figuring in large numbers as victims of the war, both as casualties and refugees, while the leading Western governments supporting NATO’s campaign make no secret of the fact that their goal is regime change. The country is de facto being partitioned, as divisions between the predominantly opposition-held east and the predominantly regime-controlled west harden into distinct political, social and economic spheres. As a result, it is virtually impossible for the pro-democracy current of urban public opinion in most of western Libya (and Tripoli in particular) to express itself and weigh in the political balance.

At the same time, the prolonged military campaign and attendant instability present strategic threats to Libya’s neighbours. Besides fuelling a large-scale refugee crisis, they are raising the risk of infiltration by al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, whose networks of activists are present in Algeria, Mali and Niger. All this, together with mounting bitterness on both sides, will constitute a heavy legacy for any post-Qaddafi government.

Thus the longer Libya’s military conflict persists, the more it risks undermining the anti-Qaddafi camp’s avowed objectives. Yet, to date, the latter’s leadership and their NATO supporters appear to be uninterested in resolving the conflict through negotiation. To insist, as they have done, on Qaddafi’s departure as a precondition for any political initiative is to prolong the military conflict and deepen the crisis. Instead, the priority should be to secure an immediate ceasefire and negotiations on a transition to a post-Qaddafi political order.

According to the criteria for justifying military action under the R2P doctrine, the intervention must not make things worse for the population that it is supposed to be protecting:

Military intervention is not justified if actual protection cannot be achieved, or if the consequences of embarking upon the intervention are likely to be worse than if there is no action at all [bold mine-DL]. In particular, a military action for limited human protection purposes cannot be justified if in the process it triggers a larger conflict. It will be the case that some human beings simply cannot be rescued except at unacceptable cost – perhaps of a larger regional conflagration, involving major military powers. In such cases, however painful the reality, coercive military action is no longer justified.

The ICG report’s assessment suggests that actual protection has not been achieved. The consequences of the intervention have likely made things worse than they would have been otherwise. Each day that it continues, that verdict becomes more certain.

Micah Zenko provides a useful summary of the most prominent secondary justifications offered for the Libyan war. One of these was that the intervention would easily succeed:

A final proposition put forward by intervention proponents was that, ultimately, it would not be very hard to achieve the desired end state. Whether based on recent technological advances or the fragile nature of loyalist security forces, such best-case scenario thinking was evident on both sides of the Atlantic. Libya’s rebels encouraged the Western assumption that Qaddafi could be deposed with ease.

Of all of the dubious, debatable arguments for the Libyan war, this was the least credible, but the error in assuming that the intervention would be easy affected interventionists’ judgment about the war’s overall justification. When judging whether or not the intervention had a reasonable prospect of success, the mistaken assumption that the intervention would be successful and finished quickly tilted the balance in favor of war. A less optimistic, more realistic assessment of the chances of quick success would have made intervention appear much less desirable, because it would have forced interventionists to consider the potential for greater harm that the intervention would do by prolonging and intensifying the conflict.

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