But—and this is a message that no one in Washington wants to hear—we must not limit our war aims to simply toppling Gadhafi. We made that mistake in Iraq and Afghanistan. By not paying attention to what comes after the deposal of a dictator, we inadvertently created conditions for a long-term insurgency. In Libya it is imperative that the U.S. and our allies make plans now to insert a stabilization force after Gadhafi’s downfall to help the National Transitional Council gain control of the country. ~Max Boot

It is true that a lack of planning and general indifference to what followed the initial invasions badly plagued both of these wars, but there was also the small matter that a significant portion of the population regarded our forces as an occupying army. It didn’t help matters that this was true. In any event, there was always going to be part of the population that was not going to be reconciled easily or at all to the overthrow of the old regime, and the same holds true for Libya.

Assuming that everything else went as Boot imagines, there would likely be some form of insurgency against the Benghazi leadership as this stabilization force (filled mostly with Europeans, Boot assures us) tries to make the TNC into the de facto government of Libya. What Boot proposes is to put American and European soldiers into Libya as the post-war enforcers of a new government that currently has negligible legitimacy or authority and doesn’t even represent all of the rebels. This will make those soldiers targets of the Benghazi leadership’s enemies among old Gaddafi supporters and former rebels. These soldiers will also be at risk of attack from members of Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM), which will be only too happy to insert itself into the post-war upheaval to strike at Western forces, and possibly from those members of the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group (LIFG) that will thank the U.S. and NATO for our help by launching attacks on our soldiers. If our soldiers were fortunate enough to face minimal resistance, they would still have to be there for a prolonged mission that could last many years. Even now, there are still almost 6,000 soldiers from NATO and other nations in Kosovo. Given the size of Libya and its political history, we would have to expect that a stabilization force would have to be much larger and would have to remain there much longer. Even for Boot, recommending a U.S.-European stabilization force for Libya is an unbelievably poor suggestion.

There is a certain logic to the idea that the governments responsible for throwing a country into chaos ought to shoulder most of the burden for restoring order. This is almost certainly not going to happen in the Libyan case, so I don’t see the point in preparing for it. There is not just limited political support for such a mission–there is no support for it at all. The European governments that have been fighting the war won’t want the responsibility or the cost, and the governments that opposed the war aren’t going to do more than France or Britain. Turkey might be the exception. If the U.S. had any role in post-war Libya, it would have to be limited to financial and logistical support. Congress has had no real say in any of this, but one thing that the House did agree on was that no U.S. ground forces would be put into Libya. Just imagine how uncooperative the members will be if Obama presented Congress with a nation-building/peacekeeping mission to restore order following a war that Congress didn’t want and never authorized. No, the responsibility will be shifted, as it probably has to be, to the U.N. and the African Union. That should reduce the incentive for an insurgency against an international force.