The murder of General Abdul Fatah Younis in Benghazi on Thursday sums up the ambiguity of the conflict in Libya: he had defected from the Gaddafi regime to the Transitional National Council but strong suspicions lingered that he had not cut all his links with Tripoli. With a foot in both camps, his body finished up in a grave.
Four months into the Nato-led intervention, it is entirely legitimate to ask whether Gen Younis's fate symbolises the track that Libya is following. If so, how did it all come to this? And where do we go from here? The heady days of the February 17 uprising in Benghazi seem a distant memory now, but at the time there was a momentum to the Arab Spring that ran through Tunisia into Egypt proceeded into Libya. Expectation was high that Muammar Gaddafi, weakened by his earlier abandonment of weapons of mass destruction, would quickly follow the Tunisian and Egyptian leaderships into exile, or at least out of power.
Talk of Venezuela was on British foreign secretary William Hague's lips. But Gaddafi dug in, bloody repression was threatened and international workers clamoured to get out. Here lies the first clue to what happened next. In Britain, we were slow to mount an operation to extract our own citizens and there was a feeling of national embarrassment — exacerbated by our historic allies, the French, trying to climb into the international driving seat. So our government reacted. UN Security Council Resolutions 1970 and 1973 were passed in New York and a Nato operation — initially under the reluctant leadership of the United States — began, with the limited aim of protecting the Libyan people.
Interventions
However, limited aims invariably have limited outcomes. What were the limits? There was limited military capability: the UK's principal military preoccupation was, and is, seeking sufficient success in Afghanistan. There was limited enthusiasm: experience of the interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan had left commentators convinced that no future interventions should be undertaken unless they came firmly into the non-discretionary category for the protection of Britain's vital national interests. Did Libya come into that category? It is a moot point.
There was also limited practical support from the Arab and Muslim neighbours in the region. Furthermore, there was a limited mandate: to protect the Libyan people but not to seek regime change. (However, that limited mandate was then almost immediately challenged by Barack Obama, Nicolas Sarkozy and David Cameron calling for Colonel Gaddafi to go.) And finally, for Nato nations taking part, there was the background of economic crisis and limited financial resources. Against this background it is perhaps surprising that any success has been achieved at all.
The fate of Gen Younis should be a clear lesson that compromise will lead to Libya's destruction as a unified nation and produce a situation that no one in the international community envisaged, and for which no one within Libya has fought and died. It highlights the fact that the rebels' grip on their own territory, and their ability to withstand the kind of Islamist pressures that led to chaos and bloodshed in Iraq, are at best questionable — possibly worse. Cynics could argue that Libya's wealth production capability is now largely under Benghazi's control, so partition could be a pragmatic outcome.
For Gaddafi there is no easy way out, and hints to the contrary are wrong, so he must be defeated. The legitimate defeat of him and his regime should only be brought about by the Libyan people themselves. It is their country and they must own the key to their own future. However, Nato can do more to help them. It has correctly ruled out the insertion of ground troops, but it has wrongly ruled out doing far more to help the opposition troops already in the field.
Most military commentators would agree that while the terms of battle can be changed significantly from the air, it is rare that resolution of a conflict can be from the air alone. The denouement will be on the ground. There is therefore an increasingly compelling case to arm, equip and train the rebel ground forces. Such a policy is not permitted currently under UNSCR 1973, but it is the limited nature of that resolution that has produced the limited success thus far. International diplomats should be burning the midnight oil in New York to agree that the best protection of the Libyan people is through the departure of Gaddafi.
That will only happen when he is defeated on the battlefield. Such a defeat can only be brought about by the opposition's ground forces. Nato should therefore do more to increase their effectiveness. Many will argue that this will all take time, but Britain should have followed this track months ago — so there is no more time to lose. Incremental pressure on Gaddafi has not worked as he has rolled with our punches, thus the big stick of a comprehensive ‘arm, equip and train' policy now needs to be thrown into the ring to end the contest. The longer it takes for the campaign in Libya to be brought to its conclusion, the greater the risk of unforeseen and unwanted consequences
— By Richard Dannatt, The Telegraph Group Limited, London 2011
General Lord Dannatt was Britain's Chief of the General Staff, 2006-09
