Now that the military battle for Libya is all but over, the challenges are enormous. Britain, France and the United States, in particular, have acted as the decisive weapon on the rebel side and bear a huge responsibility for ensuring an orderly transition.
It has long been apparent that Nato’s agenda was regime change rather than the humanitarian imperative of protecting civilians on which it based pleas to Russia and China not to block a United Nations Security Council resolution to create a no-fly zone in March.
Nato air power played a vital role in destroying Gaddafi’s fixed-wing aircraft in the early days after the resolution was passed. Later, its attacks on his helicopters helped level the pitch and make it easier for the rebels to advance. Although the rebels often complained Nato was not doing enough, without it they would have been able to do very little.
The supply of radios and other communication equipment from Nato during the spring and summer was vital and, in recent weeks, British, French and other special forces have been on the ground in Libya, helping the rebels co-ordinate the various anti-Gaddafi fronts and providing intelligence to Nato helicopter pilots and the alliance’s other target selectors.
It is an almost exact repetition of the way US aircraft and missiles enabled Northern Alliance warlords to capture Kabul from the Taliban a decade ago.
Thanks to its crucial role in tipping the military scales in Libya Nato and the rebels are inextricably linked. Gaddafi had few supporters in the Arab world, but there is a justified perception on the street that the rebels are over-reliant on Western support and that the overriding Western motive is access to Libya’s oil. Hence the rebels’ attempt to distance themselves by calling for Nato to leave now.
Even among the nine states of the 22-member Arab League that voted in March to support a no-fly zone — the rest were absent or opposed it — there is unhappiness with Nato’s stretching of the UN resolution. It is for the same reason the Syrian opposition is adamant that it does not want foreign military support in its struggle against the Assad regime.
Regaining national dignity
The best revolutions are homegrown, as they were in Tunisia and Egypt. Those who took to the streets in Tunis and Cairo’s Tahrir Square wanted to regain their country’s national dignity after decades of seeing their rulers doing the bidding of France and the US.
The new Libyan rulers face a long road to establish their legitimacy on the Arab and African stage. The West will repeatedly insist, as American President Barack Obama did on Sunday night, that Libya’s future is in Libyan hands. Nato cannot be expected to micromanage every detail of the post-Gaddafi arrangements and the rebels’ political leadership in the National Transitional Council (NTC) will not allow this anyway. But it cannot pretend it has no responsibility for the way its allies behave.
A policy of reconciliation will be vital in establishing a coherent and sustainable polity. In July General Abdel Fattah Younes, who spent years in Gaddafi’s inner circle before defecting to become the military chief in the rebel NTC, was murdered by other rebels. It was not a good omen.
The risk of score-settling and unjustified reprisals against members of Gaddafi’s tribe will be high. They may also be unfairly excluded from the new dispensation as it moves towards a constitution and elections.
So far, the rebels have acted correctly. They have not tortured or assassinated Gaddafi’s two captured sons. Calling on their supporters to show restraint their leaders are pledging that the new regime will be inclusive. But the real test will come in the weeks ahead, when the international spotlight is off.
The experience of post-Taliban Afghanistan is not encouraging. Succumbing to triumphalism a new administration was put in place that marginalised large parts of the Pashtun population of the south and restored warlords to power in Kabul, undermining the expensively organised but easily manipulated new electoral system. The Taliban soon found it had a fertile soil on which to reorganise.
Iraq also holds out a sobering precedent: more than eight years after Baghdad fell, with the same ignominious haste as Tripoli, it remains a basket case of competing agendas, a disengaged political class and a state with neither the capacity nor the will to look after its citizens.
Libya shares with Iraq its fiercely tribal character and the North African country’s 140 tribes and clans have flagged a stake in whatever emerges from the rubble of the Gaddafi regime.
As Libya’s civil war descended into stagnation and setback three distinct rebel factions developed, all with disparate identities and different tribal roots. There were the originals in the east, drawn largely from a rebellious middle class; a second group in the centre, who fought the war’s most intense battles; and the mountain men from the west, who saw getting to the capital first as their higher calling.
In the end, it was the western rebels who broke through Gaddafi’s weakened lines late last week and stormed fortress Tripoli. With their triumphant arrival in Green Square came a sense of entitlement.
The spectre of the tribes waging war against one another was often raised by Gaddafi’s son, Saif al-Islam, and other members of the regime. The attitude of tribal groups will be decisive, especially that of those who feel they did not enjoy the benefits of Gaddafi’s patronage.
Overlaying these fault lines are other groupings with competing stakes in Libya: exiles who have returned en masse in recent months and will probably be lured in greater numbers when Tripoli finally falls, and Islamists in the east.
The latter were kept under control by Gaddafi, except when they wanted to travel to Iraq or Afghanistan, which villagers chose to do in large numbers.
The Nato intervention led to the paradoxical reality of jihadists who had fought the US military in Iraq fighting Gaddafi under the cover of US warplanes within the space of five years. Their allegiance for now is to the NTC and its ambition to turn a state run under an entrenched cult of Gaddafi into a pluralist democracy that represents an array of competing interests.
There are real fears that such a task may be beyond the competence of the 33-member NTC and its leader, Mahmoud Jibril, which has been recognised by the international community more on promise than merit. It must build a coherent state from the ruins of four decades of totalitarian control, where institutions remain feeble and immature.
The NTC has drafted a constitution and said this week it would take up to 20 months to create the framework for a new Libyan government. It may not have that long. —