How can we link Libya with Iran, Iraq and Afghanistan when it comes to USA?

It's easy to see how Libya offers a "new model" for American intervention abroad when comparing it with the ill-conceived invasion of Iraq in 2003, but the mission to overthrow the regime of Colonel Muammar Gaddafi has too much in common with the U.S. intervention in Afghanistan to mark it, at this stage, as the herald of a new era of getting it right.

TIME magazine's Fareed Zakaria recently offered an eloquent exposition of how the Libya mission differed from Iraq. And in a related blog post, he argued that four preconditions for U.S. involvement distinguished Libya as the first intervention of a new era of American foreign policy.

1)    A local group that was willing to fight and die for change; in other words, 'indigenous capacity'.
2)    Locally recognized legitimacy in the form of the Arab League's request for intervention.
3)    International legitimacy in the form of United Nations Security Council Resolution 1973.
4)    Genuine burden sharing with the British and French spelling out precisely how many sorties they would be willing to man and precisely what level of commitment they would be willing to provide."

The limited terms of U.S. involvement, the legitimacy established by fighting in concert with indigenous ground forces, the burden-sharing by allies and the low cost make Libya an appealing model for the future, he argues: "Compared to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the Libya operation was a bargain.  It cost the U.S. about $1 billion.  The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan collectively cost the U.S. $1.3 trillion. In other words, success in Libya could be achieved at less than one-tenth of one percent of the cost of the interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan.  That's not a bad model for the future."

Indeed. But it's worth remembering that most important of these four conditions (all but the extent of burden-sharing, actually), were present in the Afghanistan intervention that began in October of 2001:

* It was not the U.S. or NATO that stormed into Kabul to scatter the Taliban, but the battle-hardened indigenous Northern Alliance, which had been fighting the Taliban for five years. As in Libya, Western allies provided air support and Special Forces coaching to the indigenous forces that overthrow the regime.

* Regional legitimacy for the Afghanistan was well established ahead of the operation, so much so that Iran had even agreed to allow its territory to be used for search-and-rescue missions.

* International legitimacy for the Afghanistan intervention was affirmed by the U.N. Security Council, which in the wake of the September 11, 2001 terror attacks on the U.S. expressed its support for "the efforts of the Afghan people to replace the Taliban regime". The U.N., with U.S. support, took charge of efforts to broker a new political order for Afghanistan to replace the Taliban -- which the U.N. had never recognized as the legitimate government of Afghanistan to begin with.

* While the U.S. was the key outside player in "Operation Enduring Freedom," British Special Forces were also involved in the initial mission. And in December of 2001, the U.N. established the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) to stabilize the Afghan capital and its surrounds. By early 2003, ISAF had grew to close to 5,000 troops from 28 countries, most of them NATO member states, with France, Germany and Turkey among the largest contingents. The U.S. at the same point had around 10,000 troops in Afghanistan.

THE ECONOMIST acknowledges Afghan parallel, but notes that "there is no sign so far that alliance ground troops will follow in the path of pilots as they did in Afghanistan, where a 2001 air campaign against the Taliban allowed a weak and divided opposition to take over, only later to need rescuing. Libya may still require peacekeepers but nobody is yet volunteering NATO for the task."

Well, not yet, anyway. But it's worth noting that there are more than ten times the number of U.S. troops in Afghanistan today than there were three months after the Taliban was overthrown. The Western powers that ran the war effort certainly hope things will turn out better for the Transitional National Council -- the Benghazi-based rebel leadership most of them recognized as the sole legitimate government of Libya long before the Libyan people had cast a vote in the matter -- than they did under the government of President Hamid Karzai. But there are plenty of indications that tribal, ethnic and factional divisions will be major obstacles (as they were in Afghanistan) to establishing a stable post-Gaddafi order.

There's something decidedly Afghan-esque about the fact that the rebels' Tripoli Military Council, which played a leading role in the insurrection inside Gaddafi's capital, is led by a former jihadist commander of the Libyan chapter of al Qaeda. And news that key leadership elements of the Gaddafi regime may have taken shelter in neighboring Algeria, which appears for its own reasons to be cool to the Libyan rebellion, also harkens unfortunately to Pakistan's stance in the Afghan conflict.

If Libya does descend into fratricidal conflict and some foreign military presence is deemed necessary, nobody will absolve the countries that enabled the rebel takeover of Tripoli from responsibility to help stabilize the country.

Finding indigenous partners for U.S. interventions is not that difficult. The Kosovo Liberation Army, in 1998 when it was still on the U.S. list of terrorist organizations, took up arms against Serbia precisely in order to win Western military intervention. And Libya has already prompted some groups in Syria to advocate following suit.  But international authority via the U.N. will be harder to come by for the foreseeable future.  To the Russians, Chinese and most of the non-Western world, Libya will have simply confirmed a suspicion that the U.S. and its allies can't be trusted to abide by the limits of any international mandate. Success in ousting Gaddafi doesn't change the fact that UNSC Resolution 1973 authorized military intervention to protect Libyan civilians and create conditions for a political solution to the conflict; a handful of NATO powers used it as cover for providing combat air support to one side of a civil war.

But the sad lesson of Afghanistan is that indigenous allies, regional and international authority and shared responsibility among allies are necessary, but not sufficient preconditions of success -- particularly in a country with weak institutions and riven by ethnic and tribal conflicts. When intervening in distant conflicts over the past two decades, Western leaders have routinely overestimated the competence and political authority of their indigenous allies, and underestimated the resilience and support base of their foes. And the cost and consequences of serious setbacks are, inevitably, a deeper and more open-ended entanglement. Before we proclaim Libya the post-child for future interventions, we need to know how it plays out long after the "ding-dong-the-witch-is-dead" moment. Or, to borrow from Chinese leader Zhou Enlai's 1972 answer when asked about the historical significance of the French Revolution, when it comes to Libya's grander significance, it may simply be "too early to tell."

They may call it political science, but it’s rarely like that. Politics tends to be messy, rather than exact. Yet under way in the Arab world is what might be described as an uncontrolled experiment, testing what has emerged as one of the defining questions of the 21^st century international relations: when it is armed, foreign intervention necessary to remove a brutal tyrant? On one side of the West Asian laboratory stands Libya which, thanks to the help of Nato firepower, has shaken off all but the last remnants of the vicious Qadhafi regime. And on the other stands Syria, where impossibly courageous people continue to brave bullets and rocket-propelled grenades, as they work to topple the pitiless Assad regime, certain that there be no British, French or U.S. fighter jets to lend them a hand. The uprising that received foreign help has succeeded. What if the one fated to fight alone fails? On its face, the Libya case seems to settle definitively a debate that has raged for most of the last decade, reaching its hottest point nearly a decade ago in the lead-up to the invasion of Iraq. Once again the two sides, interventionists and their opponents have been saddling up and doing familiar battle against each other. Since fall of Tripoli, it has been the interveners’ chance to crow – taunting the anti-war crowd with the claim that, had they had their way, the Colonel would still be riding around in his golf cart, wearing his phoney uniforms, having slaughtered any Libyan who had dared rise up against him. The discovery of farm buildings filled with charred human remains testifies to the dictator’s cruelty but also to the apparent necessity of foreign military. Without it, Mr. Qadhafi could have gone on killing.

Meanwhile, those who opposed the Nato operation have been left to argue that things could yet go horribly wrong, especially if the western allies decide to hang around as they did in Iran and Afghanistan, or that it would have been so much better if the Libyan rebels had toppled Mr. Qadhafi all by themselves. Of course that would have been the ideal – but all the evidence said it was impossible. If dictator is as determined as Mr. Qadhafi, and as ruthlessly ready to deploy force, then it amounts to a kind of callous indifference to tell the people crying out for help – as the Libyan rebels were – that they are on their own. If Mr. Assad continues to murder his own people and clings on to power, then that will prove the point in morbid fashion.

But what if there is a flaw in the experiment, a flaw indeed in the way this long, wearying debate over intervention has run most of the last 10 years? For what the Libya/Syria comparison assumes is a crude binary choice: either we bomb the hell out of a wicked despot or we do nothing. But that dichotomy might be false. A far fuller range of oppositions might be available.

The thought should be appealing even to those who support military intervention. All but the most gung-ho concede that such action comes at a cost. Greatest, of course, is the loss of human life inevitable in any military development. Nato pilots returned unscathed from their Libyan sorties, but those on the ground did not. Perhaps the new masters in Tripoli will say those lives were a price worth paying to remove the tyrant. But not all the grieving families will see it the same way.

What’s more, armed intervention can have a distorting effect once the dictator has gone. By aiding the Benghazi rebels, for example, Nato may have given greater muscle to that particular element of the anti-Qadhafi forces than would have been the case had Libya’s revolution unfolded the way change came to, say, Egypt. And because western armies were its midwife, the new authority is born with a legitimacy problem. So, could there be another way to act, one that might have all the efficiency of the Libya intervention, but with fewer of the costs? Enter Carne Ross, a former high-flying British diplomat who resigned after serving as the U.K.’s lead man on Iraq at the U.N. Security Council. In a powerful new book – part fiercely self-critical memoir, part idealistic polemic – Mr. Ross argues that we have, for too long, expected governments to take care of the world’s problems and that they are no longer up to the job. He calls instead for a Leaderless Revolution – the book’s title – in which people will reclaim control over their own lives and futures, through even the tiniest individual actions. Having several western interventions, Mr. Ross has particularly strong views on what outsiders might do when they witness brutality far from their shores.

He’s no pacifist; he does not rule out the use of force (and, he had been an MP, would have voted for it in Libya). But he says that all too often we turn to it as a first, not last, resort. In Iraq, Libya or Syria there was much that could have been done to oust those hated regimes non-violently long before the West finally acted. Rather than waiting for an uprising to begin, outsiders could embark on any combination of these three steps, depending on the circumstances: “Boycott, Isolate, and Sabotage.” So Mr. Qadhafi could have been shunned, rather than embraced by Tony Blair while his sons were feted in London. We might have mounted cyber-attacks on the Colonel’s infrastructure. Mr. Ross cites approvingly the Stuxnet computer worm which has wreaked such havoc with Iran’s nuclear program. Such methods entailed no violence and might have hastened Mr. Qadhafi’s downfall – and are applicable to today’s Syria. The target would emphatically not be the Syrian people but the Assad regime, restricting the travel and freezing the bank accounts of the key players, making their lives difficult if not impossible.


Post published by CHANDAN VISWAS