Could a lack of thinking ahead be our undoing in Libya?
Aaron Ellis 8.03am
It has been hard to oppose the intervention in Libya, and even harder after the fall of Tripoli. People can grow weary of caution and impatient with their predictions - dark prophecies that become more and more ridiculous as things turn out so well. Whilst many celebrated this week, I felt like an outsider looking in.
Yet the collapse of Colonel Gaddafi’s regime has not made me rethink my opposition to the UK’s intervention because it has not disproven some of my key reasons: first, we knew little about the rebels and second, we had no coherent strategy. Like in Afghanistan, the salience of these two factors would only become apparent after our side had ‘won’. And like Afghanistan, we would pay for them dearly.
Given that the forces determining our own future have nothing to do with the constitutional make-up of Libya, I wanted us to avoid this cost altogether. By intervening, and repeating the same mistakes of 2001, David Cameron may have bought more than he bargained for.
Since the weekend there has been a lot of talk about what comes next in Libya. Many commentators have used Iraq as a cautionary tale. TRG patron and former Foreign Secretary Sir Malcolm Rifkind has another op-ed in the Times (£) today, giving his reasons why Libya won’t turn out to be another Iraq. Indeed, the bloody aftermath there should teach us many things but as an analogy for Libya it is wide of the mark. Afghanistan is a more apt comparison in that we enabled the Northern Alliance to overthrow the Taliban, as we enabled the Libyan rebels to overthrow Gaddafi.
There are more worrying similarities. Like with the Northern Alliance, our understanding of the Libyan rebels is superficial. We assume that they are a homogenous group, sharing the same goals, and that the authority of the Transitional National Council (TNC) - albeit formally recognised by 54 national governments around the world - is both wide and deep in Libya itself.
Neither of those assumptions are true. Doug Saunders, one of the few journalists genuinely to cover the political composition of the rebels, put it starkly last month:
[The TNC] is only barely in control of the war; it clearly does not represent the full expanse of Libyan opposition; and it is very unlikely to remain a major political body after the war.
The Benghazi-based Council cannot stop extra-judicial killings of Gaddafi loyalists, as the murder of Abdel Younes ought to show. Had Saif al-Islam actually been captured, they would be negotiating as fiercely with the rebels in the west of the country to hand him over to them as they would be with the International Criminal Court.
Like the Bush administration with Afghanistan, we are so afraid in the UK of being drawn into nation building in Libya that we have done very little, if any, planning on what comes next.
We seem to think about war and peace sequentially because they happen sequentially: we must win the war and peace can be decided at a grand conference in London or Rome. The twin phenomena of war and peace should not be separated, however you must decide what the peace should look like and shape your actions accordingly.
Strategy should be the bridge. In Afghanistan in 2001, the NATO allies had no coherent political-military strategy and during the initial fighting created many of the problems that undermined the illusory peace of 2002-05.
We ought to be concerned that because the NATO allies over the skies of Libya, with Britain and France at the forefront, had no initial strategy and little idea about what peace should look like, Western governments have created new problems in Libya that will draw them into nation building whether they want to or not.
There is no guarantee that these concerns about Libya are more or less accurate than more optimistic predictions. Foreign policy analysis is a pseudo-science; as Bismarck said of politics, “it is a thankless job because everything depends on chance and conjecture.” That being said, the combination of recent history and present policies suggest that supporters of the Libyan intervention would be advised to keep the bunting under wrapping for now.
Follow Aaron on Twitter @ThinkStrat
