Endgame in Tripolitania

 Ten weeks ago, I wrote this:

In military terms, Qaddafi should be doing okay. He’s still in charge of most of Libya’s territory, including its capital, and most of its population. He’s still got a much bigger army than the rebels. He has open supply lines through friendly neutral countries (Algeria, Chad) — which means that, although he’s formally under embargo, he can almost certainly import weapons, men, ammunition, replacement parts, and pretty much anything else he needs.

But he’s not doing okay. He’s losing. This is a war on three fronts — the east, the western mountains, and Misurata in between — and he’s been losing ground on all of them. Generals and ministers have been defecting. Foreign countries have been lining up to recognize the rebels. In Soviet terms, the correlation of forces has shifted against him — and is, at this writing, continuing to do so...

Qaddafi is losing ground for a variety of reasons. His military is a bunch of unhappy draftees; morale is low. (Civilian morale is no better.) NATO is preventing him from using his air, armor, or heavy artillery, while also degrading his 4C. He has every reason to be paranoid about a coup, which means he must restrict power and personal interaction to a small trusted circle, which cuts down on his (already degraded) ability to process information and respond effectively.

Here’s my take on this: things are likely to get worse for him, because the more ground he loses, the more likely he is to lose more ground. He’s probably still able to launch counterattacks at the tactical level, so he may well be able to roll back the rebels in one or more areas. But he won’t easily be able to build on those victories, because they won’t change the underlying diplomatic, economic, or internal-political dynamics. To accomplish that, he’d have to win a major, crushing victory — retake Misurata, say, or wipe the Berbers off the map. That’s unlikely to happen. Meanwhile, rebel victories in the field do change the correlation of forces — they further depress Loyalist morale, make Qaddafi’s remaining foreign allies less enthusiastic about standing up for him, make major desertions more likely, and thus make Qaddafi ever more paranoid and isolated. Simply put, he’s trying to climb a slope that’s steadily getting steeper.
 
Back in April, I said I gave Qaddafi “more than a month, but less than a year.” I’ll narrow that a little now — as of this posting, he’s got more than two weeks, but less than six months. Too vague? Okay, I’ll live dangerously: August, plus or minus a month.

I said “August, plus or minus a month.” We’re now exactly halfway through August. So what has happened?

Well, after six weeks of relative stalemate, things have suddenly started to move.  (Above is a map that may help follow along; click to enlarge.) In the last few days we’ve seen the following:

— Rebels captured the high ground south of Misrata, putting the whole town out of artillery range and cutting the main route between Tripoli (the capital) and the big concentration of Loyalist forces fighting in the east. Gaddafi is now connected to his main field army only by a roundabout route, several hundred miles long, through some truly awful desert.

— Then the rebels captured Gharyan, which sits across the main north-south highway running from Tripoli down into Libya’s interior.

— Then, in a sudden surprise move, the rebels attacked the towns of az-Zawiyah and Surman, which lie on the coast 30-40 km west of Tripoli. Az-Zawiyah is actually a small city of a couple of hundred thousand people, and house-to-house fighting is continuing around the city center — but the key point is, they’ve cut the main coastal road from Tripoli west to Tunis. Thus, in the space of a week, the rebels have very nearly severed the capital from the rest of the country. 

—  The town of Tiji, Gaddafi’s strongest remaining base adjacent to the rebel-held Nafusa Mountains, fell to the rebels early this morning. If the rebels hold on to  Surman, taking Tiji means they’ve now put all Gaddafi’s forces in the northwest corner of Libya into a pocket, cut off from resupply or reinforcement.

—  And Qaddafi’s former Minister of the Interior just arrived in Cairo, with nine family members, on “a tourist visit.” 

Suddenly things seem to be moving very fast. It’s possible that Qaddafi could still launch a counterstrike, of course. But he won’t easily be able to undo the results of the past few days; for instance, even if he retakes the coastal towns, the rebels can still destroy highway bridges and overpasses, keeping the capital’s main supply route cut for days or weeks.

One peculiarity of this whole thing is that the eastern front — where the main concentration of government forces faces the main rebel army — has been almost static. The rebels have spent the last few weeks very slowly fighting their way into the town of Brega. Brega sits at the edge of a massive concentration of Libya’s oil infrastructure — pipelines, refineries, an export terminal. So it’s possible that the rebels have been deliberately going slow in order to minimize the risk of damaging large amounts of complex and expensive equipment, hoping that it will fall into their hands intact.  Whether this will work out or not remains to be seen.

Another interesting point: the rebel offensive seems to have been remarkably well coordinated, with major offensives in three widely separated fronts. As far as can be told (this is not certain) NATO forces seem to have been working quite effectively with the rebels, providing air cover and helping bring down Loyalist strongpoints. Someone fairly competent is running this show, it seems. It would be nice to know more.

None of this means that Qaddafi is finished — though at this point I’d be willing to bet money on it — and of course, none of it tells us anything about what will happen after he’s gone. That’s going to be a difficult, gnarly and complicated time, with a wide range of possible outcomes. 

Back in April I wrote that I opposed the NATO intervention. I still think it was a bad idea at the time, on both US-national-interest and humanitarian grounds. Let’s put that discussion aside for another post, though. I opposed the intervention, but given that it happened ... I think we’re doing okay. (For broad values of “we.” The Libyan people, the United States, NATO, most interested parties.) Here’s hoping it’s all over soon.

Comments

[pc]

That was one hell of a prediction.

[Will Baird]

No kidding.