Military Action Alone Will Not Save Libya

By Mike Jackson
This commentary was published in The Financial Times on 03/04/2011

Intervention continues to be a prominent dimension of the post-cold war world. Since the early 1990s, Britain and other countries have made the choice to be involved in, among others, Bosnia, Kosovo, East Timor, Iraq, Afghanistan and now Libya. For some, these represent latter-day military adventurism. For others, the operations are “all about oil”, or “a clash of civilisations”. But none of those views is borne out by the facts.

Of course, the degree of national consensus in support of each has been mixed: from general support for the Nato Kosovo operation (despite the lack of a UN Security Council resolution) and for the UK operation in Sierra Leone, to the controversy of Iraq and, today, Afghanistan. The interventions in the Balkans were undertaken mostly to safeguard Muslim minorities and there are certainly no great oil reserves in that part of Europe.

There are two fundamental and connected motives for intervention: the avoidance of humanitarian catastrophe and the desire for greater stability in the world order. They are connected because humanitarian catastrophe – as a result of ethnic hostility, tyranny or civil war – is a big source of instability. As events in Libya show, the concept of “responsibility to protect” has more or less been adopted by the UN as a duty to intervene where a state cannot (or will not) protect its own people – or, as in the case of Muammer Gaddafi, where it abuses its own population.

Crucially, this concept accepts that the weight of this duty can be even greater than the sanctity of sovereign borders enshrined in the UN charter. In the absence of a Security Council resolution, this doctrine – then nascent – was the justification for the Kosovo intervention. Interestingly, it is also the justification Russia used for its intervention in Georgia in 2008.

The search for stability, however, is far broader than the military dimension of intervention. That may be dominant in the early stages of a campaign, but great effort is required in the political, diplomatic, economic, legal and humanitarian dimensions – all, ideally, coherent and integrated under clear international or, occasionally, national political authority. It is a complex challenge, the more so when undertaken by many nations.

It is also – pace Donald Rumsfeld – nation-building, a challenge with both moral and pragmatic aspects. The moral is that the stable world should not stand aloof when instability results in the mass murder of civilians; this is where Rwanda and Srebrenica loom large. The pragmatic is that geographically limited instability today may spread out tomorrow.

This is the case for intervention. But does it work? It certainly is unlikely to be a quick-fix solution. Britain’s Sierra Leone intervention achieved great success in days, but it is the exception. International forces remain in Bosnia and Kosovo a decade and more on, even though violence is no longer likely in either case. And it is too soon for a considered judgment where Afghanistan and Iraq are concerned.

All of these lessons have relevance for the current action in Libya. Here, the UN has provided a broad mandate: it allows “all necessary measures”, although this is constrained by the injunction that excludes “a foreign occupation force of any form on any part of Libyan territory”. Quite what is meant by “occupation” is left unclear.

In my view, however, stability for Libya seems impossible while Col Gaddafi remains in power. His presence prevents any definition or expression of those legitimate demands. However he goes, only with his departure can the political process develop.

However, expectations by some of the utility of the international force are likely to be unrealistic. Military operations cannot be tidy or free of friction – particularly in a coalition whose contributing nations see the campaign through national prisms. Allied personnel are rightly going to every length to avoid civilian casualties in Libya. While they must do so on humanitarian grounds alone, the operational consequences are also very significant.

Military intervention alone, though, is unlikely to achieve stability. Force is necessary, but it is not sufficient to bring about the political solution that conflict – itself an inherently political state – requires.

While one must be wary of direction comparison, in 1999 it took Nato 78 days of bombing the forces of Slobodan Milosevic, Serbian president, before he conceded and withdrew from Kosovo. It was then some months before his political opponents were able to eject him from power. Col Gaddafi may be assassinated by members of his own clique, he may be killed in battle, he may seek exile – but once he is gone, Libya can start to rebuild. This may well require international assistance, including the presence of a peacekeeping force with, one hopes, a substantial Arab contribution.

I have little doubt Col Gaddafi’s military will be rendered impotent. But Libya’s future turns on the ability of Libya’s people, with such international assistance as they require, to find their stable and secure future.

General Sir Mike Jackson is a former chief of the general staff of the British Army