NATO’s Role After The Fall of Gaddafi

NATO ambassadors met in Brussels on Tuesday, to discuss the alliance’s next steps in Libya. Since March, NATO planes have flown more than 20,000 sorties as part of Operation Unified Protector. NATO officials also recently confirmed that special units have been on the ground providing training and assistance to the Libyan rebels.

At a news conference in Brussels, NATO spokesman Col. Roland Lavoie said Gadaffi’s regime is losing it’s grip on power, but that NATO’s focus stays the same.

“Our mission remains to protect the civilian population against the threat of attacks and to enforce the arms embargo as well as the no-fly zone as mandated by the United Nations,” said Col. Lavoie. “

Let there be no doubt that we will continue to monitor military units and key facilities as we have since March. When we see any threatening moves towards the Libyan people, we will act in accordance with our UN mandate.”

But in a post-Gaddafi environment, what role, if any, should NATO play?

“In many respects, the simpler, easier phase of this is coming to an end,” said Major General Tim Cross, who served as the UK representative to the Pentagon’s Office for Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance in Iraq.

In an interview with the BBC, Cross said: “We’re bound to have a situation where individual people who have been collectively focused on getting rid of Gadaffi and this regime, whence that has happened, inevitably they will start positioning themselves both individually and corporately for power and influence and so on. And holding that ring is not going to be easy.”

One solution might be NATO troops in larger numbers on the ground. But that is not a popular idea, according to Robert Haddick, managing editor of the website Small Wars Journal.

“Based on the recent, distasteful experiences in Iraq and Afghanistan and elsewhere, the NATO policy-makers are hoping that somehow the Libyan rebel forces will be able to achieve some kind of amicable post-conflict situation there, that won’t require an outside stabilization force.”

Hope is one thing, though, and reality is another. For example, NATO ended up sending thousands of troops to the Balkans to try to keep the peace in the 1990s.

Colonel Richard Kemp, a former commander of British forces in Afghanistan, says it’s not advisable to send Western troops to Libya, but that factional struggles might make it necessary.

“It may be we have to do that. If this factional infighting that might occur, if it does take off, there may be a need to wade in and prevent the kind of bloodshed that we’ve been trying to prevent Colonel Gaddafi from causing,” said Kemp in a BBC interview.

On Tuesday in Brussels, a NATO spokeswoman told reporters that NATO will not put troops on the ground in Libya. She said the leading role in a post-Gaddafi period in supporting the Libyan people would rest with the United Nations. Any further NATO involvement in Libya, she added, would have to be upon request.