[LINK] Doug Muir on the Libyan civil war

[rfmcdonald]

Over at The Power and the Money Douglas Muir has two guest posts presenting his take on the Libyan civil war. The first, "The Correlation of Forces", takes its name from the old Soviet strategic concept of the same name.

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.

The second post, "August and everything after", takes its name from an earlier prediction of Doug's that Qaddafi will be gone by August, more or less. What then?

One, the dismount is going to be tricky. Much depends on how Qaddafi leaves the building. If he flees like Ben Ali, that’s one thing. If he’s taken out by a coup, that’s another. If it ends with rebel columns rolling into Tripoli ... that’s actually pretty unlikely. So, flee or coup.

Say it’s a coup. Then what? Qaddafi’s inner circle are still around. Say they can be sidelined. (How? Could get messy.) You’ve still got a functioning state government in Tripoli. And that’s great — nobody wants a Somalia on Europe’s doorstep. But whoever ends up running it, that state government is not going to be eager to hand over power to a bunch of scruffy rebels in Benghazi. (Never mind a bunch of Berbers. Ugh, Berbers.) On the other hand, the National Transition Council (NTC) — the guys in Benghazi — are reasonably going to ask why they should acknowledge the authority of a bunch of guys in Tripoli who, until last Tuesday, were loyal apparatchiks of the Supreme Leader. So, watch for some sort of National Reconciliation Council, possibly brokered by friendly foreign powers.

Two, legitimacy. PQL is likely to be a troubled place in various ways. Qaddafi did a pretty good job of crushing civil society. The country is divided by regions and tribes. Nobody has any meaningful experience with civil liberties or democratic institutions. Everyone’s going to be armed. A significant amount of nation-building type assistance is going to be required, and frankly it’s none too soon to start.

Meanwhile, who’ll have legitimacy? The NTC can advance a plausible claim if they’ve reached a clear point of military dominance — control over most of the country’s territory and population, Loyalists clearly falling backwards. They’re nowhere near that point today. Otherwise, legitimacy will have to come from, sigh, democratic elections. I sigh because those are likely to be... problematic. Libya’s a country that has never had anything remotely approaching a fair and clean election. And being in political opposition, in Libya, has not historically been a great career choice. So everyone is likely to enter this thinking winner-take-all, so our side must not be allowed to lose! Things could work out, but...

Foreign relations and the plight of the Berber minority are going to complicate things further.

Go, read.