Muammar Gaddafi's purported Long March
from Benghazi to Tripoli, which began on Friday,
was cut short on Tuesday as his army routed and
then - almost as if carried by inertia alone -
chased the rebels back across a few small towns
along the Mediterranean coast. The opposition
performed so poorly in its advance on his town of
birth, Sirte (which it claimed - falsely - to have
captured on Monday), that Gaddafi did not even get
to use the full gamut of asymmetric warfare
tactics he had in store.
As he struggles
to hide his considerable forces from increasingly
powerful coalition air attacks but nevertheless
holds sway on the ground, the Libyan leader is
very likely to be spicing up the long hours of
hiding by brushing up on legendary Chinese
communist leader Mao Zedong's experiences in using
mobile warfare against the Kuomintang and the
Japanese.
''Fool me once, shame on you;
fool me twice, shame on me,'' a
famous Chinese proverb goes.
Even without testimonies, the opposition advance
that began on Friday resembled much too much the
initial phase of the rebellion that captured much
of Libya before crumbling under the strikes of
Gaddafi's forces. As first-hand accounts started
to emerge from the rebels themselves, this
suspicion deepened. ''There wasn't resistance,''
Faraj Sheydani, 42, a rebel fighter interviewed by
The New York Times, said on Monday. ''There was no
one in front of us. There's no fighting.''
Where did the army go? A few days earlier,
it had posed an urgent threat to Benghazi, a city
of over 500,000 inhabitants and full of rebel
fighters. ''People coming along the coastal road
from Sirte said Gaddafi forces were gathered
around 60 kilometers outside the city, positioned
in trees,'' al-Jazeera reported on Monday.
An army of trees waiting for the enemy -
to a civilian, it is an image almost out of
Shakespeare's Macbeth. Not that it is
something completely unusual - ambush is very much
a part of standard military operations - but it
certainly signals a shift of tactics for Gaddafi.
Mobile warfare, Mao's specialty, can be
loosely interpreted as a cross-breed between
positional warfare (defense and conquest of
territory, what regular armies usually do) and
guerrilla warfare (hit-and-run tactics; small
units that melt into the civilian population or
disappear into the surroundings).
It is
designed for regular units with certain permanent
bases, but it draws heavily on guerrilla tactics:
battle lines are blurred, the forces use surprise
to strike quickly and regroup, exploiting
specifically the overextended communication and
supply lines of the enemy. To quote one of Mao's
speeches in the compilation On Protracted
War (1938):
Our strategy should be to employ our
main forces to operate over an extended and
fluid front. To achieve success, the Chinese
troops must conduct their warfare with a high
degree of mobility on extensive battlefields,
making swift advances and withdrawals, swift
concentrations and dispersals. This means
large-scale mobile warfare, and not positional
warfare depending exclusively on defense works
with deep trenches, high fortresses and
successive rows of defensive positions. It does
not mean the abandonment of all the vital
strategic points, which should be defended by
positional warfare as long as profitable. But
the pivotal strategy must be mobile
warfare.
It is hard not to see the
similarities with what is currently happening in
Libya:
The rebel pick-up truck cavalcade
was first ambushed, and then outflanked by
Gadhafi's troops. The advance stopped and
government forces retook the small town of
Nawfaliyah, 120 km (75 miles) east of Sirte.
(Reuters, March 29)
Several [rebels]
also described a ruse in which pro-Qaddafi
forces stationed about 12 miles west of Bin
Jawwad waved white flags to lure them close and
then opened fire. (The New York Times, March 28)
Fighting is ongoing at Nawfaliya, about
180km east of Sirte, where opposition forces say
they have come upon a heavily mined road.
Pro-Gaddafi forces have dug into positions near
the front line, and are shelling opposition
fighters … The speed of the rebel advance has
stretched lines of communications and created
logistical problems, said [Al Jazeera's
correspondent] Bays. One problem is a lack of
electricity, which means that petrol pumps do
not work ... ''At petrol stations they're using
plastic bottles on strings down into the tank
below the station to pull up fuel," said Bays.
(al-Jazeera, March 28)
Strategically,
Gaddafi faces a broadly similar challenge to Mao's
in 1938: he has a considerable force at his
disposal and can achieve local superiority on the
ground, but nevertheless he is confronted with
superior fire power and, for the moment being, is
unable to achieve victory in a decisive
confrontation.
The Libyan leader,
moreover, has a long background in both positional
and guerrilla warfare: the commander-in-chief of a
standing army for the last four decades, he also
supported actively numerous rebel movements that
took the latter tactics to extremes of violence
across Africa. According to some reports, prior to
his attack on Benghazi 10 days ago, he was able to
plant undercover forces and hide equipment, even
tanks, in the city. By all accounts, he
understands mobile warfare very well and is well
prepared for it.
In Libya, there are some
peculiar twists: firstly, the rebels on the ground
are hardly a match for Gaddafi's army. Patrick
Graham, writing from the ground for Foreign
Policy, describes them as a disorganized and
undisciplined group of mostly ''young
volunteers'':
It is not much clearer who is
running the rebel army - or even who is in it
... As courageous as they are undisciplined, the
fighters' simple tactic is to make quick,
abortive jabs at Qaddafi's forces, drawing fire
from various kinds of artillery. At the front,
it is rare to come across anyone who presents
himself as a commander, let alone an officer ...
A real military is unlikely to be organized by
the rebels for some time ...
On the
other hand, the powerful air campaign currently
compensates for this weakness. The American and
North Atlantic Treaty Organization onslaught on
Gaddafi is intensifying, featuring strategic air
strikes and what looks suspiciously like close air
support. According to a report by think-tank
Stratfor:
[One March 28-29] Coalition
airstrikes continued unabated, with individual
military operations being flown against targets
in Tripoli, Tajoura, Surman, Sirte, Sabha,
Harawa, Garyan, Mizdah, Misurata, and the
mountain area west of Tripoli. In addition, U.S.
forces attacked three Libyan ships firing at
merchant vessels in the port of Misurata.... An
unnamed top U.S. military official said March 29
that in addition to the A-10C Thunderbolt IIs,
which specialize in close air support and
targeting armor on the ground, U.S. Air Force
AC-130 gunships - devastating and increasingly
precise platforms for attacking ground targets -
were employed over the weekend of March 27-28.
Despite the increased use of aircraft tailored
for the close air support role, U.S. Vice Adm.
William Gortney denied that the United States is
coordinating attacks with the
opposition.
Air power, nevertheless,
is subject to tactical and political limitations -
in this case, the mandate ''to protect civilians''
given by United Nations Security Council
Resolution 1973. The administration of US
President Barack Obama and its international
allies has already gone a long way in interpreting
the text selectively to justify a wider mandate
than specified, and this has produced some
international backlash. To unleash a massive
bombing campaign on a city where the population
supports Gaddafi, just so that the rebels can
capture it, is pretty clearly a gross violation of
the resolution, and would cause a storm at the
United Nations.
Thus, when Gaddafi fights
''on his own turf',' the efficiency of the air
strikes against him is reduced, and this has a
similar effect to that of overextended supply
lines in ground operations. It is pretty clear,
moreover, that the Libyan leader has a ''turf'':
in a recent report, Reuters quotes rebel fighters
as saying that residents of the town of Nawfaliyah
had fired at them, and that the population of some
towns near Sirte had formed local militias allied
with the government forces.
Besides, even
strikes on Gaddafi forces laying siege on rebel
cities have their limitations. They worked for now
in Benghazi (the attackers withdrew), but have not
had much success in the third-largest city of
Libya, which is in the Gaddafi-dominated western
part of the country. In the past few days, the
government army captured large parts of the city
despite the continuing air campaign.
Intelligence-analysis website Debka File
interprets Gaddafi's withdrawal as a signal to the
West, and underscores that the Libyan leader has
other options left in store:
Qaddafi offered Washington a way
out. By pulling his troops out of the eastern
towns, he gave the Americans a chance to chalk
up a rebel victory - or at least a standoff -
and leave it at that. … However, should
the Obama administration decide to persist in
its active military support for the rebellion,
the Libyan ruler may consider three
counter-steps: One, to carry out the threat he
made prior to the coalition campaign against his
regime to strike back at American, British and
French targets in the Middle East and Europe;
Two, to activate Libyan undercover terrorist
networks in Europe against US targets as well as
local ones; Three, to retreat along with his
family to a secret sanctuary among loyal Saharan
tribes and from there to fight for his survival
against both the Americans and al-Qaeda which he
accuses of penetrating the opposition and
turning his people against
him.
Despite that Debka is known for
occasionally publishing wild rumors, this analysis
makes a lot of sense, and different parts of it
concur with the observations of other experts; the
three ''counter-steps'' outlined could as well be
right out of Mao's handbook. Whether the coalition
intends to settle for a standoff, however, is
another matter.
In a meeting in London on
Tuesday, 40 ''global leaders'' resolved to
continue with the air campaign, after today under
NATO auspices. This is nothing new, and the
vaguely formulated end goal - until Gaddafi
stopped his attacks on civilians - does not
clarify much. A day earlier, in a televised
address from the National Defense University in
Washington, Obama defended the military operation,
even as he claimed that removing Gaddafi from
power was not one of its goals. Previously, he has
said that removing the Libyan leader is US
''policy,'' not a military ''mission goal.''
At least some of the European governments
taking part in the operation have indicated that
their goal is to see Gaddafi ousted. How they hope
to accomplish that, short of a ground invasion, is
uncertain. Some - for example, France - have
suggested arming and training the rebels, but the
idea caused ''fierce debate'' in Washington, over
worries that the arms might go to Muslim
extremists such as al-Qaeda. [1]
In all,
Gaddafi seems to be in a good position right now
to wait patiently while consolidating his control
in the west. His enemies are in a bind - as NATO
chief Anders Fogh Rasmussen put it on Tuesday,
''Clearly there's no military solution, solely, to
the problems in Libya.''
It is unlikely
that, even if it tries seriously, NATO can train
and equip the rebels well enough to take on his
army in the next few months. Meanwhile, as the air
campaign draws on, costs for NATO will pile up and
backlash against the operation will grow.
Equipment failure - if not anti-aircraft fire -
can even bring down a few warplanes, hurting the
morale of the allies.
At a later stage,
according to Mao's doctrines, mobile warfare turns
again into positional warfare, and the enemy is
conquered. The Libyan leader, who left most of the
oil infrastructure intact even as his forces
withdrew over the weekend from key oil towns such
as Ras Lanuf and Brega, appears confident that
this is how his battle will develop as well. The
burden is on the coalition and the rebels to prove
him wrong.
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