Retreat for Rebels; Libyan Foreign Minister Quits
(Washington Post) - Libya’s foreign minister defected to Britain on Wednesday, dealing a blow to Col. Muammar Al Qathafi’s government even as his forces pushed rebels into a panicked retreat and seized valuable towns they ceded just days ago under allied airstrikes.
The government advance appeared to return control of eastern Libya’s most important oil regions to Colonel Al Qathafi’s forces, giving the isolated government, at least for the day, the east’s most valuable economic prize.
The rout also put into sharp relief the rebels’ absence of discipline and tactical sense, confronting the United States with a conundrum: how to persuade Colonel Al Qathafi to step down while supporting a rebel force that has been unable to hold on to military gains.
But the defection of Mussa Kussa, the foreign minister, showed that at least one longtime confidant seemed to be calculating that Colonel Al Qathafi could not last.
The news of Mr. Kussa's defection sent shockwaves through Tripoli on Wednesday night after it was announced by the British government. Mr. Kussa had been a pillar of his government since the early days of the revolution, and previously led the fearsome intelligence unit.
Although American officials suspected him of responsibility for the bombing of Pan Am 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, Mr. Kussa also played a major role in turning over nuclear equipment and designs to the United States and in negotiating Libya back into the good graces of Western governments.
Presumably, he is now in a position to talk about the structure of Mr. Al Qathafi’s remaining forces and loyalists. What is unclear is whether his defection will lead to others. “We think he could be the beginning of a stream of Libyans who think sticking with Al Qathafi is a losing game,” one senior American official said. “But we don’t know.”
Having abandoned Bin Jawad and the oil port of Ras Lanuf on Tuesday, the rebels fled helter-skelter before government shelling from another oil town, Brega, and stopped for the night at the strategic city of Ajdabiyah.
As the rebels retreated in disarray, a senior rebel officer, Col. Ahmed Omar Bani, pleaded for more weapons. He conceded that rebel fighters had “dissolved like snow in the sand” but framed the retreat as a “tactical withdrawal.”
Vowing that “Ajdabiyah will not fall,” he claimed that rebels were still fighting on the east and west sides of Brega, suggesting that pockets of resistance persisted even if the main force had fled.
He acknowledged that the rebels had no answer to the artillery pushing them back unless foreign governments provided parity in arms. “The truth is the truth,” he said. “Even if it leaves a bad taste in your mouth.”
The White House press secretary, Jay Carney, released a statement responding to a report of a presidential finding authorizing covert support for the rebels. It said: “No decision has been made about providing arms to the opposition or to any group in Libya. We’re not ruling it out or ruling it in.”
Whether more weapons or longer-range weapons would make a difference is an open question, however. Leadership and an appreciation for tactics were noticeably missing in the rebels’ battle lines.
Faced with fire, the rebels seemed not to know how to use the relatively simple weapons they had in any coordinated fashion, and had almost no capacity to communicate with one another mid fight. Throughout the spontaneous retreats on Wednesday, not a single two-way tactical radio was visible.
The rout put civilians to flight as well. By Wednesday evening, Ajdabiyah’s hospital patients were evacuated and a long stream of vehicles packed with forlorn residents filled the road north to Benghazi, the rebel capital.
Abdul Karim Baras, a young man with a crackling bullhorn, tried to buoy their spirits. “God will rescue Libya from this moment!” he shouted repeatedly as he stood on the highway median.
A few of the displaced — many of whom made the same trek a week ago, before the allied airstrikes that reversed the loyalists’ first push — smiled or gave desultory victory signs as they passed through rebels’ disoriented ranks.
There were few signs of renewed airstrikes. But an American military spokesman said coalition warplanes resumed bombing pro-Al Qathafi units on Wednesday, without specifying where. “The operation is continuing and will continue throughout the transition” to NATO command, Capt. Clint Gebke said.
There were 102 airstrikes over a 24-hour period ending at 12 a.m. Eastern time, according to the United States Africa Command. The airstrikes did little to reverse the momentum of the ground battle, which shifted decisively in the early afternoon.
After a brief ground-to-ground rocket or artillery attack on the approaches to Brega, the rebels hastily abandoned their positions, fleeing pell-mell in perhaps 200 cars and trucks, heading east with horns honking and lights flashing. They clogged both lanes of the narrow highway as they raced for Ajdabiyah, recaptured from loyalist troops days ago.
Some rebels said Colonel Al Qathafi’s forces, pushing eastward from Ras Lanuf, were within 10 miles of Brega. As artillery or rockets pursued the fleeing rebels several miles north of the city, the colonel’s forces seemed closer than that.
The retreating column seemed rudderless, a sea of vehicles and fighters armed with infantry weapons and light rockets, but lacking the resolve, training or leadership to stand up to even a modest display of force by Colonel Al Qathafi’s conventional armed forces. They were an unmistakably intimidated lot.
After several minutes of wild driving, some of the rebels tried to regroup, pulling over on the shoulder of the highway between Brega and Ajdabiyah beside an abandoned restaurant and a small mosque.
A man standing on a pickup truck and brandishing an assault rifle led a crowd in chants of “God is great!” Morale appeared to stabilize.
Then a single artillery shell or rocket exploded several hundred yards away, kicking up dust and black smoke. The crunch of the impact made the rebels flinch.
The chanting ceased at once. The rebels scattered, dashing for their vehicles and speeding east anew, their panic both infectious and a display of an absence of command and control.
At one point, mid-afternoon, a government T-72 tank was seen afire half a mile or so off the road, beside another tank that appeared recently abandoned.
The rebels thought a coalition aircraft had stopped a flanking attack. But after the tank erupted in a tremendous flash, curious rebels approaching it determined it had succumbed not to violence but vandalism. Someone, a bearded rebel said, had simply set the tank on fire, causing its ammunition to explode.
The nervous column pushed on, regrouping at last at the gate of Ajdabiyah, where the rebels arrayed their mud-streaked trucks along the road. Some of them began to argue bitterly.
The reversal was almost complete. Last week on the same highway, allied airstrikes pounded loyalists, enabling the rebels to advance toward the Libyan leader’s hometown, Sirte, a symbolic and strategically important objective on the way to Tripoli.
Military analysts said that even after days of airstrikes, loyalist forces had enough resources to defend Colonel Al Qathafi's urban strongholds, including Sirte, where the dense civilian population could preclude air attacks.
As loyalists extend their lines east along the coast toward rebel redoubts, experts said, Colonel Al Qathafi’s forces risk opening themselves to renewed allied strikes.
But rebels also said many loyalists now roamed the battlefield in pickups, making them indistinguishable from rebels when viewed by pilots overhead — a shift in tactics that could render air power less effective.
In Beijing, President Hu Jintao criticized France’s president, Nicolas Sarkozy, meeting there with finance officials, saying the Western air campaign he championed risked killing even more civilians than the attacks it was meant to stop.
Human Rights Watch, based in New York, said Colonel Al Qathafi’s forces had laid antipersonnel and antitank mines. It said about 60 mines had been found in Ajdabiyah after government forces held it from March 17 to Sunday.
“Libya should immediately stop using antipersonnel mines, which most of the world banned years ago,” said Peter Bouckaert, the group’s emergencies director. “Al Qathafi’s forces should ensure that mines of every type that already have been laid are cleared as soon as possible to avoid civilian casualties.”
The authorities in Tripoli had no immediate comment.
C.I.A. Agents in Libya Aid Airstrikes and Meet Rebels
(N.Y. Times) - The Central Intelligence Agency has inserted clandestine operatives into Libya to gather intelligence for military airstrikes and to contact and vet the beleaguered rebels battling Col. Muammar Al Qathafi’s forces, according to American officials.
While President Obama has insisted that no American military ground troops participate in the Libyan campaign, small groups of C.I.A. operatives have been working in Libya for several weeks as part of a shadow force of Westerners that the Obama administration hopes can help bleed Colonel Al Qathafi’s military, the officials said.
In addition to the C.I.A. presence, composed of an unknown number of Americans who had worked at the spy agency’s station in Tripoli and others who arrived more recently, current and former British officials said that dozens of British special forces and MI6 intelligence officers are working inside Libya.
The British operatives have been directing airstrikes from British jets and gathering intelligence about the whereabouts of Libyan government tank columns, artillery pieces and missile installations, the officials said.
American officials hope that similar information gathered by American intelligence officers - including the location of Colonel Al Qathafi’s munitions depots and the clusters of government troops inside towns - might help weaken Libya’s military enough to encourage defections within its ranks.
In addition, the American spies are meeting with rebels to try to fill in gaps in understanding who their leaders are and the allegiances of the groups opposed to Colonel Al Qathafi, said United States government officials, speaking on the condition of anonymity because of the classified nature of the activities.
American officials cautioned, though, that the Western operatives were not directing the actions of rebel forces.
A C.I.A. spokesman declined to comment.
The United States and its allies have been scrambling to gather detailed information on the location and abilities of Libyan infantry and armoured forces that normally takes months of painstaking analysis.
“We didn’t have great data,” Gen. Carter F. Ham, who handed over control of the Libya mission to NATO on Wednesday, said in an e-mail last week. “Libya hasn’t been a country we focused on a lot over past few years.”
Several weeks ago, President Obama signed a secret finding authorizing the C.I.A. to provide arms and other support to Libyan rebels, American officials said Wednesday. But weapons have not yet been shipped into Libya, as Obama administration officials debate the effects of giving them to the rebel groups. The presidential finding was first reported by Reuters.
In a statement released Wednesday evening, Jay Carney, the White House press secretary, declined to comment “on intelligence matters,” but he said that no decision had yet been made to provide arms to the rebels.
Representative Mike Rogers, a Michigan Republican who leads the House Intelligence Committee, said Wednesday that he opposed arming the rebels. “We need to understand more about the opposition before I would support passing out guns and advanced weapons to them,” Mr. Rogers said in a statement.
Because the publicly stated goal of the Libyan campaign is not explicitly to overthrow Colonel Al Qathafi’s government, the clandestine war now going on is significantly different from the Afghan campaign to drive the Taliban from power in 2001.
Back then, American C.I.A. and Special Forces troops worked alongside Afghan militias, armed them and called in airstrikes that paved the rebel advances on strategically important cities like Kabul and Kandahar.
In recent weeks, the American military has been monitoring Libyan troops with U-2 spy planes and a high-altitude Global Hawk drone, as well as a special aircraft, JSTARS, that tracks the movements of large groups of troops. Military officials said that the Air Force also has Predator drones, similar to those now operating in Afghanistan, in reserve.
Air Force RC-135 Rivet Joint eavesdropping planes intercept communications from Libyan commanders and troops and relay that information to the Global Hawk, which zooms in on the location of armoured forces and determines rough coordinates.
The Global Hawk sends the coordinates to analysts at a ground station, who pass the information to command centres for targeting.
The command centre beams the coordinates to an E-3 Sentry Awacs command-and-control plane, which in turn directs warplanes to their targets.
Lt. Gen. David A. Deptula, who recently retired as the Air Force’s top intelligence official, said that Libya’s flat desert terrain and clear weather have allowed warplanes with advanced sensors to hunt Libyan armoured columns with relative ease, day or night, without the need for extensive direction from American troops on the ground.
But if government troops advance into or near cities in along the country’s eastern coast, which so far have been off-limits to coalition aircraft for fear of causing civilian casualties, General Deptula said that ground operatives would be particularly helpful in providing target coordinates or pointing them out to pilots with hand-held laser designators.
The C.I.A. and British intelligence services were intensely focused on Libya eight years ago, before and during the successful effort to get Colonel Al Qathafi to give up his nuclear weapons program.
He agreed to do so in the fall of 2003, and allowed C.I.A. and other American nuclear experts into the country to assess Libya’s equipment and bomb designs and to arrange for their transfer out of the country.
Once the weapons program was eliminated, a former American official said, intelligence agencies shifted their focus away from Libya. But as Colonel Al Qathafi began his recent crackdown on the rebel groups, the American spy agencies have worked to rekindle ties to Libyan informants and to learn more about the country’s military leaders.
A former British government official who is briefed on current operations confirmed media reports that dozens of British Special Forces soldiers, from the elite Special Air Service and Special Boat Service units, are on the ground across Libya.
The British soldiers have been particularly focused on finding the locations of Colonel Al Qathafi’s Russian-made surface-to-air missiles.
A spokesman for Britain’s Ministry of Defence declined to comment, citing a policy not to discuss the operations of British Special Forces.
U.S. public split on Libya
(UPI) - President Obama's speech to the nation did little to shift U.S. public opinion on his handling of the Libyan crisis, a poll released Wednesday indicated.
Only 43 percent of those surveyed by Pulse Opinion Research said the president is doing a good or excellent job on Libya, Rasmussen Reports said. That is up only 2 percentage points from last week after the bombing campaign began, and three points from a poll taken before the United States military was involved in the country.
Only 27 percent of respondents said Libya is vital to U.S. national interests while 48 percent said it is not, up 6 points from last week. Nearly a quarter, 24 percent, said they were undecided.
At 72 percent, Democrats were far more likely to say Obama is doing a good or excellent job. Only 44 percent of Republicans and 43 percent of unaffiliated voters agreed.
The telephone poll of 1,000 likely voters was conducted Monday and Tuesday nights. The margin of error is 3 points.
CIA officers in Libya are aiding rebels, U.S. officials say
(L.A. Times) - CIA officers on the ground in Libya are coordinating with rebels and sharing intelligence, U.S. officials say, but the White House is still mulling whether to provide weapons to those trying to oust Muammar Al Qathafi.
"No decision has been made about providing arms to the opposition or to any group in Libya," White House spokesman Jay Carney said in a statement. "We're not ruling it out or ruling it in."
The White House had no comment on a report by Reuters that said Obama had signed a presidential finding authorizing secret aid to the rebels within the last two or three weeks.
U.S. officials familiar with covert actions noted that a presidential finding can authorize a variety of steps that may or may not ultimately be taken. Members of Congress who would have been briefed on the finding would neither confirm nor deny the Reuters report.
The CIA has been on the ground in rebel-held areas of Libya since shortly after the U.S. Embassy in Tripoli was evacuated, U.S. officials say.
Agency officers are meeting with rebels in an effort to learn more about them, and in some cases providing them with non-lethal assistance. The officials spoke on condition of anonymity because they are not authorized to discuss the matter.
On Monday, Deputy National Security Advisor Denis McDonough told a group of journalists at the White House that "we're looking at … specific non-lethal assistance of the sort that they might find useful."
The CIA officers in Libya are part of a contingent of operatives from Western nations. The public got a hint of the activity March 6, when a group of British special forces officers, and a member of the intelligence service, were detained by rebels and released.
The U.S. is leading an international effort to protect civilians in Libya by enforcing a no-fly zone and bombingAl Qathafi's military forces, but the coalition said it has not been coordinating with the ragtag rebel forces seeking to oust the regime from power.
In recent days, the rebels have faced heavy pressure fromAl Qathafi's forces and have retreated from towns they had seized.
Rep. Norm Dicks (R-Wash.) said officials told lawmakers that bad weather had been hampering allied airstrikes. "It's been hard to give air support to the rebels," he said.
Two key lawmakers came out against arming the rebels.
Rep. Mike Rogers, the Michigan Republican who chairs the House intelligence Committee and who thus far has supported the U.S. intervention, said in a statement that the U.S. doesn't know enough about the Libyan rebels to provide them with weapons.
"We don't have to look very far back in history to find examples of the unintended consequences of passing out advanced weapons to a group of fighters we didn't know as well as we should have," Rogers said. "We need to be very careful before rushing into a decision that could come back to haunt us."
Exclusive: Obama authorizes secret help for Libya rebels
(Reuters) - President Barack Obama has signed a secret order authorizing covert U.S. government support for rebel forces seeking to oust Libyan leader Muammar Al Qathafi, government officials told Reuters on Wednesday.
Obama signed the order, known as a presidential "finding", within the last two or three weeks, according to government sources familiar with the matter.
Such findings are a principal form of presidential directive used to authorize secret operations by the Central Intelligence Agency. This is a necessary legal step before such action can take place but does not mean that it will.
"As is common practice for this and all administrations, I am not going to comment on intelligence matters," White House spokesman Jay Carney said in a statement. "I will reiterate what the president said yesterday - no decision has been made about providing arms to the opposition or to any group in Libya."
The CIA, which declined comment on the Obama authorization, has inserted small groups of clandestine operatives to gather intelligence for air strikes as part of a shadow force of Westerners that the United States hopes can help bleed Al Qathafi's military, The New York Times reported, citing unnamed American officials.
In addition to the CIA operatives, dozens of British special forces and MI6 intelligence officers are also working in Libya, the newspaper said.
News that Obama had given the authorization surfaced as the President and other U.S. and allied officials spoke openly about the possibility of sending arms supplies to Al Qathafi's opponents, who are fighting better-equipped government forces.
The United States is part of a coalition, with NATO members and some Arab states, which is conducting air strikes on Libyan government forces under a U.N. mandate aimed at protecting civilians opposing Al Qathafi.
Interviews by U.S. networks on Tuesday, Obama said the objective was for Al Qathafi to "ultimately step down" from power. He spoke of applying "steady pressure, not only militarily but also through these other means" to force Al Qathafi out.
Obama said the U.S. had not ruled out providing military hardware to rebels. "It's fair to say that if we wanted to get weapons into Libya, we probably could.
"We're looking at all our options at this point," he told ABC News anchor Diane Sawyer.
In Washington, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton insisted to reporters that no decision had yet been taken.
U.S. officials monitoring events in Libya say neither Al Qathafi's forces nor the rebels, who have asked the West for heavy weapons, now appear able to make decisive gains.
While U.S. and allied airstrikes have seriously damaged Al Qathafi's military forces and disrupted his chain of command, officials say, rebel forces remain disorganized and unable to take full advantage of western military support.
SPECIFIC OPERATIONS
People familiar with U.S. intelligence procedures said that Presidential covert action "findings" are normally crafted to provide broad authorization for a range of potential U.S. government actions to support a particular covert objective.
In order for specific operations to be carried out under the provisions of such a broad authorization - for example the delivery of cash or weapons to anti-Al Qathafi forces - the White House also would have to give additional "permission" allowing such activities to proceed.
Former officials say these follow-up authorisations are known in the intelligence world as "'Mother may I' findings."
In 2009 Obama gave a similar authorisation for the expansion of covert U.S. counter-terrorism actions by the CIA in Yemen. The White House does not normally confirm such orders have been issued.
Because U.S. and allied intelligence agencies still have many questions about the identities and leadership of anti-Al Qathafi forces, any covert U.S. activities are likely to proceed cautiously until more information about the rebels can be collected and analysed, officials said.
"The whole issue on (providing rebels with) training and equipment requires knowing who the rebels are," said Bruce Riedel, a former senior CIA Middle East expert who has advised the Obama White House.
Riedel said that helping the rebels to organize themselves and training them how use weapons effectively would be more urgent then shipping them arms.
ARMS EMBARGO
Sending in weapons would arguably violate an arms embargo on Libya by the U.N. Security Council imposed on February 26, although British, U.S. and French officials have suggested there may be a loophole.
Getting a waiver would require the agreement of all 15 council members, which is unlikely at this stage. Diplomats say any countries that decided to arm the rebels would be unlikely to seek formal council approval.
An article in early March on the website of the Voice of America, the U.S. government's broadcasting service, speculated on possible secret operations in Libya and defined a covert action as "any U.S. government effort to change the economic, military, or political situation overseas in a hidden way."
The article, by VOA intelligence correspondent Gary Thomas, said covert action "can encompass many things, including propaganda, covert funding, electoral manipulation, arming and training insurgents, and even encouraging a coup."
U.S. officials also have said that Saudi Arabia and Qatar, whose leaders despise Al Qathafi, have indicated a willingness to supply Libyan rebels with weapons.
Members of Congress have expressed anxiety about U.S. government activities in Libya. Some have recalled that weapons provided by the U.S. and Saudis to mujahideen fighting Soviet occupation forces in Afghanistan in the 1980s later ended up in the hands of anti-American militants.
There are fears that the same thing could happen in Libya unless the U.S. is sure who it is dealing with. The chairman of the House intelligence committee, Rep. Mike Rogers, said on Wednesday he opposed supplying arms to the Libyan rebels fighting Al Qathafi "at this time."
Rebel limitations pose quandary for West in Libya
(Reuters) - The swings in fortune in the Libyan conflict that have seen dramatic rebel advances from the east, followed by equally rapid retreats, in part reflect the country's wide-open desert terrain.
It is not without precedent: rapid advances by British, German and Italian forces in Libya during World War Two also resulted in over-extended supply lines, leaving them vulnerable to counter-attack.
But for the present-day Western military intervention in Libya, this is only part of the problem.
The international coalition appears divided over the critical issue of whether to arm rebel fighters.
U.S. officials told Reuters on Wednesday President Barack Obama had signed a secret order authorizing covert U.S. government support for rebel forces. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said no decision to provide it had yet been taken.
Such a move could mark the beginning of deeper involvement in another conflict in the Arab world - and some doubt it would work.
"The rebels really haven't shown so far that they are a competent fighting force," said Marko Papic of political risk consultancy Stratfor. "Their military capacity is extremely low and this explains this back and forth going on.
"While they do have some experienced members among them, these seem mostly to spend their time trying to stay alive from the gunfire of the less experienced members," he said.
"So it's not clear that giving the rebels complex weapons will achieve anything - for a start, it's not clear they would know how to use them."
RAPID REVERSAL
Quick rebel gains at the start of their uprising in February suggested leader Muammar Al Qathafi would quickly be toppled. That thinking was spurred again when Western powers began air strikes 11 days ago, allowing rebels to regain ground.
But subsequent reverses have exposed the rebels' military limitations and have also shown Al Qathafi and his forces to be more resilient and tactically adept than expected, leaving the West in a quandary.
A conference of 40 governments and international bodies in London on Tuesday agreed to press a NATO-led aerial bombardment until Al Qathafi complies with a U.N. resolution to end violence against civilians.
It also set up a contact group of 20 countries and organizations, including Arab states, the African Union and the Arab League, to coordinate international support for an orderly transition to democracy.
But it remains far from clear how this can be achieved.
Barak Seener, a Middle East expert at London's Royal United Services Institute, said the rebels should be given military training and "game changing" weapons such as anti-tank and anti-aircraft systems.
"It is clear that Al Qathafi will not leave his position as a result of any negotiations, or because President Obama declares that he must go," he said.
Seener also said Western policy should go beyond the existing U.N. mandate to protect civilians, instead allowing the "targeting and decapitation of the Al Qathafi regime."
U.S. President Barack Obama said on Tuesday he had agreed to provide communications equipment, medical supplies and potentially transportation aid to the rebels, but he has yet to decide whether to provide military hardware.
"I'm not ruling it in, I'm not ruling it out," he told NBC while on a trip to New York.
REBELS' DEMANDS
Analysts said that while the British also appeared open to the idea of arming the rebels, France was more cautious, with its Foreign Minster Alain Juppe making clear a new U.N. resolution would be required -- something unlikely to get necessary Russian or Chinese support.
NATO Secretary-General Anders Fogh Rasmussen, having to maintain a consensus among 28 allies, said NATO had no mandate to arm the rebels.
Rebels returning from the frontline have no doubts.
They say they have been overwhelmed by Al Qathafi's superior firepower and need heavier weapons than their Kalashnikov rifles, rocket-propelled grenades, truck-mounted machineguns and light rockets.
Rebel spokesmen say they particularly need anti-tank missiles, more ammunition and communications equipment.
Training is clearly a pressing need, with most fighters lacking tactical experience and oblivious to basic requirements such as reconnaissance or protection for their flanks -- something that has caught them out in recent days.
Some fighters say they have had a day or two of training from military defectors, but most have not. They would have more ammunition if they did not keep firing into the air.
While some fighters say they do have officers, they are hard to detect and do not seem able to keep much discipline.
Decisions are often made after heated arguments or by following whoever shouts loudest and despite the courage of some, the tendency is to flee in disarray when the Al Qathafi forces start firing in a sustained way.
In some cases supply lines have been so over-stretched or are non-existent that advancing rebels have had to scoop petrol from abandoned filling stations using plastic bottles attached to string as they have no other fuel supplies.
Daniel Keohane of the Institute for Security Studies said that while there were clearly divisions among Western governments over how to proceed, he would be surprised if Western special forces were not already trying to advise the rebels on how to organize themselves.
However, arming them covertly was a different proposition and politically difficult.
"This has to be seen as a Libya victory, not a coalition victory," he said. "I find it hard to see how the coalition can agree politically to arming the rebels, but without arms I can't see how the rebels can win."
One possible option would be for Arab states such as Saudi Arabia, Qatar or Egypt to provide arms, Keohane said.
"That would be a politically more acceptable route -- it would be Arabs helping Arabs. Even if it happens to be Western technology, it would be much more politically acceptable than the Americans directly doing this," he said.
Brigadier Ben Barry of the International Institute for Strategic Studies said the rebels were so disorganised that providing them with better weapons would make little difference in the short term.
"What might have greater effect is deployment of teams of trainers and advisers to assist the rebels in better co-ordinating their efforts. Capability could be provided by Special Forces, which should ideally be from Muslim and Arab states," he said.
Al Qathafi offensive pushes back rebels
(Irish Times)-Libyan rebels fled in headlong retreat from the superior arms and tactics of Muammar Al Qathafi's troops today, exposing the insurgents' weakness without Western air strikes to tip the scales in their favour.
It had taken more than five days of allied bombardment to destroy government tanks and artillery in the strategic town of Ajdabiyah before rebels rushed in and chased Col Al Qathafi's troops 300km west in a two-day dash along the coast.
Two days later the rebels have been pushed back to close to where they started.
The Libyan army first ambushed the chaotic caravan of volunteers, supporters and bystanders outside Col Al Qathafi's hometown of Sirte, then outflanked them through the desert, a manoeuvre requiring the sort of discipline the rag-tag rebels lack.
The towns of Nawfaliyah, Bin Jawad and Ras Lanuf fell in quick succession to the lightning government counter-strike.
Rebel spokesman Colonel Ahmad Bani said fighting was going on at Brega, the next town east along the narrow coastal strip that has been the theatre of most of the fighting. But many rebels had pulled back further to the strategic town of Ajdabiyah and regrouped.
"We thought it better to make a tactical withdrawal until we can think of better tactics and a strategy to face this force," said Bani, adding: "One of the defence points will be Ajdabiyah, not the only one."
He appealed for more allied air strikes and heavier weapons. "We are seeking weapons that will be able to destroy the heavy weapons they are using against us such as tanks and artillery."
Dozens of rebel pick-up trucks mounted with machineguns milled around the western gate of Ajdabiyah. Confusion reigned.
Asked what was happening, one rebel said: "We don't know. They say there may be a group of Al Qathafi's men coming from the south." That would suggest another big flanking move through the endless desert which pins the coast road to the sea.
Cars carrying families and their belongings streamed out of Ajdabiyah towards the rebel stronghold of Benghazi.
Libya's state news agency said thousands of Libyans carrying olive branches had joined a peace march towards Benghazi.
In town after town, Col Al Qathafi force's have unleashed a fierce bombardment from tanks, artillery and truck-launched Grad rockets which has usually forced rebels to swiftly flee.
"These are our weapons," said rebel fighter Mohammed, pointing to his assault rifle. "We can't fight Grads with them," he said earlier before joining the rush away from the front.
Without Western air strikes, the rebels seem unable to make advances or even hold their positions against Col Al Qathafi's armour. Warplanes flew over the battlefield for a time on Wednesday, but there was no evidence of any bombardment of government forces.
Rebel forces lack training, discipline and leadership. There are many different groups of volunteers and decisions are often made only after heated arguments.
When they advance it is often without proper reconnaissance or protection for their flanks. Their courage and enthusiasm notwithstanding, the insurgents tend to flee in disarray whenever Col Al Qathafi forces start sustained firing.
"Whether we advance 50km, or retreat 50km ... it's a big country. They will go back the next day," rebel spokesman Mustafa Gheriani told reporters in the opposition stronghold of Benghazi.
"This revolution really is only five weeks old. On the political front it is very organised," he said. "Normally it takes six months to train a soldier ... We are talking about citizens who picked up guns to protect their homes."
A conference of 40 governments and international bodies agreed Tuesday to press on with a Nato-led aerial bombardment of Libyan forces until Col Al Qathafi complied with a UN resolution to end violence against civilians.
The Pentagon said yesterday 115 strike sorties had been flown against Col Al Qathafi's forces in the previous 24 hours, and 22 Tomahawk cruise missiles had been fired. Britain said two of its Tornado jets had attacked a government armoured vehicle and two artillery pieces outside the besieged western city of Misurata.
Libya's official Jana news agency said air strikes by forces of "the crusader colonial aggression" hit residential areas in the town of Garyan, about 100km south of Tripoli, yesterday. It said several civilian buildings were destroyed and some people wounded.
UN Security Council Resolution 1973 sanctions air power to protect Libyan civilians, not to provide close air support to rebel forces. That would also require troops on the ground to guide in the bombs. Without forward air controllers, intervening from the air in such a fluid battle space is fraught with risks.
Air strikes then may not be enough to stop the Libyan desert civil war turning into a stalemate.
The United States, France and Britain have raised the possibility of arming the rebels, though they all stressed no decision had yet been taken. "I'm not ruling it in, I'm not ruling it out," US president Barack Obama told NBC.
Libya's foreign ministry said it would be tantamount to aiding terrorists.
Many of the amateur army of teachers, lawyers, engineers, students and the unemployed appear not to know how to properly use even the weapons they already have.
Mr Obama said he had already agreed to provide communications equipment, medical supplies and potentially transport to the Libyan opposition, but no military hardware.
Russia has already accused the allies of overstepping their UN remit by carrying out strikes on Col Al Qathafi's ground forces and today warned the West against arming the rebels.
Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov said it was obvious Libya was "ripe for reforms", but Libyans themselves must decide without influence from outside.
"I find it hard to see how the coalition can agree politically to arming the rebels, but without arms I can't see how the rebels can win," said Daniel Keohane of the Institute for Security Studies.
Aid agencies are increasingly worried about a lack of food and medicines, especially in towns such as Misurata where a siege by Col Al Qathafi's forces deprives them of access.
Government troops killed 18 civilians in Misurata yesterday, a rebel spokesman in the city said, and soldiers are still shelling and fighting skirmishes with rebels.
"There are skirmishes today. Tanks bombard the city every now and then," he said. "Snipers are still positioned in Tripoli Street (in the centre of Misurata)."
But a blockade of Misurata's Mediterranean port by pro-Al Qathafi forces has now ended, allowing two ships to deliver humanitarian aid and evacuate people wounded in the fighting.
Libyan rebels fall back as pro-Al Qathafi troops gain ground
(Deutche Welle) - Rebel fighters flee from the heavy firepower of Al Qathafi's troops, highlighting their weakness without western airstrikes to tip the scales in their favor. Western nations meanwhile continue to debate arming rebel forces.
Forces loyal to Muammar Al Qathafi bombarded rebels with rockets and artillery on Wednesday, causing them to retreat east and cede oil towns as the Libyan leader's troops advanced. Rebels said Al Qathafi's forces, which have overrun Es Sider and Ras Lanuf, were headed to another oil town, Brega.
News agencies reported that many rebels in pick-up trucks and other vehicles had pulled out of Brega and were moving on towards the main city of Ajdabiyah. Rebel fighters said Al Qathafi's troops swept through Ras Lanuf, strategically important because of its oil refinery, blazing away with tanks and heavy artillery fire soon after dawn.
The rebels are calling for coalition airstrikes against Al Qathafi's forces.
"We want two things: that the planes drop bombs on Al Qathafi's tanks and heavy artillery, and that they (the coalition forces) give us weapons so we can fight," rebel fighter Yunes Abdelghaim told AFP.
A spokesman for the rebel Transitional National Council, Mustafa Ghuriani, told reporters in Benghazi that "it would be naive to think we are not arming ourselves" to match the weaponry deployed by Al Qathafi loyalists.
But he declined to confirm or deny that France and the United States were offering to supply arms, saying only that unspecified "friendly nations" were backing the rebels.
(Bildunterschrift: Großansicht des Bildes mit der Bildunterschrift) - Cameron welcomed Hillary Clinton to the Libya conference on Tuesday
A heated debate erupted in the British parliament on Wednesday over possible arms supplies to rebel forces in Libya.
British Prime Minister David Cameron refused to rule out arming the rebels after France's Foreign Minister Alain Juppe said at the London conference on Libya the previous day that France is prepared to hold discussions on the issue.
"We do not rule it out but we have not taken the decision to do so," Cameron told parliament after he was asked what Britain's policy was on arming the rebels, given the existence of a United Nations arms embargo on Libya.
However, senior Liberal Democrat Menzies Campbell said the legal position on arms sales was "by no means clear" and the political consequences of supplying the rebels with weapons were "difficult to predict."
Veteran left-wing Labour parliamentarian Denis Skinner urged Cameron not to repeat the "errors" of Afghanistan by arming rebel groups which were later found to have been infiltrated by al Qaeda and other terrorist organizations.
Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said Moscow believed that foreign powers did not have the right to arm the rebels under the mandate approved by the UN Security Council.
Belgium, too, voiced its opposition to arming Libya's rebels, warning that the move could alienate Arab nations.
Foreign Minister Steven Vanackere, whose country has deployed fighter jets as part of a NATO-led campaign to protect Libyan civilians, said providing weapons to the insurgents would be "a step too far."
"This would cost us the support of the Arab world," Vanackere said.
US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said that, although UN sanctions prohibit the delivery of arms to Libya, the ban no longer applies. Previously, President Barack Obama had said he did not rule out arming the rebels.
"I'm not ruling it out. But I'm also not ruling it in," Obama said.
Morgan Strong
Contributing Editor-New York |
