Patrick Cockburn: The shady men backed by the West to displace Gaddafi

World View: We seem to have learnt little from recent history. Trying to impose a no-fly zone in Libya looks like a mistake and the rebels’ credentials to rule are thin

Sunday, 3 April 2011
Originally at The Independent (U.K.)

Rebel soldiers at a checkpoint near Brega: many are untrained gunmen in pick-up trucks

IN  THE RESTAURANT of the Amal Africa hotel in Ajdabiya south of Benghazi, waiters have started to ask journalists to pay their bills before they eat. This urgency on the part of the hotel management reflects their bitter experience seeing journalists – their only customers – abandon meals half-eaten and leave, bills unpaid, because of a sudden and unexpected advance by the pro-Gaddafi forces.

Since yesterday, rebel fighters without training or weapons, together with the foreign media, are being sternly forbidden from driving to the frontline. It must have become obvious to the rebel leaders in Benghazi that television pictures of their forces – essentially untrained gunmen in their pick-ups looking like extras from a Mad Max film – were damaging the credibility of the rebel cause in Europe and the US.

But the new military leadership, which Britain, France and to a decreasing extent the US, will be supporting, inspires even less confidence than their men. The careers of several make them sound like characters out of the more sinister Graham Greene novels. They include men such as Colonel Khalifa Haftar, former commander of the Libyan army in Chad who was captured and changed sides in 1988, setting up the anti-Gaddafi Libyan National Army reportedly with CIA and Saudi backing. For the last 20 years, he has been living quietly in Virginia before returning to Benghazi to lead the fight against Gaddafi.

The Libyan militiamen look like a rabble even by the lowly standards of militias in Lebanon, Iraq and Afghanistan. They could only be effective if they were given enough training to act with foreign special forces calling in tactical air strikes every time they face an obstacle. This is what happened in Afghanistan in 2001 and northern Iraq in 2003.

Even well-organised militias are dangerous to do business with because they are prone to paranoia, believing they have been sniped at or spied on by some innocent civilian. I remember, during a war between Druze and Christians south of Beirut in 1983, trying to persuade a Druze fighter that a toasting fork he had found in a house was not specially designed to out the eyes of Druze prisoners. So strong were his suspicions that he had been planning to shoot the Christian householders.

Life in Libya always seems to have a farcical but dangerous element to it. The first time I went in the early 1980s was to see the Libyan army withdraw from Chad. Somewhere in the southern desert, the vehicle I was in ran out of petrol in the middle of a minefield where we were stuck for hours. Later I was taken to see a model farm in an oasis which turned out to be abandoned. The only inhabitants were little green frogs hopping happily about amid the broken pipes and water-logged palm trees.

The mistake in Libya was ever to become involved in trying to impose a no-fly zone. This was only going to have an effect if it turned into a no-drive zone, and this works best when the enemy is unwary enough to drive around in tanks and armoured vehicles and rely on heavy artillery that can be destroyed from the air.

If foreign military force was to be used to save the people of Benghazi from massacre, it would have been better to impose a ceasefire from the beginning. This would have to be policed by foreign forces, but it was and is an achievable aim. It is politically more neutral and avoids charges of reborn imperialism. It has not happened because the not-so-covert aim from the start was to get rid of Gaddafi.

PATRICK COCKBURN is a well-known international correspondent.