By one understanding of the war against Moammar Gadhafi, it’s practically time to unfurl the Mission Accomplished banner. But the U.S.-led coalition’s attacks against the Libyan dictator’s forces are only increasing.
In a briefing for Pentagon reporters on Tuesday afternoon, Adm. Samuel Locklear, who’s directing Operation Odyssey Dawn from the U.S.S. Mount Whitney in the Mediterranean, said the no-fly zone that undergirds the effort is in effect. Gadhafi’s air fleet is grounded, thanks to a relentless pounding by cruise missiles, bombers and fighter jets. “We have not seen any significant movement of those [air] forces,” Locklear said.
But attacks are on the rise. Locklear’s boss, Gen. Carter Ham, said on Monday that allied aircraft ratcheted their sorties up to nearly 80 from Sunday’s total of 60. And “well over half” of those were flown by non-U.S. aircraft, as the U.S. looks to dial back its combat role in Libya.
Even before the gung-ho French take on a bigger role in Libya, there’s evidence on the ground that the coalition Locklear commands is going, increasingly, on offense. Like his boss and President Obama, Locklear defined his mission as a limited one. But he said he was “considering all options” to respond to Gadhafi’s “attacks against civilians in Misurata,” a city in Libya’s west that Obama demanded Gadhafi abandon. And he’s keeping an eye on Gadhafi’s “fairly significant land force,” especially as elite units fan out from Tripoli to reestablish the regime’s control.
And there are even more targets popping up that don’t have to do with keeping Gadhafi grounded. Airstrikes knocked out one of Gadhafi’s naval facilities in eastern Libya, for instance. That probably didn’t support Gadhafi’s air fleet, as a Reuters reporter saw a bunch of smashed Russian-made trucks inside. And there’s no indication that the facility was menacing civilians, the other condition within the U.N. Security Council Resolution to authorize force.
One simple explanation for the expansion in targeting: keeping Gadhafi out of the skies won’t knock him out of power, which Obama insists is still U.S. policy. Obama, Ham and Locklear insist their military mission can still be met with Gadhafi in office. That’s less of a problem for the French, who want to assume a leading role in the war. “Everybody clearly has in mind the secondary aim of Colonel Gaddafi’s departure,” a top aide to President Nicholas Sarkozy said on Monday.
In Brussels, NATO managed to agree on enforcing the arms embargo against Gadhafi, but it hasn’t come to a consensus on taking over the broader mission from either Locklear or Ham or the U.S. overall — something the Pentagon has said from the start of the war that it expects within “days.” That’s led France to seek work-arounds allowing a French-led coalition to press the attack. Reportedly, it wants a “political steering committee outside NATO” to run the war, which would have the benefit of adding the Arab League under its banner, an organization wary of working under NATO.
Locklear said on Tuesday that he hasn’t yet worked out how he’ll work with the NATO mission enforcing the arms embargo. And he danced around the question of whether he’s stepping up strikes on ground forces. But there’s little doubt that the war is set to intensify, even if the U.S. role falls to a supporting one.
“As the capabilities of the coalition grow,” Locklear said, “we’ll be able to provide more support, more missions to what you would call ground forces [and] what I would call time-sensitive targeting, where we’re looking at the battlespace as it changes, looking at the disposition of Gadhafi’s forces that are not complying with the U.N. Security Council resolution and we’ll be able to have more of an effect, because we have those. That’s how I would characterize the coming hours and days.”
Photo: Flickr/AlJazeeraEnglish
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