West Ponders Another Libya Intervention As Islamic State gains ground, Europe and U.S. prepare for military action By Yaroslav Trofimov
http://www.wsj.com/articles/west-ponders-another-libya-intervention-1454606312
With Islamic State gaining ground in Libya, another Western intervention there looks increasingly likely. The key question is whether it will happen at the request of a Libyan unity government, once rival factions endorse it, or if the West will be compelled to go to war first.
The U.S. and other Western countries helped topple Moammar Gadhafi in 2011 but then turned their attention elsewhere.
By 2014, the country fell into a civil war between an Islamist-led administration in Tripoli and an internationally recognized government based in the eastern city of Tobruk.
Local affiliates of Islamic State took advantage of that division to grab the coastal city of Sirte, Gadhafi’s hometown, last year. They later seized some other areas and inched closer to critical oil fields, damaging vital infrastructure.
With lawless Libya also serving as a springboard for migrants to Europe, European nations—particularly Italy and France, but also the U.K.—have long pushed for a stronger effort to stabilize the country. The U.S., too, has come to view continuing mayhem in Libya as a threat.
“The last thing in the world you want is a false caliphate with access to billions of dollars in oil revenue,” Secretary of State John Kerry said about Libya at a meeting of the coalition against Islamic State in Rome this week.
The preferred scenario for any intervention, senior Western officials say, is to be invited by a widely recognized government that would unite most Libyans against the threat of Islamic State, also called ISIS or Daesh. But, some say, the West may have to go it alone if the situation deteriorates dramatically on the ground.
The United Nations has tried to cajole the two rival administrations and their allied militias into a unity government for more than a year. The task was complicated by a proxy battle between Turkey and Qatar on one side, supporting the Islamists in Tripoli, and Egypt and the United Arab Emirates on the other backing the more secular regime in Tobruk.
“ISIS is prospering because the state has been destabilized,” said Karim Mezran, Libya expert at the Atlantic Council in Washington. “It is necessary to resolve the problem of Libya before tackling ISIS, and not the other way around.”
A U.N.-brokered government of national accord was announced in January, but the deal has run into opposition from some factions. One major area of disagreement is the future of Gen. Khalifa Haftar, the strongman of the Tobruk administration.
Resolving these differences and empowering the new government may take months—and even then it isn’t certain that such a government would actually invite Western soldiers.
“The West is going to push the unity government pretty hard to acquiesce to the extension of the anti-ISIS coalition to Libya,” said Lydia Sizer, North Africa analyst at the Delma Institute think tank in Abu Dhabi, and a former State Department official dealing with Libya.
“It could be the case that the Libyans will not accept anything. But the more ISIS poses a threat to the oil, and the more Libya faces the pressure of economic collapse, the more they will have an incentive to work with the West to overcome this challenge.”
If a Libyan government ends up inviting foreign troops, Italy, France, the U.K. and the U.S. are likely to consider creating a force that would back Libyan units in operations against Islamic State, diplomats say. These countries have worked for months on contingency planning and the U.S. already sent a small Special Operations team into Libya.
Richard Dalton, an associate fellow at the Royal Institute of International Affairs and a former U.K. ambassador to Libya, estimated the international force would need at least 10,000 troops to be effective. Islamic State, he pointed out, operates out of at least four locations in Libya that would have to be tackled simultaneously.
ENLARGE “There will be a great many fronts,” Mr. Dalton said. “I would not think it would make much sense to deal with them sequentially. You know how easy it is to move across Libya. The mercury would slip from the first area where you put pressure to reinforce the other three, and that doesn’t seem to me to be a very sensible military strategy.”
Yet, as the political talks drag on, the patience of some European nations is wearing thin. Those with Mediterranean shores, in particular, fear that with the arrival of warmer weather hundreds of thousands of African migrants would once again sail from Libya to Europe.
“We can’t imagine the spring going by with the Libyan situation still stalled,” Italy’s Defense Minister Roberta Pinotti said in an interview with Corriere della Sera newspaper last week, adding that Italy has already moved warplanes to the southern base of Trapani in case military action is needed.
While European and U.S. officials recognize the risks of unilateral action, this doesn’t mean that the West wouldn’t go to war anyway. Islamic State’s Libyan branch, after all, has already threatened to attack Rome. If it succeeds, in Rome or another European city, pressure to act would be hard to resist.
“A mandate from a legitimate government is important, but for European countries it is not an absolute requirement,” said Bruno Tertrais, senior research fellow at the Foundation for Strategic Research in Paris and a former French Defense Ministry adviser. “If there is a rapid Daesh advance, especially into oil-producing areas, or a terrorist attack prepared in Libya, they will not wait for such a mandate.”
Write to Yaroslav Trofimov at yaroslav.trofimov@wsj.com
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