By STEVEN LEE MYERS and JUDY DEMPSEY
“As our mission continues, maintaining our resolve and unity only grows more important,” Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton said, responding to the unusually public divisions among NATO leaders over a military operation now nearly a month old. “Qaddafi is testing our determination.”
As if to prove the point, Libya’s state television showed Colonel Qaddafi riding through the capital, Tripoli, in an open-top sport utility vehicle. Presumably he did so in defiance of new NATO strikes there on Thursday, although NATO officials have said repeatedly that they are only defending civilians, and that the Libyan leader is not a target.
In an opinion article published Friday in The International Herald Tribune, three of the coalition’s senior leaders — President Obama, Prime Minister David Cameron of Britain and President Nicolas Sarkozy of France — said their nations were “united on what needs to happen” to end the turmoil in Libya.
NATO will continue to protect civilians, they wrote. And while the coalition’s mandate does not include removing Colonel Qaddafi by force, they said, “It is impossible to imagine a future for Libya with Qaddafi in power.”
The leaders said in the article, which also appeared in The Times of London and Le Figaro, that as long as Colonel Qaddafi was in power, “NATO must maintain its operations so that civilians remain protected and the pressure on the regime builds.”
NATO leaders meeting in Berlin also said they were united in forcing Libya’s military to end its assaults on civilians in rebellious cities — and ultimately in forcing Colonel Qaddafi to leave power — but rifts remained over how to accomplish those goals.
Only 14 of the alliance’s 28 members are actively participating in the operation — joined by other nations like Qatar, the United Arab Emirates and Sweden — and only 6 of those are striking targets on the ground in Libya. That has prompted France and Britain in particular to call for an intensification of the war effort by more allies.
“Britain is bearing the brunt” of the airstrikes, a diplomat said on Thursday, speaking on condition of anonymity, to discuss internal debates. “We need nations to contribute.”
NATO officials and commanders, joined by the United States, insisted that the coalition was already doing everything it could within the United Nations mandate to halt attacks by Colonel Qaddafi’s forces. Those attacks continued even as the ministers met, including most fiercely in Misurata, where, Mrs. Clinton said, the alliance was “especially concerned about the atrocities unfolding.”
“As far as NATO is concerned, as far as the U.S. is concerned, we have the forces we need,” a senior official traveling with Mrs. Clinton said. “We are striking the targets that are available.”
The official said that the operation’s commanders, led by Lt. Gen. Charles Bouchard of Canada, could ask for additional aircraft or different types of aircraft as they needed them. “That’s not what they are doing,” the official said, “and so far they seem to be satisfied with the pace of the operation, and we’re satisfied with the pace and the scope of the operation.”
After two hours of private meetings, however, NATO’s secretary general, Anders Fogh Rasmussen, said he was optimistic that more allies who had not already contributed forces would “step up to the plate,” though he did not receive any specific pledges.
He said that the senior NATO military commander, Adm. James G. Stavridis, told ministers that more highly sophisticated ground attack aircraft were needed to strike Libyan military equipment deliberately operating in heavily populated areas.
An American military official said that as few as eight additional ground-attack planes would help relieve the growing strains placed on the allied pilots who are flying strike missions around the clock, as well as the ground crews that are supporting the missions. But prodding the allies to provide even that relatively small number of additional planes faces stiff political opposition in many of the 14 countries participating in the NATO-led mission, allied diplomats said.
The meeting in Berlin was the latest in a series of far-flung diplomatic efforts involving a disparate coalition of countries trying to break what has emerged as a stalemate on the ground, with Colonel Qaddafi’s forces controlling almost all of the western part of the country and rebels the east.
Thursday’s meeting here came a day after representatives of 20 countries involved met in Qatar’s capital, Doha, and issued the clearest statement yet that the conflict would end only with a political transition that replaced Colonel Qaddafi. NATO “strongly endorsed” that goal in a statement after the meeting.
In Cairo, the United Nations secretary general, Ban Ki-moon, held a separate meeting with leaders of the European Union, the Arab League and the African Union.
The leaders in Qatar — including many NATO ministers also in Berlin — pledged to consider additional ways to support the newly formed opposition council in Libya, including transferring Colonel Qaddafi’s frozen assets and supplying rebel fighters with arms. The latter has also divided NATO, which continues to enforce an arms embargo ordered by the United Nations Security Council.
While Italy’s foreign minister said providing weapons to what are ill-quipped, poorly organized rebellious forces was “on the table,” the idea was not considered in NATO’s deliberations on Thursday, two American officials said.
“There are still a number of different views both on what the legality is of arming the rebels and importantly of the question of whether this is a wise policy move,” one of them said.
NATO’s response to the conflict in Libya is widely seen as a significant test of the Europeans’ ability to take responsibility for a crisis on the Continent’s southern flank. Even though the United States continues to provide significant military might to the operation, and continues to strike Libya’s air defenses, the alliance has taken command and control of the operation — so far, as the divisions show, with mixed results.
While much of the focus is on Libya, NATO also remains deeply involved in the war in Afghanistan. Mr. Rasmussen said that one was not affecting the other.
Mrs. Clinton, however, warned that the alliance needed to maintain military and political pressure on the Taliban forces fighting the weak government of President Hamid Karzai.
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