By Michael Birnbaum and Ernesto Londono, Published: June 26
NAPLES — As NATO bombs began to rain on Libya in March, President Obama and other Western leaders assured their war-weary publics that the campaign to protect civilians from Moammar Gaddafi’s crackdown would be over within weeks.
Now the coalition’s springtime incursion has stretched to summer, and Gaddafi’s resilience has startled the leaders who committed to the operation. Calls are growing to end it even as NATO pleads for more time.
As the campaign enters its fourth month, NATO officials insist that it is succeeding and that Gaddafi will become the Arab Spring’s third casualty. But that will happen, they say, only in a slow and steady advance on the capital as his troops run out of supplies, not in a flash of pyrotechnics that puts him out of power in an instant.
“The noose is tightening around him, and there’s very few places for him to go,” Gen. Charles Bouchard, the Canadian head of the operations, said Saturday in an interview at his Naples headquarters. But, he added, “You don’t stay in power for 41 years and expect that he’s going to leave at the first sign of stresses.”
Indications of a fraying commitment to the mission were evident in a House vote Friday in which an unusual coalition of anti-war Democrats and tea party Republicans joined to reject a measure to authorize U.S. involvement in the Libya operation, even as they declined to strip part of its funding. In Britain, a top commander said last week that if the campaign goes on past September, his forces could crack under the strain. On Wednesday, Italy’s foreign minister called for an immediate end to hostilities.
NATO has flown more than 4,700 strike sorties, pummeling bunkers, depots and vehicles and reducing much of Gaddafi’s army to ruins. It watches his military movements with drones that can remain in the sky for days.
Still, Gaddafi holds on, continuing to cause casualties in the rebel-held city of Misurata, in the mountain towns south of Tripoli and along the front line in the east.
Bouchard said NATO’s extreme caution about civilian deaths — in one case scuttling days of planning because a soccer game was being played next to a target — has slowed the campaign. The upshot, he said, is that there has been only one instance in which NATO thinks it may have caused civilian casualties, and few opportunities for the Libyan government to present evidence of more.
Both sides say that credible allegations of civilian deaths probably are the best weapon Libya can use against NATO. The nervousness was palpable at NATO’s operational headquarters on Friday before major strikes on Brega, a now-depopulated city near the main front line that NATO says government troops have been using as a base.
NATO later said it hit seven command-and-control nodes in the city, along with 28 other targets. Libyan officials said Saturday that the strikes killed 15 civilians, but they did not present evidence to support that number and in the past have exaggerated when saying that civilians were killed in strikes.
Measures that could speed Gaddafi’s departure, such as cutting overland fuel lines to Tripoli, aren’t being carried out because the United Nations mandate does not allow targeting civilian infrastructure, Bouchard said, adding that he is cautious about potentially harming civilians in the process.
One major problem with the campaign has been unrealistic expectations from the outset, analysts said.
“With any use of air power comes this public expectation that airplanes will prove our resolve, that we’ll be able to deter the enemy, that they can’t possibly win and will capitulate,” said Tami Davis Biddle, a military historian at the U.S. Army War College. “But this idea that aerial bombardment equals capitulation is a really flawed equation.”
Rebels have blamed NATO for their inability to make meaningful headway in their advance toward Tripoli, although they also say they are slowly smuggling weapons into the capital to undermine it from within. Rebel leaders based in the east say their grip on the besieged port city of Misurata — the bloodiest and arguably most important front line in the conflict — is fraying. Rebels took control of the city in late April, despite intense shelling and artillery attacks by forces loyal to Gaddafi, but they have been unable to push westward.
Rebel spokesman Mohamed Ali said opposition leaders are mystified by what they perceive as the coalition’s reluctance to more forcefully attack Gaddafi troops on the front lines.
“NATO is a mystery to us,” Ali, who is based in Doha, Qatar, said in an interview via Skype. “This is getting to a stage where it’s getting very, very dangerous.”
NATO officials say they are doing all they can without risking civilian casualties, pointing to Libyan government forces switching tactics since NATO’s operation began. Many have shed their uniforms and are using weapons mounted on the backs of pickup trucks, just like the rebels, officials said. That led NATO to mistakenly target a column of rebel vehicles this month.
In the meantime, poorly trained rebel fighters are taking a beating as government troops lob long-range rockets into Misurata, with NATO unable to stop them, rebels say.
“They could do better,” said Abdul Bassett Swaisi, the commander of a rebel unit of about 150 men outside Misurata. “If the situation continues to be like this, it will take years, not months.”
The debates raging in the West and allied Arab states have made untenable the prospect of deploying ground troops to push out Gaddafi.
Military analysts say that matters a great deal.
“There’s no example of regime change occurring by bombing alone,” said Shashank Joshi, an analyst at Britain’s Royal United Services Institute, a think tank. In Kosovo, he pointed out, where the NATO air campaign was significantly more forceful than it is in Libya, the threat of deploying ground troops was what finally prompted Slobodan Milosevic to surrender.
Although it is difficult to know whether Tripoli residents are being earnest when they speak to Western journalists in the presence of government minders, recent street interviews suggest there is growing anger in the capital about NATO’s campaign.
Abdul Adeem, 44, an electrician who lives near a house leveled after a NATO strike last week, said the bombing campaign has made people rally around Gaddafi.
“All neighbors are afraid,” he said. “They think maybe NATO will do it again tonight.”
Londono reported from Tripoli. Staff writer Karen DeYoung in Washington and special correspondent Portia Walker in Misurata contributed to this report.
Showing posts with label NATO. Show all posts
Showing posts with label NATO. Show all posts
Wednesday, June 29, 2011
Tuesday, June 14, 2011
Defense Secretary Warns NATO of ‘Dim’ Future
NYtimes
June 10, 2011
By THOM SHANKER
BRUSSELS — Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates bluntly criticized NATO nations on Friday for what he said were shortages in military spending and political will, warning of “a dim if not dismal future” unless more member nations scaled up their participation in the alliance’s activities.
NATO has struggled for a generation to define its place in a post-cold war world, and its member nations have frequently quarreled about the scope of the alliance’s commitments and their individual responsibilities.
With little indication of any change in policy among the more reluctant member nations — notably Germany, the Netherlands, Poland, Spain and Turkey — Mr. Gates’s harsh words seemed likely to increase pressure on an alliance already deeply strained by differences over sharing the burden in Libya and Afghanistan.
Perhaps most significantly, Mr. Gates issued a dire warning that the United States, the traditional leader and bankroller of the alliance, is exhausted by a decade of war and and its own mounting budget deficits, and simply may not see NATO as worth supporting any longer.
“The blunt reality is that there will be dwindling appetite and patience in the U.S. Congress — and in the American body politic writ large — to expend increasingly precious funds on behalf of nations that are apparently unwilling to devote the necessary resources or make the necessary changes to be serious and capable partners in their own defense,” Mr. Gates said.
Mr. Gates complained of what he called a “two-tiered” membership structure, “between those willing and able to pay the price and bear the burdens of commitments, and those who enjoy the benefits of NATO membership but don’t want to share the risks and the costs.” He added that some NATO partners are “apparently willing and eager for American taxpayers to assume the growing security burden left by reductions in European defense budgets.”
He criticized NATO nations for failing to meet their commitments in Afghanistan — or for imposing sweeping restrictions on those forces they do send — which he said hobbled the effort.
And despite NATO’s decision to take command of the air war in Libya, the alliance is running out of bombs after just 11 weeks, he said. The operation would fall apart without a continued large infusion of American support, Mr. Gates added, since other NATO nations have not invested in the weapons required to carry out lengthy combat operations.
While Mr. Gates made his case Friday in strong language, his complaints were not entirely new. Last year he warned of the dangers of the “demilitarization of Europe,” and there are long-standing American frustrations at the discrepancy of military capabilities and spending on the two sides of the Atlantic.
That theme has been echoed by NATO’s Secretary General, Anders Fogh Rasmussen, who has called on European allies to spend more on “smart defense” by pooling resources and cooperating more effectively.
“There is clearly a longstanding concern about the transatlantic gap in defense,” said Oana Lungescu, NATO spokesman when asked Friday about Mr. Gates’s comments. “There is a risk that European allies may fall further behind in terms of technological development because of low levels of defense spending.”
Mr. Gates has spent his final weeks before retirement speaking forthrightly on issues that ranged from preserving Pentagon spending to sustaining combat forces in Afghanistan. But his address on Friday to the Security and Defense Agenda, a Brussels policy center, was among the most pointed and challenging ever delivered by the former C.I.A. director who has served eight presidents of both political parties.
Despite signs of real progress in Afghanistan, the mission has been weakened by “the inability of many allies to meet agreed upon commitments,” Mr. Gates said. The war effort also has been hobbled by “national ‘caveats’ that tied the hands of allied commanders in sometimes infuriating ways,” he added.
The defense secretary was even harsher in his critique of NATO’s command of the Libya operation. After an initial bombing campaign run by the Americans, the alliance took over the air war and Mr. Gates warned that NATO may not be up to the task.
“The mightiest military alliance in history is only 11 weeks into an operation against a poorly armed regime in a sparsely populated country — yet many allies are beginning to run short of munitions, requiring the U.S., once more, to make up the difference,” Mr. Gates said.
While the Libya war was unanimously endorsed by NATO nations, less than half are participating, and less than a third are carrying out strike missions.
“Frankly, many of those allies sitting on the sidelines do so not because they do not want to participate, but simply because they can’t,” Mr. Gates said. “The military capabilities simply aren’t there.”
The Libya operation has proven the alliance is desperately short of intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance aircraft, as well as aerial refueling planes — all are crucial to modern combat. The United States still is supplying the largest share of all of those to the NATO effort, even thought it pulled most of its strike aircraft out of the operation.
Mr. Gates said the problem has been lack of military investment on the part of too many NATO nations. “For all but a handful of allies, defense budgets — in absolute terms, as a share of economic output — have been chronically starved for adequate funding for a long time, with the shortfalls compounding on themselves each year,” he said.
Mr. Gates did offer a prescription. “Looking ahead, to avoid the very real possibility of collective military irrelevance, member nations must examine new approaches to boosting combat capabilities — in procurement, in training, in logistics, in sustainment,” he said.
Stephen Castle contributed reporting.
June 10, 2011
By THOM SHANKER
BRUSSELS — Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates bluntly criticized NATO nations on Friday for what he said were shortages in military spending and political will, warning of “a dim if not dismal future” unless more member nations scaled up their participation in the alliance’s activities.
NATO has struggled for a generation to define its place in a post-cold war world, and its member nations have frequently quarreled about the scope of the alliance’s commitments and their individual responsibilities.
With little indication of any change in policy among the more reluctant member nations — notably Germany, the Netherlands, Poland, Spain and Turkey — Mr. Gates’s harsh words seemed likely to increase pressure on an alliance already deeply strained by differences over sharing the burden in Libya and Afghanistan.
Perhaps most significantly, Mr. Gates issued a dire warning that the United States, the traditional leader and bankroller of the alliance, is exhausted by a decade of war and and its own mounting budget deficits, and simply may not see NATO as worth supporting any longer.
“The blunt reality is that there will be dwindling appetite and patience in the U.S. Congress — and in the American body politic writ large — to expend increasingly precious funds on behalf of nations that are apparently unwilling to devote the necessary resources or make the necessary changes to be serious and capable partners in their own defense,” Mr. Gates said.
Mr. Gates complained of what he called a “two-tiered” membership structure, “between those willing and able to pay the price and bear the burdens of commitments, and those who enjoy the benefits of NATO membership but don’t want to share the risks and the costs.” He added that some NATO partners are “apparently willing and eager for American taxpayers to assume the growing security burden left by reductions in European defense budgets.”
He criticized NATO nations for failing to meet their commitments in Afghanistan — or for imposing sweeping restrictions on those forces they do send — which he said hobbled the effort.
And despite NATO’s decision to take command of the air war in Libya, the alliance is running out of bombs after just 11 weeks, he said. The operation would fall apart without a continued large infusion of American support, Mr. Gates added, since other NATO nations have not invested in the weapons required to carry out lengthy combat operations.
While Mr. Gates made his case Friday in strong language, his complaints were not entirely new. Last year he warned of the dangers of the “demilitarization of Europe,” and there are long-standing American frustrations at the discrepancy of military capabilities and spending on the two sides of the Atlantic.
That theme has been echoed by NATO’s Secretary General, Anders Fogh Rasmussen, who has called on European allies to spend more on “smart defense” by pooling resources and cooperating more effectively.
“There is clearly a longstanding concern about the transatlantic gap in defense,” said Oana Lungescu, NATO spokesman when asked Friday about Mr. Gates’s comments. “There is a risk that European allies may fall further behind in terms of technological development because of low levels of defense spending.”
Mr. Gates has spent his final weeks before retirement speaking forthrightly on issues that ranged from preserving Pentagon spending to sustaining combat forces in Afghanistan. But his address on Friday to the Security and Defense Agenda, a Brussels policy center, was among the most pointed and challenging ever delivered by the former C.I.A. director who has served eight presidents of both political parties.
Despite signs of real progress in Afghanistan, the mission has been weakened by “the inability of many allies to meet agreed upon commitments,” Mr. Gates said. The war effort also has been hobbled by “national ‘caveats’ that tied the hands of allied commanders in sometimes infuriating ways,” he added.
The defense secretary was even harsher in his critique of NATO’s command of the Libya operation. After an initial bombing campaign run by the Americans, the alliance took over the air war and Mr. Gates warned that NATO may not be up to the task.
“The mightiest military alliance in history is only 11 weeks into an operation against a poorly armed regime in a sparsely populated country — yet many allies are beginning to run short of munitions, requiring the U.S., once more, to make up the difference,” Mr. Gates said.
While the Libya war was unanimously endorsed by NATO nations, less than half are participating, and less than a third are carrying out strike missions.
“Frankly, many of those allies sitting on the sidelines do so not because they do not want to participate, but simply because they can’t,” Mr. Gates said. “The military capabilities simply aren’t there.”
The Libya operation has proven the alliance is desperately short of intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance aircraft, as well as aerial refueling planes — all are crucial to modern combat. The United States still is supplying the largest share of all of those to the NATO effort, even thought it pulled most of its strike aircraft out of the operation.
Mr. Gates said the problem has been lack of military investment on the part of too many NATO nations. “For all but a handful of allies, defense budgets — in absolute terms, as a share of economic output — have been chronically starved for adequate funding for a long time, with the shortfalls compounding on themselves each year,” he said.
Mr. Gates did offer a prescription. “Looking ahead, to avoid the very real possibility of collective military irrelevance, member nations must examine new approaches to boosting combat capabilities — in procurement, in training, in logistics, in sustainment,” he said.
Stephen Castle contributed reporting.
Monday, June 13, 2011
Gates rebukes European allies in farewell speech
Washington Post
By Greg Jaffe and Michael Birnbaum,
BERLIN — Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates rebuked some of America’s staunchest allies Friday, saying the United States has a “dwindling appetite” to serve as the heavyweight partner in the military order that has underpinned the U.S. relationship with Europe since the end of World War II.
In an unusually stinging speech, made on his valedictory visit to Europe before he retires at the end of the month, Gates condemned European defense cuts and said the United States is tired of engaging in combat missions for those who “don’t want to share the risks and the costs.”
“The blunt reality is that there will be dwindling appetite and patience in the U.S. Congress, and in the American body politic writ large, to expend increasingly precious funds on behalf of nations that are apparently unwilling to devote the necessary resources ... to be serious and capable partners in their own defense,” he said in an address to a think tank in Brussels.
The speech comes as the United States prepares to begin withdrawing some of its forces from Afghanistan this summer and as it and other NATO powers engage in an air campaign against the forces of Libyan leader Moammar Gaddafi. In both cases, Gates said, budget cuts and sheer reluctance among European partners to fight have made the missions significantly more difficult and shifted the burden onto the United States.
The challenges facing the Libyan campaign were underscored just hours after Gates spoke, as Norway announced it would pull its forces out of operations by the beginning of August because of the burdens on its small military.
The country’s F-16 jets have carried out about 10 percent of the airstrikes on Libyan soil since the NATO operations began at the end of March, according to Norway’s air force.
This week, NATO carried out the most intensive bombardment of the Libyan capital, Tripoli, to date. But the airstrikes are depleting NATO munitions, forcing the United States to supply more, Gates said.
U.S. officials have been unhappy with Germany in the months since it refused to support a U.N. Security Council resolution to intervene in Libya, but President Obama feted German Chancellor Angela Merkel on Tuesday at the White House, presenting her with the Presidential Medal of Freedom.
In response to Gates’s speech, the German Foreign Ministry dismissed the notion that it was not sufficiently contributing to NATO and noted the celebrations earlier this week in Washington.
“Germany makes a considerable contribution to NATO and NATO-led operations,” said a Foreign Ministry spokeswoman, speaking anonymously under diplomatic ground rules. “Germany’s engagement is very emphatically valued,” as evidenced by Merkel’s new medal, she said.
Official reaction in other European capitals appeared muted Friday. The French Defense Ministry had no immediate comment.
But NATO Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen shares Gates’s concerns about European willingness to contribute to its own defense, an alliance spokeswoman said. “There is clearly a long-standing concern about the transatlantic gap in defense spending,” Oana Lungescu told reporters in Brussels.
Gates’s criticism drew mixed reactions from European think tanks. Daniel Korski, a senior policy fellow at European Council on Foreign Relations said the speech displayed ignorance about widespread budget cuts across Europe. But Jonathan Eyal, director of international security studies at the Royal United Services Institute in London, said the departing U.S. defense chief delivered a message that Europeans need to hear.
In Libya, Gates said, “the mightiest military alliance in history is only 11 weeks into an operation against a poorly armed regime in a sparsely populated country, yet many allies are beginning to run short of munitions, requiring the U.S., once more, to make up the difference.”
Gates and other U.S. officials have criticized Europe in the past, saying it is failing to hold up its end of the bargain. But his harsh language Friday in the speech to the Security and Defense Agenda think tank — delivered after a NATO defense ministers’ summit in which NATO and American top brass tried but largely failed to secure additional resources for the Libyan campaign — was a sign of just how tenuous the military relationships have become.
“Future U.S. political leaders, those for whom the Cold War was not the formative experience that it was for me, may not consider the return on America’s investment in NATO worth the cost,” he said.
Gates said he has “worried openly” in the past “about NATO turning into a two-tiered alliance between members who specialize in ‘soft’ humanitarian, development, peacekeeping and talking tasks and those conducting the ‘hard’ combat missions — between those willing and able to pay the price and bear the burdens of alliance commitments, and those who enjoy the benefits of NATO membership ... but don’t want to share the risks and the costs.”
“This is no longer a hypothetical worry,” Gates said. “We are there today. And it is unacceptable.”
Gates expressed alarm about “the real possibility for a dim, if not dismal, future for the transatlantic alliance.” He added: “Such a future is possible, but not inevitable. The good news is that the members of NATO — individually and collectively — have it well within their means to halt and reverse these trends and instead produce a very different future.”
Gates is stepping down as defense secretary on June 30 after more than four years in office. Obama has nominated CIA Director Leon E. Panetta to succeed him. Panetta’s Senate confirmation process started Thursday with testimony before the Armed Services Committee.
The global financial crisis has stretched the budgets of countries around the world, and even the U.S. defense budget, long immune to cuts, has seen its projections trimmed. But many countries in Europe have been quicker to reduce their forces. Last fall, Britain and France agreed to share an aircraft carrier. This spring, Germany eliminated its draft and slimmed the size of its ground forces. Smaller countries have made big cuts to forces that were never particularly large.
At a defense conference in Munich in February, Rasmussen, the NATO secretary general, made an impassioned plea for smarter spending, and more of it. Europe’s patchwork of small countries leads to a jumble of small military forces that are not particularly effective if they actually need to go to war, critics say.
Gates repeated the criticism on Friday, saying that the $300 billion that non-U.S. NATO members spend annually on defense “could buy a significant amount of usable military capability. Instead, the results are significantly less than the sum of the parts.”
He said that the best hope for NATO was for European leaders to push harder to protect their budgets from further cuts, and he urged them to work together to coordinate their military capabilities.
“It is not too late for Europe to get its defense institutions and security relationships on track,” Gates said.
Korski, a defense policy expert at the European Council on Foreign Relations, a pan-European think tank, complained after the speech that “we are getting used to upset defense secretaries spewing bile at regular intervals.” European governments “face dramatic budget pressures, and that means cuts in health, education and also defense,” he said, adding that “to assume that defense would be immune to the effort of balancing budgets is absurd.”
Korski rejected “the idea that everybody shares the same risk assessment” as the United States “and that everyone must show solidarity” with Washington. For example, “many Europeans, excluding the British, don’t regard Afghanistan as a threat,” he said, and Eastern Europeans do not feel the Americans show sufficient sympathy for their fears of Russia.
Eyal, of London’s Royal United Services Institute, said the speech would be “very welcome” in Britain and France, however, because “privately this is what officials have articulated for years.” Gates “identified the key problem, which remains Germany,” he said. “You can argue that there are many countries that do not contribute their fair share, but most of the others don’t matter, and smaller ones would likely fall into line if Germany did.”
Eyal said: “It’s a shame politicians say what they think only when they are about to depart, but the Europeans needed this cold shower, and if it’s up to Gates to administer it, so be it.”
The speech amounted to “an outburst of frustration that is bigger than bottom line of defense cuts,” he said. “It’s about the lethargic way the Europeans walk on the world stage,” lacking a sense of urgency and thinking that “at the end of the day the Americans will always be there and do Europe’s bidding.”
But the speech “hasn’t caused a great rift,” Eyal said. “Deep down, there is no one in Europe that doesn’t think that what Gates said is absolutely the truth. No one argues he’s exaggerating problem. It’s not a rift. It’s worse. It’s an act of indifference.” The missing reaction in Europe, he said, is to reconsider burden-sharing and “how the Europeans can contribute more to the common pot.”
In Germany, one analyst said that Gates’s reaction to European defense cuts was understandable even if he was overreacting to disagreements within NATO.
“The Europeans do not understand that they will have to take much greater care of their own security,” said Constanze Stelzenmueller, a Berlin-based fellow at the German Marshall Fund of the United States. “They haven’t translated that into their defense budgets.”
NATO members disagree not just about spending levels, but also about what constitutes a threat, Stelzenmueller said. However, she said, “it is to be expected, and in fact normal, for allies to disagree with each other on how to react” to situations such as that in Libya. “I don’t think that that in itself undermines the alliance.”
Correspondent Karla Adam in London contributed to this report.
By Greg Jaffe and Michael Birnbaum,
BERLIN — Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates rebuked some of America’s staunchest allies Friday, saying the United States has a “dwindling appetite” to serve as the heavyweight partner in the military order that has underpinned the U.S. relationship with Europe since the end of World War II.
In an unusually stinging speech, made on his valedictory visit to Europe before he retires at the end of the month, Gates condemned European defense cuts and said the United States is tired of engaging in combat missions for those who “don’t want to share the risks and the costs.”
“The blunt reality is that there will be dwindling appetite and patience in the U.S. Congress, and in the American body politic writ large, to expend increasingly precious funds on behalf of nations that are apparently unwilling to devote the necessary resources ... to be serious and capable partners in their own defense,” he said in an address to a think tank in Brussels.
The speech comes as the United States prepares to begin withdrawing some of its forces from Afghanistan this summer and as it and other NATO powers engage in an air campaign against the forces of Libyan leader Moammar Gaddafi. In both cases, Gates said, budget cuts and sheer reluctance among European partners to fight have made the missions significantly more difficult and shifted the burden onto the United States.
The challenges facing the Libyan campaign were underscored just hours after Gates spoke, as Norway announced it would pull its forces out of operations by the beginning of August because of the burdens on its small military.
The country’s F-16 jets have carried out about 10 percent of the airstrikes on Libyan soil since the NATO operations began at the end of March, according to Norway’s air force.
This week, NATO carried out the most intensive bombardment of the Libyan capital, Tripoli, to date. But the airstrikes are depleting NATO munitions, forcing the United States to supply more, Gates said.
U.S. officials have been unhappy with Germany in the months since it refused to support a U.N. Security Council resolution to intervene in Libya, but President Obama feted German Chancellor Angela Merkel on Tuesday at the White House, presenting her with the Presidential Medal of Freedom.
In response to Gates’s speech, the German Foreign Ministry dismissed the notion that it was not sufficiently contributing to NATO and noted the celebrations earlier this week in Washington.
“Germany makes a considerable contribution to NATO and NATO-led operations,” said a Foreign Ministry spokeswoman, speaking anonymously under diplomatic ground rules. “Germany’s engagement is very emphatically valued,” as evidenced by Merkel’s new medal, she said.
Official reaction in other European capitals appeared muted Friday. The French Defense Ministry had no immediate comment.
But NATO Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen shares Gates’s concerns about European willingness to contribute to its own defense, an alliance spokeswoman said. “There is clearly a long-standing concern about the transatlantic gap in defense spending,” Oana Lungescu told reporters in Brussels.
Gates’s criticism drew mixed reactions from European think tanks. Daniel Korski, a senior policy fellow at European Council on Foreign Relations said the speech displayed ignorance about widespread budget cuts across Europe. But Jonathan Eyal, director of international security studies at the Royal United Services Institute in London, said the departing U.S. defense chief delivered a message that Europeans need to hear.
In Libya, Gates said, “the mightiest military alliance in history is only 11 weeks into an operation against a poorly armed regime in a sparsely populated country, yet many allies are beginning to run short of munitions, requiring the U.S., once more, to make up the difference.”
Gates and other U.S. officials have criticized Europe in the past, saying it is failing to hold up its end of the bargain. But his harsh language Friday in the speech to the Security and Defense Agenda think tank — delivered after a NATO defense ministers’ summit in which NATO and American top brass tried but largely failed to secure additional resources for the Libyan campaign — was a sign of just how tenuous the military relationships have become.
“Future U.S. political leaders, those for whom the Cold War was not the formative experience that it was for me, may not consider the return on America’s investment in NATO worth the cost,” he said.
Gates said he has “worried openly” in the past “about NATO turning into a two-tiered alliance between members who specialize in ‘soft’ humanitarian, development, peacekeeping and talking tasks and those conducting the ‘hard’ combat missions — between those willing and able to pay the price and bear the burdens of alliance commitments, and those who enjoy the benefits of NATO membership ... but don’t want to share the risks and the costs.”
“This is no longer a hypothetical worry,” Gates said. “We are there today. And it is unacceptable.”
Gates expressed alarm about “the real possibility for a dim, if not dismal, future for the transatlantic alliance.” He added: “Such a future is possible, but not inevitable. The good news is that the members of NATO — individually and collectively — have it well within their means to halt and reverse these trends and instead produce a very different future.”
Gates is stepping down as defense secretary on June 30 after more than four years in office. Obama has nominated CIA Director Leon E. Panetta to succeed him. Panetta’s Senate confirmation process started Thursday with testimony before the Armed Services Committee.
The global financial crisis has stretched the budgets of countries around the world, and even the U.S. defense budget, long immune to cuts, has seen its projections trimmed. But many countries in Europe have been quicker to reduce their forces. Last fall, Britain and France agreed to share an aircraft carrier. This spring, Germany eliminated its draft and slimmed the size of its ground forces. Smaller countries have made big cuts to forces that were never particularly large.
At a defense conference in Munich in February, Rasmussen, the NATO secretary general, made an impassioned plea for smarter spending, and more of it. Europe’s patchwork of small countries leads to a jumble of small military forces that are not particularly effective if they actually need to go to war, critics say.
Gates repeated the criticism on Friday, saying that the $300 billion that non-U.S. NATO members spend annually on defense “could buy a significant amount of usable military capability. Instead, the results are significantly less than the sum of the parts.”
He said that the best hope for NATO was for European leaders to push harder to protect their budgets from further cuts, and he urged them to work together to coordinate their military capabilities.
“It is not too late for Europe to get its defense institutions and security relationships on track,” Gates said.
Korski, a defense policy expert at the European Council on Foreign Relations, a pan-European think tank, complained after the speech that “we are getting used to upset defense secretaries spewing bile at regular intervals.” European governments “face dramatic budget pressures, and that means cuts in health, education and also defense,” he said, adding that “to assume that defense would be immune to the effort of balancing budgets is absurd.”
Korski rejected “the idea that everybody shares the same risk assessment” as the United States “and that everyone must show solidarity” with Washington. For example, “many Europeans, excluding the British, don’t regard Afghanistan as a threat,” he said, and Eastern Europeans do not feel the Americans show sufficient sympathy for their fears of Russia.
Eyal, of London’s Royal United Services Institute, said the speech would be “very welcome” in Britain and France, however, because “privately this is what officials have articulated for years.” Gates “identified the key problem, which remains Germany,” he said. “You can argue that there are many countries that do not contribute their fair share, but most of the others don’t matter, and smaller ones would likely fall into line if Germany did.”
Eyal said: “It’s a shame politicians say what they think only when they are about to depart, but the Europeans needed this cold shower, and if it’s up to Gates to administer it, so be it.”
The speech amounted to “an outburst of frustration that is bigger than bottom line of defense cuts,” he said. “It’s about the lethargic way the Europeans walk on the world stage,” lacking a sense of urgency and thinking that “at the end of the day the Americans will always be there and do Europe’s bidding.”
But the speech “hasn’t caused a great rift,” Eyal said. “Deep down, there is no one in Europe that doesn’t think that what Gates said is absolutely the truth. No one argues he’s exaggerating problem. It’s not a rift. It’s worse. It’s an act of indifference.” The missing reaction in Europe, he said, is to reconsider burden-sharing and “how the Europeans can contribute more to the common pot.”
In Germany, one analyst said that Gates’s reaction to European defense cuts was understandable even if he was overreacting to disagreements within NATO.
“The Europeans do not understand that they will have to take much greater care of their own security,” said Constanze Stelzenmueller, a Berlin-based fellow at the German Marshall Fund of the United States. “They haven’t translated that into their defense budgets.”
NATO members disagree not just about spending levels, but also about what constitutes a threat, Stelzenmueller said. However, she said, “it is to be expected, and in fact normal, for allies to disagree with each other on how to react” to situations such as that in Libya. “I don’t think that that in itself undermines the alliance.”
Correspondent Karla Adam in London contributed to this report.
Blunt U.S. Warning Reveals Deep Strains in NATO
NYtimes
By THOM SHANKER and STEVEN ERLANGER
Jine 10, 2011
BRUSSELS — Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates sharply criticized NATO nations on Friday for what he said were shortages of military spending and political will, warning of “a dim if not dismal future” and “irrelevance” for the alliance unless more member nations contributed weapons, money and personnel.
In his final policy speech before he steps down, Mr. Gates issued a dire and unusually direct warning that the United States, the traditional leader and patron of the alliance, was exhausted by a decade of war and its own mounting budget deficits and simply might not see NATO as worth supporting any longer.
“The blunt reality,” Mr. Gates said, “is that there will be dwindling appetite and patience in the U.S. Congress — and in the American body politic writ large — to expend increasingly precious funds on behalf of nations that are apparently unwilling to devote the necessary resources or make the necessary changes to be serious and capable partners in their own defense.”
The White House made clear on Friday that in the tough tone of his remarks, Mr. Gates was speaking for the Pentagon, not necessarily for the administration, and that he appeared to be expressing his own frustrations after years of asking NATO to do more. But a White House official did say that Mr. Gates’s speech raised “legitimate concerns” about whether NATO was providing enough resources for the war and that the Obama administration fully expected the alliance to meet its challenges.
The United States accounts for about three-quarters of total military spending by all NATO countries, and it has in the past taken the lead in military operations and provided the bulk of the weapons and matériel. But in a post-Soviet world, there is growing resentment in Washington about NATO effectively paying for the defense of wealthy European nations.
Those strains have deepened considerably during the air war against Libya’s leader, Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi, the first NATO-run multilateral war where Washington has pulled back from a leadership role.
The strains come from varying commitments to the war from different NATO countries, the difficulties of coordinating air attacks, deficiencies of aircraft and ammunition and the simple cost of the operation, which is going on longer than many countries, including France, expected when it began on March 19.
Although NATO ambassadors attended Mr. Gates’s speech, the reaction was muted, and there was little response from NATO capitals, which have heard similar criticisms from Mr. Gates before, though not in such candid terms. “But people should take note,” one NATO ambassador said. “This is not just an old curmudgeon leaving office. He cares about the alliance and says you need to start investing in it.”
NATO’s shortcomings have long been the subject of black humor in Afghanistan, where American military officers sometimes refer to the official NATO command — called the International Security Assistance Force, or ISAF — as “I Saw Americans Fighting.” In recent months, the aggravation with NATO in Afghanistan has intensified because of Libya.
“The Europeans enjoy generous social welfare programs in part because the United States subsidizes their defense spending,” said Andrew M. Exum of the Center for a New American Security, a military research organization, who was an Army infantry officer in Afghanistan in 2002 and 2004.
If the United States did not have large stockpiles of ammunition, a senior NATO official said, the NATO campaign would already have come to a halt. The Americans are selling the ammunition, but it was the American military budget that paid for its manufacture and stockpiling.
Similarly, NATO allies must still rely on American Awacs planes and refueling aircraft, American suppression of air defenses and American intelligence gathering. Even with the United States playing a secondary role, by mid-May its operations in Libya had already cost $664 million, according to a Pentagon memo circulating in Washington, The Financial Times reported. To a certain extent, the Libyan campaign represents precisely the shift that Mr. Gates warned was coming — namely, the European nations paying for more of their own security, and to that extent it represents a “major strategic shift,” said François Heisbourg, a defense expert at the Foundation for Strategic Research.
But the Libyan campaign has also revealed inadequacies in European budgets and equipment that are likely to have a bigger impact on European spending than any swan-song scolding from an American official, no matter how respected.
At about $2 million a day, by some estimates, France is spending almost as much on Libya as it is on Afghanistan, French officials said Friday, and about the same as the United States is currently spending per day.
Even at a lower estimate of roughly 1 million euros a day — about $1.45 million — Libya has already cost France at least $120 million. But the costs are likely to have increased since the United States pulled back from a leadership position.
The French budget for military operations abroad is about $900 million for 2011, said René Carlé, the defense expert for the finance committee of the National Assembly. But the budget is “always underestimated,” and the government typically comes back to Parliament for supplementary financing. In 2008, the final operations budget was $1.2 billion, he said.
Last year, he said, French operations in Afghanistan, where there are ground troops, cost about $675 million. Adding that to the Libya operation will badly stretch the budget, and then there will be more costs to restock.
Britain, too, is being cagey about its spending in Libya, even as the current government vows to cut military outlays by about 8 percent over the next four years. There are estimates that Britain is spending about the same amount as France, around $9.8 million a week. But the British defense secretary, Liam Fox, has said that the budget is adequate for both Libya and Afghanistan.
Britain and France rank second and third within NATO on defense spending, after the United States. But Britain’s military budget is only about 7.7 percent of Washington’s. (France’s is about 6.6 percent.) Norway and Denmark have tiny military budgets of only $6.4 billon and $4.5 billion respectively, yet they have been flying strike missions over Libya, while much larger countries like Germany and Spain have not — but not because they lack the capacity, but because they disagree politically with the airstrikes.
Europeans argue that they are spending blood and treasure to support Washington in Afghanistan against the Taliban and Al Qaeda, far from Europe, and they are eager to draw down their forces there. NATO, some argue, would be best served, since Russia is no longer judged to be an adversary, as an alliance with more limited goals like defending Europe against other kinds of threats, like piracy, cyberattacks or natural disasters.
But Mr. Gates is not alone in arguing that the European allies must spend more to keep credibility with the United States.
In February, even before Libya campaign, NATO’s secretary general, Anders Fogh Rasmussen, delivered a similarly strong warning about shrinking military expenditures to Europeans at a security conference.
Thom Shanker reported from Brussels, and Steven Erlanger from Paris. Stephen Castle contributed reporting from Brussels, Elisabeth Bumiller from Washington, and Romain Parlier from Paris.
By THOM SHANKER and STEVEN ERLANGER
Jine 10, 2011
BRUSSELS — Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates sharply criticized NATO nations on Friday for what he said were shortages of military spending and political will, warning of “a dim if not dismal future” and “irrelevance” for the alliance unless more member nations contributed weapons, money and personnel.
In his final policy speech before he steps down, Mr. Gates issued a dire and unusually direct warning that the United States, the traditional leader and patron of the alliance, was exhausted by a decade of war and its own mounting budget deficits and simply might not see NATO as worth supporting any longer.
“The blunt reality,” Mr. Gates said, “is that there will be dwindling appetite and patience in the U.S. Congress — and in the American body politic writ large — to expend increasingly precious funds on behalf of nations that are apparently unwilling to devote the necessary resources or make the necessary changes to be serious and capable partners in their own defense.”
The White House made clear on Friday that in the tough tone of his remarks, Mr. Gates was speaking for the Pentagon, not necessarily for the administration, and that he appeared to be expressing his own frustrations after years of asking NATO to do more. But a White House official did say that Mr. Gates’s speech raised “legitimate concerns” about whether NATO was providing enough resources for the war and that the Obama administration fully expected the alliance to meet its challenges.
The United States accounts for about three-quarters of total military spending by all NATO countries, and it has in the past taken the lead in military operations and provided the bulk of the weapons and matériel. But in a post-Soviet world, there is growing resentment in Washington about NATO effectively paying for the defense of wealthy European nations.
Those strains have deepened considerably during the air war against Libya’s leader, Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi, the first NATO-run multilateral war where Washington has pulled back from a leadership role.
The strains come from varying commitments to the war from different NATO countries, the difficulties of coordinating air attacks, deficiencies of aircraft and ammunition and the simple cost of the operation, which is going on longer than many countries, including France, expected when it began on March 19.
Although NATO ambassadors attended Mr. Gates’s speech, the reaction was muted, and there was little response from NATO capitals, which have heard similar criticisms from Mr. Gates before, though not in such candid terms. “But people should take note,” one NATO ambassador said. “This is not just an old curmudgeon leaving office. He cares about the alliance and says you need to start investing in it.”
NATO’s shortcomings have long been the subject of black humor in Afghanistan, where American military officers sometimes refer to the official NATO command — called the International Security Assistance Force, or ISAF — as “I Saw Americans Fighting.” In recent months, the aggravation with NATO in Afghanistan has intensified because of Libya.
“The Europeans enjoy generous social welfare programs in part because the United States subsidizes their defense spending,” said Andrew M. Exum of the Center for a New American Security, a military research organization, who was an Army infantry officer in Afghanistan in 2002 and 2004.
If the United States did not have large stockpiles of ammunition, a senior NATO official said, the NATO campaign would already have come to a halt. The Americans are selling the ammunition, but it was the American military budget that paid for its manufacture and stockpiling.
Similarly, NATO allies must still rely on American Awacs planes and refueling aircraft, American suppression of air defenses and American intelligence gathering. Even with the United States playing a secondary role, by mid-May its operations in Libya had already cost $664 million, according to a Pentagon memo circulating in Washington, The Financial Times reported. To a certain extent, the Libyan campaign represents precisely the shift that Mr. Gates warned was coming — namely, the European nations paying for more of their own security, and to that extent it represents a “major strategic shift,” said François Heisbourg, a defense expert at the Foundation for Strategic Research.
But the Libyan campaign has also revealed inadequacies in European budgets and equipment that are likely to have a bigger impact on European spending than any swan-song scolding from an American official, no matter how respected.
At about $2 million a day, by some estimates, France is spending almost as much on Libya as it is on Afghanistan, French officials said Friday, and about the same as the United States is currently spending per day.
Even at a lower estimate of roughly 1 million euros a day — about $1.45 million — Libya has already cost France at least $120 million. But the costs are likely to have increased since the United States pulled back from a leadership position.
The French budget for military operations abroad is about $900 million for 2011, said René Carlé, the defense expert for the finance committee of the National Assembly. But the budget is “always underestimated,” and the government typically comes back to Parliament for supplementary financing. In 2008, the final operations budget was $1.2 billion, he said.
Last year, he said, French operations in Afghanistan, where there are ground troops, cost about $675 million. Adding that to the Libya operation will badly stretch the budget, and then there will be more costs to restock.
Britain, too, is being cagey about its spending in Libya, even as the current government vows to cut military outlays by about 8 percent over the next four years. There are estimates that Britain is spending about the same amount as France, around $9.8 million a week. But the British defense secretary, Liam Fox, has said that the budget is adequate for both Libya and Afghanistan.
Britain and France rank second and third within NATO on defense spending, after the United States. But Britain’s military budget is only about 7.7 percent of Washington’s. (France’s is about 6.6 percent.) Norway and Denmark have tiny military budgets of only $6.4 billon and $4.5 billion respectively, yet they have been flying strike missions over Libya, while much larger countries like Germany and Spain have not — but not because they lack the capacity, but because they disagree politically with the airstrikes.
Europeans argue that they are spending blood and treasure to support Washington in Afghanistan against the Taliban and Al Qaeda, far from Europe, and they are eager to draw down their forces there. NATO, some argue, would be best served, since Russia is no longer judged to be an adversary, as an alliance with more limited goals like defending Europe against other kinds of threats, like piracy, cyberattacks or natural disasters.
But Mr. Gates is not alone in arguing that the European allies must spend more to keep credibility with the United States.
In February, even before Libya campaign, NATO’s secretary general, Anders Fogh Rasmussen, delivered a similarly strong warning about shrinking military expenditures to Europeans at a security conference.
Thom Shanker reported from Brussels, and Steven Erlanger from Paris. Stephen Castle contributed reporting from Brussels, Elisabeth Bumiller from Washington, and Romain Parlier from Paris.
Monday, June 6, 2011
NATO and the Arab Spring
By ANDERS FOGH RASMUSSEN
Published: May 31, 2011
BRUSSELS — The dramatic developments across North Africa and the Middle East remind me of the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of the Cold War. From Tunis to Cairo to Benghazi, people overcame fear to embrace freedom. Some governments in the region have taken important steps to meet the rightful demands of their citizens. Others realized their time was up and moved aside. But I was appalled to see that in some countries, and especially in Libya, the call for freedom and dignity has been met with state violence.
NATO’s reaction to the crisis in Libya has been quick and resolute. In March, acting under the authority of an historic United Nations Security Council Resolution, the alliance took overall command of military operations to protect the Libyan people against Colonel Muammar el-Qaddafi’s outrageous attacks. Working together with partners, including from the region, we have made significant progress in degrading Qaddafi’s ability to attack civilians and to lay siege to cities.
Some people have asked why NATO acted in Libya but not elsewhere, in particular in Syria. My answer is clear. We took action in Libya because we have a strong mandate from the Security Council and solid support from countries in the region. That is a unique combination which we have not seen elsewhere.
Three months ago, nobody would have predicted a NATO operation in North Africa. But NATO allies have long understood that our security is closely tied to that of our southern neighbors. That is why it also makes perfect sense to consider how we can help North Africa and the Middle East become a region that is free, democratic, and stable.
First, we will sustain our efforts to fulfill the United Nations mandate to protect the Libyan people. We will continue operations until all attacks and threats of attack against civilians have ended; until the regime has verifiably withdrawn its forces and mercenaries back to their bases; and until full, safe and unhindered humanitarian access is guaranteed to all the people in Libya in need of assistance.
However, there is no solely military solution to this conflict. The only lasting solution will be a political one that responds to the legitimate aspirations of the Libyan people. NATO allies and partners will keep up the pressure to pave the way for such a solution. As the Contact Group and the recent G-8 summit made clear, the question is not if Qaddafi will go, but when.
Second, President Obama has already announced a far-reaching policy to support democratic reform and economic development in North Africa and the Middle East. The European Union could also have a major role to play. NATO, too, can make a unique contribution. Many allies went through demanding reforms after their own revolutions over 20 years ago and have a wealth of experience to share. Modern defense and security institutions which are fully accountable to democratically elected authorities will be a vital reform priority for Libya and many other countries in the region.
Finally, the Arab Spring has shown the importance of intensifying our political dialogue. NATO already has two partnership frameworks that bring together the 28 allies with many countries of the region: our Mediterranean Dialogue with Algeria, Egypt, Israel, Jordan, Mauritania, Morocco and Tunisia, and our Istanbul Cooperation Initiative with Bahrain, Qatar, Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates. They form an excellent basis to discuss common security concerns, develop common responses, and build lasting trust between our nations. We are open and stand ready to include other countries. A democratic Libya, if it were interested, would be a most welcome new partner.
As an alliance of democracies, we believe that fundamental values are the true foundation for stability. That is why I am convinced that lasting stability, security and prosperity across North Africa and the Middle East can only be possible once all the people of the region enjoy the fundamental values that we all cherish: freedom, democracy and human rights.
Anders Fogh Rasmussen is the secretary general of NATO.
Published: May 31, 2011
BRUSSELS — The dramatic developments across North Africa and the Middle East remind me of the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of the Cold War. From Tunis to Cairo to Benghazi, people overcame fear to embrace freedom. Some governments in the region have taken important steps to meet the rightful demands of their citizens. Others realized their time was up and moved aside. But I was appalled to see that in some countries, and especially in Libya, the call for freedom and dignity has been met with state violence.
NATO’s reaction to the crisis in Libya has been quick and resolute. In March, acting under the authority of an historic United Nations Security Council Resolution, the alliance took overall command of military operations to protect the Libyan people against Colonel Muammar el-Qaddafi’s outrageous attacks. Working together with partners, including from the region, we have made significant progress in degrading Qaddafi’s ability to attack civilians and to lay siege to cities.
Some people have asked why NATO acted in Libya but not elsewhere, in particular in Syria. My answer is clear. We took action in Libya because we have a strong mandate from the Security Council and solid support from countries in the region. That is a unique combination which we have not seen elsewhere.
Three months ago, nobody would have predicted a NATO operation in North Africa. But NATO allies have long understood that our security is closely tied to that of our southern neighbors. That is why it also makes perfect sense to consider how we can help North Africa and the Middle East become a region that is free, democratic, and stable.
First, we will sustain our efforts to fulfill the United Nations mandate to protect the Libyan people. We will continue operations until all attacks and threats of attack against civilians have ended; until the regime has verifiably withdrawn its forces and mercenaries back to their bases; and until full, safe and unhindered humanitarian access is guaranteed to all the people in Libya in need of assistance.
However, there is no solely military solution to this conflict. The only lasting solution will be a political one that responds to the legitimate aspirations of the Libyan people. NATO allies and partners will keep up the pressure to pave the way for such a solution. As the Contact Group and the recent G-8 summit made clear, the question is not if Qaddafi will go, but when.
Second, President Obama has already announced a far-reaching policy to support democratic reform and economic development in North Africa and the Middle East. The European Union could also have a major role to play. NATO, too, can make a unique contribution. Many allies went through demanding reforms after their own revolutions over 20 years ago and have a wealth of experience to share. Modern defense and security institutions which are fully accountable to democratically elected authorities will be a vital reform priority for Libya and many other countries in the region.
Finally, the Arab Spring has shown the importance of intensifying our political dialogue. NATO already has two partnership frameworks that bring together the 28 allies with many countries of the region: our Mediterranean Dialogue with Algeria, Egypt, Israel, Jordan, Mauritania, Morocco and Tunisia, and our Istanbul Cooperation Initiative with Bahrain, Qatar, Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates. They form an excellent basis to discuss common security concerns, develop common responses, and build lasting trust between our nations. We are open and stand ready to include other countries. A democratic Libya, if it were interested, would be a most welcome new partner.
As an alliance of democracies, we believe that fundamental values are the true foundation for stability. That is why I am convinced that lasting stability, security and prosperity across North Africa and the Middle East can only be possible once all the people of the region enjoy the fundamental values that we all cherish: freedom, democracy and human rights.
Anders Fogh Rasmussen is the secretary general of NATO.
Friday, April 29, 2011
Libya, Russia And NATO Disunity
Stratfor
April 15, 2011
The NATO foreign ministers met in Berlin on Thursday to determine the objectives of the alliance’s intervention inLibya. The conclusions were relatively tepid, with the meeting essentially reaffirming that forces loyal to Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi had to stop all attacks against civilians, permit unhindered humanitarian access to the country and withdraw from the cities they had “forcibly entered, occupied or besieged throughout all of Libya.”
The meeting’s show of unity among the 28 member states belied the reality of the last couple of weeks. The military intervention in Libya has not found support in Germany or the alliance’s newer East/Central European members, while in the last few days, France and the United Kingdom have launched criticism against the alliance for not moving aggressively enough on the ground. Furthermore, while the meeting on Thursday said nothing of regime change, French, British and U.S. leaders penned an op-ed to appear in Friday’s press that reaffirms regime change as the goal of the intervention. That is a considerable lack of clarity on whether NATO is unified on that issue or not.
“Libya, however, is not a spark for NATO disunity or a glimmer into future discord. Rather, it is a symptom of a well-progressed disorder that has afflicted the alliance for several years.”
Rogozin suggested two things. First, in the run-up to the meeting, he said that Russiaexpected “real guarantees” that the BMD would never be aimed against Russia. Second, he said Europeans should establish a group of “wise men” to “support official talks, first between the U.S. and Russia, and then between Russia and NATO” regarding the BMD.
The first comment, regarding the guarantees, has to do with Moscow’s suggestion for the European BMD project to be a single system with full-scale interoperability. Most NATO member states are fully committed to the U.S. proposal that the BMD system should have two independent systems that exchange information and that Russia’s system not be integrated into Europe. The most vociferous opponents of the Russian single-system proposal are the post-Soviet sphere Central/East European NATO member states like the Baltic States and Poland. For them, the BMD system is about a tangible alliance with the United States, and not so much about preventing ballistic missiles from Tehran hitting Tallinn or Warsaw. Russia, on the other hand, realizes this and is trying to prevent the system from being the pretext used to bring U.S. boots to its former sphere of influence. It therefore wants a single system that it will be able to mold in developmental stages.
The second comment, about creating a European “wise men” group to referee U.S.-Russia talks on the two versions of the BMD, has to do with the fact that NATO is, at this moment, as disunited as it has ever been. Russia is betting that not all Europeans are as committed to the two-systems version as NATO ambassadors and officials indicate.Russia hopes to sow seeds of discord by getting West European diplomats (certainly, Rogozin did not mean wise men from the Baltics) to see Central/East Europeans’ demands for excluding Russia as unreasonable and excessive.
Russian probing of NATO unity comes at a time when the alliance is showing its discord over Libya. Germany, France and the United Kingdom are also split, with Berlin seeing London and Paris going off on a 19th century-style colonial expedition. Germany has few interests in the Mediterranean and it has been vocal about this in the past. Meanwhile, France is trying to prove that it is a leader in Europe and if it can no longer be the political and economic leader that Germany now has become, it will be a military one. At the same time, Italy is standing on the sidelines, angered that France and the United Kingdom have threatened its national security (because Rome has far more at stake than anyone) by upending a favorable set of arrangements that Rome had with Gadhafi.
Quite possibly, never before has NATO’s soil been as fertile for such seeds of doubt as today. Central/East Europeans are irked about yet another “out of theater” operation in Libya. For them, the theater of NATO’s concern should be Europe, focused on the security threat posed by a resurgent Russia. Seeing NATO’s main security guarantor, Washington, dragged into a third Middle East military operation by France and the United Kingdom is disconcerting.
Libya, however, is not a spark for NATO disunity or a glimmer into future discord. Rather, it is a symptom of a well-progressed disorder that has afflicted the alliance for several years. Bottom line is that the interests of the alliance are no longer compatible. The alliance has not had a common enemy since the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War. But what is different today, 20 years after the end of the Cold War, is that a powerful Germany is thinking for itself and one of its most cherished new-found signs of independence is a policy towardRussia that is fundamentally incompatible, with security fears of the NATO member states living in the shadow of the Kremlin’s sphere of influence.
The Kremlin senses this disunity and plans to act on it — and it did not need Libya to understand it.
Saturday, April 16, 2011
NATO runs short on some munitions in Libya
By Karen DeYoung and Greg Jaffe, Friday, April 15, 8:46 PM
Less than a month into the Libyan conflict, NATO is running short of precision bombs, highlighting the limitations of Britain, France and other European countries in sustaining even a relatively small military action over an extended period of time, according to senior NATO and U.S. officials.The shortage of European munitions, along with the limited number of aircraft available, has raised doubts among some officials about whether the United States can continue to avoid returning to the air campaign if Libyan leader Moammar Gaddafi hangs on to power for several more months.
U.S. strike aircraft that participated in the early stage of the operation, before the United States relinquished command to NATO and assumed what President Obama called a “supporting” role, have remained in the theater “on 12-hour standby” with crews “constantly briefed on the current situation,” a NATO official said.
So far, the NATO commander has not requested their deployment. Several U.S. military officials said they anticipated being called back into the fight, although a senior administration official said he expected other countries to announce “in the next few days” that they would contribute aircraft equipped with the laser-guided munitions.
Opposition spokesmen in the western Libyan city of Misurata, under steady bombardment by government shelling, said Friday that Gaddafi’s forces had used cluster bombs, and Human Rights Watch said its representatives on the ground had witnessed the explosion of cluster munitions in civilian areas there. The Libyan government denied the weapons had been used.
A spokesman for the Misurata City Council appealed for NATO to send ground troops to secure the port that is the besieged city’s only remaining humanitarian lifeline.
The opposition has also repeatedly called for an increase in NATO airstrikes. The six countries conducting the air attacks, led by Britain and France, were unsuccessful at a meeting this week in Berlin in persuading more alliance members to join them.
NATO officials said that their operational tempo has not decreased since the United States relinquished command of the Libya operation and withdrew its strike aircraft at the beginning of April. More planes, they said, would not necessarily result immediately in more strike missions.
But, they said, the current bombing rate by the participating nations is not sustainable. “The reason we need more capability isn’t because we aren’t hitting what we see — it’s so that we can sustain the ability to do so. One problem is flight time, the other is munitions,” said another official, one of several who were not authorized to discuss the issue on the record.
European arsenals of laser-guided bombs, the NATO weapon of choice in the Libyan campaign, have been quickly depleted, officials said. Although the United States has significant stockpiles, its munitions do not fit on the British- and French-made planes that have flown the bulk of the missions.
Britain and France have each contributed about 20 strike aircraft to the campaign. Belgium, Norway, Denmark and Canada have each contributed six — all of them U.S.-manufactured and compatible with U.S. weaponry.
Since the end of March, more than 800 strike missions have been flown, with U.S. aircraft conducting only three, targeting static Libyan air defense installations. The United States still conducts about 25 percent of the overall sorties over Libya, largely intelligence, jamming and refueling missions.
Other NATO countries, along with the United Arab Emirates, Qatar and Jordan, have contributed planes to enforcing a no-fly zone over Libya to prevent Gaddafi’s use of airpower, but so far have declined to participate in the strike missions.
After the Berlin meeting, NATO Secretary General Anders Fogh Rassmussen said that 10 more aircraft were needed and that he was confident they would be supplied. A U.S. official said that Italy — which earlier in the week said it was not interested — may contribute planes to the ground attack mission, and that the Arab participants might also do so.
But with Gaddafi’s forces and the rebel army locked in a stalemate, Obama has resisted calls from opposition leaders, and some hardline lawmakers in this country, to move U.S. warplanes back into a leading role.
Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) and other have called on Obama to redeploy U.S. AC-130 gunships, which are considered more effective over populated areas.
Although the gunships flew several missions early in the operation, Gen. Carter Ham, who commanded the mission before it was turned over to NATO, said last week that they were frequently grounded because of weather and other concerns.
The slow-moving aircraft, which flew as low as 4,000 feet over Libya, are also considerably more vulnerable than jet fighters to surface-to-air missiles. While much of Libya’s stationary air defenses have been destroyed, Ham said Gaddafi was believed to have about 20,000 shoulder-held SAMS at the beginning of the conflict, and “most” of them are still unaccounted for.
Concerns that supplies of jet-launched precision bombs are growing short in Europe have reignited long-standing controversies over both burden-sharing and compatibility within NATO. While allied jets have largely followed the U.S. lead and converted to precision munitions over the last decade, they have struggled to keep pace, according to senior U.S. military officials.
Libya “has not been a very big war. If [the Europeans] would run out of these munitions this early in such a small operation, you have to wonder what kind of war they were planning on fighting,” said John Pike, director of GlobalSecurity.org, a defense think tank. “Maybe they were just planning on using their air force for air shows.”
Despite U.S. badgering, European allies have been slow in some cases to modify their planes and other weapons systems so they can accommodate U.S. bombs. Retooling these fighter jets so that they are compatible with U.S. systems requires money, and all European militaries have faced significant cuts in recent years.
Typically, the British and French militaries buy munitions in batches and stockpile them. When arsenals start to run low, factories must be retooled and production lines restarted to replace the diminished stock, all of which can take time and additional money, said Elizabeth Quintana, an aerospace analyst at the Royal United Service Institute in London.
deyoungk@washpost.com
Pace of Attacks in Libya Conflict Is Dividing NATO
By STEVEN LEE MYERS and ERIC SCHMITT
WASHINGTON — With the United States limiting itself to a supporting role in the conflict in Libya, fissures opened among NATO allies on Tuesday over the scope and intensity of attacks against the forces of Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi, officials here and in Europe said.
On the eve of two important meetings this week, France and Britain openly called on the alliance and its partners to intensify airstrikes on Libyan government troops to protect civilians, prompting an unusual public retort from NATO’s command that it was carrying out the military operation under the terms of the United Nations Security Council resolution that authorized force.
“As long as regime forces continue attacking their own people, we will intervene to protect them,” Lt. Gen. Charles Bouchard of Canada, the NATO operational commander, said in Naples, Italy. “NATO’s resolve is in its mandate to protect the civilian population.”
Arriving for talks in Luxembourg with other European leaders, the British foreign minister, William Hague, said that the allies had to “maintain and intensify” the military effort, noting that Britain had already deployed extra ground attack planes.
“Of course, it would be welcome if other countries also did the same,” Mr. Hague said.
His remarks, echoed by Foreign Minister Alain Juppé of France, reflected what officials have described as a complex and at times convoluted coalition, with many participating countries refusing to carry out airstrikes against forces on the ground, even as their planes patrol the skies over Libya.
Britain and France, for example, are now flying the bulk of the attack missions, with Norway, Denmark and Canada also striking Libyan targets on the ground. But other countries, including the Netherlands, Sweden, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates, are taking less aggressive roles, enforcing the no-fly zone over Libya or conducting reconnaissance missions, in a nod to political considerations back home.
The varying tactics reflect the different ways in which each country in the coalition views the mission, and how tough it has been to corral all the participants into focused attacks.
In Washington, Obama administration officials sought to tamp down a growing sense of concern among some military analysts that the combination of the Americans’ back-seat role, NATO’s inexperience in waging a complicated air campaign against moving targets and botched communications with the ragtag rebel army had thrown the mission into disarray. In the past week, NATO pilots were involved in two friendly-fire instances that killed well over a dozen rebel fighters.
Meantime, as some allies privately hope for the return of the American-led ground-attack missions, other coalition partners have expressed concern that their supplies of precision-guided bombs are running low after more than 800 strike missions.
“We have every confidence in NATO’s ability to carry out the tasks of enforcing the arms embargo as well as the no-fly zone and the protection of civilians in Libya,” Mark Toner, a State Department spokesman, said Tuesday. “As the president said, the U.S. and other key partners had capabilities that they brought to this operation upfront, and then our role would diminish as NATO stepped up and took command and control of the operation. And that’s what’s happened.”
The United States has worked hard to limit its role in the Libyan campaign, arguing that it has its plate full with wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. It has also argued that Libya’s history and proximity to Europe make it a European problem, and that it was the French, in particular, who had argued for aggressive intervention.
Still, officials in Washington and Europe expressed frustration and worry about the coordination of the campaign, though a senior official of the Obama administration said it was willing to accept the complications inherent in the command of the operation because “there’s a huge benefit in having a wider coalition.”
The countries involved in the conflict are to hold separate meetings this week to try to maintain a consensus on forcing Colonel Qaddafi to end attacks on cities held by rebel forces.
In Doha, Qatar, on Wednesday, representatives of one group of allied countries will discuss the diplomatic initiatives now under way, led by the United Nations special envoy for Libya, Abdel Ilah al-Khatib, and African leaders. Libya’s former foreign minister, Moussa Koussa, who fled to Britain, is also expected to attend. NATO members begin a meeting the next day in Berlin.
The American delegation to the meetings in Doha will be led by Under Secretary of State William J. Burns. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, who met with the Jordanian foreign minister and the emir of Qatar in Washington on Tuesday, will attend the NATO meeting in Berlin.
The separate meetings are themselves a sign of the bifurcated political and military leadership of the coalition, whose members remain divided over the means of the operation, if not the end: a political transition in Libya that sees the removal of Colonel Qaddafi.
“Forming coalitions is complicated enough,” the senior administration official said. “Sustaining them is sometimes equally complicated. It requires a lot of hard work and tending.”
A European diplomat expressed concern that the efforts to negotiate a cease-fire — rebuffed so far by the rebels and government loyalists — could have a potential “demobilization effect” among some of the militaries now involved, because it might entice some countries to slow down the assault. Referring to Colonel Qaddafi, the diplomat insisted that “we have to maintain the military pressure on him” in order to end the conflict.
Several European and NATO diplomats acknowledged on Tuesday that NATO’s initial handling of the air campaign has been plagued with problems and miscommunications. But these officials insisted that with improving weather and lessons learned from a week’s worth of hard knocks, the tempo of operations was steadily improving.
A senior NATO diplomat said, for instance, that the alliance decided only at the end of March how many aircraft it would need to maintain the operation that the United States led for about 10 days. After some reluctance, countries were providing the forces to fill the requirements.
NATO is now flying just under 200 aircraft, with the United States supplying about 40 refueling, reconnaissance and other specialized planes that few if any other countries have. The United States also has about 40 aircraft in reserve, including tank-killing A-10s and AC-130 gunships.
The diplomats said that after a rough start, NATO was getting better at attacking mobile targets by identifying them accurately and quickly and relaying that information to the warplanes. “There is a learning curve, but we are progressing,” a French diplomat said. “The Americans are not indispensable.”
In Brussels, Brig. Gen. Mark van Uhm, NATO chief of operations, said Tuesday that allied warplanes flew an average of 62 bombing runs a day last weekend, about on par with what the American-led operation did.
“We are having an effect,” General van Uhm said. “Qaddafi forces can’t fight how they want to, where they want to or with what weapons they want to.”
NATO steps up airstrikes around besieged Libyan city of Misurata
Washington Post
By Simon Denyer, Wednesday, April 13, 12:22 PM
TRIPOLI, Libya — NATO stepped up airstrikes around the besieged Libyan city of Misurata on Wednesday, destroying 12 government tanks, after criticism from within its own ranks that it was not doing enough to stop the Libyan government from shelling and shooting indiscriminately at civilians in the rebel-held portion of the city.Rebels, who control Misurata’s port and much of the north and east of the city, reported heavy fighting but said things seemed finally to be going their way.
The situation for civilians, however, remained desperate, and a spokesman for the city council appealed for NATO to send in ground troops to protect civilians and prevent a massacre.
“Every single day, mortar shells and tank shells are falling randomly all around the city,” said the spokesman, who insisted for safety reasons that he be identified only by his first name, Mohammed. “It is endless madness and carnage.”
On Wednesday, The Washington Post received photographs from local doctors of an ambulance hit by a mortar shell just that evening, along with disturbing pictures of three badly wounded and very young children hit by shellfire in their parents’ home and car. Two of the children survived, one doctor said.
“All we can smell is smoke and blood, all we can hear is crying children,” said Aiman Abushahma, a doctor at a Misurata hospital. “We sleep to the sound of shellfire, we wake up to the sound of shellfire. They are shelling ambulances, they are shelling medical staff.”
Misurata, Libya’s third-largest city, lies just 131 miles east of the capital, Tripoli. As the rebels’ only foothold in western Libya, it represents a strategic prize for both sides in the conflict — and a major irritant for Moammar Gaddafi’s forces, who would like to regain control of the city before moving decisively against rebel strongholds far to the east
On Tuesday, the foreign ministers of France and Britain said their NATO partners were not doing enough to help protect rebel-held cities such as Misurata from attacks by Gaddafi’s troops, although NATO commanders say it is often difficult to isolate military targets in urban settings without putting civilians at risk.
Mohammed, the city council spokesman, said that NATO airstrikes had destroyed hundreds of tanks around Misurata and badly disrupted Gaddafi’s supply lines, but that government forces were now hiding tanks and heavy artillery in schools, hostels and hospitals.
With Misurata encircled by government forces for seven weeks, the humanitarian situation in the city is “grave” and deteriorating, said the United Nations children’s agency, UNICEF.
Virtually the entire population of 300,000 of this once bustling commercial city is crammed into just a third of the area, with homes, schools and mosques all full. Water has been cut off for weeks, and sewage systems are disrupted. Electricity is also out in much of the city, and the streets are not safe from snipers and shellfire.
Shahida Azfar, UNICEF’s regional director for the Middle East and North Africa, said more than 20 children had died as a result of shooting and shelling by government forces. “The siege must stop,’’ she said.
More than 260 people, most of them civilians, have been killed in Misurata since the siege began, according to local doctors interviewed via Skype.
The Libyan government denies killing any civilians in the city.
On Monday, Social Affairs Minister Ibrahim al-Sharif said all the children killed were victims of NATO airstrikes. On Tuesday, government spokesman Moussa Ibrahim blamed civilian deaths on “armed gangs” and “al-Qaeda affiliates,” as he refers to the rebels.
NATO Showing Strain Over Approach to Libya
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.
Tuesday, April 5, 2011
more on Libya
Military action alone will not save Libya FT
NATO Press briefing on libya here
Bombing by International Consensus: Libya reveals the complications of multilateralism. National Review
Down with Doctrines National Interests
Libya Crisis Leaves Berlin Isolated Spiegel
Libya: Unrest and U.S. Policy here
Operation Odyssey Dawn (Libya): Background and Issues for Congress here
NATO Press briefing on libya here
Bombing by International Consensus: Libya reveals the complications of multilateralism. National Review
Down with Doctrines National Interests
Libya Crisis Leaves Berlin Isolated Spiegel
Libya: Unrest and U.S. Policy here
Operation Odyssey Dawn (Libya): Background and Issues for Congress here
Libya's Strains on NATO
Interviewee: Charles A. Kupchan, Whitney Shepardson Senior Fellow, CFR
Interviewer: Bernard Gwertzman, Consulting Editor, CFR.org
April 4, 2011
With the United States starting to remove warplanes from frontline Libyan missions, France, Britain, and other NATO nations will be at the forefront of the aerial conflict in Libya. The United States' move highlights strains in the NATO alliance that could become "serious divisions" if NATO tries to ramp up support for Libya's rebels, says CFR Europe expert Charles A. Kupchan. German Chancellor Angela Merkel has resisted participation, largely for domestic political reasons, says Kupchan, and Turkey has been uncomfortable with the appearance of "another Western war in a Muslim country." Kupchan says that French President Nicolas Sarkozy led the effort to involve NATO in Libya to compensate for his reluctance to take a pro-democracy stand in Egypt and Tunisia. Kupchan adds that looking forward, the problem for the coalition is "the ambiguity that prevails on the question of the mission's scope and objectives."
Why did U.S. ally Germany abstain in the Security Council vote on a no-fly zone over Libya on March 17 and announce it would not participate militarily in the subsequent operation in Libya?
The roots of the German position are in the troubles the current government faces at home. The Merkel government has been in a tailspin, with its poll numbers dropping and having received a series of setbacks in regional elections. Merkel has attempted to stabilize the situation with a number of policy decisions that have backfired. One was a decision to change her position on nuclear power plants in Germany. She had essentially been in favor of the continuation of nuclear power electrical generation and then after the earthquake and tsunami in Japan, she flip-flopped (Reuters), but that cost her credibility with the German electorate. On the Libya question, Merkel seems to have calculated that she would be able to follow in the footsteps of Gerhard Schroeder [German Social Democrat chancellor from 1998 to 2005], who rallied his domestic supporters in 2002-03 by standing up to George W. Bush and allying with France and Russia to oppose the Iraq war in the UN Security Council.
The German vote in the Security Council was to abstain, but in effect it kept Germany outside the transatlantic center of gravity and aligned the country with China, Russia, Brazil, and India. Again, this did more harm than good to her political fortunes. Part of the problem is that even though going to war has very little resonance in Germany, for historical reasons the German public has tended to see the Libya mission as a humanitarian intervention and therefore the opposition to the operation has been not as strong as Merkel had suspected it would be. [Her] decision has been exacerbated because now that NATO has taken control of the Libya operation, Germany has essentially gone along for the ride. Technically speaking, Germany could have vetoed NATO's taking over command and control because NATO makes decisions by consensus, but that would have been an extremely costly move. Essentially Germany has simply sat on its hands during the Libya operation.
So Germany is officially in the NATO operation, but not really doing anything?
German military are not participating (DailyMail) in the operation. But that's not all that unusual. Other NATO members have also chosen to sit out this mission in terms of concrete contributions.
The French were one of the first say there should be a military no-fly zone over Libya. Some press reports suggest the French involvement came about because well-known French philosopher Bernard-Henri Levi was in Benghazi when the fighting picked up, and he telephoned Sarkozy and set up a meeting between Sarkozy and Libyan rebel leaders in Paris. Then he introduced the rebel leaders to U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who was in Paris at the time.
There are three factors that help explain the French position.
The first is that Sarkozy has always attempted to use foreign policy and France's place as a great power to shore up his domestic political support. We've seen since the beginning of his presidency his readiness to step out ahead of the pack and play a leading role on foreign policy issues. He was the leading personality in attempting to negotiate a ceasefire between Russia and Georgia during their war in August 2008. He took the lead in proposing and fashioning (BrusselsJournal) what has come to be called the Mediterranean Union, a new effort to build greater regional integration among Mediterranean states. There are many other examples.
We are in a stage in the fighting in which at times it appears that NATO forces have become the air force of the rebels. If things head down that road and NATO begins to arm the rebels, we will see some pretty serious divisions emerge within the NATO coalition.
Secondly, he felt vulnerable because of claims that France was behind the curve on Tunisia and Egypt and that Sarkozy had shown too much sympathy for the leadership in those countries and not aligned [France] readily enough with the democracy movements. Many analysts believe that his readiness to rush into Libya was to make up for his previous political mistakes.
The third factor would be that for both geographic and historical reasons, France continues to view North Africa as part of a broader French sphere of influence. Libya figures less in that than former French colonies like Algeria and Tunisia, but there still is a sense that France should play a leading role in this part of the world. I think those conditions combined to impress on Sarkozy the need to act boldly on Libya and made him want to get out in front of the issue.
In some ways, it's safe to say France has been leading the pack on the Libya intervention and that the intervention may well not have occurred had it not been for French leadership.
Did France push the United States into the military operation over Libya?
It's safe to say that the United States moved toward intervention reluctantly, and one of the factors that I think forced Obama's hand was that you had not only the Arab League but a coalition of willing European countries saying to Washington, let's go! It put Obama in an awkward position.
But now, the United States is essentially withdrawing from the military field and turning it over to NATO command. But of course the United States is the biggest player in NATO. What's Washington's thinking?
Obama has been in the awkward position of justifying the war to the American people as a necessary act of humanitarian intervention while at the same time acknowledging that the United States doesn't have vital interests in Libya. [It also means] being aware that the United States is passing through a period politically in which building support for the projection of power abroad is more difficult given the long wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and the budget deficit. Obama from the very beginning has said, "We're in this, but we don't want to take the lead. We're in this, but we want the timing and the scope of our involvement to be limited." To some extent, the handoff to NATO is more perception than reality. That's because the United States is the dominant power in NATO, and the United States will still be calling the shots on a day-to-day basis. It's not as if the United States is getting out. My guess is that when we look at the numbers of sorties being flown by NATO aircraft, and who is launching missiles, we really aren't yet at a stage in which U.S. participation is dramatically dropping. [There were reports that the number of flights flown by the United States in Libya would drop.]
The word is that the United States is going to try to decrease that number, but I think a lot depends on the military situation.
My guess is that when we look at the numbers of sorties being flown by NATO aircraft, and who is launching missiles, we really aren't yet at a stage in which U.S. participation is dramatically dropping.
The situation on the ground is very fluid, and clearly the rebels have had some setbacks in the last few days. Some of the airpower can be provided by European allies alone, but if the mission calls for close air support for ground forces and going after Qaddafi's forces more difficult to identify--those who have taken off their uniforms, [or] those who are in pickup trucks and sedans rather than armored vehicles--some of the flying will need to be done by American pilots flying aircraft that the Europeans don't have.
At first Turkey, a NATO member, was opposed to military action in Libya, but it has gone along, right?
The Turks were reluctant from the beginning, in part because of concern that a NATO mission in Libya would be seen as yet another Western war in a Muslim country. The Turks were also riled by the fact that Sarkozy was in the lead. That stems in part from longstanding tension between Ankara and Paris because of Sarkozy's open opposition to Turkish membership in the European Union. Relations between France and Turkey have not been good for several years. Then, Sarkozy called a meeting in Paris just as the operation was coming together, and he didn't invite the Turks to participate. That led to a situation where for a week or so the Turks were openly dismissive (DerSpiegel) about the operation and about French leadership. That then led to a stalemate of sorts, with the Turks essentially insisting that the mission be put under a NATO chapeau rather than let the French lead it. The French initially were unwilling to put the military mission formally under NATO. Apparently, Obama had to really twist arms to get the French to sign off on the NATO mission.
Right now, I would say that the danger for the coalition, looking forward, is the ambiguity that prevails on the question of the mission's scope and objectives. The Turks, for example, have been quite explicit in arguing that the UN authorization of the mission restricts NATO to the protection of civilians. That essentially would mean bombing campaigns only against Qadaffi's forces that are going after civilians. Now we are into a stage in the fighting in which at times it appears that NATO forces have become the air force of the rebels, in which they may therefore be supporting offensive operations. If things head down that road and NATO begins to arm the rebels, we will see some pretty serious divisions emerge within the NATO coalition.
Interviewer: Bernard Gwertzman, Consulting Editor, CFR.org
April 4, 2011
With the United States starting to remove warplanes from frontline Libyan missions, France, Britain, and other NATO nations will be at the forefront of the aerial conflict in Libya. The United States' move highlights strains in the NATO alliance that could become "serious divisions" if NATO tries to ramp up support for Libya's rebels, says CFR Europe expert Charles A. Kupchan. German Chancellor Angela Merkel has resisted participation, largely for domestic political reasons, says Kupchan, and Turkey has been uncomfortable with the appearance of "another Western war in a Muslim country." Kupchan says that French President Nicolas Sarkozy led the effort to involve NATO in Libya to compensate for his reluctance to take a pro-democracy stand in Egypt and Tunisia. Kupchan adds that looking forward, the problem for the coalition is "the ambiguity that prevails on the question of the mission's scope and objectives."
Why did U.S. ally Germany abstain in the Security Council vote on a no-fly zone over Libya on March 17 and announce it would not participate militarily in the subsequent operation in Libya?
The roots of the German position are in the troubles the current government faces at home. The Merkel government has been in a tailspin, with its poll numbers dropping and having received a series of setbacks in regional elections. Merkel has attempted to stabilize the situation with a number of policy decisions that have backfired. One was a decision to change her position on nuclear power plants in Germany. She had essentially been in favor of the continuation of nuclear power electrical generation and then after the earthquake and tsunami in Japan, she flip-flopped (Reuters), but that cost her credibility with the German electorate. On the Libya question, Merkel seems to have calculated that she would be able to follow in the footsteps of Gerhard Schroeder [German Social Democrat chancellor from 1998 to 2005], who rallied his domestic supporters in 2002-03 by standing up to George W. Bush and allying with France and Russia to oppose the Iraq war in the UN Security Council.
The German vote in the Security Council was to abstain, but in effect it kept Germany outside the transatlantic center of gravity and aligned the country with China, Russia, Brazil, and India. Again, this did more harm than good to her political fortunes. Part of the problem is that even though going to war has very little resonance in Germany, for historical reasons the German public has tended to see the Libya mission as a humanitarian intervention and therefore the opposition to the operation has been not as strong as Merkel had suspected it would be. [Her] decision has been exacerbated because now that NATO has taken control of the Libya operation, Germany has essentially gone along for the ride. Technically speaking, Germany could have vetoed NATO's taking over command and control because NATO makes decisions by consensus, but that would have been an extremely costly move. Essentially Germany has simply sat on its hands during the Libya operation.
So Germany is officially in the NATO operation, but not really doing anything?
German military are not participating (DailyMail) in the operation. But that's not all that unusual. Other NATO members have also chosen to sit out this mission in terms of concrete contributions.
The French were one of the first say there should be a military no-fly zone over Libya. Some press reports suggest the French involvement came about because well-known French philosopher Bernard-Henri Levi was in Benghazi when the fighting picked up, and he telephoned Sarkozy and set up a meeting between Sarkozy and Libyan rebel leaders in Paris. Then he introduced the rebel leaders to U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who was in Paris at the time.
There are three factors that help explain the French position.
The first is that Sarkozy has always attempted to use foreign policy and France's place as a great power to shore up his domestic political support. We've seen since the beginning of his presidency his readiness to step out ahead of the pack and play a leading role on foreign policy issues. He was the leading personality in attempting to negotiate a ceasefire between Russia and Georgia during their war in August 2008. He took the lead in proposing and fashioning (BrusselsJournal) what has come to be called the Mediterranean Union, a new effort to build greater regional integration among Mediterranean states. There are many other examples.
We are in a stage in the fighting in which at times it appears that NATO forces have become the air force of the rebels. If things head down that road and NATO begins to arm the rebels, we will see some pretty serious divisions emerge within the NATO coalition.
Secondly, he felt vulnerable because of claims that France was behind the curve on Tunisia and Egypt and that Sarkozy had shown too much sympathy for the leadership in those countries and not aligned [France] readily enough with the democracy movements. Many analysts believe that his readiness to rush into Libya was to make up for his previous political mistakes.
The third factor would be that for both geographic and historical reasons, France continues to view North Africa as part of a broader French sphere of influence. Libya figures less in that than former French colonies like Algeria and Tunisia, but there still is a sense that France should play a leading role in this part of the world. I think those conditions combined to impress on Sarkozy the need to act boldly on Libya and made him want to get out in front of the issue.
In some ways, it's safe to say France has been leading the pack on the Libya intervention and that the intervention may well not have occurred had it not been for French leadership.
Did France push the United States into the military operation over Libya?
It's safe to say that the United States moved toward intervention reluctantly, and one of the factors that I think forced Obama's hand was that you had not only the Arab League but a coalition of willing European countries saying to Washington, let's go! It put Obama in an awkward position.
But now, the United States is essentially withdrawing from the military field and turning it over to NATO command. But of course the United States is the biggest player in NATO. What's Washington's thinking?
Obama has been in the awkward position of justifying the war to the American people as a necessary act of humanitarian intervention while at the same time acknowledging that the United States doesn't have vital interests in Libya. [It also means] being aware that the United States is passing through a period politically in which building support for the projection of power abroad is more difficult given the long wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and the budget deficit. Obama from the very beginning has said, "We're in this, but we don't want to take the lead. We're in this, but we want the timing and the scope of our involvement to be limited." To some extent, the handoff to NATO is more perception than reality. That's because the United States is the dominant power in NATO, and the United States will still be calling the shots on a day-to-day basis. It's not as if the United States is getting out. My guess is that when we look at the numbers of sorties being flown by NATO aircraft, and who is launching missiles, we really aren't yet at a stage in which U.S. participation is dramatically dropping. [There were reports that the number of flights flown by the United States in Libya would drop.]
The word is that the United States is going to try to decrease that number, but I think a lot depends on the military situation.
My guess is that when we look at the numbers of sorties being flown by NATO aircraft, and who is launching missiles, we really aren't yet at a stage in which U.S. participation is dramatically dropping.
The situation on the ground is very fluid, and clearly the rebels have had some setbacks in the last few days. Some of the airpower can be provided by European allies alone, but if the mission calls for close air support for ground forces and going after Qaddafi's forces more difficult to identify--those who have taken off their uniforms, [or] those who are in pickup trucks and sedans rather than armored vehicles--some of the flying will need to be done by American pilots flying aircraft that the Europeans don't have.
At first Turkey, a NATO member, was opposed to military action in Libya, but it has gone along, right?
The Turks were reluctant from the beginning, in part because of concern that a NATO mission in Libya would be seen as yet another Western war in a Muslim country. The Turks were also riled by the fact that Sarkozy was in the lead. That stems in part from longstanding tension between Ankara and Paris because of Sarkozy's open opposition to Turkish membership in the European Union. Relations between France and Turkey have not been good for several years. Then, Sarkozy called a meeting in Paris just as the operation was coming together, and he didn't invite the Turks to participate. That led to a situation where for a week or so the Turks were openly dismissive (DerSpiegel) about the operation and about French leadership. That then led to a stalemate of sorts, with the Turks essentially insisting that the mission be put under a NATO chapeau rather than let the French lead it. The French initially were unwilling to put the military mission formally under NATO. Apparently, Obama had to really twist arms to get the French to sign off on the NATO mission.
Right now, I would say that the danger for the coalition, looking forward, is the ambiguity that prevails on the question of the mission's scope and objectives. The Turks, for example, have been quite explicit in arguing that the UN authorization of the mission restricts NATO to the protection of civilians. That essentially would mean bombing campaigns only against Qadaffi's forces that are going after civilians. Now we are into a stage in the fighting in which at times it appears that NATO forces have become the air force of the rebels, in which they may therefore be supporting offensive operations. If things head down that road and NATO begins to arm the rebels, we will see some pretty serious divisions emerge within the NATO coalition.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)