Libya: Should the tribes’ support go and the regime will turn down

By African Bulletin on June 1, 2011

The NATO air strikes, in Libya, are about to reach their threshold for reversibility and become non productive.

This has led the coalition forces to introduce air combat helicopters to enhance its effectiveness as the loyalist forces have also deployed other tactics if not a new strategy. They simply merged with the population and entered into an asymmetric warfare – thus no more targets can be attacked with the NATO coalition bombs or cruise missiles. The loyalists and militiamen have been reconstituted in furtive groups, using civilian vehicles, and light armaments. No more conventional war with its heavy tanks and armored artillery. The loyalist forces have adopted the guerrilla warfare and without overflowing the policy framework, set by the Security Council, the coalition must find new appropriate military responses to the new situation. Then some military experts drew a parallel between the enhancement of military tactics like what has been done in Colombia against the FARC, and recently in the Ivory Coast, using helicopters’ capabilities of mobility and stealth, as well as their high-tech means of optical, thermal and radar detection and target identification. However, and despite these shifts from both sides – coalition and rebellion against the Loyalists, there is a persistent suspicion of failure because “Guerrilla” (meaning small war) has mainly been employed as an internal rebellion against the state. In Libya and to the advantage of the rebellion, we see exactly the opposite happening. It is the regular army military units that have gone into a so called guerrilla, but in reality it is just a last chance or attempt for the Kadhafi’s regime to hold on a distant Nation-state that has never been created on the basis of real state’s institutions, but only tribal identities to mobilize support. Should this support come to an end and the regime will turn down too.