Military campaign in Libya is only the start: Plan now for the aftermath

12 April 2012

The international community must have a simple three-point plan to help Libya once the bombing and missile strikes stop.

The first priority must be maintaining an enforceable ceasefire - something we haven't been terribly good at in the past two decades, from the Balkans to Africa, Afghanistan and Iraq. This is almost certain to involve a peacekeeping force on the ground in half a dozen cities.

It will have to have a watertight mandate along the lines of Chapter VI of the UN Charter, applicable where peace terms have been agreed by all sides. It may even have to form as an operation under Chapter VII, where peace has to
be enforced by an international blue-helmeted force.

The second part of the plan must be a huge humanitarian operation, bringing aid to up to half a million distressed refugees, including basics such as food and medicine. Do not forget Libya needs to import more than 90 per cent of its food supplies.

The third element is trickier still: the rapid growth of a political culture to produce some form of stability. This is easier said than done, given the problem that Egypt, the country from which I write, is now facing.

With a far deeper political culture than Libya, the fear is that the referendum in Egypt at the weekend, in which voters approved constitutional changes that will allow swift elections, is going to short-circuit blooming democracy and deliver power to the most organised elements: the hardline Islamists of the Muslim Brotherhood and the Salafists.

As former US secretary of state Colin Powell famously remarked about Iraq: once you break a thing, you own the problem. As in Iraq, so in Libya. Neither Tony Blair nor George W Bush had an overall coherent plan for the aftermath in Iraq or Afghanistan. The coalition's present position is to say Libyans must decide their own fate, leadership and form of government. This is just a recipe for anarchy - which is likely to spread across the region.

Libya has been a Gaddafi fiefdom for 40 years, with little administrative structure and certainly no mechanism for an opposition to take power peacefully and effectively.

We are not even at the end of the opening chapter of the new phase of world politics sparked by the Arab "youthquake". We are barely beginning.

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