Pentagon Plan to Fight ISIS in Libya Includes Barrage of Airstrikes ... in a ground battle against the Islamic State in Libya has drawn warnings about an .... a buildup of Chinese surface-to-air missiles and fighter jets in the contested region, ... five years at Japan's crippled Fukushima Dai-Ichi nuclear plant, the utility that ran it ...
Pentagon Plan to Fight ISIS in Libya Includes Barrage of Airstrikes ... in a ground battle against the Islamic State in Libya has drawn warnings about an .... a buildup of Chinese surface-to-air missiles and fighter jets in the contested region, ... five years at Japan's crippled Fukushima Dai-Ichi nuclear plant, the utility that ran it ...
Pentagon Has Plan to Cripple ISIS With Air Barrage in Libya
Photo
American warplanes bombed an ISIS training camp in Sabratha, Libya, about 50 miles west of Tripoli, last month.Credit
Mohame Ben Khalifa/Associated Press
WASHINGTON
— The Pentagon has presented the White House with the most detailed set
of military options yet for attacking the growing Islamic State threat
in Libya,
including a range of potential airstrikes against training camps,
command centers, munitions depots and other militant targets.
Airstrikes
against as many as 30 to 40 targets in four areas of the country would
aim to deal a crippling blow to the Islamic State’s most dangerous
affiliate outside of Iraq and Syria, and open the way for Western-backed
Libyan militias to battle Islamic State fighters on the ground. Allied
bombers would carry out additional airstrikes to support the militias on
the ground. The military option was described by five American
officials who have been briefed on the plans and spoke about them on the
condition of anonymity because of their confidential nature.
Defense
Secretary Ashton B. Carter outlined this option to President Obama’s
top national security advisers at a so-called principals meeting on Feb.
22. But the plan is not being actively considered, at least for now,
while the Obama administration presses ahead with a diplomatic
initiative to form a unity government from rival factions inside Libya,
administration officials said.
Even
so, the United States military is poised to carry out limited
airstrikes if ordered against terrorists in Libya who threatened
Americans or American interests, just as it did against an Islamic State
training camp in western Libya last month.
“We
will continue to use the full range of tools to eliminate ISIL threats
wherever they are,” Mr. Obama said on Feb. 25, after convening the
National Security Council to discuss combating the Islamic State, also
called ISIL or ISIS.
But
the broader scale of the airstrikes option prepared by the Pentagon’s
Africa Command and the highly secretive Joint Special Operations Command
illuminated differences in perspectives and short-term goals within the
administration. The scope of the military plan surprised some senior
administration officials, and it drew warnings from some State
Department officials that such airstrikes, if not coordinated properly,
could jeopardize the United Nations-led effort to forge a unity
government from Libya’s fractious political actors.
The
detailed military planning does expand the choices available to Mr.
Obama in the coming months as he and his advisers, along with allies
like Britain, France and Italy, try to manage a tricky balancing act:
nurture a fragile political process to form a unity government in Libya
but not wait so long that the Islamic State grows too big for defeat by a
limited — and politically acceptable — military action.
Gen.
Joseph F. Dunford Jr., the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff,
summed up the current thinking about this juggling of priorities and the
possibility of taking more aggressive military action in the future, at
a news conference last week.
“Where
there is opportunity to conduct operations against ISIL, to disrupt
them at this point and not undermine the political process, that is
where we are,” General Dunford said. “At some point in the future, if I
believe we are at risk with that strategy, I will certainly come back to
the secretary and make some different recommendations.”
The
newly refined Pentagon planning comes amid increasing reports that
British, American, French and possibly even Italian Special Operations
forces have been on the ground in Libya for months. They have been
conducting reconnaissance, gathering intelligence, vetting and possibly
advising Libyan militias deemed good partners to fight the Islamic State
in strongholds such as Surt along a 150-mile section of territory the
terrorist group controls.
As
recently as last fall, senior American commanders and intelligence
officials said they lacked sufficient information about the Islamic
State in Libya even to identify targets to bomb.
But
this effort on the ground among special operators does not appear to be
well coordinated, and seems to reflect the concern of each clandestine
forces should they be called on suddenly to speed up any unilateral
military strikes against the Islamic State. The militant group’s
fighters now number as many as 6,500, more than double their ranks last
fall, according to a Defense Department assessment.
Pressure
is growing on the United States and its Western allies to intervene
militarily. Britain announced last week that it was sending 20 military
trainers to Tunisia to help counter illegal cross-border movements from
neighboring Libya. Tunisia has already built a 125-mile earthen wall
that stretches about half the length of its border with Libya in an
attempt to prevent militants from infiltrating.
Italy
last month agreed for the first time to allow American armed drones to
take off from an air base in Sicily to defend coalition forces fighting
Islamic State extremists in Libya.
Last
Friday, Italy’s Foreign Ministry confirmed the release of two Italians
kidnapped in Libya in July. That good news came a day after ministry
officials grimly announced that two other Italian hostages in the
country had likely been killed in clashes between ISIS fighters and
local militia fighters near Sabratha.
Last month, American warplanes bombed an ISIS training camp
in Sabratha, 50 miles west of Tripoli, killing a militant commander
linked to attacks on Western tourists. Those strikes targeted Noureddine
Chouchane, a Tunisian militant, whom the Pentagon said helped arrange
the arrival of Islamic State recruits from across Africa into Libya.
The
strikes demonstrated the United States’ growing concern over Libya as a
new base for the Islamic State and its willingness to use air power
against militant commanders and infrastructure. So far, though, it has
been a power limited by political constraints on the ground.
“We’d
like nothing better than to have a government in place in Libya with
whom we could work and from whom we could gain consent for engaging
militarily in Libya,” James R. Clapper Jr., the director of national
intelligence, told Congress last month.
Mr. Clapper said that in addition to Surt, ISIS is operating in Benghazi, Tripoli and other areas of the country.
Indeed,
the reason so many military officials were willing to discuss
classified war planning, including the option of aggressive airstrikes,
was to show that the administration was taking the ISIS threat in Libya
seriously. At the same time, though, the administration hopes to show
that it is exercising restraint for the time being to help the political
process succeed. The Pentagon produced the options at the White House’s
request, but did not offer any formal recommendations, officials said.
Libya’s
political leaders are divided between two loose political alliances in
the capital, Tripoli, and the eastern city of Tobruk. The United Nations
effort to form a unity government, led by the German diplomat Martin
Kobler, has been stymied by the factional differences.
Last
month, Mr. Kobler warned the West to move carefully if a unity
government is formed, and not press it immediately to support foreign
military intervention. He said that “very intense” anti-foreigner
feelings run deep among Libyan politicians and that pressuring a new
government to support outside military action against ISIS could
undermine it.
Two prominent Libya specialists offered the same warnings to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee last week.
“A
great risk is that outside intervention against the Islamic State,
before a cohesive government is formed, could exacerbate political
conflicts, bolster the power of local militias, and throw the country
into greater turmoil,” said Frederic Wehrey, a Libya expert at the
Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, who recently returned from two weeks in the country.
Claudia
Gazzini, a senior Libya analyst with the International Crisis Group in
Rome, told lawmakers: “Rushing an international military intervention in
Libya to counter ISIS would be shortsighted and would probably
backfire. Any such intervention should be discreet, measured and linked
to a political strategy aimed at bringing Libyan factions together into a
single government.”
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