Because Italy has far more to lose than anyone else involved in the U.S.-European coalition, Italy sought to hedge its policy toward Gadhafi throughout the run-up to the intervention. Rome initially took a line very close to that of Tripoli, with Italian Foreign Minister Franco Frattini voicing concerns Feb. 21 over the “self-proclamation of the so-called Islamic Emirate of Benghazi” echoing a statement from Gadhafi’s son, Seif al-Islam, issued the previous day to describe the rebels in eastern Libya.

While Italy now supports the coalition against Gadhafi, offering the use of seven Italian airbases to coalition aircraft and having the Italian air force conduct patrols over Libyan airspace, Rome continues to hedge its policy. Frattini on March 21 said Italy would have to resume control of its airbases, thus hinting it would kick out foreign troops, if some sort of NATO coordination structure were not agreed upon. Rome’s insistence that it is both part of the intervention and has abstained from playing an aggressive role against Gadhafi is a strategy intended to allow Italy to continue to balance the rebels in the east with Gadhafi in the west of the country. Rome simply has too many interests in Libya to pick one side and stick with it.

NATO command-and-control structures are important to Rome, which does not want the Libyan intervention to remain a Paris-London affair when the United States withdraws from leading the operations, leaving Italy’s energy and security interests at the mercy of two countries looking to gain the upper hand in a post-Gadhafi Libya.

This explains Rome’s reluctance to allow France to lead a command structure concurrent with NATO’s. Rome simply does not trust Paris or London, both of whom have plenty of reasons to expand energy and business interests once rebels grateful to both for leading the charge in Libya assume power in the eastern part of the country. Rebel leaders themselves have stressed that economic ties “will be calibrated to reflect the support that the various European countries have offered the grasroots uprising,” as the Libyan National Transition Council Deputy Chairman Hafiz al-Ghogha said in a response to a question what is in store in the future for Italy’s business and energy interests in Libya. In fact, one can directly draw a parallel between the competing interests of Italy, France and the United Kingdom in the intervention in Libya today with the competing interests of the three during the colonial 19th-century Scramble for Africa.

Geographically, Italy is one of the closest European country to Libya, with the island of Lampedusa, a destination of choice for migrants fleeing North African unrest, only 225 kilometers (140 miles) from Libya. It shares deeper ties with Libya than the rest of Europe, given its former colonial relationship. Like Germany, Italy became a unified European power only in the late 19th century and entered the scramble for African colonies after France and the United Kingdom had taken the choicest spots. The desolate stretch of North Africa just south of Sicily was still available, so Italy began building a sphere of influence in what is now Libya but was then three separate states: Tripolitania, Cyrenaica and Fezzan. Italy invaded in 1911, but resistance by insurgents in Cyrenaica (today’s eastern Libya) lasted until the 1930s. Italy lost its North African colony after World War II.

Because of its geographic proximity and knowledge of local conditions, Italy has not shied from conducting business in Libya in the post-World War II era. Energy company ENI began operating there in 1959 and never left the country, even when the rest of the West rebuffed Gadhafi in the 1980s due to his association with terrorism. This commitment to Libya allowed Rome to negotiate lucrative energy and arms contracts once Gadhafi renounced terrorism in 2003. Today, Libya accounts for some 15 percent of ENI’s total global hydrocarbons output, with oil production of 108,000 barrels per day and natural gas production of 8.1 billion cubic meters in 2009.

Italy has also been one of Gadhafi’s major arms suppliers since an EU arms embargo was lifted in 2004, a step for which Italy strongly lobbied. Italy has delivered on approximately $500 million worth of deals since 2004, slightly less than the value of French military deliveries.

The flow of capital and investments is not one-sided; Libya’s sovereign wealth fund has invested in a number of Italian financial and industrial enterprises. Libya’s sovereign wealth fund owns about 1 percent of ENI, and had stated its intent to increase its stake to 10 percent; 7.2 percent of UniCredit, Italy’s biggest bank; and 2 percent of weapons manufacturer Finmeccanica. Rome fears Gadhafi could withdraw these investments from Italy — something Gadhafi has threatened — or that a new government in Libya might decide to invest in Paris and London instead.

Acceptable Exit Strategies?

Italy has therefore enjoyed a privileged relationship with Gadhafi, from energy to weapons sales to its being a main destination for Gadhafi’s investments. The cozy business relationship has allowed Rome to negotiate a deal on securing its seas from an unchecked influx of migrants, both a national security and domestic political issue. Since January, when the Tunisian upheaval kicked off the unrest in the Arab world, 19,000 migrants — including 2,000 Somalis and Ethiopians — have landed on Lampedusa. This has largely confirmed Rome’s fears that the general unrest in North Africa — combined with the destabilization of Libya — would lead to an exodus of North and sub-Saharan Africans to Italy.

The current situation carries many risks for Italy. Replacing Gadhafi with an unknown regime or unstable environment that resembles the tribal warlordism of Somalia would lead to unchecked migration flows — which is essentially already happening — and an insecure business environment. His replacement with a rebel leadership grateful to London and Paris but suspicious of Rome also would threaten Italian interests. But participating in the coalition is risky, too, as Gadhafi could wind up clinging to power and deciding to seek revenge against Italy for joining forces with the United States, France and United Kingdom against him despite the 2008 friendship treaty.

Moreover, the European coalition allies do not trust each other. Rome believes that London and Paris are undermining Italy’s long-held upper hand in Libya. Italy wants to ensure its influence in how a post-intervention Libya is run and therefore has fought to move the coalition toward a NATO command-and-control structure that would be headquartered in Naples — allowing Rome to keep a close eye on the operations’ details.

Because its European neighbors seem unwilling to deal the finishing blows to the Gadhafi regime — at least as of this moment — Rome must take into account the possibility that Gadhafi could remain in power, if only in the western portion of Libya. Italy is therefore walking a tightrope: It can stand neither with Gadhafi nor too aggressively against him. Rome therefore has to be part of the coalition so as not to be frozen out of Libya by a new regime in the event Gadhafi is eliminated; however, its participation in the coalition has to be conducted in a halting manner to minimize the risks to its energy assets in western Libya should Gadhafi survive.

Rome is jockeying to play the role of peacemaker by participating in the coalition while not seeming overly eager to oust Gadhafi, currying favor with both the coalition and Gadhafi. To this end, Italy has sought, and has received, command over the NATO naval operation to embargo Tripoli’s access to arms, potentially a beneficial command if Rome wants to have power over Gadhafi in the near future. It has in the meantime maintained a non-aggressive role in the intervention so that it can claim to Gadhafi that its intentions from the beginning were to be a voice of reason in the intervention. Rome will attempt to use both its links to the Gadhafi regime and its role in the intervention to carve out a post-conflict mediator role that can protect its interests.

The problem with Italy’s plan is both the fluidity of the situation and the fact that it’s ability to continue hedging its role is being reduced every day London and Paris endear themselves to the rebels and as Gadhafi becomes more indignant toward Western powers. Ultimately, it is difficult to see Italy being completely frozen out of Libya. Geographic proximity and a long history of involvement means Rome, from Carthage to Libya, always has had a hand in the affairs of North Africa. The question in Rome today is how profitable that influence will be.

Today’s Question of Arming the Rebels

The problem the coalition forces seem to have today is that there is a gap between what they said they want to do to get rid of Gadhafi and what the no-fly zone authorizes them to do, which is use military force to protect civilians. And they are considering to close that gap by strengthening the opposition. Strengthening the opposition by giving them arms, so they can impose their own anti-tank and -- and anti-air zone. Another consideration here will be that a partitioned Libya is not what they are looking for as an end state. Today the rebels have already been beaten back to Ras Lanuf, which they had moved through quickly just yesterday.

As expected thus the airstrikes are not effective in the sense that Gadhafi now even is able to move from the defensive to the offense. There are still a great deal of questions as to who is involved in the rebel group as the situation is still very fluid at this point.

Coalition airpower is capable of defeating Gadhafi’s air force, crushing his larger, more fixed air defense capabilities as well as taking out known command, control and communications hubs. But the use of airpower to eliminate Gadhafi’s ability to wage war would entail civilian casualties and collateral damage. While airpower is the wrong tool for the job, no country is willing to provide the right tool in the form of ground combat forces. Thus providing weapons to the Libyan rebels is increasingly appearing to be the best alternative, at least to some of the coalition partners. In theory, this would provide the capability to do what airpower cannot and enable the rebels to provide the required ground presence. However, at no point in the Libyan civil war have the rebel fighters proved to be a competent military force, and their difficulties are not solely linked to their lack of arms. And without coherent organization, leadership, battlefield communications or command and control, as well as the ability to plan and sustain offensives logistically, no quantity of arms is going to solve the problem.

In the early days of unrest, opposition forces broke open Libyan military arsenals and appropriated an enormous quantity of small arms, ammunition, heavy weapons and related materiel, including armored vehicles and rocket artillery. Numerous reports have described rebels expending massive amount of ammunition to no purpose, firing small arms, rockets and recoilless rifles aimlessly into the air. Early on there were reports that a rebel SA-7 shoulder-fired surface-to-air missile was used to shoot down one of the rebels’ own planes, and the rebels have even implicitly acknowledged their limitations by issuing a call for drivers capable of operating a T-55, an archaic Soviet tank and one of the oldest in even the Libyan arsenal.

Indeed, the longer-term problem in Libya might be not too few arms, but too many. All of the arms that have been broken out of Libyan stockpiles will not be returned after the conflict ends. Everything from small arms to explosives to man-portable air defense systems (MANPADS) will be proliferating around the region for years. There are also minor concerns that even within the rebel movement there now are elements of al Qaeda and Hezbollah seeking to take advantage of the situation, though this is largely reflective of the overall lack of understanding by Western countries of the nature of the eastern opposition movement.

Unconfirmed reports have indicated Egypt and possibly Qatar may already be involved in smuggling weapons to the opposition. But what the opposition needs is not more weapons but training that will enable them to be a competent fighting force that could advance with only limited outside support, as the Northern Alliance did against Kabul and the Taliban in 2001. And, as experience in Iraq and Afghanistan demonstrated, training requires time — usually years, not weeks or months — that neither the coalition forces nor the rebels have.

The necessity that training go along with any arms shipments to the rebel fighters has reportedly complicated the internal debate in Washington over whether this policy is the best course of action. The United States has been explicit in its opposition to deploying ground forces in Libya, fearing that placing even a small number of advisers in eastern Libya could suck the United States into a protracted conflict.

Arming an opposition or insurgent force can work when the group or a collection of groups are already composed of capable fighters and competent leadership. When the United States gave FIM-92 Stinger MANPADS to the Afghan mujahideen during the Soviet occupation of the country, the mujahideen were a bloodied and battle-hardened force capable of planning and executing ambushes and assaults on Soviet positions. They were already slowly bleeding the Red Army in Afghanistan and may well have ultimately prevailed even without the Stingers. But the new missiles helped reduce a key Soviet advantage, their airpower. And when the Soviets and Chinese armed North Vietnam, the North Vietnamese had the basic military competencies not only to incorporate those arms into their operations but also to orchestrate the massive logistical effort to sustain them in combat and conduct large-scale military operations.

Today, the Taliban are winning in Afghanistan with Lee-Enfield rifles dating back to the 19th century and homemade improvised explosive devices, among other weapons. They are an agile and capable insurgent force that may ultimately prevail even without any expansion of limited outside assistance.

Taken alone, the act of supplying arms to a group cannot fundamentally alter the military reality on the ground. Also, rooting out competent forces from prepared defensive positions in fortified urban areas is a profound challenge for the best militaries in the world. Providing a ragtag group of rebels with additional arms and ammunition will not achieve that, though it may well make the conflict bloodier, particularly for civilians. And like the arms already loose in the country, any additional arms inserted into the equation will not be used only against Gadhafi’s forces, but around the region for years to come. If minimizing those casualties is a key objective, then it is simply not possible for airpower alone to force loyalist forces already embedded in urban areas to withdraw.

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