IN THE end the regime of Muammar Gadafy appears to have folded like a house of cards. Not that the seizure of Tripoli came cheap. Hundreds of rebels died in the last two days in the final push, a pincer movement from east and west that supported an insurrection in working-class areas of the capital. Last night Gadafy loyalists were still vainly holding out in pockets in the city and several towns, still inflicting a heavy toll. But their leadership has largely been arrested or gone into hiding, and their ultimate fate seems sealed.
The speed of events has astonished everyone. Pundits and the rebels themselves had warned that the taking of Tripoli would be a long, hard slog. But in the fog of war, estimating morale and weighing the balance of forces becomes a desperate guessing game and the tide can turn with amazing rapidity. A combination of the capital’s military encircling and isolation, leadership and rank-and-file defections in the face of increasingly impossible odds, and the extraordinary courage of the city’s browbeaten masses in rising against an utterly ruthless regime tipped the balance, exposing the myths of a capital solidly behind Gadafy and of his invincibility.
It is a salutary reminder to other regional strongmen, not least Syria’s Bashar al Assad, that the Arab Spring may still have legs and that their regimes, far from the solid monoliths they appear to be, may be resting on shifting sands.
For Mustafa Abdel Jalil and the National Transitional Council he leads the challenges are now, if anything, more daunting than before. Some commentators see the rapid fall of Tripoli and the exuberant crowds in the streets as boding well for a peaceful transition. But the temptation for heavily armed young men who have fought their way to the capital, losing family and friends in the process, to engage in revenge and looting is bound to be huge.
The imposition of law and order and the disciplining of irregular forces will be particularly difficult for the council which is reportedly divided and whose authority rests largely at its Benghazi base. Fighters from the west may be reluctant to accept its writ. And its attempts to co-opt the expertise of elements of the old regime in key administrative and economic positions to assist in the rebuilding will undoubtedly prove controversial.
Expectations that the overthrow of the regime can usher in a new period of prosperity for the country’s people will be hard to fulfil. The civil war has destroyed huge swathes of infrastructure and massively disrupted economic production, not least its crucial oil output. Before the war, Libya, Africas largest oil producer, produced about 2 per cent of global output, 1.6 million barrels a day, a level of output it is likely to take up to a year to restore. Support, both political and economic, from the international community will be crucial. The Contact group of nations is meeting urgently to consider aid and the unfreezing of some the $150 billion in sovereign assets abroad once controlled by Gadafy and his inner circle. The World Bank yesterday also promised to weigh in. There is no time to waste.