Alex Warren: West must now step back as a new Libya takes shape

One surprise lay in store on Sunday night, when opposition fighters drove into the western suburbs of Tripoli to meet virtually no resistance from pro-Gaddafi forces that had been expected to fight tooth-and-nail.

Another came early yesterday, when Saif al-Islam, the most prominent of Colonel Muammar Gaddafi’s six sons, appeared alive, well and free in Tripoli only hours after the opposition had announced his capture.

One still-unsolved mystery is the whereabouts of Gaddafi himself. Another is the situation in the enormous southern regions, home to some of Libya’s largest oil and water resources and still apparently controlled by Gaddafi loyalists. But President Barack Obama was right on Monday when he said that Libya had reached a tipping point. It is now a matter of how much time and blood – perhaps a great deal of both – will be required to kill, capture or drive out Gaddafi’s inner circle, including his sons.

Much of Libya’s population may not have been actively pro-Gaddafi, and certainly welcomed his removal, but they are also uneasy about being governed by an unelected and untested transitional authority whose claim to legitimacy, and whose track record so far, is questionable.

This conflict has also gone on long enough to open up deep-seated regional antagonisms that were kept in check by the Gaddafi regime, either by force or by buying allegiance, but now risk rearing their heads in the power vacuum that could follow.

Building popular trust in the transitional government over the coming days, weeks and months is therefore crucial to the prospect of a stable and prosperous Libya.

But the stakes for the UK are also high. David Cameron took a gamble in March by joining Nicolas Sarkozy in throwing his full weight behind a military intervention.

Since then, the UK’s Armed Forces have played a prominent role in an operation that has cost hundreds of millions of pounds and divided many of the world’s powers.

Russia, China and India all abstained from voting on the original resolution, and along with South Africa, have regularly accused Nato of going beyond the protection of civilians and pursuing regime change by another name.

A Libya that now descends into something resembling Iraq or Afghanistan, with long-term insurgency and infighting, would be a damning indictment of another costly western military intervention.

The toppling of the Gaddafi regime may not have required boots on the ground, but without Nato air power it would never have happened.

That is not to take anything away from the bravery and resilience of the Libyans who risked their lives to fight for their new-found freedoms, nor to deny that UN Resolution 1973 prevented bloody reprisals by Gaddafi forces on the verge of crushing the rebellion in Benghazi back in March.

The UK government is therefore hoping that the Transitional National Council (TNC), which it has supported so closely over the past six months, will be able to lead a successful transition and justify the intervention.

It will also hope for favourable business and political links with the new Libya, something which the TNC chairman Mustafa Abdel-Jalil hinted at on Monday, by promising that countries which had supported the opposition from the start would enjoy “special” relations.

Yet this creates dilemmas for both the new Libyan authorities and their foreign backers. The TNC has acknowledged its debt to Nato, but it cannot be seen as a western puppet.

Similarly, Nato members will doubtless exert great pressure on the TNC to act in a way that justifies the trust and expense placed in them over the past six months.

They will be strongly tempted to impose their own views and plans, or even send in peacekeeping forces, but doing so could undermine the legitimacy of the new government in the eyes of Libyans themselves and provide a rallying call for extremist elements.

In the interests of Libya’s future, the best policy for Nato powers should now be to step back and assist only when asked to do so.

No-one really knows what the new Libya will look like. Those who fought together to remove Gaddafi will have different views.

A temporary constitution written by the TNC leadership sends all the right signals, but still needs to be discussed and approved by the wider population, a process that cannot start until the fighting ends. And the longer it goes on, the bigger the headache for London and Paris.

Alex Warren, from North Yorkshire, is director of Frontier, a Middle East and North Africa consultancy.