NATO ending 7-month campaign in Libya

[October 31, 2011]  BRUSSELS (AP) -- NATO will end Monday the seven-month bombing campaign that enabled Libyan rebels to overthrow Moammar Gadhafi's regime.

Spokesman Col. Roland Lavoie said NATO staff temporarily seconded to the headquarters in Naples, Italy, for the operation are being reassigned to regular duties. The alliance concluded its airstrikes soon after Gadhafi's capture and death on Oct. 20, but maintained regular air patrols over Libya.

The operations will end at midnight Libyan time (2300GMT), just days after the U.N. Security Council, which authorized the mission in March, decided to end all military action.

Allied air forces carried out 9,600 strike sorties in the past seven months, destroying about 5,900 military targets.

The mission has been hailed as a success by NATO's military and political leaders, who have argued that the bombing raids caused minimal loss of innocent lives while paralyzing Gadhafi's command and control networks and preventing his forces from carrying out reprisals against civilians.

NATO persevered during a months-long period of stalemate on the battlefields, when it appeared that Libya could become an Afghanistan-like quagmire.

"We have fully complied with the historic mandate of the United Nations," Secretary-General Anders Fogh Rasmussen said Friday. "(The operation) is one of the most successful in NATO history."

But the campaign caused deep strains within the alliance, with only eight of the 28 member states agreeing to participate in the bombing. Although allied aircraft enjoyed total air supremacy after Gadhafi's weak air defenses were incapacitated early on, it took more than seven months of daily airstrikes to finally defeat his demoralized forces.

Critics -- including Russia, China, the African Union, and other governments -- have argued that NATO misused the limited U.N. resolution imposing a no-fly zone and authorizing the protection of civilians as a pretext to promote regime change.

[Associated Press]

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