Lesson from Libya: NATO alliance remains relevant.

• Author: Brzezinski, Ian
• Position: Viewpoint

* NATO's six-month campaign against Moammar Gadhafi yielded a much-needed success for an alliance fatigued, if not disillusioned, by the war in Afghanistan and financially drained by the debt crisis. Operation Unified Protector, executed by a coalition of European, North American, and Arab forces, prevented a brutal massacre in Benghazi, helped the Libyan opposition to route Gadhafi and his regime from Tripoli, and thereby enhanced the prospects that Libya's future will be decided by its citizens.

As the fighting in Libya creeps to an end, a number of conclusions concerning NATO and its future appear justified.

NATO's air war and blockade against Gadhafi demonstrated that the alliance remains relevant and militarily useful. The Libyan rebels could not have toppled the Gadhafi regime--or even survived--without NATO's support, particularly the precision air strikes that steadily degraded his military- forces.

Despite efforts by Paris to preclude a NATO role, the alliance emerged as the sole organization capable of this undertaking. Only NATO had the proven command-and-control structures and the political credibility necessary to quickly integrate allies and non-allies, including Qatar, Jordan and the United Arab Emirates, into a cohesive fighting force.

Although Unified Protector was directed at a weak opponent, its complex air operation serves as a powerful reminder that the interoperability NATO generates among militaries is valuable and should not be taken for granted.

Ironically, it may be France that will benefit most from this lesson. As pointed out by Damon Wilson, vice president of the Atlantic Council, Unified Protector was the first time that France achieved a significant national objective through NATO. This fact alone has the potential to significantly erode the remaining vestiges of Gaullism that causes some in Paris to remain suspicious, if not resentful, of the alliance's role in European affairs.

At the same time, it must also be acknowledged that the war in Libya underscored the continued military shortcomings of NATO's European members. Unified Protector could not have been executed without the United States providing a significant portion of the deployed capacity. The preponderance of the initial salvo that disabled Gadhafi's air defense came from U.S. forces, and afterwards U.S. aircraft were relied on heavily for intelligence gathering, surveillance, air-to-air refueling, electronic jamming and the suppression of enemy...