Analysis: ‘Final victory will see no parades for a job well done’

It’s all there in the statistics: 26,323 missions flown, 9,658 targets destroyed, one dictator removed, zero pilots lost.

But with Nato air operations ending there will be no victory parade in Whitehall or anywhere else.

For one thing, the victory in the skies over Libya does not balance out the bloodshed, chaos and uncertainty of other engagements by those same forces in Afghanistan and Iraq.

For another, London and Paris, who took ownership of this war, have yet to find out whether they have succeeded only in bombing a fresh set of tyrants to power in Libya.

None of which should take away the achievement of the pilots, ground crews and commanders who found their targets and kept their nerve in a campaign that throughout much of its time seemed to be going nowhere. As late as mid-August it seemed to reporters like myself, stuck in the besieged city of Misrata, that the bombing was having a marginal effect.

Five months of air strikes, their flashes and deep rumbles a constant night-time companion, had moved the front lines not one jot. Muammar al-Gaddafi’s grad missiles continued to crash into the heart of the city, and bloodied bodies piled up in the hospitals and morgues.

When fixed-wing strikes proved ineffective at hitting dug-in loyalist forces, Apache helicopters were deployed. But concern about the UN mandate, which allowed protection of civilians, but not close-air support for the rebels, meant they were not used in the role for which they were designed: They performed effective pin-point strikes, but full-scale hosing-down of enemy positions to provide combat air support for the rebel forces was deemed politically unacceptable.

In effect, Lt Gen Bouchard and his crews were having to fight the war with one hand tied behind their back.

What was probably clear to Nato intelligence, if not to the rest of us, was that eventual victory was assured, thanks to a simple equation: Gaddafi started the war with a finite number of tanks and artillery pieces. Nato was destroying this equipment at the rate of 50 strikes a day. Eventually, Gaddafi was bound to run out of kit.

That point came in late August when the front lines collapsed and the two most effective rebel armies, those of Misrata and the Berbers of the western mountains, surged across the front lines and seized Tripoli. Game over.

Along the way, the alliance avoided controversies such as the bombing of a civilian air raid shelter in the first Gulf war in Iraq and the mistaken bombing of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade during the 1999 Kosovo operation. There is as yet no firm evidence of any bombs veering off target into schools, apartment blocks or foreign embassies, no mean achievement after 9,658 strikes.

Whether those strikes should have been launched in the first place is an easier question to answer. Back in March, David Cameron, Barack Obama and Nikolas Sarkozy faced the prospect of standing by and seeing outright massacres – and of enduring the same criticism the West faced when it stood back from the Rwandan genocide in 1994.

The UN itself sensed that doing nothing would also mean tens of thousands of Libyan civilians fleeing to the Egyptian border, where someone would have to feed and house them in camps, probably for years.

That nightmare scenario was avoided, and if controversies remain – not least the fact that British and French air forces lack the surveillance and ground-attack equipment only the United States can provide – Lt Gen Bouchard and his crews will be congratulating themselves, in private, on a job well done.