WASHINGTON — The Pentagon has presented the White House with the most detailed set of military options yet for attacking the growing Islamic State threat in Libya, including a range of potential airstrikes against training camps, command centers, munitions depots, and other militant targets.
Airstrikes against as many as 30 to 40 targets in four areas of the country would aim to deal a crippling blow to the Islamic State’s most dangerous affiliate outside of Iraq and Syria, and open the way for Western-backed Libyan militias to battle Islamic State fighters on the ground. Allied bombers would carry out additional airstrikes to support the militias on the ground. The military option was described by five US officials who have been briefed on the plans and spoke on the condition of anonymity because of their confidential nature.
Defense Secretary Ashton Carter outlined this option to President Obama’s top national security advisers at a so-called principals meeting Feb. 22. But the plan is not being actively considered, at least for now, while the Obama administration presses ahead with a diplomatic initiative to form a unity government from rival factions inside Libya, administration officials said.
Even so, the US military is poised to carry out limited airstrikes if ordered against terrorists in Libya who threatened Americans or US interests, just as it did against an Islamic State training camp in western Libya last month.
“We will continue to use the full range of tools to eliminate ISIL threats wherever they are,’’ Obama said Feb. 25, after convening the National Security Council to discuss combating the Islamic State.
But the broader scale of the airstrikes option prepared by the Pentagon’s Africa Command and the highly secretive Joint Special Operations Command illuminated differences in perspectives and short-term goals within the administration. The scope of the military plan surprised some senior administration officials, and it drew warnings from some State Department officials that such airstrikes, if not coordinated properly, could jeopardize the United Nations-led effort to forge a unity government from Libya’s political actors.
The detailed military planning does expand the choices available to Obama in the coming months as he and his advisers, along with allies like Britain, France, and Italy, try to manage a tricky balancing act: nurture a fragile political process to form a unity government in Libya but not wait so long that the Islamic State grows too big for defeat by a limited — and politically acceptable — military action.
The newly refined Pentagon planning comes amid increasing reports that British, US, French, and possibly even Italian Special Operations forces have been on the ground in Libya for months. They have been conducting reconnaissance, gathering intelligence, vetting, and possibly advising Libyan militias deemed good partners to fight the Islamic State in strongholds such as Surt along a 150-mile section of territory the terrorist group controls.
As recently as last fall, senior US commanders and intelligence officials said they lacked sufficient information about the Islamic State in Libya even to identify targets to bomb.
But this effort on the ground among special operators does not appear to be well coordinated, and it seems to reflect the concern of clandestine forces should they be called on suddenly to speed up any unilateral military strikes against the Islamic State. The militant group’s fighters now number as many as 6,500, more than double their ranks last fall, according to the Defense Department.
Pressure is growing on the United States and its Western allies to intervene militarily. Britain announced last week that it was sending 20 military trainers to Tunisia to help counter illegal cross-border movements from neighboring Libya.
The strikes demonstrated the United States’ growing concern over Libya as a new base for the Islamic State and its willingness to use air power against militant commanders and infrastructure. So far, though, it has been a power limited by political constraints.
“We’d like nothing better than to have a government in place in Libya with whom we could work and from whom we could gain consent for engaging militarily in Libya,’’ James R. Clapper Jr., the director of national intelligence, told Congress last month.
