West Africa Task Force May Pull Out of Liberia : Peacekeeping: Leaders of 5 nations are split as the operation proves costly and largely ineffective.

Sentiment is growing among West African leaders for the withdrawal from Liberia of the costly and largely ineffective military task force they deployed in August in that war-stricken country.

Leaders of the 16-nation Economic Community of West African States may meet by the end of this month to settle the future of the 6,000-strong task force, according to diplomatic sources here in neighboring Ivory Coast. The meeting might help to relieve a political split among the members of the economic community over the Liberian civil war.

Since landing Aug. 24 in Monrovia, the capital, the task force, made up of soldiers from five nations and called by its acronym ECOMOG, has been unable to establish a workable peace between Liberian rebel groups led by Charles Taylor and Prince Johnson, Taylor’s former deputy.

In the last week, strengthened by air and artillery support from Nigeria, which also provides most of its troops, ECOMOG has managed to push Taylor’s army largely out of Monrovia. This is a boon for Johnson, who has generally supported the task force.

But regional leaders are unconvinced that the latest military success can be easily sustained in the face of Taylor’s resolute opposition.

Several diplomatic initiatives emerged during the past week in efforts to resolve the problems of Liberia and the international force.

Late last week, Ivory Coast President Felix Houphouet-Boigny, doyen of West African leaders, called a summit of economic community heads of state to discuss the task force. Eleven of the 16 member countries agreed to attend the conference, originally scheduled for today in Houphouet’s native town of Yamassoukro, now a diplomatic center.

But the presidents of the five countries making up the task force--Nigeria, Ghana, Gambia, Sierra Leone, and Guinea--declined. No Liberian politicians were to be involved either.

On Sunday, the plans were canceled, possibly because Nigeria objected that such a rump summit would violate the bylaws of the economic community. A formal meeting may now be scheduled for the end of this month.

The economic community was never a perfect vehicle for the Liberian intervention. An erratically functioning trade organization modeled after the European Community, it was not designed as a regional political entity.

And the real goals of the Liberia task force were neither realistic nor well-articulated, local observers maintain.

“They went in for all the wrong reasons,” said a Western diplomat in Abidjan. “They imagined they were a peacekeeping operation like a United Nations, keeping two sides apart. But peace didn’t exist to keep. They went in with the wrong mental attitude, the wrong battle plan and the wrong equipment.”

ECOMOG quickly became bogged down in Monrovia. It may even have exacerbated rather than alleviated the Liberian bloodshed. By taking sides with Johnson against Taylor, it became simply another armed force in the 10-month-old conflict, which has turned Liberia into an abattoir.

The lack of clear direction or resoluteness was demonstrated Sept. 9, when Johnson boldly ambushed Doe at the task force headquarters, killed more than 60 of the president’s guard and spirited the wounded president away unimpeded by the West African troops. Johnson later tortured and killed Doe and declared himself president of Liberia (as Taylor also has done).

Reports from Monrovia indicate that the task force’s undisciplined troops have even joined in the spree of looting and mayhem that afflicts civilians in the capital.

“The behavior of the troops has alienated all Liberians,” says a Western diplomat here who is familiar with the situation.

The disagreements over ECOMOG illustrate how the Liberian civil war has spread beyond that small country’s borders to disrupt the domestic and regional politics of West Africa.

The sharpest wedge is between two Francophone supporters of Charles Taylor, Ivory Coast and Burkina Faso, and such erstwhile friends of the Doe regime as Nigeria.

Taylor initiated his invasion of Liberia last December from a base in neighboring Ivory Coast and long continued to use the Ivorian border town of Danane as an informal headquarters. Burkina Faso, whose President Blaise Campaore is related to Houphouet-Boigny by marriage, has reportedly provided Taylor’s troops with training and arms and has openly expressed support for Taylor.

Both countries criticized the move to dispatch forces to Liberia, with Campaore flatly saying he considered the action illegal. The intervention also clearly violated bylaws of the Organization of African Unity, which bar the intervention by any member in the internal affairs of any other. All 16 of the West African community states and Liberia are members of the OAU; still, the OAU had lent at least tacit support to the creation of the international force.

For all that, the tribal nature and the scale of the Liberian bloodletting clearly unnerves its neighbors, sensitive as they are to the tribal animosities lying not far beneath the surface of their own societies. Western Ivory Coast, for instance, is populated by Gio, Mano and Krahn tribes, ones involved in the Liberian war.

“The same people are in our country,” a top Ivorian government official said last week in an interview. “You can see how dangerous this war is for us.”

Domestic pressure to recall the troops has been growing in some of the countries with soldiers in Liberia, particularly Ghana.

“ECOMOG got the Ghanaian nationals evacuated (from Liberia), that was Ghana’s preoccupation,” said a Western diplomat here. “Now that’s been accomplished, there’s a strong feeling to get out.”

Questions are also being raised in Nigeria about that country’s participation in the task force, but the political context of Nigeria’s involvement is more complicated, according to diplomatic sources.

Nigeria was the principal instigator of the task force, as well as the provider of most of its troops, and its army’s already uneven domestic reputation is more dependent on the success of the Liberian venture than those of the other participating countries.

Nigeria’s president, Ibrahim Babangida, also cherishes his image as an African “democrat”--he is planning to turn over his military government to civilians in 1992--and he evidently relished the opportunity, implausible as it was, to reimpose something akin to democracy in Liberia.