The inevitable has now happened and Britain, France and the leader of the rebels' Transitional National Council, Mustafa Abdel Jalil, are all saying that Muammar Gaddafi can stay in Libya if he agrees to leave power. Contrast this to the statements that David Cameron made in February and you get some measure of how this military campaign has gone, even in the eyes of those who launched it. Badly.

Gaddafi's assault on Benghazi was halted and parts of the country freed from Tripoli's control. But the regime itself has not folded like a house of cards as some blithely predicted it would. Gaddafi has not been bombed out of Tripoli and the territorial progress of the rebel army is painfully slow, with rebel fighters exasperated at Nato pilots. Gaddafi's forces are still at liberty to advance undetected, launch big barrages of rockets and lay mines – not the actions of soldiers who are about to give up.

William Hague's U-turn was choreographed to coincide with a visit to Tripoli by the UN special envoy, who is in search of a political process that will end the war. The start of Ramadan in August is one deadline. The expiration of the mandate for military action at the end of September is another. These deadlines may apply to Nato's bombing campaign, but there is as yet little evidence that they are rocking Gaddafi to his foundations. If indeed this war is in its final stages, the Libyan leader must be congratulating himself on having survived four months of bombing without making any concessions. For him, survival is victory.

The western strategy agreed at a recent meeting in Istanbul is this: a halt to the bombing and a ceasefire will only be triggered by a formal and clear commitment by Gaddafi to give up his civil and military responsibilities. After that, a national reconciliation government will be formed to create a new Libyan leadership, who will then decide what to do with Colonel Gaddafi and his family – and the warrants for their arrest on war crimes charges issued by the international criminal court.

Leave to one side the object lesson provided to Gaddafi by the Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak, who left his personal fate in the hands of those who ousted him. For that reason alone Gaddafi is unlikely to buckle now. Strip away the concession that Mr Hague and his French counterpart Alain Juppé appeared to make, and Nato is still left demanding that the colonel fall on his sword as a precondition for a ceasefire and national reconciliation talks. Unless the economic and military pressure on Gaddafi inside Tripoli really is intense – and if so he is doing a good job of hiding it – this is make-believe. The U-turn Britain, France and the US have just performed is unlikely to be the last.