Our Balkan Fumbling Grows Dangerous

The NATO raid on Serb police headquarters in Banja Luka last month marked a sharp departure in U.S. Bosnia policy. It represents a huge gamble that will fail unless the distance between the impossible ends set forth in the Dayton accords and the means employed to achieve them is narrowed.

What has changed?

NATO’s military posture in Bosnia had been very conservative, concentrating on separating Muslim, Croat and Serb forces but not on implementing the core political aspects of the accords--seizing war criminals and assisting the resettlement of refugees. Now NATO has declared war on Radovan Karadzic and the rest of the de facto leadership of the Bosnian Serb Republic, physically occupied its western sector and put itself on one side of the burgeoning intramural dispute among the Bosnian Serbs. The aim is clear: to drive Karadzic from political life once and for all so that Dayton can be fully implemented.

But Karadzic won’t go softly into the night. NATO forces must be ready for further escalation if he tries to outwait them or to “do another Somalia” by driving a risk-averse American public to demand the withdrawal of U.S. forces after a dozen or so casualties. U.S. officials hint at possible violence; foreign diplomats are more blunt, speaking of bombs and body bags.

Why take this risk now, after having done so little since U.S. troops first went to Bosnia in December 1995? The answer is that the Clinton administration has put its head in a policy vise of its own making. To one side is its worry that nonimplementation of Dayton will drive Congress to refuse an extension of the Bosnia force beyond June and to the other is the worry that failure in Bosnia will scuttle the ratification of NATO expansion as well. Hence the sudden resolve to implement Dayton.

It won’t work. The Dayton accords can’t be fully implemented because they compose a diplomatic fantasy. Dayton cannot be a formula for a multicommunal democratic, Bosnian state; Dayton is a de facto partition whose tranquillity can rest either on an intimidating foreign presence or on a local balance of fear. For NATO to force into being the symbols of a Bosnian fantasy state--refugees returning to live peaceably in areas dominated by their enemies; ethnic leaders turning over their own henchmen to war crimes tribunals--is to engage in politically unnatural acts in the aftermath of brutal warfare and to create a lose-lose situation.

NATO loses if it fails to force such acts and it loses if it succeeds, for “success” would only create a greater need for a foreign presence to keep those acts from coming undone. As long as the goal remains the impossible one of the Dayton accords, NATO forces can retreat under duress (again, see Somalia), go home and watch as war recommences or stay to await local Balkan intrigues.

So what to do? NATO should acknowledge the partition of Bosnia and work to make it stable and fair. This will require difficult adjustment to Bosnia’s ragged borders. Croatia and Serbia will gain some territory, but only in return for their acceptance of the borders and sovereignty of Bosnia. This means, of course, making a deal that stands to benefit Slobodan Milosevic, the man who arguably caused the latest series of Balkan wars in the first place. This is irksome, but Belgrade is a legitimate address from which to make promises and to which to address sanctions if those promises are not kept; Pale isn’t. And Milosevic will know how to make Karadzic disappear.

Making new borders secure and managing population movements that might go with them will require military as well as diplomatic energy. For a while at least, NATO may need to exert greater power to achieve a lesser peace. But that’s the only way that foreign forces can leave the former Yugoslavia without a disaster. Trying to make Bosnia look like Switzerland--an intercommunal democracy at peace with all its neighbors--won’t work.

This is sad, but war invariably produces sadness. Trying to impose unrealistic solutions will only spread the sadness around to include American families whose loved ones will die for the well-intentioned but fuzzy-minded conceit of their civilian superiors.

Unless the Clinton administration sobers up about what is and is not possible in Bosnia, last month’s raid will mark the beginning of a descent to disaster: the Tonkin Gulf of the Balkans.