Debate Turns to Finger-Pointing on Kosovo Policy

The Clinton administration’s top negotiator on Kosovo warned 13 months ago that airstrikes might be necessary to stop Serbian forces from continuing to massacre ethnic Albanians in the region. The White House rejected the idea as too extreme--and, within three months, the killing resumed at full force.

Six months ago, the United States actually did threaten airstrikes. But the White House turned down proposals to enforce a truce with armed peacekeeping troops--and, within three months, the war was back on at full force.

And just two months ago, NATO belatedly brandished both airstrikes and peacekeepers. But it declared that it would never send ground troops into combat--and the Serbs ratcheted up the violence once more.

In a recurring cycle of escalation, Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic repeatedly tested NATO’s resolve to stop him from using force to control Kosovo, a province of Serbia, Yugoslavia’s dominant republic. Each time, NATO sent back a muddy signal: It was ready to use force, but only the minimum amount necessary.

“At every point, the match between what we were ready to do and what was required to stop the conflict was one notch out of sync,” said a senior U.S. diplomat who helped administer the policy.

“There were serious miscalculations on both sides,” agreed another official who was involved. “Saying that we would never support [Kosovo’s secession from Yugoslavia] was probably not the best choice. Saying we would never use ground troops in combat was probably not the best choice either.”

Last week, in a round of finger-pointing, Clinton administration officials traded anonymous charges over who was responsible for the mess in the Balkans.

Defense Department officials said they had warned all along that air power wouldn’t guarantee a quick victory. Some, sniping at the hawkish secretary of State, spoke of “Madeleine Albright’s war.”

Albright and her aides replied that they had never been optimistic that Milosevic would back down--and shot back as well that the Defense Department had agreed with President Clinton’s decision to launch airstrikes.

In any case, administration spokesmen added, Milosevic is the one who should bear the blame for the bombing of Yugoslavia and the exodus of refugees from Kosovo.

U.S. May Have Missed Chances to Avert War

But in private, some of the nation’s most accomplished diplomats, including some directly involved in the confrontation over Kosovo, worry that the administration missed several chances to avert this war. And they say the lessons deserve a serious look, beyond the debate over who most misjudged the Yugoslavs’ intentions or endurance.

“Look, Milosevic was going to do this, or something like this, one way or another,” said one. “But yes, we could have done things differently. We might have been able to handle it earlier, or handle it better. And we need to work through those lessons because this is the kind of problem we face in the post-Cold War world.”

Clinton and Albright often say that U.S. diplomacy can solve deep-seated conflicts around the world when it is backed up by clear threats of U.S. force. But with Kosovo, that confident assertion at the core of American foreign policy has gone seriously awry.

The United States and NATO made several threats of force against Milosevic during the past year. But the Western powers also made clear that they strongly hoped to avoid the use of force and that there were limits on the amount of force they intended to use.

“We always threatened the minimum feasible amount of force, not the maximum,” said Ivo Daalder, a former National Security Council staff member now at the nonpartisan Brookings Institution think tank in Washington. “It is likely that Milosevic read U.S. unwillingness to put a large stick behind its words as meaning he could push us and get away with it. We were inadvertently communicating weakness instead of strength.”

There were several reasons for the North Atlantic Treaty Organization’s hesitance.

At one point last fall, Albright and other officials wanted to push for a NATO ground force to go into Kosovo, but Clinton refused.

“The midterm elections were coming up, everyone thought the Republicans were going to gain seats, impeachment was underway,” a senior official explained. “There was great concern about public support.”

But the problems weren’t only in Washington. Early this year, Albright won the president’s support for an unmistakable threat of airstrikes--but Britain and France insisted on restraint and another try at negotiations.

Results of Failure to Enforce Settlement

The result was a vicious spiral. NATO failed to enforce a durable settlement when the task might have been easier. Each successive campaign of repression by Milosevic sent more young ethnic Albanians into the Kosovo Liberation Army, the province’s insurgent guerrilla force. And each new exploit by the KLA only hardened Serbian resistance to the idea of granting real autonomy to Kosovo.

“The administration may well be right to say that [Milosevic] would have used force in any case,” Daalder said. “But that was not the underlying assumption of our policy at the time. The assumption of our policy was that he would be willing to grant Kosovo some status short of independence and that it could be achieved at the negotiating table.

“We never put together the right combination of diplomacy and force to achieve that,” he said. “Whatever we did was insufficient.”

Clinton made a commitment to use force in Kosovo in his first weeks in office in 1993, when he endorsed a warning his predecessor, George Bush, had sent to Milosevic at the end of 1992. But few Americans seemed to notice the issue and, on the evidence, Clinton never wanted to have to deliver on the threat.

The age-old conflict between ethnic Serbs and ethnic Albanians was an obscure sideshow to the war in Bosnia-Herzegovina until 1997, when the collapse of Albania’s government sent thousands of contraband weapons into the hands of the KLA.

In March 1998, after a series of KLA attacks on Serbian police, Milosevic unleashed his security forces for reprisal killings--drawing a warning from the U.S. special envoy to the area, Robert Gelbard.

“All options are open,” Gelbard said at the time, hinting at military force.

Gelbard asked the White House to make visible preparations for airstrikes to back up his words with action, officials said. But Clinton’s national security advisor, Samuel R. “Sandy” Berger, shelved the idea, a former official said.

“We didn’t have the allies with us,” an aide explained.

“By taking force off the table that early, we undermined the possibility of a political settlement,” Daalder said. “The Kosovars hadn’t been radicalized yet. You could have had a deal.”

Instead of peace, the rapidly growing KLA escalated the war, and, by September, the insurgents held as much as 40% of Kosovo’s territory. Yugoslav forces struck back, often by massacring unarmed civilians.

The United States, appealing for restraint on both sides, sent special envoy Richard Holbrooke to negotiate a truce. This time, Clinton persuaded the NATO allies to join in threatening airstrikes--but he backed away from an Albright recommendation to send in ground troops as a peacekeeping force.

“Albright, [U.S. Ambassador to Macedonia Christopher] Hill and Holbrooke all said we needed a ground armed force, but the White House turned it down,” a senior official said, attributing that refusal partly to the impeachment inquiry.

NATO’s September threat of airstrikes produced a truce agreement in October--but the pact lasted only until January. The KLA again stepped up operations, Serbian forces massacred 45 ethnic Albanians in the village of Racak, and Milosevic refused to cooperate with the international observers who were supposed to investigate such incidents.

NATO again threatened force--but again indicated that it desperately hoped to avoid any conflict. The United States and its allies delayed authorizing airstrikes, made it clear that they would not send ground troops into combat and summoned the two sides to European-led peace negotiations at a 14th century chateau in Rambouillet, France.

In Proposal, Officials Saw ‘Rosy Scenario’

At first, U.S. officials were optimistic about a NATO proposal under which Yugoslav troops would withdraw from Kosovo, an international peacekeeping force would go in, and the province would govern itself as an autonomous part of Yugoslavia for at least three years.

“There was a rosy scenario,” a State Department official acknowledged. “The expectation was that Milosevic would realize this was a good deal.”

He didn’t. His envoys turned up at the negotiations but refused to engage in serious bargaining. Western envoys said they sometimes appeared drunk.

Albright aides insist that they quickly realized no deal was possible. But other State Department officials say there was still some optimism that the Yugoslav leader might back down.

“All along, everyone who knew Milosevic said this is a guy who goes right up to the wire and then, at the last minute, flips,” said one. “Obviously, he thought the wire was someplace other than where we thought it was.”

On March 22, in a last-ditch effort, Holbrooke flew to Belgrade, the Serbian and Yugoslav capital, to make sure that Milosevic knew the threat he was facing. But even as he stressed that NATO was serious about bombing, the U.S. envoy couldn’t threaten ground troops--because in Washington, Berger, Albright and Defense Secretary William S. Cohen were publicly promising that ground troops wouldn’t be involved.

Holbrooke, in a television interview, later described his last meeting with Milosevic at Belgrade’s ornate Beli Dvor--Serbian for “White House.”

“I said to him, ‘Look, are you absolutely clear in your own mind what will happen when I get up and walk out of this palace that we’re now sitting in?’

“And he said, ‘You’re going to bomb us.’

“And I said, ‘That’s right.’ . . . There was no question in his mind what we would do.”

When NATO’s airstrikes began March 24, at least some officials believed that the campaign would succeed quickly. The international observer force that evacuated Kosovo a few days earlier even stayed near the border, half-expecting to return within a week.

“I don’t see this as a long-term operation,” Albright said in a television interview that night. “I think that this is something . . . that is achievable within a relatively short period of time.”

Even the airstrikes were limited at first.

“It was representational bombing,” said a U.S. military officer involved in the campaign. “They didn’t think it would be necessary to go whole hog. They thought it would be over in a week.”

Some Officials Had Expected Quick Success

But it wasn’t over in one week--or two. Instead, Milosevic’s ground offensive produced a refugee crisis, thousands of dead civilians and a round of finger-pointing in Washington.

Some officials said no one could have expected such a debacle. Others said grimly that they had expected a debacle all along. CIA officials leaked word that they had warned that Milosevic wouldn’t fold.

“Those bastards,” an undiplomatic State Department official responded. “I saw their intelligence. Half of it said the [Yugoslav army] would collapse, and Milosevic would back down. The other half said the opposite. They were having it both ways.”

In public, the administration could do little but promise to stay the course.

“We never expected this to be over quickly,” said Albright, 11 days after she had predicted success in “a relatively short period.”

“The president himself has said, ‘This is not a 30-second commercial.’ We are in there for a long time.”

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