Clinton Assumes Large Risk With Plan for Kosovo

The tentative acceptance of an interim peace agreement by Kosovo’s ethnic Albanian negotiators may have saved the talks in France from complete failure, but it marks just the beginning of a long and perilous journey for President Clinton’s Balkan policy.

In fact, few outside the separatist Serbian province itself stand to lose more politically than the beleaguered American president if U.S. policy there falters.

The next step in the peace process--winning full Serbian approval of the political arrangements and strong-arming Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic into accepting a NATO-led peace force in the province to implement the accord--is fraught with dangers.

Should the Yugoslav leader resist Western pressure and attract punitive air attacks to force his hand, the result would only further charge an atmosphere already laden with hatred, making an eventual solution harder to impose and the job of any peacekeeping force even more dangerous.

If Milosevic does yield on the peacekeeping issue in coming days, as many analysts believe he will, and if the fragile unity among the fractious ethnic Albanian negotiators holds, only then does the hard part of bringing peace to Kosovo really begin in earnest.

U.S. troops have deployed twice before in the Balkans this decade as part of a multinational peacekeeping force, in Bosnia-Herzegovina and in Macedonia. However, the conditions awaiting them in Kosovo are of another order of difficulty.

There will be no government actively supporting the accord, no battle lines to separate the forces as in Bosnia and no distinct areas of control. There is only an elusive, but deadly, confrontation between Serbian security forces and ethnic Albanian insurgents in the province.

With the ethnic Albanian guerrillas only now becoming a major force, there is also no sense of exhaustion among the warring parties as there was in Bosnia, where a NATO-led force of 60,000, including 20,000 Americans, entered the country after nearly four years of brutal war.

“Kosovo is not Bosnia,” noted Lee Hamilton, long a respected voice on foreign affairs in Congress and now director of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington. “The deployment is riskier, the stakes are higher, the mandate is more vague, and the geography is less clear.”

In a very real sense, the conflict in Kosovo epitomizes the messy, complex and largely thankless nature of policing the post-Cold War world.

“In crises like Kosovo, there is no good solution, only bad ones,” said David Wright, Canada’s ambassador to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. “The trick is to find the one that is the least bad. We’re all losing in Kosovo.”

Among the dangers for the Clinton administration in Kosovo:

* While there appears to be marginal support among the public and in Congress for U.S. participation in any NATO-led Kosovo peacekeeping mission, that backing is extremely fragile, analysts believe.

Still licking their wounds in the wake of the presidential impeachment battle, congressional Republicans are likely to resist a full-scale assault on the administration’s Balkan policy right now, in part because they want to avoid adding further to a “wrecking ball” image they gained during the impeachment.

But even one catastrophic incident taking American lives in Kosovo could quickly turn public opinion against the mission, analysts say, especially because the United States has been gradually lulled by experiences in Bosnia and Iraq into the belief that U.S. military action does not necessarily lead to casualties. In addition, such an incident would provide enough cause for brooding Republicans to attack the leader they love to hate.

* Kosovo marks a new, more difficult test of NATO’s post-Cold War role. Any faltering by the alliance there would reflect directly on administration policy, which has helped define NATO’s new mission to a greater extent than any other member government.

And with Clinton scheduled to preside over a summit of more than 40 nations in Washington in just over two months to celebrate the alliance’s 50th birthday and its pending enlargement, any problems with a NATO-led mission in Kosovo would prove politically embarrassing for the president.

* In recent months, efforts to resolve the conflict in Kosovo, a predominantly ethnic Albanian province of Serbia, the dominant republic of Yugoslavia, have been accompanied by an undercurrent of tension between the United States and its European allies about the proper division of labor in dealing with such situations.

The Americans want the Europeans to play a bigger role--but don’t trust them to do it. The Europeans privately criticize U.S. tactics--France, Germany, Denmark and Italy are all said to be uncomfortable with American threats to bomb the Serbs into acceptance if necessary--yet they seem incapable of doing more themselves.

The decision by the Europeans to host and co-chair the Kosovo peace talks, and to offer more than 80% of the troops required to enforce an agreement, reflects one strand of this tension. The fact that Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, in the end, had to cross the Atlantic to rescue the negotiations from collapse reflects the other.

Summed up Serbian President Milan Milutinovic at the talks: “Really, we negotiate with the Americans--fortunately or unfortunately.”

Times staff writer John-Thor Dahlburg in Paris contributed to this report.