Agreement ‘Is Good, but We’ve Got to Be Cautious’

There were no triumphant grins Thursday in NATO capitals, no cheers or church bells, and the word “victory” was spoken not at all.

On paper, Yugoslavia’s acceptance of the alliance’s demands after a grinding 72-day air war should qualify as a remarkable success for NATO arms and big-power diplomacy.

But the grim realities of the Balkans got in the way of any temptation to celebrate.

“There were no smiles, no high-fives,” a White House aide said of the moment President Clinton got word that the Serbian parliament had approved the peace terms. “It was, ‘This is good, but we’ve got to be cautious.’ ”

First, Clinton and his colleagues in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization don’t dare claim success until Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic actually withdraws his troops from Kosovo province. “We’ve been fooled by this guy too many times before,” a senior State Department official said.

Second, making the agreement work entails a long list of headaches: monitoring the withdrawal of Serbian forces; returning well in excess of a million refugees to their homes; disarming the rebel guerrillas of the Kosovo Liberation Army. “There’s an incredible amount of work to be done,” Secretary of State Madeleine Albright said.

And third, even if the Kosovo agreement holds, the United States and its allies still face a host of long-term problems in the Balkans. Milosevic backed down, but he remains in power, indicted on war crimes charges and still a potentially disruptive force.

Some U.S. officials urged privately that ousting Milosevic should be one of NATO’s war aims, arguing that that was the only way to pacify the unruly region. But their advice, which could have meant a ground war to capture Belgrade, was turned down.

In the end, the U.S. and its allies waged a deliberately limited war against Yugoslavia in pursuit of limited objectives--and that’s what they achieved: a limited success.

NATO succeeded most clearly in keeping its own costs down: The alliance stayed together, the nightmare of a ground war was averted, and only two Americans died.

But in its original goal, the protection of Kosovo’s ethnic Albanians, the alliance failed completely. Much of the population was driven out. Thousands of people, Albanian and Serb, died. Serbia--and with it, Kosovo--suffered immense economic damage; neighboring countries also took economic losses.

In that larger perspective, the agreement struck Thursday doesn’t solve the Balkan problem; far from it. After eight years of blocking Milosevic’s attempts to create a Greater Serbia, NATO governments have now acquired the mission of protecting five vulnerable places--not only Kosovo, but Albania, Macedonia, Montenegro--the smaller Yugoslav republic, which is dominated by Serbia--and Bosnia-Herzegovina as well.

“It may be that this is a victory, but we won’t know that for a while,” said Michael Mandelbaum, a foreign policy scholar at the Council on Foreign Relations. “It leaves everything important to the implementation phase. It will take a long time and cost a great deal. We may have to patrol this agreement forever.

“Milosevic may calculate that he has some advantages. He’s there, we’re not. He has a vital interest in the outcome, we don’t. And he’s willing to take casualties, we’re not. The devil really is in the details.

“The test will be: How many refugees come back? They will be the ones to ratify this outcome with their feet,” Mandelbaum said.

When Clinton and his allies announced their decision to launch airstrikes against Milosevic, they said their first aim was to deter him from expelling the ethnic Albanians from Kosovo, where they made up 90% of the population.

NATO’s offensive didn’t cause “ethnic cleansing” in Kosovo--the process had already begun--but it appeared to accelerate it. And the alliance was painfully incapable of “deterring” the expulsions.

“This has to be counted as a mixed outcome more than a limited victory,” said Richard Haass, a former official in the Bush administration now at the centrist Brookings Institution think tank.

“The basic purpose of this humanitarian intervention was not met. The humans we intended to help got hurt instead,” he said. “The bombing had a lot of costs: direct costs to us, humanitarian costs on the ground, diplomatic costs in our relations with Russia and China. But the biggest cost was that 95% of the people we set out to protect became vulnerable.

“This was not a victory for coercive air power. Air power turns out not to be a useful tool in humanitarian interventions. It worked, eventually--but it worked only after it failed.”

Part of the problem, Haass said, is that the Clinton administration and NATO designed their war strategy by first deciding what kind of casualties they were willing to bear--and then adjusted their goals accordingly.

“We got it backward,” he said. “We started out by stating what we wouldn’t do; we wouldn’t launch a ground war. These arbitrary limits on means drove our ends, rather than the other way around. The avoidance of casualties seemed to be the highest consideration.”

Mandelbaum agreed, saying, “It is certainly true that the bottom line of this war was: ‘No casualties.’ And if this settlement holds, Clinton can legitimately claim that he won this war with no casualties.”

That has become the standard for U.S. military intervention abroad since 1993, when a humanitarian mission in Somalia turned into a political debacle at home after a battle in which 18 U.S. soldiers died.

“From Somalia onward, the lesson we have learned is that the American public is willing to support these acts of international social work so long as there are no casualties,” Mandelbaum said. “The public attitude is: You can station our armed forces anywhere you want; in New Jersey or Germany or Bosnia. Just make sure nobody gets killed.”

But Mandelbaum and Haass said the lessons need to be considered--because the Balkans and other regions will produce more crises.

“This is not a distraction,” Haass said. “This is what NATO does now. It maintains protectorates in unstable countries. Welcome to the post-Cold War world.”

* TOUGH CHALLENGES: Along with rebuilding nation, Milosevic must explain why he led Yugoslavia into war. A20

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