Conference Highlights Flaws of NATO’s Kosovo Campaign

A global security debate about “the lessons of Kosovo” unleashed angst and anger here Saturday as generals and politicians blasted NATO’s first military engagement for being expensive, morally misguided and an unfinished job that left ticking time bombs in the Balkans capable of exploding into new wars.

More than 200 defense and security strategists--gathered for the 36th annual Munich Conference on Security Policy--had been expected to engage in self-congratulatory celebration of the unity and determination of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization’s nearly three-month assault on Yugoslavia last year.

But many of the world’s security elite, given the opportunity to discuss the air campaign together for the first time, lambasted it as so fraught with bureaucracy and shackled by political cowardice that it accomplished little more than a baring of the deep divisions and daunting challenges facing the alliance.

The frank exchanges also exposed disagreement concerning European Union plans for a new continental army independent of NATO, as well as about a nuclear missile defense program that U.S. leaders appear determined to push forward despite vehement objections from Russia.

At the conference that for years has been an informal brainstorming session for Western politicians and military leaders, Russian and U.S. figures regressed to verbal clashes reminiscent of Cold War-era encounters.

Gen. Leonid G. Ivashov, Russia’s international military relations chief, characterized the discussions about NATO as opposed to a continent-wide force, and about a U.S. missile shield, as “songs of praise for warfare.”

That prompted former U.S. Assistant Secretary of State Richard Perle, a renowned Cold Warrior, to retort that the West hardly needs diplomatic advice from a country “whose armed forces are bombing Chechnya into oblivion.”

Lamenting the “horrible situation” of the Balkan states today, U.S. Sen. Joseph R. Biden Jr. (D-Del.) told the conference: “I think the lesson of Kosovo is that we didn’t learn from Bosnia.”

Biden Warns of a Recipe for Disaster

Biden warned that a long-term military occupation of the tense regions of the former Yugoslav federation is courting disaster, as the alliance has failed to fulfill its commitments to establish civilian police forces to patrol Kosovo--a province of Serbia, the rump Yugoslavia’s dominant republic--or even Bosnia-Herzegovina, where an international peacekeeping force has been deployed for more than four years.

Like many who were critical of NATO’s Kosovo campaign, Biden denounced those who pressured the alliance to conduct a war without Western casualties.

“If we tell our publics that we can intervene without loss of life, we are creating a horrible standard for the conditions on which we will act,” he said, in a clear swipe at President Clinton.

Even Gen. Wesley K. Clark, the U.S. commander of the alliance’s first and only hostile action, expressed diplomatic but unmistakable criticism of the cumbersome decision-making procedures imposed on him during the bombing of Yugoslavia last spring and the “dangers of incrementalism” that tip off the enemy and limit the effectiveness of offensive moves.

“What if we’d been up against a serious opponent?” John Gilbert, a former British deputy defense minister, asked derisively after noting that the NATO assault force represented the cutting edge of technology and countries that own 60% of the world’s wealth but that it still took 78 days of intense bombings to bring an isolated and impoverished Yugoslavia to heel.

Ground Troops Called Essential Element

NATO’s opposition from the onset of the conflict to sending in ground troops also came in for harsh criticism from the leading military figures of member countries.

“You can’t stop human rights violations from a distance,” said German Gen. Klaus Naumann, former chairman of NATO’s military committee. “You must be ready to commit ground troops, or the whole thing is a sham.”

U.S. Defense Secretary William S. Cohen and his counterparts from Britain and Germany insisted that, on balance, the alliance intervention in Kosovo was a success because it stopped Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic’s systematic purge of ethnic Albanians from the province.

“Lesson One is crystal clear. We won,” NATO Secretary-General George Robertson told delegates. “Whatever the revisionists now contend, the ethnic cleansing and state-sponsored violence were stopped, the perpetrators withdrew, the refugees are home.”

Cohen spoke less about the Kosovo mission than of U.S. concerns about a European Union decision two months ago to create its own armed forces.

Missile Shield a Hot-Button Item

NATO is worried that the European structures will duplicate existing alliance forces and divert funds that the EU countries should be spending to shoulder more of NATO’s burdens.

“Where are the resources to match the rhetoric?” Cohen asked the audience of mainly European security experts.

Cohen also flustered the Europeans--and especially the Russians--when he hinted that the United States is leaning toward giving the green light to development and deployment of ground-based missile interceptors. The national missile defense, or NMD, is a successor project to President Reagan’s “Star Wars” initiative which so upset Moscow in the 1980s that it triggered major breakthroughs on nuclear disarmament.

“It is becoming increasingly clear that effective limited defenses are technologically achievable,” Cohen told the conference, adding that the NMD is needed to counter the threat of missile attacks from so-called rogue states such as North Korea, Libya and Iraq.

Russia has warned that it would consider such deployment a violation of the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, and it reacted with fury to two recent--unsuccessful--tests of dummy warheads over the Pacific Ocean.