U.S. in Kosovo for the Long Haul

One year after the first of more than 5,000 U.S. troops marched into Kosovo to help impose a fragile peace, Clinton administration officials are acknowledging an unsettling truth: They won’t be coming home any time soon.

Unlike the “one-year-only” bravado that accompanied U.S. forces into Bosnia-Herzegovina in 1995, there is not even an estimate from these officials of the duration of international military operations in Kosovo.

But their message is clear.

“The most honest answer has to be ‘a long time,’ ” summed up one senior U.S. official who declined to be identified.

Those outside government are less inhibited. NATO’s commander in Kosovo through April, German Gen. Klaus Reinhardt, recently suggested that peacekeepers will be needed in Kosovo for at least five years, and possibly as long as 10 years. Former Finnish President Martti Ahtisaari, who helped negotiate an end to the war, has estimated that two to three generations must pass before Kosovo becomes a normal society.

Such assessments carry major implications for President Clinton’s successor, who must once again weigh the risks of America’s commitment to the region and then build political support for his policy.

A major study on Kosovo released this week by the Washington-based Brookings Institution concludes: “Not only is it impossible to say when NATO troops will leave Kosovo, it is also impossible to specify under what circumstances they will do so.”

In the year since the United Nations and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization took on Kosovo as an international protectorate, conditions there remain chaotic and the killings continue.

About 40,000 peacekeepers provided by the United States and its allies are unable or unwilling to halt violence by ethnic Albanians, who form a large majority, against a rapidly diminishing number of Serbs.

The underlying mood of Kosovo--a province of Serbia, the dominant Yugoslav republic--is so ugly that the head of the U.N. reconstruction effort, Bernard Kouchner, is said to have scaled back his medium-term goal of building a multiethnic society. Now his aim is to get ethnic Albanians and Serbs merely to accept each other’s right to live there in dignity.

Even that won’t be easy.

During the week that ended Monday, eight Serbs--including two elderly women and a 4-year-old boy--and one Albanian died in violence in the province.

While there is talk of municipal elections next fall, procedural questions such as who gets to vote and how they will register remain politically explosive.

Efforts to establish the rule of law have been slowed in part by a dearth of police officers. One year after war’s end, the international community has been able to muster barely half the 6,000 police officers needed.

Even the most basic issue of what Kosovo should be remains too volatile to deal with in the short term. Serbs want Kosovo to be as U.N. resolutions describe it--an autonomous region within Yugoslavia. Most Kosovo Albanians want it to be independent.

Questions Over Final Status of Kosovo

With virtually no functioning democratic institutions in place, few believe that the Albanian-dominated province is ready for independence. Clinton administration officials note that other Balkans neighbors, such as Macedonia, Greece and Montenegro, would oppose independence for Kosovo as a threat to their own security and to regional stability.

On the other hand, regional specialists are convinced that no final decision to link Kosovo permanently with Serbia can be made as long as Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic remains in power. Milosevic seems firmly entrenched, so the province is likely to remain a ward of the international community for the foreseeable future.

“I don’t see the status question resolved any time soon,” said Christopher Hill, a senior White House advisor dealing with the Balkans.

There is concern that hard-liners among Kosovo’s increasingly impatient ethnic Albanian leadership might declare independence unilaterally, a move that could trigger new fighting and transform the international community from protectors into de facto occupiers.

Although Clinton administration officials argue strongly--both publicly and in private--that only a democratic, multiethnic Kosovo can bring stability to the Balkans, the United States waited months before finally delivering a stern, high-profile warning to the province’s ethnic Albanian leadership that it must act to curtail the wave of attacks on minority Serbs.

Despite all this, U.S. policymakers insist that the picture is not all bleak. They note that most of those who fled their homes during the war have returned in the year since the fighting stopped, that reconstruction has begun and that the ethnic Albanian-dominated Kosovo Liberation Army leadership agreed to disarm its guerrillas. The killings, if not curtailed altogether, have been sharply reduced, and there is talk of elections.

They plead for patience.

“One of the stupidest things we could do is rush it,” said a senior U.S. official who requested anonymity.

Added Ahtisaari in an interview: “My single biggest concern is that we are able to take a long-term view of this. If we can develop our patience, then we can solve this problem.”

Next U.S. President Faces Challenges

Such assessments present the next U.S. president with an especially thorny set of challenges:

How does he maintain public support for a messy, seemingly thankless peacekeeping task that could go on for decades in a far-off place that has neither oil nor gas nor much else of visible value to the United States? Harder still, how does he do it in a culture that measures its attention span in MTV milliseconds?

Both presumptive presidential candidates, Democrat Al Gore and Republican George W. Bush, seem ready to try. Both opposed an attempt in the Senate last month to cut off about $2 billion in funding for America’s military deployment in Kosovo, beginning next year. Gore said the move would have “demoralized our allies and emboldened those in the region who favor violence.” Bush said the Senate effort could limit his options if he became president.

The measure, which would have ended the mission unless Europeans shouldered most of the load, was defeated 53-47, in part because of the opposition from Gore and Bush.

But the fact that the vote occurred at all is a reminder that the next president is likely to face an early challenge from Congress. The outcome of any such confrontation is important, because few believe that the mission can succeed without U.S. involvement.

“The fact is that everyone in the Balkans, even the bad guys, look to America as the broker, as the one to exert pressure, to deliver what’s promised,” said John Fox, director of the Washington office of the Open Society Institute and a Balkans specialist.

For America, the stakes in Kosovo extend far beyond the Balkans. Foreign affairs specialists on both sides of the Atlantic are quick to note that NATO’s credibility is at stake.

“It’s the American-European security connection that’s the real issue here,” former National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski said in an interview. “NATO is the expression of this connection, and if it is discredited or undone, the entire American-European security connection runs the risk of being severed.”

Increasingly, policymakers have come to believe that the real solution to the turmoil in Kosovo can come only with the political and economic development of the Balkan region and its integration into a democratic, free-market Europe. As Ahtisaari suggests, that process is likely to take generations, if it succeeds at all.

Debate on U.S. Role in Region Is Needed

The policymakers see the recently established Southeast Europe Stability Pact--which commits groups including NATO and the European Union to assist in regional development--as a small, yet hopeful, beginning. The campaign was launched just over a year ago; a donors conference in Paris two months ago brought pledges of $2.3 billion.

“We’ll get out of the Balkans the same way we got out of Western and Central Europe--after the establishment of democracy, the rule of law, human rights, open markets and integration with the rest of Europe,” Fox said. “That’s the exit strategy.”

If so, analysts argue, the incoming president must launch--and win--what they see as a long-overdue national debate on America’s proper role in the region. Only then, they maintain, can he and his successors hope to sustain long-term involvement. The analysts note that a broad consensus formed behind decades-old U.S. military commitments in Europe and South Korea only after they were approved in a national debate.

Clinton has made no attempt to start such a debate, either over Kosovo or over the earlier deployment of American troops in Bosnia. Instead, he has stressed the limited nature of U.S. commitments in the region, and then struggled to stay within the limits. In Bosnia, the peacekeeping deployment he initially sold to Congress and the American public as a 12-month mission is now well into its fifth year.

“We need a president who will stand up and say, ‘Here are the American national interests in Southeastern Europe’--that it’s about the future of NATO, of U.S.-European relations and the region itself, that it’s about the unfinished common business of the United States and Europe in Europe,” Fox said. “He has to say it has worked in Western Europe and must work in Southeastern Europe because we don’t have any other choice.”

Such a statement would boost the confidence of political moderates in the Balkans, he said.

Despite Clinton’s skittishness and a visible discomfort among many in Congress, experienced observers believe that Americans might be receptive to a long-term commitment if they were convinced that it was in the national interest.

In a poll conducted in March by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press, 51% still backed U.S. involvement in Kosovo, although their doubts about the mission’s success had increased.

Some senior American policymakers are convinced that the United States must accept involvement in hot spots such as Kosovo as an obligation for the world’s only remaining superpower.

“It has to become part of what we do when we get up in the morning, rather than be disparate and episodic, as it is now,” Deputy Secretary of State Strobe Talbott said.

“We got into a 50-year habit of waging the Cold War,” Talbott said. “Now that the Cold War has ended, the international community, including the United States, has to develop a mind-set and an awareness that part of what we do is make sure we’re keeping these different threats dampened down and under control.”

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Times Washington Bureau Chief Doyle McManus contributed to this report.

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Kosovo’s Peace Force

The NATO-led peacekeeping force entered Kosovo on June 12, 1999. NATO divided Kosovo into five sectors controlled by the United States, France, Britain, Italy and Germany.

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Sources: United Nations, NATO

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Compiled by SUNNY KAPLAN / Los Angeles Times