Edging Toward the Exit in Kosovo

The United States joined its NATO allies and others in a Kosovo peacekeeping mission last June after Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic was forced to withdraw his army and paramilitary troops from the province. Now, nine months later, peace is still nowhere in sight. In the last six weeks especially, violence between Serbs and Kosovar Albanians has escalated, notably in the northern city of Kosovska Mitrovica. The goal of the U.N.-authorized intervention was to create the conditions that would encourage two hostile communities to coexist. Instead the intervenors must increasingly struggle to control intercommunal violence.

NATO Secretary-General George Robertson insists that the problem is “short-term,” though he concedes the need for additional troops to keep things under control. A high Pentagon official, just back from Kosovo, offers a much bleaker assessment. The situation is deteriorating, he says, with the international plan to revive civil life and provide security to all of Kosovo’s inhabitants falling far short of fulfillment.

There are too few troops to prevent violence and to keep Kosovo’s borders sealed against infiltrators and weapons from both Albania and Serbia. About 6,000 American troops are supposed to guard 125 miles of border in eastern Kosovo. Two to three times that number would be needed to do an effective job, the Pentagon official said.

This week France and Italy announced modest increases in their troop contributions. But NATO troop levels are still about 8,000 below what had been pledged. Meanwhile, the promised commitment of police personnel, vitally needed if there is to be any hope of restoring a functioning civil society, remains largely unmet.

NATO went to war against Yugoslavia to halt the slaughter and dispersion of the Kosovar Albanians. Now it finds itself trying to halt increasing Albanian thuggery against a Serb population fighting to hold on to its remaining enclaves. Peacekeeping once again is proving a complex and thankless assignment, and Kosovo more and more looks like a quagmire.

The United States has endured more than its share of bitter experience with quagmires. Kosovo is a European problem, affecting no vital American interests, and the European powers clearly have the military capabilities to deal with it. It’s time to prepare for an early American exit.