Today and Tomorrow in Yugoslavia

Any (naive) hope of short-term NATO gains from the bombing in Yugoslavia is dashed by now. It should have been foreseen that a) the Serbian people would rally around Milosovic, and b) Serbian troops and “police” in Kosovo would step up the horrendous rate of ethnic cleansing. Pictures of terrified Albanian Kosovars streaming over the borders are beginning to worry people in the government. What have we started? What if Milosovic outlasts us?

Any (naive) hope of short-term NATO gains from the bombing in Yugoslavia is dashed by now. It should have been foreseen that a) the Serbian people would rally around Milosovic, and b) Serbian troops and “police” in Kosovo would step up the horrendous rate of ethnic cleansing. Pictures of terrified Albanian Kosovars streaming over the borders are beginning to worry people in the government. What have we started? What if Milosovic outlasts us? What if it takes weeks to get him to the table and by then the death toll is in the tens of thousands and the refugee figures are in the hundreds of thousands? If Milosovic succeeds in removing the Albanians from Kosovar, doesn’t he win no matter what?

Attempting to improve on a very bad policy, two very bad options have begun to sneak into public discourse: ground forces and arming the Kosovars.

Ground troops are, in fact, what NATO would need to stop the bloodletting quickly. However, troops need protection and where are the tanks, armored personnel carriers and helicopter gunships to support the ground troops supposed to come from? NATO? By what route — who would be willing to let us march through to invade Yugoslavia? Can we bring equipment from the US? We have materiel in depots, but remember Desert Shield. It took six months of steady, massive airlift at the height of our ability to bring the equipment to Saudi Arabia, and – oh yes – Saudi was a vast, friendly staging ground with modern airbases courtesy of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. Where will we stand while we prepare to invade Kosovo? Albania? Macedonia? For them that would be tantamount to declaring war on Serbia. Ground troops would widen the war before they ended it.

And even if we get there, the terrain and supply lines vastly favor the Serbs over the U.S. and NATO. It isn’t the flat Iraqi desert. It is rugged, mountainous, forested – it is Serb territory.

Arming the Kosovars, as some have suggested, is a problem of another sort. The fighters of Kosovo are the KLA – and the KLA are armed by Iran and supports a fundamentalist Islamic state. Such a state would destabilize the Balkans and exacerbate existing problems in areas of Europe with large Muslim minorities, including France and Germany. The Albanian Kosovars are already victims, American support for an Islamic insurgency in Europe would make them victims twice.

What then? The Administration says, “Bomb on; maybe something will happen to go our way.” Maybe not.

Serbia is not an enemy of the United States and preventing a fundamentalist Islamic state in Europe is in the interest of the Balkan countries and the NATO allies. America’s ultimate goal should be a stable, unitary Yugoslavia under a government committed to tolerance and human rights (certainly not this one) – and a return to the autonomy the Kosovars had prior to 1988 (certainly not independence). Anything less is a prescription for long-term destabilization in the region.

See JINSA Report #98 for more on the Crisis in Kosovo.