The gated campus of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization has all the necessities for war planning–a hair salon, a card shop, a foreign-currency exchange with better rates than anybody gets on the outside.
When war-planning fatigue sets in, the denizens of NATO can drop by their vacation center, which was offering a great deal last week on a seven-day package to Jamaica.
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I came here to see how official Europe takes care of things, and learned that official Europe takes care of itself very well. If it had to hunker down in the confines of NATO headquarters for any length of time, it could do so very comfortably.
Which is good, because that’s what will be necessary if NATO launches a military operation in the Serbian province of Kosovo. It will hunker down for a long, long time.
The political leaders in Europe have a grand vision that the Cold War will be the last war of any kind on the continent. That’s not just the rationale for the expansion of NATO, it’s the bottom line of any discussion here about political, military and economic union.
Even the Euro, the common currency to be introduced in 11 nations next Jan. 1, is presented as an effort toward peace. The nations of Europe will wrap themselves so tight in a big bear hug of economic integration that war between Germany and France will be as unthinkable as war between Connecticut and Rhode Island.
But then along comes someone such as Slobodan Milosevic, the Serb president of Yugoslavia, who hasn’t gotten the message. The U.S. and the rest of Europe stepped in to halt his assault on Bosnia, and their troops are still there to maintain the peace.
Now Milosevic’s thugs are strafing the villages of Kosovo to rout an independence movement of ethnic Albanians known as the Kosovo Liberation Army. The U.S. and the rest of Europe are debating whether to step in with soldiers again.
But here’s a problem. Europe’s military leaders are telling the political leaders that what they can achieve with tanks and planes and guns in Kosovo is very simple: nothing.
They can’t define a specific and achievable mission in Kosovo. “In and out. Nice and quick. Surgically, then back home for tea and medals,” as one European military leader put it. That’s what the political leaders want, but the military leaders can’t deliver.
NATO members have considered whether to station troops on the borders of Kosovo and cordon off the area so fighting won’t spill into neighboring Albania and Macedonia. But the military knows a cordon will be porous and could create the inelegant image of NATO troops sitting in courtside seats while Kosovo goes up in flames.
NATO has considered whether to punish Milosevic by bombing his military hardware and supply lines. But that would not just halt the fighting, it would advantage the KLA. Europe has as much to fear from the KLA’s quest for independence as it does from Milosevic’s thugs. Europe wants more autonomy for Kosovo, but definitely not independence. Europe wants no change in the borders of Yugoslavia out of fear that that would embolden minority populations in other nations.
So the military leaders understand that there is no defined, achievable mission for NATO in Kosovo, save to keep the civil war combatants apart by occupying the region for a long, long time.
But European political leaders have been afflicted with “something must be done” syndrome, so the rhetoric builds toward military action. There’s an added urgency because the political leaders are still embarrassed that the decision to intervene in Bosnia took so many years to reach while so many people died.
There’s one more political calculation they need to make. If Europe steps in, it will expect the United States to be right alongside with soldiers. President Clinton hardly wants to remind people, however, that he has pulled a bait-and-switch in the Balkans. He sent U.S. troops to Bosnia with a specific mission and a 12-month deadline for their withdrawal. But he moved that deadline to 18 months, and then stopped making deadlines altogether. Clinton will have no credibility if he starts talking about timetables and Kosovo, and little public support if he speaks honestly about an open-ended mission.
Earlier this week, Clinton set economic sanctions on Milosevic, freezing Yugoslav assets in the U.S. and prohibiting U.S investment there. Now, no president or prime minister invites comparisons to General Patton when he vows to wage war with economic weapons. But the miserable state of Milosevic’s economy is as much his enemy as the KLA, and economic pressure might still have real impact on persuading him to compromise in Kosovo. That’s not as dramatic as sending in the warplanes, but it might yet work.
Europe without war? That’s the vision. But NATO’s military intervention in Kosovo won’t achieve that, and it won’t look anything like the seven-day vacation package to Jamaica.