>From The Tablet International Catholic Weekly
Submitted by Phil Marchant April 10/99


How will it all end?


ANATOL LIEVEN


The logic of war now has Nato and Slobodan Milosevic in its grip. A former correspondent in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, now at the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London, speculates about what may lie ahead.
NATO is at war with Serbia, and the logic of war is already beginning to operate. War is about victory and defeat. If at the end of the alliance's bombing campaign Slobodan Milosevic is still in power in Belgrade, is still refusing to accept a Nato peacekeeping force in Kosovo, and is still fighting hard against the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA), then Nato will be seen to have lost, and its credibility will be in tatters.
Far from demonstrating "resolve", the use of air power while shying away from war on the ground because the politicians fear even limited casualties, is showing up the severe restrictions which have been placed on Nato's real fighting potential. Nato after all is overwhelmingly, crushingly, superior to Yugoslavia in ground troops. For those troops to stand by and watch as thousands of Kosovan Albanians are massacred by the Serbs, in part at least as the entirely predictable result of Nato's air campaign, is a disgrace - not to the troops themselves but to their masters. If this is the best we can do, it would have been better not to have intervened at all. In the harsh words about Lord Salisbury which are attributed to Bismarck, Nato will be seen as "a lath painted to look tike iron".
Even some kind of compromise involving a United Nations peacekeeping force would make Nato look foolish, especially as such a force would not be able to prevent the fighting in Kosovo from continuing, with inevitable heavy civilian casualties. If Milosevic were to be overthrown by the Yugoslav armed forces, Nato would certainly be able to claim victory - but on the substance of control over Kosovo, it is most unlikely that any post-Milosevic Serbian regime would be able to compromise either.
All historical precedent suggests that it is highly improbable that bombing from the air will alone force the Serbs to surrender what most of them view as a key part of their national territory. I have been exposed myself on occasions to such bombing in Afghanistan and Chechnya (albeit inaccurately aimed by Soviet and Russian airmen). Only a tiny handful of Nato planners have had this experience, and in consequence most lack any real understanding of the severe limits on the military effectiveness of airpower when not backed up by a (and offensive. And in fact, the belief in airpower is not really a military strategy at all: it is a politician's requirement dressed up in a pilot's uniform.
In the Gulf War of 1991, the terrain was vastly more favourable to aerial bombardment than the hills and forests of Serbia and, much more important, the air campaign was. followed up by a massive ground assault. As for Bosnia in 1995, Nato propagandists have repeated so often that Nato airstrikes ' brought the Bosnian Serbs to the Dayton negotiating table that they have begun to blind themselves to the obvious truth: that it was the US-equipped Croatian army (and to a lesser extent the Bosnian Muslims) which defeated the Serbian forces on the ground, ` with Nato playing a secondary role as in effect the Croat airforce. In Iraq, intermittent American and British bombing has gone on for almost eight years since the Gulf War - most unsuccessfully.
This leads to the second result of the logic of war: that when at war, you accept whatever allies are on offer - which in Kosovo means the KLA, a ruthless nationalist group with strong criminal links, who in recent years have on occasions targeted not only Serbian civilians but Albanian moderates. Nato leaders have already ruled out sending Nato ground troops to attack the Yugoslav Army, which may be sensible in terms of reassuring Western public opinion, and, especially the United States Congress, but. unfortunately is also highly reassuring to Milosevic and his generals. Without those Nato troops on the ground, Nato groundattack aircraft targeting the Yugoslav forces in Kosovo serve in effect as the KLA's airforce. Moreover, the longer the Serbs hold out against Nato the more likely it is that Nato (or at least the United States) will end up by treating the KLA as full allies and supplying them with arms, as they did previously with the Croats and the Bosnian Muslims. We may also see United States support for the secession of Montenegro, leading to another civil war in what is left of Yugoslavia.
The end result of this process could well be Nato support for the KLA's determined goal of full independence for Kosovo, and, this position is now being supported by more and more Western politicians and newspapers.
It does indeed seem increasingly unlikely either that Albanians and Serbs could ever live peacefully together in Kosovo, or that after suffering Nato attack, the . Serbs could ever accept Nato as a neutral peacekeeping force. The range of possible consequences would appear to be a Serbian victory in Kosovo - which Nato cannot allow; independence for Kosovo; or, perhaps most likely of all, partition and population exchanges. For while it is possible that the Serbian forces might ultimately be forced out of southern Kosovo, unless they were utterly beaten in the field I cannot see them abandoning Pristina and the immensely emotionally important battlefield of Kosovo Polje itself, both of which lie in the north.
This would be a thoroughly odious result, and to get to it by means of Albanian militarv successes, without the introduction of Nato ground forces, would inevitably cost tens of thousands more lives. Nonetheless, I do not see any realistic solutlon that would be much better. For the unhappy truth is that the ability of Serbs and Albanians to live together in peace in Kosovo has been hopelessly damaged by the rise of nationalism over the past 150 years, and the appalling wars and atrocities that resulted.
There seemed to be a chance under the Yugoslav Communist system that some accommodation could be reached, but the legacy of history, and of local traditions of violence, was too great. In the 1980s, the outbreak of Albanian nationalism and attacks on local Serbs led to a Serbian reaction that propelled Milosevic to power and began Yugoslavia's spiral of disaster. After everything that has now happened, an Albanian victory, or even a Nato peacekeeping force, could only lead to the exodus of the entire remaining Serbian minority in Kosovo something which any Serbian Government would have to fight to prevent as long as it had any means to do so.
The idea of a solution involving partition and population exchanges causes cries of horror among diplomats, but that is mere hypocrisy. Not only has the West gone along with both of these in Croatia and in Bosnia, but they are entirely in the tradition of the United Nations after the Second World War. In Central Europe, millions of Germans were forcibly shifted from Poland, Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia, and smaller numbers of Poles from Ukraine, Belarus and Lithuania. This was a hateful process, but the resulting ethnic homogeneity has contributed greatly to the political stability of the countries concerned. The same was true of Palestine in 1948 - and very few Western voices are raised in favour of a return of Palestinian Arabs to the homes they lost that year.
Such a solution would of course mark a radical change from more recent Nato principles towards secessionist and ethnic conflicts. This might set a precedent with important implications for disputes in the Caucasus and elsewhere, like Karabakh and Transdniestria. Most immediately, it would point towards acceptance of the partitioning of Bosnia along ethnic lines and the creation of a limited greater Serbia.
This may in fact be the only realistic solution to the Bosnian conflict, for the Croats and Serbs of Bosnia have also proved that they cannot live together in peace with their neighbours unless held down by an outside power. Acceptance of that truth might mark a useful return of realism to Western counsels - but it would place past Nato policy, that of holding Bosnia together at all costs, in a singularly ridiculous fight. None the less, this may be where the logic of events is leading us. The only alternative seems to be to commit tens of thousands of Nato troops to an invasion and subsequent occupation of Yugoslavia.
All these outcomes are odious, but some are less odious and more practicable than others. The one point on which we have to be clear is that now that Nato is committed, Nato has to win - at least if we continue to believe that Nato and the United States have an important and desirable role to play in European security.


How will it end