ONE WEEK INTO THE IMPLEMENTATION of the Kosovo peace accord, everything appears to be moving more or less on schedule. Fighting, beyond a few skirmishes, has ended. Serb military, police, and paramilitary forces have largely withdrawn. NATO troops have moved into every corner of the Connecticut-sized territory. Relief agencies are starting to reach the hundreds of thousands of Kosovars who are emerging from hiding after a 12-week Serb reign of terror. These are the major accomplishments that flow from the U.S. and Allied determination to respond to Milosevic's brutal attempt to expel the Albanian population from Kosovo.
NATO's firm stance, moreover, has produced an outcome that improves on the Rambouillet deal Milosevic rejected earlier this year. Under Rambouillet, some 5,000 Serb troops could have remained in Kosovo; now all Serb forces must withdraw, and only "hundreds" may return. The NATO force entering Kosovo is significantly larger and better armed than the KFOR mission the Alliance had planned to deploy before the bombing. While there is no sure mechanism for settling Kosovo's political future within the three years stipulated at Rambouillet, the province's final status is left to be determined through negotiations in which the Kosovar Albanians will have a fundamental role.
But NATO's success comes at a high price. The Alliance resorted to bombing for what President Clinton at the time said was a clear purpose: "to deter an even bloodier offensive against innocent civilians in Kosovo and, if necessary, to seriously damage the Serbian military's capacity to harm the people of Kosovo." However, having ruled out the use of ground troops and prepared only for three days of bombing in the belief that Milosevic would cave, NATO had neither the strategy nor the means to prevent the mass expulsion of Kosovars. Rather than acceding to Allied demands that he accept the Rambouillet deal, Milosevic accelerated his campaign to defeat the armed rebels and radically alter Kosovo's ethnic balance. In this, Belgrade succeeded -- 1.4 million Albanians were expelled from their homes, and over 850,000 were driven across the border, shorn of their identities and their valuables; and tens of thousands were murdered, raped, and otherwise brutalized. Notwithstanding what Clinton called the "moral imperative" of acting on their behalf, NATO could do little but watch -- and bomb from great heights -- as Milosevic's henchmen did their dirty work.
However lamentable NATO's failure to protect the nearly 2 million Kosovars, the larger failure lies in a policy that left the United States and its Allies no choice in mid-March but to bomb -- without the plans or capacity to stop Milosevic's onslaught. If the brutal Serb campaign was already under way before the bombing started, as administration and NATO spokesmen repeatedly claimed, and if Milosevic's plans for "Operation Horseshoe" (as the Serbs termed their attack) had been in Western hands since October 1998, why were no preparations made to prevent it? With six months' notice, why were no military contingency plans drawn up to enable the Alliance to fulfill its stated mission of protecting the Kosovars?
The answers to these questions are to be found in the agreement Richard Holbrooke, the Clinton administration's Balkan envoy, negotiated with Slobodan Milosevic in October 1998. That agreement, reached after NATO feebly threatened airstrikes to avert a humanitarian crisis, sowed the seeds of NATO's subsequent failure.
Holbrooke concluded his accord with Milosevic after nine days of dramatics, punctuated by NATO's decision (made only after Holbrooke had assured the Allies that a deal was at hand) to bomb if the fighting in Kosovo continued. The Holbrooke-Milosevic agreement had three parts:
(1) Belgrade promised to cease attacks on civilians, withdraw army and police forces in excess of the nearly 20,000 troops stationed in Kosovo before the Serbs began their assault in February 1998, provide humanitarian and international agencies unimpeded access, allow some 400,000 displaced people to return to their destroyed homes, and cooperate with the war crimes tribunal.
(2) Milosevic agreed to a timetable to complete talks with the Kosovars on reestablishing Kosovo's autonomy, including the holding of elections within nine months.
(3) Belgrade accepted what the Clinton administration termed a "robust and intrusive" verification regime -- consisting of 2,000 unarmed monitors operating under the auspices of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe and unrestricted aerial surveillance of the territory by unarmed NATO aircraft.
While Holbrooke touted Milosevic's "enormous concessions" and intimated that, in time, the accord he had negotiated would represent a "historic turning point" in the Kosovo conflict, the agreement was in fact deeply flawed. Notably, it allowed nearly 20,000 troops responsible for large-scale atrocities to remain in the province. Moreover, rather than exacting any major concessions from Milosevic, Holbrooke's terms were fully consistent with Belgrade's desire to take a breather, wait out a Balkan winter, and prepare for Operation Horseshoe.
In the end, only a political settlement between the Kosovars and the Serbs was likely to prevent a return to war. In the spring of 1999, realizing that time was running short, the Clinton administration sent Christopher Hill, a Holbrooke aide and the current U.S. ambassador to Macedonia, to forge a deal. His was an impossible task -- the Kosovars demanded independence, the Serbs demanded sovereignty. Predictably, Hill's efforts (which culminated at Rambouillet) went for naught.
If Milosevic's acceptance of the agreement represented little more than a tactical retreat, only vigorous enforcement of its terms could ensure that Holbrooke had achieved anything worthwhile. Unfortunately, Holbrooke's "civilian army" of unarmed verifiers was utterly unable to enforce compliance. Any serious enforcement mechanism was ruled out by Washington's decision not to deploy ground troops in the region, even to help implement a U.S.-negotiated agreement. The president and his advisers even ruled out participating in a NATO force deployed in Macedonia to protect the 2,000 verifiers inside Kosovo, although the largest contingent of verifiers were Americans.
Absent enforcement, it was entirely predictable that Milosevic would fail to comply. Indeed, as President Clinton warned when word of Holbrooke's agreement with the Serb leader reached the United States, "Commitments are not compliance. Balkan graveyards are filled with President Milosevic's broken promises."
The cease-fire never went into effect. The Kosovar rebels, predictably, took advantage of the Serb retreat, and fighting soon escalated. By January 1999, the Serbs were up to their usual tricks. The result: 45 Albanians were brutally massacred near the village of Racak. Equally important, the Serbs failed to draw down their forces to the 12,500 army and 6,500 police troops permitted under the agreement. What is more, by February there was ample evidence that Milosevic was preparing a major assault, with heavily armed forces amassing near the Serb-Kosovo border.
The OSCE and NATO verifiers on the ground and in the air did their job. They reported the escalation in fighting, were quickly on the scene following the Racak massacre, informed NATO that troops had neither withdrawn in sufficient numbers nor been confined to barracks and border posts, and notified Allied capitals of the major buildup just outside Kosovo. But NATO failed to follow up. Although NATO's order to strike Belgrade in case of non-compliance ostensibly remained in effect, the United States and its Allies had quickly and quietly with-drawn many of their air assets from the region in late 1998. Washington's refusal to deploy ground forces further deprived NATO of a real option for countering Serb moves. And so, Milosevic, confident that his defiance would exact no forceful response, did as he pleased.
Once again, Holbrooke had negotiated and the Clinton administration had assented to an agreement that depended for its success on trust that Milosevic would comply. And once again, the administration was left with a choice between accepting non-compliance and escalating the conflict. NATO rightly rejected the former option, but as its bomb-and-pray strategy underscored, it was not prepared to prevent the Serb onslaught on the Kosovars.
NATO's perseverance in its bombing strategy finally paid off. The Alliance has succeeded where Holbrooke failed -- all Serb forces are out of Kosovo, and a real (not a civilian) army of 50,000 troops has moved in. Equally important, the Clinton administration has finally abandoned the belief that Milosevic must be a part of any deal -- that he is not only the arsonist but also the fireman of the Balkans, as Holbrooke puts it.
It has long been evident that Milosevic is a fireman only when the West makes him one, and he performs the role only in order to set other fires other days. Now, NATO's dominance in Kosovo obviates the need to rely on Milosevic and provides a solid basis for seeking his early removal and transfer to the Hague, where he can stand trial for his arsonist's career. The only regret is that NATO did not act soon enough to prevent the horrendous suffering of the Kosovar people.
Ivo H. Daalder is a visiting fellow at the Brookings Institution and author of the forthcoming Getting to Dayton: The Making of America's Bosnia Policy.