With loud congressional complaints over the Kosovska Mitrovica
shambles a daily reminder of what victory has wrought--a costly and
misgoverned colony--and with the Pentagon's admission that crucial war
plans were indeed leaked to the Serbs, it is hard to recall now that
Kosovo was to be NATO's splendid little war. By taking on the brutal but
weak Serbia of Slobodan Milosevic on behalf of the endangered Albanians
of Kosovo, by winning a swift and clean victory after a few days of
precision bombing, NATO would prove that it still was indispensable. That
way the purely defensive alliance built to resist the Soviet Union could
survive by acquiring a new role as the active instrument of European
security.
There is a colossal irony in this unconscious repetition of history:
In 1914, the decaying Austro-Hungarian empire of the Hapsburgs tried to
prove that it was still a great power by defeating Serbia in the
prototypical "splendid little war." Instead, it started World War I,
which wrecked Europe for two generations, destroying the Hapsburg empire
with much else. By those standards, the Kosovo war must be judged a great
success, because it did not start a world war, although it did provoke
much enduring hostility in Russia as well as a contrived tantrum from
China.
But for NATO as the embodiment of strategic solidarity between
Americans and Europeans, the outcome of attacking Serbia in 1999 is no
better than the attack of 1914 was for the Hapsburg empire. The gap
between American and European military strength was much too great. It
left the Americans contemptuous and the Europeans thoroughly humiliated.
For the first time, the French have found an audience for their
long-standing opposition to the American military role in Europe, and
more than that: all sorts of European politicians, including British
Prime Minister Tony Blair, now tacitly agree with what Gen. Charles de
Gaulle enjoyed saying out loud: Oui to American help if we ask for it,
but non to American strategic direction through NATO.
That is not how things were supposed to turn out when NATO's civil and
military leaders agreed to start the Kosovo war. By then, the fall of the
Soviet Union had long since removed the great force that had kept the
Americans in Europe, while imposing solidarity on all the European
members, even Greece and Turkey. Military alliances naturally dissolve
once they no longer face a powerful enemy, but NATO seemed to defy that
fate.
One reason for this reversal of strategic logic was the particular
enthusiasm of the Clinton administration for anything that was
multinational. At first, Clinton's people even believed that the United
Nations could be effective in keeping the peace. That illusion did not
outlast the Somalia fiasco. At the same time, the U.N.'s disastrous
failure in Bosnia was reaching its climax with the Srebrenica massacre,
featuring pusillanimous Dutch troops on the spot and irresponsible U.N.
officials above them, all the way to Secretary-General Kofi Annan in New
York (he was then in charge of peacekeeping, as his admirers have
contrived to forget).
The Clinton administration reacted by transferring all its
multinational enthusiasm to NATO. By then the administration had ensured
that NATO troops would take over responsibility for Bosnia and also had
decided to enlarge the alliance by admitting the Czech Republic, Poland
and Hungary, ignoring strenuous Russian objections.
But more than high politics was involved. NATO is not just an
alliance, it is an organization--with an elaborate structure of
multinational military commands, its own civilian bureaucracy and a
variety of venues for the diplomatic and military representatives of each
member state. They all offer highly valued positions for military
officers and civilian officials alike, with rapid career advancement in
many cases and excellent monetary rewards. For citizens of several member
states, pay and allowances on NATO duty are five or six times higher than
at home. Thus the strategic logic that dictated a diminishing role for
NATO once the Soviet army disappeared was powerfully resisted not only by
political leaders but also by the military and civilian bureaucracies of
every member state.
By 1999, when the Kosovo war started, more than half of the American
forces in Europe had been withdrawn, while continuing budget cuts were
reducing European forces, never strong to begin with.
That of course was the first weakness exposed by the war. Once it
turned out that Milosevic would not surrender after a whiff of precision
bombing, the only alternative to a ground war was a strategic bombing
campaign of many thousands of strike sorties. That left the European air
forces totally outclassed and even the U.S. Air Force and Navy strained
mightily to bring in enough fighter bombers, tankers, electronic warfare
and reconnaissance aircraft from all over the world.
By then another weakness had been exposed. NATO was acting as an
offensive coalition to attack Serbia, but it still was organized as a
defensive alliance, governed by slow and stately consultations between
the representatives of every member state. With no fighting on the ground
and nothing much at sea, war plans were essentially bombardment plans,
and everyone's approval was needed for every target category and any
sensitive individual target before orders could be sent off. At first,
there were so many objections and so few approvals that the initial
target list hardly could have intimidated the most timid of enemies, let
alone Milosevic, who was not impressed because he somehow realized that
only some 50 mostly inconsequential targets such as radio relay antennas
on remote mountains would be attacked.
We now know that it was not just his intuition that reassured
Milosevic. When NATO Secretary-General George Robertson flatly denied
last Thursday that anything was leaked to Serbia, he was importing the
standard response of British officialdom to any security leak: bluff and
bluster and deny--until the tell-all book is published 10 or 20 years
later. This time, however, the Americans embarrassingly contradicted
Robertson within 24 hours. Pentagon spokesman Kenneth H. Bacon admitted
that there were "security problems in the first two weeks" and that "the
Serbs somehow gained access to portions of the air tasking order." It is
useless to speculate about a Serbian spy high up inside NATO, because
when there is no security to begin with, there is no need of spies or
traitors.
The strength of military alliances is always a mirror image of the
power of their enemies. For NATO, that enemy once was the Soviet Union,
making it formidable. With Serbia as its only available enemy, nobody
should be surprised if NATO is becoming weaker day by day.
