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NATO
Kosovo:
A Symptom of NATO's Strategic Failure
7 April 1999
By Daniel Plesch
The summit of NATO leaders in Washington April
23-25 will be overshadowed by the war in the Balkans whatever
the result of the next few weeks fighting. The summit was
supposed to have been a gala party celebrating the Alliance's
first fifty years and agreeing to a new "Strategic Concept"
NATO's mission statement for the next century. Few new policy
initiatives were in the works before the bombing of Yugoslavia
began. Now, the understandable preoccupation with the war
has curtailed discussion on other topics such as whether the
Alliance should still be prepared to start a nuclear war,
and what level of forces are necessary for the defence of
western Europe. Nevertheless the NATO nineteen, now including
the Czechs, Hungarians and Poles will meet with twenty five
leaders of partner nations from as far afield as Tajikistan.
Boris Yeltsin was invited, and his Prime Minister Primakov
was also to have attended. Even a low level Russian presence
is now in doubt.
Far from being a party, the summit marks a crisis
for NATO as well as for the war-ravaged peoples of the Balkans.
Mainstream commentators now talk of the "End of NATO", "NATO
fighting for Survival and "Suicide at Fifty." Much ink has
been devoted to how far NATO precipitated the present crisis
and what short term steps should now be taken. However the
scale of the present failure has not been appreciated. The
key elements of the Western strategy in Kosovo are merely
symptomatic of a broader failure of strategic thinking by
the West's governing geostrategists.
NATO's present strategy was agreed in November
1991 whilst Dubrovnik was being shelled by the Yugoslav army
and when the USSR had a month left to live. At that time,
NATO announced that its new strategy would be "crisis management."
A relationship with Russia was based on the idea that Europe
would be "whole and free." And yet eight years later the one
real crisis zone in Europe, the Balkans, is in as appalling
a state as it has ever been, and Russia is marginalised at
every turn on Western policy. The failure of Western leadership
and its chosen instrument, NATO, is great. The central
need of European security was identified in 1991 but not acted
upon.
In previous phases of the conflict in the Balkans
the US was able to point to failure by the European Union
or the United Nations. After the introduction of the NATO
bombing and IFOR in 1995, NATO enjoyed a great reputation
as a 'can do alliance,' appearing to pick up the pieces of
the mess others had created. In 1995 this picture was unrealistic:
NATO nations are EU nations and three NATO states are Permanent
Members of the Security Council. The failure of international
institutions is largely a function of the political will applied
to them by states. Today there is little talk of the UN
or the EU. NATO is acting on its own authority and the US
can point nowhere else to accept responsibility.
The US has consistently devalued non-military
approaches to security since the end of the Cold War and has
even failed to live up to NATO objectives agreed to back in
1991. When President Clinton declared that NATO had no alternative
but military action, there were other options available in
practice and in theory. However, the US kept them off of the
table.
The West gave little if any support to the
non-violent moderate leadership of the Kosovo Albanians thoughout
the 1990s. They were physically locked out of the discussion
at Dayton by Richard Holbrooke in order to placate Milosevic,
who was allowed to keep the subject of Kosovo out of the Dayton
Peace Accords. Neither the US nor its allies were prepared
to invest in the price of a few cruise missiles into conflict
prevention in Kosovo. Recommendations from NGOs and think
tanks were studiously ignored by senior officials.
The specific failure to prevent the development
of the conflict in Kosovo merely reflects the fact that NATO
has no new Europe-wide strategy for enhancing conflict prevention
and management as it prepares for the Washington summit.
The US is not supporting a greatly enhanced role for other
organisations to fill the gap. The annual budget of the
Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe is some
$40,000,000, less than the cost of a night's air raids on
Serbia. NATO's supporters will doubtless argue that the
expansion of the Alliance has increased stability. Sceptics
will point to the alienation of Russia as an indication that
expansion had been broadly counter-productive, even if it
has helped the international democratic development of, say,
Poland. Those countries which need the military security and
stability that NATO can undoubtedly provide - Macedonia, Albania,
Bosnia - are excluded precisely because the Alliance doesn't
wish to provide security to countries with "pre-existing conditions"
Nevertheless there are pockets of new thinking
to be found within the Administration, amongst field commanders
from Bosnia who have learned of the limits of traditional
military forces first hand, as well as in agencies that have
been sacrificed to the republican agenda: AID and ACDA. But
creating a permanent capability for mediation, arbitration,
policing functions, public access TV, war crimes investigations
and arms reductions are not on the agenda of official Washington.
The Kosovo verifiers were an ad hoc unit likely to be scattered
to the four winds. We badly need to have such capacity
made permanent in order to increase our options for a real
endgame in the Balkans and for future crises. They would be
best created for the OSCE.
Having failed to invest in new tools for
conflict prevention and management, the Administration approached
the latest Balkan crisis without modern political tools at
its disposal. Through inattention the US and its allies
have deliberately permitted a massive gap in capabilities
between talking and war. Military force is the main option.
As we are seeing with tragic clarity it is at best a blunt
instrument. The current air power is ineffective and the ground
forces, so far, are unusable.
The Administration also insists on limiting
the international organisations through which it will work
to just one - NATO. The UN and the OSCE are not considered
to be serious fora for debate or conflict resolution. At
best the Security Council can be used to rubber stamp US/NATO
decisions. Besides alienating and excluding Russia
and China, this also sends the message that only military
security is of any importance.
At the end of the 20th Century this approach
is unacceptable. There are enough viable alternatives to military
force that it should only be used as a last resort. In a crisis,
aggressive dictators have to be faced down (that is, all violent
dictators - it has to become unacceptable for states to pick
and choose the democracies they will fight for). But it is
far better that the conflict prevention and democracy building
tools at the disposal of the international community should
be used to prevent those dictators from ever being in the
position of being able to threaten international security.
Newsweek has concluded that even within
a NATO-only context other options to bombing existed. Today,
NATO says that a force in Kosovo should be international,
hinting that such a force might not be NATO. Senior NATO officials
are even talking about a UN protectorate, had such options
been on the table a month ago.
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