From Bravo Minus to East Timor

By Gwynne Dyer

LONDON (JP): Operation Bravo was the British government's codename for a full-scale invasion of Serbia involving some 300,000 North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) troops. Bravo Minus was the codename for a land invasion of Kosovo alone using only 170,000 troops: over 50,000 British troops, 30-40,000 Americans, and large French, German and Spanish contingents, plus some thousands of soldiers each from Belgium, Canada, the Netherlands, Italy and Poland.

Last week is when all those troops would have fought their way across the border into Kosovo if Serbian leader Slobodan Milosevic had not pre-emptively surrendered the province on June 3. They would have won, of course, but every country involved would have lost people killed if the Serbs had stood their ground.

The date of the ground attack was determined by the fact that there is usually snow on the hills in Kosovo by mid-October, and the NATO planners were determined not to get bogged down in winter fighting in the Balkans. Besides, a million Kosovar refugees living under canvas or out in the open within Kosovo would be freezing by then.

The war simply had to be over before the snow flew, so you just count back the four weeks of fighting you think it will take to clear the Serbian army out of Kosovo, and that gives you your deadline for starting the land offensive. It was last week.

And the point is that they really would have done it: moved the necessary troops in, built roads up to the Kosovo frontier, and sent them across. They would have accepted hundreds, maybe thousands of casualties. They would have fought a real war, not just a sanitized, no-casualty campaign of aerial bombardment, to achieve a purely humanitarian objective.

This point was deliberately obscured while the war was on, because the nature of the NATO alliance was such that no military option could be publicly discussed before every member was ready to sign up for it. But the evidence of what was really going on is now trickling out, and it is clear that behind the scenes the planning for a massive ground assault in Kosovo was underway at NATO headquarters in Mons, Belgium from early May at the latest. (The planning team were known as the Jedi Knights.)

Talks at the highest level, particularly between U.S. President Bill Clinton and British Prime Minister Tony Blair, had reached agreement that it would be done if necessary. Given the delicacy of the task of gaining assent from some of the more reluctant alliance members, a public commitment to a ground war would probably not have come before the end of June, three weeks after Milosevic actually folded. But various preparatory steps that didn't irrevocably commit anybody were already being taken in late May.

The most important was the public decision on May 25 to double the size of KFOR, the peacekeeping force that was being assembled to enter Kosovo after a negotiated Serbian withdrawal, to 45- 50,000 troops. As British Air Marshal Sir John Day, Deputy Chief of the Defense Staff, explains it: "It was a form of heavy breathing on Milosevic and a subtle way of moving to (Operation) B Minus whilst keeping the coalition together....The forces that were being prepared for KFOR Plus were the core elements of what would then have become Bravo Minus, the full ground invasion."

On May 31, Washington gave NATO's Supreme Commander in Europe, Gen. Wesley Clark, permission to start building the 145-mile (225-km) road from the Albanian port of Durres up to Kukes on the Kosovo border that would be needed to get NATO's heavy armor up there. And on June 3, President Clinton was scheduled to meet his Joint Chiefs of Staff for the first time since air strikes began on March 24. It was widely and rightly surmised that he was going to tell them that a full ground invasion was now likely.

In the event, Milosevic agreed to an almost unconditional withdrawal from Kosovo on June 3 to save his own neck, probably because his spies were picking up evidence of NATO's willingness to fight a ground war. (A 19-member alliance leaks information like a sieve) Milosevic would have known that once the land war began and large numbers of NATO troops got killed, the peace terms would escalate to include a demand that Serbia deliver him to an international war crimes tribunal.

But it is now clear that there is rather more backbone in the major Western democracies than was generally supposed at the time. They would obviously rather fight stand-off wars of immaculate coercion' using Cruise missiles and the like, but their newly proclaimed willingness to fight (selectively) in defense of human rights will not necessarily evaporate at the first sight of their own blood.

They are being given another opportunity to show their stuff right now, as a peace-keeping force (with the right to use force) is being urgently assembled for devastated East Timor. Once again, human rights are being given priority over strategic considerations. Even Australia, whose governments have spent the past 25 years sucking up to Indonesia, is not hesitating to take a leading role in an exercise that could easily see its own servicemen killed by rogue Indonesian troops.

This is turning out to be a remarkable year.