Ground war in the Balkans: What is NATO afraid of?

By Gwynne Dyer

LONDON (JP): If this were 1991 and Kosovo were Kuwait, then today we would be just two days away from the start of the ground war. The air phase of the campaign would be nearing its end, the tanks would be about to roll, and the liberation of Kosovo would be only a week away.

Only we're not two days away from the ground war, or even four weeks away. North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO)'s leaders cannot privately be so deluded as to believe that mere airplanes are going to drive the Serbian troops out of Kosovo, but they will still not officially commit to a ground war where NATO troops would actually have to fight and maybe even die.

This reluctance was embarrassingly obvious during last weekend's NATO summit in Washington. The war is going badly, and the people NATO set out to protect are mostly in refugee camps, on the run within Kosovo, or murdered. Yet NATO will still not even announce a timetable for a serious build-up of ground troops.

Why not? Kosovo is not nearly as far away as Kuwait, and Slobodan Milosevic's Yugoslavia is vastly poorer and less well armed than Saddam Hussein's Iraq in 1991.

Partly, it is because the political leaders are terrified of NATO casualties, which they believe will cause the populations they lead to cut and run. This war is now over a month old, and they have not lost a single soldier killed or wounded, which has to be some sort of world record even if they have achieved this marvel mainly by bombing from altitudes so high that they cause many avoidable civilian deaths.

But NATO and its Arab allies did finally wage a ground war in the Gulf, and a few hundred allied troops did get killed. Have Western publics become so much more timid in only eight years that this is no longer acceptable, or are other factors at play?

A little knowledge is a dangerous thing, and that is just what most outsiders have about Kosovo and Serbia: a little knowledge. More precisely, they know two myths, both of which serve the Serbs very well.

The first is that any ground war would be fought in savage Balkan mountain terrain where Western-style armor-heavy armies would get hopelessly bogged down. The second is that Serbs are incredibly fierce fighters with a special gene for guerrilla warfare.

There is a strip of really serious mountains in the western Balkans; but they are starting to run out by the time you get as far inland as Kosovo. Right along the border between Albania and Kosovo, the likeliest entry point for NATO ground forces, there is a range of mountains with peaks rising to 6,000 feet (2,000 metres), but once through the passes you enter an undulating plain that takes in most of Kosovo.

Coming from the north into Serbia itself, the terrain is ideal tank country. It is one long day's drive from Frankfurt to Belgrade, and if you go via Vienna and Budapest you won't see a single major mountain the whole way down. When the Germans invaded Yugoslavia from the north in 1941, their tanks overran the whole country in a couple of weeks, and they lost only 151 soldiers killed in the whole campaign.

Ah, but that was just the start of it. What about the terrible guerrilla war that followed, which (all together, now) "tied down 37 crack Axis divisions" for most of the war?

Well, 30 of those famous 37 divisions were actually Italian, and in the context of the World War II the notion of "crack Italian divisions" is laughable. Most of the other seven were so- called "stomach divisions" of the German army, full of older men with ulcers, flat feet, etc. who were judged unfit for the rigors of combat on the Russian front.

Yugoslavia was not strategically important, and only once, in 1943, did Berlin commit three first-rate divisions and an air fleet to stamp out the guerrilla nuisance. They surrounded about 100,000 partisans in the battle of Sutjeska Gorge. The Yugoslav partisans fought well, but almost half of them were killed before the rest broke out of the trap and after that the Germans went back to the serious business of the Eastern Front.

It was the approaching Soviet army, not the partisans, that forced the Germans to pull out of Yugoslavia in 1944, but Tito's post-war regime built up the role of the partisans to justify its own power. The West conspired in this fiction once Tito broke with Moscow in 1948, and by now everybody in Serbia and many people elsewhere actually believe it.

Serbian partisans were no more fearsome than Russian or Greek partisans, and there is no evidence that their grandchildren have inherited either their skills or their grit. The Serbs rarely committed infantry to battle in this decade's Balkan wars, though they were good at ethnic cleansing and at shelling defenseless cities.

When their victims finally got enough weapons to counter- attack, like the Bosnians and Croats in 1995, the Serbs generally broke and ran: no Serbs stayed behind to wage a guerrilla war in Krajina, for example.

What we have here is another "Mother of Battles" myth, with Western journalists again collaborating with the other side's propagandists in the interests of pumping up the story. What's odd is that even NATO's generals seem to be taken in by it. But then, most of them are only chocolate soldiers anyway.