Lessons learned from Kosovo war

By Gwynne Dyer

LONDON (JP): Thirteen tanks? Over a thousand North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) planes bombed Serbia and Kosovo for 79 days with the highest technology money can buy, and they only destroyed or damaged thirteen Serbian tanks?

Maybe they'll find a few extra burnt-out tanks as Kosovo peacekeeping force (KFOR) builds up in Kosovo, but they aren't going to find a hundred more. What this means is that it definitely wasn't the air war that persuaded Serbian strongman Slobodan Milosevic to give in to NATO.

This won't surprise anyone who knows the history of air power in other wars. Aircraft are excellent for destroying targets that can't hide or move, like bridges and factories, but they are not good at finding well dug-in and camouflaged military targets. And they're absolutely hopeless at destroying them if low-level attacks are banned in order to avoid losing planes.

Thirteen tanks. This stark little statistic means that we don't have to waste time listening to claims that wars can now be won by air power alone. Air forces and defense industry will still make the claim, of course, but at the rate of loss being inflicted on the Serbian forces by NATO's massed aerial might -- about five tanks a month -- Milosevic could obviously have gone on resisting well into the 21st century.

So why did he quit when he did? Mainly because by early June, NATO was signaling strongly that it was willing to launch a ground invasion of Kosovo.

Even then, a Serbian leader whose main goal was to keep Kosovo would have gone on fighting. After all, NATO might never really work its nerve up to commit ground troops to combat. If it did, they might get bogged down by a stiff Serbian resistance. And even if NATO troops did drive the Serbian army out of Kosovo in the end, which was clearly the likeliest outcome -- well, how would that outcome be worse for Serbia than the deal Milosevic signed voluntarily early this month?

Milosevic's main goal, despite his nationalist rhetoric, is not hanging onto Kosovo. It is staying in power, and out of jail. A land war would have been too risky for him, for after NATO had lost some hundreds of troops, its war aims would almost certainly have expanded to include the overthrow, arrest, and trial of the man who has put the former Yugoslavia through a decade of misery and carnage: Slobodan Milosevic. So he signed quickly, in the hope of saving himself.

NATO has been very lucky, and the first war that was ever fought almost solely to stop human rights abuses in another country has been won at a low cost to the countries that intervened. But this is part of a much broader movement to bring human rights issues into the center of international law, and if air power is not a magic bullet, then enforcement is back as the key problem.

The NATO powers, in particular, have no stomach for taking casualties on the ground to enforce the new rules they are writing. That's why some senior NATO leaders who knew that an air war alone could not save the Albanian Kosovars went along with that concept anyway last March.

They hoped that the logic of war would eventually force a ground invasion of Kosovo onto the agenda -- but that would only happen if there actually was a war going on, and in early March the choice was an air war, or no war at all. They gambled on Milosevic folding to avoid a ground war, and they were lucky. But you cannot count on a Milosevic every time, so who does the dirty job of enforcement on the ground when it is necessary?

NATO countries in Europe are even less likely to volunteer now that they know the promises of the air warriors are hollow. Nigeria is wearying of the thankless role of enforcing ethnic peace in West Africa, and Uganda is staggering under the weight of the task in Central Africa. There's not even a plausible candidate for the job in Asia -- and the United States is definitely not interested in being the world's policeman if the price in money and lives is high.

So what future can there really be for this new principle that grave human rights abuses cancel the protection of sovereignty and permit international intervention in a country's internal affairs? If we had to fight a war every couple of years to enforce it, no future at all. But the way good laws succeed in the real world is by commanding the respect of most people and deterring most potential law-breakers, not by constant shoot- outs.

Consider the United Nations rules that guarantee the sovereignty and the borders of every member state. Only five years after its founding, the UN authorized a large war in 1950 (a "police action", technically) to enforce those rules against the North Korean invaders of South Korea. Then it didn't authorize another such operation for 40 years, until Iraq invaded Kuwait in 1990. It didn't have to, because by and large the laws were respected.

Kosovo could be a precedent for international human rights law as powerful as Korea was for sovereignty law. It may not be necessary to fight more wars like it in order to have a huge deterrent effect on other would-be genocidal regimes -- especially if Milosevic and his henchmen wind up facing an international tribunal for their crimes.

In that case, something very important will have been accomplished in Kosovo despite all the tragic blunders.