-Caveat Lector- >From Int'l Herald Tribune Paris, Friday, April 23, 1999 Anniversary Gala Recast As a Major War Council Kosovo Dictates Agenda at NATO Summit ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- ---- By Joseph Fitchett International Herald Tribune ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- ---- WASHINGTON - Long planned as an extravaganza celebrating NATO's 50th year as a peacetime alliance, the summit meeting that opens Friday in Washington finds allied leaders grappling with a brutal, frustrating and unconventional war in Kosovo, Europe's biggest conflict since World War II. In the face of that reality, the event planned to celebrate NATO's past and give a fillip to its future has become instead a defining moment for the war - a moment more decisive for the North Atlantic Treaty Organization than the reams of commitments on paper that have been prepared for the occasion. Military fly-bys have been dropped from the schedule, as have banquets with Hollywood entertainment. Evening clothes have been left behind. The biggest-ever summit meeting in the U.S. capital, involving the leaders of 19 allied nations, plus the presence of 25 more countries involved in alliance activities, has been recast as a wartime conference to shape the alliance's strategy as leaders try to get a fresh grip on a Balkans conflict that has proved stubbornly different from the defensive wars in Central Europe that NATO had prepared to fight. A month after launching the air offensive against the forces of Slobodan Milosevic, the Yugoslav president, allied leaders face even tougher decisions. They must weigh conditions for starting a ground war in Kosovo, ways of stabilizing the fragile front-line countries around the conflict and ideas for meeting the costs of rebuilding postwar Kosovo - and also Macedonia and Albania, and ultimately, Serbia. If they fail, Western leaders could live to recall this weekend in Washington as the end of what has promised to be widened and deepened trans-Atlantic cooperation on international security in the post-Cold War era. NATO, after proving its effectiveness in Bosnia, gained recognition as the indispensable mainstay of security in Europe, and the allies, led by the Clinton administration, were seeking ways to expand on this new stable core. Many of these plans are at stake, suddenly, in the struggle against Mr. Milosevic and his Serbian forces, whose resistance has surprised NATO planners. The alliance has always been prepared for a defensive war against an aggressor with sophisticated weapons. Now it has to retool, militarily and politically, for an expedition against a small but determined army fighting with low-technology weapons - including refugee flows - that Western leaders had underestimated and perhaps even forgotten. The decisions facing NATO now are crucial for President Bill Clinton, and for Prime Minister Tony Blair of Britain and President Jacques Chirac of France, all of whom know that their political careers and place in history will be marked by the outcome in Kosovo. A litmus test in the eyes of many people, undoubtedly including Mr. Milosevic, will be the success or failure of NATO leaders to start preparations for a credible ground campaign in Kosovo. Western leaders' failure to pose even a threat of a ground offensive when they launched air attacks last month has led critics to say that NATO was not credible militarily in Belgrade and must become so. Planning for a ground war, critics say, would demonstrate the West's determination to prevail, and therefore increase the chances of winning with the air war alone. But even preparing to send in the troops carries the cost of admitting that allied leaders hoped to get victory in Kosovo on the political cheap. It also broadcasts an ominous signal of escalation, including an economic embargo against Serbia to halt oil supplies. The call for a fight to the finish will require the alliance to be able to reassure NATO allies, such as Italy, Greece and Hungary, that are liable to feel the blowback, and also to help stabilize nonallies, such as Albania, Macedonia, Bulgaria and perhaps even Montenegro, with evidence of the alliance's ability to see them through a showdown. These imperatives overshadow the summit meeting's original program of debates about future directions for NATO. Diplomats have labored for months on a series of issues for the meeting, including several thorny questions: Should NATO promise ''no first use'' of nuclear weapons as sought by the Greens in Germany's new coalition government? What answer should be given to a dozen Central European nations asking to follow the Czech Republic, Hungary and Poland into the alliance? How far should NATO ''globalize'' its ambitions as a force ready to act outside Europe? Does NATO have to always wait for an authorization from the United Nations Security Council? Should NATO - in this case, the United States - welcome an Anglo-French initiative to give Europe an autonomous capacity in defense? That list will be largely dealt with in what the alliance calls a new strategic concept to emerge from the meeting, and which is being finalized in the last few hours, apparently successfully. As a French participant put it, ''No one is going to jeopardize the war effort by pushing the allies to a public split on some doctrinal point.'' On a few questions about the alliance's future, the war has raised the stakes, notably concerning the issue of a European defense role inside NATO and the related matter of how far the allies in Europe can go in modernizing their armed forces and equipping them to fight future conflicts resembling the one in Kosovo. The decisive fashion in which the European allies entered the air war reflected a new determination among leaders on the Continent after decades in which they had often seemed leery of military action and too concerned about domestic problems to risk combat. That boded well, U.S. officials said, for a green light at the summit meeting on further discussions about a deal in which Washington would promise, under certain conditions, to lend the European allies the equipment they needed, including satellite intelligence and big cargo planes, for missions where the United States did not want to be involved with ground troops. After a month in Kosovo, the outlook is no longer that clear. ''The conflict has probably been a wash as far its impact on the European defense role is concerned,'' Hubert Vedrine, the French foreign minister, said in an interview this week. ''It's probably a plus for Europeans' confidence in their ability to work together, but we still have a great deal more work to do in developing a defense identity of our own.'' The ''defense identity'' as redefined last year by Paris and London, means, Mr. Vedrine said, that ''Europeans want to be able to work inside NATO when it's appropriate, as it is right now in Kosovo, and we also want to be able to work among Europeans, on the basis of confidence with the alliance, when it's appropriate.'' That call for a larger European role in NATO, including some autonomy in defense for allies that are also members of the European Union, has received a cautious welcome from the Clinton administration, which says that it has shed previous U.S. governments' habit of giving lip service to European aspirations while maintaining U.S. insistence on running the show at NATO. But Mr. Vedrine's cautious tone seemed to reflect an emerging theme in Washington: that Kosovo has revealed major shortcomings in the European allies' readiness to be a full-scale military partner with the United States. In Kosovo, where 13 of the allies are flying combat missions with the U.S. Air Force, ''it turns out that all F-16s are not equal,'' a National Security Council official said recently at a closed-door conference in Europe. Indeed, only U.S. warplanes - and only some of them - have sufficiently advanced electronics to be able to operate even in bad weather. When all-weather capabilities are added to size, only the United States has been able to meet NATO commanders' needs when they call for reinforcements to escalate the air war. By the end of the month, the U.S. share of the air armada will rise to about 70 percent, after starting out below half. Already, nearly 90 percent of the ordnance hitting Serbian targets comes from the United States, since none of the allies have long-range cruise missiles - except Britain, which has bought a few. None of them has bombs directed by the Global Positioning System, and none of them has attack helicopters such as the tank-busting Apaches that have finally arrived in the Balkans. All of this has injected urgency into the NATO plan for an initiative on defense capabilities, meaning a drive by the European allies to invest more in the emerging electronic technologies for use on the battlefield. The American worry, experts said, is that the technology gap across the Atlantic is widening to the point where the allies will find it difficult to participate usefully in joint operations. Many Europeans agree with the diagnosis. The European Union countries have a defense budget that is 60 percent of the U.S. figure of around $265 billion a year, a level about right since Europe has no defense responsibilities in Asia or elsewhere. Only Britain, with its professional army designed for mobility, offers a model of modernization in Europe, and only France, with its spy satellites, has started developing the expensive new technologies. None of the European allies is close to the U.S. level in terms of fusing intelligence with battle management. Washington, especially the Pentagon, seems increasingly intent on making an issue of European capabilities before letting NATO accept a greater role for Europe. The other question that Kosovo has moved from NATO's future to its present is the alliance's relationship to the Security Council and specifically the mandate question. It had been billed as a contentious problem at the summit meeting, with France resisting any U.S. effort to assert that NATO was entitled to circumvent the Security Council whenever Russia blocked a Western initiative. Mr. Vedrine said Paris wanted to see that NATO actions remained rooted in the alliance's basic charter, which enshrines Security Council authority. France, he said, approved the NATO decision in October to intervene against Serbia, a sovereign state, because overlapping Security Council resolutions provided the necessary legitimacy. But, he added, ''I think we'll find a basis for agreement in Washington.'' The phrase seemed to reflect a formula in which the Clinton administration and Paris agreed to say as little as possible to leave open the door for NATO to act pragmatically over future Kosovos. With NATO engaged in Europe's largest war in half a century, the mandate issue, like the long-running debate over whether NATO would operate out of its old area, comprising the territory of its member states, has probably become a matter to be determined by the outcome in Kosovo. Certainly, any outcome less than a clear-cut victory will make it a virtual certainty that the alliance could never again get unanimity on dispensing with the legitimacy conferred by a Security Council resolution. Similarly, the conflict has created a new context for the summit meeting's expected stance of saying ''yes, the door is open'' to prospective new members while refusing to name any names or give any dates. Not only closer military cooperation but also economic assistance, potentially on a massive scale, will be under discussion in Washington, where the 19 NATO leaders will have a separate meeting Sunday with the heads of front-line states in the Balkans, a sign of their sudden new importance. Paramount-seeming only months ago, the nuclear issue - ''does NATO need to be able to threaten nuclear war in some circumstances short of a nuclear attack on NATO?'' - now seems ripe to be relegated to a study group, officials said. The alliance, which certainly needed a nuclear threat to deter a sophisticated antagonist such as the Soviet Union from aggression in Europe, now has little political time to worry about that doctrinal issue as it tries to fight and win its first real war. It is a struggle that still may draw in ground troops, including German forces for the first time since World War II - a struggle in which NATO leaders are challenged in Washington to engage what it takes - militarily, politically and economically - to pacify and find a new footing for the Balkans, the unsettled corner of Europe that threatens to poison the whole continent. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- ---- ~~~~~~~~~~~~ A<>E<>R The only real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes. -Marcel Proust + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + Every great advance in natural knowledge has involved the absolute rejection of authority. -Thomas Huxley + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + Forwarded as information only; no endorsement to be presumed + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. section 107, this material is distributed without charge or profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving this type of information for non-profit research and educational purposes only. 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