WASHINGTON -- The NATO leaders who will sit down at their summit here today have confounded critics who thought the 50-year-old alliance would fracture before fighting its first major war. But a month into NATO's bombing campaign in Yugoslavia, no one can say it's been easy to preserve the unity.
And yesterday, it got tougher.
On the eve of today's opening of the NATO summit, Russia and Yugoslavia chipped away at the alliance's solidarity with a peace overture calling for a United Nations-led "international presence" in Kosovo. The offer drew a hesitant half-welcome from President Clinton, but the White House became increasingly skeptical as the day wore on.
Clinton has demanded that President Slobodan Milosevic accept an armed force in Kosovo that would guarantee the return of the refugees.
The effort to keep 19 diverse NATO countries unified has added cumbersome delays to an air campaign complicated by bad weather, a vast and unforeseen refugee crisis and NATO's determination to avoid allied and civilian casualties.
And a move to commit ground troops to the war would likely expose deep political splits in every nation called upon to send soldiers, including the United States, increasing pressure on the alliance to accept a peace overture from Belgrade.
"I don't see a major break in NATO unity for now," said Hans Binnendijk of the National Defense University, a research and training institution. "If there's a decision required for ground forces, there will clearly be a major debate."
With U.S. approval, NATO officials say they are beginning to lay the groundwork for eventually sending tens of thousands of troops into the province to wipe out pockets of Serbian resistance remaining after more weeks, and possibly months, of punishing airstrikes.
"I think it's important not to rule anything out," Secretary of State Madeleine K. Albright said yesterday when asked about NATO planning for ground troops.
NATO has streamlined its military decision-making, giving its secretary general, Javier Solana, leeway to seek consensus among members without a formal meeting of 19 ambassadors at the Brussels headquarters.
Key decisions, however, still require such a meeting and what is known as the "silence procedure." In this, Solana prepares a summary of a decision. NATO ambassadors are given time to consult with their capitals and to "break silence" if they have an objection.
This procedure was followed when NATO needed Albania to serve as a base for U.S. Apache attack helicopters.
Right now, the silence procedure has been compressed to 3 1/2 hours. Yet in such a sprawling and diverse alliance, just about every decision is difficult.
The targets for the airstrikes were selected last summer and fall, before Milosevic agreed to a short-lived autonomy deal for Kosovo's majority ethnic Albanians. NATO planners designed a four-phased campaign that would begin by knocking out Yugoslavia's air defenses.
But even as NATO bombers pound targets ever closer to Milosevic, they are not yet fully into the third phase of the campaign, which calls for hitting command and control targets throughout Yugoslavia.
Moving to a full third phase of bombing would require a formal meeting of the alliance. The final, or fourth phase, calls for heavy bombing of a range of targets everywhere in the country.
As of yesterday morning, NATO had flown "more than 2,750 attack sorties under some of the most difficult weather and terrain conditions that can be encountered in modern warfare," according to an independent assessment by Anthony Cordesman of the Center for Strategic and International Studies.
Overall, NATO has flown more than 9,000 sorties since the beginning of the war, including the attack sorties.
The small number of accidents and civilian deaths "is an amazing tactical and technical achievement," Cordesman concluded.
But this safety -- for the pilots and potential civilian victims -- has come at a price. Each mistake has required painstaking investigation and explanation. This was particularly true of the strikes on two convoys last week that may have hit civilian vehicles and caused numerous deaths.
"The convoy [attack] threw us off for the better part of five days," says a NATO diplomat.
Cordesman says that based on the results made available so far, the air war has failed to show steady progress.
"Further, the air campaign clearly has had little operational impact on Serbian operations in Kosovo. 'Ethnic cleansing' now affects at least 90 percent of the Muslim population in Kosovo, and even NATO admits that its airstrikes may have made some aspects of 'ethnic cleansing' worse -- at least in the near term."
Part of the reason for lack of success so far was the underlying purpose of the air campaign, says Michael O'Hanlon, a military expert at the Brookings Institution: "The administration felt this was a war about psychology, not about battlefield effect."
Tactical disputes among allies have also gotten in the way. For close to a week, the United States and France have been locked in a disagreement over how to curb oil shipments to Yugoslavia. Paris opposes a naval blockade as an illegal act of war.
When a NATO military spokesman said that Serbian television was a suitable bombing target merely because it was an instrument of hate and propaganda, certain ambassadors complained that he had veered from the alliance script. NATO allows such attacks if the targets have a military, as well as civilian, purpose.
The interests of different members of the alliance have to be taken into account in planning airstrikes.
Hungary is deeply worried that attacks on targets in Vojvodina could threaten that Serbian province's large ethnic Hungarian population.
One NATO member, Greece, has opposed the airstrikes and has refused to participate, though it has allowed its ports to be used.
Holding the alliance together has become virtually a full-time job for Albright, who has been on the phone daily with many of her fellow NATO foreign ministers.
If disagreements seriously threaten military success, O'Hanlon suggests that the administration dispense with the NATO decision-making structure altogether in favor of a "coalition of the willing," as was used during the Persian Gulf war.
Besides dampening disputes and easing concerns among members of the alliance, NATO has had to gain cooperation from nations in the region, including Bulgaria, Albania, Macedonia and Slovenia.
Preparing for the NATO summit has inevitably distracted NATO leaders and officials. But the most unexpected drain on alliance time, money and manpower has been the enormous crush of refugees in Albania and Macedonia, which has diverted soldiers, aircraft and vehicles.
Partly because of the need to avoid interfering with humanitarian operations, the 24 U.S. Apache helicopters, which were ordered Easter weekend, are only now arriving in Albania.
"The military would certainly like to move quicker -- that's the military's job," said a NATO diplomat. "This is not the Warsaw Pact, where one organization tells all the others what they're going to do. Cumbersome is an apt description of democracy."
Milosevic himself, and the brutality of his regime, have helped to sustain the alliance's unity. France, Germany and Britain, all led by left-leaning governments, have been galvanized by the horror of "ethnic cleansing."
The fourth phase of airstrikes, bringing a broader array of targets and an intensity that threatens more casualties, could strain this humanitarian impulse.
A greater threat to unity would be a ground war, even a limited one against a badly weakened Yugoslav military. "I don't see this crisis playing out in a nice, clean, easy way," says David Gompert of RAND, a national security research firm. "The question is whether an ally raises his hand and says, 'You do not have consensus.' "
It is possible, Gompert said, that France might start to pull away from the alliance. But despite a record of challenging American initiatives, Paris has adopted a tough-minded attitude "when they hear the sound of the guns," he said.
"To opt for the easy way out would not go over well with French public opinion," Gompert added. The chief danger to allied unity in a ground war could come from the United States.
"Once there is a ground war, all bets are off," says Andrew Pierre of the U.S. Institute of Peace. "To maintain public support might be very difficult."
By suing for peace, with the support of Russia, Milosevic could exploit two soft spots in the alliance: an uneasiness about the war among a few members, and, perhaps more important, a worry about further antagonizing Russia and possibly drawing a new dividing line in Europe.
"The moment Milosevic makes an offer to deal, a lot of people will say, 'Let's grab it,' " Pierre says.
Pub Date: 4/23/99