The Kosovo War: Is There an Endgame?

Transcript

R. Nessen: Good morning. Welcome to Brookings. My name is Ron Nessen, and I want to welcome you to this briefing on the Kosovo War.

Congress is back in session, and this has generated a wider public discussion of the war. There have also been new developments on the diplomatic front, and also on the military front. So, we thought it would be a good idea to have another briefing. This is our third briefing on the Kosovo War over the course of the three weeks of the war.

Let me introduce you to the panel, and they are experts, our leading experts, in fact, on both the military and diplomatic aspects, and the NATO aspects, alliance aspects of the Kosovo conflict.

First of all, you're going to hear from Michael O'Hanlon who is a fellow in the foreign policy studies department here at Brookings, also an adjunct professor at Columbia and Georgetown Universities. He is the author of Saving Lives With Force: Military Criteria for Humanitarian Intervention; and a forthcoming book which will detail the impact of advanced technology on military operations. He was a defense and foreign policy analyst in the national security division of the Congressional Budget Office. And he is going to talk to you about the military aspects, obviously, the prospects for the air war succeeding, and what the options might be for ground troops.

Secondly, you'll hear from Richard Haass, he is, as most of you know, the director of foreign policy studies here at Brookings, the author of many books, and many of them relevant to the Kosovo War, including The Reluctant Sheriff: The U.S. After the Cold War; and also Intervention: The Use of American Military Force in the Post-Cold War World. He is the editor of Economic Sanctions and American Diplomacy. From 1989 to 1993, Richard was special assistant to President Bush, and senior director for Near East and South Asia affairs at the National Security Council. He was awarded a presidential citizens medal for his role at the NSC during the Gulf War. And Richard will talk to you about diplomatic issues, the relationship between diplomacy and force in Kosovo.

Finally, Ivo Daalder, a visiting fellow in the foreign policy studies area at Brookings. He is on leave as an associate professor at the University of Maryland School of Public Affairs. He is a former director of European Affairs in the National Security Council at the White House. The author of several forthcoming books which are relevant to this topic, including Getting to Dayton: The Making of America's Bosnia Policy; and also NATO in the 21st Century: What Purpose, What Missions. And Ivo will talk about NATO issues, the effect of the war on the alliance, and the relationship between the forthcoming 50th Anniversary celebration of NATO, which is later this month, and the Kosovo conflict.

So, they will talk to you about their most recent analysis of what's happening, and then will take your questions and discuss the issue.

First of all, Michael.

M. O'Hanlon: Thank you, Ron.

We're delighted to have you all here and also our window washers, we apologize for any noise you make here in the course of the events this morning.

I wanted to talk, as Ron said, about two main issues. One is the air war so far, and prospects for its possible future success, and then secondly, to the extent it may not succeed, or to the extent it needs to be followed up with other kinds of operations, ways to think through the so-called ground force option, which right now is just kind of thrown out with those three words, as if that explains everything about what forces would do if putting their boots in the mud in Kosovo. And that just begins to raise issues. It doesn't by any means answer them.

I'm not going to try to recite what's been going on in the air war in detail. You've got plenty of that kind of information, or at least as much as I do in the newspapers. General Clark gave a good briefing yesterday with some more specific data. But what I want to try to do is to call into some doubt a little bit of the overall prospects for what we're doing, and to put some of the specific numbers, and these terms like "degrade" and "destroy" that we're so frequently hearing now in some kind of a broader military context.

And I think the easiest way to do this in most cases is by analogy to Operation Desert Storm, where we do have some very good data, and some very careful post-war analyses that have been done. So, these can be instructive.

Let me just touch on a couple of things. One is, what are the chances that we can really cut off supply lines into Kosovo? This, as you know, has been a major focus of the air campaign so far. We know we're having only mediocre success against actual armored vehicles within Kosovo, and we are having some success clearly against air defense sites, and that sort of thing, within Serbia proper, the main part of Serbia. But we hear a lot of talk about trying to cut off these supply lines. Well, my overall assessment is, you can do this to the extent that you want to reduce supplies. You can make it hard for the Serb forces in Kosovo to maneuver. In other words, you can reduce their supply flow enough that it will make a difference in an all-out operation, but you almost certainly cannot deny them enough supplies to keep on doing what they're doing now against only sporadic KLA resistance, if they choose to. And Milosevic may buckle for other reasons. He may decide the air campaign causes too much pain in economic and political terms, but in military terms, I doubt very seriously that this campaign can work to stop the ethnic cleansing within Kosovo.

Let me read you a couple of sentence quote by General Horner, who, as you know, was instrumental in the Gulf War air campaign, very telling quote. "Anybody that does a campaign against transportation systems had better beware, it looks deceivingly easy. It is a tough nut to crack. The Iraqis were very ingenious and industrious in repairing damage to bridges or bypassing them. I have never seen so many pontoon bridges in my life. When the canals near Basra were bombed, the Iraqis just filled them in with dirt and drove across."

It's tough to do an analogy from that overall assessment of the Gulf War to what's going on in Serbia today. Obviously much different kinds of terrain, and different dependencies in Kosovo than in the war against Iraq. But my guess is that overall it was actually easier to interdict supplies against Iraq than it is in this case because of the complex terrain, the forests, and the fact that Kosovo, of course, is part of Serbia, and that there are undoubtedly a number of secondary supply routes that are well-known by Serbian forces and can be utilized in that regard.

So, my overall message here, clearly, is just that we're going to have to be a little bit nervous and skeptical about our prospects of denying the Serbs in Kosovo enough fuel and ammunition to do what they're up to already. I think also we saw some reports today in the New York Times about some fairly intense fighting and ethnic cleansing in Southeastern Kosovo yesterday. There had been some hope that perhaps we were already reducing the supply flow enough that this was not going to be as possible for the Serbs now as it was three weeks ago, or two weeks ago. But I would, for the reasons I just indicated and because of yesterday's report, I would be skeptical about drawing that conclusion.

Another point, can we cut off the forces in Kosovo from communication with Belgrade? Here, I would say again, the answer is almost certainly no. We can make it difficult for detailed instructions to be given in the course of a fast-moving ground campaign. So, we can certainly reduce the Serbian forces in Kosovo their ability to fight us if we intervene on the ground. But we cannot stop them from at least basic communications. Saddam was never cut off from either his SCUD launchers or from Kuwait in the course of the Gulf War. And when the Iraqis in Kuwait were in a position where they established a location for a while, they would simply string field wire from one place to another, and this would provide communications that they could sustain throughout the campaign until we forced them to move. So, if you let the Serbs on the ground dictate the pace of operations, and let them operate largely from static positions, or small areas, they will not be cut off from Belgrade in terms of their communications. So, I'm skeptical again about that particular goal of the air war.

Those are just a couple of observations that reinforce my general concern, and my general skepticism about this war being able to work in military terms. It may work in political or economic terms, as I've said, but I doubt very seriously that it can work in military terms.

Let me touch quickly on the Apache helicopter issue. I was rereading the final Defense Department report to Congress on the Gulf War yesterday, and I was struck, the first thing that was said about the Apache was that the Apache was extremely useful because it could be deployed to theaters so quickly that it provided anti-armor capability in the first days of the crisis. So, apparently things have changed a little bit in the ensuing eight years. But if and when the Apaches get there, they will be effective. But I don't believe they will be a radically new capability.

They were not even used that heavily in the 40-day air campaign in Desert Storm. They were used for some specialized targets against air defense sites, but the did most of their anti-armor work, as well as I can discern from the Gulf War documents and histories, during the ground campaign. They're designed to work with ground forces, that's the way they train. And they can be used independently. But in the Gulf War, we did not consider them so radically better than other kinds of aircraft as to put them heavily into the air campaign in the first 40 days. That was largely an A-10, F-117, F-111, F-16, F-15 operation, and not so much an Apache operation.

So, my concern is that we are all going to be a little bit mystified by all this talk of Apaches and think that it's going to make a big difference once they get there. They can fly below cloud cover better than fixed wing aircraft, and they did so with relative impunity in the Gulf, only one of them was shot down in Desert Storm, and so there is some hope for an improvement here, but not a radical one.

I would also point out, if you try to use Apaches or any helicopter against infantry forces on the ground, and you try to get close enough to shoot people, you run into the kinds of problems that we're all now familiar with from Somalia in 1993, where a rag-tag militia under General Aideed actually downed about a half-dozen U.S. Blackhawk helicopters, remarkably, and very surprisingly, but nonetheless tellingly. And it's something that makes me realize we're going to have a very hard time flying these things low enough to go after people, which means, I think, the Serbs will be in a good position to continue ethnic cleansing operations with smaller weapons, even if we can eventually reduce the ability they have to do so with armor.

Let me move along, but one more point on the Desert Storm analogy, when we started flying low early on in Desert Storm, we actually lost 17 airplanes the first day, either shot down or heavily damaged. For the rest of the war, we only lost about 70, actually more like 60, damaged or shot down for the entire rest of the war. What this means is that if you start flying lower, you'd better be braced for a lot higher casualty rate. So, I'm not sure what that will be. And one hopes we've done enough damage to the early warning radars and other kinds of integrate air defenses now that we could have a lower casualty rate than that, but in Desert Storm, the rates of loss were almost 10 times higher when we flew low.

Now, let me move on a little bit to some ground war operations, and we can talk more about these military details on the air war if you'd like later. I would lay out three ways to think about a ground force intervention into Kosovo, or into Serbia. They're all dangerous, but there are important distinctions between them in terms of how many overall NATO forces would be needed, how many U.S. forces of that total would be required, and the likely number of casualties.

To set up an enclave in Kosovo, let's say in Western Kosovo, to help the internally displaced, and I fear we will be pressured to do this in short order. We know there are hundreds of thousands of internally displaced ethnic Albanians within Kosovo who are not being aided right now by the international community. I'm sure they're not being aided by the Serbs. This could be an intense humanitarian crisis. Any debate we've had right now about the fact that we haven't achieved our goal in Kosovo will pale in comparison to the debate we're going to have when we think that there are thousands of people dying a day from starvation within Kosovo. And this is going to make it a lot harder to be patient about continuing the air war for weeks on end, in my judgment.

At that point, it will be, I think, at least seriously considered to either risk flying airplanes low and dropping a lot of food supplies in a manner that General Clark wanted to rule out yesterday or, better yet, setting up a enclave in Western Kosovo. Doing the latter would take, I believe 30,000 to 50,000 NATO troops to be safe. I think if you had probably 15 to 20 thousand NATO troops within Kosovo able to just defend themselves, and that was their only mission, I believe they could do a pretty good job in the sense that we have control of the air. Serbia has a hard time massing force. And even if Serbia has 50,000 or 60,000 troops within Kosovo, if we're set up in defensive positions and we have control of the air, and the firepower that we have, even a force of 15 or 20 thousand could probably defend itself pretty well. However, to set up an enclave, you obviously need to patrol a perimeter of land, and that's going to add on requirements above that 15 to 20 thousand. So, I think you're looking at numbers on the order of 30,000 to 50,000.

If you could keep things in that vicinity, you could probably get away with having no more than half of all those troops be American, and maybe even as few as two-fifths or even a third. The reason, of course, being that the Europeans already have 12,000 troops or so in Macedonia. They're adding more, they can move additional battalions and brigades, and we could play an important, but perhaps equal or somewhat less than equal role in that kind of an operation.

The counter-argument, though, is that to do this kind of an operation, it's going to be dangerous. You really don't want to drive through minefields, and drive through ravines and over bridges that the Serbs could demolish once they saw NATO forces on them. You really want to do a helicopter assault, I believe. And in this area, the United States is much better prepared than Europe. So, at a minimum, I believe we would send certain kinds of units, even for the enclave strategy, perhaps from the 101st Air Assault Division, perhaps from the Marine Corps if we can get more Marines into the vicinity quickly, and this would be the major role of U.S. forces in this kind of a mission.

Even so, you've got to assume some resistance from anti-aircraft fire. You've got to assume that he Europeans will have to drive over at least some of those mine-strewn fields. And I think you'd better be ready for dozens of Western soldiers killed, even just to set up an enclave in Western Kosovo. It may not take that many casualties, but it might, and we should be ready for it.

The next option is the one I personally favor, which is to set up a larger ground force intervention to liberate most of Kosovo. I would be leaning towards personally thinking in terms of an independent state, although we'll have some disagreement and some debate on that this morning, I'm sure. But regardless of how you envision the endgame, the military requirements, I believe, would be on the order of 100,000 to 125,000 NATO troops. If you start talking about that kind of force, the majority of those forces do have to be American. Europeans just do not have enough ability to move fast and support forces overseas or even on the flank of Europe in short order. So, this would have to be a U.S.-led operation, not necessarily U.S.-dominated, but U.S.-led, with probably 50,000 to 75,000 U.S. troops.

I believe you'd have to be ready for as many killed as we had in Desert Storm in this operation, hundreds. We had a total of 400 losses in Desert Storm, if you take all different sources of our losses combined. It could be that difficult. I hope it would not be. I'd hope that our use of helicopters and rapid movement would intimidate the Serbs, and make them realize that they don't want to hunker down in cities and fight to the last man, they're better off retreating into the woods, into the hills, and into Serbia proper, but it's hard to know in advance.

And, part of the reason I would favor offering them a swath of Kosovo to retain is to give them some incentive not to fight as hard. But, obviously, they might, and if they do, they could probably be as effective as General Aideed?s military was in Somalia, and we know from that operation that we lost 18 people in one day, and if the war were to continue over a period of days or weeks, we could certainly lose as many as hundreds of people.

The other operation is the one that NATO has estimated would require 200,000 NATO troops to liberate Kosovo, and possibly occupy all of Serbia, possibly overthrowing the Milosevic regime, presumably. That would require, I would estimate, at least two-thirds of the contingent to be American. Maybe as many as 150,000 U.S. troops, and the possibility of even as many as thousands killed in action. For one thing, Serbia could even use chemical weapons in this kind of a scenario. They could use chemical weapons in Kosovo, but I think it's a more plausible concern if we're going into their own capital. I hope that's an overestimate, but it cannot be dismissed out of hand. And it is something we would have to be braced for.

A couple of final comments, and then I'm done, on the cost. We've seen that Congress is now being asked to provide $3 billion or so for military operations. I am a little bit befuddled by that number. There's no way we've spent anything close to that so far. I think it presupposes the air war continuing into May to get that kind of a number. We may very well wind up there, but it's a somewhat defeatist position in a sense, because I would hope that it won't take until May. Certainly, a ground operation would take at least into June, but the air war, if we really believe our strategy, it's a little bit disconcerting to hear that we think we're going to need a month to six weeks more of this even with 1,000 airplanes in place. But, nonetheless, if we do take that long and keep fighting for that long, this could cost the $3 billion number that the administration apparently is requesting of Congress.

By the way, we might point out the number of U.S. airplanes we have now on the way to the region is perhaps two-thirds as many as we would imagine sending to a major theater war against Iraq or Korea. We're getting into a major combat operation here, this is war. There's hardly any other term for it that I could think of.

If we get into a ground war, apart from the casualty costs, how much would it cost budgetarily? It's very hard to say this absent knowledge of how long we would have to say, but a very rough rule of thumb is maybe $10 billion for every 100,000 U.S. forces we send, and that's assuming an operation of several months duration, including the initial counter-offensive, and then setting up some kind of a stabilizing presence for a period of time. So, if we're on the lower end of this operation, or for the modest operation, maybe we get by with $10 billion in total cost. If we go to the higher end, we can be looking at $15 or $20 billion, or perhaps even more.

There are obviously a lot more things we can talk about in specific, but I'll save that for the Q&A.

R. Haass: Thank you, Mike.

Good morning. I also want to address the question of where we go from here. But I'd like to focus mostly on the diplomatic questions, though obviously and inevitably, there's a close connection between the military and the diplomatic, or at least there should be.

We're now three weeks into the war, beginning the fourth week. The issue has clearly and the debate has clearly gone beyond whether we were right to intervene. I would argue yes. I would be glad to defend that argument. But I believe we were based upon largely humanitarian to a lesser degree strategic interests. This is not to say that we have gone about it in the right way. And there I would say the answer is to the contrary, we have not.

I would simply say that about five-six years ago, I wrote a book about intervention, with that title, and the subtitle was the Use of American Military Force in the Post-Cold War. And in that book I laid out a dozen or so guidelines about what I thought was the proper use of military force. And I would simply say that we have violated nearly every one. This has been a textbook operation about how not to use force, and about how not to mesh force and diplomacy.

Indeed, I believe when people write about this, what they will note, first of all, is the fundamental disconnect between force and diplomacy, between the scale of the objectives, which has been ambitious by any measure, and the scale of the use of force, which has been modest. Ad it is that disconnect which explains, more than anything else, why this operation to date has not succeeded.

But, again, my task this morning is not to look back, it is to look forward, so let me do just that. At this point, the immediate priority ought to be to end the violence, and to bring about the return of as many people to Kosovo as possible. This will, needless to say, not just happen by itself, it will require an effective cessation to hostilities, and it will require a protective force. Too much has happened, too much has transpired for anybody to go back on the basis of promises at this point.

Now, this force need not be NATO in the technical sense, but it need be capable and credible. And in my view that will take the participation of several NATO members, probably the United States among them. But I do not think the chapeau need be NATO.

Diplomatically, we also need to move beyond Rambouillet. As you recall, Rambouillet allowed for the Serbs to maintain some 5,000 security forces, all over Kosovo. They could be scattered or distributed in ways that the Serbs wanted. That is impossible at this point. You will never bring about the return of people if there are Serbian police or security forces on street corners. That is a non-starter at this point.

So what you are going to need is the withdrawal of Serbian forces of any sort, police, security, intelligence, you name it, from most or all of Kosovo. If any Serbian forces are to be allowed in Kosovo, and I'll come back to this later, it would have to be geographically very confined and constrained, as well as numerically constrained. But the bulk of Kosovo would have to be free of Serbian forces if people are going to go back in sufficient numbers.

At this point, I would question the policy of strategic bombing of Belgrade and of Serbia more generally. I would question it for several reasons. One is, it seems to be having the counterproductive political effect of largely rallying people around the flag. Mr. Milosevic's popularity has soared, not waned, and it's not clear to me that this is weakening him at home, which ought to be one of our objectives.

Secondly, I do think that this will sow problems within NATO. I'm actually pleasantly surprised it hasn't happened to date, but I do not think we have an unlimited string here to play about bombing what most Europeans see as a European city, quite understandably, because it is one. And I just don't think we have an unlimited amount of time to continue to do this, because sooner or later there will be more accidents, there will be more collateral damage, and I do think that that will have a consequence.

Also, militarily, the focus ought to be on Serbian forces in Kosovo. Those are the forces that are doing the killing, those are the forces that are bringing about the displacing, those are the forces that are creating the refugees, and that ought to be the focus of our military efforts at this point.

To the extent we're bringing over several hundred more aircraft, which I applaud, my only complaint is that they were not brought over before this operation began and used from the outset, but that is where those assets ought to be focused.

I believe we need to mass a ground option immediately, and it should be done visibly, it should not be done in the stealth of night, it should be done visibly and noisily. If it is done that way, there is the chance it will spur diplomacy. That when Mr. Milosevic sees we have basically put them on the table, that it will force him to recalculate his likely costs and benefits from holding on or, if that doesn't work, then I think ground forces ought to be used to create a large space in most of Kosovo for these people to return to, going back to Mike O'Hanlon's options, we didn't coordinate this beforehand, but it's essentially what he would call a second option. It's a safe haven in most of Kosovo.

And I think he made another good point, which I would want to highlight. We do not have unlimited time here, one of the problems with keeping to this somewhat leisurely schedule that we find ourselves on is that people are dying and getting displaced every day. And while the people who have left Kosovo enjoy the protections under international law of refugee status, there is no body of international law that protects people who haven't left. Those who have not left the country but are displaced are not refugees. In order to be a refugee you have to leave the country. These people have no legal protection, they have no physical protection. The international agencies cannot get at them to help them.

Scholars here at Brookings have done an awful lot of work on this. I think it's important work, but what it highlights is the fact that these people are essentially at the mercy of the elements, and at the mercy of the very same authorities who have created the problem. So every day that goes on, while we keep to our schedule, is one more day that these people are threatened and vulnerable. And again, it means that we do not have this unlimited amount of time, I believe, to allow the bombing to sink in, as seems to be NATO's strategy.

Now, obviously it would be better if these international forces that would enter Kosovo on the ground, and occupying, say, most of Kosovo would be able to do so on a consensual or administrative basis, or at least in a basis of low resistance. And obviously, we want to do that, that should not require an agreement on the part of the Serbian authorities. If we have one, sobeit, it's nice to have it, but we should not require an agreement to do that. I have no problem with third party mediation to try to get such an agreement. Again, if we can lower our own casualties and get these forces in administratively, that ought to be welcomed. And if the Russians or the U.N. can provide such effective third party mediation, sobeit, that would be great. We ought not to turn that down, I think there are reasons, even, to welcome a Russian role if that helps dampen down some of the alienation that has grown up between Russia and NATO.

But, one way or another, consensual or otherwise, we ought to ready and introduce a ground option as soon as is physically possible. And I would simply say in going back to the military options, my own preferred one at the moment is the idea of creating an enclave in most of Kosovo, but in general the size of what we ought to do ought to be to some extent determined by the scale of the resistance that we expect to encounter. And I think we can be somewhat flexible on this point, but what we really want to do is create a situation again where as many people can return and live safely as possible, as soon as possible. I would think it's best in all of this to keep the political status of Kosovo, be it the part we would occupy or all of Kosovo, an open-ended question at this moment.

I want to avoid questions of independence, we want to bring about maximal autonomy, it will probably be some sort of an international protectorate or trusteeship. We're in a sense creating something of a new animal, an international practice here, but I'd like to avoid independence for now, in part because I want to keep that as a piece of leverage o use against Serbian authorities as this thing plays out down the road diplomatically. And secondly, I think independence does bring with it some other problems, because it's no clear to me it would stop there. I think then you are into the question of Greater Albania, and I think that opens up other questions.

Let me say two other things before I conclude. I lean against arming the KLA, the Kosovo Liberation Army. I know it's an idea that has some currency up on Capitol Hill. I'm not sure their agenda is one we share. It's not clear to me that their agenda is limited to the liberation of Kosovo. Clearly, it does have a larger set of Albanian ambitions. I'm not sure their means are necessarily always ones that we would welcome. I'm not sure the Europeans would welcome the idea of having an armed group running around in the center of Europe. I think it might stiffen Belgrade's resistance, and indeed in some ways be used as a justification for continuing to fight, by Milosevic and others. He wouldn't be alone in this.

And also, I think Afghanistan ought to have taught us some humility here, that when you provide arms to insurgencies, yes, it reduces your costs, they provide the manpower, we don't. But, you pay a price for that, and the price you pay is a loss of control. You don't exactly know whose hands these weapons will end up in, and what they will do with these weapons once they have them. And what we've seen played out in Afghanistan over the last decade or so, since the Soviet army left, is clearly a less than successful, less than happy story. And I just think we ought not to approach the idea of arming the KLA as a cost-free option for the West. I think it is a risky option, that would not help the plight of the people for years. In the short run it might actually make it worse, and over time it may actually come back and boomerang in ways that we will all regret. So I am not attracted to that option.

I am attracted to the call of ousting Mr. Milosevic, but that is not a goal I would assign to military forces. Military forces, the military instrument is not the only tool in the policy-maker?s kitbag. I simply don't know how to use military force to get rid of him, or any other leader, short of a lucky shot, and you can never count on that, or the complete occupation of a country, the sort of thing we did in Panama to get rid of Mr. Noriega. But, as you saw in Panama, that required that that United States military essentially blanket that country. Well, that is what we would have to do to assure that we could use the military instrument to get rid of Mr. Milosevic, and that is simply a price I think that would be way, way beyond what we should be even thinking of committing.

So again, I would like to get rid of Mr. Milosevic, I would like to see a very different government in Belgrade, but I do not think that is a role to assign to the military. But, let me suggest four other things we might want to approach that with. The first is sanctions, we ought to think about maintaining an even deepening sanctions where possible. Secondly, covert action, that we ought to look to what possibilities there are to stimulating opposition to him. Thirdly, I would condition any Western economic aid for the rebuilding of Serbia when all this is over to a democratic government.

Let's hold out a major economic incentive, and basically tell people, dump Milosevic, dump this sort of government, put something much better in its place, and then you can expect billions of dollars in credits and aid, but not a penny until then. We ought to make it very clear that so long as Mr. Milosevic is maintained in power, life will be miserable and the people of Yugoslavia will pay an enormous price for maintaining him. And also again, as I suggested before, we ought to keep open the option of independence for Kosovo. And we ought to make it very clear that our interest in that option, and our inclination to support it goes up the longer that Mr. Milosevic stays in power, and we ought to--and I think there's also the flip side of that.

Clearly, if Yugoslavia becomes a democratic place, that becomes the sort of Yugoslavia where Kosovo's separatism becomes a much less urgent subject, because suddenly then Yugoslavia becomes the sort of country that most of the people of Kosovo would perhaps not mind being a part of. So political change is crucial down the road if there ever is to be a solution, and one hates to use the word solution when one talks about the Balkans. But, if there ever is to be a solution it will require fundamental political change in Belgrade, but again, it is not a role I would assign to the military instrument, and it is not something I would count on any time soon. It will not offer anything like a solution to the immediate crisis that we face.

Let me just say in conclusion, let me essentially return to where I began, and just try to give you the logic train of where I now come out on this. The current NATO-Clinton administration strategy, if I had to sum it up in a couple of words, is ambitious ends and modest means. And I think after three weeks, as we now begin the fourth week, that's not working. A policy of ambitious goals and modest or limited means is simply not working and, indeed, things are measurably worse today than they were three-plus weeks ago. I think that that critique is actually pervasive in this town and elsewhere. Most of the editorial pages, most of the TV shows, are filled with people who are essentially, correctly in my view, highlighting the disconnect between what is it we aim to do, and what we're prepared to do toward those aims.

You then have two sets of alternative strategies or approaches being offered. And I think both of these are flawed as well, for very different reasons. But, let me quickly describe what I see as the alternatives to the ambitious goals, modest means policy of NATO and the Clinton administration. One, and you're seeing this from both isolationists as well as realists, there was a very articulate presentation of it yesterday in the Washington Post by Pat Buchanan essentially saying this isn't worth it. They're saying, let's dramatically scale down our goals, let's not intervene directly in the conflict, let's do what we can externally. It's what you might call the Rwanda solution, essentially try to deal with the human hardship that followed from it, but don't try to intervene directly in it.

And the problem with this, it seems to me, is it does ignore the humanitarian hardship that's going on, which ought to be a proper goal of American foreign policy to do something about, and ignores the strategic costs of walking away. Certainly the strategic costs that have grown up in part over what we've done over the last three weeks. So those who would essentially say we virtually have no interest here, there's no rationale for being involved, I think they're underestimating the humanitarian and strategic costs of walking away. But, at least they would put policy into line. What they would basically do is dramatically reduce our goals, so very limited efforts would at least be consistent. So you have the virtue of consistency, even if I question their correctness.

The other critique is just the opposite. And one is seeing this across the political spectrum. One of the interesting things about this crisis is Democrat, Republican, what have you, these lines are meaningless. And what you're basically seeing is people saying our goals are right, or if anything should even be more ambitious, it should be the complete liberation of Kosovo, the overthrow of Milosevic, and so forth, and we ought to increase our means. What it takes we need to "win this". Now that we're in it, we need to win it. That is the argument one is seeing, again, parts of Capitol Hill, and from various pockets along the American political spectrum left and right, it doesn't matter.

And here my problem with that is that it's not clear to me that our interests warrant unlimited commitment of resources, because it could be, as Michael O'Hanlon pointed out, an enormous commitment of resources, measured by blood and measured by treasure. And it would also have strategic consequences around the world if we were so committed here, whether it was consequences for our Russia relationship, or the draw down it would cause for U.S. military capabilities and so forth. I just don't think this warrants it.

So let me suggest a slightly different short hand, which I would call ambitious means but limited ends. In a sense, take some of the critiques that are offered up by the various alternatives but reverse the approach of NATO and the Clinton administration. Essentially do a lot more militarily, increase the air power, introduce a ground element, but do it for limited ends. Don't try to overthrow Milosevic using military force, don't go to war against Serbia, don't even necessarily try to liberate all of Kosovo. But, take a large enough slice of Kosovo that you actually can make it possible for these people to return.

And what it seems to me this does is this alleviates the humanitarian nightmare, but this does show at a scale of effort that is commensurate with the fact that our interests in this crisis, whatever they are, are still less than vital. It preserves what's left of our relationship with Russia, and it does not devote a percentage of American military assets, such a high percentage that we endanger ourselves elsewhere around the world, and introduces a degree of proportionality, into what it is we're trying to do here. So what it tries to do is reconnect ends and means, or force and diplomacy. So right now if the diplomacy--the goals are here, and the means are here, what I'm suggesting is like this, to raise up what it is we are prepared to do, but to become slightly more modest in what we set out to do.

Thank you very much.

I. Daalder: Good morning. I'm tempted to comment on some of the specifics of what you've just heard, because I don't agree with all of it. I'll leave it for the question and answer session, and I will also try to be brief, so you in fact have the opportunity to enable us to answer your questions.

What I wanted to talk about is the fact that in 10 days time this town will be overrun by more heads of state in government than this town has ever seen in its history, for the ostensible purpose of celebrating the 50th anniversary of the Atlantic alliance. This was indeed to be a celebration of NATO's past and present achievements, including the fact that it had won the Cold War without firing a shot, that it had enlarged its membership to include three former Warsaw Pact countries, and that it brought and was maintaining peace in at least one small part of the Balkans called Bosnia over the last four years.

The summit was also to be an opportunity to lay out what NATO and Europe were going to be doing in the future. It would adopt a new strategic concept, to guide NATO operations. It would set the stage for continuing the enlargement process, by agreeing to a membership action plan. There would be an agreement to rebalance the responsibilities between the North American and the European members of the alliance, in a way that would enhance Europe's capacity to both decide and act militarily, without necessarily having U.S. participation in those operations. And finally, it was a summit dedicated to the improvement of defense capabilities that are most appropriate for the new task that NATO faces in the new century.

Unfortunately, three weeks ago NATO started a war, and that places the summit in a completely different light. Both by underscoring the importance of the transformation that NATO is now engaged in, and also by making clear that what NATO does in practice is far more important than what it is debating that it should do in theory. Kosovo in my view--in my mind is a defining moment for NATO. If the alliance succeeds in accomplishing its goals that they have set themselves, including removing Serb forces from Kosovo, securing the return and safety of the refugees, guaranteeing self government for Kosovar Albanians, and establishing an international security presence to protect all of Kosovo's inhabitants, if it succeeds in accomplishing these goals, they will have solidified NATO's reputation as the preeminent, in fact, the only security organization in Europe. So the summit--so what happens in Kosovo is, indeed, vitally important to what happens to NATO.

How has NATO fared? I won't repeat what my colleagues have demonstrated abundantly. Clearly, on the main issue, so far NATO has failed to achieve even its minimal objective, which I take the launching of air strikes in order to protect the Kosovar Albanians, and thereby to prevent a humanitarian nightmare. A half a million refugees living in squalor, another 700,000 Kosovars running for their lives inside Kosovo, countless murders, summary executions, rapes, and a variety of other atrocities that we are only beginning to hear about now do not add up to success. They add up to a miserable failure. As Mike, I think, has made abundantly clear, the air war is not going to be making an impact on what happens inside Kosovo. And barring a miracle, only the introduction of ground forces will start to reverse the process that has been taking place in the last three weeks. Only ground forces can guarantee NATO victory, and the willingness to remove--the willingness to remove Milosevic's forces forcefully cannot be accomplished with anything less than a ground invasion.

Continued failure on NATO's part, I would argue, would have very dire consequences. After all, if NATO cannot deal with a tin pot dictator in the middle of Europe, what good is NATO for, certainly not to defend against such global threats as weapons of mass destruction proliferation, as international terrorism, as interruptions of energy supplies, or to conduct major regional wars, all functions that people inside and outside the Clinton administration believe that NATO should undertake in the future. It is even doubtful that if NATO fails in Kosovo it could continue to fill its minimalist purpose of providing a credible hedge against a possibly resurgent Russia.

Therefore, NATO cannot afford to lose in Kosovo. It must, in fact, devise a way to win. Its involvement in the air war over the past three weeks suggests that there are at least some reasons to hope that the alliance still has the mettle to pull this off in the weeks and months ahead. For despite the fact that NATO is losing its first major military engagement, its first war in 50 years, it's noteworthy that the allies have demonstrated a remarkable degree of unity.

Who would have thought that an alliance led by left wing governments in Europe, and here, and led by a man Javier Solana, who campaigned openly against NATO membership, Spain's membership in NATO, that that alliance would be engaged in a major military confrontation, a war, and still remain united in the process of doing it. Who would have guessed that the number one cheerleader of NATO's action is a man, the German foreign minister, Joschka Fischer, who built his career, and in fact his preempt came to power, as one of the leaders of the Green Party, by opposing NATO and the deployment of cruise and Pershing missiles in 1992? Indeed, one of the notable aspects of what has happened and transpired in the last three weeks is the emergence of Germany as what one would call a normal power, standing tall next to its allies, willing to use force, no longer afraid that its people or its neighbors believe that the use of force would be regarded as a threat to their security.

What unites, I believe, these leaders in their common purposes, is the disgust of what is happening inside Kosovo. This is an alliance that is using military force in order to protect the values that unite them. And that will continue so long as we see the humanitarian nightmare that we are confronting today. And despite some disquiet in some corners, notably in Athens and in Rome, about how the war has been conducted today, including some second guessing about which targets can and cannot be hit, the 19 allies have allowed the military leaders, in the main, to conduct the war in the best way that they see fit.

For all the fears that we heard in this town and elsewhere, that the addition of new members would dilute NATO's decision making, or that fighting by war of--fighting a war by committee would make NATO ineffective, Brussels has hardly interfered with this operation. Where there have been delays, as indeed in the Apache decision, where there has been hesitation, as in the consideration of introducing ground troops, the problem has been here in Washington, not in Brussels. It is, therefore, remarkable that NATO remains united, when it has absent--when absent is the leader that has long led the alliance, for it is Washington's absence in leadership that at this point in time is causing the problems that we are seeing.

And, in fact, this suggests that NATO's future success in Kosovo, and thus its future success as a major military alliance, depends less on the decisions that are made in Brussels, and much more on the decisions that are going to be made here in Washington, not at the summit, but in the White House. If the Clinton administration were to do what its predecessors have always done, that is to lead NATO, the NATO allies will be eager to follow, I am convinced, and the NATO summit next week provides the perfect opportunity for Europe's leaders, for Tony Blair, for Jacques Chirac, and for Gerhardt Schroeder, to remind Bill Clinton of two very salient facts. First, NATO cannot afford to lose its first war, and therefore it will have to deploy ground forces sooner rather than later. Second, a NATO decision to deploy ground forces will be forthcoming immediately upon the president's decision to lead that effort. The NATO summit will be a success, I believe, if the U.S. and its allies agree to do what is necessary to win the war in Kosovo. Anything less, I'm afraid, will guarantee failure, not just in Kosovo, but also in NATO.

R. Nessen: At this point we turn it over to you. We have people who will come to you with a microphone. I would simply ask that you identify yourself, and you keep your questions short, and please make it a question, or at least a comment that ends with your voice going up at the end of it.

Sir?

Participant: I am Nicolai Zimin from Russian newspaper Segodnya. And my question is to you, Mr. Haass. American correspondents in Moscow report about very interesting phenomenon. During three weeks the Clinton administration was able to do what the Soviet propaganda machine would not do in 70 years. Anti-American feels among Russians are at the highest level. You know, it's related with the events in Kosovo. Please, could you comment on this situation.

Thank you.

R. Haass: Well, sir, you point to something that's all too real. And clearly one of the costs or casualties of the past three weeks has been a further marked deterioration in Russia's relationship with the United States. I would simply, though, point out a few things. One is, it didn't begin with this. This relationship has been deteriorating for some time now. This has reinforced the trend, rather than create it. I think there are things that we need to do and we, for example, should be willing to entertain a Russian mediation role, so long as it operates within parameters that would be acceptable to NATO. And similarly, we should welcome a Russian participation in an international force, again so long as Russia is willing to accept the same ground rules as others, just as Russia has been involved on the ground in Bosnia.

But, I also think it's important that Russia see things differently as well. And it's important to see this as not simply an American undertaking. And something that my colleague Ivo Daalder just said is worth pointing out, the United States has not been the driver in many ways of what NATO has done. This is as much a European reaction as it is an American reaction. So Russian anti-Americanism to some extent is misplaced here. This is a truly a Western reaction. And that suggests something larger here. The images of Kosovo have had tremendous resonance in the West.

The fact that the Clinton administration is now contemplating the idea of maybe, just maybe, using ground forces is because American public opinion polls are suggesting that the American people support that idea. The government in this case--the American government is not leading the charge, in some ways its reflecting or following shifts in public opinion. What this says is that this really is a largely humanitarian undertaking. What is driving this is not anti-Serbness per se, it's not geopolitics per se, it is a very strong human reaction that what is going on is wrong.

So Russian authorities and the Russian media are simply misreading the Western reaction, either if they see it as largely American, or if they see it as somehow a function of geopolitics, to get at Slavs, or Serbs, or Russians. This is being driven by Western societies, and its being driven by humanitarian concerns. And given that that's the case, the fact that this is stimulating such an anti-Western reaction in Russia is extremely unfortunate. And it suggests to me that much of the fault therefore lies with Russian politicians, who are essentially increasingly competing with themselves as to who can be more anti-American or more anti-Western than thou, as we approach your parliamentary and presidential elections.

So, yes, we can look for some opportunities to include Russia. But, there's very little we can do to affect the Russian debate unless some Russian politicians act responsibly.

I. Daalder: Let me add just one point on this because one of the remarkable things here is that those people who stood together with the Soviet Union in the big debates in the 1980s and 1970s in Europe, whether it's in Britain and the Labor Party, and the campaign for nuclear disarmament, whether its in Germany, the Social Democrats in the Green Party, whether its in Italy where the government is now led by the former Communist Party, whether it is in France where a goalless president is running the country, in all of these instances the kind of policies that the United States and NATO were pursuing in the late '70s and early '80s were being opposed. These very people are now the leaders in the effort to oppose this, which suggests that what unites them is a sense of the affront of their values. The fact that it is truly a humanitarian crisis, and deeply troubling, in fact.

This is a defining moment for Russia. It apparently means that Russia does not share these values. That Russians do not care about the fact that 500,000 people can be made refugees in three months and 700,000 can be internally displaced, half the population, and this from a country that has suffered more than any other country in this century, from war and those kinds of things. That is deeply, deeply troubling and in fact it places the relationship between the United States, and the West, and Russia in a qualitatively different footing.

R. Haass: Clearly if provoked.

Yes, ma'am, in the back.

Participant: Jennifer Hewitt from the Sidney Morning Herald. Some people suggest that Russian involvement in this is not only desirable, but absolutely vital, that there will not be a solution without Russian involvement, and also that the costs of this to the Russian-American relationship are going to create even greater problems in the long run than what's happening in Kosovo. Do you think that there's any prospects of a deal, a real diplomatic effort being successful between Russia and American, which would restore Russia's kind of sense of involvement and credibility which it seems to want so much, even at the expense of perhaps downplaying NATO's role in the military force. Do you think that there's a likelihood that there would be really a very strong participation and sense of leadership by Russia in any imposed solution?

R. Haass: Again, the idea the Russia might be positioned well to be something of a midwife to a successful diplomatic outcome here is possible. Clearly, it's one of the very few parties that has access in Belgrade right now, as well as in Brussels and Washington. That gives it the potential, the question is how it decides to use that position. Up to now, at least, I haven't seen a lot shown for it. Say, during the Gulf War, when Russia, or at that point the Soviet Union, was one of the few countries still talking directly to Baghdad, as well as the United Nations and the United States, there it wasn't able to play a terribly useful role. But, as I said in my remarks, in principle I would welcome it. I see nothing to be gained from Russia's alienation or exclusion, per se. So I would welcome Russia --

[End of side one.]

R. Haass: [In progress]--that what Russia tries to sell in Belgrade is also sellable in Brussels. What you want to avoid is a situation where Mr. Ivanov or Mr. Primakov or anyone goes and totally associates Russia with a position that is acceptable in Belgrade, but is not acceptable in Brussels. That, to me, would simply deepen the chasm between the West on hand and Russia on the other. Clearly, that would be in no one's interest. So, if Russia is going to be a helpful intermediary, it's important that it not simply represent Belgrade's views to the West. It also needs to represent NATO's views to Belgrade equally.

And, similarly, I would be open to the idea of Russian participation in some sort of an international force. Again, I think it could be useful on the ground, it certainly would be useful in healing some of the scars, that's not a mixed metaphor, of the last few weeks. But, again, that presupposes we all agree on the ground rules for the force, on the rules of engagement and so forth.

So, yes, Russia can potentially play an important role. It would potentially have real dividends, both in Kosovo and beyond, but all of that presupposes the emerges of greater consensus than I've seen to date between NATO's position and Russia's.

Participant: Goldstein with the Philadelphia Inquirer.

For Mr. Daalder, with regard to the summit upcoming, do you expect what's happening in Kosovo to cause the NATO nations to reassess their new strategic concept and possibly alter it or recalibrate it?

And, secondly, given that the situation is fluid, what specifically do you expect the NATO nations to say or do about Kosovo at the summit?

I. Daalder: I do not expect them to change the strategic concept which, except for the issue for the mandate, has been agreed as far as I understand. The mandate being whether NATO can act in situations like Kosovo without a U.N. Security Council resolution. In practice, we have seen that it can. In theory, the French want to maintain the option that in practice it shouldn't, which is a good Cartesian French position, but bears no relation to what's happening on the ground. So that will be fudged in one way other another.

And the strategic concept that has been agreed has two components. One, it is sufficiently vague that anything that we do, won't do, in terms of Kosovo, will somehow fit into that document. And the other, what we are doing in Kosovo, and whether that's an air war or a ground war or a protectorate at the end of it, is all consistent with the notion that one of the fundamental tasks of NATO now is not just collective defense, but crisis, being able to respond to crises and support peace operations, which is already in the strategic concepts. I don't expect a lot to happen.

I do believe that what happens in Kosovo will determine whether this document has any meaning. That is, if we don't, in fact, respond successfully to this crisis, then who cares what NATO's mission is if we don't do what we say we're supposed to do. And what I expect to come out of the summit is unfortunately a reiteration of our goals, but very little in terms of our ability to adjust our means to achieve those goals in the way that Richard outlined

I would hope that, as I said in my remarks, that Mr. Blair and Mr. Chirac and Mr. Schroeder might take Mr. Clinton by his lapels and point out that, unlike Mr. Clinton, they do face an election and they can't afford losing this war.

Participant: Two questions. One, in terms of partitioning and having an enclave in Kosovo, have you not at that point conceded diplomatically that ethnic cleansing works, because the larger goal, the inflated goal was, indeed, a protectorate for the return of the refugees to all of Kosovo.

And, secondly, in terms of the fighting on the international force, originally it was to be a NATO force to secure the return of the Kosovars. Now, talking of an international force, possibly including Russia, is that not in a way also a concession?

R. Haass: You might have some disagreement here on the panel, so let me begin, and then I'll give my colleagues a chance to disagree with me if they so choose. But I would agree on both of them that they are concessions. And what I think the United States and NATO has to ask themselves at this point is what price they are willing to pay for what outcomes.

So, yes, to talk about an enclave that, say, two-thirds of Kosovo as opposed to all of it, would clearly allow Mr. Milosevic to walk away with some benefits, and some accomplishments for all the awful things he's done. And what you have to ask yourself is, is the price of denying him that worth paying?

And what I think I am at least suggesting is that it may not be. That given that the interests here, however important, are still less than vital given our responsibilities elsewhere around the world. That at some point you have to be willing to take two-thirds of a loaf rather than all of it. So, I would at least be very open to the idea of exploring the enclave option, particularly if I concluded that I could gain an enclave that would allow most of the people to return safely to Kosovo at very little military cost in terms of casualties to the West.

If that was, as opposed to a situation where, in order to gain all of Kosovo it would become an enormously expensive military operation. And you have to ask yourself, again, is it worth paying that extra price for that extra degree of benefit? And I am suggesting perhaps not.

But, you're right, it would represent something of a concession, which again is why I would emphasize the use of other tools to oust Mr. Milosevic. So, if we concede something to him in the battle, I don't want to concede anything to him in the larger war. And I would use other foreign policy tools to ultimately try to weaken his place in Belgrade.

Similarly, on the international force, if the price of getting these people back in quickly, and the price of protecting the people still there was to have an international force with NATO contributions rather than a NATO force, is that a price worth paying? Well, maybe. And I would perhaps say yes. Yes, it is something of a concession, but you've got to ask yourself again, is it worth holding out given the humanitarian price that would be paid.

But these are the sorts of decisions I think that we are getting close to. And wherever people up here come out on that, I think it's our collective view that we need to start thinking very hard, and I would say actually go ahead with the ground option, that's the only way I know these issues are going to come to the fore. And the sooner that happens, the better, but this is what we need to be thinking hard about.

Let me give my colleagues a chance to disagree with me on both of these positions.

I. Daalder: Let me sort of make the point that if we're not willing to put in ground forces, it doesn't matter what we say about this issue. We are all agreed that putting in ground forces, and being willing forcefully to retake part or all of Kosovo is a minimum requirement that we all agree on.

Then the issue is, when do we make the concessions. Should we do that up-front, or do we do it as part of a final endgame? I am not prepared to say that we should now deploy 75 or 150 thousand ground troops. And, by the way, our aims are extraordinarily limited at the outset. I think we've given Mr. Milosevic enough. We've told him for three weeks, we've bombed him with weakness rather than with strength. We've told him for three weeks that we weren't willing to put in ground troops. And he's gotten away with murder. He can no longer get away with murder. And our minimal objectives needs must be to protect the Kosovar Albanians inside Kosovo.

Now, I don't particularly think that the borders are Kosovo are sacrosanct. What is important is that the Kosovo that is being protected by an international presence, military presence, is a defensible proposition. That may mean that it is slightly less than the current Kosovo. It also may mean that it's slightly more than the current Kosovo. I don't know. I don't know the terrain, I haven't done the military analysis. But at some point the issue of how you protect the people is a military question, and the boundaries are no longer political or military. And the goal remains the same. So, that's our number one.

And the international security force, I don't particularly believe that this needs to be a NATO force, in theory. That is, in name, but it will be in practice, and it has to be in practice, because it has two fundamental characteristics if it is going to be effective. One, unity of command. You need unity of command. There's only one organization that provides for unity of command unless the United States will do it virtually all by itself, as we did in the Gulf War, which I don't think we're prepared to do nor need to do.

Secondly, as for the Russian participation, we're all talking as if this is such a big, new thing. Russia was ready and willing to participate in the NATO-led KFOR that was supposed to be deployed as part of the Rambouillet agreement. Russians have participated in Bosnia for the last four years in a NATO-led force. And whatever Russia can contribute, it's going to be not sufficient to do the job. They don't have the troops, they don't have the manpower. They don't have the money to deploy more than maybe 1,000, maybe 2,000 troops. So, this notion that somehow you should have an international force and allow the Russians to have a major part in it has no relation to reality, which is that if you want to do this right, you have to have single unity of command, which means that it's a NATO force in practice. And the Russians will participate within that capability as they have in Bosnia, or they won't.

Participant: Chris Anstee (sp) with TV Asahi.

I think all of you seem to support the idea that unless Milosevic backs down, one way or the other, either to the air campaign or to preparatory building up of the ground troop option, you all seem to support putting in ground troops to establish a safe haven for most if not all of Kosovo. I'm just wondering if you could go through again, how long would it take, first, to prepare for that kind of operation, how long would it take to achieve that, and do you think the NATO allies would go along with that?

M. O'Hanlon: Well, I believe weeks is the way to think about the first deployment. You may be able to get 30,000 to 50,000 people in place within two to three weeks. And you may be able to start putting people into Kosovo within a couple of weeks. I've had good discussions with our military colleagues here and other folks, and this is a matter of debate, but the bottom line is that you can move probably a brigade of light force within a week from the United States, and a brigade is maybe 4,000 people.

You have 12,000 NATO troops already in Macedonia, and then you've got the ability to possibly move people down by rail from Germany. Then you've got to figure out how to drive across some country's territory into Kosovo. And then you can keep doing the airlift from the United States. And then you can have your Marine forces, about 4,000 of which are now in the Mediterranean or Adriatic, land and drive into Kosovo themselves. And then you've got, of course, the entire U.S. force structure back home that you can put on ships, but that gets you into one to two months.

So, I think to get started, seriously, regardless of which option you're headed towards in the end, you can get people on the ground within Kosovo within a couple of weeks, probably not much sooner than that. It's going to take you probably three to four weeks to get a pretty robust force, and more than a month to get one of the larger forces that we've been talking about.

I. Daalder: Let me just add two things, if the administration and NATO had done what we three have been advocating from the beginning, we would be three weeks ahead of schedule. This whole notion that it is too late is becoming a self-fulfilling prophesy. Second, on the NATO issues, let me reiterate what I said before, the problem is not NATO. That is the excuse that you're hearing at the State Department, at the Pentagon and at the White House for the inability of this government to make decisions on this issue. If the United States were to decide that ground forces are necessary, there is no doubt in my mind that you will have eager allies who will follow that lead. And, in fact, all the indications are that people re waiting for Washington as opposed to the other way around.

R. Haass: If this briefing keeps going on, we'll tell you what we really think.

Participant: Marvin Leibstone, Global Security and Trade Journal.

For either of you, has NATO done enough to create adjunct roles for those nations aspiring to be in NATO, especially those close to the crisis, such as Slovenia, Romania, Croatia, and even from NATO member Greece?

I. Daalder: NATO has done something quite remarkable. It has written a letter to these government who are aspiring members, and said that their security is fundamental to NATO's security, implying that we now are extending Article V guarantees to non-NATO members before they have become NATO members. I welcome a larger role of NATO in this manner, but it would have been nice to have informed the governments involved that this was happening. And if they have, then perhaps the Congress and parliaments of the NATO countries. But I think these countries' role is to stand by and allow NATO to do its job, which is what's happening. Slovenia, and Romania, and Bulgaria have opened their air space for NATO, and you can't expect them to do anything more until there is a ground force component, particularly a protectorate component, when I expect these countries to participate with troops on the ground.

Participant: [Inaudible]-Germany. I have two questions, one is concerning the ground troops you are talking about. Let's take your second scenario, about kind of 100,000 or 120,000 troops, could you tell us where the staging area could be? I cannot imagine that Macedonia is ready to be the staging area, or Montenegro. And the second question is to Mr. Haass, and Mr. Daalder, could you please comment on the German plan of yesterday to bring back the United Nations or Russia in this business?

R. Haass: Il go first with the first question. A very hard problem here, no doubt. I think Albania would be the primary staging area. You would do some of this by essentially starting forces in Italy or Greece, and then maybe doing one refueling in Albania, if its helicopter mobile forces, or if it's Marine forces, putting them into Albania driving through. If it's NATO forces in Macedonia, as you point out, Macedonia might ask that they somehow first go to Albania, and only then deploy into Kosovo. So I think you have a hard problem, but you have options, especially with an alliance that has a lot of helicopter mobility.

But, I would add one final point. This is part of why this has to be a U.S. led operation, even though NATO countries--NATO European countries do have some helicopter mobility, and mobile logistics to operate in hostile and difficult terrain, we really are the country that has, by far, the majority of this kind of capability within the alliance. So it has to be a U.S. led operation, partly because of the logistical challenges that you underscore.

I. Daalder: On the U.N. issue, if it is clear that the kind of force that is necessary to do that job, protect the Kosovars, enjoys support from the Russians the Chinese, I have no problem with a U.N. Security Council resolution. If it's clear that either the Russians or Chinese would veto it, we should do it anyway.

R. Haass: I agree.

Sir?

Participant: Ron Lorenzo, Defense Week. Okay, we can talk about a ground force, but it doesn't seem like they're planning on one. They're going to stick with this bombing campaign until who knows when. And we start getting into the question of later this year, if they do enough damage to the Serbian infrastructure, agriculture, oil industry, are we going to wind up with the ironic problem that not only are we caring for Kosovar Albanians, but maybe feeding Serbia by the end of the year?

R. Haass: It's possible, but unlikely. But, again, as I said before, I would like to limit any serious rebuilding aid for Serbia for a time only after which a new government is in place. If it turns out there has to be some humanitarian aid, some food or medicine type supplies, I would not oppose that. As a rule of thumb, I do not believe that sanctions should include food and medicine. I think those ought to be exceptions. But, any type exception ought to be extremely narrow, if indeed it comes to that, for Yugoslavia, for Serbia, but anything that's at all discretionary in terms, again, of rebuilding, I would make conditional on political change.

We've got time for a few more questions, and I don't want to have us overstay your welcome.

Participant: Peter Fritz from Austrian Television. It was said that whoever goes into Kosovo by way of ground troops will have to deal with the country and will have to govern there. So if NATO goes in, if NATO carves out an entity, or whatever, how would this territory then be administered, and governed? Should this be NATO? Should this be some Albanian autonomy government, which might be inclined towards incorporation into Albania?

R. Haass: Well, there's lots of possibilities at this point. You just talked about the idea of having a security council mandate. It's conceivable you would have some sort of an international trusteeship. That might not be a political correct term in 1999, but it could be under some sort of temporary international custodianship, in which you leave questions of sovereignty aside, they're not addressed directly, but day to day rule is done by the international community, or forces that are empowered by the international community, and they would then work with local forces. So over time there might be a gradual transfer of power to Kosovar authorities. So I think you would have the gradual introduction of autonomy, under what would essentially be, though, the protection of the international community, and to me the question is whether there would be some U.N. imprimatur, or NATO imprimatur or something else secondary. But, I think we're looking at something like that.

Sir?

Participant: Two questions, but they're closely related. One, the enclave--two questions but closely related, on the idea of the enclave in Kosovo, what--if that were to happen, what do you expect would be going on in Serbia, or broader in, say, Bosnia, and how might that affect the long-term prospects for an enclave. And second, on the military side, did you look at the option of going in across through the north, across Vojvodina?

M. O'Hanlon: I'll start with that one. I think that option is useful to hold in check. I don't prefer the all out invasion of Serbia as my primary option. But, I would consider putting force up north, if NATO countries such as Hungary, or countries like Slovenia was willing to accept them, as a deterrent to Milosevic saying, basically, if you start slaughtering ethnic Albanians, or using them as human shields and putting them in the way of our aircraft and that sort of thing, and this turns into a far worse humanitarian tragedy than it already is, we will perhaps considering expanding our war aims, and we have these forces poised up north, by the way, that are in a position to do so. But, that would be the way I would use the northern entry points initially, as a deterrent, not as an actual staging base.

I. Daalder: Let me broaden the answer to your question, and basically say, once we deal with the immediate humanitarian crisis that we're facing, which requires some kind of presence in Kosovo in order to allow refugees to return, whether it's a partition, or an enclave, whatever, we're not going to solve this problem by just focusing on Kosovo and Serbia. It's time that the United States and NATO and the West started adopting a policy towards the Balkans, or at the very least the former Yugoslav space and look at this in an integrated way.

Lou, as you well know, one of the reasons why we're as late as we are in Kosovo in acting is because we were afraid of what it would do to our policy in Bosnia. And that, in my mind, raises questions about our policy in Bosnia rather than our policy towards Kosovo. And it is this notion that you can solve this fundamental problem, which is truly region wide, by looking at it in a piecemeal fashion that needs to be changed. And you know, I wish Dick Holbrooke a lot of luck.

R. Haass: We've got time for one more question, then we're going to wrap it up. In the back? Let me just apologize for those we haven't gotten to, but I don't want to ask too much of you all.

Participant: Mike Hirsch with Newsweek. Is it--even accepting your argument that the ground force option would have been very useful at the outset, is it not almost too late for it now? I mean, the Serbs are mining the borders. They're getting dug in, and this is, after all, a country that held off Hitler. And I mean, is it too late in the sense that the kind of losses that NATO troops, including U.S. troops might have to accept now, for an invasion of just Kosovo might be politically unacceptable.

R. Haass: That's a fair question. Let me say two things, and then turn to my colleagues who may want to use this as an occasion to say anything else. It's likely the costs would be greater now than they would have been earlier. And at the risk of turning something into a mantra, the idea of force as a last resort is almost always a terrible idea. Gradual escalation is almost always a terrible idea. The idea that you can fight wars with air power alone is almost always an unrealistic idea. So we're paying a price for what I think was essentially a politically derived decision not to introduce ground forces at the outset. We've lost the chance to prevent many things from happening. So we're essentially now dealing with the consequences. And second of all, as you suggest, it might be more expensive.

Secondly, though, it's one of the reasons that I am increasingly attracted to the enclave idea, is that it's possible by scaling back our aims, we can scale back the costs. And it's not a proven point, and it's something that we might have to see how that play out. But, it is one of the arguments that if you don't try to liberate all of Kosovo, much less Serbia itself, you do not, I think, stimulate or trigger quite the response that you would otherwise. And I think that that is one of the reasons for scaling back some of the goals of a ground operation. But, I think your basic point is right. Every day we wait makes it more difficult, with one exception, perhaps, and you'd have to ask yourself, it's almost two time lines. As every day goes on, what is the positive effect from our point of view of the air campaign, as opposed to the negative effect of their digging in. And you had better be persuaded that the time lines work in our favor, if you are in favor of waiting. Though, you have to also factor in, and I think it's the decisive one, the impact on the people of Kosovo.

And the principal reason for not waiting, I would suggest, is not simply that the Serbs might be digging in, which raises the cost of a ground operation, but it's the plight of the internally displaced. And at some point I want to make sure there's Kosovars left to save. And I worry about a protracted conflict, or a war of attrition, because this is not a battlefield devoid of noncombatants. This is a place where people lived, and continue to live. So a war of attrition does nothing to protect the people whose lives and welfare are at stake. And an air war of attrition, which is essentially what NATO's strategy has become, seems to me the assumption there is time is not a factor. And I just don't think that assumption is accurate.

M. O'Hanlon: I agree wholeheartedly with everything Richard just said. I want to add two narrow military points, and that's it, to your question. Just to reiterate, we do have a lot of helicopter mobility, helicopters are vulnerable to air defense weapons, but they don't know where we're going to come in. Which means you have to expect that you might get a few lucky shots from the Serbs against your helicopters. But, if you can do a good job of intelligence you can minimize that. You may lose a few helicopters on the way in. In fact, you probably will. But, there's no reason to think that your only option is to drive over these minefields.

Secondly, in Kuwait we showed we're pretty good at penetrating minefields. In fact, the Marines are the ones who did that in Kuwait. They didn't even have the best equipment in the U.S. armed forces, and they're the ones who penetrated the minefields. So we can deter ourselves too much. We have an extremely good military. Serbia has a conscript military. I'm not convinced they're going to fight that hard, especially if we give the incentives for them not to fight hard that Richard mentioned. In the end we don't know. But, let's not deter ourselves into underestimating our own abilities here, either.

R. Haass: Sir.

I. Daalder: Let me broaden it on the political side. This administration likes to say, this is its mantra, that there are no good options in the Balkans. And I agree with that. I would only add, the longer you wait, the worse the options get. And this has been the consistent problem with our policy. And every day we're waiting becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy for not doing what we need to do. We're talking ourselves into being self-deterred, because we were not planning, although we have some stuff that we can dust off, off the shelf, or it's on the table, or off the table, I don't know what the metaphor is today that we're hearing from the White House. But, clearly, we have a problem, which is we have a strategic bombing campaign that is designed with only one purpose in mind, to change Mr. Milosevic's mind. That's what General Clark said yesterday. The goal of our effort here is to change Mr. Milosevic's mind, after three and a half weeks it's pretty clear that bombing ain't going to do it. In fact, quite to the contrary, the more you bomb, the more support this guy gets.

A wonderful quote today in the Post or the Times about this taxi driver, he said, you know, you've destroyed our country, now all we have left to support is to support Mr. Milosevic, there's nothing more you can destroy. So this notion that we just continue on on the same path of failure, in the hope that somehow Mr. Milosevic will wake up one day and say, oh my God, I made a major mistake, I'm going to withdraw my troops, I'm going to have all the Kosovars come back. Please, let NATO come in. This is--enough said.

R. Haass: On that note, I want to thank you again for spending you morning at the Brookings Institution, and I hope we don't have the need to do another one of these briefings, but if this crisis continues, I expect you'll be hearing from us again in a week or two.

Thank you very much.

[END OF EVENT.]