NATO airstrikes might end Sarajevo's siege but they can't spike the hatred in Bosnia
by Tim Zimmermann, Kenneth T. Walsh, Bruce B. Auster, Robin Knight, Fred Colema, Samantha Power
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Bill Clinton was in the White House preparing for a political-strategy meeting when the call came in from the Situation Room in the basement. A single mortar round had landed in the center of a crowded Sarajevo market. This one had killed 68 people and wounded almost 200. Clinton turned on his television and saw the shattered innocents being dragged off through pools of their own blood. "My God," he told aides, "you can't just turn your back on this."
After having done just that since Secretary of State Warren Christopher unveiled the administration's cautious policy almost exactly a year ago, Clinton was finally ready to face up to the problem of Bosnia. His fidgety political advisers warned that political support for military action in the Balkans is a mile wide and an inch deep and worried that a foreign misadventure would reverse the president's gradually improving popularity ratings. But stymied by dictators from Pyongyang to Port-au-Prince, Clinton last week moved with unusual speed to rally an uneasy North Atlantic Treaty Organization alliance behind a French proposal to threaten airstrikes against the Serbs besieging Sarajevo and to inject American diplomacy into the stalled peace negotiations in Geneva.
Clinton's sudden burst of foreign-policy zeal won him applause from pundits and politicians and even created a momentary impression that NATO finally had shrugged off its post-cold-war lethargy and regained its sense of purpose. But while allied airstrikes might break the Serbs' siege of Sarajevo, they will do nothing to help the Bosnians in other embattled enclaves, they will not end the fighting between Muslims and Croats, they could encourage the Muslims to dig their heels in even deeper at the peace talks and they risk provoking Serbian attacks on United Nations peacekeepers and relief workers. "Bosnia could be one of those struggles that becomes larger and more overwhelming than the U.S. intends in the beginning," says Michael Beschloss, a presidential scholar. "The last thing Lyndon Johnson had in mind on election night in 1964 was that he would be a foreign-policy president."
Warning signs. The early returns were mixed. President Boris Yeltsin of Russia, a traditional ally of Serbia, ducked phone calls from Clinton for two days and denied that NATO has the authority to stage airstrikes. Belligerent Bosnian Serb military officials detained relief workers. And the U.N., worried that airstrikes against Serb targets would compromise the U.N.'s tenuous neutrality and expose aid workers to retaliation after NATO's ultimatum, temporarily halted relief convoys through Serb-occupied territory.
Some U.N. peacekeepers began moving into new areas of Sarajevo, and facing a February 21 deadline, the Bosnian Serbs began surrendering to U.N. control some of their heavy weapons within the 12-mile exclusion zone NATO declared around the Bosnian capital. But a few other artillery pieces continued firing sporadically, suggesting that some Serbs may have a cat-and-mouse game in mind: Move 20 guns and fire 2, move 5 guns and fire 1. That will leave allied pilots scrambling to keep up with all the moving targets, much as they tried to hunt down Iraq's much larger Scud missiles during the gulf war, and NATO and U.N. officials scrambling to agree on how many shells the Serbs must fire in order to trigger an airstrike.
If there is anything the Pentagon hates more than this sort of uncertainty, it is the expectation that small amounts of military force, "surgically" applied, will be decisive. In a key breakfast with Secretary of State Christopher two days before the market attack, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. John Shalikashvili signed off on Christopher's desire to use air power more aggressively in Bosnia to help broker a settlement in Geneva. But Christopher's action memo did not include the French idea of an ultimatum and an exclusion zone around Sarajevo. Military officials say air power alone cannot eliminate the estimated 200 to 300 Serb mortars and artillery pieces around Sarajevo. Most are mobile, many are deployed in civilian areas, and NATO pilots are under strict orders to ensure that they do not hit civilian targets.
Moreover, while Pentagon leaders are resigned to the NATO declaration, they are dead set against any "mission creep." Even though the United States possesses the world's best counterbattery radar system, which would allow the U.N. to return fire accurately against any heavy weapons that breach the cease fire, the prohibition against American ground troops short of a peace agreement means that any deployment of such a system will once again be left to the Europeans.
Pentagon officials also are dubious that the threat of airstrikes will produce a peaceful settlement and are worried about what happens if the Serbs up the ante. "You don't know the second chapter of the book," says a senior officer. "It may feel good to bomb, but what do we do after that?"
Finding the right balance of diplomacy and military power will not be much easier than finding Serb howitzers hidden on the wooded hillsides around Sarajevo. The first problem will be for NATO to coerce the Bosnian Serbs into calling offthe war and returning captured territory to the Bosnian government without convincing the Muslims that the threat of airstrikes means the West will rescue them. "We hope the Muslims won't make the mistake of thinking that the U.S. cavalry is coming over the hill and therefore they can abandon the peace process," says one diplomat based in Geneva.
The Clinton administration, until now reluctant to pressure the Bosnians -- whom it considers victims of Serbian aggression -- has started to work directly with U.N. and European Union negotiators in Geneva to help strike the most equitable partition of Bosnia that can be salvaged. Discreet consultations have gone on in the past, but "we're going to get a little more pregnant in that regard," says a State Department official. U.S. envoy Charles Redman is working with Bosnian Prime Minister Haris Silajdzic to hammer out a Bosnian peace proposal that the United States and its allies can present to the Serbs and the Croats. "I would call this the best chance we've had in years if we handle it right," says one U.S. official who has followed events in Bosnia closely.
But the United States and its allies are still not in complete harmony on the next steps to take. The Europeans are keen to start lifting the economic sanctions imposed on Serbia in the hope that Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic will prod the Bosnian Serb leadership to compromise, but the Clinton administration remains reluctant to take that step unless the Bosnian Serbs make additional concessions in Geneva.
The long haul. Finally, it remains to be seen whether the United States and its allies are prepared to stay what will be a difficult course in Bosnia. If a partition is agreed to, the Clinton administration is committed to providing thousands of ground troops to help implement it. Preserving momentum will require a political commitment to foreign policy that Clinton, already battling for health care reform and other domestic priorities, has been reluctant to make. "For the president to do this, and do this in a sustained way, he will have to make a real effort to sell this to the people," says Stephen Hess, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. "He has to tell us our objectives, why we are doing this and how we get out of it."
The stakes extend far beyond the future of Clinton's presidency, and even the fate of Bosnia, to the future of NATO, which will be decided by whether or not the alliance can use its political and military heft to help keep order in the new Europe. "We faced the risks quite consciously," says a senior administration offi
