-Caveat Lector- >From http://www.newsunlimited.co.uk/AC/ Via http://www.zoran.net/afp/text/guardian/oh_what_a_messy_war.htm NewsUnlimited Original link: News Unlimited | Documentaries Story ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- ---- Oh what a messy war Nato's strategies are frustrated at every turn, while enemy resistance is not fading as fast as promised. Patrick Wintour charts the bumpy course of a battle with no end in sight Sunday May 2, 1999 'The mood is pretty grim at the moment. We will just have to keep pounding on,' admitted a British official this weekend, five and a half weeks into the war. Nato had emerged broadly united following the Washington summit last weekend; intelligence reports suggested morale in the Serb army was collapsing; open fissures were appearing in Milosevic's own government, and Russian diplomats might be able to lever a deal out of Belgrade. But only one week later, that optimism has deflated and now the picture looks a lot more messy for Nato, and for Russia. The admittedly febrile mood in Washington seems to have shifted dramatically with US officials now consistently briefing that the air campaign is not having the impact intended on the Serb army. Despite claims by the Foreign Secretary Robin Cook, based on intelligence reports that the Serb army is deserting in droves, the Pentagon claims morale among the military is high. General Wesley Clark, Nato Supreme Commander in Brussels and no peacenik, was forced to admit last Wednesday that he thinks the Serbs have reinforced their numbers inside Kosovo. General Klaus Naumann, the second most senior Nato general, has also been sounding less confident. He said publicly last Monday that the exclusive use of air power had never achieved victory in the history of military campaigns. Estimates handed out by Pentagon officials last week confirmed this analysis. They suggested the Yugoslav army still has 80 percent of its tanks; 75 per cent of its most sophisticated surface-to-air missiles; and 60 per cent of its MiG fighter planes. And although Nato warplanes have blown up the main rail links into Kosovo, five of the province's eight major roads remain at least partially passable. Yugoslav troops in Kosovo still have nearly half of their resupply capacity, the Pentagon estimated last week, and have been able to maintain - or perhaps even expand - the force of 40,000 they had when the bombing began on 24 March. At the Italian air bases - launch pads for the sorties of Operation Allied Force - there is frustration among the pilots because the weather and the rules of engagement mean that individual Serb army units in the field in Kosovo are 'close to impossible' to hit. So Nato is scrabbling around to rethink its operations. Its options include the use of new precision weapons, 'area bombing' missions and a reduction of the altitude ceiling for aircraft from 15,000 ft, possibly to as low as 10,000 ft. New weapons and bolder tactics may help. But the daily claims of the Chief of the British Defence Staff, Sir Charles Guthrie, that the strikes are clearly damaging the military, are beginning to sound like a stuck gramophone record. It is not surprising that the word 'stalemate' is on the lips of many military analysts. Even Clinton himself spoke last week of the air campaign stretching into July while humanitarian experts are already quietly planning for the prospect that tens of thousands of refugees might still be in the camps come the return of the severe Balkan winter. The polls, obsessively monitored inside the White House, also show a shift away from Clinton. He is getting no pick-up for his role as Commander-in-Chief. Since the air war began, his approval ratings have fallen by five to 10 percentage points in most polls. Clinton is also struggling to maintain control of Congress as the isolationist wing of the Republican Party gains ground and the Democrats struggle to defend an incoherent strategy. The Wall Street Journal, in an editorial last week, called for Clinton to sack his entire National Security team including Secretary of State Madeleine Albright and Defence Secretary William Cohen. And there are also deeper cracks in the alliance. Big anti-war rallies in Germany yesterday, starring former German Finance Minister Oskar Lafontaine, have put pressure on the Greens' interventionist Foreign Minister Joscka Fischer. And the Rev Jesse Jackson had to brave White House disapproval to meet Milosevic yesterday and plead for the release of the three captured US soldiers. They were later freed, according to unconfirmed reports last night. It was the only positive step of the week. Milosevic on Friday produced his own seven-point peace plan prior to six hours of talks with the Russian envoy Viktor Chernomyrdin in Belgrade. His formula was dismissed outright by Nato. Making the best of the gloom, a Foreign Office official said yesterday: 'At least he was so clear it simplifies things. He is not even trying to play games with us.' Yet at the start of last week, both the British and the Americans saw diplomacy, and Russia, as the new exit strategy. Last Sunday Clinton spent more than an hour on the phone to Boris Yeltsin, massaging his ego and promising Nato valued Russia's constructive role. He told Yeltsin that he wanted Strobe Talbott, the US Deputy Secretary of State and a Russian expert, to come to Moscow to talk. The ground would be prepared for a second diplomatic mission to Belgrade by Chernomyrdin which duly took place on Friday. And Talbott was not the only diplomat in Moscow. At one point last week, the Russians played host to Nelson Mandela, UN Secretary General Kofi Annan, the Greek Foreign Secretary Georges Pandreou, and Canadian Foreign Secretary Lloyd Axworthy. Earlier in the week Rudolf Scharping, the German Defence Secretary, had flown in. 'The only guy missing is Jimmy Carter,' said one jaundiced British official. The West's decision to welcome Russia's diplomatic involvement was not without risk. By putting Moscow at the fulcrum of diplomacy, there is a danger Russia will come to be seen as the arbiters of what constitutes a fair settlement. Moreover, bankrupted by financial collapse last August, gripped by post-imperial trauma and stripped of international prestige, Russia may prove a messy mediator. Chernomyrdin sometimes sends out one signal and Prime Minister Yevgeny Primakov another. Moscow has also shown an excessive optimism in the past about what it can extract from Belgrade. On his last visit to Belgrade on 22 April, Chernomyrdin claimed to have won Milosevic's consent for Nato military peacekeepers in Kosovo. He quickly had to retract when Belgrade refuted his claims. In his second round of shuttle diplomacy last week, British sources assert, Chernomyrdin was more cautious. 'He has not been running around with a single peace plan. Instead, he has been using his meetings to work out the bottom line of all the parties,' said a British diplomat. So far he has found it simply impossible to match up these requirements. Offering a preview of what Milosevic was prepared to concede, Igor Ivanov, the Russian Foreign Minister, said last Monday that the Yugoslav president was ready to reduce his forces in Kosovo to the level they were at in October, before the Serbian military began preparing for its offensive against ethnic Albanians. According to Nato estimates, Yugoslavia had about 22,500 military and Interior Ministry troops in Kosovo then, compared with some 40,000 now. Ivanov also said optimistically that Milosevic had agreed in very general terms to allow an international presence to police a settlement in Kosovo, though crucial details remain to be worked out. The optimism continued last Tuesday when Goran Matic, from the Yugoslav United Left party of Slobodan Milosevic's wife, Mirjana Markovic, claimed 'this will be the week in which the basic outline of an agreement can be firmed up'. On the same day the now dismissed Deputy Prime Minister Vuk Draskovic said Milosevic was willing to move on the single biggest barrier to an agreement - the composition of the international peacekeeping force that would escort the Kosovo refugees back to their homes. Draskovic said Milosevic would accept UN peacekeeping forces in Kosovo. Yet those closer to Milosevic, such as his brother Borislav, Yugoslavia's ambassador to Moscow, quickly scotched these hopes. He insisted there can only be 'a civilian mission under a UN flag. We will not allow occupation of any part of our country'. Slobodan Milosevic underscored this with an interview with the UPI news agency released late on Friday. Giving an idea of the kind of non-military presence he would accept, Milosevic said: 'There is no job for forces. What would forces do? Just ruin our roads with tracked vehicles.' He said that members of any UN presence could carry 'self-defense weapons' but 'no offensive weapons'. He insisted too that even this limited military force excluded the Nato countries involved in the bombing camapign. Ivanov himself explained Serb thinking, even if he did not endorse it. 'Put yourself in the place of Yugoslavia's leaders,' he said. 'Would you allow the people who destroyed your country to carry out the peacekeeping operation?' The Russians, for their part, are willing to accept an international military force, so long as it run under the UN flag. NONE OF THIS remotely meets Nato's demands. Nato's firm position has been that the force can run under a UN mandate, and include Russians. But Nato must form the core of the force, provide the leadership and be given the kind of peace enforcement mandate given to Iprofor in Bosnia following the Dayton peace accord. British Cabinet Ministers, speaking off the record on Friday, explained the thinking: 'I doubt Kosovo refugees would return without the knowledge that they had the military support of Nato,' said one. 'I do not see the refugees going back if the Nato allies are not there. If you are sitting in one of those Macedonian camps, are you supposed to think it is going to be Russia, Ukraine and some other far-flung country looking after you, but there will be no Germany France, Britain and the US? They'll choose to stay in the camp.' It was also pointed out that the British led ACE Rapid Reaction Corps headquarters stationed in Macedonia has for months been training, equipping and preparing to run the headquarters inside Kosovo. 'It's very hard to see who else could provide a credibly functioning HQ apart form the Nato Rapid Reaction Force,' the Cabinet source said. 'But we are not exclusivists about this. Right from the start we have said we would want Russia to be working alongside us as they do in Bosnia. It would be best if the force had a UN authority, but that depends on Russia being agreeable.' The Russians are also testing out the allies on the future status of Kosovo. In a speech in the Commons in the run-up to the Washington summit, Cook revealed Nato had hardened its stance since the fruitless Paris peace talks. In future, Kosovo would be placed under an international provisional administration, Cook said. Such protectorates have no precise status in international law, but it would in essence make Kosovo independent of Serbia, at least pending further negotiations over autonomy. Milosevic, who made his reputation by ending Kosovan independence, totally rejected this idea on Friday. There are also subsidiary issues, described by Cook as footnotes rather than principles. In Washington Nato promised to suspend the bombing once Milosevic started to withdraw his forces, agreed to an international military presence and promised to negotiate on the future of Kosovo. But how could it be verified that a withdrawal was under way and at what point does a Nato ceasefire start? How rapidly would the Serbs have to withdraw for an initial 24-hour ceasefire to be extended? Another question is whether a form of words could be found at the UN to fudge the issue of the composition of the peacekeeping force. In all this diplomatic manoeuvring the biggest mystery remains the influence Russia retains over Milosevic. 'Religious affinity, a wishy-washy pan-Slavist philosophy and misremembered history gives Russian nationalists a claim to a special role in the Balkans,' says Rodric Braithwaite, Britain's former ambassador to Moscow and foreign policy adviser to John Major. Primakov is sensitive on this issue. He said: 'As for whether Russia can persuade Milosevic, I must ask another question: can the United States persuade the Israeli government to implement what was signed in Washington in the presence of the United States president?' In view of the failure of Friday's meetings between Russia and Serbia, some Western diplomats privately believe that the best that can emerge from the Russian initiative is a break between Belgrade and Moscow. British sources suggest that when Primakov left Belgrade soon after the war started he was exasperated by Milosevic. Similarly, Milosevic is frustrated by the refusal of Russia to provide material support, including naval support. Western diplomats believe Russia might support a UN resolution calling for an international military force. 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