A Soldier's Civic Duty?: Playing mayor and other things in the Balkans - US military presence in Kosovo and surrounding areas

National Review, July 23, 2001 by Richard Lowry

Witness the marvel of the American military, the best trained and equipped fighting force in the world. When on duty in Kosovo, First Sergeant William Burns led a weekly meeting in the town of Pones, a village where violence against ethnic Albanians during the war had been relatively light, but where the majority Albanians had murdered five Serbs in revenge. Hate, of course, is not a family value, nor one that the United States will tolerate in the Balkans. Hence, Burns's weekly meetings. As reported in Foreign Affairs magazine, the confabs were part encounter session, part pep talk, meant once and for all to get the Albanians and Serbs in Pones to get along.

Among the agenda items, according to Foreign Affairs, was the hiring situation at Glama, "a local quarry where American soldiers tried to enforce a crude form of affirmative action. U.N. administrators, who technically control the quarry and all other formerly state-run enterprises in Kosovo, reserved 30 percent of the jobs at Glama for local Serbs. American soldiers provided security during the tense job interviews that followed." In the Balkans, the American military is not just the world's policemen, it is its human-resources department as well.

As Albanian extremists stir the pot in Macedonia-the former Yugoslav republic that borders Kosovo-international pressure will build for extending

American involvement in the region. Thus George W. Bush's campaign talk of exiting the Balkans is going the way of the 33 percent top rate (he now says he is open to sending more troops there). Bush's pledge had come in the context of his determination to renew the American military, by, among other things, increasing its funding to develop a new generation of weapons and ending nation-building missions that serve only to the degrade its fighting capability. Now the funding won't be forthcoming, and neither will a Balkan pullout. Instead of a new generation of weapons, we're getting a generation of involvement in Bosnia and Kosovo.

Defenders of the Balkan commitment like to point out that only 10,000 or so U.S. troops serve as peacekeepers there. But that force has a huge "logistical tail" that requires the work of thousands and thousands of additional soldiers to support the troops on the ground. Meanwhile, both prior to rotating in and after rotating out of the Balkans, soldiers are tied up in training and retraining, since the skills required to be the mayor of a small Kosovo town are almost exactly counter to those necessary to fighting a war (which is why, traditionally, civilians have been mayors and active-duty soldiers have not). Make no mistake: Peacekeeping in the Balkans is a major drain on the U.S. Army.

Is it worth it? The hard-headed case for involvement-which tries to justify it on grounds of national interest and not just morality-is twofold. One argument is that that it is necessary to keep together NATO. But this risks confusing means and ends. NATO is simply a means to promote U.S. interests, and must always be considered an important tool for a policy, not its driving rationale. The other argument-heard especially when the wars in Bosnia and Kosovo were hot-is that U.S. intervention is necessary to keep conflict from spreading, especially to the major powers. But as Richard K. Betts writes in the latest National Interest, noting the damage to U.S. relations with Russia and China from the Kosovo war: "Intervention worsened conflict among great powers instead of dampening it."

U.S. involvement in the Balkans has always been primarily an exercise in Wilsonian moralism. On those terms, it can claim considerable success: stopping murderous Serb adventures in Bosnia and Kosovo, and hastening the ouster of Slobodan Milosevic. Helping give Milosevic the boot was a clear and achievable political objective. The goal of the West's continued occupation of Bosnia and Kosovo now is much murkier. It makes sense only as a nation-building endeavor, as a way to fashion Bosnia and Kosovo in a new image. This means prompting nothing short of a revolution of consciousness in the Balkans. As Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist David Rohde puts it in Foreign Affairs, "Changing the destructive aspects of ordinary people's attitudes is both the most pivotal and the most daunting task the NATO and the UN missions face in Kosovo."

Good luck. According to a State Department survey, 91 percent of Kosovar Albanians think that ethnic Albanians and Serbs can't live together peacefully. Two-thirds of ethnic Albanians say that the Serbs chased out of the province after the war shouldn't come back, while more than half of Albanians believe that the violent retribution against Serbs was justified (in the Balkans, the victims of ethnic cleansing often prove adept at the practice themselves). How such attitudes can be changed by occupying armies is unclear. At the moment, the West resorts to multiculturalist fictions. The Dayton accords created a supposedly unified Bosnian state, but that "state" really exists in separate Serb, Moslem, and Croat components. Meanwhile, the West pretends that Kosovo is part of Yugoslavia, when the province, emptied of most of its Serbs, has a de facto independence and could probably never be ruled equitably by Serb-dominated Yugoslavia.