Who's Won When Both Sides Are Cheering?

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At the outset, Milosevic said he would accept only a lightly armed United Nations force in Kosovo, with no NATO participation. Now hes been forced to accept heavily armed NATO troops there, and has lost even the Rambouillet provision that allowed Belgrade to keep 10,000 troops in Kosovo. On the other hand, NATO, too, has had to compromise. Milosevic is ceding control of Kosovo, but not to NATO per se. The territorys political administration, and the mandate for the international peacekeeping mission, are in the hands of the U.N. Security Council, where NATOs power is diluted by the veto power of Russia and China.

The White House may spin this as a NATO operation with a U.N. fig leaf, but the apparent failure of NATO's attempt to simply issue the Serbs their marching orders last weekend, and of its plan to confine Russia to a decorative role in the peacekeeping operation, are clear signs that the agreement hasnt empowered NATO to call all the shots. Moreover, the U.N. resolution also reaffirms Yugoslavian sovereignty over Kosovo, requires that the peacekeepers "demilitarize" the KLA and makes no provisions for a referendum on independence. Small consolations for Belgrade, perhaps, but consolations nonetheless.

NATO, of course, has some reason for celebration. It forced an apparently intractable foe to back down in a massive military operation that avoided sustaining a single allied combat casualty. And although most of its member states are ruled by the most unlikely warriors -- from boomer peaceniks like Clinton and Blair to Germanys Red-Green veterans of the anti-NATO campaigns of the 80s, Italys reconstructed communists and the Czech Republics Velvet Underground-loving philosopher-king Vaclav Havel - it managed to stay the course against many predictions of internecine chaos.

But the moral purpose for which NATO went to war - to protect the Kosovar Albanians from Serb persecution - has failed, at least in the short term. Given its war aims, NATO cant claim victory before the refugees return home and are able to live in security. While the alliance has taken a major step toward that goal by forcing the Serb withdrawal, theres a long road ahead. NATO in the immediate future faces political challenges ranging from Russias bid for a greater share of the peacekeeping pie and Serb insistence on screening returning refugees to dealing with recriminations against Serb civilians by returning ethnic Albanians and potentially violent infighting among Kosovar politicians. But even once those political battles are won, creating an environment into which the refugees can viably return will take months, if not years. Undoing Milosevics dirty work will require a long-term political commitment to protect and rebuild Kosovo at a cost of tens of billions of dollars a year.