Why NATO Is Looking on the Bright Side in Kosovo

Things could be a lot worse in Kosovo, and they were a year ago. That's the nub of NATO secretary general George Robertson's assessment, "Kosovo One Year On: Achievement and Challenge," published Tuesday in a preemptive strike against the growing chorus of criticism of the operation's achievements a year after the alliance began bombing Yugoslavia. Robertson argues that NATO lost only two planes and no pilots, inflicted minimal civilian casualties, and succeeded in driving out Serb forces and returning refugees to their homes. Last June there were 50 deaths each week in Kosovo, he notes, while today there are only five. Still, the defensive tone of his report signals that NATO has failed to realize its lofty aim of creating a thriving democratic, multiethnic Kosovo — and more important, perhaps, hints at the fact that NATO's troop presence needs to be maintained, or even expanded, to prevent a renewed outbreak of hostilities. "If NATO left either Bosnia or Kosovo, they'd be back at war within months," says TIME State Department correspondent Massimo Calabresi. "Although things are certainly immeasurably better now than they were a year ago, the deep-seated political problems are by no means solved."

Pressure in Washington has begun to mount for a cap on U.S. involvement, as the potential for violent outbreaks grows in the divided town of Mitrovica and in ethnic-Albanian communities just across the border in southern Serbia. That's made Kosovo one of the few areas in which the U.S. is enthusiastic about the planned European Union military force, which Washington hopes will eventually take over a mission that may well require a permanent commitment. "It's perfectly fair for Robertson to say that the region is more stable now that there are thousands upon thousands of NATO troops there to squelch most of the problems," says Calabresi. "Milosevic's room for maneuver has been drastically reduced, and the U.S. and NATO have managed with minimal casualties to defuse the potential for tragedy in Kosovo — but by doing so, of course, they've inherited a bunch of other problems." And if NATO had to take its hand off the lid, the Balkans could quickly once again turn messy.