The New York Times OP-ED

Tuesday, May 25, 1999

Arm the K.L.A.

By Michael W. Doyle

and Stephen Holmes

Princeton, NJ - Slobodan Milosevic can defeat NATO on any one of three fronts.

He will win a political victory if he manages to poison relations between NATO and Russia permanently or to shatter the unity of the alliance, results avoided so far largely by NATO's exclusive reliance on air strikes to wage the war.

He will win a moral victory if Americans and Europeans gradually grow numb to bombing hospitals and school buses and become in any way like him, either killing civilians routinely or killing them inadvertently without actually helping the Albanian Kosovars. Or he will win a strategic victory if NATO fails to help the Kosovars survive and return to Kosovo in safety.

Thousands of Albanian Kosovars have been killed, more than 800,000 have been driven across borders, and more than 600,000 have lost their homes and are living in the mountains, risking death by starvation and diseases. Bombing the bridges of Novi Sad may prove to be a brilliant strategic move in the long haul, but it does nothing for the Albanian Kosovars in troubles today.

What can be done to escape the terrible logic of this situation? A negotiated safe return of the Kosovars is the best solution. But even though news reports now say that Mr. Milosevic is willing to accept a compromise, his conditions and NATO's remain far apart. A straightforward invasion by ground troops is off the table, and if troops arrived three months from now, they would be too late to save lives.

The best remaining alternative, though still anathema to many, is to arm and assist the Kosovo Liberation Army. In addition to 6,000 to 10,000 lightly armed irregulars in strongholds inside Kosovo like the one mistakenly bombed by NATO last week, three are 10,000 to 15,000 more on the Albanian side of the Kosovo-Albania border. They are confident that if they were handed better arms and some logistic support, they could break through the Serbian border defenses and solidify control over the corridors through which they have been sporadically infiltrating supplies. They, not NATO, would take the casualties.

They would leap at the chance just as we shrink from the thought. As they broke into Kosovo, NATO could support them with Apache helicopters and other air weaponry.

Yes, for such an emergency rescue mission, NATO would certainly be justified in acting as the air force of the Kosovo rebels. The rebels would provide the ground forces that NATO's helicopters and aircraft need to be effective. Once across the border, the rebels could secure a staging area into which we could airlift food and medicine for the internally displaced Kosovars. This would allow NATO to put pressure on Serb forces in Kosovo while avoiding the cost of hacking its way through recently reinforced Serb border emplacements.

The level of Serb partisan resistance would be low in southern Kosovo, where there is little population to support it, and trivial compared with what we would meet if NATO tried to invade Serbia proper from Hungary. Occupation of southern Kosovo would not necessarily end the war, but it could put a stop to at least some of the violence of the Serb paramilitaries - including some of their use of human shields - and reduce dangerously destabilizing refugee pressure on Macedonia, Montenegro and Albania.

Many military and political experts warn that arming the K.L.A. would be like arming Irish Republican Army; if some of its members are indeed drug runners or imbued with totalitarian fantasies, they ask, who would control them later?

Or, they say, the K.L.A.'s ragtag units would be unlikely to be able to mount a serious incursion anyway.

The risks are real, but given the available alternatives, they are worth taking. And we could lower them by helping Kosovar leaders build civilian authority in the camps in Albania and Macedonia, establishing village councils to plan for repatriation and reconstruction and to recreate, with Western technical assistance, the registries of titles and deeds that have been maliciously destroyed. Civilian authorities, who could offer to rebuild people's homes would have a chance, after hostilities ceased, quickly to eclipse the gunmen, however heroic, in prestige.

If NATO refuses to risk this battle by surrogates and Mr. Milosevic refuses to capitulate, where will we be in four months' time? NATO may well have killed large numbers of Serb civilians by disease and medical deprivation as Serbian support structures have continued to be destroyed. but we will not have protected the vulnerable Kosovars from slaughter or helped return any of them to their homes. NATO will have failed, and Slobodan Milosevic will have won.

- Michael W. Doyle is the director of the Center of International Studies at Princeton University, and Stephen Holmes is a professor of politics at Princeton.