The New York Times

September 15, 1999

FOREIGN AFFAIRS / By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN

The Four Questions

Once again a vicious civil war. Once again the call for U.S. troops. This time to East Timor, which is one of the farthest places you can fly from Washington D.C. and still be on this planet. What to do? What criteria do we use when deciding whether to dispatch forces to small, distant corners where some outrage is being committed? I would start with the following four questions:

1. Is there some strategic rationale for U.S. involvement? I believe the diplomacy leading up to the war in Kosovo was utterly botched by the NATO allies. War there was not inevitable. Nevertheless, once thousands of Kosovo Albanians were evicted, the U.S. and NATO had a strategic as well as moral interest in forcing their return home. NATO's credibility was at stake, and leaving the Kosovo refugees floating around southern Europe would have destabilized the whole region and divided the allies.

Containing Serbia, and basically closing the worst open sore in Europe -- the Balkans -- so that the rest of Europe can concentrate on integration and development, is also worth a few U.S. troops. We have 100,000 troops in Germany marching around flagpoles. Shifting a few of them to patrol ethnic dividing lines in the Balkans has some strategic merit. The same in East Timor. Roughly 40 percent of the world's trade passes through the sea lanes around Indonesia, the world's fourth-largest nation. If contributing a few U.S. logistics personnel -- to a U.N. force made up of Australians and Asians -- helps resolve Indonesia's ugliest internal strife, it has some strategic benefit.

2. Can we make a reasonable difference at a reasonable cost? In Kosovo, because the allies were able to rely on air power alone, they were able to make a reasonable difference -- forcing the return of the refugees -- at a cost the public would tolerate. In East Timor, assuming that Asians and Aussies staff the U.N. force, we should be able to make a reasonable difference -- instituting a free and fair U.N.-sponsored vote for independence by the people of East Timor -- at a reasonable cost. For a relatively small price we will be upholding the rule of international law and the U.N.'s credibility, and showing how U.S. power can be leveraged.

3. Can we make a sustainable difference at a reasonable cost? Here's where the Clinton team has failed in Haiti, Somalia and Kosovo. The U.S. intervention in Kosovo made a crucial difference: It halted ethnic cleansing. But to make that difference self-sustaining -- so that NATO doesn't have to keep a soldier on every corner preventing ethnic Albanians and Serbs from killing each other -- you need a political solution. As the NATO commander in Kosovo, Lieut. Gen. Mike Jackson, just said: "I fear that the soldiers are now more and more policemen, due to the continuing desire for revenge. And that has to change."

There are only two ways to change that. One is for Serbs and Albanians to learn to love each other. Forget that. The other is to separate them permanently. The reason NATO has made a sustainable difference at a reasonable cost in Bosnia is because it has abandoned the fantasy that it is building a multi-ethnic democracy there, and has instead partitioned Bosnia into ethnic zones. NATO then simply patrols the partition lines, which is quite sustainable. Some form of partition, or enclaves, has to be instituted in Kosovo between the ethnic Albanians and the remaining Serbs. That's the only way NATO's presence there will make a sustainable difference.

East Timor is more like Kuwait than Kosovo. It's a territory occupied by bad guys. If the U.N. comes in and the bad guys gradually leave or are isolated, East Timor should be self-governing at a sustainable cost.

4. Can we walk and chew gum at the same time? We can afford these distant interventions as long as we don't lose focus on what are still the killer strategic issues for America. For instance, the Clintonites have utterly dropped the ball on arms control, failing for years to win Russian ratification for an already signed treaty (Start 2) that would slash Russia's long-range nuclear arsenal -- which is still aimed at us -- in half.

If the Administration can do the big stuff and the small stuff, it will set an important precedent -- and it's still not too late. But if it makes the world safer for Kosovars and Timorese but not for Americans, its whole approach to intervention will be scorned. History is not kind to leaders who just do capillaries, not arteries.