Word: kosovo
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...more than the Apache debate that burst into the open last week. Just 48 hours into the war, NATO Commander Wesley Clark called on Washington to send in the state-of-the-art AH-64 helicopter gunships as the best weapon against Milosevic's ferocious ground-level cleansing of Kosovo. After a week of backroom debate, a deeply reluctant Pentagon and White House agreed to deploy the Army's premier tank killers--but not to use them in battle. More than two weeks later, to great fanfare, the first of 24 began arriving in Albania along with their...
...Pentagon isn't so sure. The brass are worried that the Serbs have moved hundreds of SA-7 shoulder-fired missiles toward Albania, lurking in the valleys the Apaches would follow into Kosovo, just waiting for the gunships to cross the frontier. "The Apaches are MANPADs magnets," an Army officer says, referring to the acronym for Man-Portable Air Defense System, used for the small-missile launchers. "We keep asking the Army," a Joint Staff officer says, "how many Apaches they think are going to come back." That's why the helicopters--initially heralded as saviors--still sit at their...
...capitals sent out contradictory messages. German Chancellor Gerhard Schroder called the use of ground troops "unthinkable" and pledged to block any alliance combat on land. From London came the opposite, a steady drumbeat of demands by the Blair government to start assembling a ground force that could go into Kosovo even without agreement from Milosevic. Long after the threat might have spooked the Serbian leader, Clinton for the first time last week reserved the right to send in ground troops. Two days later, NATO Commander Clark visited the Pentagon to push for deployment of the 50,000 ground troops, trying...
...consensus to gather a serious invasion force, the Tower of Babel talk won't do much to move Milosevic. Threatening to dispatch troops at the start might have given him pause, or at least forced some of his soldiers to stay home and protect Serbian borders instead of depopulating Kosovo. Had a relatively small ground force been deployed by now, it could have made the air war more lethal by spotting targets and flushing Serbian armor from hiding. But now the noisy, public ground-troops debates seem more likely to crack apart NATO than to cow Milosevic...
...Belgrade begin to realize they don't want the air war to last many more months. If NATO is not ready to take risks to defeat Milosevic, it may have to prepare itself, and the wider world, for the least bad negotiated settlement. And winter comes quickly in Kosovo. Clinton pleaded for the allies to "stay focused and patient." But there are not many months left for the air campaign or the diplomacy to work in time for ethnic Albanians to be shepherded home to their charred villages before the autumn snows turn the battered province into a frigid moonscape...