Word: kosovo
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Israel was severely criticized when two boys were accidentally killed in a rocket attack on a Hamas building. That indeed was tragic. But no military campaign--not the NATO bombing of Serbia in the Kosovo war, not the U.S. bombing of Baghdad in the Gulf War, not the current Israeli attacks on Palestinian terrorists--has ever been conducted without accidental deaths. There is, moreover, an ocean of difference between a targeted attack on terrorists that inadvertently harms civilians and the deliberate murder of civilians, which is the specialty of the very Palestinian terrorists Israel is targeting...
...greater civil rights alongside Macedonians. NATO's deployment, in support of a political deal according those rights, is, in one sense, a calling of the NLA's bluff. Then again, the risk-averse Western alliance showed little vigor in carrying out its mandate to disarm Albanian nationalist guerrillas in Kosovo or to clamp down on those guerrillas' ethnic cleansing of the province's remaining Serbs and on their export of nationalist insurgencies into Serbia and Macedonia. Which may mean there may be more than a handful of nationalist guerrillas in Macedonia who see NATO as a paper tiger...
...NATO decide to turn Ahmeti from a "terrorist" into a respectable citizen? Essentially, because the alliance was never prepared to risk exposing its troops to danger in any confrontation with Albanian nationalists. Although it made limited attempts to seal the Kosovo border, across which all of the NLA's weapons, supplies and personnel initially passed, once the guerrillas had proved their ability to survive the clumsy counterinsurgency efforts of the Macedonian security forces, NATO changed its tack, turning the "terrorists" of three months ago into the key partner of today's peace deal...
...NATO may protest that its peace plan requires the disarmament of the ethnic-Albanian guerrillas. Indeed. So did the agreement that ended the Kosovo war two years ago, and NATO failed conspicuously to enforce it there. Perhaps that's why this time the definition of its mission very definitely excludes the term "disarm...
...course, Macedonia and Kosovo are hardly unconnected. The Macedonian insurgency originated inside Kosovo, where NATO is supposed to be in charge of security. But the alliance has shown little inclination to effectively police the activities of Albanian nationalist guerrillas there, and it appears to have woken up rather late to the fact that those guerrillas were exporting an insurgency into Macedonia under NATO's very noses. Although it then moved very quickly to press the authorities to address the political grievances on which the insurgency was feeding, it did little to create disincentives for ethnic-Albanian nationalists to choose...