A Soldier's Civic Duty?: Playing mayor and other things in the Balkans.

Witness the marvel of the American military, the best trained and equipped fighting force in the world. When on duty in Kosovo, First Sergeant William Burns led a weekly meeting in the town of Pones, a village where violence against ethnic Albanians during the war had been relatively light, but where the majority Albanians had murdered five Serbs in revenge. Hate, of course, is not a family value, nor one that the United States will tolerate in the Balkans. Hence, Burns's weekly meetings. As reported in Foreign Affairs magazine, the confabs were part encounter session, part pep talk, meant once and for all to get the Albanians and Serbs in Pones to get along.

Among the agenda items, according to Foreign Affairs, was the hiring situation at Glama, "a local quarry where American soldiers tried to enforce a crude form of affirmative action. U.N. administrators, who technically control the quarry and all other formerly state-run enterprises in Kosovo, reserved 30 percent of the jobs at Glama for local Serbs. American soldiers provided security during the tense job interviews that followed." In the Balkans, the American military is not just the world's policemen, it is its human-resources department as well.

As Albanian extremists stir the pot in Macedonia-the former Yugoslav republic that borders Kosovo-international pressure will build for extending

American involvement in the region. Thus George W. Bush's campaign talk of exiting the Balkans is going the way of the 33 percent top rate (he now says he is open to sending more troops there). Bush's pledge had come in the context of his determination to renew the American military, by, among other things, increasing its funding to develop a new generation of weapons and ending nation-building missions that serve only to the degrade its fighting capability. Now the funding won't be forthcoming, and neither will a Balkan pullout. Instead of a new generation of weapons, we're getting a generation of involvement in Bosnia and Kosovo.

Defenders of the Balkan commitment like to point out that only 10,000 or so U.S. troops serve as peacekeepers there. But that force has a huge "logistical tail" that requires the work of thousands and thousands of additional soldiers to support the troops on the ground. Meanwhile, both prior to rotating in and after rotating out of the Balkans, soldiers are tied up in training and retraining, since the skills required to be the mayor of a small Kosovo town are almost exactly counter to those necessary to fighting a war (which is why, traditionally, civilians have been mayors and active-duty soldiers have not). Make no mistake: Peacekeeping in the Balkans is a major drain on the U.S. Army.

Is it worth it? The hard-headed case for involvement-which tries to justify it on grounds of national interest and not just morality-is twofold. One argument is that that it is necessary to keep together NATO. But this risks confusing means and ends. NATO is simply a means to promote U.S. interests, and must always be considered an important tool for a policy, not its driving rationale. The other argument-heard especially when the wars in Bosnia and Kosovo were hot-is that U.S. intervention is necessary to keep conflict from spreading, especially to the major powers. But as Richard K. Betts writes in the latest National Interest, noting the damage to U.S. relations with Russia and China from the Kosovo war: "Intervention worsened conflict among great powers instead of dampening it."

U.S. involvement in the Balkans has always been primarily an exercise in Wilsonian moralism. On those terms, it can claim considerable success: stopping murderous Serb adventures in Bosnia and Kosovo, and hastening the ouster of Slobodan Milosevic. Helping give Milosevic the boot was a clear and achievable political objective. The goal of the West's continued occupation of Bosnia and Kosovo now is much murkier. It makes sense only as a nation-building endeavor, as a way to fashion Bosnia and Kosovo in a new image. This means prompting nothing short of a revolution of consciousness in the Balkans. As Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist David Rohde puts it in Foreign Affairs, "Changing the destructive aspects of ordinary people's attitudes is both the most pivotal and the most daunting task the NATO and the UN missions face in Kosovo."

Good luck. According to a State Department survey, 91 percent of Kosovar Albanians think that ethnic Albanians and Serbs can't live together peacefully. Two-thirds of ethnic Albanians say that the Serbs chased out of the province after the war shouldn't come back, while more than half of Albanians believe that the violent retribution against Serbs was justified (in the Balkans, the victims of ethnic cleansing often prove adept at the practice themselves). How such attitudes can be changed by occupying armies is unclear. At the moment, the West resorts to multiculturalist fictions. The Dayton accords created a supposedly unified Bosnian state, but that "state" really exists in separate Serb, Moslem, and Croat components. Meanwhile, the West pretends that Kosovo is part of Yugoslavia, when the province, emptied of most of its Serbs, has a de facto independence and could probably never be ruled equitably by Serb-dominated Yugoslavia.

The creation of true pluralist democracies in the Balkans would require drastically different civic cultures; so in the meantime, the West just draws lines around notionally multiethnic political entities and fudges the rest. "Self-government in Bosnia and Kosovo so far remains subject to the higher authority of the occupying forces," Betts writes in The National Interest. "NATO officials skew elections, disqualify candidates, close down radio and television stations, and so on. The benefit in this is that it prevents self-government from re-energizing local conflict; the cost is that it defers resolution of the essential issue. True self-government requires decolonization-termination of the controlling role of the occupying powers."

The problem, of course, includes the Albanians, who have refused to play the role of pure-hearted victims outlined for them by the Western press during the Kosovo war. The KLA shifted its cause from national liberation to white slavery without missing a beat. The guerrilla group has dissolved into various gangster outfits, whose turf battles may well be driving the conflict in Macedonia. The way the focus of U.S. forces in the Balkans has rapidly shifted-from fighting Serbs to restraining Albanians- highlights the fact that the enemy in the Balkans is not a particular geopolitical entity or force endangering U.S. interests, but the hearts of men. If the United States is not willing to devote itself entirely to forging a new Balkan society-which would require a lot more than 10,000 troops and some economic aid-it shouldn't waste its military resources on a half-hearted occupation.

And one that could well end badly. Support for the U.S. involvement in the Balkans comes primarily from the foreign-policy establishment, liberal do-gooders who favor U.S. military activism so long as it doesn't involve protecting U.S. interests, and neoconservative defense hawks who argue that the United States would cease being a superpower should it ever pass up the chance to send its troops to an international hot spot. None of these groups command much public support. The fact is that the American public will countenance U.S. involvement in the Balkans only so long as it is relatively unobtrusive and has no cost (which is why the Clinton administration shied away from a ground war, or even low-flying bomber missions, in Kosovo). This tenuous political support means the U.S. must practice colonialism on the cheap, with a limited force easily chased from the field should any of the perpetually aggrieved Balkan factions succeed in inflicting causalities on it.

The best course for the West would be to abandon the pretense of multiculturalism in the Balkans, allowing the various ethnicities to splinter into separate entities. This may not be a step forward for tolerance, but it would at least be consistent with the value of self- government. NATO forces would still be necessary, perhaps for policing borders and other sundry tasks, but there is no reason that the American military need be in the mix. A U.S. pullout would prompt European screaming about "burden-sharing," but the United States has already shared more than its bit of the burden by flying almost all the combat missions in Kosovo during the war. The low-tech, less combat- worthy European forces are perfectly suited for the civics work that is now required in the Balkans, and they aren't subject to being called away for more urgent, dangerous duty in the Middle East and Asia.

As for the village of Pones, by all means, it deserves a decent and competent mayor. He just shouldn't be a U.S. serviceman.