If they are not disarmed and go around trying to settle scores with Serbs, it's going to be tough. At the Pentagon, one planner said the threat to NATO peacekeepers would come in stages. In the beginning, angry Serbs might try to inflict enough casualties to induce the troops to leave. As time wears on, and autonomy but not independence comes, it reverses. It becomes the KLA that takes action.
Balkan commitment is far broader and deeper than Kosovo alone.
President Clinton, with help from Secretary of State Madeleine K. Albright, has fashioned a program that would stretch well beyond his presidency and complete the overturning of a long-standing U.S. and NATO strategy in southeastern Europe. For decades NATO has insulated itself from the turmoils of its Balkan flank. The United States and NATO should do more than broker, and if need be impose, a settlement of Yugoslavia's ethnic wars. They should usher Yugoslavia and its neighbors into the same economic and military ties that bind central and northeastern Europe to the West. And we need to condition such help, as we did fifty years ago in Western Europe, on close cooperation among the beneficiaries and new understandings of sovereignty.