America's War for the Greater Middle East: A Military History (33 page)

Jackson:
Sir, I’m not taking any more orders from Washington.

Clark:
Mike, these aren’t Washington’s orders, they’re coming from me.

Jackson:
By whose authority?

Clark:
By my authority as SACEUR.

Jackson:
You don’t have that authority.

Clark:
I do have that authority. I have the Secretary General behind me on this.

Jackson:
Sir, I’m not starting World War III for you.

In an effort to resolve the standoff, Jackson placed a call to his British military boss, General Sir Charles Guthrie, chief of the defense staff back in London. Jackson explained the situation to Guthrie and then handed the phone to Clark. “I agree with Mike,” Guthrie told the SACEUR, “and so does Hugh Shelton,” effectively cutting off Clark at the knees.
⁴³
Although Clark didn’t know it yet, his military career was effectively over. He might have salvaged a win against Milo
š
evi
ć, but
he was about to lose his job.

Under KFOR’s protective eye, the displaced Kosovars began returning home. There, they promptly initiated a vicious ethnic cleansing campaign aimed at ousting the roughly quarter-million Serbs and Roma living in the province.
⁴⁴
The U.S. Army official history offers a concise account of what newly arrived peacekeepers witnessed:

Ethnic Albanians, consumed with hatred and resolved to avenge past grievances, initiated a wave of destruction that equaled in method if not in volume what they had experienced earlier during the Serbian ethnic cleansing of the province. Anything Serbian was destroyed or vandalized—even abandoned houses and churches. Moreover, much of the violence was clearly organized and deliberate. Each day in June, American soldiers confronted new expressions of hatred….

Sadly, the violence was not confined to isolated incidents or property destruction. Kosovo-Serbs were attacked throughout the province. Even before the first week of KFOR occupation ended, at least twenty-seven ethnic Serbian men were known to have been abducted by members of the KLA. The men were never found. A Serbian school official who had protected an Albanian home and family during the Serbian ethnic cleansing in 1998 thought he would be safe once the war ended in June the following year and Yugoslav forces withdrew. He was not. KLA personnel arrived ahead of NATO’s KFOR; they killed the man and his wife and left their bodies hanging in the town square. Other Serbs were accosted in public buildings, or on the street, and then robbed, beaten, or “arrested” and detained in jails for several days. Some of them simply “disappeared.” In one community, an estimated five thousand Roma, who had occasionally cooperated with the Serbs during their reign of terror, were expelled from their homes, which were then looted and burned.
⁴⁵

These events challenged the hypothesis attributing Balkan violence entirely to malevolent politicians like Milo
š
evi
ć
. Even so, they prompted little by way of second thoughts in Washington or any other allied capitals. The Kosovo Serbs were written off as incidental, with neither NATO nor the United States inclined to assume responsibility for their fate.

By the end of summer 1999, the first half of Secretary Albright’s diktat had found fulfillment: Apart from a small, besieged remnant, the Serbs were out of Kosovo. As for the second half—that Kosovo was to remain part of Serbia—this was no longer for authorities in Washington to decide. Allied Force had empowered Kosovar nationalists. Although they waited nearly a decade before declaring their independence, in 2008 they did just that. A remarkable collaboration between the KLA and NATO—the one employing terror, the other habitually condemning its use—had enabled Kosovars to achieve their long-sought political goal. So although NATO had “won,” it was the Kosovars who benefited. Here was a case study in how to make terrorism work, with the United States and other avowed opponents of such behavior both assisting and subsequently ratifying the results.
⁴⁶

Apart from acknowledging that winning ultimately meant what the
Kosovars
said it meant, what are we to make of Operation Allied Force? And how exactly does NATO’s intervention in Kosovo, along with its lesser Bosnian cousin, fit into the narrative of America’s War for the Greater Middle East?

Notably, of all the various campaigns comprising that larger enterprise, Kosovo and Bosnia alone found U.S. forces fighting
on behalf
of Muslims
against
a non-Muslim adversary. In that regard, the two Balkan excursions stand apart. To some this may suggest that the interventions in Kosovo and Bosnia don’t belong here—that they actually relate to the story of Europe’s post–Cold War reconstitution. In fact, they form part of both stories. To exclude the Balkan campaigns from the narrative of America’s War for the Greater Middle East is to overlook weaknesses in U.S. military practice destined to afflict the larger-scale military campaigns just ahead.

Two weaknesses in particular stand out. The first relates to campaign design and the challenges inherent in aligning military plans with political purpose. In Kosovo in particular, the disconnect between the two was nearly absolute. Responsibility for that failure rests primarily, although not entirely, with General Clark. In place of serious engagement with the complexities inherent in using force to move the Serbs out while keeping Kosovo in, Clark substituted amateur psychologizing of Slobodan Milo
š
evi
ć
. When he got that wrong, nothing remained but to improvise.

The actual conduct of Allied Force served, at least in part, to conceal this fundamental lapse of generalship. Once the shooting began, the United States military did what it traditionally does best, mustering and managing resources on an astonishing scale. Judged from this perspective, Allied Force gives the appearance of being an impressive, even masterful affair, at least statistically.

Over the course of seventy-eight days of combat, while operating out of airfields in several countries, NATO air forces flew over thirty-eight thousand sorties, losing a mere two aircraft to enemy action. Every Yugoslav MiG that rose to offer a challenge was shot down. Despite the expenditure of some twelve thousand tons of munitions—over twenty-eight thousand smart bombs, dumb bombs, and cruise missiles—NATO inflicted relatively few noncombatant casualties. Although errant NATO weapons killed an estimated five hundred civilians and injured another nine hundred, by historical standards these were remarkably small numbers. More astonishing still, the campaign ended without the United States or its allies suffering a single combat fatality.
⁴⁷

As measured by numbers of aircraft deployed and weapons delivered, the American contribution to this effort was immense. In all, the U.S. flew two-thirds of all sorties and dropped 83 percent of the munitions. Less visible but arguably even more crucial was the American role in choreographing intelligence collection, targeting, and tasking. Without U.S. participation, NATO could not have sustained and would not have undertaken an operation on the scale of Allied Force. Yet even without NATO, the U.S. military alone could have replicated Allied Force and would probably have done so more efficiently.

So General Clark’s characterization of Allied Force as “the most precise and error-free campaign ever conducted” does not lack for merit.
⁴⁸
Yet even if arguably correct, with the lion’s share of the credit going to the United States, his assertion mistakes tactical measures of success for actual victory. This is bit like evaluating Operation Desert Storm based on battlefield exchange ratios while ignoring all the snags that followed once the fighting ended.

In sum, Allied Force offered compelling evidence to suggest that senior U.S. military officers—even supposedly bright ones—were strategically challenged. Although as the designated fall guy Clark found himself soon eased into retirement, recognition of the deficiencies inherent in his conduct of war escaped broader attention. Yet in the campaigns just ahead, those deficiencies reappeared with troubling regularity. In Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, and elsewhere, U.S. forces continued to post impressive numbers, much as they had in Kosovo and Bosnia. But the generalship required to translate numbers into something approximating permanent and categorical success would prove elusive. By then, of course, Clark was long gone. Yet the flawed approach to wartime command that he represented remained. Operational virtuosity continued to offer a poor substitute for strategic wisdom.

This brings us to the second weakness displayed by Allied Force: the conviction that employing U.S. military power to export universal—that is, Western liberal—values will reduce the incidence of violence globally and holds the best and perhaps only hope for ultimately creating a peaceful world. However imperfectly, this conviction, deeply embedded in the American collective psyche, provides one of the connecting threads making the ongoing War for the Greater Middle East something more than a collection of disparate and geographically scattered skirmishes.

In the Balkans, the United States, along with its allies, subjected this proposition to a very specific test. In Bosnia and Kosovo alike, underlying ideological issues were at stake. In both places, the forces of retrograde sectarianism vied with and were seeking to crush the possibility of secular multiculturalism. Serb nationalists like Milo
š
evi
ć
represented the former and therefore deserved punishment. Bosnians and Kosovars ostensibly represented the latter and merited protection. By clinging to antipathies, grudges, and resentments traceable back to the heyday of Christendom, the Serbs became, in the eyes of enlightened Westerners, “them.” By wearing their Islamic identity lightly, Bosnians and Kosovars became part of “us.”

Underpinning this moral drama were unstated assumptions about the proper role of religion in modern life. In the United States and throughout most of the West, the reigning conception of universal values marginalizes faith. In present-day America, individual readers of the Hebrew Bible, the New Testament, or the Qur’an are at liberty to believe that they are encountering the word of God. That such encounters should provide the basis for societal relationships or political arrangements, however, is another thing altogether. In all such matters, real authority derives from sources to which God is not privy.

Yet outside the West, the superiority of cosmopolitan secularism as a basis for organizing societies is not necessarily self-evident. There, imposing on others the West’s multifaceted, ever-evolving rights agenda—universal by no means implying fixed or permanent—is as likely to inflame resistance as to foster harmony. In many (although not all) quarters of the Islamic world, values that the West asserts are universal appear empty at best and blasphemous at worst. Even in the Balkans, with Muslims the putative beneficiaries of the West’s insistence that universal rights should transcend identity, this proved to be the case.

Here we encounter the Islamic dimension of the war over Kosovo. Although policymakers like Albright and military commanders like Clark regarded the Muslim identity of the Kosovars as incidental, religion was by no means irrelevant to the issue at hand. On the contrary, for observers outside of the West, such considerations loomed large. Much as the government of Israel views attacks on Jews anywhere in the world as matters of Israeli concern, so too many Muslims viewed Serb persecution of Kosovars as an assault on their own. Islamic fundamentalists meeting in London compared the plight of the Kosovars to that of Palestinians forced to flee their homes in 1948. “The massacres perpetrated against Muslims in Afghanistan, Lebanon, Palestine, Albania, and Kosovo” were all part of the same phenomenon. Despite their benign pretensions, organizations such as NATO were directly implicated in orchestrating anti-Muslim violence. Preventing such violence required “the establishment of an Islamic caliphate,” which defined “the primary central issue for Muslims all over the world.”
⁴⁹

Predominantly Muslim nations that had rallied to support Bosnians in their time of trial now competed with one another to assist the Kosovars, with the KLA the ultimate beneficiary. The Saudi government provided millions of dollars of relief supplies to aid the refugees who had fled Kosovo.
⁵⁰
For its part, Iran had covertly supplied the KLA with funds and arms.
⁵¹
Israeli foreign minister Ariel Sharon went so far as to charge Iran with fostering the emergence of an Islamic state in Kosovo.
⁵²
Americans might be insufficiently attuned to Kosovo’s relevance to developments elsewhere in the Greater Middle East, but the ever-alert Sharon was not.

No doubt Sharon’s worries on that score, stemming from a self-serving Israeli perspective, were overstated. Yet anyone inclined to dismiss such concerns out of hand should consider the fate suffered by the Serbs who had inhabited Kosovo, some of them for generations, now, in the wake of Allied Force, expelled as ethnic and religious undesirables even as U.S. troops stood by, mutely bearing witness.

As in Bosnia, the proponents of U.S. intervention in Kosovo misconstrued the issue at hand. Military action on behalf of persecuted Muslims in these instances was not going to earn gratitude elsewhere in the Islamic world. The humane and enlightened Professor Ajami might subsequently find it a “mystery” that “no Arab or Muslim leader [had] given the United States thanks or credit for taking military risks on behalf of two Muslim populations in Europe,” that America’s “good deeds” in Bosnia and Kosovo were somehow “never factored in.”
⁵³
But the mystery was a product of Ajami’s own wishful thinking, informed by expectations that others would ultimately choose to adhere to the worldview to which he himself subscribed. This failing was by no means confined to Ajami. In American political circles, it runs rampant.