James Galbraith on lessons of the Kosovo War

Economist James Galbraith heads a group called Economists Allied for Arms Reduction (ECAAR), whose Web site is definitely worth checking out.

One of the resources available there is a collection of presentations from an October 1999 seminar on the topic Kosovo: New Paradigm or Object Lesson (.pdf file). The Kosovo War of 1999 was one in which I supported American participation. My support was based on a variety of reasons:  the humanitarian horror of "ethnic cleansing" in the Balkans, of which Serbia was the worst perpetrator but by no means the only one; the threat of runaway instability in the entire Balkan region, potentially involving Greece, Turkey, Bulgaria, Rumania and Hungary; and, the very real problem of refugees flooding into European Union countries and exacerbating social tensions there.

One of the most persuasive cases I heard made on the Kosovo War was by German Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer on the PBS Newshour of 05/25/99:

If you were to ask me a half year ago whether we [the governing coalition in Germany] would politically survive a bombing campaign of 60 days, I would say "never." We are now very united not only in Germany, but also in the alliance. I think this is a very positive result. On the other side, I mentioned it before, you must understand that in Germany, there is a trauma of the two world wars and especially in the older generation. Germany, for example, accepted much more refugees than all other countries. Why? Because many of us, my family is for 200 years lived in Budapest. We are ethnic Germans from Budapest. After-- in 1946, we were sent back like hundreds of thousands of other Germans to Germany after 200 years. So the experience to be displaced persons or refugees is very substantial in our people. So I mention that, that I think tradition and historical experiences, historical fears are very important. ...

I was a peace activist against colonial wars. But this is not a colonial war I think. This is an aggressive confrontation against aggressive nationalism. In the 30's, Milosevic would fit -- would have fitted wonderful in the political landscape of a fascist Europe and fascist means not only the extreme -- most extreme form of fascism of the Nazis. Mussolini, Franco and all the others. It's an aggressive nationalism and is believing in the right of its own people to attack, to fight for territory for whatever and to suppress others, the Balkans is full of this heritage. They all have their maps in their pockets. And these maps mean bloodshed and means real disaster. And Milosevic is acting in that way. And we cannot accept it. This would mean that Europe, the principals of Europe, of unification would be, I think, attacked and if Milosevic will win, others will follow in the Balkans and then we will have a real security problem. Therefore, he must be stopped.

"They all have their maps in their pockets. And these maps mean bloodshed and means real disaster." One of the best descriptions I've ever heard of the danger of belligerent nationalism.

Gen. Wesley Clark - for whom I voted for President in California's Democratic primary, even though Kerry already had the nomination wrapped up - was the commander of the NATO forces opposing Serbia.  After a controvesial bombing campaign, NATO was preparing for a land invasion, which Serbian leader Milosevic apparently decided was more than he was willing to face to carry out "ethnic cleansing" in Kosovo, Serbia agreed to NATO's terms.  NATO still maintains a substantial peacekeeping force in Kosovo.

Although I believe even in retrospect that American participation in the war was the right thing to do, I also believe it's important to learn practical lessons for real events.  For one thing, the need for a large peacekeeping force has been more prolonged than I expected, and probably more than most people expected.

There was significant domestic opposition to the Kosovo War in the US, mostly from rightwing Republicans. Sidney Blumenthal in The Clinton Wars (2003) described the domestic opposition:

But the war went on without conclusion, and from the right and left came harsh criticism. "A colossal failure," railed George Will on ABC's This Week. Some argued that ground troops should have been put into the field at once, that NATO's failure to do so showed cowardice, perhaps even a special generational cowardice, a desire to achieve results without sacrifice but with politically clean hands. The liberal writer Mark Danner suggested, "Perhaps one day there will be a method to calculate how many Kosovars had to be displaced, how many had to die, for the West to prosecute its 'perfect" war.'

On April 28 [1999], the House of Representatives voted a resolution on the air war in the Balkans. Speaker Dennis Hastert had assured the White House that he could secure a majority in favor, but the true power within the Republican Party unmasked Hastert once again as a figurehead. Republican whip Tom DeLay ensured that there would be no positive vote for President Clinton. The final vote in the House was a carefully stage-managed tie, 213-213. But DeLay gloated. He saw Kosovo as "act two of impeachment," according to representative Peter King. DeLay believed, as he told Republicans, "When the sun rises following the election of 2000, I think we will control both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue because of it." "I don't respect the President, but I don't agree with the President either," he explained on NBC's Meet the Press on May 16.

James Galbraith's own contribution to the Kosovo Seminar that fall reflected on implications of the war, both in terms of actual results and in terms of perceptions.  The air war against Serbia, he noted, "represented a middle ground between ineffective diplomacy and full-scale invasion."

For many Americans, it is a model of relatively clean, politically achievable projection of power. It is a way of securing national and also humanitarian objectives without interrupting the normal rhythms of domestic political life, and especially without sacrificing our own soldiers.

But for much of the rest of the world the appearance is quite different. For them, it is a model of a country that issues ultimatums and then enforces them with high explosives delivered at long range. That we view our goals as noble, and our soldiers as priceless, is not so important to other people. Let me suggest that we should think very carefully about the implications of this for the American position in the world in the long run.

He goes on to summarize some of the more skeptical research on the results of bombing campaigns on an enemy's war-fighting capabilities. He makes the important point that in Serbia, similar to Vietnam, there were actually a limited number of "fixed military targets to bomb," the mobile military targets were difficult to hit even with precision bombs and often in civilian area, and the Yugoslav army had good success in setting up decoy targets. Postwar evaluations showed that the amount of military equipment destroyed was limited and even the casualties in Milosevic's army were small.

That meant, as in earlier cases, the air war was primarily effective because it was, and only to the extent that it was, aimed at the fixed infrastructure of civilian life. We destroyed government office buildings and television stations.We destroyed oil refineries and chemical plants, and we damaged the powergrids. We bombed the major automobile factory and other industrial facilities.We destroyed hotels and other business assets belonging to the Serbian elite. We dropped bridges into the water up and down the Danube. We bombed a nation until it gave up.

We need to face this reality squarely. The bombing of civilian and administrative targets is not incidental to military operations in this kind of warfare. It is the essence of the operation. The campaign is successful only through the political pressure that arises from economic and civilian losses, environmental damage, and the psychological stress that comes from being under bombardment for a long period of time. It is perhaps gratuitous to point out that this type of warfare is plainly illegal under the laws of warfare to which we purport to subcribe.

Although from what I know about the Kosovo War, I do not believe the statement in the last sentence quoted is correct as applied to that war, Galbraith identifies a key consideration in that discussion. The human and economic costs of a bombing war are huge for the population on the receiving end.  To Americans watching on TV at home, it may have seemed a "clean" war. (We certainly didn't set up a gulag with playrooms as part of that war.) But the results were not so neat and clean as many imagined.

In total, the physical and human costs of the operation were very large. Serbia itself is in ruins, with heavy damage to transport, utilities, the industrial base and energy supplies, as well as scars on the urban landscape.  Kosovo is a mess, littered with unexploded cluster bomblets that will cause civilian casualties for years to come. There is human and physical damage: civilian death and injury directly from the bombing, and the destruction of Kosovar homes that has to be counted in, because it would not necessarily have occurred had we not had the bombing campaign.

Many in the US and even in other NATO counties viewed the Kosovo War as an humanitarian effort, though in Greece and Italy criticism was notable. Galbraith touches on the potential negative consequences of that perception in his final paragraph:

Our current capability to bomb presents similar problems. It tempts us to take a path that is easy on ourselves, but inflicts maximum damage on other people, and that prompts us to neglect our responsibility to win over the candid opinion of the rest of the world before committing our forces to military action.

We've seen that last danger realized to a large extent in the Afghan and Iraq Wars. In Afghanistan, the Bush Administration's faith in the power of bombs and the idea of winning with minimal exposure of American troops led to a decision to concentrate on an aerial campaign and backing the Northern Alliance in a war for "regime change" in Kabul.  But the goal of targeting al-Qaeda operatives would likely have been better served by injections of Special Forces in areas where Bin Laden's cadres were concentrated.

Former counterterrorism chief Richard Clarke supported the Afghan War.  However, he believes the approach taken was badly misconceived.  In Against All Enemies (2004), he writes:

Yet right from the start, we made crucial mistakes. The war that the U.S. fought in Afghanistan was not the rapid, no-holds-barred operation that one might have expected. We did not immediately send forces to capture al Qaeda and Taliban leadership. The Bush administration decided to continue appeals to the Taliban to turn over bin Laden and his followers, and then, when we attacked, we treated the war as a regime change rather than a search-and-destroy against terrorists.

And the neglect of winning over "the candid opinion of the rest of the world" prior to the Iraq War has had enormous negative consequences for the US.  And will continue to do so long into the future.