Source: Carnegie

Reprinted from the Weekly Standard, May 5, 1997

American troops in Bosnia face a unique threat that even the fiercest critics of the peacekeeping mission never imagined. Forget all the hysterical predictions that U.S. soldiers would be slaughtered in a vicious crossfire between angry Serbs and Muslims, or assaulted by rogue snipers just itching to square off with M-1 tanks and Apache helicopter gunships. No, it turns out that our troops have a different problem: They're bored.

Bored sick, in fact. The New York Times recently reported that "the tedium . . . is stifling," and soldiers deployed in Bosnia for longer than six months start showing signs of severe mental fatigue and low morale. Two of the three U.S. fatalities in the 16-month-old mission have been suicides (the other was the result of a land-mine explosion). As a statistical matter, the Times notes, the forces in Bosnia have more "to fear from themselves than from any of the former combatants in the Bosnian war." They've also suffered fewer casualties than if they had been conducting routine training exercises or driving around America's highways. But they are suffering nonetheless from acute frustration at a mission that seems increasingly to have no purpose.

Boredom is, of course, always a part of a soldier's life. The real cause of low troop morale in Bosnia is a sense of their utter uselessness. When the Sarajevan suburb of Alija was put to the torch last year, Admiral Leighton W. Smith, Jr., then U.S. commander of NATO forces, refused to intervene. When Muslim refugees were shot by Croats in the town of Mostar, NATO troops could only watch. When Muslim homes in the town of Gajevi were burned down by Serb mobs last month, American troops were ordered to stay behind their barbed-wire fences and do nothing.

Not surprisingly, our soldiers in Bosnia have gradually adopted the sad cynicism of cops driving through a bad neighborhood. They can see the thugs working over their victims in the shadows, but they've been told to stay in their cars and drive on. As one soldier told the Times, "We all wonder if when we pull out in 1998 the Bosnians won't start fighting again. I don't want to look back 10 years from now and say I wasted my time."

It is beginning to look as though the Bosnian deployment will indeed have been a waste of time, not to mention a squandering of more valuable resources like national prestige, money, the cohesiveness of the NATO alliance, and the well-being of the international system. More than anything, the ennui of American troops reflects the fact that the mission to implement the 1995 peace accords signed with so much fanfare in Dayton is now sliding toward failure. The troops know it, and so do officials in Washington.

The Bosnia mission has been losing altitude for months. War criminals still run free. Refugees are barred from returning to their homes. Efforts to reinvigorate the Bosnian economy and rebuild infrastructure destroyed in the war have faltered miserably, mostly due to inadequate international leadership by the United States and its principal allies. Despite the relatively successful elections last September, Bosnia remains riven by ethnic hatreds which seem to be hardening rather than eroding.

And if that weren't enough bad news for the troops, enter William S. Cohen, the new secretary of defense. Public statements by Cohen in recent weeks have sent the already descending Bosnia policy into a steep and perhaps irrecoverable dive. Since the end of January, Cohen has been telling anyone who will listen that U.S. troops will be out of Bosnia by June 1998, regardless of the consequences.

"We are not going to be there," Cohen told his former colleagues at his chummy confirmation hearings. If Serbs, Muslims, and Croatians "go back to slaughtering each other" in Bosnia, Cohen declared in Germany, "it's going to be up to them." If you take Cohen's comments seriously -- and both European and Balkan leaders do -- then the United States is, for all intents and purposes, already out of Bosnia. For those still hunkered down in the Balkan mud, Cohen's pronouncements have only reinforced their growing sense that all the time they have invested in the mission will have been in vain.

Cohen's comments have been music to the ears of Republicans who, like Cohen himself, opposed the Bosnia mission from the beginning. Some, like House Budget Committee chairman John Kasich, have recently proposed legislation that would pull the troops out even sooner. And why not? If Clinton's defense secretary doesn't believe it matters what happens in Bosnia after we leave, why should we stay another year?

While opponents of an active Bosnia policy may be celebrating the turn Cohen has given to Clinton's policy, some of his new colleagues in the Clinton administration are furious with him. Since Cohen took office, a senior official says, U.S. policy has been "stagnating and beginning to move backwards." There is a "sense of drift and fatigue," both in the United States and among our European allies. Thanks to Cohen's repeated insistence on the June 1998 withdrawal date, the official complains, "Everything is now predicated on getting out. Rather than trying to build for success, we are working backwards from the departure date." State Department officials believe Cohen is trying to create "facts on the ground" to guarantee a quick withdrawal from Bosnia.

The problem is not primarily Cohen, of course, but the man who appointed him to run the Pentagon. The shockingly low level of Bill Clinton's commitment to his own policies in Bosnia was never more clearly demonstrated than when he named this staunch opponent of the mission to oversee the execution of military strategy. But signs of the president's inconstancy have abounded since the very beginning of the deployment in Bosnia.

Ever since making the risky decision to send the troops to the Balkans, Clinton and his advisers have done everything possible to reduce the political and military risks that logically flowed from that decision. It is as if Clinton spent every ounce of political courage in his being to launch the U.S. intervention over the objections of his myriad Republican critics. And once having braved that storm, he had no courage left over to see the mission through to a successful completion. Thus Clinton's strategy since that brief flurry of bold statesmanship a year and a half ago has aimed exclusively at avoiding further criticism -- like the kind of criticism that might arise from any American casualties that were not self-inflicted. The result has been a policy so risk-averse that it cannot possibly accomplish the objectives for which it was originally intended.

American policy in Bosnia has thus fallen victim to Clinton's unique style of political triangulation. Clinton sent the troops into Bosnia to achieve one set of goals, the implementation of the Dayton accords, aimed at rebuilding a unified Bosnian state. But to calm the anger of his Republican critics, he agreed to a military strategy that aimed at a very different and much more limited set of goals. The critics warned against "mission creep," derided the idea of "nation-building," insisted that there be no U.S. casualties, and demanded a clear and irrevocable "exit strategy." They were more interested in how we got out than in what we accomplished while we were there. These congressional critics had strong allies in the U.S. military, who opposed the more ambitious objectives of the Dayton accords and had no interest in using American troops to achieve them.

In the face of these combined pressures, Clinton gave in immediately. Even before the first troops set foot on Bosnian soil, Clinton agreed with the Joint Chiefs of Staff on a set of restrictions on the use of American power in Bosnia that all but guaranteed the promise of the Dayton accords would not be fulfilled. According to the terms of the agreement NATO forces could intervene to ensure implementation. But from the beginning U.S. commanders balked, and Clinton let them.

In the end, then, Clinton overcame the critics in sending the troops to Bosnia but also gave them effective control of the way his policy would be carried out.

The Clinton administration's mission in Bosnia probably ended before it began. William Perry, Cohen's predecessor at the Pentagon, described the American force in Bosnia as the "meanest dog" around; if so, that dog has been on a short, choking leash. To avoid the dreaded "mission creep," U.S. commanders refused to arrest war criminals -- even those traveling freely through areas which NATO forces nominally controlled. They refused to aid in the resettlement of refugees -- even though soldiers were confronted every month by the demoralizing spectacle of uprooted people being turned back from their old homes by stone-throwing mobs. And they refused to ensure Bosnian citizens safe passage across the bloody ethnic lines that the U.S.-sponsored Dayton peace accords aimed to erase.

The combined effect of all the restrictions imposed by the Clinton administration and its senior military planners meant that the U.S.-led multinational force was simply not in charge in Bosnia. To be sure, the troops separated the warring factions and forced the cantonment of many heavy weapons on all sides, all in a matter of weeks and with remarkably little resistance. But then they quickly put themselves in a canton, too. They dug in deep, built walls around their bases, steered clear of the natives, assiduously kept their noses out of other people's business. They steeled themselves to wait out the rest of their stay until they could finally go home, having accomplished little that can't be undone when they leave.

Senior military officials like to blame senior civilian officials for failing to reconstruct Bosnia once the violence was brought to a halt, and there is plenty to criticize on that account. But, according to Richard Holbrooke, the architect of the Dayton peace agreement, the reluctance of the U.S.-led international force "to go beyond a rather narrow definition of its role and mandate" has also had a damaging effect on the efforts to reconstruct Bosnia politically and economically.

"Despite [their] enormous capabilities," Holbrooke complained in a letter to the editor published in Foreign Affairs, the U.S. commanders have " avoided most opportunities to support the civilian parts of the agreement, even when the risk was minimal." In particular, their continuing refusal "to even consider, let alone attempt, the arrest of [Bosnian Serb leader] Radovan Karadzic or any other indicted war criminal . . . has given strength to the separatist cause." Ambassador Robert Gelbard, recently named President Clinton's point man on Bosnia, insisted in April that it is "fundamental" to the success of the president's policy that the war criminals be "handed over for justice."

But Holbrooke isn't in charge of U.S. policy in Bosnia, and neither is the State Department. President Clinton has turned the policy over to William Cohen. Clinton should not be surprised, therefore, when June 1998 rolls around and he gets the "solution" in Bosnia that Cohen and his friends in Congress were always willing to accept: de facto partition, a military balance slightly more favorable to the aggrieved Bosnian Muslims, a resumption of the brutal war over ethnic boundaries (since neither Serbs nor Muslims are happy with the current arrangement) -- and the United States on the sidelines.