Those watching NATO action are now confident of victory

The strike against the Chinese embassy in Belgrade has widened to a chasm the gap between the soul-searching of NATO's political masters and the growing confidence of those on the ground who think victory is in sight.

An upbeat feeling is hard to avoid among the diplomats, military observers and NATO officers now pouring into neighbouring Macedonia and Albania. Those watching the action believe the Alliance will win, given enough time and the willingness to use, and perhaps lose, some ground troops.

This is based on a number of assumptions. The first is that nearly 50 days of bombing is beginning to have an incremental effect on the Serbian war machine. The Serbs now have little refining capacity, so oil must be imported in its expensive, refined, state. And paid for by a country which is technically bankrupt. And stored in canisters because anything larger has been bombed. And transported along roads with blown bridges and constant battering from prowling jets.

While NATO can churn out more and more bombs, the Serbs cannot so easily replace lost tanks and men. Furthermore, half the 45,000 Serb troops in Kosovo are police units, sufficient for tussling with lightly armed guerrillas, but neither equipped nor trained for battle with tanks supported by aircraft.

Under the grinding law of diminishing returns, NATO's planners here expect eventually to smash Serb forces to the point where a compact ground force can roll into Kosovo from neighbouring Albania.

The diplomats here say Serbia's fighting record is poor. Its heroic resistance to Nazi occupation in the second World War has yet to be seen in the wars in Yugoslavia in the past decade.

Against Croatia in 1991 the cream of the army, badly led and prone to desertion, took three months to take one town, Vukovar, against a far smaller Croatian force.

Five years on the Croats, helped by US advisers, took two days to recapture its Serb-held province of Krajina, puncturing the legend of military prowess of the Krajina Serbs, who once guarded the borders of Christendom against Ottoman invaders.

A few months later Bosnian Croat and Muslim forces swept the Serbs from much of northern Bosnia. When one Serb position fell, the entire line fell back, units more frightened of being taken captive than defending their homeland.

Serb forces have yet to demonstrate that they can hold their own against forces of comparable strength.

Kosovo could be different. This province is the most sacred part of Serbdom, and Serbs could yet decide to fight sacrificial battles to defend it. But that, say NATO staff here, is the whole point. For a Serb unit to fend off a NATO armoured column, which could call on unlimited air support, would mean a sacrificial holding action. Some Serb units might be willing to do this. NATO is betting that most would rather run away.

A ground offensive of sorts is already under way, with the rebel Kosovo Liberation Army having carved out a modest slice of northern Kosovo from bases in Albania.

More KLA units are active inside Kosovo, picking off isolated Serb units and further battering morale already strained by air strikes and lack of leave.

Quantifying all this is difficult, and Alliance intelligence inconclusive. Nevertheless, some think they see weakness in the Serb withdrawal last week from the key northern Shalja mountain. The KLA says the Serb pullout has nothing to do with its own action, and hopes it is a sign of the Serbs drawing in their lines as they grow weaker.

One by one, Serb positions are being found, mapped and then "taken out" by NATO jets. Such strikes are poised to increase massively.

Forget about the Apaches, high-tech helicopters that will find it hard to find targets in the mountainous border. The weapon that has them excited in the bars of Skopje and Tirana is the Multiple Launch Rocket System (MLRS).

About 15 of these tracked beasts are now in northern Albania, each with the ability to take out, in NATO's user-friendly parlance, everything within an area the size of a football field. Hence, for instance, NATO could "pave the way" along a road by simply destroying every Serb firing position along it.

And here, of course, the military and political views collide. The military men here know that, given enough time, NATO can simply "MLRS" its way through Kosovo. NATO's politicians know they may not have that time.

"The opinions here, these are from military men," said a French diplomat in Tirana. "In Europe they are thinking, we've been bombing and the atrocities are still happening. People are thinking, `Are we doing something wrong'?"