NATO's "air strikes only" strategy emboldened the Yugoslav President, Mr Slobodan Milosevic, to defy the West and will not achieve allied political goals in Kosovo unless it is backed by credible preparations for a ground war, a leading strategic think-tank said yesterday.
The respected International Institute for Strategic Studies said in its annual Strategic Survey that "while the operation against Serbia could clearly damage Serbian military power, the value of air power as an instrument to force diplomatic compliance was shown to be limited".
The West's reluctance to send a fighting force on the ground encouraged Mr Milosevic to adopt "a hedgehog strategy": taking air strikes in the belief that the West would be unable to ram an autonomy agreement for Kosovo down his throat, it said.
Mr John Chipman, director of the London-based institute, said Western policy was handicapped by a "strategic correctness" in which "military force is threatened without any corresponding willingness to accept the casualties that inevitably come with a serious military effort".
To secure a lowest common denominator of alliance cohesion, NATO had abandoned key principles of warfare: achieving surprise, not limiting one's options and keeping the enemy in doubt about one's intentions.
Despite the rhetoric of last month's Washington summit, allied leaders had failed so far to adopt a strategy for winning the war or to conceive a comprehensive political, military and economic strategy for stabilising the Balkans, he said.
Mr Chipman said NATO faced the choice between building up ground forces on Kosovo's borders with the threat of invading in a "semi-permissive environment", and having to compromise on some of its principles for ending the conflict.
NATO continues to oppose independence for the 1.8 million ethnic Albanians in Kosovo because of the precedent in changing borders and fears of a domino effect elsewhere in the Balkans.
"Unless the threat of force is coupled with a promise to deliver a less attractive political outcome than that promised by diplomacy alone, dictators will often prefer to play poker with the West's military machine," the IISS said.
The use of air power alone had not induced the Iraqi President, Mr Saddam Hussein, to allow the return of UN arms inspectors to Baghdad, it noted, and dropping bombs on Yugoslavia would not drive Mr Milosevic to sign the Rambouillet accords "when the facts of war might produce other, more useful options". The survey attributed earlier failures to settle the Kosovo question partly to Western short-sightedness, reacting to each crisis in former Yugoslavia as it flared without adopting a broader approach to stabilising the region, and partly to the reluctance of the United States to commit ground troops.
In a world with a peerless United States as the only one global superpower, a rapidly rusting Russia and a still inchoate Europe, "regional conflict will remain configured by the presence or absence of an American will to intervene", it said.