OVER the past month diplomats and military officers from the U.S. and NATO have been struggling to figure out how to respond to Yugoslavia’s heavy-handed repression of Albanian separatists in the province of Kosovo. They were searching for some sort of military action that would cause Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic to rein in his troops and yet not encourage the terrorist Kosovo Liberation Army in its fight for Kosovo’s independence.
As the discussions grew frustrating, one senior official noted the sticking point. Over the past several years, NATO had learned what made Milosevic tick, but it knew little, if anything, about the KLA, its plans, leadership, methods, or supporters. “We need to do a lot more work,” the official noted, to figure out who the KLA is and how it works. After all, if one is in the business of sending signals, one must be relatively sure who the party being signaled is and whether he understands the signals and rules of the game. He might, after all, be playing by different rules. But who’s to know?
Comments