Into the Fire
The U.S. leads NATO's ferocious assault against the Milosevic regime--and finds itself tested in the harsh crucible of combat. In the bid to halt ethnic slaughter, has the alliance ignited a new Balkan tinderbox?
By BRUCE W. NELAN

If there was a single moment that captured both the fear and the optimism in NATO's shatteringly violent assault on Yugoslavian President Slobodan Milosevic last week, it came after the second wave of attacks, when British Air Commodore David Wilby played an astonishing "bombsight" video. The snippet--about eight seconds long--showed a NATO bomb streaking into an ammunition depot in Kosovo. Milliseconds after the bomb strike, the video showed a large explosion. And then an almost imperceptible snake of flame sneaked outward to a nearby building and triggered a blast so bright and hot it turned the infrared video image from night to day. In pilot jargon, the big bang was a "secondary"--a sign that targeters had picked a site loaded with combustible stuff.

But the video was also a worrisome metaphor for the strike itself. In the days after last Wednesday night's initial air attack, the anger and determination that brought NATO and Yugoslavia head-to-head seemed to snake out like that tiny flame in the video, triggering all kinds of "secondaries." On Saturday night the combat came home to Americans, who had their television shows interrupted by images of an F-117A Stealth fighter in flames on the ground inside Yugoslavia--and the astonishing story of the rescue of the downed pilot. Earlier in the week U.S. embassies from Moscow to Paris were besieged by furious Serbs, American allies like Italy and Greece nervously waffled on their support for the bombing, and neighboring states from Albania to Macedonia were convulsed by the prospect of ethnic violence. Inside Yugoslavia, in what may come to be regarded as the worst of the secondary effects of the strike, Serbian troops stepped up their campaign against Kosovo's Albanian citizens, squeezing the province in a pincer movement that stabbed south from Belgrade and north from the Macedonian border. The offensive produced thousands of refugees and inspired terrifying reports of mass killings.

For more than a century, the world has worried that the Balkans were a tinderbox. Last week NATO went in with a big match--and by week's end it was impossible to see if they had started a brush fire or, for the third time in 100 years, a conflagration. "Look," President Clinton told his wound-up crisis team in a Saturday morning Oval Office meeting, "this is not a 30-second commercial."

That was abundantly clear Saturday night as the world ogled the burning wreckage of the F-117A, a plane that more than any other symbolized the nation's technical and strategic superiority. Before the attack, Pentagon planners estimated NATO would lose 10 planes in the initial wave of strikes. President Clinton warned the nation that the conflict was not without risks. But NATO skated around those risks so effortlessly at first that it was possible to hope for a war without costs. Even amid the relief at the pilot's rescue, it was difficult to retain that illusion.

It's hard to overstate how remarkable and surprising to most people this war in the name of peace is. On the eve of its 50th birthday, NATO, a defensive alliance founded to protect Western Europe from Soviet invasion, has struck hard at a sovereign state that is not a threat to the allies. Without a specific U.N. Security Council authorization, NATO is intervening in a civil war, a war of secession, to halt the cruelty with which it is being fought--especially by the Serbs. In the process, the allies run the risk that their attacks might increase the level of killing in Kosovo, drive the conflict into neighboring countries and make a negotiated peace less likely.

And this is only the start of a three-stage campaign that could last several weeks. As allied bombs continue to fall on the Yugoslav air-defense network, NATO will increasingly go after the tanks, artillery and armored vehicles the Serbs are using to demolish villages in Kosovo. In Phase Two, the allied pilots will focus on hitting the Serb forces spreading carnage inside Kosovo and staging just north of the province.

If the campaign continues into the third phase--and the allies will have to vote on that--NATO planes would attack military targets in every part of Serbia. How the adventure turns out hangs precariously on the decisions of Milosevic. Will he buckle under or hunker down? Or will he lash out with his carefully hoarded missiles and planes to fracture the still fragile NATO alliance? The bombing would stop if he were to phone in his agreement to a truce and enforceable autonomy for Kosovo. If he doesn't, no one is quite clear about how this drama will end.

Paving the Way
For all the satisfaction and can-do spirit coming from NATO headquarters and the Clinton Administration, there are signs that even Phase One did not go as well as the planners had hoped. The main objective in the opening round was to destroy as many as possible of Serbia's 1,000 surface-to-air missiles and almost 2,000 antiaircraft guns, making the air safer for the planes that will later go sniffing after tanks and artillery. Milosevic's air-defense system is, as NATO commanders keep insisting, "state of the art." But he and his lieutenants have not been cooperating with plans for its destruction. They have kept most of their missiles hidden in thick forests, their radars turned off so they remain invisible to NATO's missiles. The Pentagon is particularly interested in rooting out the 30 or so most sophisticated missile launchers--Russian SA-6s--but it admits that it hasn't found a "large slice" of them. No one in the Pentagon knows for sure why the Serbs are holding back, but there is one fear: "They're just waiting for us to fly a little lower and a little slower," says an officer.

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