Clinton Will Keep Troops in Bosnia

By John F. Harris
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, December 19, 1997; Page A01

With a blunt admission that he misjudged how long it would take to build lasting peace in Bosnia, President Clinton yesterday announced that he has decided in principle to keep U.S. military forces there past a June 1998 deadline and into the indefinite future.

While the administration remains in the midst of an internal debate over how many U.S. troops should stay in Bosnia and precisely what they should do, Clinton said pulling out the U.S. force now would invite a return to the ethnic violence that made one in 10 Bosnians a casualty of war before a U.S.-brokered peace settlement two years ago.

Rather than bringing the 8,000 U.S. troops home by June 30, administration officials say the options now receiving most serious consideration by Clinton would reduce this figure only modestly -- and conceivably not at all -- and that the essential mission of the troops would remain unchanged. Their withdrawal, Clinton said, would depend on the fulfillment of a series of "benchmarks" toward creation of a "self-sustaining, secure environment" in Bosnia.

Clinton declined to pledge that this goal would be reached by the time he leaves office in three years and said -- after twice setting target dates for bringing troops home and twice missing those targets -- that he would no longer define a military mission by dates on a calendar.

"I understand your job is try to get a deadline nailed down, but we tried it . . . and it turned out we were wrong," Clinton told reporters at the White House briefing room.

While Clinton's announcement yesterday was a culmination of months of debate and speculation over the future of the U.S. military mission in the Balkans, many questions remain about what benchmarks will eventually be used to determine progress. Clinton said the standards would be worked out over the next month by the United States and NATO allies.

Among several sample standards Clinton offered were whether Bosnia's governing institutions -- in which power is shared among Bosnian Serbs, Croats and Muslims -- will be strong enough to survive on their own after a NATO pullout, whether the country's civilian police force is capable of maintaining order on its own and whether the military is clearly under democratic civilian control.

Two years after Clinton first ordered U.S. troops to Bosnia to enforce a U.S.-brokered peace agreement signed at Dayton, Ohio, with a pledge that they would be out in a year, none of these conditions is close to being met. Bosnia, he said, "remains poised on a tightrope, moving toward a better future, but not at the point yet of a self-sustaining peace." With Clinton set to leave for Bosnia in three days to visit troops for the Christmas holiday, his announcement prompted divergent reactions among members of the Republican majority in Congress, which must approve funds for an extended U.S. military presence in Bosnia.

Some influential voices on Bosnia policy, such as Sen. Richard G. Lugar (R-Ind.), praised Clinton for stating more forthrightly than he has in the past what remains for the U.S. military to do in Bosnia. But Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) noted that Clinton was breaking his second deadline for bringing troops home and that the benchmarks the president mentioned yesterday were far too vague to prevent the military from being bogged down in an expensive and indefinite commitment.

For two months or more, administration officials from White House national security adviser Samuel R. "Sandy" Berger to Secretary of State Madeleine K. Albright have been signaling broadly that an extension of the U.S. military mission is inevitable. Still, officials said yesterday, Clinton had to make it explicit now in order to begin the task of convincing Congress and to reassure European allies, who have warned that they have no intention of staying in Bosnia if the United States goes.

Even so, Clinton, in explaining yesterday why his decision was "in principle," set down conditions for U.S. participation in a follow-on to the current "SFOR," or Stabilization Force, which has more than 30,000 troops on the ground. U.S. involvement after June, he said, is contingent on the United States remaining in command and an increase in the European share of the force. In addition, Clinton said, "the cost must be manageable" -- though neither he nor other administration officials yesterday would estimate what an extension might cost.

While Clinton described the extension as open-ended, he said it would not be "permanent."

Clinton credited the NATO mission so far with ending hostilities and returning Bosnia to some degree of normalcy, but large gaps remain in implementing the agreement, including the capture of many of the most prominent indicted war criminals, returning most of the 2 million refugees evicted by war, removing Bosnia's media from the hands of propagandists and establishing a reliable police force.

Within the administration, Berger and Albright agreed early on the need for an extension, but Defense Secretary William S. Cohen, who criticized the Bosnia mission when he was a senator and said in his confirmation hearings that it would end on time, was opposed. Cohen has said he has changed his mind about the need.

Even within the Pentagon, though, there are different views about how to accomplish this. Cohen is understood by other officials to prefer a substantially smaller force that would no longer be responsible for some of the policing, election monitoring and refugee resettlement functions that U.S. and other coalition troops have assumed.

But Gen. Wesley Clark, NATO's top military commander, is reported to be pressing for keeping the force near its current size, given the fragility of Bosnia's peace and the still anemic civilian reconstruction effort.

NATO is set to decide early next year on the final shape of a force. The administration recently sent NATO formal planning guidance outline options for a future force. One option, little favored in the White House, calls for a smaller rapid-reaction combat force with the single mission of preventing hostilities. A second option would involve a broad force, about the size of the current one, that would retain many of the same tasks, such as helping civilian agencies return refugees and retrain police. A third option falls somewhere in between the first two.

The fact that the most prominent alleged war criminals, including Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic, remain at large continues to be an embarrassment to the NATO force. But Clinton yesterday said that rounding up war criminals is not the principal mission of the military and said that even if Karadzic is not arrested, as long as he is "deep enough underground" then "we might make the peace work anyway."

While Clinton refused to set a deadline, he and his aides remain exquisitely sensitive to the idea that they are inviting a military quagmire. Clinton emphasized that he is not contemplating a "permanent presence" for the military. And Berger, without being asked, brought up an analogy to the escalation of U.S. involvement in Vietnam, in order to reject it.

"We're talking about an important operation, but we're not talking about hundreds of thousands or even tens of thousands of American soldiers, number one," he said. "Number two, we're talking about a trajectory that is heading in the right direction, in terms of America's ultimate departure."

Staff writers Helen Dewar and Bradley Graham contributed to this report.