By William Drozdiak
Washington Post Foreign Service
Thursday, October 8, 1998; Page A27

BERLIN, Oct. 7—With hopes fading for an eleventh-hour diplomatic deal to resolve the Kosovo crisis, the NATO allies struggled today to reach agreement on whether to launch punitive airstrikes against military targets in Yugoslavia.

Secretary of State Madeleine K. Albright flew to Brussels tonight for talks with U.S. special envoy Richard C. Holbrooke, who has concluded three days of unsuccessful negotiations with Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic in Belgrade, and with NATO Secretary General Javier Solana.

The United States, along with Britain, has been pushing for a NATO decision to take military action against Yugoslavia to force Milosevic to comply with U.N. demands that he halt the violence in Kosovo, a province of the Yugoslav republic of Serbia, withdraw Serbian security forces and begin autonomy talks with Kosovo's ethnic-Albanian majority.

But in the face of continued uncertainty within the alliance about whether to launch a military attack, U.S. and British officials today softened their comments about an imminent decision, stressing that no deadline had been set and that they would prefer a diplomatic solution.

Speaking to reporters in Jerusalem, Albright said she had spent a lot of time on the telephone with Western foreign ministers trying to forge a consensus, but U.S. officials said there was still no clear agreement on military action.

"We are continuing to push for early action," said State Department spokesman James P. Rubin. "NATO is not there yet." But, Rubin added, "nobody is in a rush to use force."

Albright plans to travel to London on Friday to meet with foreign ministers from Washington's major European allies and Russia that make up the six-nation "contact group," which guides international policy on the Balkans. A British official described the meeting as a "stock-taking event. We don't expect any big decisions to be taken there," the Reuters news agency reported.

Before flying to Brussels, Holbrooke completed a third day of what one U.S. official described as "grim and sober" talks with Milosevic that ended without progress.

In late February, Milosevic ordered Yugoslav army and special Interior Ministry units into Kosovo to put down a force of ethnic-Albanian guerrillas who were attacking Serbian police in an effort to win the province's independence. He has been criticized by the West for the brutal nature of the crackdown, which has killed at least 750 people, most of them ethnic-Albanian civilians, and forced at least 275,000 people to flee their homes.

Milosevic has claimed that he is already in compliance with the demands set out in the Sept. 23 U.N. Security Council resolution. But several U.S. officials close to Holbrooke's mission said they could not confirm Serbian claims of a "significant net outflow" of security personnel from Kosovo.

In Washington, a senior administration official said Milosevic is "unambiguously short of where he needs to be." President Clinton's senior national security advisers met to discuss planning for a military strike that White House officials said could happen within days, most likely by early next week.

In a brief statement tonight, Milosevic said only that the threat of a NATO airstrike was interfering with a political solution to the Kosovo crisis and that foreign media were behind "a campaign against our country."

Holbrooke's failure to reach a political agreement with Milosevic has left NATO governments facing a moment of truth they have long dreaded. After brandishing the threat of airstrikes for nearly seven months to no avail, the allies now confront the responsibility of living up to their word by carrying out the attacks while trying to stave off a humanitarian disaster by finding shelter for an estimated 50,000 refugees before winter arrives in Kosovo.

Alliance diplomats say NATO members will be asked in coming days to approve rules of engagement for an airborne attack, which military officials have said would begin with cruise missile strikes against Yugoslav air defenses and then escalate if necessary to a phased bombardment.

A senior NATO official said the alliance's governments would be reviewing an "activation order" that places aircraft of member states under control of the NATO military commander and moves them into the Balkan region. They also would be asked for material contributions for a humanitarian-relief effort for refugees.

But at least five NATO members -- Spain, Denmark, Greece, Italy and Germany -- have said they believe military action should be undertaken only after a new Security Council resolution authorizes use of force. The United States and Britain, along with France, maintain that NATO already has the legal authority to act, and they want to avoid an almost certain Russian veto of any new U.N. resolution.

Senior alliance diplomats say failure to follow through with the intervention threats would deal a severe blow to NATO's credibility and create the appearance that Russia can block NATO military operations.

On the other hand, several governments are troubled by the unprecedented situation of having NATO launch an attack that would breach the territory of a sovereign nation without clear legal authority from the United Nations.

The different interpretations suggest that NATO ambassadors still face considerable work in trying to achieve unanimous consent about how and when to deploy military force. Aides to Solana, who canceled a trip to Greece to remain at NATO headquarters in Brussels, said he expects the efforts to achieve consensus to continue "around the clock" and to last well into the weekend.

"It is important that everybody says yes," said a senior NATO official in Brussels. "Consensus is the absolute rule here. We all agree that before NATO acts the allies will have a collective understanding of what the legal basis is."

In the case of Italy, which has air bases from which some of the planned air attacks would be launched, the government of Prime Minister Romano Prodi is facing a tenuous vote of confidence Friday and may not feel able to make any decision that would jeopardize its survival.

Germany also faces a complicated situation. Last week, the outgoing government of Chancellor Helmut Kohl approved mobilization of 14 Tornado ground-attack aircraft and 500 troops for any military action against Yugoslavia. But the German Supreme Court has ruled that parliament, which was dissolved with the Sept. 27 election that ousted Kohl, would have to be recalled to approve deployment of those forces for combat.

Germany's victorious Social Democrats say they would be prepared to endorse NATO military intervention without a clear U.N. mandate if it could be proved that Russia was "abusing" its right of veto.

But the Greens party, the likely junior partner in a future government led by the Social Democrats, has said that using force without a U.N. mandate would be a dangerous precedent that could jeopardize international stability.

Correspondent R. Jeffrey Smith in Belgrade and staff writers Thomas W. Lippman in Jerusalem and John F. Harris in Washington contributed to this report.