On December 16, 1995, over 60,000 troops of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and partner countries entered Bosnia on the alliance's first-ever peacekeeping mission. Operating under the International Force (IFOR) banner, the troops moved quickly to disarm the combatants that in the previous 42 months had killed over 200,000 people and turned Bosnia's cities and villages into rubble. Five years and five commanders later, a scaled-down presence of 20,000 troops now known as the Stabilization Force (SFOR) remains in the country. But NATO's mission, which moved with speed and success in its first months, recently became mired in a web of corruption scandals and frustration which grips the international presence in Bosnia. Despite years of essentially direct rule by Western experts and $5 billion in aid, Bosnia remains a poor country divided into three ethnic groups passionately resentful of each other.

Yet the military component of the mission is hardly a failure. The military's peacekeeping task, as defined in the Dayton Peace Agreement that ended the Bosnia war in 1995, was to enforce the former warring parties' accord to stop hostilities, withdraw from areas of conflict, and turn over their weapons. In the long run, IFOR was to assist civilian authorities in their efforts to rebuild Bosnia. IFOR and SFOR succeeded admirably on the first count but faltered on the second.

In parallel with the peacekeepers' efforts, the international community began repairing Bosnia's economy and creating a stable political system. The United Nations Security Council created an Office of the High Representative (OHR) to direct this effort, which was nothing less than building a new nation from the ashes of the old Bosnia. But from the beginning, the civilian mission ran into trouble: much of the $5 billion allocated to Bosnia has been lost to mismanagement and corruption. Even more importantly, international efforts failed to break the stronghold of extreme nationalist parties on local politics. Even as the hard-line regimes of Slobodan Milosevic and Franjo Tudjman crumbled in neighboring Serbia and Croatia, Bosnia re-elected many of its extremist, war-time leaders in the November 2000 general elections. Five years into the rebuilding mission, virtually everyone in Bosnia agrees that, should the international military and civilian forces withdraw, the country would quickly descend back into war.

 
Keeping Peace

The peacekeepers' work in Bosnia began with disarming and separating the warring factions. In this, IFOR was entirely successful. The war stopped, the armies withdrew back to bases, and the highly visible IFOR presence discouraged most confrontations. IFOR and later SFOR were less successful at removing non-Bosnian armed forces from the republic as demanded in the Dayton Agreement. In 1999, the independent International Crisis Group (ICG) reported that mujahedeen forces, as well as units from Yugoslavia and Croatia, were still present in Bosnia. Some – including fighters close to Osama Bin Laden – reportedly settled in Bosnia and travel using the country's passports. But the overall level of violence is very low – by Bosnia's standards – and except for isolated cases the foreign units have not been implicated in any armed incidents.

Rebuilding the Armed Forces

As their second and more controversial task, U.S. forces (separate from IFOR/SFOR) also set out to arm and train the armed forces of the Croat and Bosniak (Muslim) entities, jointly known as the Federation forces. The program, known as Train & Equip, was designed to bring the Federation forces to roughly equal strength with the Bosnian Serbs, thus deterring future hostilities. As a secondary goal, Train & Equip was to forge close cooperation between the Bosniaks and Croats in Bosnia.

In practice, the cooperation sputtered. Bosnia's Croat forces continued to rely on aid, training, and weapons from Croatia itself. In 1998, 100 percent of the Bosnian Croat army's budget came from Croatia (the level of aid may decline under the new government that came to power in Croatia in January 2000). Train & Equip turned largely into an aid program for Bosniak troops. U.S. advisors trained the Bosniaks while Arab countries – mostly Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Brunei, and Malaysia – supplied weapons.

On one level, Train & Equip was a success: Bosniak troops have not been challenged by any of the other armed factions in the republic, although this is mostly due to the deterrent effect of IFOR/SFOR forces in the area. Train & Equip, however, cemented the division of Bosnia's armed forces into three ethnically-based components. Just as the Bosnian Croat troops receive support from Croatia, nearly a half of the Bosnian Serb army's budget in 1998 came from Yugoslavia (this support, too, will likely decline with the removal of Slobodan Milosevic from power). The foreign financial support to Bosnian Croats and Bosnian Serbs removed any incentive for those ethnic groups to cooperate with the Bosnian government in Sarajevo. Even more ominously, "all three [armed] forces [in Bosnia] maintain active intelligence gathering and order-of-battle … to fight against one another," noted the United States Institute of Peace (USIP). Richard Holbrooke, the architect of the Dayton Agreement, recently acknowledged that creating three separate armies had been a mistake.

Enforcing Law

IFOR/SFOR units were most often criticized for their timid approach to arresting war criminals. Dozens of persons accused of heinous crimes during the 1992-95 war continue to live freely – and in some cases very prominently – in all three parts of Bosnia. The whereabouts of dozens of other indicted war criminals are publicly known, and international representatives in Bosnia often work with them on a daily basis. Nevertheless, SFOR has detained less than one third of the publicly indicted war criminals. This statistic has improved lately but some of the best known, including the wartime Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic, remain at large (U.S. forces claim to have no known war criminals remaining in their sector).

The Dayton accord clearly makes IFOR responsible for enforcing implementation of the agreements. A February 1996 follow-up agreement to Dayton, the Rome Treaty, puts IFOR (now SFOR) in charge of providing security for the work of war crime prosecutors and investigators in Bosnia. SFOR troops have already carried out a number of arrests, so any arguments about a lack of mandate – occasionally raised by SFOR when pressed to make arrests – are clearly invalid. The peacekeepers' inability or unwillingness to capture the indictees casts a shadow over the mission. Whether the peacekeepers themselves are to be blamed is less clear. A 1997 report by the U.S. Institute of Peace exonerates the military and puts the blame on political masters. "[There was] a clear abdication of decision-making responsibility on the part of NATO's political leadership," USIP wrote. "In order to limit the likelihood of political failure that often occurs when military lives are lost, politicians have seemingly left it to the generals to define the Bosnia mission. Based on the Somalia experience [where the relief mission ended after 18 American soldiers died in a botched assault] the NATO mission has adopted a minimalist approach in order to avoid conflict and casualties."

Lessons of Bosnia

Plan for peacekeeping operation. Current war plans make no room for peacekeeping. Even though the Bosnia mission is five years old, peacekeeping assignments are treated as ad-hoc short-term contingencies. As Bosnia and Kosovo demonstrate, peace operations are likely to last years rather than weeks or months. The ad hoc nature of U.S peacekeeping has very practical implications. The first U.S. troops in Bosnia lived in tents for over a year before obtaining more suitable accommodation (four years later, in Kosovo, SEA-huts were erected almost immediately). Just as importantly, poor planning leaves political damage. The Bosnia mission was originally presented as a one-year assignment. When President Clinton extended it further in 1996, he angered crucial supporters in Congress. Low public support and congressional opposition hamper peacekeeping itself – U.S. commanders are averse to taking any chances for fear of alienating the fragile congressional support.

Incorporate peace operations into training. The Bosnia experience shows that changes are needed, especially on the command level. All commanders who have led U.S. troops in Bosnia noted the lack of proper training for peace missions. "I was on my own," said General Montgomery Meigs, former IFOR and SFOR commander. "I'd certainly never been trained for this." Most SFOR commanders created their own crash courses in peace operation in Bosnia before assuming command, but a more organized approach is needed. As a potential blueprint for such a training program, the U.S. Institute of Peace interviewed past SFOR commanders and identified the most crucial skills required for the mission. Besides warfighting, USIP highlighted the need for an ability to interact with international non-military agencies, strong interpersonal skills, strong intellectual background, patience, and the confidence to delegate authority.

Create clear and sensible rules of engagement. The rules should provide a reasonable margin of safety for the troops without keeping them from implementing their mandate. U.S. troops in Bosnia suffer from the "Somali syndrome" – exaggerated casualty-avoidance in order to avoid losing political support at home. Their reluctance to apprehend war criminals is a case in point. Future rules of engagement should be defined as clearly as possible while still giving troops on the ground the flexibility to adjust to changing situations.

For Additional Information:

CDI Balkans Home Page.

CDI European Defense Home Page.

E-Mail Senior Analyst Tomas Valasek.

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