Travel  |  Business World  |  Women's World  |  Entertainment

Change Your Life!

British report cites NATO's 'confusion of purpose'

News
Sports
Chat
Travel
Dhaka Today
Yellow Pages
Higher Education
Ask a Doctor
Weather
Currency Rate
Horoscope
E-Cards
B2K Poll
Comment on the Site
B2K Club

October 25, 2000 

LONDON (AP) - Saying that military conflicts are always "messy, dangerous and wholly unpredictable," a British report on last year's NATO bombing campaign in Yugoslavia advised politicians to be more realistic about what the alliance's military powers can achieve.

"Kosovo has ... dispelled the illusion that NATO is an instrument that can readily be used in a precise and discriminating way to support diplomacy," said the report, published Tuesday by the House of Commons defense committee.

The 19-nation alliance launched a 78-day air war last year to try to force former Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic to end his crackdown on ethnic Albanians in Kosovo. Atrocities against the ethnic Albanians continued unabated during the air war.

In their report, aimed at analyzing the effects of the bombing campaign and Britain's contribution to it, the lawmakers concluded that Britain's role was disappointing and limited. The British air forces suffered from a lack of precision-guided weapons and carried out fewer than 5 percent of all NATO sorties flown, they said.

"Overall, despite the heroic efforts of U.K. aircrew and support staff, we must conclude that the U.K.'s contribution to the air campaign, in terms of actual firepower rather than support, was somewhat disappointing," the report said.

"U.K. aircraft were (even compared to other European allies) relatively few in number, delivered few munitions relative to even their small numbers and were not well-equipped for the task they faced."

The report concluded that Britain's major contribution was in the form of "cluster bombs," which drop munitions over wide areas of ground - a weapon the lawmakers concluded was "of limited military value and questionable legitimacy" during the campaign.

Despite some success, the air strikes "failed in their primary objective of averting a humanitarian disaster" as hundreds of thousands of ethnic Albanians were expelled from Kosovo by Serb forces, the report noted.

"The limitations of airpower in pursuit of such humanitarian goals were clearly demonstrated and this lesson must be learned," it said.

The lawmakers also criticized NATO over what they saw as a "confusion of purpose" about the campaign's objectives. Public pronouncements by leaders such as U.S. President Bill Clinton ruling out the use of ground troops were a "serious error of judgment," the report said.

"They enabled Milosevic to shelter much of his military equipment underground, rather than leaving it deployed to meet the possibility of a ground attack. This severely weakened the impact of air attacks against forces in the field," according to the report.

The lawmakers concluded that "military conflict ... is messy, dangerous and not wholly predictable. Politicians will, we hope, face up to some of its less palatable lessons."

Despite strong criticisms in the report, Britain's Armed Forces Minister John Spellar said the findings implicitly acknowledged that the NATO operation had been a success.

"The departure of Milosevic's troops from Kosovo, the return of Kosovar Albanians and now the rejection of Milosevic's dictatorship by the people of Serbia has shown that NATO's approach was right," he said. "It is right that we should look at the lessons that can be learned. But we must not let this overshadow the fact that our objectives were achieved."