NATO meeting December 16, 1997

NATO leaders met in Brussels on December 16th and 17th, 1997 to discuss a smaller, more flexible NATO-led peace keeping force for Bosnia after the (current) mandate of the Stabilization Force would expire in June 1998. US Secretary of State Albright was faced with the difficulty of a reluctant US congress and she pushed her NATO colleagues to take a bigger share of responsibility for key duties like the training and equipping of Bosnian police. "The United States will continue to do its share. But in key areas such as this, other members of the alliance need to do much, much more," she said.

The NATO leaders approved a proposal giving military planners 4 options for extending the peace mission. The generals were expected to report back in January. NATO was not expected to make a final decision to extend the mission until March 1, 1998.

Earlier, the Clinton administration promised the American people that the 8,500 troops then in Bosnia would be home when the (current) mandate would end in June 1998. Later, Clinton admitted that was a mistake. At a news conference in Washington Clinton said: "If there is to be a mission after the SFOR mission expires, it must also have a clear-objective component. I still don't believe there should be anybody interested in some kind of a permanent stationing of global military presence all over Bosnia."

Options

There still did not seem to be the political will for maintaining a similar force as SFOR with at least 34,000 troops, roughly half the amount of the initial 60,000 troop Implementation Force that started its deployment in 1995. Of these IFOR troops, 20,000 were US soldiers.

A major question was how much support the NATO-led forces would be expected to provide for civilian implementation of the Dayton agreement.

The serious alternatives presented at time were:

• One of the options presented during the meeting was a full withdrawal. That seemed unlikely, now that every political and military expert was convinced that some sort of force was needed to prevent resumption of the war and implementation of the Dayton agreement. The NATO allies said they would withdraw if the US would.
• Another option was to carry out the same mission with fewer troops -- some said 18,000 -- and stripping the NATO-led force of all civilian responsibility and concentrating solely on the military mission.
• A possibility was cutting down the number of troops while maintaining all military security and civilian rebuilding programs. In other words, maintaining a similar force as deployed at the time.
• Another option was to restrict the civilian and military programs while focusing on hot spots such as Brcko and Mostar.

Alternatives

There were several other scenarios. Some suggested an "over-the-horizon force," a highly mobile force based outside of Bosnia, ready to deploy as needed. But generals said the idea was too expensive and impractical to implement.

Another idea was bringing in a large police force — such as France's gendarmes — to reinforce the UN International Police Task Force. The unarmed force essentially was a training and monitoring group. Neither the military nor the police liked the idea of putting police under military command.

Political Planning

None of the options approved so far contained troop levels. That was to be worked out by the military. They did not talk about any new date for a final troop withdrawal but rather the conditions under which a NATO withdrawal would be possible, with reviews every six months.

Albright still needed to convince the US congress, but gradually she was getting more European support. She praised the European allies for committing resources to Bosnia before the United States did, but suggested they should have done more to retrain Bosnia's security forces to eventually replace NATO.

Finances

Canada and Norway responded by pledging several hundred thousand dollars each to the police training effort, and other Europeans nations were expected to contribute and more equally share the burden.

The United States also announced US$1 million in new aid for the International War Crimes Tribunal in The Hague, partly to build a new courthouse by spring 1998 for increasing captures of suspects and prosecutions.