In the Balkans events on the ground were about to change direction as well because of a new confidence in the Croat military. Despite some reservations at the top in Washington, the United States had authorized the training of the Croat army under the auspices of retired but highly talented American officers and NCOs, all of them operating in the private sector. Eventually a green light was given to the Croats’ request for an offensive against the Serb forces still occupying parts of Croatia, despite considerable ambivalence in Washington about their ability to pull it off. They got the go-ahead because Washington was by then desperate.
A good deal of prior work had gone into the decisions that allowed the Croats to arm themselves and undertake the offensive, and one of the men who had advocated it, Peter Galbraith, the American ambassador to Croatia, was hardly a favorite of his boss, Warren Christopher. Galbraith, son of the famed economist John Kenneth Galbraith, had asked for the job because he had already become interested in refugee work and thought that this would be a post where he could make a difference. But he had been appalled by the lack of interest in the area on the part of his superiors. When it came time for him to fly to Zagreb, none of the top people at State wanted to meet with him, and he arrived essentially without instructions. Once settled in Zagreb, Galbraith was more proactive than his government, which was well-known locally, and it made him, as one colleague noted, something of a rock star there, but a pariah back on the seventh floor of the State Department building, where he was regarded as a difficult person representing an unlikable country, and someone who always managed to get too much local press, often, they believed, at the expense of the administration.
Galbraith had long believed that Christopher and the people around him were in deep denial about what was happening in the Balkans, the degree of human destruction and its implications for larger American foreign policy. Galbraith was an activist, and though his government did not particularly welcome or applaud his efforts, some of the things he did in 1993 were to bear fruit two years later, most particularly in limiting tensions between the Croats and the Bosnian Muslims, and creating the foundation for what would eventually become the Bosnian-Croat Federation. His job was hardly easy. The head of state he was working with, Franjo Tudjman, a narrow, brutal, prejudiced man, was almost as unlikable as Milosevic. Tudjman’s nationalism was every bit as intense as Milosevic’s, but he was not as aggressive in his military pursuit of it because, most Americans believed, he simply lacked the means, not the intent. Still, Galbraith had little doubt about which course to pursue. The Serbs were the aggressors, their deeds were genocidal, and the job of the United States was to use its influence to stop them. Sure from the start that the main threat to the region came from Milosevic, Galbraith was often a step ahead of American policy in trying to get arms to the Bosnians and to limit some of the worst of the bitter internecine and immensely destructive struggles between the Bosnian Muslims and the Croats.
In March of 1994, pushed by the Americans, the Bosnian Muslims and Croats signed a peace treaty in Washington, creating what was called a federation, a two-nation partnership filled with the kind of hatred and distrust rarely matched in such accords. Nonetheless it was, without many people realizing it, an early step in turning the tide against the Serbs. Tudjman, though an architect of the agreement, literally hated what he had wrought because of his dislike of the Bosnian Muslims. He remained unwilling to make the simplest tactical moves that would strengthen a potential ally and weaken a powerful aggressor who had already taken a huge slice of his own territory. Even after the federation was formed, the real result for a long time, like so many things in the Balkans, was an appalling military-political stew. Galbraith liked to tell people that the area he was working in was “like Lebanon placed next to Cyprus.”
In the spring of 1994, the desperately underarmed Bosnians went to Tudjman and asked for his permission to let shipments of arms flow through his territory to their own landlocked bases. Tudjman detested the idea, and he answered evasively that he would put the question to the United States. Galbraith had urged Tudjman to give his permission, and now the Croat leader had shrewdly bounced the question back to Washington, suspecting that the United States would turn down the request, as it had once before at the end of the Bush administration when a planeload of arms from Iran had been stopped at the Zagreb airport. Certainly, thought Galbraith, the UN’s regional embargo on arms had nothing to do with Tudjman’s attitude; the Croats themselves were openly violating the embargo every day.
Galbraith strongly urged Washington to give its approval to arms for Bosnia. What he wanted was a nonresponse response. Washington would not have to say that it was in favor of arms to Bosnia, but it was not to imply that shipments should be blocked. The administration, he suggested, should look the other way on this one. His reasons were simple. It was good for the federation, he believed the Bosnians deserved the arms, and, finally, he felt there was no obligation to enforce the embargo on Bosnia, since everyone else who was involved in the conflict had a source of arms. Back came the word: you have no instructions. Galbraith interpreted that response to mean that Washington had not made a decision.
In fact, Tony Lake had raised the issue with Clinton on Air Force One on the way back from Richard Nixon’s funeral on April 27, 1994, and Clinton had given his approval. But Galbraith, believing that Washington was hedging again, misunderstood the all-too-discreet answer he had received, and aided by special negotiator Charles Redman, he called the NSC. Jane Watson, the woman on Lake’s staff who took his call, told him that he and Redman had carried the day. “Your instructions are to say that you have no instructions,” she said, then added, “When Tony passed the instructions on, he said it with a smile and a raised eyebrow.” Galbraith and Redman immediately went to see Tudjman. “Mr. President,” Galbraith said, “I have no instructions.” Then he added, “Please pay attention to what I am not saying.” Just to be sure that Tudjman did not misinterpret his meaning, Redman took him aside and emphasized that the United States was not in a position to object to arms going to Bosnia. That would be a significant victory in terms of future events. It meant the Bosnians got some arms (as did, of course, the Croats, who served as unofficial customs officers and took about 50 percent of incoming arms shipments for their own forces) and were not totally at the mercy of the invading Serbs. It also helped save a weak Bosnian alliance with the Croats, who were themselves beginning to strengthen their military position and gradually becoming a competent military force.
If the early skirmishes in the war had not gone well for the Croats and they were forced to fight off what was effectively the JNA with local police, then they had begun in the years that followed to bring themselves up to military parity with the Serbs. They did that first by importing weapons from friendly European countries. The Zagreb airport was a haven for incoming flights bearing arms from all over Europe. An American diplomat who went out to the airport and saw the many new fighter planes that were now part of the Croatian air force asked Gojko Susak, the defense minister, how he got so many of them. “It’s easy,” he said, smiling. “A fighter plane arrives, we put it in the hangar overnight, and six months later a new airplane is born.”
Susak was a member of the greater Croatian diaspora, which was to prove important in the next few years, a Croat who had gone to Canada, prospered as a pizza entrepreneur, and returned to his country at the time of independence. He was not a military man—the Americans sometimes called him the pizza man—but he had strong ideas about the kind of military his country should one day have. It would be built on an American model, and he hoped to maximize the American influence on his military as a first step toward bringing Croatia into NATO. Equally important, to improve the quality of his army, Susak went to an organization in Washington called MPRI, or Military Professional Resources Incorporated, to do the job. A small, private company uncommonly rich in American military talent, it was headed by two exceptional former four-star generals. One of them was Carl Vuono, a former army chief of staff, the army’s highest-ranking officer and its representative on the Joint Chiefs, who was greatly respected within army circles because of his role in modernizing and at the same time downsizing the professional American army post-Vietnam. The other was Butch Saint, a former commander of American forces in Europe. The impetus for their new company was one of the more important changes wrought by Vietnam. Not only was the American army much smaller in general, but the old military advisory groups, or MAGs, could no longer attract quality people to train foreign forces and were being cut back. But the private sector was quite another matter, and Vuono and Saint operated here, filling this vacuum.
Susak gave the Americans a three-part set of objectives. He wanted his army to be like those in the West in order to get into NATO; he wanted to create a professional military under strict civilian control; and as he said, “I want to drive the Serbs out of my country.” Vuono and Saint were in a strong position. They knew who all the talented American one-star and two-star generals and colonels were, the kind of men who would be unusually well suited for a complicated challenge like this. They also knew who the top NCOs were. They hired no one but the army’s very best. Among those in the first group that arrived in Zagreb was a former senior sergeant major (or highest-ranking enlisted man) who had served in the army in Europe. After finally getting State Department permission, Vuono and Saint sent a team of fourteen people to Croatia in October 1994. There had never been any doubt that their primary assignment was to improve the Croatian military as dramatically and quickly as possible. In only ten months, they helped turn the Croat army into a competent fighting force. Ten months is not a long time to create and train a modern army, but when the competing forces were as poorly trained as they were in this region, and when the needs were so basic, even so brief a period turned out to make a considerable difference. In the land of the blind, as one American officer noted, the one-eyed man is king. At first the Croat army was something of a territorial force—policemen, schoolteachers, blue-collar workers, lower-level bureaucrats—which was not necessarily a disadvantage. It meant that for most of them, particularly the younger men in the lower ranks, there was less to unlearn. In addition, they brought a quality that any good army needs—a broad representation of its country’s citizenry.
One thing the Americans set out to do immediately was create an NCO corps, which the Warsaw Pact armies, notoriously more hierarchical, badly lacked. They also worked on basic infantry tactics and how to coordinate medium unit assaults. By the time the Croat offensive against the Serbs began in early August 1995, the first graduates had left the officer training schools the Americans had set up. The basic infantry skills they had learned there, as well as the psychological lift that came from being trained by so reputable a group of officers, gave the Croats a considerable edge. “We were not there very long—if the Serb-Croat war had been fought in 1999 our fingerprints would have been all over it,” said one of the American officers who served there. “But as it was, even in the brief time we were there, we made something of a difference, if only in the confidence we helped instill.” Their timing could not have been better. Croatia’s bright, young people badly wanted American military advice to modernize their own forces and drive the hated invaders off their land. In addition, the raw material the American tutors found in Croatia was more than worthy: physically tough, exceptionally well-motivated young men, usually of rural rather than urban backgrounds, not yet removed from the hardships of country life. Perfect prototypes for soldiers, they had not lived for several generations in cities or the suburbs, where, many military men believed, human raw material gets more than a little soft.
Most of the lessons taught by their American instructors were of the most basic kind: how to create covering fields of fire, how to use tree lines, how to flank a bunker, and how to minimize casualties. Though not there as advisers, not in the way the Americans had advised at battalion and even company level in Vietnam, nonetheless the instructors were able in a short time to upgrade the Croat army significantly. The instructors also knew that by the summer of 1995 the Croat forces were ready and eager to attack the Serbs in the Krajina. But despite the considerable reputations of Vuono and Saint, and their men working on the ground in Croatia, their belief in the improvement of the Croat military never altered either the Pentagon’s or the CIA’s view of the forces pitted against each other in Croatia. The top CIA and Pentagon people had been dubious from the start about the entire proposition, mostly because of the old Serbophilia. The leading American military and intelligence people knew all the top JNA people, and by 1994 the Pentagon had, consciously or unconsciously, a vested interest in downgrading the Croats and upgrading the Serbs. Besides, if you downgraded the Croats and hailed the talents of the Serbs, it made it easier to rationalize staying on the sidelines. The Americans were also nervous about the consequences. What if we encouraged the Croats and an even wider war and more killing ensued with little real change on the battlefield? Or worse, what if the Croats attacked and were easily manhandled by the mighty Serbs, who then seized more territory? So even as the Croats prepared for an offensive against the Serbs, the American left hand and the American right hand did not seem to be well coordinated. Both the Defense Department and the CIA kept feeding into the NSC machinery the belief that if the Croats attacked the Serbs, the Croats would readily be defeated.
Earlier—in the middle of November 1994—when the Bosnian and Croatian Serbs were squeezing the Muslims caught in the Bihac pocket, the Croats had queried the Americans about their attitude toward a Croatian offensive. Tudjman summoned Galbraith for talks, but the driving force behind the idea of an offensive, Galbraith thought, came from Susak and the military, rather than Tudjman, who was uneasy about it. If the issue ended up in the UN Security Council, Tudjman asked, would the Americans move to block the possibility of sanctions against the Croats? Galbraith, with some reservations, liked Susak’s idea of an offensive. No forward step in any peace negotiations, he was convinced, was going to take place until the Serbs were met by force on the ground and driven back from their earlier conquests. Galbraith also suspected that the Serbs in the Krajina were something of a paper tiger. Washington did not agree with him; it did not think the Croats had the muscle to pull off the offensive, and it did not want a wider war. Galbraith was told to make as strong a case as he could against any offensive.
Tudjman was greatly relieved by Washington’s negative response. “See, that’s what I told them,” he remarked, referring to what he had said to his own military. So the offensive that might have taken place in November was put on hold. In time, the Serb pressure on Bihac eased and the crisis there lessened. But by the summer of 1995, the equation had changed dramatically. The Serbs had badly overplayed their hand. The siege of Srebrenica was taking place, making the status quo untenable. The Serb pressure on Bihac had increased again, and some predicted a human disaster there that might be three times as great as Srebrenica because so many people were crowded in the area. Still, Washington remained apprehensive about a Croat offensive, and the Croats, of course, were all too aware of Washington’s doubts. In February 1995, more than two months after the first rejection, Susak had attended a meeting in Munich with Bill Perry and John Shalikashvili. There he made an impassioned plea for a Krajina offensive, but both Perry and Shalikashvili took a dim view of it. They told the Croats it would be nothing less than a disaster. The Americans were saying, in words that could hardly be misunderstood, that the Croats, if they challenged the Serbs, would get their clocks cleaned. Dick Holbrooke had also attended and he noted in his diary that night that it had been a grim meeting.
But then came the destruction of Srebrenica, encouraging the Croats to push forward again. First Susak and then Tudjman summoned Galbraith for talks. They were more secure about the state of their own military now, confident that it was ready to attack. Their troops had fought well in May of 1995 in brief skirmishes in western Slavonia, a section of eastern Croatia, ousting the Serb forces that were occupying it. In addition, far more than the Americans, they had a skeptical view of the Serb military. They believed the Serbs were overextended and the sieges taking place in eastern Bosnia had diverted men and equipment. Again they asked for American protection against sanctions by the Security Council.
Galbraith argued to Washington that we should take the Croat side; the choice, he said, between greater and lesser evil was clear. In the hierarchy of evil, he wrote Washington, the massacre of some forty thousand Muslims in Bihac—which would be a real possibility if the Serbs succeeded—was a much more terrible event than the fall of the Krajina with, inevitably, episodic atrocities there, and with Krajina Serbs driven off their ancestral lands to become refugees. If the Serbs took Bihac, he said, a massacre three or four times greater than the one at Srebrenica had to be expected. With Holbrooke, Bob Frasure, Holbrooke’s top deputy, and others also arguing to let the Croats have a shot at it, Washington finally bought the argument, though somewhat ambivalently. Thus, with the Serbs at the high-water mark of their power, Srebrenica and Zepa conquered, and Bihac surrounded, the battlefield picture finally changed. In late July 1995, Tudjman and Bosnian Muslim leader Izetbegovic, nominally rivals with a distrust of each other as old as the centuries, met quietly in Split, pushed to do so by the Americans, and agreed to attack the Serb troops that had encircled the Bihac pocket. The hatred that had caused so many conflicts in the past was still there between the two men, but they had both finally identified a common enemy. If they would not fight exactly together, they would, and this was a breakthrough of considerable importance, fight on a common front and with a shared, common purpose.
Washington still remained ambivalent, wary of a larger war and dubious about both Bosnian and Croat military capacities. In general, the closer officials were to what was happening on the ground, the more they tended to favor a Croat-Bosnian offensive. Both Galbraith and Holbrooke, by then the most important player on the scene, favored unleashing the Croats. In Washington, Lake was an ally, a cool one—he was for a yellow light—as was Madeleine Albright at the United Nations. Christopher was not an enthusiast, nor were the top people at the Pentagon and the CIA, who feared Croat weaknesses and the Serb ability to widen the war. But Washington, living too long with a failed policy, had little in the way of alternatives. When a high-level Croat military official had come up to Bob Frasure during the London conference and unveiled a detailed plan for the invasion of the Krajina, Frasure had looked at the map for some time, smiled, and then said, “Well, do be careful.”
Even as the Croats were ready to strike in the west, the Bosnian Serbs, under Mladic, seemed to be invincible in eastern Bosnia. They had completed the siege of Zepa and demanded its surrender. The Western threats to use NATO airpower to protect some surviving safe areas had not included Zepa in the itemized mandate—it was judged too hard to defend. Mladic, vainglorious as ever, quick to pose for the people back home in Serbia, strutted about Zepa as thousands of Muslims surrendered after the city fell. That he had just been indicted as a war criminal seemed not to bother him at all. He boarded one bus filled with Muslim survivors and boasted to them, “Not Allah, not the United Nations, not anything can help you. I am your God.”1
It was, though no one realized it at the time, least of all Mladic, the high-water mark of Serb battlefield success. For even as Mladic was about to enter Zepa, Croat troops were moving across the Bosnian border to relieve the pressure on Bihac. With that, the tide turned. On August 4, the Croats struck against the Serbs in the Krajina, heading toward Bihac in an offensive called Operation Storm. The Serb forces completely disintegrated and the Croat offensive became a major rout. The Croats advanced and the Serbs fled, not just Croatian Serb soldiers, but thousands of longtime Serb residents of the Krajina. The Croatian advance took place virtually without resistance and with great brutality as Serb villages were systematically torched. Even those who had believed that the Croat forces were vastly improved were stunned by the totality of their success. On August 5, just one day into the offensive, the Krajina Serbs gave up their so-called capitol in Knin without a battle. The Croat troops kept going, and the next day, on August 6, the siege of Bihac was lifted. In only four days the Croats regained all of the territory—some four hundred square miles of land—seized by the Serbs in their 1991 and 1992 assaults.
At virtually the same time, the Bosnian Muslim Fifth Corps, considered the best unit in the Bosnian army, broke out of the Bihac pocket and started driving both south and east. If the Croat-Muslim marriage was imperfect—if it was not, as one American said, the easiest thing to get all their top military men into the same restaurant on the same night and come out unscathed—then, nonetheless, the military link worked. In Washington, the top people at the Pentagon and the CIA were surprised by how well the Croats and Muslim forces were doing, but some of the Americans on the scene, including the former American military officers and NCOs training the Croat army, were not. Dick Holbrooke was irritated with the Pentagon and the CIA because their attitude was too Serb-oriented. They had thought the Serbs would defend the Krajina and would be successful, and that if they got into trouble, Milosevic would send regular JNA troops to help them out. On all these points they had been completely wrong.
Milosevic made no attempt to save the Krajina. He left the Croatian Serbs, some of whom had lived there for centuries, to their fate, which was bitter indeed. Thousands of them were fleeing, mostly into Serb-controlled parts of Bosnia, but Croat and Muslim troops were hard on their trail, leaving their own brutal mark on the villages that they recaptured. Not many people in the other parts of Yugoslavia, where Serb atrocities had become a staple of life, felt much sympathy for the fleeing Krajina Serbs. It was, after all, Milosevic’s early aggression, to which many of them had enthusiastically rallied (and from which far too few had dissented), that had broken the accords of the past wherein Serb and Croat had lived in an often uneasy partnership. Relief agencies estimated that more than two hundred thousand Serbs who had lived in Croatia for generations had to flee. The brutality of the Croats toward Serbs in what were once Serb strongholds was one more tragedy of the war. Serb villages were burned and Serbs who stayed behind were killed in the Croats’ own form of ethnic cleansing, one more ugly incident in a war where most of the fighting had been waged against civilians.
At almost the same time, his Endgame strategy accepted by his peers and by the president, Tony Lake was preparing to fly to Europe to sell it to the allies. Even as he was getting on the plane, Lake was apprehensive about the response he would get. Sandy Vershbow, who had been working on Bosnia just as long and as hard as Lake and was just as frustrated by it, kept telling him, “Tony, this isn’t going to be as hard as you think. It just isn’t.” When Lake again expressed his doubts, Vershbow dissented: “No, they’re going to be more amenable. They’re ready for a change. Watch.” He was right. The coming of Chirac had placed considerable pressure on the British to favor a more aggressive policy. In addition, the horrendous events in Srebrenica had begun to change British public opinion. When Lake explained to the British what the president wanted and what the Americans were going to do with or without allies, they proved far more amenable than in the past. Later, as the Americans were boarding the plane for their next stop, Lieutenant General Wes Clark, the army officer representing the Pentagon on the team, turned to Lake and said, “The big dog barked today.” It had taken two and a half years, but it had finally happened. The Europeans and the Americans were together in a joint strategy to use NATO airpower against the Serbs.
By chance the Croat offensive coincided almost perfectly with Lake’s trip. As he sat in his plane with Vershbow and others, they read aloud to each other the earlier intelligence reports from the Pentagon and the CIA with their negative estimates of any Croat assault upon the Serbs. Rarely had pessimistic estimates been so pleasant to read.
Thus for the first time the forces poised to strike not just the Bosnian Serbs, but Milosevic as well, were formidable and, ominously, double-edged. Not only were the Croats and the Bosnians racing across the Krajina, but the West was clearly readying itself for a more aggressive stance against the Serbs, which might include massive air attacks.