Deadline closes for Nato invasion

LONDON - Time is running out for Nato if it wants to get the Kosovo refugees home before the northern winter.

After nearly eight weeks of an intensifying but thus far indecisive bombing war, Slobodan Milosevic must wonder whether his country can withstand the aerial pounding by Nato for longer than Western public opinion is prepared to back it.

For the allies there is a more precise deadline: they have a couple of weeks or so to decide whether to send to the region the land forces required - under whatever circumstances - to enter Kosovo if the refugees are to return before the snows arrive. It is only late spring in the Balkans. But already General Winter stalks the landscape.

If the political calculations of the Kosovo war grow more complex by the day, the timetable of any land intervention is clear. The first real cold and snow usually start to settle on the high plateaus and valleys of Kosovo towards the end of October.

By then, if the 750,000 ethnic Albanians are to go home this year, the process should have been under way for a month or so. But even for it to begin, at least 40,000, and perhaps 60,000, Nato troops will have had to enter Kosovo beforehand.

The lower figure, analysts say, will probably suffice if there is no Serb resistance, following a diplomatic settlement. But if, as seems more likely, allied ground forces enter a "semi-permissive" environment, with at least some determined resistance despite months of battering from the air, the number required will probably be nearer 60,000.

Under those circumstances the campaign might take up to two months; three or four weeks to complete an invasion, perhaps as much again to mop up pockets of die-hard Serb opposition. At that point, the operation could be placed under the aegis of the United Nations.

All this means that K-Day can safely be no later than the end of July, or the very first part of August.

Given that a minimum of six weeks, more probably two months, will be needed to assemble the extra forces, logistical support and supplies in the theatre, a start must be made by the end of May, or very early June at the latest. Tony Blair, Bill Clinton and Jacques Chirac therefore have about two weeks to make up their minds.

Why Blair, Clinton and Chirac? Because if there is to be a "coalition of the willing," of those countries ready to risk some opposition going into Kosovo, it would perforce be dominated by Britain, France and the United States. For political and historic reasons, German participation is more problematic; Italy, Greece and many other Nato countries would refuse to take part.

Indeed, Greece could create a huge extra problem by not permitting Salonika to be used as a shipping transit point.

Britain, France and the US between them have about 15,000 troops in Albania and Macedonia. That number will have to be tripled by the end of July, ideally sooner, to allow the option of an earlier move into Kosovo and an element of tactical surprise.

If the aerial pounding of Yugoslav forces in Kosovo continues unabated, there can be relatively little doubt about the outcome, despite all the mines and booby-traps laid by the defenders.

That, at least, is how the soldiers see it.

The trouble is, Kosovo has thus far been a war whose parameters have been decided by the politicians, often in defiance of elementary military principles.

Nato says so far it has not suffered a single battle casualty. But even a partly opposed ground war will change all that. - INDEPENDENT