NATO as a peacekeeper

Ladies and gentlemen, good afternoon, this is Jamie Shea the NATO Spokesman speaking to you from NATO Headquarters. I'm very pleased to have the opportunity to present this, the second in my current series of lectures on NATO Today, and I'm very pleased today that all of us at NATO Headquarters can be joined by students and colleagues at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel, the Centre for European Studies there.

Those of you who tuned in to my first lecture will remember that I spoke about how NATO transformed itself after the Cold War and how it developed partnerships in particular with Russia, Ukraine and other countries of Central and Eastern Europe. At that time I did point out that the old NATO was very much the child of the Cold War, but it's also true that the new NATO, the one we have today, is very much the child of the Balkans and how NATO responded to the conflicts in the Balkans throughout the 1990s. The 1990s were the decade of the collapse of the former Yugoslavia and the test case for how international organisations like mine, NATO, were able to adapt or not to adapt to meet the new challenges not of massive nuclear threats or massive military invasions but of ethnic cleansing, concentration camps and collapsing states, not outside Europe but tragically, in the case of the Balkans, very much on NATO's doorstep inside Europe.

Remembering the period in the early 1990s it seems almost inconceivable that war could've broken out in the heart of Europe. The 1990s, at the beginning, were a decade of tremendous euphoria, the Cold War had gone, the Berlin Wall had come down, everybody was reaping the peace dividend and believing that henceforth they wouldn't really need military forces or armies because the old classical threat, the Soviet Union, had totally disappeared and then suddenly, in the middle of all of that euphoria, in June 1991 Yugoslavia collapsed, war broke out between Serbia and Slovenia and thereafter Serbia and Croatia and then of course, one year later, the most tragic conflict of all, the war in Bosnia-Herzegovina.

Now I remember when I was a student at university, first studying international relations and we were asked a typical exam question which is that, which current communist country in Europe has the greatest prospect of transforming towards capitalism, democracy and a market economy and the standard answer, which all of us gave was Yugoslavia, which always seemed to be the most stable, the most advanced, the most open, the most liberal, the most developed of the communist countries of Central and Eastern Europe. The last one, we thought, where collapse was likely to lead to mass violence, indeed when the Soviet Imperium imploded most analysts believed that violence was much more likely in Warsaw Pact countries that in Yugoslavia which had been a leader of the neutral and non-aligned movement and was outside the Warsaw Pact.

Why did it happen? Well historians are still debating this of course, but one thing is quite clear, which was that the end of ideology, the end of the confrontation between the two blocks in Europe was not the end of conflict. Because we had been used for so many years to seeing ideology as the main factor in creating international tensions we took our eye off nationalism, but nationalism as any nineteenth century politician knew was always a much more potent source of conflict and a much more durable one than communism versus capitalism.

At the same time when the Cold War was over, there was a great belief in rationality as the guiding principle of international relations. That nobody would make war because there was no sense in making war, it was destructive, it led nowhere and therefore no European politician would go down that road. And many politicians in Europe, when Yugoslavia blew up, believed that going to Belgrade or Zagreb and reasoning with leaders, appealing to their rationality would inevitably make them see sense and stop the war. It took many years before people realised that threats, not backed up by the use of force would have no deterrence value whatever, and indeed sometimes weapons were the only way to stop other people using their weapons.

NATO got off to a slow start when Yugoslavia imploded in '91. In fact, for the first 18 months we looked at the situation, we analyzed it but we did very little. This was the house of Europe, the time when many hoped that the European Union after the Cold War would be able to manage its own conflicts without the need for a transatlantic approach and therefore without the need for heavy U.S. involvement.

Another reason was a lot of confusion as to what our policy really was, some believed that Yugoslavia was a war of international aggression, that it should be stopped in much the same way as the United States had intervened in Kuwait with an international coalition the year before in order to stop Iraq eliminating Kuwait from the map and what was different, for example, about Bosnia being eliminated from the map or at least divided when it became independent in 1992. But many others saw Yugoslavia very much in tragic historical terms as a place where violence had been endemic, where inter-ethnic conflict had always happened, where people were destined under any circumstances to fight each other and where, therefore, international intervention could achieve very little before the various groups came to their senses and stopped fighting.

That confusion as to what was really going on didn't help NATO intervening either. And also, at the same time, there was still, at that time, a belief that NATO's role was not to go beyond its traditional perimeter, in Europe, that there was 'in-area' which was essentially NATO waiting to be attacked and only defending its borders, its own territory and that there was 'out-of-area' where Aallies might go from time to time to sort out problems but where NATO as an Alliance would not be able to go. And therefore as we observed the situation, it deteriorated sharply.

In 1992, as I said, the war expanded to Bosnia. The Bosnians had held a referendum in March 1992 in which 90% of those voted, voted for the independence of their country in the hope that it would be recognized by the United Nations as an independent country and therefore if the Serbs attacked the international community would have an obligation to defend it. The only problem was that the Bosnian Serbs that represented about 35% of the population refused to take part and therefore, in their eyes, a referendum for an independent Bosnia was not valid and instead of accepting the outcome they took up arms with the view to effectively partitioning the country between a Croat-Muslim area and a Serb area.

This was undoubtedly a bad time for NATO. Everybody here these days would acknowledge that. Things occurred that we hadn't seen since the end of the Second World War, concentration camps in which 10,000 Bosniacs are believed to have died, mass rapes in which about 30,000 Bosniac women are reported to have been subjected to sexual harassment of the worse possible kind, 250,000 dead, the largest figure in Europe since World War II, and 2 1/4 million people displaced from their homes, 65% of the physical infrastructure of Bosnia destroyed on our doorsteps in what was considered to be humane post-Cold War, civilised Europe.

The Alliance was not passive, in 1992 we nonetheless took an important step forward by implementing an arms embargo in the Adriatic to stop weapons flowing into the former Yugoslavia, although that clearly went against the ability of the Bosnian Muslims to gain weapons and as the Serbs had plenty of weapons already, that was something which many Allies were uneasy about and the United States eventually came under pressure from Congress not to implement that naval arms embargo but it was, symbolically, a first step for the Alliance. That was the first out-of-area mission.

NATO then went further, in 1993 it gave close air support, in other words, aerial protection to the United Nations forces on the ground and set up a no-fly zone to prevent the Bosnian Serbs using their aircraft to attack cities being held by the Bosnian Muslims.

Indeed, in February 1994, NATO used force for the first time and shot four... downed four Bosnian Serb aircraft in the sky. I remember that moment, February 1994, the Secretary General at the time Manfred Woerner was dying from cancer, he was ill and in a hospital in Aachen, Germany, but the day NATO used force he was so excited that from his sickbed he telephoned me and asked me to go down to see him with a group of western TV stations including the BBC and CNN. When we got to the clinic, he was very ill indeed but he insisted on getting up, we put on his suit for him, we put on makeup which disguised the holes in his neck where his tubes had been placed, we turned his hospital ward into a studio and he went on television and announced proudly that NATO had decided to make a stand against aggression and had used force for the very first time. He was always a great champion of the notion that NATO, if it was going to protect its own values, had to stand up to ethnic cleansing in its backyard.

But the close air support for the United Nations was a difficult exercise because it came under a dual key arrangement which meant that the UN had to give the green light for those air strikes to be used, which given the circumstances of having to protect the safety of the UN forces on the ground where many NATO countries were involved, was something that clearly the UN, understandably perhaps, was reluctant to do for fear reprisals. But it led to a great deal of criticism of the Alliance. William Pfaff, the famous New York Times editorialist, wrote an article in which he said "Bosnia Alive or NATO Dead". NATO flying its aircraft at Mach 1 over Sarajevo but not intervening against the siege of that city seemed to many to be a paper tiger.

Ultimately, it took a massacre to bring the Alliance in and to rally the international organisations into taking decisive action. That was the massacre at Srebrenica in July 1995 in which 7,000 Bosnian Muslims were tragically murdered and of course the war crimes trials related to that massacre are still taking place in the Hague today. It's one of the paradoxes of international relations that sometimes the situation has to get worse before it gets better. But that massacre meant that the United Nations gave NATO the green light to conduct an air campaign. NATO then threatened the Bosnian Serbs with ultimatum that they would either take their guns away from around Sarajevo and lift the siege or we would intervene.

When there was another tragic bombing of the Markale marketplace in Sarajevo in August 1995, NATO did intervene and within ten days the Bosnian Serbs had been very badly damaged in their military posture and that set in train the momentum, which 60 days later allowed the United States to get the various factions together including Milosevic of Serbia and of Tudjman of Croatia to Dayton and signed the Dayton Peace Agreement.

Well, did we learn from that debilitating experience which ultimately did have a positive ending? Well the first thing we learned was that threats not backed up by the use of force simply don't work. Secondly, we learned that if we threaten to take action we have to mean it and we have to go through with it. But the third thing we learned is that although military action does not solve all international problems, applied with firm commitment of the Allies, applied professionally, applied decisively, it can work and it can bring about a new momentum for diplomatic talks and negotiations. But it was true that the paradox of Bosnia as Boutros Boutros Gali, the Secretary General of the United Nations pointed out was that we had a UN force there of 30,000 men while the war was going on and we introduced a NATO force of 60,000 men with much better equipment and much better command and control after the war had finished.

That became IFOR, or the Implementation Force, which was NATO's first experience in peacekeeping. I remember a meeting with Boutros Boutros Gali at the United Nations in 1994 when he complained bitterly that the UN, I quote "could only go at six miles and hour while NATO would be able to go at 60 miles an hour". It was a lesson which is... that you obviously sometimes have to intervene during a conflict to stop it rather than waiting for the flames to burn themselves out and then to only intervene thereafter.

NATO's been in the Balkans, in Bosnia, for eight years since the time of Dayton, the good news today is that we don't have 60,000 troops there, we are now at 12,000 and at the ministerial meeting here in Brussels a few days ago the Allies agreed to take those troops down to the level of 7,000 with even the prospect that this mission which today is called SFOR, or stabilisation force, can be terminated next year.

In other words, we're succeeding in Bosnia. Tenacity, perseverance have begun to pay off. It doesn't mean that all of the problems are over in terms of setting up functioning democratic institutions or a functioning economy, but it does mean that we are reaching the point where the self-sustaining peace, in other words a peace which can be guaranteed by the ethnic groups in Bosnia themselves within their institutions will not require the permanent presence of NATO forces at a time when the international community is engaged in Iraq, in Afghanistan, in so many other trouble spots of the world, the Bosnian example is an example of optimism that the sustained engagement of the international community can actually pay dividends.

We've also learned that mission creep is not necessarily a bad thing. One of the reasons why our troops in Bosnia have been so successful is because they've been willing to go beyond a very narrow interpretation of their role which is only to disarm armed factions and only to prevent major fighting to do other things. They have assisted in organizing elections, they've rebuilt the railway system, they've rebuilt many roads, in some cases they've rebuilt schools. I remember one fascinating day that I spent with the Bundeswehr German contingent in Sarajevo where most of them were reservist architects who had been drafted and spent their days redesigning blocks of apartments in Sarajevo so that refugees could go back.

It was also a fascinating experience for NATO, because we were an organisation which during the Cold War lived exclusively among ourselves, barely talking to other international organisations but here we were in Bosnia, in Sarajevo, attending daily sessions with the UN, with the EU, with the World Bank, with NGOs, all learning to work together in a co-ordinated civilian-military program for reconstruction. And that experience has certainly allowed us now to have this permanent dialogue with the other security organisations.

Therefore, Bosnia is indeed a success story. This is a country which now has football teams playing in the European championship, has now a team for the Olympic Games and it's even proposing now, not to be any longer a consumer of security but a provider of security. The Bosnian government now has a multi-ethnic peacekeeping battalion which is has proposed recently to send to Liberia in Africa under a UN flag and we hope, and expect, that very soon Bosnia will join NATO's Partnership for Peace which means, ladies and gentlemen, that even after the NATO forces have left NATO will still be there but in a different form helping with defence institution building for instance, helping to organise military activities which will allow the various armed factions to work more closely together than ever in the past.

So the lesson of Bosnia is that although we intervened far too late, tragically, and should've been there many years before, but that you can rebuild Humpty Dumpty, you can replace war with functioning nations, there is no Balkans malediction, which means that that part of the world is incapable of enjoying the fruits of a market economy or functioning democratic institutions. Winston Churchill said famously that the Balkans produce more history than they can consume and Bismarck once said that the Balkans are not worth the bones of a healthy Pomeranian grenadier, but however witty those statements, clearly they don't reflect present reality.

Hegel once said that those who don't learn the lessons of history are condemned to repeat them and so, when conflict broke out in Kosovo in 1998 it was very important for NATO to show that we had indeed learned the lessons of Bosnia.

Intervene early, make credible threats, have military capabilities that clearly demonstrate that if diplomacy fails you are prepared then to use force otherwise diplomacy rarely succeeds. Don't have contradictory mandates, the problem with Bosnia is that the troops on the ground were always working at cross purposes with the planes in the air. We had too many contradictory mandates that cancelled each other out, so therefore, have a very, very clear policy about what you are trying to achieve and finally, unity of response. What went wrong in Bosnia ultimately was that the United States and the Europeans were on different wavelengths, following different policies, one wanting to use classical peacekeeping, the other wanting to use peace enforcement and those two elements mixed in the same way that fire and water mix, which is to say badly.

Peacekeeping is possible, but not with peace enforcement, that has to come at a different phase. This time around, the transatlantic community swung into action from the word go, not that we had sympathy for the Kosovar-Albanian armed gangs but we did believe that Milosevic was overreacting to those provocations and that innocent civilians were being targeted and punished collectively for the crimes of a few.

And so from the word go, NATO was actively involved in Kosovo diplomacy. We issued a number of warnings which had some success. We even managed ultimately to get the Serbs to withdraw from Kosovo, a large percentage of their forces, but not all of them. The problem also with this type of crisis management is that you have to keep the pressure up every single moment of the day. You can't afford to take your eye off the ball for one minute or there is a danger of things slipping back.

All analysts, ladies and gentlemen, of international conflicts talk about a tipping point, that moment when something happens that swings the international community out of its doubts and hesitations towards the view that something not only must be done, but something will be done. In Bosnia, as I said, that tipping point was clearly the Srebrenica massacre, in Kosovo it was the massacre at Racak, a village in the north, in January 1999, when about 60 Kosovar Albanians were killed. That clearly showed that the so-called counter-insurgency campaign of the Serbs in Kosovo had gone beyond that. So its a massive sweep of targeting innocent civilians and then NATO issued its final warning, peace talks were tried unsuccessfully at Rambouillet and then NATO conducted the riskiest, the most ambitious operation in its entire history, the 78-day air campaign against Yugoslavia that went from the 24th of march 1999 and finally ended on the 10th of June. 78 days in retrospect seems rather short but at the time it seemed almost like an eternity, it was a frustrating affair. Contrary to many people's predictions, Milosevic did not crumble the first time force was used against him.

Against our hopes, inevitably, mistakes were made. Terrible instances of, what became known collateral damage, happened despite NATO's pilots taking every single conceivable precaution to avoid inflicting accidents or killing of civilians and that invariably in a TV age in which everything was being shown within minutes, live or at least world-wide on TV, that cost us a lot of public support which we had to try very hard to make up.

But, as time went on NATO's cause became stronger. First of all, those Milosevic expelled, nearly a million Kosovar Albanians into the former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia and into Albania, people could see that we weren't make it up when we talking about ethnic cleansing. That people really were, if not being killed en masse, at least being deprived en masse of their basic human rights and terribly mistreated.

Secondly, contrary to what a lot of people said, NATO held together, did not collapse at the first sign of trouble. I think Milosevic probably was a student of Napoleon and remembered Napoleon's famous line that "God, if I have to fight let it be against a coalition". But NATO as a coalition proved to be remarkably resilient and as the extent of the crimes became clear the determination of the Alliance to go the course whatever it took, became more manifest and so after 78 days Milosevic met the conditions of the international community and withdrew his forces.

NATO also had learned the lesson of Bosnia in another way, which is that when you get a peace, you have to reinforce it immediately before it collapses and we deployed 40,000 KFOR troops, Kosovo Force troops over the border from Macedonia into Kosovo and they do have been there ever since. Today we have 19,000, it's a difficult situation there, let's be honest. As I said in Bosnia you succeed, but you don't succeed overnight. We deserve credit, I believe for having stopped the war. Sometimes it's easy to be blamed for not building a perfect peace but it's not... nothing to have stopped the killing and stopped the war and at least created a chance for people to seek a durable peace. But the situation in Kosovo is tense, I remember one afternoon I spent on patrol with the British Green Jacket regiment on the streets of Pristina where they took me to a apartment building which they had surrounded with tanks at all the main entrances and a permanent presence, 24-hours a day, and the Serbs living in this apartment building were unable to go out. All of their meals had to be delivered, their pension cheques had to be taken by the British Army to the post office to be cashed so they could receive their pensions, the mail had to be delivered, they were just too scared to go out.

But it's not that bad today, we've got a lot to do in Kosovo, tensions are still high, only 3,000 of a potentially 200,000 Serb refugees so far have gone back, but when I went to Pristina earlier this year to participate in a refugee pilot program I noticed that you can today speak Serbo-Croat on the streets of Pristina without being mugged or without being the victim of an assault. That was unthinkable in 1999 or 2000. Refugees are now coming back, albeit in small groups. Proximity talks between Belgrade and Pristina are starting again. So we're going to have to keep 17,000 troops there for the immediate future but it's not hopeless.

Finally, Macedonia, the former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia (ª), there we learned the lessons even better than in Kosovo when violence began in 19... the end of 1999-2000. We've armed Albanian groups beginning to attack Macedonian policemen in the north, but all of the signs of a Bosnia or even a Kosovo syndrome were there, paramilitaries, populations which were becoming increasingly alienated, these are the Albanian, the pressure for a military solution over dialogue. But NATO intervened early diplomatically with the EU, and it is organisations working together with their joint clout that showed that we are much more powerful together than we are individually.

The war crimes tribunal also worked. I'm certain that there were probably many people on either side that would've been very tempted to carry out a massacre, but seeing so many people from Bosnia sitting in the Hague, standing trial, knowing that that international justice worked, I think, made them think twice and therefore we did not have any major massacres occurring in the former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia.

NATO also made it clear that we were against any type of violent action, that our sympathies did not lay with one side... did not lie with one side or the other, that nobody who was trying to impose a solution by armed force could count on NATO's sympathy. That rapid response, diplomacy, backed-up by a credible forced worked wonders and a situation that could have been as ugly as Bosnia or Kosovo thank God, did not develop, we got the parties to the negotiating table and they signed the Ohrid framework agreement, which if it is implemented as it must be, will allow Macedonia to be a truly multi-ethnic society like virtually every other society in Europe these days with minority rights for its Albanian... ethnic Albanian population.

So where are we today as I finish this analysis of NATO in the Balkans? Well, let me say it this way, NATO's been good for the Balkans, but the Balkans have also been good for NATO. If we had not had to deal with that tragedy in the 1990s would today we'd be in Afghanistan or anywhere else outside Europe? I think not, personally.

Would we have redefined the role of our armed forces to be ready for a variety of missions, based on mobility, projection, rapid response? Probably not, quite frankly.
Would we be working so closely with other international organisations and NGOs? No, we wouldn't or probably not as well.

Would we have such active partnerships with so many countries? No. One of the key driving factors behind NATO's partnerships, ladies and gentlemen, was the fact that those countries joined us peacekeeping on the ground, in the... both Bosnia and Kosovo. At one stage we had more non-NATO countries participating in our SFOR force than we had NATO countries, not in terms of absolute numbers but in terms of the number of countries. Today for example, the Pristina command of NATO's force in Kosovo is run by Sweden. Finland has had a sector Bosnia which shows that partners are not only contributing troops but are willing to take on major responsibilities.

One of my abiding memories was visiting the Russian contingent in Bosnia integrated into the NATO force some years ago, again our relations with Russia would not have advanced so quickly had we not had this practical experience of doing things together.

And it has also been a powerful educator of our public opinion as well as our governments. There was a view during the Cold War that the crisis would always come to us and that we therefore did not have to go in search of it, but today we recognize increasingly that these conflicts, no matter how distant they are, cannot simply be allowed to fester, or burn without affecting our security interests. In other words if don't go to the crisis, the crisis will surely come to us. What we learned from the Balkans was that beyond the moral repugnance over killing and ethnic cleansing and savage violence, there were other factors that directly affected our security interests.

For example, the massive outflow of refugees that then had to be accommodated in many NATO countries, but particularly Germany. The upsurge in organised crime that comes from situations of anarchy where the state collapses, the danger that these conflicts could spill over onto NATO territory. Without the Balkans experience it would've been even harder today to convince people that we have a security stake in taking over the ISAF mission in Afghanistan.

So yes, NATO has been good for the Balkans and that will be one day, I hope, recognized by the fact that Serbia or Montenegro will join NATO's partnership for peace, Bosnia-Herzegovina will join NATO's partnership for peace, they both want to very much indeed and they're meeting the conditions progressively but that certain of these Balkan countries will also be members of the Alliance, Croatia, Albania and the former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia are currently the candidates.

Where are we now finally? Well there's a lot of more to do, there's no doubt about that but we have learned not only that intervention works if it's done in the right way. We've not only also learned that military force sometimes can solve problems, but we've also seen the incredible power of Euro-Atlantic attraction. The attractiveness of NATO, the attractiveness of the European Union as drivers of change. And let me just end with one example of that.

The last visit that current Secretary General Lord Robertson made to a country before stepping down as Secretary General was to Serbia, to Belgrade. To me, in 1999 it would've been almost inconceivable that a NATO Secretary General could go peacefully to Belgrade, the only country that NATO has ever fought a conflict against, without being greeted by massive demonstrations. But not only did Lord Robertson go to Belgrade but while he was there Serbia offered to send 1,000 of its troops to join NATO in Afghanistan and insisted that it wanted to join the Partnership for Peace, to cooperate with NATO, and to put the past behind it.

In other words, despite the controversy at the time, the sheer attractiveness of the Alliance and Euro-Atlantic integration is certainly a lever that we can use and therefore NATO will not depart the Balkans when its troops depart through this network of relations, working for reconciliation, working for partnership, working from military to military co-operation, our ultimate goal is not only to make them peaceful but also to make them members of our institution.

Thank you.

(ª) Turkey recognises the Republic of Macedonia with its constitutional name.

Questions and answers

Q: It's often said that the EU provides the mediation, NATO provides the military, and the UN provides the money. But now that the EU is - at least thinking - of also providing the military, how do you see this evolving with NATO in the future?

Jamie Shea: Well, with the European Union, I think the key thing is to be partners. We both have sort of different advantages. NATO, of course, the link to the United States, the ability to work with Russia, with so many partners in a security arrangement. And NATO too, as you know, as the integrated military command structures and the forces.

The European Union, of course, has all of its economic assets as well, and expertise in the civilian field, such as human rights, elections, police training and the rest. But of course, one interesting new development is that over this past year, the European Union has begun to develop its own military structures. And it has taken on its first military mission, Operation Concordia, in the former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia (ª), and in fact a mission which is finishing this week, having been very successful.

So, where I see the relationship is that both of us should in fact try to engage together, but in different ways. In Macedonia, the EU has been doing the military role, which it took over from NATO, but NATO has not disappeared. We have been instead able to concentrate on the Partnership for Peace, on military reform, on helping the Macedonians build up democratic defence institutions.

Similarly, if you look at Bosnia, NATO has been doing the military implementation and the EU has been doing the police training.

Now, next year, there are plans for the European Union to take over NATO's SFOR mission with a civil military mission of its own that remains to be defined. We largely support that idea.

But NATO will not disappear because we then hope to set up an office in Sarajevo to do the kind of the things we are doing in Macedonia in terms of the democratic institution building.

So, I think that those two examples show how we can work together, but not duplicate each other, rather sort of use our advantages in a coherent, co-ordinated way. And there's no reason why that approach could not apply to Afghanistan or to any other place where we engage in the future.

Q: But this is something else. You mentioned at a certain moment that you have the out-of-area operations. But how far can you go? There's about 120 armed conflicts going on today in the world and we look at Georgia, Aphasia to have things nearer, Nagorno-Karabakh, Chechnya. What's... these also form potential threats to both Europe and the Alliance. What's... what's your idea on that?

Jamie Shea: Obviously, NATO can't look after every conflict in the world, but because you can't do all of them doesn't mean that you should do none of them.
If you look at the map of security... major security challenges today, at least in geographic terms -- because terrorism of course is something that does not respect any geography -- but in geographic terms, you'll say, well the biggest challenges are Iraq, Afghanistan, Kosovo, finishing the job in the Balkans or policing against possible threats from terrorism in Europe, for example in the Mediterranean.

Now, NATO is involved in all of those in different ways. We have nearly 6,000 troops in Kabul, in Afghanistan, and we are going to expand on that. We have in the Balkans, as I was saying in this lecture, still today about 30,000 plus troops, although that number will be going down. And we are helping currently the Polish-led multinational division in Iraq. So, NATO is doing something in Iraq.

And in our ministers' meeting last week, foreign ministers, Colin Powell, the US Secretary of State, put on the table the idea that NATO should do more next year and nobody, none of the ministers dissented. So, clearly, that is a discussion we will have. And there are various options for how NATO could play a greater role.

Now, we have to obviously not become the jack-of-all-trades and master-of-none. We have to be careful at biting off more than we can chew. We don't want to fail at two missions; we'd rather succeed at one clearly.

So, I think the view here is that we have to get Afghanistan right first in terms of expanding the mission beyond Kabul and introducing security into the provinces, making sure that the warlords are disarmed, making sure that the authority of the government of President Karzai in Afghanistan extends throughout the country. We have to do that first before we can see what more we can do in Iraq. But as I mentioned, it's not always the case that we just start new missions without bringing the existing ones to a close.

The progress in Bosnia does show that there is a good chance the NATO's SFOR mission there can stop in 2004. And I agree that a good success story will increase international support for NATO doing more missions in the future.

Q: Then... a question from Brussels. You mentioned, Jamie, the fact that in some cases, the threat of the use of force is a very important instrument in resolving conflicts. What would you say is the test or the criteria for justified use of force? At which point can we say that diplomacy has failed and there is no other resort but the use of force? What are the tests that the international community should apply?

Jamie Shea: This is a good question. There will always be those who will say that diplomacy is not fouled, that you should try one final, final talk mission to Belgrade or to any other place where a dictator may be in residence.

And so, yes, it has to be a somewhat subjective judgement. But there are nonetheless I think criteria which are increasingly universally recognized.

The first one, of course, is force has to be seen as a last resort. So certainly, you have first of all to try to solve a conflict through diplomacy or peaceful means. You have to give people a chance to back down. You have to give them a way out and not push them into a corner; that's clear.

The second thing, of course, is that you have to have what would be called a legitimate objective. In the case of Kosovo, NATO's objective was not to conquer Yugoslavia, of course not, nor to bring about the fall of the Milosevich regime -- not as a direct aim -- but it was the humanitarian aim of stopping the ethnic cleansing by obliging the Serb forces that were conducting that ethnic cleansing to leave Kosovo.

So you have to have an aim which is legitimate, which basically people accept as being necessary. You need a basis in international law, that's another important condition.
Now, in Kosovo that was controversial. Everybody remembers this. NATO was not able to have a resolution from the UN Security Council. But that was not because NATO did not try to get one. You know, some people believe that we just ignored the UN: Nonsense. Five NATO allies are always on the UN Security Council, either as permanent members or non-permanent members.

In fact, we tried very hard but it was not possible because of the attitude taken by Russia then to get that resolution. But we still ensured that we had legal... a legal basis. Several NATO parliaments like the German Bundestag voted explicitly to authorise that action. And so, that is very important as well.

And finally, you've got to have a military strategy which has a reasonable chance of success and which can guarantee that you are able to achieve your objective with a minimum amount of destruction.

This goes back to the Middle Ages with the doctrine of proportionality, you remember the so-called Just War Theory, which is making a bit of a comeback in the modern age as we are increasingly focusing on humanitarian interventions, the notion that the good that the conflict produces has to outweigh the harm that you inflict, that you discriminate between military targets and civilian targets, that any damage to civilians is of course purely accidental and not deliberate; which is certainly not the case for ethnic cleansing where it was deliberate and the sense that you use only the minimum amount of force to secure your objective.

Well, if there are no further questions, ladies and gentlemen, I'd like to thank you very much indeed for listening to this second lecture, and hope that you will still have the tenacity and the perseverance, the key qualities to be there for the third one in a month's time.

But for today, from NATO Headquarters, thank you.

(ª) Turkey recognises the Republic of Macedonia with its constitutional name.