Aside from a bit of sniping and a few small shoot-outs, everything is pretty quiet on the ground here in Kosovo…

Serbs control nothing at night except the capital Pristina and the stools they sit on. During the day they control the roads and anything they can see from their fortified positions. No appetite for aggressive anti-guerrilla patrols, low morale, no incentive to take casualties.

The KLA are better trained and armed than last year but remain more important as a force-in-being than as actual combat units. Good at ambushes. Turning itself into a “Kosovo Liberation Party” in order to fulfill Western demands to demilitarize. Count on nothing more than sling shots and rubber bands to get turned in no matter what gets signed.

All that being said the Albanians are the primary victims, and if the whole concept of self-determination has any merit, this is a classic case. The Serb propensity for atrocities is inseparable from the cause of Serb nationalism; any argument of “we should be sympathetic to the Serbs if only they would fight a clean war” is a pointless charade. Like the French in Algeria or the Russians in Chechnya, they lost any chance of redeeming their actual legitimate claims when Milosevic unleashed his thugs. So it goes.

There is a fundamental European and American misunderstanding of this and the other Balkan wars of the ’90s. Intelligent, liberal, prosperous people seem to think that war, death, and destruction are inherently terrible things which should be avoided at almost any cost, and all of our diplomacy has essentially had this axiom in mind. To an Albanian in Kosovo, and perhaps slightly less so for the Serbs, there is every reason in the world to fight, and to continue fighting until victory. The American use of power towards containment and compromise can only go so far, as in Bosnia. Is it enough?

Pristina remains strangely normal, if tense. The food is better here than in Belgrade, and Kosovo wine is not bad at all.