15 March 2001
Envoy: Troops Should Be Aggressive


By TOM COHEN, Associated Press Writer

TORONTO (AP) - Concern about the political cost of casualties in Kosovo prevented U.S. troops there from being as assertive as European allies would like,Norway's deputy foreign minister said Thursday.

Espen Barth Eide said European forces also serving in the Yugoslav territory now under international control perceived the U.S. operation as ``very geared toward force protection.''

He cited weapons searches and patrols along a buffer zone set up on the Kosovo border with Serbia, the main Yugoslav province, as two tasks that European forces believed the American troops could carry out more aggressively.

Eide attributed the U.S. posture to political concerns that American casualties would undermine support back home for participation in the Kosovo peacekeeping operation.

In Washington, National Security Council spokeswoman Mary Ellen Countryman declined to comment on the matter. But since the Gulf War (news - web sites), the U.S. military has focused on minimizing casualties through the use of overwhelming force and air or missile attacks instead of ground troops.

A U.S. presence in Kosovo was important ``for political and military reasons,'' Eide told The Associated Press in a telephone interview from Ottawa.

``The U.S. army is best tailored for fighting a real war, much better than European forces if the going got really tough and it looked like a traditional war,'' he said.

Ethnic Albanian guerrillas have launched attacks in southern Serbia and battled with Macedonian troops in the former Yugoslav republic to the south. Under a peace deal brokered by NATO (news - web sites), Yugoslav forces have been allowed to deploy in a buffer zone between Kosovo and southern Serbia.

In Canada for two days of meetings with government officials on Russia, the Balkans and the Middle East, Eide said any differences between the actions of troops from differing NATO countries in Kosovo would create the falseimpression of a lack of unity in policy.

``It's very important that we do not give the people in Kosovo the impression that there are different priorities between different countries,'' Eide said.



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