Now, with the flareup of fighting in
Macedonia, this newspaper can report
scenes like this: A US Army platoon
leader patrolling the hills between Kosovo
and Macedonia says he's equipped to stop
any Albanian rebels:

"We have night vision. We have thermal
imaging. We have soldiers out in the
country day and night. We see people
all the time. We stop them and search
them. We're quite adept at finding
people out here."

If that level of military engagement by
NATO had existed in the early 1990s,
when the West was still trying to figure out
how to act in the post-cold-war world,
tens of thousands of people might not have
been lost to ethnic cleansing and
massacres. But after two wars in the
region, NATO now has 42,000 troops in
Kosovo, and another 22,000 in Bosnia.

And despite the reluctance by the Bush
administration to make any more
commitments to the Balkans, the US
nonetheless has quickly given diplomatic
and military support to Macedonia's\
government to help it fight off a small
Albanian insurgency.

           Once again, the US has
shown that it has the best military capability,
such as aerial reconnaissance photos,
to help stop a civil conflict before it
escalates into a regional ethnic war.

And with the US and its NATO allies
cutting rebel supply lines from Kosovo, the
message is being sent to militant Albanian
nationalists that peaceful means must now
be used to resolve political differences and
that Macedonia's territorial integrity is
essential to Europe's interest in a stable
Balkans.

Still, the grievances of Albanians in both
Kosovo and Macedonia will not go away
once this rebellion is suppressed.

The West must still work with the new
government in Serbia to provide
autonomy, if not independence, for
Kosovo. Holding full elections in the
province would help that.

And the West must push Macedonia's
Slavic-dominated government to boost the
political participation of the minority
Albanians and to address their complaints
about discrimination.

Compared with most other states of
former Yugoslavia, Macedonia has served
as a relatively good model of ethnic peace,
or at least coexistence. Its stability is
necessary to support the West's goal that
multiethnic states can survive in the
Balkans despite decades of strife that led
to wars.

The region has been an anvil for the US
and Europe to learn some hard lessons.

Now they are paying off.