U.S. Troops Converge Near Kosovo
By ROBERT BURNS AP Military Writer
WASHINGTON (AP) - American ground troops converged on Kosovo's doorstep Thursday, poised with NATO allies for a mission fraught with dangers ranging from land mines to booby-trapped bridges and the possibility of sniper fire from stay-behind Serbs.
``This is going to be difficult,'' Defense Secretary William Cohen said. ``I don't think anyone should minimize the hardship that's going to be involved.'' He and Army Gen. Henry Shelton, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, outlined the peacekeepers' mission at a Pentagon news conference after NATO suspended its bombing campaign and the United Nations authorized a NATO-led peacekeeping mission.
``We face challenges and risks in bringing home the refugees and restoring stability,'' President Clinton said at the White House.
Clinton declined to say how long the peacekeepers might have to stay in Kosovo. Next door, in Bosnia, 6,000 American soldiers are on a peacekeeping mission now 41/2 years old and with no end in sight.
``I don't think we should put a timetable on it,'' Clinton said of the Kosovo mission for the 7,000 U.S. troops in a 50,000-strong NATO-led force. ``We will define our objectives and proceed to implement them.''
Marines and Army soldiers in the vanguard of the U.S. peacekeeping contingent began arriving Thursday in northern Macedonia, where thousands of other allied forces stood ready to begin their Kosovo mission.
The U.S. contingent, dubbed Task Force Falcon, is to be headquartered in the town of Gnjilane in southeastern Kosovo. They will operate with peacekeepers from other NATO countries and possibly Russia.
Cohen said the operation is likely to cost U.S. taxpayers $1.5 billion to $2 billion a year, not counting the cost of returning the hundreds of warplanes and thousands of troops that the Pentagon has sent to the Balkans and elsewhere in Europe over the past few months to carry out airstrikes.
NATO Secretary-General Javier Solana said the first peacekeepers could enter Kosovo on Friday.
``It is inevitable that some unpleasantries will greet them,'' British Lt. Gen. Michael Jackson told a news conference in Skopje, Macedonia. He is the overall commander of the NATO-led peackeeping force.
Cohen, citing reports that Serb forces are destroying villages and laying more land mines on their way out of Kosovo, said: ``Regrettably, that is a practice perhaps pursued by those who are intent on laying as much waste as they can while they are on the way out.''
U.S. and allied warplanes continued patrolling the skies over Kosovo, and the aircraft carrier USS Theodore Roosevelt, one of the mainstays of NATO's 11-week air campaign, remains on station in the Adriatic Sea.
``We want to keep its firepower close by as we judge the reception and the level of risk that our forces encounter as they go into Kosovo,'' Navy Vice Adm. Daniel J. Murphy, commander of the U.S. 6th Fleet, said in a telephone interview from his command ship in the Adriatic, the USS Mount Whitney.
The 1,900 Marines who offloaded from ships at a beach in northern Greece and headed overland into Macedonia on Thursday, are expected to be gathered at their staging area near Petrovec, Macedonia, by late Friday, Murphy said.
Once there, the Marines will come under the command of Army Brig. Gen. John Craddock, an assistant commander of the 1st Infantry Division, which is contributing most of the troops for the mission. They will be heavily armed, to include tanks, Bradley armored troop carriers and a variety of artillery, multiple-launch rocket systems, attack helicopters and equipment to find and remove land mines.
The military-to-military agreement that Yugoslav and NATO generals signed on Wednesday calls for the withdrawing Serb troops to mark and clear minefields, booby traps and other obstacles on their way out of Kosovo, but Pentagon officials said they expected many of the hazards to be left behind.
The accord also says that by Friday, Yugoslav authorities are to provide to NATO ``detailed records, positions and descriptions of all mines, unexploded ordnance'' and other hazards to safe movement in Kosovo.
Secretary of State Madeleine Albright said a small number of Serb forces will be permitted to return to Kosovo to help locate land mines so that children will not have to be ``tethered to their homes'' for safety. She was in Germany for a meeting with foreign ministers of the Western powers and Russia.
The swift end to the Kosovo conflict left NATO with an enormous task in fashioning a peacekeeping plan that will actually move into Kosovo before many of the 40,000 Serb forces have left the province.
It was barely a week ago that Washington was buzz with speculation that
U.S. ground troops would have to enter Kosovo - forcibly, as an invasion
force, not a peacekeeping force. Then, with a swiftness that took NATO
by surprise, Milosevic capitulated and the door to a peaceful settlement
swung open.
