President Bill Clinton’s announcement, made during his brief Christmas visit to Bosnia, that U.S. troops were going to stay in that blighted Balkan province well beyond the initially announced “deadline” of June 1998, surprised only the naive. The only surprising aspect of the announcement was Clinton’s refusal to set any new deadlines: the troops were to stay, he said, “until the job is done.”

If “the job” in question is the creation of a stable, peaceful, and more or less integrated state in Bosnia-Herzegovina, the troops will stay indefinitely, because the objective is unattainable. If “the job” is simply to keep the warring factions apart, then the Clinton administration ought to stop talking about the “reintegration” of Bosnia as its objective. After the trauma of the latest war, Bosnia can only function as an evenly treated and finely balanced arrangement among its constituent peoples: Serbs, Croats, and Muslims. The European Union is stable because its member-nations have chosen, over a period of years, to eliminate customs barriers, passport controls, and tariffs, and to allow completely free movement of goods, services, and capital. This may happen in the former Yugoslavia, too, if America allows people on all sides to see the benefits of association and cooperation.

The Dayton Accords, as General Charles Boyd wrote in Foreign Affairs, just may succeed—but only if the United States puts the security of Muslims, Serbs, and Croats before their integration. Each group of “Bosnians” feels safe only with its own kin, and their self-created partition should be allowed to stand while the trauma of war fades. Meanwhile, the powers-that-be in the outside world need to rectify the gross disparity between the reconstruction aid and military supplies flowing to the Muslims and the crumbs allotted to the Serbs. Reinterpretations of the Dayton Accords are detrimental to the prospects for peace. “Dayton” is a balanced document, carefully worded, and its application needs to be balanced too. The perception in Europe still persists, however, that the United States cares less for the letter of “Dayton” and more for the integrative “spirit” that would enable Albright and company to continue with their ad hoc reinterpretation of the agreement.

The situation is complicated by the continuing split within the Bosnian-Serb leadership between the embattled President of the Republika Srpska, Biljana Plavsic, and the loyalists of the former president. Dr. Radovan Karadzic. Plavsic is often dubbed “pro-Western,” but her position is actually akin to that of Philippe Petain in the summer of 1940: accept a bad outcome and pretend you are doing it with a good grace, lest the alternative proves to be infinitely more painful. Having witnessed what happened to the Serbs in the Krajina, Plavsic knows that only a sympathetic West may prevent a repeat performance in Bosnia.

Plavsic’s Western interlocutors, for their part, understand that building up a pliant Serb leader in an emaciated Republika Srpska is the only way they can veto the preferred Muslim scenario: an all-out military offensive, which would “unify” Bosnia (minus a million Serb refugees pushed into Serbia) under the rule of Alija Izetbegovic.

The Muslim scenario clearly calls for the continuous presence of Karadzic as the Bosnian Serb puppet-master. This fact would in itself provide an alibi for the “full and final liberation of the entire state territory” (in the language of the Sarajevo media). The Muslim leadership is well aware that Karadzic’s control at Pale would also make it politically impossible for any Western leader to try to prevent the Bosnian Serb catastrophe.

Plavsic’s desperate game plan also relies on the potential for renewed Muslim- Croat conflict if Sarajevo and Zagreb cannot agree on the division of the spoils after a Bosnian Serb collapse. No such agreement seems possible, for having finished off the Krajina, Croatia regards Muslims as a worse threat to its regional interests than its traditional Serb rivals. Croatian President Franjo Tudjman has never given up on his plan to divide Bosnia along ethnic lines. It is one of the worst-guarded secrets that the Muslim-Croat Federation in the non- Serb half of Bosnia—so lovingly nurtured by the experts at the U.S. State Department—is dead, primarily because Croatia has completed its de facto annexation of western Herzegovina.

Tudjman therefore would be loath to see Izetbegovic’s triumphant army on the west bank of the Drina River, separating Bosnia and Serbia, unless his checkered Croat flag were to be raised in Banja Luka. This, in turn, is unacceptable to Izetbegovic because a two-way split of Bosnia — between Croats and Muslims—would probably prove more definite than the three-way arrangement adopted at Dayton. This he will never accept without a fight—and a speedy Muslim victory over the Serbs could ignite renewed hostilities between the victors and the Croats.

Amid such nightmarish scenarios, it makes sense for both sides to preempt it all by cooperating. It is encouraging that at least some elements within the Clinton administration have understood, finally, that the Pax Americana in the Balkans is a disastrous strategy. The resultant instability would produce a new round of bloodshed within a generation at most. American support for Plavsic and a limited Serb self-rule under Dayton could therefore be taken as a clear signal—primarily to Messrs. Tudjman and Izetbegovic—that there will be no next round in Bosnia for years to come. After all the blunders it has made in the Balkans over the past decade, the United States would do well to adopt however belatedly—this pragmatic attitude and stick with it. Otherwise the GIs, stuck in the Balkans for years to come, may easily get in harm’s way.