Bosnia Mission Evaluated Albright And Nato Colleagues Forge A Plan For Extended Duty

Agreeing that the peacekeeping deployment in Bosnia is far from over, Secretary of State Madeleine Albright and her NATO colleagues directed military planners to consider a smaller, more flexible force that would remain after the current mission ends in June.

“Much remains to be done,” said Albright, who faces resistance in Congress to an extended U.S. role in Bosnia.

President Clinton said he and his advisers are “discussing actively” an extended - but not permanent - commitment of U.S. troops to the NATO Stabilization Force, or SFOR.

“If there is to be a mission after the SFOR mission expires, it must also have a clear-objective component,” Clinton said at a news conference in Washington. “I still don’t believe there should be anybody interested in some kind of a permanent stationing of global military presence all over Bosnia.”

Clinton plans a trip to Bosnia on Monday to celebrate Christmas with U.S. troops and to begin selling a reluctant Congress on extending the peacekeeping mission for a second time.

NATO won’t make a final decision to extend the mission until March 1. Military planners report back next month on follow-on force options for the former Yugoslavia, which remains a powder keg of ethnic rivalry two years after the 1995 Dayton peace accords ended the three-year war.