NATO’s war against Yugoslavia set a precedent at considerable cost. It was the first instance of unilateral NATO intervention in a sovereign nation during the alliance’s 50-year history. NATO sent more than 1,000 aircraft to fly more than 38,000 sorties, at an eventual estimated cost of tens of billions of dollars. The alliance deployed 38,000 peacekeepers, drawn from 28 countries, with no foreseeable end to their mission. Reconstruction has barely begun and is expected to cost another $32 billion.

But one year later, the alliance’s peacekeeping mission, known as KFOR, is failing. Not only does ethnic violence persist, but the alliance appears to be further losing control. The murder rate in the rural breakaway province now equals that of the world’s largest cities. Sources on the ground report that weapons are increasingly in the hands of former guerrillas. NATO troops have come under attack by the ethnic Albanian majority as well as the Serb minority. The alliance is steadily headed toward a daunting choice. It must increase its grip on Kosovo or resign itself to providing a garrison force that safeguards a tumultuous province, which is effectively in the hands of the KLA.

It appears that elements of the guerrillas are orchestrating violence that threatens international forces. Even Western military officials have come grudgingly, though privately, to the conclusion that extremist elements of the KLA are making a bid for outright independence. NATO troops were stoned last October in the western city of Pec. The recent violence in the northern city of Mitrovica included a grenade attack that wounded 17 KFOR troops. In February, KFOR Cmdr. Gen. Klaus Reinhardt said, "When NATO came into Kosovo we were only supposed to fight the Yugoslav army if they came back uninvited. Now we’re finding we have to fight the Albanians."

Violent crime is falling but the largely rural province is far from safe. In the southeast corner of Kosovo, the American sector, there were 615 incidents of hostile fire, 15 mortar attacks, 20 altercations with unruly crowds, 129 grenade attacks and 58 landmine explosions – in the first six months of peacekeeping, according to NATO figures. The murder rate for the entire province has dropped from 127 murders per 100,000 people at the end of the war to 23 murders per 100,000. Still, the murder rate of rural Kosovo now equals the murder rate of Los Angeles, California – one of the world’s largest and most densely populated cities.

Under the June cease-fire agreement, the KLA was supposed to disband and disarm, but there is evidence that former guerrillas now enjoy easy – even sanctioned – access to weapons. Some 5,000 former KLA guerrillas have joined the Kosovo Protection Corps (KPC), a sort of national guard for emergency and disaster response. They are allowed to carry sidearms with the proper permit cards. But the permit cards are being copied and distributed to other former guerrillas, according to an international police source.

While the KLA was to have disbanded, two important wartime figures remain at the core of the still existent KLA power structure. Hashim Thaci, who led the KLA’s political wing and became the chief contact for the West, is now Kosovo’s most important ethnic Albanian politician. The commander of the KLA’s military wing, Agim Cequ, commands 5,000 former guerrillas who are now in the Kosovo Protection Corps.

The KLA is indebted to Balkan drug organizations that helped funnel both cash and arms to the guerrillas before and after the conflict. Kosovo is the heart of a heroin trafficking route that runs from Afghanistan through Turkey and the Balkans and into Western Europe. It now appears that the KLA must pay back the organized crime elements. This would in turn create a surge in heroin trafficking in the coming months, just as it did following the NATO occupation of Bosnia in the mid-1990s.

Two to six tons of heroin, worth 12 times its weight in gold, moves through Turkey toward Eastern Europe each month. The route connecting the Taliban-run opium fields of Afghanistan to Western Europe’s heroin market is worth an estimated $400 billion a year – and is dominated by the Kosovar Albanians. This "Balkan Route" supplies 80 percent of Europe’s heroin.

For the KLA, the Balkan Route is not only a way to ship heroin to Europe for a massive profit, but it also acted as a conduit for weapons filtering into the war-torn Balkans. The smugglers either trade drugs directly for weapons or buy weapons with drug earnings in Albania, Bosnia, Croatia, Cyprus, Italy, Montenegro, Switzerland or Turkey. The arsenal of weapons smuggled into Kosovo has included: anti-aircraft missiles, assault rifles, sniper rifles, mortars, shotguns, grenade launchers, anti-personnel mines and infrared night vision gear, according to a NATO report cited in the Washington Times in June 1999.

There is already anecdotal evidence that the drug trade is flourishing in Kosovo, in full view of international authorities. The bombed out, unpaved streets of Kosovo are the new home to sleek European sports cars with no license plates. There are 20 percent to 25 percent more cars in Kosovo than there were before the war, according to an international police official recently returned from several months in Kosovo. The refugees claim Serbs took the plates, but the black Mercedes are signs of a prospering drug trade.

Some 500,000 Kosovar Albanians live in Western Europe. Those living off the heroin trade rely on clan loyalties to tightly control their business partners. They gain access to Western European cities by exploiting their reputation as refugees. This gives them a distinct advantage over the Turks or Italians.

Although Albanian speakers comprise about 1 percent of Europe’s 510 million residents, they made up 14 percent of all Europeans arrested for heroin smuggling in 1997, according to Interpol. The average quantity of heroin confiscated from arrested smugglers was two grams; ethnic Albanians arrested for the same crime carried an average of 120 grams, the agency said.