Why Albania Matters

FOR A TIME, IT looked as though Albania had become America's favorite Balkan country. The Pentagon quickly cozied up to the military once the country abandoned communism--but has now run away just as fast. Do we have an interest in trying to contain Albania's collapse?

Certainly. It's enough to remember the last time the question was raised in the Balkans. Unfortunately, that record is the recent history of Bosnia--rape, massacres and torture; huge expenditures and the prospect that the new order may fall apart if NATO doesn't put some muscle behind implementing the Dayton accords. Bosnia argues that the West needs to do better.

Sleepwalking in the Balkans is dangerous. Nobody wanted to look too closely at the important but fraudulent Albanian elections of last May. And the pyramid disaster blossomed quickly.

What we do now that the cold war is over, it appears, is hope there's a happy twist of fate and the problem goes away. The West watched the situation degenerate, sent people to talk and offered our usual rhetoric--but never really concerted our thinking and efforts. Once more, domestic politics undermined governments' ability to manage a crisis whose ""strategic importance'' isn't obvious.

The Albanian crisis could directly threaten regional stability. A refugee exodus will weigh heavily on Italy and Greece. More dangerous still, the flood of weapons could spill into Macedonia (where pyramid schemes also are popular) and Kosovo. The response of the beleaguered Serbian strongman Slobodan Milosevic to the continuing Albanian crisis in Kosovo is unpredictable--a good example of why order is no substitute for democracy. Turkey, a key ally for many Western countries, has friendly relations with Albania; Greece, an antagonistic NATO member, doesn't. That relationship doesn't need any irritants.

And, quite apart from the regional politics, the West could easily find itself once more in the position of paying for our dithering over whether to spend even small political capital early by making vast expenditures for humanitarian aid later. That's hardly cost-effective.

Not all problems require a military answer. Often, solutions must be long-term. Albania's problems won't be easy to solve. But we must seriously consider options beyond evacuating U.S. nationals. As some allies propose, we should consider the dispatch of a Western peacekeeping force.

Bulgaria and now Albania have disintegrated, the latter into utter chaos. Long term, the West might have to get ready to do the impossible--consider treating such unstable young democracies almost as protectorates.

The news from Tirana makes ironic counterpoint to the current debate over expanding NATO. It's hard to avoid concluding that NATO is good at dealing with problems that don't now exist but has shown great difficulty in facing up to the destruction on its doorstep.