LONDON -- Ethnic peace has withstood an entire week of shooting around the Macedonian city of Tetovo, despite the efforts of ethnic Albanian guerrillas based in neighboring Kosovo to topple the small Balkan republic into civil war. Another week of fighting would probably do the trick, however -- so it would help if NATO, which has occupied Kosovo for the past 20 months, could work its nerve up enough to stop the guerrillas crossing into Macedonia.
It is almost entirely NATO's fault. The alliance has 37,000 troops in Kosovo, quite enough to seal its borders against the extremist minority who want to destabilize their neighbors. But NATO governments have such an acute fear of casualties that they are unwilling to police the borders seriously.
All NATO countries suffer from this casualty aversion, which is why the NATO campaign to expel the genocidal Serbian forces from Kosovo in 1999 was conducted entirely from the air, and why NATO occupation forces have done such a rotten job of protecting the remaining Serbian minority in Kosovo from extremist Albanian attacks.