Opinion

BROKEN BORDERS

ON Sunday, Kosovo declared its independence from Ser bia and joined the great strategic movement of our time – the demolition of the phony world order imposed by dead Europeans.

The dismantling of artificial colonial-era states and the collapse of dysfunctional borders decreed by conferences in Berlin in the 1880s or at Versailles in 1919 is an irresistible trend around the globe.

The problem is that we’ve been resisting it, anyway. Since the disintegration of the Soviet Union, Washington has wasted troops and treasure in hopeless attempts to reverse the flow of history, to keep doomed states on life support. Now, with our acceptance of Kosovo’s right to independence, we’ve almost gotten it right, in at least one case.

Why “almost?” Even now, we can’t see past the fatal lines printed on the map. Kosovo will get its own flag, but our determination to avoid short-term difficulties, no matter the long-term price, guarantees that Kosovo’s problems aren’t over.

The cancerous issue we’ve ignored is the enclave in northern Kosovo where 100,000 Serbs live under lockdown. While the Serbs as a whole excite little sympathy, the key to getting the Balkans halfway right isn’t to ask, “Who’s guilty?” but “Who’s guilty this week?”

Those Serbian-populated lands in the north were an organic part of Serbia until a half-century ago, during the Tito era, when the West’s favorite dictator administratively attached them to the Kosovo Autonomous Region (previously incorporated into Serbia) to dilute the Albanian Muslim majority.

Including this enclave now in independent Kosovo just promises further conflict down the road – like forcing an ex-husband and -wife to share an apartment after a savage divorce.

Had the United States and the European Union returned that shabby plot of land to Serbia, it would’ve infuriated the Kosovars – who don’t want to give their hereditary Serb enemies an inch, and who also exaggerate the region’s economic potential. Nor did we want to “interfere” with the former Yugoslavia’s corrupt internal boundaries.

So we’ve lit the fuse for future explosions to avoid a few sparks today.

This is cowardly and stupid, and we’ve done it before. Do any of our diplomats truly believe that the atrocity-ravaged Bosnia that only survived “intact” thanks to the strong-arming behind the 1995 Dayton Accords will ever become a fully functional state? It’s three unhappy territories biding their time.

Like Bosnia, Kosovo is going to fester on. Only the presence of international troops and an ambitious European Union mission impede the immediate outbreak of violence where the world saw those red-and-black flags waving.

The lesson we should’ve learned in Iraq and still refuse to apply in the Balkans and elsewhere is: Take the pain up front. Revise the dysfunctional borders while everything’s in an uproar. Don’t preserve century-old European misdeeds in pursuit of hollow stability.

Half a continent east of Kosovo, we await the final results of an election in Pakistan that, no matter its outcome, will add to that struggling country’s turmoil. A huge Muslim holding pen with nuclear weapons, Pakistan suffers from a flawed founding vision: Islam has not been enough to unite Sindhis and Punjabis, Baluchis and Pashtuns. Only its military holds the country together.

As in Kosovo, the question isn’t whether we’ll see more violence, but when.

Then there’s our experiment in Iraq. We’re committed to preserving that glued-together state in the exact dimensions set by the last century’s cynical French and British imperial schemers. We may be able to pull it off – for a time.

But might it not have been wiser – as several of us suggested in 2003 – to shake off Europe’s vicious legacies and give Kurds their state, Iraqi Shias their state, and the country’s Sunni Arabs a rump Iraq to do with as they wished?

Yes, there would have been problems, practical, political and emotional. But was it wiser to defend the status quo?

The wretched borders Europe’s empires left behind did two fundamental things: 1) forced historical antagonists together, and 2) divided populations who felt an ethnic or religious kinship. Sometimes the borders were drawn in ignorance of local conditions – but they were often structured purposely to aid divide-and-rule policies.

Such borders cannot, will not and should not stand. They’re changing as you read this, from Central Africa through the Balkans and Iraq to Afghanistan. We can slow the process – at great cost – but we can’t stop it.

We needn’t launch an endless war to fix the mess Europeans in pinstriped trousers left us – but we’d damned well better accept that, when we expend blood and treasure to prop up phony states, we’re standing on the tracks in front of the speeding train of history.

At times – as in the case of Pakistan – there’s an immediate strategic necessity to support a cobbled-together state. But there’s no excuse for our recent history of reflexively defending every bad border out of diplomatic inertia.

How long will the United States – the greatest force for freedom in history – continue bleeding to preserve the most-destructive legacies of Europe’s empires? When will we stop confusing short-term quiet with long-term peace? Why do we keep ignoring the mounting evidence of our folly?

Back in Pristina, the Kosovar-Albanian victory celebrations continue, while Kosovo’s minority Serbs wonder what to do next. They know that, for all the EU’s promises and the rhetoric of Kosovo’s leaders, the knives are out for them.

Free Kosovo? You bet. But fairness for its Serb population, too, please. Once again, two wrongs haven’t made a right. Bad borders mean blood.

Ralph Peters’ latest book is “Wars of Blood and Faith.”