The air war in Kosovo may soon be over. While both the Clinton administration and the Belgrade regime are claiming victory, the standard by which the new peace agreement signed Wednesday must be judged has not changed since NATO bombing began 79 days ago: All Serbian forces must leave Kosovo, and all of the Kosovar Albanian deportees must return to their original homes, live securely and govern themselves freely under the protection of a NATO-led force.

It may be too early to determine whether this will happen, but so far, NATO's victory seems to be as cloudy as it appeared from 15,000 feet above Belgrade. Although we supported the NATO bombing campaign, we are concerned that the peace agreement appears to be a better deal for Serbian leader Slobodan Milosevic than the Rambouillet accords, which he earlier rejected. This agreement permits him to remain in power after the displacement of more than a million people, the deaths of tens of thousands, billions of dollars in damage and the expenditure of billions by NATO -- two-thirds of which will be paid by U.S. taxpayers. If Milosevic lost, why is the new agreement so favorable to him? If we won, why did the administration retreat until it claimed victory?

First, it is not clear that this agreement places the international implementation force in Kosovo under clear, unified NATO command. If the United Nations is able to obstruct NATO action on the ground, or if Russian or other non-NATO troops are deployed in ways in which they can obstruct such action, the plan would be fatally flawed.

Second, in the draft United Nations resolution on the settlement, the administration appears to have sacrificed clarity on NATO's most vital objectives in order to obtain a quick agreement. NATO is mentioned only once in the lengthy text, and then only in an annex and in the context of "participation" rather than command. The resolution calls for the withdrawal of "all military, police, and paramilitary forces," but does not identify those forces as "Serbian" or "Yugoslav." At the same time, it clearly and explicitly provides for the demilitarization of the Kosovo Liberation Army and the presence of Serbian personnel at key border crossings.

Third, Belgrade has agreed to an "interim administration" of Kosovo that is to be determined by the U.N. Security Council.

With Russia and China serving as Serbia's proxies, the council may weaken the self-government provisions for Kosovo. The Kosovar Albanians must be permitted to control their economy and polity and the society in which they live. Milosevic will not allow them full participation or equal rights in rump Yugoslavia. Nor, after the horrors of their recent experience, can they be expected to seek integration into Yugoslav institutions. Instead, they must be guaranteed the full political autonomy that they enjoyed from 1974 until Milosevic arbitrarily revoked it in 1990. NATO cannot claim success if it accepts second-class citizenship for the Kosovar Albanians.

Fourth, this deal seems to have been made in a historical vacuum. It would appear that the administration has forgotten that Milosevic is an indicted war criminal who has now launched four wars, killed 300,000 people and driven 4 million others from their homes in a struggle to create a Greater Serbia purged of its non-Serb population -- and that there is ample reason to think that he may now attack Montenegro and the ethnic Hungarians and Croats of the Vojvodina and Muslims of the Sandzak. Since NATO has reduced, but not eliminated the threat posed by Belgrade, these peoples also need the protection of the NATO troops in the region.

We are concerned that this administration may repeat the mistakes of Bosnia, where the fighting was halted by making Milosevic the West's strategic partner in implementing a peace settlement -- an arrangement that strengthened him politically in Serbia. The Kosovo agreement may do the same: Serbian spokesmen are already claiming that the deal reaffirms Belgrade's sovereignty over Kosovo and authorizes an international troop deployment only "under U.N. auspices." These are more than face-savers for Milosevic: They are achievements that may well strengthen him domestically, much as Saddam Hussein was strengthened by surviving Desert Storm.

The United States should have learned from Bosnia that Milosevic's agreement does not guarantee implementation. The Dayton Accords ended the Bosnian war, but they also preserved Serbian domination over the half of Bosnia captured by Serbian forces and purged of its non-Serb population. These accords have been further weakened by the failure to arrest key war criminals and facilitate the return of refugees. After three years, only 5% of the non-Serbs who were driven out of Bosnia's Serb-controlled entity have returned. We must not settle for this kind of "victory" in Kosovo.

We believe that Congress should monitor the Kosovo agreement closely to ensure that the administration does not repeat the mistakes it made in negotiating and implementing the Dayton Accords. It should ensure that all Kosovar Albanians are returned to where they resided in Kosovo and freed from the terror and tyranny of Milosevic's rule. Congress should also ensure that Milosevic cannot turn his killing machine on the remaining non-Serbs within his grasp. It should also ensure that there is no aid to Serbia for as long as Milosevic remains in power -- except perhaps a one-way ticket to take Milosevic from Belgrade to the U.N. War Crimes Tribunal in The Hague.