The opinions of John Blunt are not necessarily those of this newspaper

WHEN will it end? Where will it end?

These are the constantly repeated questions as Nato's war with Serbia over Kosovo begins its third week.

But one does not have to be either a foreign policy expert or military strategist to know already that, however morally right the allied action may be - and Tony Blair is right when he says it is a battle between good and evil - in practical terms, Nato has a long way to go to defeat the evil of Slobodan Milosevic and even further to go to achieve the aim of returning the Kosovo Albanians to their homes.

It is difficult to see how either might be achieved by the use of air power alone - and note that the cranking up of the process for the use of ground forces has already begun - and when tens of thousands of refugees have been dispersed, officially only temporarily, all over Nato countries, even as far as Canada.

But while Nato's good intentions are not in doubt, its ability to see and plan ahead must be - not least when we find our own government admitting it did not foresee that while we were conducting a limited air war on military targets, the Serb forces on the ground would turn their onslaught against Kosova's Albanians into a dreadful reminder of the Nazi holocaust against the Jews. It beggars belief that our leaders could not imagine that the Serbs would escalate their atrocities and anger against those for whom the air strikes on them are being waged.

Now, we see that Serbia's campaign of ethnic cleansing has been speeded up and perhaps even permanently assisted if the plans to disperse vast numbers of the uprooted and driven-out Albanian Kosovars far and wide evolve in the process of a long war from providing temporary refuge to lasting resettlement.

Yet, now we are at the stage where seeing it through to the end for as long as it takes and doing what it takes - all of which suggests to me the eventual nightmare of British squaddies going in on the ground for years and many coming home in body bags - has become the only plan Nato has.

One adaptation urgently needed - and one which should have been employed long ago when we took sides -- is the arming by Nato of the Kosovar freedom fighters, so they can fight this conflict on the ground rather than our boys. It might be a just war but, after all, it is more theirs than ours.

Converted for the new archive on 14 July 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.