By GWYNNE DYER LONDON -- He's "abrasive," "bullying," the," "top gun," even "the Quentin Tarantino of international diplomacy." Special U.S. envoy Richard Holbrooke has bearded the evil Serbian president; Slobodan Milosevic, in his lair and brought back peace in our time. Maybe we should reward him by making him U.S. Secretary of State one of these days. The publicity machine of the U.S. special envoy charged with ending the Kosovo crisis pumps out a consistent line about how tough he is, and the sycophantic media lap it up. But the Kosovo crisis is not over -- and if Dick Holbrooke is the toughest guy on the block, then I am the Fairy Queen. All spring and summer, Serbian police and soldiers burned and looted their way across the 90 percent Albanian province of Kosovo, destroying the homes of a quarter of its 2 million people, in order to terrify the Kosovars out of their desire to secede. Nobody intervened, and only the media complained. Suddenly, NATO gave the Serbian leader an "ultimatum" and began mustering a strike, force of 430 aircraft to make him stop. Much rattling of sabers ensued, as we allegedly teetered on the brink of something big. Then Holbrooke went in, yelled and banged the table a lot, and the craven Milosevic crumbled. End of crisis. Well, not exactly. If it was truly an ultimatum, why did Holbrooke go to Belgrade four times in the past two weeks? It was half a negotiation, half a charade -- and the outcome was bound to favor Milosevic because NATO so badly wanted to avoid a war. Last week, British journalist Martin Woolacott described the ideal outcome for Milosevic: "unarmed monitors and aid workers so as to re-create the hostage situation which so crippled Western efforts in Bosnia; no full withdrawal of Serbian forces; no, or very few, NATO troops; no true self-administration for Kosovo now; and a framework for talks on final status ruling out both independence and republican status within what remains of the Yugoslav federation." And what did Holbrooke actually get? Two thousand unarmed monitors will arrive in Kosovo over the next month. They will be controlled not by NATO or the United Nations but by the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe which has neither armed forces at its disposal nor any experience in these matters. ("This will be virgin territory for us," said an OSCE spokesman.) These monitors will be as vulnerable to intimidation by the Serbs as their counterparts were in the early stages of the Bosnian conflict -- and there will be plenty of Serbian forces around, since Milosevic has only agreed to withdraw the extra forces that he sent to Kosovo after he launched his offensive last March. Nor can NATO threaten airstrikes again to guarantee the monitors freedom of access, since they will be Milosevic's hostages. No NATO ground troops will go to Kosovo, and the talks will not even offer the province the same degree of autonomy that it had before Milosevic subjugated it to Serbia in 1989, let alone the independence almost every Kosovar demands. In other words, Milosevic has got what he wanted. As he told the Serbs on Oct. 13: "A ... political solution ... will be geared toward an affirmation of the ethnic equality of all citizens and all ethnic groups in Kosovo." Translation: The Serbian minority in Kosovo (less than 10 percent of the population) will get veto powers equal to those of the Albanian ethnic majority. It will not last, of course. Nobody in his right mind believes that Kosovo will still be part of Serbia in 10 or 15 years time, and Milosevic is neither stupid nor crazy. He is often called a "nationalist," but he is really a "Milosevicist," concerned only to perpetuate his own power at any long-term cost to the Serbs. This deal buys him a year or so, and that's as far ahead as he ever plans. And to sweeten the deal, the International War Crimes Tribunal will not have jurisdiction on Yugoslav territory -- so it cannot arrest war criminals who committed atrocities in Kosovo and get confessions from them that would directly implicate Milosevic. This resembles the secret deal that Holbrooke made with the Serbian secret police at the Dayton accords, promising not to arrest any Bosnian Serb politicians senior enough to tie Milosevic to the genocide there. One can see why Holbrooke would make that deal again, for his reputation rests on the Bosnian deal, which still needs Milosevic's cooperation -- but why would NATO back it? NATO has backed Holbrooke's negotiating strategy of disguised surrender because its real goals were very different from its announced ones. In response to mounting public outrage at the horrors in Kosovo, NATO governments made a long series of empty threats to intervene, just as in Bosnia. (Outraged Muslims should note that Western public opinion has consistently supported the Muslim victims of Serbian terror both in Bosnia and in Kosovo.) Finally, NATO's credibility was so damaged that it needed to stage a crisis, and apparently win it, or else start coming apart at the seams. But the alliance carefully waited until the Serbian forces had turned many of the Kosovars into shell-shocked refugees, because it wants to avoid the destabilizing prospect of Kosovo's independence and the attendant aspiration for a "Greater Albania." And it left the door open for a deal that Milosevic would accept, because it gravely doubted its ability to sustain a military campaign past the first cruise missiles. "The best defense will be when the coffins start to go back to America," said retired Bosnian Serb Gen. Slavko Lisica last week, and he was right. So what we have is a temporary deal that saves everybody's face and gets everyone off the hook (except the Kosovars, of course). As Balkan historian Mark Almond put it, the West has pretended to thunder, and Belgrade has pretended to be struck by lighting. And Holbrooke has carved another notch in his toy pistol. But it will all come back to haunt us, six months or a year from now. Nothing is settled, and nobody in Kosovo has been saved. Gwynne Dyer is a London-based independent journalist and historian whose columns appear in 45 countries.