Paris, Friday, March 31, 2000 By Christopher Layne and Benjamin Schwarz, "The Washington Post" The United States and its NATO allies won a military victory in Yugoslavia a year ago, but, as Kosovo's deteriorating situation attests, it is a hollow triumph. This was a misguided venture from the start. Washington's declared objectives of stabilizing the Balkans and building a multiethnic democracy in Kosovo have utterly foundered. Worse, as should have been foreseen, the United States and its allies are stuck in a geopolitical quagmire. ...... Mr. Clinton's postwar assertion that the bombing was a way to stop ''deliberate, systematic efforts at genocide'' in Kosovo seems either disingenuous or ignorant. Before the start of NATO's bombing on March 24, 1999, approximately 1,800 civilians - overwhelmingly ethnic Albanians but also Serbs - had been killed in 15 months of bitter warfare between the KLA and Yugoslav forces. Up to then, however, there had been no genocide or ethnic cleansing. The Yugoslav Army's admittedly brutal operations had been directed at rooting out the KLA, not at expelling Kosovo's ethnic Albanian population. The U.S.-led NATO bombing precipitated the very humanitarian crisis the administration claimed it was intervening to stop. Administration claims of mass killings - made to rally popular support for the war - turn out to have been exaggerated. Mr. Clinton defended the intervention on the ground that the Yugoslavs had slaughtered ''tens of thousands.'' Secretary of Defense William Cohen termed it a ''horrific slaughter.'' The numbers we now have tend to disprove those claims. To date, according to UN reports, forensic specialists working under UN auspices have exhumed 2,108 bodies. It is far from certain that all perished as a result of Yugoslav atrocities. Some may have been combatants, others may have been civilians caught in the cross-fire between the Yugoslav army and the KLA or killed by NATO bombs. In the end, the number of civilians believed killed by the Yugoslav Army is certain to have been far less than the Clinton administration and NATO claimed. Though the United States and its allies accomplished one goal by forcing Belgrade to withdrew its troops from Kosovo, we must ask, at what price? The war in the province itself never ended. Despite the presence of U.S. and NATO peacekeepers, once Yugoslav forces left Kosovo, the KLA targeted the province's Serbian and Gypsy populations, a campaign of ethnic cleansing that continues unabated. Mrs. Albright's March 8 assertion that the KLA ''disbanded'' is a fiction. The KLA leadership constitutes the backbone of Kosovo's de facto government. Clinton administration officials console themselves that, if nothing else, they at least ''did the right thing'' by intervening. This is not enough to exculpate them from the responsibility they bear for the brutal quagmire Kosovo has become. In the real world, policymakers are judged by the consequences of their actions, not by their intentions. Measured by this standard, the Kosovo war is a damning indictment of both the administration's foreign policy and its doctrine of ''virtuous power.''