Making War to Keep Peace (15 page)

In the wake of Mogadishu, President Clinton abandoned the effort to hunt down Aideed as a mistaken policy. Having come to power enthusiastic about the potential to replace war with peacekeeping, they had discovered how easily peacekeeping could slide into war. Americans would never again see peacekeeping as social work.
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142 (And yet, on the same day that dead Americans were being counted in Mogadishu and a battered American captive was being displayed on Somali television, Madeleine Albright, the U.S. representative to the UN, voted in the Security Council to send a peacekeeping force to Rwanda.)

The Clinton administration and the UN officials had operated under the assumption that unified forces and a unified command actually ex
isted. In a June 1993 CNN interview with Charles Bierbauer, Albright had described the Somali mission this way:

But the violence and casualties at Mogadishu were not at all what the proponents of collective multilateral action had in mind. Now the question was how to get U.S. troops out. On October 14, 1993, Clinton wrote to Senator Byrd that he would pull U.S. forces out of Somalia before the end of March 1994, “if at all feasible.” The same day, he told a press conference that the casualties in Somalia “would make me more cautious about having any Americans in a peacekeeping role where there was any ambiguity at all about what the range of decisions was which could be made by a commander other than an American commander.”
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(And yet, twelve hours later, he deployed U.S. warships to enforce sanctions against Haiti.) Clinton selected a new commander, Brigadier General Carl Ernst, for the American task force in Somalia and appointed Ambassador Robert Oakley as a special representative who would report directly to the U.S. government rather than to the UN. Planning for evacuation of U.S. troops was put into high gear. On October 15, the Senate voted 76 to 23 for a compromise that did not call for immediate withdrawal of U.S. forces from Somalia, but required U.S. forces to be under command of U.S. commanders.

A MULTILATERAL ENCOUNTER RECAPITULATED

Nothing had worked as intended in Somalia, where Boutros Boutros-Ghali and the UN Secretariat had hastily cobbled together forces from more than two dozen countries with diverse traditions, languages, and
levels of development. These forces were never adequately coordinated and equipped. It proved impossible to overcome different priorities, training, weapons, values, goals, languages, habits, and military traditions. Incompatible cultures complicated every action. Disorganization, disagreements, lack of political will, uneven command competence, and wasteful and inefficient administration combined with language difficulties and a general lack of discipline in a number of national contingents.

Everyone associated with the mission had ideas about what went wrong.

First, the problems were very difficult. It was a violent internal conflict in a society without a government, in which several contenders for power made war on one another with murderous weapons. Factional leaders had negotiated but had not implemented a cease-fire and had hindered the delivery of humanitarian assistance.

Second, the operation suffered from progressive “mission creep.” What began as an effort to deliver emergency humanitarian assistance was redefined until it became a far-reaching mission to establish a secure environment for the delivery of humanitarian aid; curb lawless clan leaders and disarm warring factions; achieve political reconciliation, stability, and law and order; rebuild the Somali economy and institutional infrastructure; arrest Aideed; repatriate refugees; enforce an arms embargo; and create a new state. Force levels and equipment were not equal to the changed mission.

In May 1994, General Montgomery testified on the purposes of the operation. “The mission of UNITAF was limited. The objective was very clear. Disarmament was undertaken for the purpose of ensuring that relief would flow….[W]ith the clarity of retrospective [view]…[i]t was not possible to disarm Somalia totally.”
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Not until the Mogadishu ambush did the public realize that the mission had slipped from being a humanitarian effort into nation building and war.
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The third major problem was the complicated chain of command. During the first phase of UNITAF, U.S. forces operated under American command; under UNOSOM II, almost all U.S. and other forces were placed under the command of the UN, with the secretary-general as
commander in chief. The respected (Turkish) Lieutenant-General Cevik Bir had operational command.

General Montgomery, commander of U.S. forces and deputy UN force commander in Somalia from March 1993 to March 1994, described the UN chain of command in a
Frontline
interview: “As deputy UN commander, I was General Bir's assistant and we worked for Admiral Howe, who was the special representative of the UN secretary-general.”
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Montgomery was also commander of the U.S. forces in Somalia. In this position, he reported directly to the commander in chief of the U.S. Central Command, General Joseph P. Hoar, who was in Tampa, Florida. Montgomery explains:

As retired colonel Kenneth Allard noted, “If it takes longer than ten seconds to explain the command arrangements, they probably won't work.” In UNOSOM II, Allard said, “You had essentially three chains of command running. You had one that was going back to New York to the United Nations; you had one that was very clearly going back to Washington, DC; and you had another one that was being exercised by the unified command itself, the United States Central Command…. [T]hat is precisely the wrong way to do a command control.” The right way, he said, is to “have one person in charge.” He added, “I think General Schwarzkopf said it very well during Desert Storm: ‘When you get off the plane, you work for me.'…The command arrangements should be the thing that enables effective command control, not an obstacle to it.”
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Some Pentagon officials, such as Assistant Secretary of Defense Walter Slocombe, acknowledged the problems with the command structure. “In my opinion,” Slocombe later told a Senate hearing, “the UN as such does not currently have the capability to conduct Chapter VII peace enforcement operations which entail serious combat, or the potential for
it…. It can do these things only with the leadership of a strong nation…or an effective international military organization [such as] NATO. The complexity of these operations currently exceeds the UN's capabilities.”
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The lack of a central authority over national contingents was yet another source of difficulty—a fact that became especially clear as governments began to make unilateral decisions about withdrawing their forces. In September 1993, Italian forces declined to follow orders regarding the capture of Aideed and threatened to leave because of disagreements with UN methods and goals. The UN command lacked the authority to fire the Italian commanders. Eventually, after the massacre at Mogadishu and the return of Robert Oakley as President Clinton's special adviser, the United States withdrew its support for the capture. When Clinton announced the planned U.S. withdrawal, shortly thereafter, the governments of Belgium, France, and Sweden followed suit; in the following months, Germany, Greece, Italy, Norway, Turkey, Korea, Kuwait, Morocco, Saudi Arabia, Tunisia, and the United Arab Emirates all withdrew their forces.
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A formerly confidential investigation conducted by the Zambian chief justice, a retired UN peacekeeping commander from Ghana, and by Finland's chief of staff into the heavy casualties suffered by Pakistani, American, and other forces in Somalia reached very different conclusions than the Farer report about the causes of the deaths of twenty-five Pakistanis and eighteen Americans. While the Farer report had blamed Aideed, this investigation divided the “blame” among Somali factions, UN commanders, troop-contributing countries, and the Security Council. This investigation concluded that UN forces had overstepped their mandate, interfered in internal affairs, and taken sides in the internal conflict, creating “virtual war situations.”
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Most observers agreed that the secretary-general bore some responsibility for the failures and casualties, because he had assumed unprecedented powers that he was unable to exercise in a professional manner. The “traditional United Nations peacekeeping culture that often disdains military solutions or even military expertise” created additional complications.
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Boutros-Ghali's embrace of that culture was apparent in his appointments and decisions. Chapter VII operations were considered
peacekeeping engagements, to be carried out under the peacekeeping rules of engagement. Those rules were inappropriate for the situation in Somalia, as they called for geographic balance in forces, minimum armaments, and minimum use of force for passive self-defense only.

Inadequate Force: How Much Is Enough?

The Clinton administration shared the UN attitude of disdain for military solutions, including a reluctance to supply the necessary means. This attitude became an increasing problem as the UN turned more frequently to military solutions. Richard Haass, George Bush's representative to the Security Council, noted that “the greatest failures come from approaching a mission as one of peacekeeping when it in fact is much more.”
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General Montgomery said that if the UN's Pakistani troops had had Bradley tanks, Bradley APCs, or M1-A1 Abrams tanks, they could have made a speedier rescue in Mogadishu. The general had repeatedly requested such reinforcements, of both personnel and weapons. In August 1993 he had requested naval battle tanks, a mechanic task force, a cavalry troop, and more intelligence capability, but these requests were rejected in Washington, where the priority was to downsize forces, not strengthen them. The responsibility for this decision lay with the secretary of defense and the upper levels of the Clinton national security team.

General Garrison, commander of U.S. forces in the Mogadishu battle, wrote to President Clinton that “the authority, responsibility, and accountability for the Op[eration] rests here in MOG with the TF Ranger Commander, not in Washington…. A reaction force would have helped, but casualty figures may or may not have been different.”
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But others were less ready than Garrison to absolve the administration of responsibility. In
Black Hawk Down
, Mark Bowden wrote the following:

Other deficiencies contributed to the catastrophe in Mogadishu. As Garrison observed, no plans had been made for reinforcing the Rangers in Mogadishu; there was no advance coordination with Pakistani and Malaysian forces, who were not on standby alert and did not understand that they were to be available as reinforcements in an emergency. The Rangers even lacked proper night-vision equipment.
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Some UN commanders in Somalia thought the number of troops was inadequate to the task. The secretary-general supposed that more involvement of regional organizations and more troops had been needed. The U.S. military commanders in the Pentagon thought the operation lacked adequate firepower, adequate clarity about its mission, and a clear chain of command. After the massacre in Mogadishu, Secretary of Defense Les Aspin announced that the Pentagon was sending four M1-A1 tanks, twelve APCs, and about two hundred more troops. He used a familiar Vietnam-era excuse that Americans had “unfortunately” become “involved in day-to-day operation in Mogadishu” in the effort to find a military solution to a political problem.
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Interoperability

Several participants, including Admiral Howe, emphasized that the approximately twenty-nine-nation UN force had serious problems of coor
dination and lack of interoperability from the start. Troops from different nations often could not understand one another's languages or methods of operating, and had different ideas about their mission.
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Sometimes they literally did not understand what they were doing.