Making War to Keep Peace (16 page)

Howe observed weaknesses of multinational UN operations that were especially obvious in Somalia: “When troops must work closely in mutual defense to combat organized opposition, practical problems of interoperability, insufficient armament, and widely varying states of training come into sharp focus.”
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He cited inadequate force cohesion; lack of unity and clear command because of donor countries' tendency to micromanage their troops; and differences in the quality of weapons, transport, and training. He emphasized the importance of unity of command to provide forces with the resolve to tackle difficult tasks. He said, “Ducking inevitable conflicts associated with carrying out a UN mandate will quickly make a Chapter VII force ineffectual.”
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Howe was more realistic than some about the problems. Oakley, who played a critical role, has emphasized that U.S. forces were under U.S. command at all times, and Bowden, in
Black Hawk Down
, reiterated that Task Force Ranger, which was tasked to capture Aideed, was wholly an American production.
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But while the forces and the commanders were American, the context in which they operated included all the problems inherent in a multinational UN operation.

The forces of some countries (for example, Italy) refused to accept orders from UN commanders to attack Aideed's forces. The Italian commanders believed (with reason, given Italy's colonial experience in Somalia) that they knew the country better than the UN commanders did. Even when the individual national forces did follow UN orders, their coordination with others was poor. And the intelligence on which the forces acted was often inadequate.

CRITICAL DIFFERENCES BETWEEN THE BUSH AND CLINTON EXPERIENCES

There were crucial differences in how the Bush and Clinton operations in Somalia were conceived and commanded. President Bush limited the mission to emergency humanitarian relief and steadfastly refused a
larger military role in internal matters. He did not put U.S. forces into a conflict inadequately armed, commanded, and reinforced; in all the operations carried out under his presidency, U.S. forces were adequately trained and armed, and their numbers were sufficient.

Because the Bush administration limited its mission in Somalia—and because Bush's team had a better understanding of the political culture and terrain—the United States avoided head-on conflicts with any Somali clan or leadership group during his term in office. Bush refused to put U.S. forces under UN command and control, and he did not endorse the use of American forces for nation building. These were the differences between success in a limited mission and failure in a broad one.

George Bush, Colin Powell, and the other major players in the Bush administration recognized that modern armies are complex, sophisticated organizations whose management cannot be cobbled together in ad hoc arrangements; that military commanders are not interchangeable parts; that tactics must be adapted to forces, weapons, and terrain; and that armies are not skilled in overhauling societies. The Bush team always provided U.S. forces with the strength they needed to carry out their missions.

The Clinton administration failed to see the dangers of sending U.S. forces into a war zone under an ambiguous command, without reinforcements, without adequate intelligence or weapons, and under peacekeeping rules of engagement (which are far more constraining than is generally understood). Calling a mission operating in a war zone a “peace operation” does not make it peaceful—or safe. For President Clinton, Somalia would prove a difficult first lesson on the use of force.

GETTING OUT

With Rangers dead and wounded, Americans demanded to know how U.S. forces had been committed to a mission that was not authorized by Congress and that did not seem to relate to our national interest. After the ambush in Mogadishu, Clinton was eager to withdraw U.S. forces, but he wanted to make it clear that we would not be scared out. On October 5, he announced that he would temporarily reinforce UNOSOM II with
seventeen hundred troops, thirty-six hundred marines, and a ten-thousand-man carrier force.

The next day, Aideed (with whom Oakley had conducted successful negotiations) called for a cease-fire with American forces, and the Security Council lifted the order for Aideed's arrest. As the fighting slowed, hopes rose for an end to civil strife. On December 15, France pulled one thousand troops out of Somalia. A few days later, Germany and Italy announced that their troops would withdraw when the U.S. forces did. The Security Council announced that the UN force would revert to its original mission of protecting humanitarian aid and expediting its delivery. There was no longer any discussion of forcibly disarming Somalis or overhauling Somali institutions.

On March 4, 1994, the last major combat unit of U.S. troops shipped out, and on March 25 the last U.S. Marines departed. The United States warned the still-feuding Somali clans that all remaining U.S. personnel, including a U.S. liaison mission of military advisers and civilians, would withdraw by mid-July unless the Somali leaders reached a settlement. The warning was answered by a Somali attack in which five Nepalese peacekeepers were killed. Peace talks among the Somali factions broke down.

On June 9, the Security Council passed a resolution limiting the UN mission to four more months—less if no progress was made. Two weeks later, the United States sent an amphibious force of two thousand marines to help close the U.S. embassy and evacuate the diplomatic contingent. In the next two weeks, seven Indian peacekeepers were killed and nine ambushed, and three Indian military physicians died in an attack on a field hospital. As the Somalia operation unraveled, the United States agreed to assist in the evacuation of 18,900 UN peacekeepers, who the Security Council had decided should be withdrawn by March 31, 1995. In January 1995, four U.S. warships carrying twenty-six hundred marines departed to help in the final evacuation of UN peacekeepers.

Fighting among Somali clans escalated as the last U.S. Marines departed from Mogadishu in March 1995, two years after secretary-general Boutros-Ghali had proposed that the mandate of UNOSOM II cover the whole country and include Chapter VII enforcement powers
for rebuilding Somali society. Phase 2 of this ill-conceived and poorly executed international adventure in Somalia had ended. General Hoar wrote of the UNOSOM II experience, “The application of decisive rather than sufficient force can minimize resistance, saving casualties on all sides.”
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In Somalia, reinforcements were too little, too late. Achieving the UN goals would have required peace, and establishing peace was impossible. It would have required the concurrence and effort of Somalis, which was not available, and it would have required a century.

Somalia quickly became a nonevent at the White House and the Pentagon, where officials were busy writing rules of engagement for a different venture in a different country. The word
Somalia
did not cross Bill Clinton's lips when he spoke to the UN General Assembly in September 1994; rather, he spoke of challenges in Haiti, Rwanda, and other troubled societies. But the ghosts of Mogadishu haunted the streets of Port-au-Prince and Cap-Haïtien.
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Even as U.S. forces moved into Haiti, the UN shut down the billion-dollar-a-year “peace operation” that was to have brought national reconciliation to Somalia's warring clans and restored the rudiments of government. The departing UN peacekeepers needed U.S. protection from the marauding gangs that had again begun to roam the streets of Mogadishu—looting, threatening, attacking, and killing.

Somalia was neither a futile mission nor a failed one. The emergency food and medicine that had been provided before George Bush left office saved hundreds of thousands of Somalis from starvation. But the second mandate—to bring peace and restore the nation's infrastructure—was quietly abandoned. There was no mention anywhere of the UN Secretariat's ambitious plans to train national police and create a court system. As U.S. ambassador to Somalia Daniel Simpson made the final preparations to shut down the American embassy, he said, “There's no more Somalia. Somalia's gone. You can call the place where the Somali people live ‘Somalia,' but Somalia as a state disappeared in 1991.”
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There is still no national government and no order in the interior or in Mogadishu, where gangs prey on one another, on UN forces, and on UN-protected targets, stealing what can be stolen. No one expects that the United States will recover the huge quantities of heavy equipment leased to the UN forces. General Aideed, after successfully eluding U.S.
forces, succumbed to a wound inflicted by a rival. His son, Hussein Farah Aideed, who had served as a U.S. Marine, returned to Somalia to assume his father's leadership role.

Most postmortems on Somalia have emphasized the incompatibility of the country's indigenous social structure with the requirements for building a modern nation-state. Most observers agree that it is impossible to keep the peace without the cooperation of warring parties. The attention of the “international community” moved on—to Haiti, Bosnia, Kosovo. There was no indication that Clinton or anyone in his administration thought much about the failure of the team's first venture into peacekeeping and nation building, although the problems encountered in Somalia foreshadowed many that would be encountered in subsequent peacekeeping ventures.

Most of these troubled societies have much in common with each other and with other African societies—Angola, Mozambique, Burundi, Sudan, Liberia. All are failed states—that is, states in which conflict and civil war are endemic, and postcolonial state structures have succumbed to the pressures of indigenous social organization. UN Security Council authorizations to use “necessary force” to solve the problems of these failed states are already on the books, but no one seems to know how to graft peace, order, and modern government onto these fractured societies.

Sobered by the casualties in Mogadishu, President Clinton was ever after cautious and reluctant about committing U.S. troops to UN command and into harm's way. Nonetheless, he recommitted the United States to the “sacred mission” of building a new world, promising to encourage democratic governments to “help civil societies emerge from the ashes of repression.”
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The main problem with this scenario is that no one knows much about how foreign forces can help civil societies or modern states emerge in very different cultures. No one knows how to harmonize hostile elites, end violent behavior, or induce respect for law and restraint in the use of power in another culture without a larger commitment of personnel, money, and time than any president or any administration is prepared to make.

In the spring of 1995, while Congress debated whether it would be possible to balance the budget without raiding the Social Security fund
or denying Medicare to aged dependents, U.S. Marines were sent back to Somalia as part of a fourteen-thousand-man “extraction mission” to cover the retreat of twenty-five hundred UN troops. The last phase of the failed UNOSOM II mission got under way in March 1995. The mission had cost 30 Americans killed in action, 175 wounded, and about $1 billion a year. The evacuation alone was expected to cost about $50 million. As with most U.S. contributions above our assessed 31.7 percent share of UN peacekeeping costs, most of this sum was simply diverted from funds authorized and appropriated by Congress for conventional defense activities, such as training and providing spare parts.

This mission was to be carried out with nonlethal weapons—barbed wire, rubber bullets, pepper grenades, wooden pellets, and sticky foam—and under UN rules of engagement. Secretary of Defense William Perry explained that he wanted to make certain that no one on either side was hurt in the operation. The spirit of this policy was captured in Perry's comment that the marines would enter Somalia with their guns pointed backward. However, he did not want to leave the impression that the marines would be defenseless. A DOD briefing explained that “authorization to use lethal force for self-defense against deadly threats would be unaffected by the use of nonlethal weapons for achieving mission objectives.”

The very idea that marines would need specific authorization to use regular weapons in self-defense in a war zone told us that they were operating under UN rules of engagement, which permit the use of force only if the peacekeeper's life is directly and immediately threatened. These are the rules UN peacekeepers operated under when, at the airport in Sarajevo, Bosnia, on January 9, 1993, they allowed Hakija Turajlic, the deputy prime minister of Bosnia-Herzegovina, to be murdered in cold blood after having promised to keep him safe. French peacekeepers explained to a reporter that they had not drawn their guns because their own lives were not directly threatened. Such rules of engagement are incompatible with unit cohesion, force security, and morale.

American military personnel are both fierce and restrained in the use of force, because they are disciplined professionals. Trusting the discipline of well-armed forces preserves their credibility and their confidence. When the Clinton administration sent marines into danger armed
with silly putty and hot pepper, it sent the message that it was as concerned about the safety of the adversary as it was for the safety of U.S. forces. But American officials have a primary and overriding responsibility to the forces they command and the taxpayers who support them—a responsibility not to unnecessarily endanger lives or waste money, and not to take on missions that are not likely to succeed.

UNITAF, George Bush's mission to deliver food and medicine to a starving Somalia, was successful. UNOSOM II, undertaken by the Clinton administration and the UN, and aimed at nation building, was a predictable failure that was abandoned after unexpected casualties. Like the phrase “Vietnam syndrome, Mogadishu massacre” had different meanings for different commanders. To some allies, it meant that Americans could not take casualties. To some, it referred to the need to avoid becoming involved in internal conflicts among factions.