Making War to Keep Peace (14 page)

Determined to make Mogadishu more secure, UN forces began a systematic drive to collect weapons. Factional retaliation led to the deaths of more UN peacekeeping troops—five Moroccan soldiers on June 17, two Pakistanis on June 28, three Italians on July 2; and then four journalists were murdered. Most of these casualties occurred in confrontations with Somali militias that shielded themselves behind large, disorderly crowds of women and children bearing guns and grenades. Although UN forces retaliated with guns, ships, and planes, the armed Somalis grew increasingly aggressive and the casualties mounted.

Howe urged Washington to send the Delta Force to hunt for Aideed. The request initially met with resistance from Secretary of Defense Aspin and Joint Chiefs chairman Colin Powell, both of whom were reluctant to send more troops and doubted that this assignment was right for the elite force. But Powell changed his mind and convinced Aspin, and U.S. Rangers were dispatched with orders to capture or kill Aideed.
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UN intelligence was clearly inadequate, with crucial delays in getting information from collectors to consumers. According to Gene Cullen, the CIA officer in charge of intelligence coordination in Somalia, information had to be transmitted back to headquarters, who would “determine what would be disseminated and what would not”—a process that could take from twelve to seventy-two hours.
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There were also questions about the reliability of Somali intelligence sources. According to Abdi Hassan Awaleh, Aideed's defense minister, the Rangers “did not have good intelligence for locating General Aideed. They never came close to
him…. We used the same Somali informers that they used. We knew who they were.”
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From the time they arrived, U.S. commanders in Somalia had requested heavier armor, tanks, and other vehicles—requests that were turned down by Aspin himself on the grounds that it made no sense to build up and build down simultaneously. But the violence continued to escalate, and events quickly demonstrated why more armor was needed.

On August 8, four American soldiers were killed when their jeep was blown up by a sophisticated remote-controlled mine. Then seven Nigerian soldiers were killed. On August 22, President Clinton himself issued an order to capture and try Aideed.
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In August and September, the Rangers staged several raids and captured a number of Aideed's aides. (During one raid, they “captured” the astonished staff of a UN development program, who were released with apologies as soon as they were identified.) Curiously, at the same time that Clinton declared Aideed a criminal and ordered his capture, he secretly opened an initiative to negotiate with Aideed, with former president Jimmy Carter as an intermediary.
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General Montgomery, the deputy UN commander at the time, said that his command “had no idea” about the back-channel effort. “I wish…that somebody…had told the military chain of command to cease and desist this effort to bring Aideed to justice,” Montgomery complained.
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Congress sensed the growing danger in the situation. On September 9, the Senate voted 90 to 7 in favor of an amendment to the Defense Authorization Bill that would require the administration to report to Congress on the Somalia operation no later than October 15 and seek congressional authorization no later than November 15. However, before that deadline arrived, there was more action on the ground.

By the beginning of October, the Rangers were closing in on Aideed and his staff. They had identified their meeting place and arrested twenty-four United Somali Congress/Somali National Alliance (USC/SNA) leaders. Yet Aideed had determined that helicopters were the Rangers' chief vulnerability, and on October 3, his forces targeted two helicopters in Mogadishu. The first helicopter was hit by a rocket-propelled grenade (RPG) and crashed; the second, a Blackhawk Super 6-1, which had provided cover for the evacuation of some of Aideed's
officers, was also hit. The two pilots were killed, and their bodies and others were pinned in the helicopters. The Rangers, committed to never leaving a fallen comrade, took heavy casualties as they fought their way to the helicopters to extract the bodies.
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No contingency plans had been made for reinforcements.

In describing the events of that day, General Montgomery described a dangerously cumbersome command structure: “I had a base officer from General Garrison at my side; I had my hand on communications to talk to the QRF and to the Rangers; I had the ability to talk to UN forces.” He needed men and tanks. First he sent in the QRF, the Rangers, and the Delta Force. There were only four operational tanks in Mogadishu, and they were Pakistani tanks without night vision. The Malaysians had old but functional armored personnel carriers (APCs) and provided drivers. For eleven hours, the Rangers, the QRF, and the 10th Mountain Division fought their way into and out of the crash scene.

Ultimately, two U.S. helicopters were downed, eighteen Rangers were killed, seventy-five wounded, and one went missing. Cheering Somalis dragged a dead American soldier through the streets of Mogadishu, and a videotape was later distributed showing Somalis capturing and mauling another wounded soldier.

In Washington and Somalia, spokesmen for the Rangers sought to make clear that they had not been overwhelmed. Major General William Garrison, commander of the Joint Special Operations Command, explained later to the Senate Armed Forces Committee that, despite heavy losses, “what we had were helicopter pilots that were trapped inside of the helicopter, and we were going to stay with them until such time as we could extract them. We were not pinned down; we could have fought our way out anytime we chose to do so.”
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But Congressional impatience with the ambiguity of the Somali mission and its remote relationship to U.S. interests had been growing even before this incident, and impatience turned to outrage when word arrived in Washington that eighteen U.S. servicemen had been killed and more than seventy wounded in an ambush in the Somali capital. Outrage turned to fury when it was learned that the ninety Rangers and others were pinned down for nine hours, during which at least one Ranger bled
to death before they were finally rescued by an unprepared, uncoordinated force.

In Washington, information about the circumstances surrounding the Mogadishu debacle seeped out slowly. Mounting evidence suggested that the Rangers had been inadequately equipped and assigned to an inappropriate mission, and that U.S. vehicles lacked adequate armor—in part because the secretary of defense himself had refused a request for less vulnerable tanks and fighting vehicles.

The Rangers took heavy casualties because they would not abandon their trapped comrades. It had not been easy to find troops to help rescue the Rangers, because there were no contingency plans, no backup troops, and no heavy armor with which to barrel through. Language problems complicated planning and execution. After the ambush, General Montgomery's request for more and heavier armored vehicles (which had been turned down at the Pentagon's highest level only a month earlier) was immediately granted. The Pentagon quickly announced that heavier arms and armor would be sent to protect and reinforce peacekeepers in Somalia.
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“It is very unusual for the United States to be in a position where we cannot really rescue our own forces in a situation like this,” observed Senate Armed Services Committee chairman Sam Nunn (D-GA). Another Senate Democrat, Robert Byrd of West Virginia, said, “Americans are paying with their lives and limbs for a misplaced policy on the altar of some fuzzy multilateralism.”
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In the PBS documentary
Ambush in Mogadishu
, some of the Rangers who had been trapped in the firefight described having to walk out:

In testimony before the Armed Services Committee in May 1994, it became clear that more armor would have made an important difference. Senator Nunn pressed the Rangers' commander: “It was my understanding…if you had had armor, you would have been able to get to the forces in the original mission that were pinned down sooner. Is that right?” General Garrison replied, “That's correct.”
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General Montgomery also took heat: “As commander,” Nunn asked, “did you ever say to any of your superiors…‘Look…the UN is asking us to have a much broader mission of disarmament, to some extent nation building.'…At the same time, the major power—the U.S. power—was being reduced. Did you ever say, ‘This makes me uncomfortable'?”
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Larry Royce, the father of one of the fallen Rangers and himself a retired army officer, wrote that the deaths in Somalia were “brought about by weak and indecisive amateurs in the Clinton administration…To put [the Rangers] into combat with no way to reinforce them is criminal.”
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Mohamed Sahnoun, UN special representative for Somalia, commented:

The effort to apprehend General Aideed was the most dangerous task U.S. forces had attempted in Somalia, and it was clear in retrospect that they lacked the forces, weapons, intelligence, and rationale to carry it out. Senator Strom Thurmond (R-SC) asked the U.S. commanders how they came to attempt such a dangerous task with inadequate forces. “When we had twenty-five thousand troops in Somalia,” he pointed out, “our operations were mostly limited to facilitating humanitarian activities. Then, after the transition to UNOSOM II, when we had withdrawn most of our forces and had only about four thousand troops in the country, with only about two thousand of those being combat troops, we became more heavily involved in combat operations—force protection, disarming the Somalis, and trying to capture Aideed.”
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When Thurmond pressed Montgomery to describe how American forces had become engaged in unanticipated combat operations, Montgomery pointed out the distinction between the original UNITAF mission and the UNOSOM II stage. Resolution 837, which targeted Aideed, “changed the nature of the Somalia mission,” he said. “We were under attack from June the fifth, increasingly after that, by a hostile militia force that engaged in, essentially, guerilla warfare.”
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The testimony of administration officials made it clear that the difficulty and danger of the new mission had been underestimated from the start. On October 20, 1993, Madeleine Albright told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, “Clearly, the difficulty of apprehending those thought responsible for killing the Pakistanis was underestimated…. While the UN was increasing military pressure, the targets of that pressure were gaining strength.”
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She added, “If UNOSOM had had more robust military capabilities last summer, better military results might have been achieved.”
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Peter Tarnoff, undersecretary of state for political affairs, offered a somewhat different explanation of what the United States was doing in Somalia, how the debacle of Mogadishu happened, and why it would not be repeated. Tarnoff was more candid than most about the sweeping U.S. goals in Somalia:

Tarnoff assured the committee that nearly all U.S. military forces in Somalia would leave within five months, by March 31, 1994, though, it was clear that the nation-building goals would not have been achieved by then.

In a 1995 review of the Somalia debacle, former UN special representative Howe wrote that the American people and Congress had never accepted a U.S. role in Somalia beyond delivering humanitarian assistance. He observed that deterring nuclear war and responding to regional aggression (as in the response to the invasion of Kuwait) were widely accepted by Americans as national responsibilities, but the kind of intervention we had ventured in Somalia (and, later, Haiti) was not.
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In Mogadishu, American servicemen had risked their lives for an ambiguous cause in a remote place under unreasonable rules of engagement. It was a mission that had never been approved by Congress, a mission in which U.S. forces were expected to coordinate operations among ad hoc multinational units, with troops from other countries who spoke other languages, using incompatible equipment, and without adequate supplies and support. These conditions had set the scene for disaster.