Clinton went on, in his usual fashion, to try to have it both ways. Rather than pulling out of Somalia, he doubled America’s troop presence, sending in 1,930 army combat troops backed up by 3,700 marines offshore. Four AC-130 gunships and 76 tanks and armored vehicles will also be sent, and NEWSWEEK has learned that the Delta Force contingent–commandos trained for hostage rescue–is being increased to about 75 men. At the same time, the president promised that all troops would leave the country by March 31. “We must leave on our terms,” said Clinton. “We must do it right.” He never defined what he meant by “right,” and he evaded the question of what had gone wrong on the way to the battle near the Olympic Hotel.
On Oct. 3, U.S. forces in Mogadishu learned from Somali spies and signal intercepts that three top Aidid aides were meeting at the city’s Olympic Hotel. NEWSWEEK has learned that intelligence officials now believe that Aidid himself was at the meeting, but left when he heard the approaching helicopters. His aides were picked up; but then mayhem broke out. Seventeen American soldiers died, 77 were wounded, with one soldier still unaccounted for and one pilot, Durant, captured.
It was a military disaster to rank with Desert One or the bombing of the marine barracks in Beirut. The heavy toll has led official Washington into a frantic search for scapegoats, and it may well have a significance in the history books. For the Somali mission was meant to be a test case for the post-cold-war world; localized violence quelled by a multinational force for which the United States provided the muscle. It has proved a fiasco.
The United States blundered into the disaster by accident. There was no clear policy and, as this reconstruction shows, apparently no one in the Clinton administration who was in charge of making foreign policy. In a miserable tale of missed signals, a mission to feed the starving turned into an urban guerrilla war of the kind that was once the exclusive province of colonial powers. From Aden to Algiers, the British and French colonial wars of the 1950s and 1960s saw all the horrors now evident in Mogadishu: the political futility of high-technology weapons in crowded souks: an untamed capital city surrounded by an irrelevantly peaceful countryside; a ruthless Big Man with whom the colonial power does not want to deal (but one day does). With such history as a guide, how did we get into this mess?
Part of the answer lies in a basic confusion. The problem is not, as congressmen have wailed, that the United Nations changed the Somali mission from “humanitarian aid” to “security” or “nation-building.” It is that in places like modern Somalia, there is no such thing as a “pure” humanitarian mission. You can’t feed the hungry or heal the sick if you don’t tame the gunmen first. When the Bush administration sent nearly 28,000 troops to Somalia last December, says Brent Scowcroft, then national-security adviser, it bad a clear view of what it was prepared to do; and it was not prepared to get into a war. But this was a delusion. Some in the Pentagon had always thought that order could not be imposed in Somalia, and especially in Mogadishu, in less than six months. And they were right.
By May when the United States banded control of the mission to the United Nations, Mogadishu was still dangerous. With fewer than 1,400 American combat troops in Somalia, 32 other countries bad to contribute the bulk of the U.N. force, but their troops lacked the muscle of the Americans and relied almost wholly on U.S. logistics support. An internal U.N. report described the Pakistani troops, the largest contingent in the spring, as “lightly armed and forced to operate under very restrictive rules of engagement…they simply were not sent as a fighting force.”
But they had to fight. because Aidid chose to fight them. By May, Aidid, the leader of the Habr Gedir subclan, had decided that he was being marginalized by U.N.–sponsored efforts to rebuild political structures in Somalia, When the American troops arrived in December, Aidid, who had helped to chase Somali dictator Mohamed Siad Barre out of Mogadishu, was acknowledged as a power in the land–not least by Robert Oakley, Bush’s representative in Somalia. But as Oakley gave way to Adm. Jonathan Howe, a deskbound officer who (at U.S. insistence) had been appointed the United Nations’ special envoy, Aidid’s position weakened. Tom Farer, a legal adviser to Howe, says that Aidid thought he had been “blackballed” as a Somali leader.
On June 5 Aidid’s troops killed 24 Pakistanis in an ambush in south Mogadishu. In retrospect, this was the decisive moment. it was the first step along a path that led ineluctably to the carnage outside the Olympic Hotel. Howe and Boutros Boutros-Ghali, the U.N. secretary-general who loathed Aidid, now formed a common front to get the warlord. In a grandiloquent gesture that horrified the Pentagon–where officers were beginning to worry about “mission creep”–Howe put a bounty on Aidid’s head. At American urging, the U.N. Security Council rushed through a resolution calling for the arrest and punishment of those responsible for the attack on the Pakistanis. This was meant to show, as one senior administration official put it, that the United Nations, engaged in a major multinational peacekeeping mission, could not be “pushed around by some renegade warlord.”
In fact, Aidid was getting stronger. In December he had sent weapons out of Mogadishu to the countryside; now he began to smuggle them back. To the rage of U.N. officials, French and Italian forces were unable, or unwilling, to stop leaks through a cordon meant to surround Mogadishu. “The Italians are playing traffic cops when the arms come down the road,” says a U.N. source in Mogadishu.
Boutros-Ghali and Howe insisted, with a resolution to support them, that U.N. forces should now hunt for Aidid. American officials then discovered that other nations with troops in Mogadishu had not signed on to the new mission-urban guerrilla warfare was not the game they had come to play. Almost at once, Howe looked to Washington for help. On June 9, Defense Secretary Les Aspin received a request for a team of Delta Force commandos to get Aidid. He rejected the idea, thinking that even if Aidid could be found–which the military rated a one-in-four chance–an already skeptical public would consider this dangerous escalation; the rest of the National Security Council agreed. Instead, the administration asked the British if they would send a detachment of their Special Air Service regiment. The British refused.
“The ball,” says one official, “kept rolling back here.” Howe kept up his demands for a detachment of elite troops. On Aug. 8, four American soldiers were killed by a land mine, and the administration sent a team to Somalia that came back critical of Howe: “He’d dropped the political ball,” said a senior official. On Aug. 22, six more American soldiers were wounded. Aspin was grabbing a week of sailing on Lake Beulah in Wisconsin. Along came a launch owned by the town of East Troy, usually devoted to catching speeding boaters, but that afternoon loaded down with Aspin’s security detail complete with communications gear. “General [Colin] Powell wants to speak with you,” Aspin was told. The chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff broke the news of the casualties. Howe had cannily rephrased his demand. He now wanted not the supersecret Delta Force personnel but the rangers. This time Aspin granted his wish; 400 rangers, together with a small contingent from Delta Force, left for Mogadishu.
The dispatch of the rangers amounted to a drastic change in policy. In Washington, there was some recognition that the United States was roaring down a military path and neglecting diplomacy. Worried about the political costs of military escalation, Aspin on Aug. 27 gave a speech calling for a renewed effort to find a political solution. Warren Christopher, the secretary of state, was of the same mind, and so by the beginning of September, a “two track” policy was underway. The hunt for Aidid would continue, but America would also press Boutros-Ghali to try to bring the factions in Somalia together, preferably by working with the Organization of African Unity and neighboring states.
The problem was that Boutros Boutros-Ghali wasn’t playing ball. According to sources close to him, he was becoming obsessed with capturing Aidid, and was not interested in making peace with him. The mild-mannered Christopher had not yet started to twist Boutros-Ghali’s arm. Throughout the time of escalation in the summer, President Clinton had been distracted by political problems at home. By the end of August, Clinton, worried that he was getting into a war, started to ask Christopher what progress was being made in pushing Boutros-Ghali toward a political settlement. But nobody noticed the fatal flaw–always the flaw–in two-track policies. Each track contradicts the other. Aidid was by now the most powerful warlord in Somalia; a political solution without his blessing was impossible. At the same time, he was being hunted as a murderer. The policy, in other words, was to kill Aidid today so that he could be coddled tomorrow.
This impossible policy twice had damning consequences. Despite acrimonious meetings in September and an exchange of letters between Boutros-Ghali and Christopher, the secretary-general continued to insist that military victory over Aidid had to take precedence over new political initiatives. Yet at the Pentagon Aspin did just the opposite. Around Sept. 9, Aspin was told that the brass had rejected a request from Lt. Gen. Thomas Montgomery, the U.S. commander in Somalia, for tanks, Bradley fighting vehicles and artillery. On Sept. 23, he turned down Montgomery’s appeal (this time without the request for artillery), which Powell now supported.
In Aspin’s view, the mission for which Montgomery sought the armor-sweeping roadblocks and the like–was an escalation of the “military” track at just the time that the United Nations was meant to be looking for political solutions. But the armor might have saved the rangers.
They would have been saved, too, had the administration gone to a purely “political” track and told their forces that Aidid was a player in the new politics of Somalia, not a quarry to be hunted and shot. But by the time the rangers received their tip about the Olympic Hotel, no new orders had come; so off the rangers charged to the Olympic Hotel and disaster.
President Clinton heard the news just before a trip to California. In a hotel room the next day, he watched the video of dead GIs being dragged through the Mogadishu streets. “It turned my stomach,” he told aides. On his return, his advisers had prepared several options for him, of the usual kind. There was an option to get out of Somalia altogether, which nobody supported, and an option to go in with guns blazing–Pentagon planners warned that sitting on Mogadishu alone would absorb an extra 10,000 troops–which had little support.
Clinton opted for a middle course. He called for a doubling of troops and, this time, armor and gunships to protect them. Their job is to hunt for Aidid–assuming, of course, that he is not invited to a political conference first. On the diplomatic front, Clinton sent Ambassador Oakley to work with the United Nations and African leaders to search for a political settlement. Christopher and Aspin were sent up to Capitol Hill, where they faced an audience furious with both of them, but with Aspin in particular. Clinton, too, is sometimes impatient with his defense secretary’s longwinded answers, but White House officials say Aspin’s job is safe, at least for now.
Clinton’s policy, however, is still in trouble. The administration is still traveling down two tracks that could collide again. There is still at least one hostage to be rescued, if Delta Force can find him. (The Red Cross and a British journalist located the captured airman last week; he told a horrifying tale of being hoisted through the streets by a mob, but seemed relatively well cared for in captivity. Nursing a broken leg and a back injury, he asked for pizza.) Administration spokesmen said at the weekend that American policy is intentionally “vague.” the better to keep Aidid guessing. On Saturday, Aidid stated that he would accept an American proposal for a cease-fire, but President Clinton insisted that no such proposal was on the table. Meanwhile, NEWSWEEK has learned, Aidid has dispatched one of his top lieutenants, warlord Omar Jess, to Iran to seek more arms.
Will the mullahs make cause with the warlord? Multinational peacekeeping may not stick around to find out. France says it is pulling its troops out of Somalia by the end of the year; Belgium will probably do likewise, and so may Italy. In Germany, which sent troops to Somalia for its first peacekeeping engagement since World War II, the mission is seen as a sick joke: 1,700 German troops have been stranded upcountry, co, waiting for logistical support from the Indian Army which, the United Nations told the Germans this week, has now been sent elsewhere. European diplomats are convinced that the reaction to the battle of Bakhara Market means that American troops will never be sent to Bosnia.
Somalia remains a glimpse of what the post-cold-war world may look like. The factions are not riven by ideology, religion or ethnic group-just by loyalty to clan. It is as if bands of brigands have returned from the pages of cheap melodramas, able to face down the political and military might of the world’s civilized nations. Tom Farer. Howe’s aide, says he is thinking of writing a book. Its title? “My Summer in Somalia; or, I Have Seen the Future, and I Don’t Think It Works.”
