After EUCOM, Tony Zinni returned to Quantico as the deputy commanding general of the Marine Corps Combat Development Command (MCCDC).[55]
The MCCDC watches over the Marine Corps requirements and structure in doctrine, organization, material, training, education, and leadership development; and it manages the Corps’ career schools for its officers and enlisted (all of which together make up the Marine Corps University).
It was an obvious assignment for Zinni, yet he was not overjoyed to have it. As he saw it, his recent experience could have been better used in an operational assignment. (“Every officer worth his salt always feels he is the best qualified operator in the Corps,” he comments.)
On the other hand, returning to Quantico brought him back into the doctrine, training, and education base with which he was familiar. There he’d be at the red-hot center of all the exciting, revolutionary changes that General Gray was creating, and there he himself would be provided with a forum for his own ideas for change. He knew he had a lot to contribute to Quantico. His tour at EUCOM had convinced him that U.S. military services would soon be forced to improve their performance significantly in joint operations and to develop programs for handling the messy new third world missions that were clearly on the horizon.
The Marine Corps, specifically, had to examine its organization, its doctrine, and the way it fought, taking a hard look at the tactics, techniques, and procedures needed for nontraditional missions such as peacekeeping and humanitarian operations. The new missions that he had tackled at EUCOM were not aberrations — the Kurdish relief effort, the NEOs, the engagement with former Warsaw Pact militaries. They were the face of the future. And Zinni was convinced that the Marine Corps, with its tradition of flexibility and resourcefulness, could more easily adapt to these missions than could other services, and pioneer the kind of post-Cold War force that was ideally suited to it.
Zinni was granted his wish to explore these new ideas… but not, as it happened, in the classrooms and on the fields of Quantico. Instead, he became a major player in the most trying and tangled U.S. military peacekeeping operation until the occupation of Iraq in 2003. It made the Kurdish relief in ’91 seem like a walk in the park.
By November 1992, Zinni had been at Quantico for six months. Shortly, he would be in the zone for promotion to major general. The next summer would change his fate one way or another; he’d either be moving up to a new command or out into civilian life.
That month, while working to develop a new war game with the Navy, he learned that President Bush had decided to launch a joint task force to conduct a humanitarian operation in Somalia. Zinni was vaguely aware of the desperate and worsening situation in that country — civil war, famine, disease, anarchy, thousands of innocents dying. The news of the humanitarian operation, however, came out of the blue.
In a few days, it would be decided whether the 1st Marine Expeditionary Force (I MEF) or the Army’s 18th Airborne Corps would lead the operation. Even though he was in the dark about the operation’s actual nature, Zinni knew his EUCOM experiences in joint and humanitarian operations would come in very handy in the planning if I MEF got the call. He immediately went to his boss, Lieutenant General Chuck Krulak,[56] to offer his services.
Somewhat to Zinni’s surprise, Krulak was enthusiastic. “Hey, listen,” he said, “I don’t want the operational force to look at Quantico as a drain. I want them to see us as an organization that’s there for them. We look out for them; we support them. So if we’ve got expertise, I want to offer it up.”
Krulak called General Carl Mundy, who had replaced General Gray as commandant, and made the offer. General Mundy, in turn, called the commanding general of I MEF, Lieutenant General Bob Johnston. (Zinni had known Johnston for years, had served under him in Okinawa, and had great respect for him.)
While these discussions were taking place, Zinni was on his way to Fort Leavenworth for a conference. When he arrived, he had a call from Krulak. “I MEF has been chosen for the mission,” Krulak told him, “and General Johnston wants you to take part in it. Get back to Quantico as soon as you can, then call Bob Johnston for further instructions.”
“The best possible news!” Zinni thought. The news soon got better.
Back at Quantico, he called Lieutenant General Johnston, still thinking that Johnston would want him primarily for the initial planning. What he heard then just about knocked him over: The commandant had recommended him for chief of staff of the Joint Task Force (JTF) that would be formed around the core of the I MEF staff.[57] Since this meant he would be going to Somalia in a leading operational role, he was ecstatic.
But it turned out that Johnston had a better idea. He wanted Zinni to be the director of operations. Even though the chief of staff was the senior position, he felt strongly that this operation was going to be so challenging and complicated that he wanted someone with Zinni’s wealth of operational experience, both in combat and in humanitarian missions, to run it. The practicalities of integrating all the pieces of this mission meant that the chief of staff was going to have to back up the chief of operations (in planning and logistics and the like). Operations was where all the action was going to take place.
To Zinni, this was great news. “I don’t care about seniority,” he told Johnston. “I want the operations job.”
The next day he packed his bags, went up to Washington, and joined the CENTCOM[58] CINC, General Joe Hoar, for the flight to Hoar’s headquarters in Tampa. There they linked up with General Johnston and got a briefing on the operation. Afterward, Zinni was to accompany Johnston back to his headquarters at Camp Pendleton, California, for a week of planning. They were to deploy to Somalia on December 10.
The plane ride from Washington to Tampa proved to be invaluable. Zinni had known Joe Hoar from his first days in Vietnam (he had first met Hoar in the Rung Sat), and the two had remained friends ever since. Hoar was a savvy operator who had earned a tremendous reputation as the CENTCOM commander. For the duration of the three-hour flight, the two men went over the mission.
Zinni had recommendations based on his recent experiences: techniques, tactics, and organizations (like UNHCR) they’d need to employ if they were dealing with refugees or displaced persons; using Civil Affairs to set up a Civil-Military Operations Center (CMOC) like the one created in Operation Provide Comfort to connect with the NGOs and the UN; using psychological operations (such as avoiding military terminology in order to better convey the humanitarian message).
Hoar listened carefully to Zinni’s ideas — most of them totally new to him: Refugees? The third world? NGOs? UN?… another universe! After he’d taken them in, he put his arm around Zinni — he’s a large, bearish man — and said: “I’m glad I found you. You’re the guy we need out there. This is going to be great.”
At CENTCOM headquarters, Hoar, Johnston, Zinni, and the staff went over the situation in Somalia and the planning so far.
The Somali people occupy the actual “Horn” of Africa, and are the majorityin northern Kenya, Djibouti, and the now Ethiopian province of Ogaden. They are a clan-based society, with five major clans and numerous subclans, unified in language and ethnic identity, separate in customs, lineage, and history. Somalia became a nation in 1960, following a period as an Italian and British colonial possession and a post-World War Two UN mandate. A weak, fractious postmandate government lasted for nine years, but collapsed in 1969 when the first President was assassinated and a military dictator, Siad Barre, took over. Barre’s rule began well enough for the country, though his early alliance with the Soviets did not sit well with the West. It paid many of his bills, however, and brought in modern weapons.
The good times ended in 1977 when Barre attacked Ethiopia to regain Ogaden. This was a tragic miscalculation — not least because Ethiopia was itself a Soviet client state. The Soviets, forced to choose, tilted toward Ethiopia; and the disastrous war and defeat (in 1978) that followed pitched Somalia into a steep decline.
Barre switched sides from the Soviets to the West, and a period of apparent progress followed — only to be eaten up by corruption, and by the increasing repression of clans other than Siad Barre’s own Marehan. As the repression grew to violent assault and terror, the Siad Barre government rotted from within. The clans fought back, and the nation drifted into civil war. (The conflict started in 1988, but only became general in 1990.)
Civil war devastated the country. It was a nation awash in Soviet and Western weapons. Most were ultimately used to kill Somalis. Hundreds of thousands of refugees left the country; hundreds of thousands more were killed in the fighting, or died of starvation and disease. By 1992, half the children born since 1987, and twenty-five percent of the country’s children overall, had perished. Institutions of government had vanished. Factional feuding among clans only added to the misery.
Millions were still at serious risk.
Siad Barre was driven from power in 1990, but kept fighting in southern Somalia near the border with Kenya, in what was called “the Triangle of Death”—the area between the towns of Baidoa and Bardera, in the interior, and Kismayo, on the coast. Faction leaders controlling the various regions fell to fighting each other. The strongest of these was General Mohammed Farrah Aideed[59] of the Hawiye clan… but there were many others.
In January 1991, Mogadishu, the capital, was divided between Aideed and the businessman, politician, and local warlord Ali Mahdi Mohamed (previously allies against Siad Barre), after Ali Mahdi turned against Aideed. This was a not totally surprising turnaround. Both were members of the Hawiye clan (yet from different subclans: Aideed was a Habr Gidr and Ali Mahdi was an Abgal; significant differences in Somalia’s fractious clan system), and both were also leaders of the same political faction, the United Somali Congress (USC) — but in Somalia, betrayal is the mother’s milk of politics.
That same month, the U.S. Embassy in Mogadishu was evacuated in a last-minute, dramatic rescue by Marine helicopters launched from amphibious ships participating in Operation Desert Shield.
For several months, the two sides faced off against each other, Aideed in the southern parts of the city and Ali Mahdi in his base in the city’s north. Aideed, who was the more experienced and effective military commander and had the benefit of better and heavier weapons (taken from Siad Barre’s warehouses), held the stronger position; but fighting between the two warlords was only sporadic. Law and order completely broke down in the city; armed gangs roamed everywhere. No one could control them. Serious fighting finally broke out in September 1991 and raged for several months, leaving little of value intact in Mogadishu.
In May 1992, Aideed finally defeated Barre, who escaped to Kenya, and later found exile in Nigeria. Aideed had proved to be a formidable commander, with powerful credentials to lead his country. He had — as he saw it — liberated Somalia from the dictator Siad Barre, a triumph that entitledhim to take Barre’s place as the national leader. Other faction leaders saw things very differently; and fighting continued. This worsened the famine and destruction throughout the southern part of the country, especially in the Triangle of Death. (The northern provinces, at the actual Horn of Africa, were relatively unaffected and in effect have operated as a more or less independent state.)
In 1992, the UN started a humanitarian operation called UNOSOM (UN Operations Somalia), which proved to be powerless and ineffective — too weak to put down the violence… or even to provide security for the relief workers. Looting prevented most UN and NGO food and relief supplies from reaching the intended beneficiaries.
In late August of that year, the U.S. also started a humanitarian operation, called “Provide Relief,” that airlifted food and medical supplies from Kenya to remote sites in Somalia. Provide Relief aircraft flew nearly 2,500 missions and delivered more than 28,000 metric tons to airfields in southern Somalia. The operation saved lives, but an airlift could not carry nearly enough food and medicine to seriously ease the famine and disease.[60]
By the fall of 1992, Somalia was a lawless, devastated land ruled by fifteen warlords with their militias and by roving gangs of armed bandits. These traveled around in “technicals,” pickup trucks with crew-served weapons mounted on their beds. (They got their name from the relief agencies who had hired out the gangs for protection and charged it off to “technical assistance.”) The relief agencies and NGOs were subject to extortion, pillage, threats, and even murder, sometimes by the very guards they hired.
By November, the chaos and violence in Somalia had made some kind of international action inevitable. After much discussion within the Bush administration and the UN, it was decided that a large military force was needed (modeled after the recent Desert Shield/Desert Storm coalition against Iraq), consisting of at least two American divisions, supplemented by other U.S. and foreign forces. This force would operate with UN approval (under Chapter VII of the UN Charter, authorizing peace enforcementusing “all necessary means” including deadly force), but it would not be a UN-commanded operation. The operation was called “Restore Hope.”
The American concept for Restore Hope foresaw the quick establishment of security on the ground, allowing the relief agencies and NGOs to operate freely, followed by a rapid transition to a UN-led peacekeeping operation (though the U.S. expected to continue to supply logistics and support services and a quick reaction force). But there was to be no attempt to disarm the warlords or seriously alter the political landscape.
However, the UN Secretary-General, Boutros Boutros-Ghali, had different expectations. In his view, Restore Hope’s limited time frame and scope would not provide enough security, disarmament, or political change to allow the UN to take responsibility for nation building in Somalia. He wanted the U.S. to embark on a full-scale nationwide disarmament program before there could be any transition to UN peacekeepers.
This ambiguity between the U.S. and the UN understanding of what had to be done came to haunt both the U.S. Restore Hope operation and its UN successor, which came to be called UNOSOM II.
The force designed to bring initial order to Somalia’s chaos was General Johnston’s JTF:
The Marine piece would consist of a Marine Air Ground Task Force, centering on the 1st Marine Division, with logistics and air components. The Army had designated the 10th Mountain Division as their part. The Navy was going to bring in maritime preposition ships and a carrier; and naval P-3 aircraft, flying out of Djibouti, would also be available. The Air Force brought in C-130s and a number of other aircraft to augment Marine Corps air. There were also special operations components.
General Hoar was additionally looking at a coalition involvement that would include participation from African, Gulf region, and Western countries. (He called this “a 3-3-1 Strategy.”) Because Somalia was both an African and an Islamic country, it was politically important for CENTCOM to be seen in Africa and in the Islamic world as encouraging their involvement. He also wanted one other Western force as a leavening factor; and the Canadians had already committed to sending a brigade. (Later, the numbers of other participating countries exploded. By the end of the operation, there were twenty-six of them.)
Once the various pieces of the force had arrived in Somalia, they had to be fused together. The CENTCOM and I MEF staffs had already put in much work on that, as well as the more obvious issues of deployment, logistics support, and bases (General Hoar wanted to use regional bases in Kenya and Djibouti as support bases, for example). Sequencing in a large force into the Horn of Africa’s slender infrastructure was not going to be easy.
The biggest problem faced by the planners, however, was that they didn’t yet understand exactly what had to be done once the forces were on the ground. This was an unusual mission, and few of them really understood its nature. Like General Hoar, they’d had no experience dealing with NGOs and the UN, much less bringing order to a failed third world nation… and saving lives there. Though shooting, killing, and destruction were seen as inevitable, this was in no way a typical combat mission. They were groping badly trying to comprehend it.
Here Zinni brought his greatest contribution.
After a day at CENTCOM headquarters, Zinni and the rest of the I MEF staff left for Camp Pendleton. By then, he had a basic understanding of the situation in Somalia and the mission they’d be mounting to deal with it. Yet, at the same time, the situation on the ground was breaking fast, and there was no clear picture of what was actually happening there or what had to be done.
The following week was spent on round-the-clock frantic planning and coordination.
Zinni, Johnston, and key members of their team took off on a C-141 for Somalia on the ninth of December. A Marine Expeditionary Unit (MEU) had meanwhile been positioned off Mogadishu in amphibious ships and would land to secure the port, airfield, and U.S. Embassy that day. The command team’s C-141 landed on the tenth.
Tony Zinni:
A few hours out of the Mogadishu airport, we received a call that the French government had decided to participate in the operation and had dispatched a general to Mogadishu from Djibouti, where there was a French base; but the French government had insisted that their general be the first on the ground. Bob Johnston’s reply was, “Bullshit”; and, as the coalition commander, he ordered the French to stand off as we landed. They complied.
This little show of hauteur had nothing to do with the French military, who were superb troops (and often suffered for their government’s arrogance). I knew from operations like Provide Comfort that they were worth their weight in gold on the ground and we welcomed their participation, despite the initial flap. They did not let us down.
It was hot when we landed (Mogadishu is not far from the equator); and the airport was a wreck, with old Soviet MiGs and other wreckage trashed and in piles off to the side, but Marines from the MEU were already in positions to defend it. We were met by the MEU commander, Greg Newbold,[61] who gave us a quick brief on the situation:
During the night before the MEU’s landing, he reported, he had sent in SEALs to recon; somebody had somehow got wind of it and reported this to the Western press who were hanging out in Mogadishu. They came running down to the beach with their klieg lights and cameras for a brilliant media welcome to the SEALs as they swam in. It was a very confused — and later very notorious — moment. (It further convinced me we needed to get a better handle on what was going on here.)
Though Aideed had promised that the Marines would have no trouble during their landing (the airport and port were in southern Mogadishu — Aideed territory), Newbold took no chances.[62] He immediately seized the port and air- field and put out security, pushing out looters and vagrants, then flew up to the abandoned U.S. Embassy compound and seized it.
We came in right behind them, and we immediately began the inflow of forces. Troops would soon be flying into the airfield, marrying up with prepositioned equipment, now being off-loaded. Other units would quickly follow. The Canadian ships were on the way. We expected to spend our next days setting up the command post, receiving troops to rapidly begin operations, and coordinating with the other efforts on the ground.
After the brief from Newbold, we moved to helicopters to fly the short distance to the U.S. Embassy compound. The sights from the helo as we flew over the city were overwhelming. The place was devastated… like Stalingrad after the battle. The people we could see seemed to be mostly combing through the ruins, searching for food or anything else of value.
As we touched down at the embassy compound, the devastation became more immediate. The effects of the destruction and wanton looting of the buildings and grounds were everywhere. For now, the Marines had set up a hasty security perimeter around the compound, and were in the process of clearing out dead bodies and debris. A few refugees who had taken up residence were also being removed. The embassy itself was completely gutted. The rooms were blackened from fires and full of trash and human waste. Even the electrical wiring and granite floor tiles had been torn out; every window was broken. Though our troops were hard at work clearing the mess, we knew it would be a long, hard task to get this place ready for operations.
We actually had other alternatives. The UN headquarters, for instance, was in a posh, intact housing compound; and one like it had been offered to Bob Johnston, but he had declined. It was our embassy — and a symbol of U.S. determination to reclaim its property.
He also did not believe in special frills or comforts for the command element; we ate MREs like the troops and were the last to receive service facilities such as shower units.
As I curled up the first night on the concrete floor of the room where I was sleeping, I wondered how this country could have fallen into such chaos and self-destruction. We faced a daunting task. The infrastructure was either destroyed or else practically unusable. It would take a major engineering effort to improve the roads, airfields, ports, and storage areas — not to mention electrical and water systems. The crude hospitals in Mogadishu were treating forty-five to fifty gunshot wounds on average per day; but these numbers sometimes reached one hundred fifty.
Outside Mogadishu, food and other critical supplies could not get through to the needy. One convoy of twenty-five trucks had started out from Mogadishu the week before we arrived to deliver food to starving Somalis in Baidoa in the Triangle of Death. In order to get out of the city in the first place, the convoy had had to give up three trucks to pay off extortionists; it had lost twelve trucks to hijackers on the roads; and eight trucks were looted as they arrived. Only four trucks made it back to Mogadishu. None of the starving received the food the trucks had carried.
The mission of Combined Task Force Restore Hope was to secure the major air and sea facilities, key installations, and major relief distribution sites; provide open and free passage for humanitarian relief supplies; provide security for relief convoys and relief organizations; and assist in providing humanitarian relief under UN auspices. Our only role (as I understood it) was to provide an overwhelming security environment so that much-needed relief supplies could flow freely. This was seen as a short-term operation that would jump-start the stalled humanitarian efforts and give UNOSOM a chance to make adjustments and pick up the mission from us. (I learned later that the UN had a different view of our mission.)
We had built our plan in four phases.
The first phase involved establishing a lodgment and securing the major facilities necessary to bring in and store relief supplies. Since the port and airfield in Mogadishu were key to this purpose, and most of the relief organizations had their primary facilities in the capital, Phase I amounted to securing key installations in Mogadishu. Stretching out to the countryside would come later. We thought this would take thirty days, but we actually completed the first phase in seven.
The second phase involved expanding operations to the major relief centers and setting up secure lines of communication throughout the country’s interior, allowing supplies to move unimpeded to the eight operational areas assigned to various American and international forces. The total area covered was half the size of Texas — remote, desolate, and with little usable infrastructure. We estimated this phase would also take thirty days, but the addition of numerous international forces allowed us to complete Phase II by December 28, nineteen days after we landed.
The third phase—“the stabilization phase”—we saw as an undetermined period during which we would develop and improve conditions in preparation for the UN takeover of our mission. To our immense frustration, this phase lasted until March 26, as the UN proved extremely reluctant to assume the mission. Though we believed that an understanding had been reached between our government and the UN to make the handoff in mid-January, or at the latest mid-February, the UN command was slow to form and take charge, and in general dragged its feet.
The fourth and last phase — the handoff to the UN — lasted until May 4. The transfer to the UN came about only after strong pressure and compromise by the U.S. government.
Our first few days were incredibly hectic, with pressure to get everything done at once coming from all sides — the leadership in Washington, the press, the Somalis, the relief organizations, and the UN. All of them had their own ideas about what we should do, and they all wanted it done immediately.
My first order of business was to get our command and control structure up and functioning. Fortunately, my crew of superb colonels overcame the horrible conditions and got the operations center rolling right off the bat. We were able to clean up the piles of crap and run our operation at the same time. There was no exemption for rank; generals through privates all pitched in.
Every staff running a field operation has to quickly and smoothly put into place its “battle rhythm”—its daily routine, schedule of operations, and procedures, all supported by a system of communications and organization for commanding the operation. Traditional combat missions have preset procedures and roles that tend to hold things together even when the operation is fast-breaking. Fast-breaking missions that are nontraditional, and have the additional challenge of integrating coalition and civilian components, make establishing the battle rhythm far more difficult.
In a cycle based on combat operations, you know when you’re going to attack and shoot and when the attack aircraft are going to fly. There are always surprises and friction, but the preset procedures help you through them. Here we were throwing all kinds of noncombat factors into the scheduling and timing coordination evolution: We were there to feed people, who need food every day. So when do the convoys have to go out in order to make sure food is delivered every day to the distribution sites? How do we coordinate the security requirements for the convoys? Out of nowhere, an NGO might come up with a plan to set up twenty-three feeding stations. They want security for them. “When are you going to man them?” we ask. “When are they going to open? Where will we meet you for the security?” And then we had to ask ourselves and answer: “How will we fit these requirements into our own capabilities?”
These tasks become part of our operations cycle. Their relation to combat procedures is very slender.
The morning after we arrived, I gave quick guidance on handling these requirements and left the implementation in the capable hands of my staff.
That first morning, General Johnston wanted us to get on the road right away to hook up with those running the political and humanitarian efforts. We set out in Humvees loaded with armed troops.
Our first meeting was with the President’s recently appointed Special Envoy to Somalia, Ambassador Bob Oakley, at the U.S. Liaison Office (USLO), located at a nearby villa. The drive there gave me my first on-the-ground look at the horrific conditions in the city. Buildings were either bullet-riddled or collapsed; hard-looking gunmen roamed the streets, glaring fiercely as we passed; clusters of dazed and traumatized people wandered around poking listlessly in the rubble.
At the USLO compound, we banged on the huge metal gate; two Somalis pushed it back and let us in. A pair of Diplomatic Security guards were in the driveway — the only security I saw. I made a mental note to check on increasing it.
Oakley came out to greet us, a tall, slender, soft-spoken, and very savvy diplomat, with considerable experience in the third world as U. S. Ambassador to Pakistan, Zaire, and Somalia. Earlier, he’d been an intelligence officer in the Navy, and knew and understood the military. He proved to be a brilliant, low-key negotiator, who commanded tremendous respect from the Somalis and the international representatives on the scene. General Johnston and I took to him right away.
What I’ve always liked about Bob Oakley is his “roll up your sleeves” attitude. In Somalia, he worked the art of the doable, and not some unreachable idealistic dream. He developed every likely avenue, and we’d go down whichever looked most passable. He also understood the necessary cooperation between humanitarian, political, and military efforts, and really went out of his way to make sure everything ran smoothly between them. Military officers were involved in all the serious political and humanitarian negotiations.
The first order of business was security for Oakley’s small staff. We immediately agreed to put a Marine rifle squad at the compound.
Oakley then introduced us to John Hirsch, an old Africa hand and friend of his, who’d originally been sent by the State Department to be Bob Johnston’s political adviser (POLAD). Later, Oakley asked if Hirsch could serve as both our POLAD and his deputy, and Johnston agreed instantly; this made great sense. It ensured the connection and coordination we all needed and proved an excellent decision.[63]
Oakley then laid out his immediate plans.
The first would soften our impact in the hinterland when we stretched out beyond the capital. Since we were an eight-hundred-pound gorilla, and a lot of suspicious armed men were out there, clashes were likely. His suggestion was to make advance arrangements with the local warlords and civil leaders. He would then move out ahead of us with a small Special Forces security detachment and symbolic food supplies. After the initial contact and food distribution, he’d explain our mission and intent, and then our forces would come in on his heels. His brave proposal worked to a tee.
More immediately, he had arranged a meeting later that morning at the USLO compound with Mohammed Farah Aideed and Ali Mahdi Mohamed. Getting cooperation from them would secure our logistics base in Mogadishu and expedite our move out of the city… and advance a further agenda of Oakley’s — a plan to anchor political stability by gaining an agreement among the fifteen faction leaders fighting for power in southern Somalia. He would press the two warlords to accept a seven-point agreement he was introducing. Once he had their okay, he would take it to the other twelve faction leaders.
The schedule called for a late-morning meeting with the warlords, then lunch, then one-on-one meetings as necessary, and then a press conference. If we had positive news at the press conference, our operation would get a good psychological kickoff.
As we waited for our guests, I walked around the compound to get a sense of the security requirements — and to give my legs a stretch. In the kitchen area to the rear of the compound, I had a chat with some of the cooks — my first direct contact with Somalis. Since many of them had worked at the U.S. Embassy before its evacuation, they spoke English. I learned later that older Somalis often spoke Italian, a legacy from the colonial period, so my own Italian background came in handy.
As I was leaving, I noticed a baby goat tied to a tree. When I stopped to pet the kid, all the Somalis smiled brightly.
“He’s a friendly little guy,” I said; and they nodded.
Then they added: “He’s going to taste good at lunch.”
Ali Mahdi’s convoy arrived first, accompanied by an armed escort we’d provided, as well as by his personal security. Since we were in south Mogadishu, Aideed’s turf, Ali Mahdi had demanded extra protection.
Aideed’s compound was, in fact, directly across the dirt street from the USLO compound, but that did not speed up his arrival. Aideed had a well-tuned dramatic sense. He did not make haste to cross over to Oakley’s compound, but kept everyone waiting for his grand entrance.
Ali Mahdi’s people emerged anxiously from their vehicles. Once they’d satisfied themselves we weren’t part of an Aideed trap, Ali Mahdi stepped nervously out of his vehicle and greeted us, sweating heavily. Inside, his conversation was fast and rambling; and prayer beads were in rapid motion in his hand.
Aideed continued to keep us waiting. “Is he coming at all?” everyone wondered.
And I wondered: “Might he make a move on Ali Mahdi, now that he has his enemy on his turf?”
I stepped outside to see if our troops were alert, then radioed our op center to make sure we had other troops moving around the area showing our strength.
When Aideed finally made his appearance, striding into our little company with a confident grin on his face, Ali Mahdi seemed close to paralysis from fear. But he quickly perked up when Aideed heartily embraced him like a long-lost friend.
After introductions and initial explanations from Bob Oakley, the two warlords made conciliatory speeches. Aideed emphasized the importance of the meeting after more than a year of separation and conflict, and made a couple of small, symbolic, starter proposals to help move the reconciliation along. He said: “We must end the division of the city by removing the green line”—the north-south line separating his turf from Ali Mahdi’s—“and we must end our propaganda war against each other.”
He closed with a hope that Somalia would again be a viable country.
This man was a formidable personality, I quickly realized — no penny-ante thug. He was articulate and statesmanlike, and obviously had no doubts that he was the natural leader of his country — he saw himself as nothing less than its George Washington — and that our purpose was to benefit his ambitions.
Ali Mahdi was not so impressive. His speech essentially confirmed and seconded Aideed’s.
It was time for lunch. My little goat friend came out well cooked and cut into chunks on a platter. As this was passed around, I noticed one huge piece — the leg, from shank to hoof — sitting in the middle of the pile. Since I was at the end of the table, the last piece left was this gigantic goat drum-stick. Everyone was delighted when I pulled it off and began to gnaw away clumsily.
The lunch turned out to be very friendly… and useful.
Aideed proved especially helpful. It was obvious that he wanted to be seen as part of our operation… and to co-opt it to his benefit, if he could. Yet, he agreed to cooperate on security measures in his areas of Mogadishu and the outlying regions; and his advice was sound. He confirmed, for example, Oakley’s plan to enter new areas carefully. “If the militias and gangs know you are coming,” he told us, “they will get out of the way and won’t cause trouble.
“And make sure,” he went on, “that the first troops in arrive with food and medicine to give directly to the people. In this way they won’t see you as just another armed band to be feared, but will associate you with good things.”
We incorporated this advice into our planning.
A couple of “Oh, by the way” comments also emerged: one having to do with the formation of political committees, the other with the need for a national police force. I didn’t pay much attention to either of them at the time; but they greatly affected me later.
Oakley then sprang his seven-point agreement and pressed for acceptance.
The key points were as follows: Immediate and total cessation of hostilities and restoration of unity of the USC; immediate and total cessation of negative propaganda; and the breaking of the artificial lines in the capital.
In Somalia, negotiation means endless talk with minimal conclusion, with any agreement reached today up for discussion again tomorrow. Aideed and Ali Mahdi were thus reluctant to reach any conclusions; they wanted a series of further meetings.
Oakley pushed back. “We have press outside waiting for signs of progress,” he told them. “We need something positive and concrete to give a boost to our negotiations. We have to give the people something to hope for.”
After hemming and hawing, they agreed to three of the points. (Oakley succeeded in gaining complete agreement within a few days.)
Bob Johnston and I also insisted that technicals be taken off the roads of Mogadishu to prevent any problems with our forces; and both agreed.
We then left Aideed and Ali Mahdi to talk privately as we prepared for the press conference. Once that was over, Bob Johnston and I left, feeling confident that the first meeting with the warlords had gone exceptionally well, and that we had in Bob Oakley a great and politically astute partner. The security cooperation that came out of this meeting allowed us to reach our first phase objectives in seven days, rather than the anticipated thirty, and hastened completion of the next and most crucial phase.
Next on our schedule was a meeting back at the embassy compound with Phil Johnston, the immensely capable, creative, and energetic head of the Humanitarian Operation Center (HOC). Johnston, the president of CARE, was on loan to the UN. HOC’s function was to coordinate the humanitarian effort in Somalia for that organization.
Like Oakley, Johnston was an open, can-do guy who focused on the mission and not on prerogatives. Also like Oakley, he was familiar with the military, understood how to work with us, and did not have to be convinced about setting up a solid coordination mechanism. He instantly embraced our plan to set up a Civil Military Operations Center to coordinate our efforts with his HOC, the NGOs, and the relief agencies, adding a suggestion that we co-locate the CMOC with his HOC.
This was a great idea. It was not only logical, but it made life easier for the NGOs and relief agencies, many of whom did not want to be closely associated with the military; and some, like the Red Cross, were actually forbidden association with the military by their charter.
One of our colonels, Kevin Kennedy, who was already involved in Operation Provide Relief and knew the humanitarian side of things extremely well, was designated as head of the CMOC. Two other superb officers, Colonel Bob MacPherson and Lieutenant Colonel Buddy Tillet, were added to the team, along with a handful of Civil Affairs personnel assigned to our task force.
Our meeting with Phil Johnston bore immediate fruit. The next day, we were able to successfully get off the first protected relief convoy. The first relief ships full of supplies landed and off-loaded in the port of Mogadishu the day after. These initial steps marked the actual start of our Phase II.[64]
For many reasons our relationships with NGOs and relief agencies proved to be mixed — and sometimes tense.
Coordinating these disparate organizations is often like herding cats. Their culture is sharply different from ours in the military — and often infused with a built-in dislike for us… rising more often than not out of the part they are called on to play in healing the devastation of armed conflict. Because they can easily be overwhelmed by the vast capability of the military, they fight fiercely to protect their identity and their own distinct contribution to the larger effort. And because they vary greatly in size, areas of expertise, charter, and sponsorship (religious, private, governmental, international, etc.), they often have a particular orientation about how or where they will function that may not be compatible with the kind of broadly coordinated plan the military likes to produce. More practically, their people do not respond to rigid direction and organizational structure, while their organizations often compete for resources and support. There is little natural tendency or interest to cooperate.
More than sixty relief agencies were operating in Somalia. Of these, several came out of the UN; the U.S. government’s Office of Foreign Disaster Assistance (OFDA) had on-the-ground presence in the form of its Disaster Assistance Response Team (DART); there was agency representation from several other countries; and there were many NGOs — all of them working under Phil Johnston’s able coordination mechanism. But coordination was at best still a difficult task.
To begin with, there was resentment of the military intervention. Many agencies feared the military would get credit for any success, even though they themselves had been working in Somalia long before the military. And some agencies opposed military participation at all in humanitarian relief, on the grounds that we did not understand how to do it and would screw up their efforts.
Relief workers also tended to develop views about who were the bad guys and who were the good… views as often as not based on partial, local experience and friendships, and not on the big picture. In a culture of blood feuds, it’s easy to take sides based on proximity. Armed with such biases, relief workers would strongly urge us to get rid of “their” particular enemies, and fight our efforts to bring everyone to the table. It was our view that Somalis themselves had to decide the who and the how of their governance. Many agencies thought they knew a better way… without realizing that in so doing they were treating the Somalis like children.
We had our biggest dispute with the agencies over the security mission. The agencies tended to expect us not only to improve general security for everybody, but to actually replace their hired guns and provide them with both full-time mission security for their organizations and full-time personal security. We could not possibly do that. Certainly not without major — and unacceptable — changes on their part.
For starters, there were well over five hundred facilities and residences in Mogadishu alone. Consolidating these would have made security feasible; but NGO culture put such consolidation out of the realm of discussion. The agencies also liked to maintain a “youthful” lifestyle, with a lot of free and easy movement around town at night for parties or other social events. In New York, L.A., London, or Paris, this kind of travel is perfectly safe. In Mogadishu, you’d be crazy to do that without armed protection; and they expected us to provide it. They refused to change their lifestyle, and we refused to provide individual protection. Tempers ran high.
At one point the UN threw an amazing costume party. They were disappointed when we did not accept their invitation to attend.
If farmers and cowboys can be friends, so can relief workers and military. The great majority of relief workers are fine people who bravely do God’s work; yet their culture remains far apart from ours; they tend to see the world from another, though equally valid, perspective.
In the military, we often have little patience for “save the whales” types — especially when they seem timid and poorly organized. Yet neither do we normally have sufficient understanding of their special expertise, or of how actions that seem logical to us can be counterproductive to their efforts. I had already learned from past experience, and would learn again in Somalia, that we both had to work much harder to understand each other and coordinate our efforts better. The good news: In Somalia, our day-to-day experiences taught both the relief agencies and the military how to do exactly that — such functions as sending out convoys under security, manning and securing feeding stations, constructing facilities, vetting local hired security, and many others were accomplished through the selfless efforts of both sides.
At the end of the first day on the ground, General Johnston and I sat down to assess the situation before he made a report to the CINC. Both of us were encouraged. The meetings with Bob Oakley and Phil Johnston had gone extremely well. (“The Johnston and Oakley team is a definite winner,” I said to myself.) The general’s guidance was to stay close to both of them, making sure I coordinated the security, political, and humanitarian efforts directly with them. This was fine with me. It made perfect sense. He also asked me to communicate directly not only with his own staff but with the CENTCOM staff; and General Hoar later instructed me to extend my direct communications to the Joint Staff as well. All of this also made perfect sense, though it was highly unusual to grant such access to someone at my level, and meant they had significant trust in me. I was determined to use the access wisely and keep everyone involved well informed. In fact, it allowed us to avoid many potential misunderstandings.
After this wrap-up meeting, I got an update from my guys in the op center: They were making terrific progress setting up our command and control facilities. But reports from our units moving out into the tense streets of Mogadishu were giving me serious concern. There were too many heavily armed men out there. Our guys did see encouraging signs, however. Many people waved and smiled when they saw U.S. Marines.
The next day turned out to be less positive.
To start things off, the bad guys decided to test us quickly, to see if we were made of sterner stuff than the UN troops, whose rules of engagement had made strong response to provocation close to impossible.
We had put up both fixed-wing aircraft and helicopters over the city and its immediate surroundings as a show of force and to provide a source of intelligence, reconnaissance, and cover as we began reaching out beyond the city. That morning, two of these helicopters were fired on by technicals. Though the helos immediately destroyed them, we were not happy that the bad guys were willing to take us on. That was of course a big mistake on their part. The quick and decisive response of the helos demonstrated that we meant business and would not tolerate attacks.
We were not the UN.
This event sparked a widely quoted statement to the press: “Things have changed in Mogadishu,” I told them. “Wyatt Earp is in town.”
The key meeting that day was with the special representative of the UN Secretary-General, Ismat Kittani, a veteran Iraqi diplomat and senior member of the UN Secretariat, and the military commander of the UN forces in UNOSOM, Pakistani General Mohamed Shaheen. Bob Oakley accompanied us to the UN headquarters, located in a villa in the center of the city that was decidedly more comfortable than our own gutted embassy. The meeting went badly.
Inside the headquarters, the air was thick with resentment. Kittani, confrontational from the start, was clearly infuriated that the U.S. military had been called to pick up after UNOSOM’s failure. And if we then managed to achieve positive results, UNOSOM’s failure would seem that much greater. Up until that moment, I’d imagined that the enormous size of the job ahead would make taking credit for success easy for everybody. There was, after all, plenty of work for everybody, including UNOSOM. And if we all together succeeded in making life better for the people who were actually suffering, then we could all go home happy. But for the first time I began to realize how far apart we were from the UN’s concept of what had to be done.
Several points of contention emerged.
In general: If the U.S. wanted to take on the job of fixing Somalia, fine. As far as the UN was concerned, let the U.S. do the whole thing.
Specifically: The UN did not intend to take over the mission from us anytime soon; neither did UNOSOM intend to work with us beyond a minimal coordination effort to de-conflict our forces; and they were very reluctant to honor any agreements we made or programs we put in place. We proposed setting up a Somali-led and — manned police force, for example. But UNOSOM was opposed — for all practical purposes — to Somalis leading anything important. They made it equally clear that our agreements with the factions would in no way be binding on UNOSOM.
As a final indignity, Kittani demanded an operational name change. For some reason known only to him, and perhaps to the trackless depths of the UN bureaucracy, our operational name at that point—“Combined Task Force,” the standard military title given to coalition commands — was unacceptable to the UN; and we would have to change it to “Unified Task Force” (UNITAF).
Such a name change is in fact no big deal… such things have little practical importance. But in demanding it, Kittani’s arrogance stuck in our craw, and did not help relations that were already starting to get frayed. Still, we did not want to do anything to give the UN an excuse for accusing us of not cooperating, nor did we want to harm efforts to eventually hand the mission back to them; so we accepted the change.
Kittani never let up his hostility, and never lost an opportunity to obstruct our work — even when his obstructions harmed Somalis.
Some time later, Bob Oakley and I worked out a plan with the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, Sadako Ogata, for resettling in Somalia the 350,000 Somali refugees then in Kenya. To the immense chagrin of Madame Ogata (whose job was to try to resettle the almost one million refugees scattered around the region and the half-million displaced persons in the country), the UN rejected our plan — without substituting another; they simply stonewalled. This kind of thing happened all too often.
In time, I began to learn some of the reasons behind the UN obstruction policy… though I still believe they were wrong not to try to work more closely with us. Cooperation and coordination would have helped all of us — not least the Somalis. But I now see that their hesitations were based on genuine fears. Primarily, they were afraid they’d be left holding the bag if chaos and anarchy returned after the eight-hundred-pound gorilla left town. A good point: Chaos and anarchy returned after we left.
As one UN official explained to me: “Boutros-Ghali is afraid you’ll hand him a poisoned apple. He won’t take the mission from you until he has wrangled as much as he can from the U.S.”
What they seemed to want from us, then, was to clean up the country and leave it in a condition that would greatly lessen the ability of the warlords to wage factional war. A worthy goal. But hardly possible without total war.
The big demand from Kittani and Boutros-Ghali was total disarmament of all the Somalis.
Thanks a lot!
There was simply no way we — or anyone — could disarm the Somalis except at the cost of enormous bloodshed. Weapons were everywhere, and most were portable and easily hidden.
This issue became a major bone of contention between the U.S. and UN leadership.
Our thought had been to establish a secure environment, while the UN simultaneously did the things they did best — working on peace agreements, setting up voluntary disarmament programs, reinstituting a national police force, resettling refugees and displaced persons, and eventually assuming the security mission. But it was evident from this first meeting that they would do nothing beyond sitting there without a new mandate and Security Council resolution.
Up to this point, everybody had made it clear that we were all working together. “Hey, we’re all one team” was the constant message. “We have one objective. Let’s figure out how to work together.” Suddenly, we’d hit a wall. The idea that this would be a kick-start operation of short duration was fading fast. It now looked like we had inherited the whole problem.
After the meeting, I would have been blind to miss General Johnston’s and Ambassador Oakley’s frustration. Theirs mirrored mine.
More bad news came that day: French troops in Mogadishu had shot up an unarmed bus, killing two Somalis and seriously wounding seven others, after an evidently confused bus driver had run a French roadblock. An angry Somali mob had gathered around the French positions, and we had to move in, negotiate some kind of peace with the warlords, and calm things down.
Later, other complaints about French troops in Mogadishu eventually led us to move them out to an area near the Ethiopian border, where they did great work. This location was no less difficult than Mogadishu, but it was politically less sensitive.
We spent the next days getting the operation rolling.
I had already broken our area of responsibility into eight Humanitarian Relief Sectors[65] (or HRSs) — a term we’d invented to avoid using traditional military terms (like “Sector of Operations” or “Zone of Action”). We wanted to convey the intent of our mission to the people, press, and relief workers as “softer” than a normal military action. Each HRS was unique, with boundaries based on factors like clan and tribal boundaries, political boundaries, geography, military span of control, capabilities of our forces, established distribution sites, security threats, and lines of communications.
Early on we had absorbed the Provide Relief operation out of Kenya and integrated it into our efforts. Soon other U.S. and international forces were flowing in at a rapid rate.
The Marines from the MEU, who’d led the way into Somalia, were quickly joined by additional Marines we flew in and married up with equipment from Maritime Prepositioning Ships that arrived in Mogadishu’s port on the twelfth of December, our third day on the ground. The 10th Mountain Division’s arrival shortly afterward allowed us to move out quickly to complete the second phase.
Though General Hoar had originally envisioned seven allied forces joining the U.S., following his 3-3-1 Strategy — three African national forces, three Arab national forces, and one Western national force — that went out the window the first day, as forces from all over the world started clamoring to join up. Forces from twenty-six nations ended up participating in UNITAF; and as many as forty-four nations had lined up when we had to shut the door.
These forces were a mixed bag. Some came with limited capabilities, some came burdened with restrictive political direction, some came with big demands for U.S. support, and a blessed few came with highly credible and capable units ready to take on any mission. My job was to find a place to put them, integrate them into the operation, and assign them missions. This was no small task.
My staff took to calling me “the Century 21 man” after I somehow found places where a rapid and unanticipated succession of international troops could lay their heads and set up camp. I’d get a call out of the blue that troops from someplace like Zimbabwe or Botswana had landed unexpectedly at the airport and were looking for direction. I’d then slip on “the yellow jacket”—as my staff put it — and try to “sell them some real estate.” I’d go out to meet their commanders — or their advance team, if we were lucky (some militaries were not aware that it helps to send an advance team before they launch the whole force). The “choice lots” were obviously out of harm’s way and near major facilities. The less desirable “lots” were in the HRSs out in the bush, where the austere environment and high threat made a “sale” difficult.
Since individual contributions — such as a transport unit, say, or a field hospital — often came in bits and pieces, we devoted considerable creative energy to the marrying up of these with other forces, taking into account factors like language, cultural affinity, political compatibility, and military interoperability.
As the operation evolved, the State Department continued to solicit new contributors for UNITAF. The variety of international troops making up the Coalition staff very quickly turned our headquarters into the bar scene from Star Wars. At its peak, Provide Hope had 39,000 troops under UNITAF command — though not in every case the same troops who started the operation. Troops came and went, and, where possible, were replaced with specialized units, more suitable for the later phases of the operation. Thus, an infantry unit might be replaced by an engineer unit.
This dynamic flow required careful assignment and management, as did issues such as Rules of Engagement, logistics support, and area assignment; and the job of assigning and managing fell on me. The law of diminishing returns set in.
I got a lot of strange requests for support. Some of the strangest included fresh food (that is, live goats, sheep, and chickens); full medical support, to include medical malpractice coverage; and, naturally, money to pay for the troops. We politely declined all of these requests.
For all the difficulties we had to deal with — or put up with — it was great to have this wonderful rainbow of Coalition forces working with us. We had enormous respect for them. I especially enjoyed visiting the Coalition units to coordinate operations… or just to check on how things were going. This often brought the added benefit of a delicious, and often exotic, meal.
The African troops were particularly impressive. They asked for little or nothing, and were willing to take on the toughest missions. Our Marines always gave them the highest praise possible for their courage and skill: They wanted them assigned to their sectors.
Since the embassy compound was quite large (it once had, in better times, a nine-hole golf course, for example), we were able to co-locate liaison teams from the various coalition forces close to our headquarters.
One night, as General Johnston and I were walking around the headquarters compound, we happened to pass the row of tents occupied by the African liaison teams. Except for a dimly lit bulb wired to our field generators, each tent was totally bare: no field desks, no cots, no folding chairs, nothing to make the tents livable — much less workable or comfortable. The contrast with the other coalition facilities was stark.
We quickly had our engineers build them makeshift desks, tables, and other field furniture.
“We’re eternally grateful for your kindness,” the liaison teams told us.
“You’ve more than earned it,” I assured them.
The presence of the liaison teams was not an unmixed blessing.
Our policy was to have coalition personnel clear their weapons near the compound entrance as they entered. The idea was to remove magazines or live rounds from the weapons, and then to confirm they were safe by a test firing into a barrel of sand. The sentry and clearing barrel were just below the blown-out window of my small second-floor office, which made me sharply aware of any mistakes. There’d be one or two accidental discharges a day, as the sentry tried to explain how to clear weapons to the often clueless coalition troops. One of these accidental rounds zinged by my feet as I was enjoying a late-night cigar near a ruined fountain in front of our gutted headquarters. So much for my pleasant, peaceful moment.
We got occasional rounds from firefights outside the compound as well. One night as I slept, three heavy, 50 caliber machine-gun rounds hit the concrete window frame of my office. This got my attention. Another time I was pinned down at our piss tube when a firefight broke out nearby and made my location the impact zone for the fusillade that erupted. I zigzagged back to the cover of our building, hitting the deck more than once. My appreciation for indoor plumbing considerably increased after that.
All the while, I spent as much time as I could watching over our operations outside Mogadishu.
General Johnston and I traveled constantly out to the units in the field, to get a firsthand sense of what was happening and what was needed. At other times, I went on patrols with the Canadians, visited feeding stations guarded by the Pakistanis, accompanied Marines on weapons searches, and visited orphanages with our Civil Affairs units.
I particularly remember a trip to our Marines in the south, working our most remote and desperately needy sector. As we drove up to this dusty, arid camp, with only scrub trees and bushes to break up the reddish brown terrain, I couldn’t help noticing a remarkable sea of bright yellow in the distance. As we got closer, I realized that every one of the suffering multitudes who had drifted into the camp on their last legs was wearing a yellow T-shirt and yellow sarong. The Marine commander had come up with a scheme to brighten up the spirits of these poor people with color. At his request, his wife back at Camp Pendleton organized a drive for the families back home to contribute anything yellow — material or clothes. It worked. As people came in for food, water, medicine, and shelter, they were given their yellow garments. You could see the immediate effect in their weak smiles. But the pickup in their morale had long-term effects as well. It actually helped them get physically stronger.
From Vietnam on, I’ve had the habit of immersing myself in the people and cultures of the countries where I’ve been stationed. I kept up this long-standing tradition in Somalia — sucking up everything I could about Somali society and culture. I read anything I could get my hands on; I met frequently with Somalis, both individuals and groups; and Somalis from the States, whom we had contracted to translate and liaise for us, provided additional insights.
One of these last turned out to be Aideed’s son, a student in California and a corporal in the Marine Corps Reserve when we called him up to come home. Though his surname, like his father’s, was Farrah, we didn’t actually make the connection until we had him in Mogadishu. Once we knew who we had, it was obvious that using him as a translator or liaison would be difficult, so we kept him at the headquarters (where the two of us had occasional friendly conversations). After his father’s death in 1996 (he was killed in a firefight in Mogadishu), young Aideed returned to Somalia and took over his father’s organization. Years later, when I commanded CENTCOM, he and I maintained a sporadic correspondence. (Again, Somalia was in my AOR.)
Though I could never hope to reach Robert Oakley’s deep familiarity with the Somalis’ complex culture, I did achieve a basic understanding:
There is a single key difference between Somalis and Westerners: Until very recently, the former have been nomads, while for many generations we have lived the more stable life of cities, towns, and farms. This difference has serious practical consequences. Somali time sense, for example, is vastly different from ours — more fluid, less logical and precise. In negotiations, we like to achieve conclusions, and to build on past agreements. We like to move forward in a progressive, linear manner; to get the damned thing over with, and move on. They don’t. They love meetings and committees… talking for its own sake; and they love to let talking take its own time. They don’t have our imperative to reach endings. Or, as I would later tell an audience: “The good news with the Somalis is that everything is negotiable. The bad news is that everything is negotiable all the time. What we agreed yesterday is still open to negotiation today.”
Their tribal, clan, subclan, and family unit system drives their entire culture. Everything is accepted as a group responsibility. Everything is settled by the clans, and only by the clans. There is no strong concept of individual responsibility. Thus, for example, there is a strict “blood tax,” or dhia, system. Wrongs are righted by paying for them. If payment is not made, violence often follows.
This system is central to Somali loyalty, not the nation or a state. Unless you understand that, you will never understand the Somalis.
My growing knowledge brought additional responsibilities. Ambassador Oakley found duties for me beyond my operational mission — working more directly and personally with the Somalis. Soon, with General Johnston’s okay, I was representing Oakley on a series of Somali committees he had set up; and at his request, I started dealing directly with the faction leaders.
I welcomed both duties.
Thus, I was on the political, security, judicial, police, and other committees; and I frequently met with Aideed or one of the other faction leaders on one matter or another. I also met with women’s groups, schoolteachers’ and other professional groups, to hear complaints and get cooperation for projects.
These encounters were hardly ever easy, given the Somali approach to negotiating; and my frustrations quickly grew. At one point, I had to ask Oakley what these endless meetings were accomplishing.
“When they’re talking, they’re not fighting,” he answered. “We need to keep them engaged in a lot of talking.”
He was right. But it took me a while to realize that.
In time, my presence on the Security Committee allowed me to get to know Aideed’s and Ali Mahdi’s security chiefs, General Elmi and General Abdi. These relationships headed off a lot of problems and potential disasters as the operation went on.
Another prominent Somali I got to know well was Aideed’s financier Osman Atto. Atto was an old-fashioned wheeler-dealer entrepreneur. His hands were in all kinds of pots. Because continued fighting would inevitably harm the many deals he always had working, he did his best to keep Aideed on an even keel and prevent fighting. “Don’t upset him,” Osman kept urging me. “Bad for business.” (Osman and I kept in touch after I left, and he proved to be very helpful when I returned to Somalia in 1995.)
The most important of my working relationships was with General Aideed himself — not easy, given the general’s mercurial personality. Today, we’d probably call him “bipolar”—manic-depressive. I could never be sure which mood I would find when I arrived at his compound. When he was in his “statesman” mode, he was articulate and expansive, making grand pronouncements about Somali and international affairs. When he was in his “alderman” mode, he harped about petty problems and complained about our operations. But in his “dark” mode, he was scary. His own men often warned me not to provoke him when he was in this mood.
For all the uncertainties of working with him, he was far and away the one person who might have led his country. His organization was actually a minigovernment, with all the bureaucratic trappings (including — improbably — a Minister for Tourism). Like Washington bureaucrats and used car dealers, Aideed liked to hand out ballpoint pens imprinted with his political party’s logo.
“You need administration, bureaucracy, and detail to run a country,” he answered when I queried him about such things; “and only I have it.” He was right. None of the other warlords had anything like it.
Without doubt, he was a dangerous character who required constant attention, but I believed he could be handled and controlled. There were times when he was relatively easy to work with him; there were times when you had to lay the law down to him; and there were times when I had to wait out a dark mood. But I could live with all that as long as we were making real progress… and we were.
Because he was a dangerous, very high-maintenance character, many people thought we ought to just threaten him — and if that didn’t work, use force — to make him toe the line. As the UN found out later, doing that opened up lots of problems. They thought they could handle him — without having any idea what they were biting into. I thought there were other ways to deal with him.
My visits to Aideed’s lair (or to one of the other warlords’ compounds) required forming up a small convoy of two or three Humvees, with security. My driver, Corporal Watts, would usually gather up eight to ten Marines from the staff, have them don their battle gear, and mount them up for the trip.
Inside the compound, the buildings were all layered with the porches that are typical in tropical countries. Dozens of heavily armed men always swarmed about, staring brazenly at my Marines from every level of the buildings. During my meetings, the Marines stood beside the vehicles returning the stares of the cocky Somali gunmen.
Our entrances and exits to and from the compound were normally without incident — which was just as well, considering the possibilities. But one of our entrances proved to be deliciously memorable. As we were stepping out of our Humvees on this particular occasion, I was greeted by shocked faces on Aideed’s men. I turned to the second Humvee in line, which seemed to be the source of all the excitement: An African American woman Marine was standing there in her battle gear, with her M-16 at the ready, looking tough as hell.
I left to conduct my business. Forty-five minutes later, when I came back out, the stir was still at high pitch. It was obvious the Somalis couldn’t believe their eyes — an armed woman in Marine battle dress.
On the way back, I turned to Corporal Watts. “You brought a woman Marine, huh,” I said; I knew he’d set this scene up.
He smiled. “She’ll kill you just as dead as any man,” he said.
I laughed. He loved jerking the Somali tough guys’ chains.
Back to our headquarters, I drew the woman Marine aside for a quick chat. Corporal Watts was right. She’d kill you just as dead as any man could.
Meanwhile, Ambassador Oakley was moving the peace process forward. By early January 1993, he had arranged a conference in Addis Ababa, attended by all the faction leaders; and in mid-January, they’d all signed a peace agreement. He then convinced the reluctant UN to sponsor another conference in Addis in mid-March, where all the factions signed on to a plan for a transition government, the disarming of the militias, and the establishment of a national police force.
It had become increasingly clear that Oakley was essential if the Somalis were going to settle their differences peacefully. Only he commanded the trust, confidence, and respect of the Somalis. Yet even this was a long shot.
As food began to flow, and we had begun to reduce the violence and chaos in Mogadishu, an unexpected phenomenon just sort of broke out here and there in the city. The old policemen started coming back onto the streets, all decked out in their musty uniforms, to include batons — directing traffic, controlling minor problems, and promoting order. It was one of those seemingly minor events that was actually a very big tipping point. Where they appeared, vendors’ booths and makeshift markets set up. The police were security magnets, and people flocked to these newly “safe” areas.
In Somalia, the police have always commanded great respect. They never took part in Siad Barre’s oppression, never took sides in the bitter civil strife that followed, and even somehow maintained the goodwill of the warlords.
The reemergence of the police presented us with a splendid opportunity to turn a large piece of the security pie over to trained, competent, and respected Somalis — an opportunity the UN was reluctant to support. We were concerned that we’d lose momentum while waiting for the UN to move ahead. But when Oakley tried to persuade the UN to take on the reestablishment of the police, they refused. And when the UN decreed that it would not accept a police force that was under Somali control, Oakley dropped the job on me.
Though U.S. law has strong prohibitions against U.S. military involvement in this area, Oakley was undeterred, and he convinced General Johnston to let me help put the police back on the street. As a result, I became the head of the oversight committee formed to reestablish the force.
A superb U.S. Army military police officer, Lieutenant Colonel Steve Spataro, single-handedly put together a plan and worked with the old police leadership to vet the former police, rebuild their academy, set up the training program, arrange for equipment and uniforms to be provided, and reestablish the prisons. The Italians and Japanese contributed vehicles, uniforms, and equipment; and we arranged for weapons (“donated” in the name of Ali Mahdi, from whom we seized them) and a control system for them.
We ended up with a national police force of 4,400 personnel, operating in sixteen cities, while Oakley worked with our lawyers to establish jails, and to set up a judicial committee that put in place judges, legal representatives, and a legal code.
Though by January 1993 UNITAF had achieved its mission to create a secure environment for the conduct of the humanitarian effort, Somalia was still a dangerous place, with violence ready to explode at a moment’s notice. Obviously, in the best of worlds, the Somalis would have gladly given up their arms, turned them into plowshares, and lived blessedly in peace and harmony. Since that was not going to happen, we had to consider some less than ideal ways to pacify a warlike society awash with weapons… while somehow or other grappling with UN Secretary-General Boutros-Ghali’s demand that UNITAF forcibly disarm the factions. Still impossible, in our view. If we attempted it, the warlords would fight; Mogadishu would become a combat zone; and the bloody fighting would put an end to humanitarian operations.
An alternative proposal was to offer “incentives” for weapons. We’d throw money at the problem… offer them a “buyout.” On the face of it, this was a pretty good idea. But in fact, it was as much a fantasy as Boutros-Ghali’s. Not only would it have cost us a fortune, it would have fed an arms market that would have brought in even more weapons.
The solution we came up with was a program to reduce arms gradually, basing the program on increasingly tight controls on weapons, a formal agreement for their voluntary cantonment[66] by the militias (with an inspection requirement), and an active effort to search for and confiscate un-cantoned weapons.
It worked. We removed all visible weapons from the streets, cantoned the weapons belonging to the faction militias in Authorized Weapons Storage Sites (AWSSs) that we watched and inspected, and disrupted the two arms markets in Mogadishu. Our sweeps captured thousands of weapons and millions of rounds of ammunition. Within days, the price of weapons skyrocketed; the gunshot wounds treated daily at the hospitals were reduced to low single digits; and the faction leaders began to participate in Oakley’s political process without fear of attack.
Putting a permanent lid on violence was of course not in the cards. There was no way we could avoid violent confrontations.
One incident with long-term consequences occurred in February at the southern coastal city of Kismayo.
Following Aideed’s victory over Siad Barre, General Hersi Morgan, a graduate of the U.S. Army’s Command and General Staff College and Barre’s son-in-law, took charge of the remnants of the former dictator’s army near the Kenyan border. Early in 1993, Morgan started conducting probes in the direction of Kismayo, one of which provoked a major counterattack by U.S. helicopter gunships and Belgian light armor (Kismayo was in the Belgians’ sector). After losing several technicals and some heavy weapons, Morgan’s forces scrambled back into the bush.
They came out again on February 22. That night, Morgan conducted a raid on the city (in violation of an agreement brokered among the warlords to freeze forces in place until negotiations on a peace plan were worked out). He infiltrated his fighters, picked up weapons he’d previously stashed (undetected by the Belgian troops), and attacked and drove off Colonel Omar Jess, an ally of Aideed’s and the ruling faction leader in Kismayo. Jess, who had committed many atrocities, was not popular; and the residents welcomed his expulsion.
Aideed naturally insisted that we expel Morgan from Kismayo and return Jess to power. Though Oakley and Johnston gave Morgan and Jess an ultimatum that essentially had them revert to the situation before the raid, and the two warlords essentially complied, Aideed staged violent protest demonstrations in Mogadishu in front of our embassy compound and near UN headquarters in Mogadishu. We had to put them down.
These demonstrations had a serious impact on UNOSOM, the NGOs, and the press, who feared a renewal of civil war. Press reports, based on an incomplete view of the situation, were overblown and inaccurate. In fact, the demonstrations were more annoyances than battles.
Though Aideed was a master of political theater, his violent demonstrations were not normally directed toward UNITAF. Most of the time, he saved them, and the accompanying shooting sprees, for Egyptian forces and the visits of Boutros-Ghali. The Egyptians were not liked by the Somalis, while the UN Secretary-General was hated. In his days in the Egyptian Foreign Ministry, Boutros-Ghali’s policies in support of Siad Barre had — in the Somali view — kept the dictator in power. (Since Siad Barre was in exile in Nigeria, there were also demonstrations against the Nigerian troops.)
Meanwhile, the U.S. Marine commander of the Mogadishu sector, Colonel Buck Bedard, ran the security of the city with an iron hand and responded quickly and decisively to all of Aideed’s provocations.
One of his more effective measures was to station Marine sniper teams in taller buildings around the city. When over the course of several nights, armed gunmen had tried to move into ambush positions near our compound, all of them were picked off by our snipers. The remaining ambushers decided to find a better way to spend their time.
Later, gunmen from an Aideed AWSS started taking potshots at passing troops. When my warnings failed to stop the shooting, the Marines attacked the compound with helicopter gunships, tanks, and infantry. The AWSS was captured with no friendly casualties.
I called a security meeting for the next day. It was a tense, confrontational encounter. “You have to make a decision right here,” I told Aideed’s generals. “Are we at war or not? Decide now. We’ll take our next actions based on your decision.”
I then threw on the table several rounds that had landed in our embassy compound from a random shooting that had originated in the AWSS we’d just attacked. “We won’t tolerate this any longer,” I told them.
The generals went off to talk, and returned much chastened. “Let us put this behind us,” General Elmi announced. “There will be no war.” He went on to explain that a difficult-to-control rogue militia had been manning the AWSS. “We regret the problems they’ve caused,” he said. “We’ll put pressure on them to stop.”
We had no more trouble from them.
Much of the violence on the streets of Mogadishu comes in midafternoon, when young thugs have started feeling the khat they’ve been chewing all day. Khat leaves (a mild, inhibition-removing narcotic) were flown into dirt airstrips each morning and quickly moved to market stalls to sell before they lost their potency. All morning, we’d see chewers’ bulging checks all over town. By three in the afternoon, the gangs of hostile young men were feeling they could take on the world. The occasional violent confrontations with our patrols ended badly for the khat-chewers in every instance.
Thugs and shooters weren’t the only security problem. We also got thieves — incredibly brazen thieves who’d risk their lives to steal anything, no matter how little it was worth.
One night, thieves came over a wall near a squad of Marines. The thieves were gunned down before anyone realized they were unarmed.
We later turned over the perimeter security of our compound to a less effective coalition force. But then another band of thieves came over the wall at night and made their way into our building. Voices whispering in Somali woke me up. I grabbed my pistol, ran into the corridor, and watched two men fleeing out of the building. Moments later, I heard shouts and scuffling; our sergeant major and General Johnston’s aide had seized one of them.
I quickly made the commander of the coalition force responsible for compound security aware of my displeasure. Though he assured me that he’d fix the problem, I didn’t sleep well after that, and checked his positions often.
Much more frustrating were the young street urchins. Some threw rocks at our convoys and patrols — not a smart idea, given our advantages in firepower. But worse were their attempts to grab loot by swarming our trucks as they passed through the streets. Intelligence reports that kids might be used to place bombs on the trucks made a bad problem worse. After our security troops had to shoot and kill a few of the young thieves, we started looking for ways to block the kids without hurting anyone. “There must be some way to apply less than lethal force,” we told ourselves. Nobody wants to kill kids.
One day, I was walking past our makeshift motor pool at the embassy and noticed troops gathered around a truck, testing a strange device. It only took me a moment to figure out what it was — a jury-rigged electric prod attached to the truck’s battery.
I gave them credit for their innovation, but not for their judgment. The prod was not a workable solution to the nonlethal problem. I could see a CNN shot of a Somali kid getting zapped. We needed a better, more permanent answer. But when we asked the Pentagon for some sort of approved, nonlethal capability, the best we could get was small cans of pepper spray. Though these were no more potent than the pepper spray you might find in a lady’s purse back home, they came — unbelievably — with an exhaustive training program and rules of engagement. Our troops had to implement the program and familiarize themselves with the ROEs before they could use them. Bureaucracy at work… a spray can is a spray can.
I knew this problem would surely come back to haunt us in future operations and made a mental note to address it.
Though security was our primary mission, other demands were hardly less pressing: We ran the ports and airfields, conducted extensive psyops and civic action programs, undertook major engineer projects to repair and rebuild the infrastructure, and provided medical support.
Our medical units also had a tough task keeping our own force healthy in this harsh and dangerous environment. By the end of the operation, we had suffered eight killed in action, twenty-four non-battle deaths (one from a shark attack), twenty-four wounded in action, and 2,853 illness and injury cases (including snakebites).
One of my responsibilities was to coordinate our psychological and tactical operations.
Though there were plenty of sources of “information,” the Somalis had little access to accurate news accounts. Most Somali news sources — notably, Aideed’s — were nothing but propaganda… much of it inflammatory. We published leaflets and a newspaper, and set up a radio station, to counter the lies. The paper and radio station, which were called “Rajo”—“hope” in Somali — made Aideed very unhappy; and he counterattacked through his own radio station. A period of “radio wars” ensued.
When he summoned me to his compound to complain about our broadcasts, I told him we’d tone down our broadcasts when he toned down his own inflammatory rhetoric. He agreed.
Another victory for nonviolent engagement.
The months to follow would show that the UN had failed to learn this lesson. Instead of countering Aideed’s hostile media blasts in kind, they tried to close down his radio station. Freedom of the press has to work both ways; we don’t shut down radio stations just because we don’t like what is broadcast. The resulting confrontation was the opening of the violent war between the UN and Aideed.
All the while, we did not want for VIP visitors — including President George Bush.
President Bush visited us on New Year’s Day, a few days before he was to leave office. It was a grand sendoff.
General Aideed even sent a huge cake as a welcoming gift, all adorned with a portrait of the President and Aideed standing side by side beneath U.S. and Somali flags. The cake, uneaten, stayed in our admin office for several days until one of the troops noticed that it was the only thing around the place that never had flies on it. He was right. I told him to get rid of it.
The best moment of Bush’s visit came when he visited our troops. The President really connected with our guys. As he walked through their ranks to a microphone, their enthusiastic cheers visibly moved him, leaving him visibly close to tears.
I’ll never forget that scene.
Unfortunately, the President did not bring with him the news we’d hoped for — plans for the UN to assume our mission. Though we’d been led to believe that talks had been going on, we were disappointed to learn that nothing had been arranged with the UN. The Clinton administration would have to pick up on the transition from us to them. This was not a job you want to drop on a brand-new administration.
As February turned into March, our efforts were increasingly focused on stabilizing the positive environment UNITAF had created and promoting the political agreements Oakley was skillfully piecing together. During this time I met frequently with Aideed, the other warlords, and the various committees, trying to keep things calm and to hold agreements together.
The UN, meanwhile, continued to fight us hard on the transition and handover front. While this process dragged on, I worked on the plan to turn over the mission to them.
The Secretary-General had presented us with a series of nonnegotiable demands. Unless we agreed to them, there’d be no transition. For starters, he wanted UNITAF to stay after UNOSOM II took over. He wanted full U.S. involvement in any follow-on UN operation. And he insisted on a U.S. Quick Reaction Force, U.S. logistics support, and a senior American leader to act as his special representative to head the operation. He got everything he asked for.
Even so, the UN was painfully slow to take the reins of the operation. In February, Boutros-Ghali appointed a respected Turkish lieutenant general, Cevik Bir, as the UNOSOM II force commander. An American Army major general, Tom Montgomery, became his deputy. Another American, Jonathan Howe, a four-star admiral and President Bush’s former Deputy National Security Adviser, took over from Kittani the job of Boutros-Ghali’s special representative. Robert Oakley left Somalia on March 3 in order to make way for Howe. Oakley was sorely missed.
The official handover date was March 26, but we continued to run the operation until we finally left on May 4. In effect, the UNITAF staff commanded the new UNOSOM II force. The UNOSOM staff simply sat on their duffs, refusing to accept command, but kibitzing over all our decisions and actions. It was weird to have two staffs officially overseeing the same force. In fact, we were actually commanding both forces, ours and theirs, while they were sitting there trying to set policy for future operations.
The UN plan that they intended to implement was vastly different from Oakley’s. Where Oakley was steering a course that encouraged the Somalis to determine their own fate, UNOSOM II had a specific political outcome in mind. They sought to rebuild the nation of Somalia into a thriving democracy of their design, with the UN dictating who would participate in the political process. (They intended to exclude General Aideed, for instance.) We saw trouble on the horizon. In our view, the UN plan was overly ambitious, and grossly underestimated the power and support of the faction leaders, as well as the historical Somali animosity toward the UN. It was a recipe for disaster.
By the time Oakley left in March, the atmosphere on the political front had drastically changed.
We turned over the command to UNOSOM II on May 4, 1993. UNOSOM arranged a grand ceremony with dancers and singers.
After the ceremony, I drove with Bob Johnston to the airport. As our two Humvees wound through the narrow streets, he was very quiet, deep in thought. Suddenly he ordered a stop, and had the vehicles pull over to a nearby curb where several children were standing. At his direction, we got out of the vehicles, and he gathered all our pens and pencils and gave them to the kids (who all seemed pleased to get them). After his little act of charity, he slowly swung his gaze around. Something was obviously weighing on his mind.
“What are you thinking about?” I asked.
He looked up at the bright sunny sky. “I give this place thirty days,” he said, “and then it’s all going to go to hell.”
Thirty-one days later, his prediction came true.
Zinni quickly resettled into his job as the MCCDC deputy commander at Quantico, but with events in Somalia never far from his thoughts. As he resumed the old routines, he stayed in close contact with Bob Oakley, participating with the former ambassador in Somalia-related speaking engagements and conferences on humanitarian and peacekeeping operations.
His Marine Corps career, meanwhile, continued to advance. Back in Somalia, he had been selected and frocked as a major general. That is, he was entitled to wear the rank but would not receive the increase in pay or the actual grade until his number for promotion actually came up several months later. The promotion meant he would be reassigned sometime within the year — hopefully back to the operational forces and possibly command of a division.
On June 5, 1993, a clash in Mogadishu between mobs loyal to General Aideed and Pakistani troops under UNOSOM resulted in the deaths of twenty-four Pakistanis and an unknown number of Somalis. Aideed was instantly blamed for the tragedy; and blame soon escalated into demonization. The UNOSOM II leadership stepped up their policy of marginalizing Aideed and putting the squeeze on his followers. Within days, UNOSOM II and Aideed forces had plunged into a raging war, with high casualties on both sides.
The growing conflict called into question the credibility of the U.S. mission in Somalia; Congress and the media went on the attack. General Johnston’s prediction was coming true: the tragedy of Somalia was growing worse by the day; and Zinni could do nothing but watch from the sidelines.
A few weeks later, Zinni attended a course at Maxwell Air Force Base for new two-star generals and flag officers, with much of the classroom discussion centering on the growing conflict in Somalia — as representing an emerging form of serious U.S. military involvement. The final class featured a distinguished guest, Representative Newt Gingrich, who continued the debate. The congressman was obviously concerned about the U.S. part in the Somalia tragedy. After it came out that Zinni had been the UNITAF director of operations, Gingrich drew him aside and picked his brain. This casual meeting had consequences. It was to lead to Zinni’s return to Somalia.
Several weeks later, on October 3, news came of the horrific battle in the streets of Mogadishu between Special Operations Forces and Aideed’s militia. Rangers and Delta Force operatives had snatched several key Aideed aides in a surprise raid. Aideed’s militia had counterattacked with automatic weapons and RPGs, pinning down the Rangers and Deltas and shooting down a pair of Army Black Hawks. An attempted rescue by the Quick Reaction Force got bogged down, and in the firefight that followed, eighteen U.S. soldiers were killed and seventy-eight wounded. Hundreds of Somalis lost their lives. An American helicopter pilot, Chief Warrant Officer Michael Durant, was wounded and then captured by the militia; and a dead U.S. soldier was brutally dragged through the streets. The American public was outraged.
Within hours of the battle, Zinni received a call from Congressman Gingrich: There was to be a bipartisan meeting at the White House. “What do you think we should do about Somalia?” the Congressman asked. “Should we pull out, or should we send in significant forces to continue the fighting?”
“If those are the only choices,” Zinni replied, “then we should pull out. Sending in more combat forces just means more casualties — civilians included — and a lot more destruction. It’s not worth it.”
“What other options do we have?”
“The best option is to get the fighting stopped and move the situation back to where it had been when UNITAF closed down.”
“Who could possibly accomplish that?”
“Bob Oakley.”
Two days later, Zinni was up late watching the baseball playoffs when a call came in from General Mundy, the commandant. “You’re to report to Andrews Air Force Base tomorrow morning at six,” Mundy said. “By order of the White House, and at the request of Ambassador Oakley, you are to accompany the ambassador on a special mission to Somalia.”
“Yes, sir,” Zinni answered. “I’ll be on the plane.”
“By the way,” General Mundy asked, “do you know how this came about?”
“Newt Gingrich got it in his head that I know something about Somalia; he called the other day and asked who could make things better over there. I told him ‘Bob Oakley.’ ”
“Good luck.”
Zinni ordered up a car, packed his bags, then made a quick call to Oakley. “It looks like I’m going to Somalia with you,” Zinni said.
“Well, you got me into this,” Oakley answered, “so you’re coming along.”
“How long will we be gone?”
“I’m not sure. But plan on several months.”
Zinni repacked his bags.
The next morning, October 7, he met Oakley at Andrews AFB.
“What’s the plan?” Zinni asked.
“We’ll work that out on the plane.”
Tony Zinni:
After the Air Force C-20 took off, Oakley told me that our first stop was Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, to solicit President Meles Zenawi’s help. Meles and the Eritreans had connections in Mogadishu who could communicate with Aideed’s faction.
Later, Oakley described his meeting at the White House. It was clear that he’d been given little guidance. The President expected him to use his own judgment.
For the remainder of the long flight to Addis Ababa, we worked out tasks we wanted to accomplish. We had no doubt that we’d run into other pressing problems on the ground that would change them — or render them obsolete; but these would give us a starting point.
The first two steps were absolutes. Accomplishing them was a necessary condition for further progress:
First, get a cease-fire in place to stop the violence and allow us to open the dialogue.
Second, get the prisoners released.
In addition to Warrant Officer Durant, Aideed also held Umar Shantali, a Nigerian soldier captured in earlier fighting. “These prisoners have to be released unconditionally,” Oakley told me. “America does not negotiate for hostages.”
We knew this would be a tough sell; the prisoners gave Aideed a lot of leverage. We had to convince his people that giving them up was in everyone’s interest.
Once we’d gotten through that hurdle, the third task was to reestablish a Security Committee like the one that had so effectively de-conflicted problems during the UNITAF operation.
Fourth, organize another humanitarian conference in Addis Ababa, possibly as soon as the following month (November 1993).
Previous conferences had successfully gained agreements — though these had never been fully accepted by UNOSOM II.
Fifth, explore the possibility of reducing the UNOSOM II force presence in southern Mogadishu, Aideed’s turf. During the UNITAF operation, we had tried to set up our logistics lines elsewhere, but without total success. The road, port, and airfield facilities in Mogadishu were unfortunately the only viable infrastructure that could handle the demands of the operation. We decided to look at this again, anyway.
Sixth, the Aideed problem. How much of the current fighting was his responsibility? How much should he be held accountable for it? Should we work with him? Could we work with him?
Admiral Howe, the Secretary-General’s special representative, had put a $25,000 reward on Aideed’s head after the June 5 battle, and had followed that up with attacks and raids on Aideed and his key people. Aideed had fought back. As long as these actions continued, there’d be little room for reasoned discussion.
In Aideed’s defense, the question of his actual guilt was very much open. The UN was in fact contemplating investigations to look into this question, while Aideed himself was calling for “independent inquiries”—outside the UN — to investigate the circumstances of the conflict.
In the light of all these questions, we decided to delay a decision about Aideed.
Seven, the press problem. As word of our mission began to circulate, the media began descending on Mogadishu in droves. They had to be handled carefully. Not only did Aideed remain a master at using the press to his advantage, but an angry and confused American public and congress were watching our every move with careful scrutiny.
In Addis, Meles’s insights, advice, and strong views proved to be extremely helpful. On our two key issues, he had good news and bad:
Aideed had recently declared an unconditional, unilateral cease-fire. Though the UN had not accepted it (preferring, as usual, to ignore him), this was still a positive first step.
But Meles was not so optimistic about getting the prisoners released. The UN at that point held eighty-plus prisoners from Aideed’s side on an island off the southern coast. An unconditional release of Durant and Shantali would be difficult without some sort of exchange for the UN-held prisoners.
As for other issues that concerned us: 1. He thought another conference was a good idea; and he was willing to support it in Addis Ababa. 2. It was his view that an independent tribunal was the best way to deal with the Aideed problem. 3. Most tellingly, he made it clear that UNOSOM was not working well; and the fighting had strengthened Aideed among his followers.
On the tenth of October, we left Addis for Mogadishu.
Because the direct route was risky from the airport to the former U.S. Embassy — now the UNOSOM compound — our helo took a circuitous path. As we approached the embassy, we could see improvements UNOSOM had put in after we left. Comfortable trailers had replaced our tents; and I learned later that “real food” had replaced our MREs. On the face of it, UNOSOM personnel were living a lot easier than we did. However, landing gave us a shock. We found a force under heavy siege. All the troops were dug in or protected by stacks of sandbags. All the new trailers were sandbagged into bunkered positions. Virtually nothing was moving outside the gates.
Oakley and I gave each other a sharp look.
After a series of initial briefs by the U.S. Liaison Office, we met with Generals Bir and Montgomery, who provided a good sense of the military situation. It was clear that the environment on the ground was extremely tense; a fragile and uneasy cessation of fighting was holding, but only by a thread.
It was equally clear that they were not glad to see us. In their view, UNITAF’s “failures” had made it impossible for UNOSOM to succeed; and they took every possible opportunity to pin responsibility on UNITAF for anything that had gone wrong. So it did not sit well that we had come back to attempt a fix.
Our presence did not sit well with Admiral Howe, either, we learned when we met him. As far as he was concerned, our mission was going to be neither helpful nor productive; nor would he yield any of the concessions we thought would smooth negotiations. “UNOSOM II’s strategy must remain as it has been,” he explained, “to isolate, marginalize, and minimalize Aideed, check the intimidation and domination of the other faction leaders, and encourage democratic processes among the ordinary people.” He continued to refuse to declare a cease-fire, as Aideed had done. In his view, Aideed’s cease-fire was nothing but PR — psyops. (Howe did agree, however, to “suspend offensive operations”… a cease-fire under another title. We could live with that.)
Howe’s strategy may have been high-minded; and yet it was also a recipe for war. The factions could only be dealt with through a political process that directly involved them. Their power had to be gradually reduced through cooperative agreements to disarm, followed by organization of a transitional government acceptable to all. A process that replaced the rule of the gun might follow… or so we hoped and prayed.
The UN was moving too fast. They had underestimated the warlords’ power, and had challenged it too soon.
We could not at that point set up a meeting with Aideed himself; he was too unacceptable to UNOSOM. So Aideed’s representatives met us at Oakley’s old USLO compound. Since the Marines protecting the U.S. mission in Mogadishu were not part of UNOSOM, Aideed’s party agreed to let them act as our security. His people treated everyone from UNOSOM like plague-bearers.
The drive through the city was Stalingrad again. The police were absent from the streets, the market stalls had vanished, the buildings more blasted than ever. Everything accomplished after we came nearly a year before had been lost.
Aideed’s men arrived at the compound in a state of high distress. The war had taken a toll on their accustomed arrogance.
Oakley let them vent awhile, then laid out the issues, concentrating on our two key demands. “Your cease-fire and UNOSOM’s cessation of offensive operations are a good start,” he told them. “They provide the environment we need in order to proceed. The next step must be to restart engagement and dialogue. But,” he cautioned, “nothing can move forward without an unconditional release of the prisoners.” When, as expected, they bristled at this, Oakley remained adamant. He knew they wanted an exchange of prisoners, but there’d be no negotiations for the captives.
“At least agree to the release of the UN’s prisoners after we hand over the captured soldiers,” they implored.
“That’s impossible,” Oakley said. “We can’t proceed on anything until there’s an unconditional release.”
After two emotion-packed hours, the Somalis agreed to take the issue back to Aideed and then get back to us.
While all this was going on, a helo passed overhead spreading psyops leaflets calling for Aideed’s arrest. Aideed’s men went ballistic. The leaflets almost derailed the talks. Thanks a lot!
I had earlier checked to make sure no operations would be run during this very sensitive time, but the leaflet drop fell through the cracks. Amazingly, the military operations on the ground were going on with little or no coordination. All the various UNOSOM commands were, as they say in Washington, stovepiped. Everything lined up top to bottom, but nothing connected side to side.
Fortunately, we got things calmed down, and the Somalis left pacified.
Later, when I jumped on the psychological operations officer, he turned out to be totally in the dark about what he should have been doing — and, far more tellingly, who was responsible for it. Under UNITAF command, he’d had a clear line of authority; but now no one coordinated with him, and he had no one to go to for approval.
The following day, he actually tried to get me to approve his leaflets; but I had to tell him I had no authority for that; he had to connect to UNOSOM.
Over the next days, several conversations confirmed what I already knew — Somalia was a mess, and it didn’t have to be.
That evening, I talked with Colonel Kevin Kennedy and some others I knew from the NGOs. (During UNITAF, Kennedy had run our Civil-Military Operations Center. Now retired, he had returned to Somalia to work for UN relief agencies.) Their very outspoken take on the current situation was not encouraging: “UNOSOM creates problems; it doesn’t solve them,” they told me. “Their leadership is either culpably blind to what actually goes on in the streets of Mogadishu, or they’re lying: Most mornings, the relief workers get a briefing from UNOSOM — just like the briefings that used to go on in Moscow back in Soviet times. They’re laughable… except that everything here is too terrible for laughter. They invariably report quiet — no military operations the night before — while we all know that special operations missions went out; we all heard shooting; and we all see the Somali casualties in the hospitals.
“Meanwhile,” they explained, “each stovepiped command has its own intelligence (if you can call it that). Mistakes have proliferated. It’s no surprise that UNOSOM forces searching for Aideed or his henchmen have attacked innocent civilian compounds. But they’ve even hit UN facilities by mistake.”
Sleep didn’t come easy that night. The terrible cost of the war was beginning to sink in. Since the June 5 flare-up that precipitated the four months of war, 83 UNOSOM troops had been killed in action (26 of these Americans) and 302 wounded (170 Americans). But thousands of Somalis had lost their lives. I thought it was a gross exaggeration when Aideed’s people informed us that they had lost 10,000 killed — two-thirds of them women and children — but reports of relief workers at Somali hospitals and our own intelligence sources later confirmed that these numbers were not that far off. I simply could not believe the level of slaughter since the fighting began.
Each side had a different version of the June 5 clash:
The monthlong period after UNITAF turned over operations to UNOSOM saw a constant worsening of the never-friendly relationship between the UN and Aideed. Differences over the role of the factions in the political process (the UN wanted to marginalize them), Aideed’s radio station (the UN wanted to shut down its inflammatory broadcasts), the police and judiciary (the UN was not convinced Somalis could run either), and participation in political conferences (the idea, again, was to marginalize certain factions by inviting only UN-approved delegates) had created a tense and hostile environment that the slightest spark might set off. That spark came on June 5.
By early June, rumors were everywhere (the rumors were accurate) that UNOSOM intended to shut down Aideed’s radio station, Radio Mogadishu— located, as it happened, on the site of one of the AWSSs. UNOSOM, meanwhile, had a policy of no-notice, or short-notice, inspections of the AWSSs. Late in the day on the fourth of June, a Friday, the Moslem holy day, a bad moment to make demands, two UNOSOM officers appeared at Aideed’s headquarters to deliver notification that an inspection would take place the next morning. As luck would have it, the responsible officer was away, and the subordinate who took the message was not cooperative. “An inspection on such short notice is impossible,” he told them. “We need more time to prepare for it.”
The UNOSOM officers stood firm. “The inspecting force will arrive at the AWSS in the morning.”
The Aideed lieutenant grew more belligerent. “If they come, it will be war,” he replied.
Early the next morning, the inspectors arrived at the AWSS, accompanied by a force of Pakistani soldiers. Moments later, they were confronted by an angry mob. When the soldiers tried to enter the radio station, a scuffle broke out, and a Somali was shot and killed. Word of the fighting quickly spread, and angry mobs sprang up elsewhere in town. One of these swarmed a feeding station guarded by Pakistani troops, and a number of Pakistanis were killed or captured. Another large mob engaged the Pakistani force returning from the inspection site, and more soldiers were killed, wounded, or captured. At the end of the day, twenty-four Pakistanis were dead, fifty-seven were wounded, and six were missing.
At this point, the truth gets murky. Tempers flared. Reason got tossed aside. The big question: Did the mobs rise up spontaneously? Or, as UNOSOM claimed, did Aideed’s people plan the ambushes? Aideed’s faction — and most other Somalis — claimed that the attacks were spontaneous responses to a real threat to the radio station that was compounded by the killing of the Somali. (It’s very possible that the mobs had been urged on by Aideed’s leaders, though without advance planning.)
Aideed didn’t help matters the next day when in a radio address he praised the people who had risen up to fight the foreigners (further provocation and an admission of guilt in the eyes of UNOSOM). Yet, at the same time, he offered a surprisingly reasonable proposal for an impartial inquiry into the causes of the confrontation, followed, hopefully, by a peaceful resolution.
UNOSOM II would have none of that: Aideed and his lieutenants must be brought to justice; and Admiral Howe placed the $25,000 reward on Aideed’s head.
A series of battles followed. UNOSOM conducted air strikes; the Aideed forces executed ambushes. The fighting escalated until the U.S. sent in special operations forces to capture Aideed and his chief lieutenants. They conducted several operations, with mixed results, until the tragedy of October 3 brought Bob Oakley back to Somalia.
Meanwhile, Oakley and I kept in close touch with Ambassadors Lissane and Menharios, the Ethiopian and Eritrean liaisons who were our contacts with Aideed. We waited anxiously for word about the prisoners.
Word finally came that Aideed had agreed to release them. However, he would only release them directly to us, not to UNOSOM.
This was not a good idea.
Since Oakley knew a release to us would create further problems with UNOSOM, he worked out an arrangement to have the prisoners turned over to the Red Cross. To emphasize our noninvolvement and to minimize our media presence, he had us pull back to the airport. As soon as word came that the prisoners were released, we’d leave Somalia for a few days and return after the news flurry had calmed down. The moment that Durant and Shantali were released, we boarded our C-20 and headed for Asmara, Eritrea, Addis Ababa, and Cairo, for meetings with President Isaias of Eritrea, President Meles, and the Egyptian Foreign Minister. (The Egyptians had troops in Somalia; the refueling stop in Cairo was a good opportunity to connect to senior Egyptians.)
We returned to Washington on the sixteenth of October. Next day at the White House, we briefed the National Security Adviser, the Secretaries of State and Defense, and the ambassador to the UN, among others. Later, at the Pentagon, we briefed the new chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Shalikashvilli. Though Oakley presented both a superb description of the situation and a clear plan for our best possible way through the Somalia mess, I had a foreboding that the Washington leadership was looking to disengage from Somalia and write the country off. Despite my misgivings, we were given the go-ahead to pursue Oakley’s plans.
A few days later, we were off again to Somalia.
After another stop in Addis to see President Meles, we flew on to Mogadishu, arriving on the first of November for a planned visit of four days. Our primary purpose in Somalia was to put in place a revised plan we had worked up since our last visit. It called for reestablishing the Security Committee; reestablishing a viable police force; getting the cease-fire and disarmament agreements back in place; getting the factions back to the process of forming a transitional government; involving in the process other nations and political organizations in the region; scheduling another conference in Addis; establishing agreed-upon sectors and security zones in Mogadishu to prevent confrontations; and several other proposals designed to put the humanitarian, political, and security situations on track.
During an intense four days of negotiating, we met with the UNOSOM leadership, the other faction leaders, and various Somali groups seeking agreement on our proposals; and we successfully persuaded everyone involved to accept a renewal of our original mission.
Sticking points remained — chiefly, the question of the UN-held prisoners and the question of Aideed’s war crimes guilt.
Aideed had accused UNOSOM of abusing the prisoners they were holding on the island; and wanted their release. In fact, there were some health problems among the prisoners (who now included Osman Atto, my contact from the UNITAF days, who had been snatched up in a Special Operations roundup). Eventually Aideed got his wish, and they were released.
Since the question of Aideed’s personal guilt was still far from being settled, we decided to continue our policy of keeping distant from him. For the time being, we dealt only with his lieutenants.
When we left, we made the regular round of African stops (adding Kampala, Uganda), returned briefly to Washington, and were back in Somalia by mid-November — this time, for direct talks with Aideed. A new Security Council resolution (Resolution 885), accepting Aideed’s party as legitimate, had eased tensions with Aideed and greatly lessened the danger of continued violence. It was time to bring him into the process and persuade him to sign on to Oakley’s program.
Aideed (still UNOSOM’s most wanted man) was hiding out in the labyrinths of Mogadishu. Getting to him was not going to be easy.
On the day of the meeting, our armored SUV was escorted by Marines to the old UN headquarters, where we were to be turned over to Aideed’s security. As we were waiting for Aideed’s gunmen to appear, a large, excited, and very curious crowd gathered around us. Though they made our Marine security nervous, they didn’t actually threaten us.
We soon had other things to think about, when Aideed’s hard-looking, heavily armed fighters came speeding into the intersection, hanging from technicals. Their leader was the largest Somali I’d ever seen, at least six and a half feet tall with bulging muscles. A man of very few words, he directed us to pull our vehicle between the technicals; and we raced off at high speed through a maze of back alleys and side streets. It was like a movie: Keeping up with the speeding technicals required blasting through intersections, countless near misses, and breathtaking two-wheel turns.
We suddenly found ourselves rushing into a large plaza, heading straight toward a screaming multitude of Somalis.
“What do you think?” Bob Oakley asked.
“Ambassador,” I said, “they’re either going to kiss us or eat us.”
As we got closer, we realized they were actually cheering us. The gathering in the plaza had obviously been staged by Aideed.
Eventually, we turned into a compound and came to a stop in front of Aideed’s temporary headquarters, where his chief lieutenants and a broadly smiling Aideed were standing ready to greet us. A bank of cameras off to the side videoed every move. As we stepped out of the SUV, the giant, taciturn security goon came up and put together what for him must have been a major speech. “No more shooting,” he said, with evident emotion, grabbing me by the hand. “No more. Too many people will die.” He had clearly had his fill of fighting.
“We’ll all do our best,” I answered, as the hugely grinning Aideed wrapped his arms around me like a long-lost relative and then ushered us down the ranks of his officials for their greetings. I hoped the cameramen didn’t catch all that. Taking photo ops with Aideed would not make us popular back home (where the media had followed UNOSOM’s lead in demonizing him).
Inside the headquarters, we followed Aideed into a large conference room. His party’s banners were hanging on the walls; pens and stationery with his logo were neatly placed at each seat. After an exchange of small talk, we got down to business with a group of people who were surprisingly somber. I’d expected them to be upbeat at the very least; and I wouldn’t have thought twice if they’d been gloating. They’d been hit hard, but had hit the U.S. and UN even harder; and now we were again treating them like leaders with a legitimate place in the political process. And yet they did not rejoice in their triumph; they were subdued and solemn. They recognized the terrible tragedy we had all suffered. It was clear that the loss of ten thousand Somali lives during the past four months was weighing heavily on all of them.
Aideed maintained the serious tone — though without altering his long-held positions: The release of the UN-held prisoners was still a pressing concern, and so were the big questions about his own status and UNOSOM’s unceasing accusations against him. He made it abundantly clear that UNOSOM and the Secretary-General were as evil in his eyes as he was in theirs (though he pointed out that he did not oppose the UN itself). He welcomed the U.S. back into the peace process, and would further welcome an independent commission to look into the causes of war — headed by former President Jimmy Carter and with members who were not appointed by the UN Secretary-General.
Following an in-depth debate of the program Oakley had put together earlier that month, Aideed gave it his reluctant consent, adding that he hoped to work within the earlier Addis agreements. Oakley’s policy was correct, he said in conclusion: Governing Somalia should be left to the Somalis.
What form that governing might take still remained a very open question, as was the part the UN and the U.S. would take in the process of answering it.
Before we left, I wanted to satisfy my curiosity about the fight on October 3 that became known as the Battle of Mogadishu (dramatically captured in the book and movie Black Hawk Down).
“Could you tell me the story from your side?” I asked Aideed.
He was more than willing to do that.
As he began his account, his respect for the military skill of the special operations force—“those dangerous men at the airfield,”[67] he called them — was obvious.
The special operations forces had focused their attacks on Aideed’s meetings with his top staff. As a protective measure for his meetings, Aideed had ordered machine guns and RPG launchers to be positioned on neighboring roofs, with orders to concentrate fire on the helos if the Americans attacked. He knew American forces would rally around a downed helicopter and be easier to fix in the fighting. He had furthermore put out a standing order to attack any reaction force coming out of the airport. The UNITAF Marines had multiple reaction forces that could respond from several directions, but now the principal reaction force always came from the airport. For that reason, it was important to cut that off if he was attacked by the special operations forces.
Aideed’s tactics had all been purely defensive… but that’s not the way they’d played on television. Even worse in the eyes of the world, they’d worked.
This did not excuse Somali atrocities; and Aideed acknowledged that no apology could make up for Somali mobs brutally dragging dead soldiers through the streets. But he also was careful to point out that he had immediately taken control of the prisoner, Warrant Officer Durant, and had adhered to Geneva Convention requirements in his treatment of him.
It was obvious that there were two widely different versions as to what happened and who was responsible for the violence. Even investigations and inquiries have presented different views.
Our return ride to the rendezvous with our Marine security force took us through another screaming crowd. Soon after that, we returned to the States.
And so my practical involvement in Operation Continue Hope, as the U.S. had named the UNOSOM II phase, ended.
In the coming days, Oakley was busy planning the Addis conference and working out implementation of his overall program. Though he asked me to be ready to return, the focus was shifting from security (which had been my responsibility) to politics and humanitarian relief. In his mind, the security situation was under control.
I returned to Quantico to watch developments from there.
It quickly became clear that the Clinton administration wanted out of Somalia. The final nail in that coffin came when they announced that all U.S. forces were to be pulled out by March 1994. In my mind, Oakley had been used to achieve a cease-fire and provide a decent interval to allow the administration to cut its loses and pull out. The U.S. was not going to follow through on the Oakley program to put the peace process back on track.
On a more positive note, at least the fighting had stopped and the ravaged country had a few quiet moments to catch its breath.
As for the question of Aideed’s war crimes guilt: Months later, in February 1994, a UN commission of inquiry into responsibility for the June 5 clash published its findings. It concluded that both sides had been at fault.
At Quantico, Zinni received good news: He was slated to take command of the 1st Marine Division at Camp Pendleton the following summer. This was exciting; he couldn’t wait to move on to the division.
He didn’t know that other plans were in the works.
In the early spring of 1994, he was made president of a Reserve General Officer Promotion Board at Marine Corps headquarters. At the conclusion of their work, the board members took their recommendations to General Mundy. When they were done, he asked Zinni to stick around.
“What do you want as your next assignment?” he asked, after all the others had left.
This seemed an odd question, since he had already been told he would get a division command. “Is the question just a formality?” he asked himself.
“I want a division,” he told the commandant, bearing that last thought in mind.
“Which one do you want?”
“It doesn’t matter,” Zinni answered. “Any Marine division is just fine with me.”
At that point, the commandant handed Zinni a folder. “Well,” he said, “I think there’s a division in here somewhere.”
Zinni, who was by then enormously confused, opened the folder: It was a nomination for promotion to lieutenant general and appointment as commander of the 1st Marine Expeditionary Force (I MEF).
He was shocked. He’d just been promoted to major general, and here he was moving immediately to three stars… and skipping over division command. That was a bummer; he’d wanted to command a division. On the other hand, it was a very big honor to command I MEF — and also pretty exciting.
Zinni’s recollection of his next moments is blurry. He mumbled his thanks to General Mundy, then left his office wrapped in shocked confusion.
A few months later, in June, he assumed command of the largest Marine operational force, I MEF, at Camp Pendleton, California. I MEF had in its ranks over 45,000 Marines and sailors, with its main components being a Marine division, an air wing, and a logistics group. Units were spread over bases in California and Nevada, but many of its forces were constantly deployed all over the world. The MEF had responsibilities that involved six different Unified and Sub-unified commands from Korea (where they were given a major new commitment), to the Western Pacific, to Latin America, to Europe, to the Middle East, and to the United States itself. During Zinni’s two years in command, the MEF had forces involved in security and counter-drug operations in Central and South America; in humanitarian operations in Africa; in peacekeeping operations in Bosnia; in human remains recovery operations in Vietnam; in sanctions enforcement operations in the Persian Gulf; and in disaster relief and counter-drug operations in the western United States. They were involved in over one hundred major military exercises around the world and in hundreds of smaller training events.
The MEF’s most substantive new effort was a crisis response assignment in Korea. Though the Okinawa-based III MEF already had a commitment there, they were now greatly augmented by I MEF. The new role was particularly challenging in that the joint and combined forces they’d be assigned in their envisioned Korean missions would be significant. According to the war plan, the MEF in Korea would become a combined Marine Expeditionary Force. That is, Zinni would command two Marine divisions — the 3rd Marine Division would be added to his own 1st Division — two Marine air wings, a Korean Marine division, a Korean Army division, and the U.S. Army’s 101st Air Assault Division.
The commander in chief in Korea, U.S. Army General Gary Luck, was a brilliant operator who taught Zinni a great deal about war fighting at this highest level of operations. Fighting a war in Korea would be much like fighting Desert Storm, but on a much larger scale. The whole business of theater logistics, movement and integration of forces, the relationships between air components and ground components, working with coalition forces, fighting a strategic battle with deep strike and close combat, and integrating all these on a large and difficult battle space, took on for Zinni a new and far larger significance.
Meanwhile, he continued to exercise his growing skills in peacekeeping and humanitarian interventions. He had become one of the few senior-level military experts on “Operations Other Than War” (OOTW).
For obvious reasons, General Binnie Peay, the new commander of CENTCOM (one of the Unified Command CINCs the MEF answered to), gave the MEF the mission to respond to peacekeeping and humanitarian crises in his theater. To better accomplish that mission, Zinni retooled a major exercise, called “Emerald Express,” to develop his unit’s humanitarian and peacemaking capabilities. Since he didn’t have to worry about tactical-level field capabilities (his MEF had those down pat), he reshaped Emerald Express into a comprehensive conference to address issues like planning, coordination, and integration, especially at the operational and policy levels, and to direct special emphasis to coordination with relief agencies, international organizations, coalitions, and political organizations.
In a short time, Emerald Express became the most significant and effective effort to promote integration of military, political, humanitarian, economic, and reconstruction functions in Operations Other Than War.
Zinni’s growing OOTW expertise brought him to testify frequently before the Senate Foreign Relations and Senate Armed Services Committees. His testimonies on specific interventions (such as in Bosnia), on U.S. humanitarian and peacekeeping policy, and on the nature of OOTWs in general, were not always encouraged by the administration or particularly the Pentagon leadership: General Shalikashvilli, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, did not relish OOTW missions. Zinni did his best to steer clear of problems with the chairman and other superiors, but he had strong feelings about these missions that he did not hesitate to express. He began to earn a reputation as outspoken — a reputation he thinks is undeserved. He has always maintained he has only done what Marines always do: Tell it like it is.
By the time he took command of the MEF in June 1994, U.S. forces were out of Somalia, and the UN mission was sputtering out. Though Zinni did not forget the lessons of Somalia, he didn’t expect to return to that country.
In a few months, he was thrown into the Somalia disaster for a third time.
Tony Zinni:
During the summer of 1994, the UN decided to end the UNOSOM mission and withdraw UN forces from Somalia. The date set for the withdrawal was March 1995.
This was going to be a complicated move: Since forces from several countries would be involved, there would be coordination problems; since the pullout would be phased, the last forces to leave were vulnerable to attack; and credible — though unsubstantiated — reports of handheld surface-to-air missiles made a withdrawal by air risky. As a result of these threats, the UN requested U.S. protection for the withdrawal. Though the Clinton administration was not excited about renewing its involvement in Somalia, the international forces on the ground had accepted the mission at our request. The administration felt responsible for their safety.
That August, less than two months after I took command, I MEF received a warning order that we were to lead a Combined Task Force to protect the UN withdrawal. I MEF was the obvious choice for the mission: We already had responsibility for crisis response in their portion of Africa; the SAM threat required an amphibious withdrawal; and I MEF had conducted Operation Restore Hope in 1993, so the staff was already familiar with the situation.
We knew it would be a difficult assignment. The international forces would have to execute extremely complex tactical tasks (tough even for U.S. units); and interoperability problems with doctrine, procedures, equipment, and language could compound the difficulty.
The good news was the planning time. We’d have five months to plan, coordinate, and practice the mission.
“Plans are nothing, but planning is everything,” Eisenhower said, possibly apocryphally. Whether he said it or not, the saying is true. We had a lot of time. I wanted to use it all to plan exhaustively, think through every possibility, and cover every contingency (or branches and sequels, in military terms). One innovation in our contingency planning was to produce a “playbook” that gave us a course of action if one of the possible scenarios occurred. At the end of the operation, I reviewed the playbook and found every event that occurred covered by a contingency plan.
The entire five months, from August to mid-January, was devoted to planning and coordination. This was the first phase of the operation. The second phase, deployment, rehearsal, and positioning, was scheduled from mid-January to the beginning of February. Phase three, setting conditions for the withdrawal and assuming of control of UN forces, was scheduled for February 8 to 28. Phase four, the execution, was scheduled for February 28 to March 3. Our fifth and final phase, the redeployment of our forces, was planned to last from March 4 until the end of that month.
The operational tasks during the execution phase were extremely complex. We would conduct two night amphibious landings at the Mogadishu port and airfield; two reliefs in place of UN forces; a withdrawal and passage of lines by the Pakistani Brigade through our coalition lines (U.S. and Italian Marines); a day and night defense of the air- and seaports; a Non-combatant Evacuation of UN, media, and civilian agencies personnel; and two night amphibious withdrawals. These difficult tactical evolutions were tough enough, but the mix of coalition forces, the nighttime executions, and the prospect of doing these under fire compounded the difficulty exponentially.
We had another serious concern — civilian crowds, mobs, and looters… always a possibility in Somalia. Mobs especially were always a major problem… and they were one of the warlords’ most effective weapons. They could effectively block many of our actions, yet they were only very rarely a physical threat to our troops. A response using lethal force was obviously unjustified; but nonlethals had been very hard to come by. That situation was about to change.
Early in our planning, I pressed for a more substantial nonlethal capability… a search that yielded surprisingly good results. We were able to gather a significant and varied arsenal of gadgets, ranging from rubber bullets to sticky foam guns to high-tech acoustic devices, microwaves, and lasers. During the coming months, we trained our forces in these capabilities, while the lawyers developed new rules of engagement for them. (They prohibited some of the more experimental devices, since there were no details on their effects.)
Our attempts to prevent unnecessary loss of lives actually sparked controversy. “You’re disarming our Marines!” claimed alarmed op-ed articles. Other articles by military professionals claimed: “Our troops will be confused. They won’t know the difference between ‘lethal’ and ‘non-lethal’ weapons.” When I threw this question at my Marines, they told me, “Don’t worry, sir. We know the difference.” They all wanted and needed this capability.[68]
We took the plan to General Peay on November 8; and to the Joint Chiefs a little over a week after that. Quick approval came. Though the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, General Shalikashvilli, remained opposed to OOTWs and was in no hurry to get reengaged in Somalia, he knew this was an obligation the Clinton administration had to take on. One month later, on December 16, President Clinton approved the plan and gave the go-ahead for the operation.
In early January, we held our final planning conference at CENTCOM; and on the fourteenth the joint task force United Shield was formally established. That day I gave the CINC a final brief, at which point General Peay added a highly unusual wrinkle to the command structure. Normally, the JTF commander reports directly to the CINC. But for this particular operation, General Peay decided that I would report to his naval component commander, Vice Admiral Scott Redd, rather than directly to him.
Peay’s decision raised a serious question: Was I going to be running the JTF or was Admiral Redd? And yet I appreciated the CINC’s logic: This operation required a large number of supporting U.S. and coalition ships (during the actual operation we had twenty-three); directing this large seaward component was potentially a huge — and unnecessary — distraction.
In the event, the arrangement presented zero command problems for either of us. Scott Redd felt strongly that United Shield was my operation, and his role was to ensure that I got what I needed. He and I worked closely and productively together. When the time came, Scott attended the final CENTCOM planning sessions, and then I flew with him back to his headquarters in Bahrain, where I received a firsthand experience of another rationale for General Peay’s command arrangement. Scott’s was the only CENTCOM headquarters near our AOR, making his people more quickly responsive to our needs. During the operation, he was able to instantly respond to several immediate requests for support, not the least of which was the rapid dispatch of a U.S. cruiser to provide us a last-minute naval gunfire capability.
I was also fortunate in having Rear Admiral Lee Gunn (from the U.S. Third Fleet) as my deputy commander and the commander of my JTF naval component. Because Lee and Scott were able to work all the ship issues, we were able to keep our total focus on the withdrawal.
After Bahrain, I went to Nairobi, Kenya, to meet the military chief of staff, General Mohamed, and other government officials. We intended to use Mombasa as a base for our AC-130 gunships and as a logistics and staging base (to stage forces that would link up with ships sailing in from the Pacific).
In Nairobi, we picked up Ambassador Dan Simpson, the President’s special envoy to the Somalia mission, and Ambassador David Shinn, the State Department’s Africa bureau head, and then flew to Mogadishu to coordinate with the UNOSOM forces and meet with warlords.
In Somalia, General Aboo Samah, the Malaysian commander of the UNOSOM forces, and Ambassador Victor Gbeho, the special representative of the Secretary-General, were professional and cooperative; and the initial meetings with warlords were also encouraging. Essentially, our message to the warlords was: “Look, we’ll take you on if we have to, but that’s not the point. We’re not looking for trouble. We just want to get these people out of here. So lay back. It’s over. Let’s get these people out of here without making waves.” And they all bought that.
But our visit to Aideed was a near disaster.
Aideed was never the most punctual of men, and, true to form, he was a little late that day. But when he came rushing in, he was in a very up mood — in his statesman mode, which was fine with me. He’d just been to a political rally, which had gone well; the UN departure favored his interests and objectives; so he seemed happy to see us.
For some reason, however, from the very start of our discussions, Ambassador Simpson took a very provocative line with Aideed. He clearly wanted to get in Aideed’s face (and, God knows, there was plenty of bad blood between our people and Aideed); and here was his chance to show Aideed that he was a very hard-ass guy who couldn’t be pushed around by a two-bit warlord. The discussion quickly grew heated; threats were tossed back and forth; and the whole situation seemed headed for a bad crash.
By then, Aideed had switched into his black mode; my brain was working on all cylinders; and I was really pissed. “What in the hell are we doing?” I was thinking. “We don’t need to piss Aideed off and take on more enemies than we need. We just want to get these troops out of here and avoid confrontation.”
Somehow we got through the rest of the meeting without a renewal of open warfare.
At the conclusion of the meeting, we stepped outside with Aideed for a photo at the bottom of the building steps. Afterward, as the others were preparing to leave, Aideed grabbed my arm and drew me aside.
“Zinni,” he said, “you look worried.”
“You’re right,” I told him. “We don’t need a confrontation at this point,” I continued. “I’m here to protect the UN, and I will; but we don’t need more casualties on any side.”
“Don’t worry, I will not attack the UN or interfere with the withdrawal,” he promised. “But,” he added, “I don’t control all the militia or gangs; and the militia and gangs at the end of the airport will fight you. I will try to control things where I can.”
It was good to know that Aideed had sense enough not to be thrown by the provocations. He knew he was getting what he wanted — the UN’s departure; he’d have been nuts to jeopardize that success. His warning, meanwhile, proved accurate; but he also delivered on his promise to control whatever his forces were able to control.
I immediately left Somalia for wrap-up meetings back in Bahrain, then flew on to Pakistan to brief General Abdul Waheed, the chief of staff of the Pakistani military. Since his forces had suffered more casualties in Somalia than any other national force, he wanted to be sure the scheme for withdrawal was sound. His support meant we were now completely on track.
I then headed on to Kenya, to board the USS Belleau Wood, which would be my command ship.
In addition to our twenty-three ships, the force we assembled for United Shield included and totaled 16,485 soldiers, sailors, airmen, and Marines from seven nations. It also included the Pakistani Brigade and Bangladeshi Battalion that would be the last UNOSOM forces that would hold the airport and port and would be put under my command for the final withdrawal.
We sailed from Mombasa on the first of February; stopped off the coast of Malindi, Kenya, for rehearsals of our landing and withdrawal; then moved north to begin our third phase — setting the conditions for the withdrawal and assuming control of the UN forces.
We arrived off the coast of Mogadishu on the seventh of February and began setting the stage for the final withdrawal. For the next three weeks, the UN drew down its presence until they controlled only the port and airfield. Meanwhile, United Shield forces prepared for the final withdrawal. This would take four days. During this period, I began taking increasing responsibility for functions like medical care and fire support, as we moved toward the moment when General Aboo passed command of the UN forces to me.
In addition to our physical preparations (defensive positions, barriers, and the like), we conducted a series of sand table exercises, thoroughly rehearsing our plan with the UN forces, to ensure everyone knew his role cold. Again, we had time — the rarest commodity — and I intended to use every second to our advantage.
Mogadishu’s airfield is located near the seashore and south of the port. Just south of the airport is a wide expanse of beach. Our plan was to land our forces, take control of the port from the Bangladeshi Battalion, then hold it and move them out by ship. The Pakistani Brigade which held the airport would then withdraw through our lines to the port, where we would also move them by ship.
During these operations, United Shield forces would maintain control of the beach areas east and south of the airport. After the UN forces had departed, we would move out of the port, then off the high dunes overlooking the airport, and finally off the beach south of the airport. We would, in effect, pull back from north (the port) to south (the beach below the airport). This would be the most dangerous phase of the operation, since we expected militias, gangs, and mobs to close in rapidly behind us. Our physical preparations involved extensive engineer work; we erected barbed-wire obstacles and huge sand mounds to cover our withdrawal.
Though our headquarters for the Combined Task Force remained aboard the Belleau Wood, my Special Operations component established a forward command post ashore (called “the Advanced Operating Base”). The special ops forces also provided Coalition Support Teams to each of the allied forces to ensure close coordination and communications. As soon as we arrived off Mogadishu, a shipboard heliborne Quick Reaction Force was activated as a reserve. Another critical component was the Explosive Ordnance Disposal unit, whose task was to destroy the considerable amount of ammunition and captured weapons that the UN forces had amassed over the years. Though the daily explosions from the EOD were necessary, they were often unnerving.
My landing force was composed of U.S. and Italian Marines. The U.S. Special Forces and U.S. SEAL units also provided valuable capabilities to the forces ashore as well. Each of our four forces had sniper teams; these proved to be key assets when the withdrawal began.
On the ninth of February, Kofi Annan, then the head of the UN peacekeeping organization, arrived to review the plans for the withdrawal, and also to visit our forces and ships. It was clear that Annan understood the complexity of the operation and appreciated what we were doing. To symbolically mark the entrusting of UNOSOM forces to our protection, he presented me with a UN beret.[69]
Several days later, a formal ceremony at the airport passed control of the UN forces from General Aboo’s command to mine.
By then, I was greatly impressed by the competence and professionalism of the Pakistani and Bangladeshi units. We had loaned armor and other equipment to the Pakistanis for their mission in Somalia. Now we had to recover and evacuate this equipment. When our U.S. maintenance personnel recovered the tanks, armored personnel carriers, and other equipment, they found the gear in terrific condition. “This stuff is like new,” a maintenance guy told me. “Every single tool in every single kit is there.” The pride of these coalition units gave me confidence that their parts in the operation would go without a hitch.
The media was not so easy to handle. They bristle at any form of control; convincing them to form a press pool proved to be particularly difficult; and loose media were running around Mogadishu unencumbered by pool restrictions. I was determined that the media who joined the pool would be rewarded: They were at all the significant locations during the operation and were denied access to commanders only when that could interfere with the mission. I spent a great deal of time briefing the pool and providing them background. By the end of our operation, the relationship that had developed with the pool was superb, benefiting both sides — the best cooperation between the media and the military I had ever experienced. This took a lot of effort and trust on both sides, but we made it work.
As the three weeks of the preparation phase came to a close, we could see the problems forming that we would face during withdrawal. The port and airfield were full of material soon to be abandoned by the UN; and these “prizes” were beginning to tempt the desperate Somalis. Soon they were gathering ominously in growing numbers around the reinforced gates and walls of the port and airfield. Militias were already jockeying for control of entry points, hoping to be the first to claim the facilities and spoils for their warlord.
In the hope of heading off more trouble, I called a meeting with the heads of these militias and my old police commanders, to be held in the open, on a small hill overlooking the city just above the airfield. Everybody showed up, with the exception of the leaders of groups that were especially hostile to us, and everybody was eager to cooperate, quickly agreeing to our plan to set up a thousand-meter buffer, marked off with warning signs and barbed wire, to keep Somalis separated from our forces. Yet like Aideed, they warned that they could not control the more hostile groups (such as the gang at the southern end of the airport).
Because these guys threatened our last position on the beach as we withdrew (no other beach area would do), we were going to have to do something about them.
It was a successful meeting; but I was particularly glad to see my old policemen, who offered to take and defend the port for us as we pulled out, if we could give them ammunition, guaranteeing we’d have no problems there. Despite opposition from our political side, who shared the UN’s distrust of the Somali police, I gave them the ammo. I knew they were anxious to prove once again that our faith in them had not been misplaced.
They lived up to their word; the port area was never a problem for us as we pulled out.
Another encouraging development at the meeting came from Aideed’s onetime financier, Osman Atto. After his release from the UN’s island prison, Atto had a falling-out with Aideed and then carved out his own faction and militia. Now, during the meeting, he offered to help with security. I took him up on his offer a few days later, when a particularly nasty armed gang outside the main gate of the airport started giving the Pakistanis trouble. They subsequently shot up an Italian news crew and killed the photographer. I called Osman, who rolled out his super-technicals (big, military-type trucks armed with heavy crew-served weapons such as quad fifty antiaircraft guns) and engaged the rogue militia. After a fierce fight, his troops defeated the bad guys and drove them from the area, and then took control of the gate area.
Later, I had to ask him to pull his super-technicals out of there, since they made our helo guys nervous. Osman gladly complied.
As the meeting was breaking up, an old militia leader remained seated, staring grief-stricken out over the devastated city and the piles of abandoned UN material around the port and airport. “A lot of resources and lives have been wasted,” he told me, his face close to tears. “For what? We’ll be abandoned by the world and left on our own to suffer more years of killing and devastation.”
I didn’t have much hope to offer him as he left.
On the twenty-eighth of February, we began the fourth phase — the final withdrawal.
That morning, we took control of the port; and the UN contracted ships which were to evacuate the Bangladeshi Battalion arrived. The condition of the ships was appalling. Yet when I raised this issue back up the line, I was told that they were the best available. Still, I was bothered that these fine soldiers were subjected to such horrible conditions. The Pakistanis, it turned out, were going to get a worse deal.
Appalling conditions or no, the Bangladeshis began their move out.
As they were boarding the ships, we began to receive sporadic firing at our positions guarding the port, and the crowds at the gate started to get more restless, hostile, and threatening.
We meanwhile evacuated the final group of 112 noncombatants to our ships — UN contract employees, non-pool media requesting evacuation, and a few civilian relief workers — for transport to Kenya. Our normal procedure is to search such people before we bring them on board our ships, but in this case I waived that requirement. After we dropped them off, however, I learned that a few of them were carrying drugs, illegal wildlife, and other contraband that had to be confiscated by Kenyan customs. This taught me a lesson about trust.
When these operations had been completed, the time had come for the passage of lines of the Pakistani unit and their move from the airport to the port. Because this operation was sure to unleash the hordes into the airport, I wanted to get the ship carrying the Pakistanis loaded and gone as soon as possible. That way we could quickly leave the port and collapse our lines to the beach south of the airport for our pullout. If everything worked according to plan, we’d be on the beach by nightfall.
The Pakistanis executed a flawless passage of lines and closed on the port in good order. We recovered their equipment and very quickly loaded it on our ship. We then waited for the ship, which the UN had contracted to carry them to Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, from where they would fly back to their country. The ship arrived late, having nearly run aground coming into port. When the ship finally pulled in and tied up pier side, it was clear it was too small for the number of troops it was to carry. Worse, the first officer was reporting that the master of the ship was drunk and there was no food or water aboard. It was to be a trip of several days.
It was easy enough to transfer pallets of MREs and water from our ships to the UN ship, but the careless treatment of brave and highly professional troops by the UN was unforgivable.
We were now way behind schedule, and a flood of people, technicals, and looters was pouring onto the airport dangerously close to our lines. There was firing everywhere as friendly militias attempted to take control and chase off the looters. Though the police had taken effective control of the port, we were now taking fire all along our lines. Somali translators shouted warnings and our snipers fired warning shots. This got the attention of the militias, and they started to gain control.
Late that afternoon, Aideed suddenly showed up to claim the airport, breaking an agreement among the warlords to share control. He simply blew in with his people and grabbed it; and the other warlords could do nothing to stop him.
Meanwhile, my hopes to be on our exit beach by dark were fading. It looked like we wouldn’t be moving there until later that night.
As dusk set in, Aideed was not yet in full control of the airport, and rogue gunmen with rifles and RPG launchers were taking up hiding places behind abandoned container boxes and other piled material scattered around, then popping up to take potshots at us. Though we called out warnings with loudspeakers, and close-aimed shots from our snipers were driving them back, my Marine commander, Colonel John Garrett, reminded me that we couldn’t let them stay nearby into the night; it would be very tough to track them then.
He was right, and I had to order the snipers to take them all out. They did. Later, when the press got wind of the story, they wanted to know how many were killed. My response got a lot of coverage. “I don’t count bodies,” I told them. “This isn’t Vietnam.”
Meanwhile, the Marine units holding the last exit beach to our south reported increasingly heavy fire from the militia there. Though helo gunships helped cover the beach area, the militia fighters were well hidden. Because it was growing ever more clear that the last troops off that beach would have a hell of a time, I decided that I would have to leave that night with them.
During the move down to the beach, we put obstacles prepared by the engineers in place behind us. They had also created huge sand dunes that covered our large air-cushioned vehicles rapidly moving our forces and equipment out. At the beach, we evacuated all but the last two companies; these would pull out by amphibious tractor.
Around midnight, I joined Lieutenant Colonel Phil Tracey, the battalion commander of these troops and an old friend. The intensity of the firefight was picking up. The militia was now sending squad-sized units at our lines, but the Marines were instantly cutting them down. I listened on the company tactical nets as young lieutenants and captains directed their troops in the fight — taking me back to Vietnam. One of these voices on the radio net sounded familiar, and Phil confirmed that it was the son of a close friend, a fellow Marine general. Another generation had come to take our place and go through our passage to manhood.
The plan for the final pullout called for the troops on signal to rapidly board the tractors, our AC-130 and helo gunships would keep up their covering fire, and the armored amphibians would make a quick rush for the water before the bad guys could react. Though we had rehearsed this maneuver many times, I worried that a lucky RPG shot could hit a tractor racing for the water. The close quarters fight that followed could be messy.
As the signal flare was fired, my aide, my chief of staff, and I jumped into the back of a nearby tractor. The hatches quickly closed, and the tractors raced in a line to the water. Soon the rumbling down the beach gave way to the gentle ride through the waves. Though the track seemed to jerk and shudder as we rumbled down the beach — as if the transmission had problems — I didn’t worry about it once we hit the water.
I’d heard no explosions, but I told my chief of staff, Colonel John Moffett, to check on the tracks.
“They’re all in the water,” he reported, “and none have been hit by fire.”
I sat back in relief.
By that time, we found ourselves in huge swells, and the swaying of the track and the water pouring through the overhead hatches started to make the Marines sick. A helmet they passed around soon filled. I think I was the only one who did not silently “donate” to the pot. I guess the tremendous feeling of relief kept me straight.
Earlier, I hadn’t worried much when the track hesitated and stuttered as it roared down the beach. But now we were losing power, and smoke was starting to fill our track. John poked his head up into the commander’s cupola, then came down and reported that we had a transmission problem and were going to be taken under tow by another track. I put my hand down on the deck: if incoming water was kept no more than about a foot deep, the bilge pumps were working… It wasn’t and they were.
Soon we could feel the tow, and we all relaxed some. But then it stopped. John poked his head back into the cupola, soon reporting that the tow vehicle was now also dead in the water, and we were both drifting back to the beach.
I stuck my head out and could see the headlights of the technicals back there.
Just then, Corporal Deskins, the track commander, stuck his head down into the troop compartment. “Sir,” he said to me, “here’s the situation. We are on fire and drifting back to the beach. The track that’s towing us is also on fire and drifting back with us. The other tracks have headed back to the ship and we can’t raise anybody on the radio. We have fired flares but have not seen any safety boats. We can see the enemy on the beach.” He then paused and smiled. “But don’t worry, sir. Our machine guns work better on the beach.”
We then popped the overhead hatches and all the Marines climbed on top of the tracks. It was very tricky there, with the swells crashing over the vehicles, but, eventually, a small Navy safety boat responded to the flares, spotted us, and came alongside. Moving troops in high seas from the track to the cramped boat was a sporty event. It was quickly overloaded, and a larger craft had to come to help. After the troops were safely transferred to the other boats, I turned back toward the beach looming against the dark horizon. There the lights of Mogadishu silhouetted the technicals, signaling each other with their headlights.
The four-man crew led by Corporal Deskins were the last troops aboard the track.
“We have to get them aboard so we can move out,” the safety boat officer was telling me, “or else we might be swamped.”
But when I asked Corporal Deskins to abandon the track and get into the boat, he scurried away from us. “Sir, we will never abandon our track,” he said.
I looked at John. He smiled and shook his head. I turned to the boat officer. “We’re just going to hang on,” I said, “and hope a larger landing craft gets here before we hit the beach.”
It did, and so did a number of tracks racing out to rescue us. We had managed to avoid an unplanned return to Somalia.
Earlier, the other tracks had gone on to the ship, thinking we were under tow; but when they were told of our situation, the entire track platoon raced to the well deck and splashed their tracks back out to the sea to come get us.
As I was climbing from the boat to the larger craft, I was handed a hot cup of coffee from the Navy chief in command of the craft. For the first time that night, I realized I was soaking wet and cold and bone-tired. I looked at my watch. We’d left the beach five hours ago; the intensity of the events afterward made that time seem like minutes.
The craft pulled into the well deck of the Belleau Wood early in the morning. As the ramp went down, I realized I’d have to wade through waist-deep water up the ramp. At the top of the ramp was the massed press pool, with cameras snapping. I smiled at the chief. “You’re going to make me wade up to those cameras, aren’t you?”
He smiled back. “Just like MacArthur, sir.”
Later, up in the command center, a briefing confirmed that we were all accounted for. I then reported to Scott and General Peay, “Mission accomplished.”
I went to my stateroom, showered, and collapsed in my rack. When I woke the next morning, the ship was gently rocking. We were on our way to Kenya. The fifth and final phase, redeployment, was under way. Remarkably, we had suffered no casualties in this operation. The exhaustive planning had paid off. I was proud of all my forces.
We docked in Mombasa on the sixth of March; and I flew off with my staff back to Camp Pendleton.
Two weeks later, Secretary of Defense William Perry spoke at an awards ceremony at the Pentagon. “We live in an imperfect world and we can never make it perfect,” he said, “but we can attain moments of perfection. Operation United Shield was such a moment.”
Leaving Somalia was an emotional moment. We left a lot of sacrifices and dashed hopes on that beach… but learned significant lessons from the Somalia experience. I am convinced it could have been better had we run this complex undertaking with more skill and thoughtfulness.