Somalia: Anatomy of a Disaster

It seemed simple at first. There were people in need. America would help. But the mission to Somalia, which began with visions of charity, now puts forth images of horror. While America’s attention was focused at home, the goals of the mission shifted dangerously, and now the effort threatens to become a violent standoff. Here’s how it happened.

For Carlos Rodriguez the battle was a few seconds of terror, hours of agonized waiting. While his comrades stormed the building near the Olympic Hotel in Mogadishu to try to snatch Somali warlord Mohammed Farrah Aidid, Rodriguez and the rest of his squad swarmed down ropes from a helicopter and began a security patrol through a nearby street. “It was bright daylight; there were windows and doors all around us, and you can’t watch all of them all the time,” said Rodriguez. “All of a sudden the Somalis just opened up on us, small arms and grenades. There was shooting from all directions, and we couldn’t see who was shooting at us. I saw a muzzle once, sticking around a corner, and I shot at it.” Almost instantly, though, Rodriguez himself “got shot in the right hip. Then I got some shrapnel in my left foot and a little bit in my face. It broke some bones, and I was down. Our squad leader got hit too. It got pretty confusing.”

The confusion only grew worse. “Some of our buddies pulled us into a room” in a nearby house, recalled Rodriguez, an Army Ranger specialist four. “There were four of us in there wounded and some others in other rooms nearby. We were calling back and forth to each other. I was bleeding pretty good, but ((a unit medic)) came and put pressure pants on me.” (These are inflatable sleeves used to immobilize limbs and stop bleeding.) Then “we just waited and waited” — for almost eight hours, until rescuers arrived. “We couldn’t get medevacked ((taken out by helicopter)). I don’t know exactly why.”

By the time Rodriguez gave TIME this account from a hospital bed in Landstuhl, Germany — in an interview cut short by a general who arrived to pin a Purple Heart on him — the rest of the world knew why the rescue had been so delayed. Just as his unit was being shot at, the Rangers storming the building near the Olympic Hotel looking for Aidid were also being hit by murderous fire. (Aidid’s supporters were actually meeting in a building next to the hotel. Aidid was not there, though senior U.S. officials insist the Rangers missed him by only two minutes.) Helicopter troops nonetheless captured the hotel and environs and bagged more than 19 Aidid supporters. But as they tried to lead the prisoners away, the streets erupted with gunfire. Somali fighters from all over Mogadishu ran to join the action; in the Bakhara market near the hotel, they set up barricades of burning tires and anything else flammable to block the Rangers’ retreat. Rescue helicopters could not land in the narrow streets; the only way out was by ground. From that point on, Ranger Major David Stockwell, the U.N. military spokesman, said, “it sounded like the air was filled with angry hornets. The buzz and crack of small-arms fire was all around” the pinned-down Rangers, as two rescue columns fought to reach them. One, a Quick Reaction Force riding unarmored trucks and humvees (modern versions of the jeep) could not get through. Pakistani, Malaysian and U.S. troops — some, ironically, aboard Soviet-made armored personnel carriers — finally made it to the scene 10 hours after the Rangers came under attack.

By then, though, the Rangers had suffered a shocking toll: 14 dead, plus one who died four days later, and 77 wounded, including Rodriguez. Known to be taken prisoner: one. A mortar attack by Aidid’s men on Ranger forces at the Mogadishu airport Wednesday night killed another American and wounded 12 more. The four-day death toll of at least 16 exceeded the 15 Americans killed in the previous 10 months of U.S. involvement in Somalia. The International Committee of the Red Cross estimated 200 Somalis had died in the battle, and hundreds of wounded piled into hospitals that in some cases had no plasma or other supplies to treat them. (

Americans did not see pictures of the Somali casualties, though. What they did see were ghastly photos of a white body, naked except for green underwear — apparently the corpse of a downed helicopter crewman — being dragged through the street while Somalis kicked and stamped at him, plus TV footage of a terrified helicopter pilot, Michael Durant, being questioned by Somali captors. Late in the week the Somalis allowed a Red Cross worker and two journalists to visit Durant as he lay, naked except for a piece of cloth stretched across his hips, on a wooden bed in a darkened room. Though he did not say so himself, his story — ground out with difficulty; he said, “The right side of my face, my lip, even my teeth seem paralyzed” — made it obvious Aidid’s people are keeping him alive for propaganda purposes:

“We had been engaged in combat for about 20 minutes when a rocket-propelled grenade hit the helicopter and literally took off its tail. The crash was extremely violent; I think I have compressed my spinal cord. After the crash, a crew member took me out of the helicopter . . . then ((the Somalis)) came in masses. They beat me violently with their fists and with sticks. They tore off all my clothes.” Naked, blindfolded, his hands bound, Durant was carried triumphantly above the heads of raging crowds, and “I was still being hit but less brutally. I understood then that someone had decided that they wanted me alive.” He came to doubt that a bit later when he was placed on the tiled floor of a house and “all of a sudden, through the door someone points a gun in my direction” and fires — blindly; the bullet ricocheted off the floor and hit Durant in the left arm. But voices argued violently outside the door, and there was no more shooting. Then he was carried in a car through many checkpoints and finally taken by people close to Aidid. “Since then I’ve been treated well,” he said. A doctor comes to change the dressings on his wounds daily. He also got a “history lesson” of which he remembers this much: “When you don’t live here, you can’t understand what’s going on in this country. We Americans have tried to help. But at one point things turned bad.”

If Aidid’s purpose was to convince the American public of the same thing, he succeeded. Thousands of horrified citizens wrote and phoned the offices of congressional representatives, posing angry questions: What was the U.S. doing in Somalia? How did an intervention to feed the starving that began with handshakes for the first Marines to hit the beaches last December turn into a deadly battle against hate-filled Somalis? What interests did the U.S. have in Somalia that could conceivably justify the sufferings of men like Rodriguez and Durant? By midweek the questions coalesced into a roar: Get out. All the way. And never mind what kind of precedent a pullout set for future U.N. peacekeeping operations in the savage local conflicts that have succeeded the cold war.

On Saturday Aidid seemed to offer a way out, but on his own terms. Speaking on his personal radio station, he accepted what he called Clinton’s offer of a cease-fire, as well as a suggestion he credited to the American President that the Somalis be allowed to settle their own political affairs. Later in the day Clinton denied he had made a cease-fire offer.

The tale of how a mission launched with the brightest of hopes and overwhelming support threatened to turn into a morass — and may yet — is a cautionary story with a number of obvious, but ever recurring, lessons: think through all the ramifications of what you are doing, set clear goals, make sure the forces assigned can attain those goals, and do not get distracted. By last week’s disastrous battle, all these lessons had been taught the hard way.

The exact mix of motives that prompted George Bush to launch the Somali intervention is still not altogether clear. The immediate causes were, of course, ghastly TV pictures of famine in that country and U.N. Secretary- General Boutros Boutros-Ghali’s pleas for help to get food past the guns of armed gangs into the hands of the starving in a country that had no real government and practically no order of any sort. In addition, Bush no doubt wanted to go out in a blaze of glory as a world statesman, and subordinates were glad that the move served as a sort of therapy for the funk he was in after his election defeat. Some other possible motives: to prove to Muslims, outraged by U.S. unwillingness to stop the slaughter of their co-religionists in Bosnia, that the U.S. could come to their aid, and at the same time to reduce pressure on the Pentagon to get more involved in Bosnia. In any case, at a National Security Council meeting the day before Thanksgiving, aides laid three options before Bush: the first was an expanded peacekeeping operation, with about 3,500 American troops joining the Pakistanis participating only in a supporting role. A second was an expanded peacemaking operation (distinguished from peacekeeping because in some circumstances the troops could shoot first); the U.S. would supply airlift and other support, but no ground troops. The third option, unexpectedly prepared by the Pentagon, was to send in a whole U.S. division under U.N. auspices but American command and control. Bush surprised everyone by immediately choosing that option. His reasoning: only an all-American force could go in quickly, and there was no time to lose; the famine, disease and fighting were snuffing out 1,000 lives a day.

There were misgivings from the start. In a cable to the State Department, Smith Hempstone, ambassador to the neighboring country of Kenya, called Somalia a “tar baby,” and presciently added, “Somalis, as the Italians and British discovered to their discomfiture, are natural-born guerrillas. They will mine the roads. They will lay ambushes. They will launch hit-and-run attacks.”

Also disquieting, the U.S. and Boutros-Ghali had trouble negotiating what it was that the American troops would be officially requested by the U.N. to do. The American story is that Secretary of State Lawrence Eagleburger told Boutros-Ghali “that we were going to do something very precise and limited and then get out,” in the words of a senior aide to Eagleburger. Boutros- Ghali accepted but then “moved the goalposts,” says the official, demanding that the Americans disarm Somali gangs, venture into the countryside and the north of the country, away from the Mogadishu area, and stay for an unlimited period. The tale heard in U.N. corridors is very different: it is of the Americans waffling over whether to disarm the Somalis and whether to move into the north or stay put, combined with demands to start getting out almost as soon as they got in. The alleged U.S. dithering at one point caused the Secretary-General to exclaim, “All my experience tells me not to trust the U.S. You are unpredictable and change your minds too often!” Whoever is right, the discord was an unhappy omen of future trouble.

For a while, though, things went well. The U.S. and other multinational troops opened roads, got the food moving again, even carried out some (though not enough) disarmament. Clinton, who had not been informed of the mission in advance but gave his blessing, knew about Christopher’s negotiations with Boutros-Ghali to draft a plan for replacing American soldiers with a U.N. multinational force, but since American troops were coming out rather than going in, he left the detailed work to subordinates. By March, in a hurry to withdraw most of its troops, the U.S. agreed to a Security Council resolution specifying what the U.N. would do to rebuild Somalia while the blue helmets kept security throughout the country. The resolution assigned them some so- called nation-building tasks — setting up regional councils, for example, looking to eventual nationwide elections. That complex and time-consuming mandate might have set off alarm bells in Washington. But since U.S. forces were being cut from 28,000 to 4,500, and because things were going so well in Somalia, none were sounded. In fact, the House of Representatives in May decisively passed a resolution endorsing the nation-building mission and favoring the use of American troops to support it, for several years if necessary.

Events continued to go well — too well for Aidid’s taste. His supporters had greeted with handshakes the first U.S. Marines to hit the Mogadishu beaches Dec. 9, and the warlord himself had attended two peace conferences arranged by retired Ambassador Robert Oakley. But he evidently concluded that the U.S. and the U.N. were making so much progress putting together the beginnings of a peaceful regime that his chance of eventually taking over the whole country was slipping away; he could retrieve it only by causing enough trouble to disrupt the mission. In early June his forces ambushed Pakistani troops inspecting unguarded weapons depots, killing 24. An outraged Security Council responded with a resolution authorizing “arrest and detention for prosecution, trial and punishment” of those responsible. Eleven days later, retired U.S. Admiral Jonathan Howe, Boutros-Ghali’s chief deputy in Somalia, plastered the bombed-out buildings of Mogadishu with posters offering a $25,000 reward for information leading to Aidid’s capture.

American officials now point to this resolution as the moment when the humanitarian mission began to turn into a mini-war against Aidid. But at the time, they thought he posed a serious threat and could be contained most efficiently by military means. As late as Aug. 10, Madeleine Albright, U.S. ambassador to the U.N., wrote that “failure to take action ((against Aidid)) would have signaled to other clan leaders that the U.N. is not serious” and called those who took a contrary view “advocates of appeasement.” This view changed in part because Aidid proved much harder to run down than the U.S. and U.N. ever bargained for. Howe took to using an American Quick Reaction Force for what amounted to search-and-destroy missions, but Aidid again and again slipped away. One reason: America’s spy satellites are no help finding out where in Mogadishu Aidid is holed up.

As officials tell it, the White House had begun to reassess what it was doing in Somalia about two weeks before last week’s deadly attack. Concerned that the operation was being focused too narrowly on capturing Aidid, National Security Adviser Anthony Lake told Clinton the previous Friday that he was working up some options to shift the emphasis more toward a political solution, intensifying an effort that had begun Sept. 20 with a tough letter from Secretary of State Warren Christopher to Boutros-Ghali protesting the military emphasis. On Saturday, less than 24 hours before the fateful helicopter raid started, Christopher called Boutros-Ghali to urge a stepped-up effort to bring about a political settlement among various Somali factions, only to be told blandly, “We are already doing all that.”

On Sunday afternoon, just before leaving for a California speechmaking trip, Clinton met with Lake in the White House. Lake talked mostly about Russia, though he did mention that there had been a fire fight in Mogadishu and some American casualties; that was about all anyone knew. Clinton included a paragraph in a speech Sunday night expressing his regrets about the deaths but calling the mission “very successful.” By Monday morning Clinton, returning to his hotel in San Francisco after an early jog, learned that the situation was more serious. He took a conference call from Lake, Secretary of Defense Les Aspin and two other advisers, who told him of the extent of casualties. “How did this happen?” Clinton demanded of Aspin, who put most of the blame on a U.N. command and control structure that had been unable to rush well-equipped troops to the Rangers’ rescue. During another conference call later in the day, Counsellor David Gergen told Clinton about the video of the corpses being dragged through the streets. “We’ve got to get together with Congress,” said Clinton, who instructed his aides to contact leaders of both parties. At Clinton’s urging, Lake ordered his aides to accelerate their review of Somalia policy, and had a draft in hand by Monday night. Also on Monday, Lake called Oakley, the blunt-spoken retired ambassador who had done some effective political work early in the Somalia intervention, to get advice about a more active political approach.

Clinton had talked about cutting short his California trip, but concluded that it would look panicky. In a speech to the AFL-CIO in San Francisco and another in Los Angeles at a $1,000-a-plate Democratic Party fund raiser, he said little about Somalia or Russia either. As late as Wednesday, though, Clinton officiated at a ceremony in the East Room of the White House to mark the signing of a bill allowing federal employees to participate in political campaigns. “This is a very happy day for me,” he remarked — as public reaction to the ghastly pictures from Somalia was building.

Meanwhile, as the boss was flying home from California Tuesday, Christopher and a reluctant Aspin had been sent to brief congressional leaders on Russia (which drew only one question) and Somalia. In a mistaken attempt at Socratic dialogue, Aspin asked the lawmakers what they thought should be done. This disastrous performance managed only to convince the congressional leaders that the Administration had no clue as to what policy to pursue.

By Wednesday, stories were going around that a week earlier, Aspin had turned down a request from Major General Thomas Montgomery, the senior American military commander in Somalia, for reinforcements — including tanks and other armored vehicles that, had they been available, could have rescued the Rangers in the Oct. 3 fire fight much sooner. Aspin eventually confirmed that, and gave his reason: at a time when the U.S. was considering dispatching a peacekeeping force to Bosnia, he did not want to make it look as if the nation was increasing, rather than reducing, its force in Somalia. Though Aspin will be kept on, he may have permanently damaged his effectiveness.

While these congressional-relations disasters were unfolding, however, a policy was quickly taking shape. By early Tuesday afternoon, Lake had faxed a 10-page options paper to Clinton, who was flying back to Washington aboard Air Force One. At 6:30 that night, Clinton met with his top advisers, who argued out a number of different ideas before him. There was never any discussion of immediate withdrawal. “The President rejected that as too damaging to our ability to function militarily in the world,” says a top official. By the time they broke up they were agreed on the essentials of the strategy: reinforce the troops, shift from a get-Aidid policy to a more political approach and set a hard deadline for withdrawal.

The group reconvened over coffee at 8:45 a.m. Wednesday, with Oakley attending. By then the Pentagon was reporting that General Joseph P. Hoar, commander of the U.S. Central Command in Somalia, was proposing a March 31 deadline. White House officials admit that the date is arbitrary, but they think it provides — maybe — sufficient time to contain (though perhaps not capture) Aidid and negotiate a political settlement among clan elders and militia leaders without committing the U.S. to a dragged-out effort. Clinton agreed Wednesday morning — even before his inappropriate happy talk at the bill-signing ceremony — and the plan was firmed up at two more meetings. During the third, which did not include Clinton and lasted six hours before breaking up at 1:30 a.m. Thursday, word of the mortar attack and an additional American death at Mogadishu airport arrived. Clinton decided the next morning to send more armor with the reinforcements heading for Somalia.

On Thursday Clinton met in the morning with congressional leaders, who engaged him in spirited but mostly constructive debate. The most common complaint was that the U.S. had no vital interests in Somalia; Clinton replied, in an odd echo of the kind of arguments he might surely have rejected as a Vietnam War protester, that the vital interest at stake was the credibility of American power: the U.S. could not just cut and run. Leaving the meeting, some lawmakers gave reporters the idea that Clinton would delay his projected speech to the nation — which prompted the White House to hurry it up instead.

At 5 p.m., Clinton went before the cameras in the Oval Office and proclaimed the policy: he is sending 1,700 more crack troops to Somalia, plus 104 tanks and Bradley fighting vehicles (essentially personnel carriers) and four Cobra attack helicopters. They ought to be able to handle Aidid, at least in open combat. But if not, an additional 3,600 Marines will be waiting offshore ready to go in. Altogether the available force will be about doubled to 10,000. And that does not count another 10,000 or so aboard the ships of a carrier battle group that will steam around offshore. There are not many targets in Somalia for the F/A-18s aboard the U.S.S. Abraham Lincoln to bomb and strafe, though U.S. officials threatened to take out Aidid’s arms caches in the countryside if he made more trouble in Mogadishu.

Clinton intends to downgrade, though not officially call off, the hunt for Aidid. The President dispatched Oakley to try to bring together rival clan leaders and warlords for what amounts to a peace conference. Aidid’s acceptance of a nonexistent cease-fire offer from the U.S. on Saturday may have been simply an attempt to wedge himself into the negotiations. “Oakley has not been sent out to negotiate with Aidid,” a senior Administration official told TIME. “We’ll judge him by what happens on the ground.”

Clinton and Christopher also sent pleas to African leaders to join in promoting a peaceful settlement. Whether or not these efforts work, though, the American troops will be out no later than March 31. Period. Supposedly, U.N. troops from other nations will remain; in fact, the White House sent messages to 30 countries asking them to increase their forces to take over from the Americans (fat chance).

The early-departure policy had one immediate success: it calmed the revolt in Congress. Whatever doubts they might retain, lawmakers generally welcomed a firm deadline for withdrawal — and what they took as a sort of declaration of independence from the U.N. and Boutros-Ghali. The new U.S. troops will be under American, not U.N., command, and Oakley will operate as an American, not a U.N., representative. Republicans in particular have long suspected Boutros- Ghali of taking a dictatorial line; they delight in quoting him as once having said U.S. troops would be withdrawn from Somalia “when I say they can come out.” Republican Senate leader Bob Dole exulted that Clinton’s orders meant the U.S. will be doing “what we were going to do, not Boutros-Ghali.”

Such sentiments will hardly make for smooth U.S.-U.N. cooperation in future peacekeeping operations. Boutros-Ghali, in an interview with Time, chose to turn the other cheek. Said he: “I am a super beggar” who can operate only with the contributions of troops and money that member nations make and the conditions they set. But members of his staff were understandably furious at the U.S. attitude.

Can Clinton’s policy work in a more fundamental sense? Just maybe. Aidid’s power is concentrated in southern Mogadishu (though that gives him a grip on the airport and the port area through which supplies for the rest of the country must move). In the countryside the U.N. has managed to organize three dozen councils of elders and other community representatives, and there are many reports of food moving to hungry people, of crops being planted and growing once again. It might be possible — barely — to promote a settlement among the councils and clan leaders that would include Aidid without anointing him, allowing the U.S. to pull out and claim, Mission accomplished.

If such a settlement were to rely on anything more than token U.N. military support, however, it might be doomed. Boutros-Ghali notes that U.N. members have stubbornly not put up the money that could finance Somalian peace — funds needed to organize police forces or a judicial system, for example. So American troops might have to pull out with no settlement in place, and if Somalia remains dangerous, it seems unlikely that other troops will stay after the Yanks go. Boutros-Ghali remarks that France, Italy, Belgium, Jordan and Tunisia are already talking about pulling out even before the U.S. does. Aidid could smile ingratiatingly until the pullout and then launch a new drive for control. Then Somalia could plunge into precisely the disasters Clinton foresaw resulting from an immediate American bug-out: renewed clan warfare, anarchy, brutality and starvation.

Perhaps an even bigger question than whither Somalia is whither future peacekeeping operations. Last December’s Operation Restore Hope was supposed to pioneer a new kind of American intervention, one for purely humanitarian purposes in a land where the U.S. had no economic or strategic interests. The later multinational operation was to have been the forerunner of a new kind of U.N. intervention, one mounted not to monitor a peace but to establish one, undertaken without the traditional invitation from a host government and carried out not by the usual lightly armed troops but by forces toting enough weapons to fight a serious battle.

But it now seems possible that Somalia will set a very different precedent — of extreme U.S. reluctance to mount or join any peacekeeping operation except one that poses little or no risk of casualties. There are signs that this is happening already. The U.S. was supposed to send 600 military engineers and medical specialists to Haiti this week to help carry out the agreement that will restore the exiled Jean-Bertrand Aristide to the presidency, but late last week the Pentagon seemed to postpone the plan, only to be reversed by the White House. It has also become hard to assess the chances that the U.S. will dispatch 25,000 troops to help police a peace agreement in Bosnia, should one ever be reached. At present the chances are zero. It would be a supreme irony if the brave venture in Somalia winds up by effectively putting the U.S. out of the peacekeeping business. But it would be unwise to bet now against that happening.