America's War for the Greater Middle East: A Military History (26 page)

On May 4, UNITAF handed off the Somalia security mission, now known as Operation Continue Hope, to UNOSOM, which had not yet reached its full strength. Howe and Bir, along with Major General Thomas Montgomery, Bir’s American deputy and the commander of the U.S. forces that remained in Somalia, were now nominally in charge.

On June 5, in downtown Mogadishu, Aidid’s SNA attacked a contingent of Pakistani peacekeepers, killing twenty-four and wounding many others. As the Pakistanis withdrew, they left behind their dead, which were then subjected to grotesque mutilation. To General Montgomery, the implications of this one-sided firefight were clear: “We were at war.”
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That accorded with the view of the UN Security Council. With strong American backing, it promptly called for reinforcements and ordered the use of “all necessary means” to punish the perpetrators.
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Back in Mogadishu, to clarify just who the Security Council was referring to, Admiral Howe put a bounty of twenty-five thousand dollars on Aidid’s head and issued a warrant for his arrest. He also started badgering Washington to send reinforcements.

Aidid was unimpressed. Once begun, hostilities rapidly escalated. By early summer, General Hoar later acknowledged, “We lost control of Mogadishu absolutely.”
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The Somali capital now became, in General Montgomery’s phrase, “Indian country.” Peacekeepers venturing off the UNOSOM compound and into the city proper encountered harassment, demonstrations, unruly mobs, and ambushes. The compound itself, located at the defunct international airport, was subjected to frequent shelling.
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Meanwhile, American AC-130 gunships began orbiting over Mogadishu, using their 105mm and 40mm cannon to rain fires down on SNA weapons sites, vehicle storage facilities, and radio stations.
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The states contributing troops contingents to UNOSOM had signed up to keep the peace, not to wage an urban counterinsurgency campaign. When the SNA beat up a Moroccan battalion on June 17, inflicting heavy casualties—those killed included the battalion commander—UNOSOM effectively exited the fight. Governments now began restricting what they would permit their forces in Somalia to do. With stunning swiftness, Aidid had exposed the limits of both the coalition’s military capacity and its political cohesion. The warlord now enjoyed the upper hand.

If anyone was going to fulfill the UN’s directive and impose order, it was going to have to be the Americans. So with Hoar’s approval and Washington’s tacit consent, General Montgomery now began employing the QRF not as UNOSOM’s reserve but as an independent strike force. As a direct consequence, the war against Aidid now became America’s war rather than the UN’s.

Montgomery understood that the QRF, numbering only some thirteen hundred infantrymen, was insufficient to defeat the SNA outright. Yet the American commander was going to have to make do with what he had. Requests for reinforcements to include heavy forces such as tanks had not met with favor back in Tampa. So rather than attempting to defeat the insurgency, Montgomery set out to cripple it by killing or capturing Aidid and his chief lieutenants.
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Here we confront another signature of America’s military engagement in the Islamic world. Time and again, when confronting situations of daunting political complexity, the United States has personalized the issue. Montgomery assumed that Aidid was, in effect, irreplaceable.
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To remove him from the scene was to settle matters in Mogadishu, an assumption destined to resurface when the nemesis of the hour was Osama bin Laden, Saddam Hussein, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, Moamar Gaddafi (on a second go-round), or any of the terrorist “leaders” designated for liquidation by Barack Obama’s campaign of targeted assassination. When put to the test, this logic proved defective on two counts. First, few leaders are actually irreplaceable. Get rid of one, and another appears: “The cemeteries are filled with indispensable men,” briefly mourned and soon forgotten.
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Second, the peremptory removal of those few possessing some approximation of indispensability leaves a void, new problems taking the place of those magically solved by getting rid of the villain at the top.

In this case, the decapitation strategy did not receive a full tryout, namely because U.S. military efforts to get Aidid misfired. An action that occurred on July 12 hinted at the problems to come. On that date, elements of the QRF’s 1st Battalion, 22nd Infantry raided a building known as Abdi House, thought to contain an SNA command post. U.S. helicopter gunships employed missiles and cannon fire to soften up the target area, before ground troops arrived by helicopter to search the premises. The raiders came up empty-handed but killed a number of bystanders and wounded dozens more.
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After the Americans left, an angry mob converged on the scene, venting their displeasure on four Western reporters present, whom they beat to death before putting their corpses on grisly display.
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Far more than the better-known “Black Hawk Down” firefight of October 3, the Abdi House incident marked the true turning point in the Somalia campaign. Any lingering inclination to exercise restraint now fell away. From this point, Operation Continue Hope could more accurately have been styled Operation Indiscriminate Force. Yet unleashing superior American firepower—one army after-action report subsequently touted the value of using an attack helicopter’s “20mm gun in flex mode” as a “great crowd breaker”—played directly into Aidid’s hands.
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By killing women and children, whom Aidid callously but shrewdly thrust into the line of fire, Montgomery’s forces provoked further outrage. The level of violence they employed did not suffice to intimidate but was more than ample to inflame.
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U.S. troops not only inflicted casualties but also began to sustain them. With UNOSOM effectively sidelined, targeting GIs now became the SNA’s priority. One of Aidid’s associates succinctly summed up the SNA perspective: “There was no more United Nations, only Americans. If you could kill Americans, it would start problems in America directly.”
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Just so: The killing of four GIs on August 8 when their vehicle hit a mine, for the United States the worst single casualty toll thus far, captured Washington’s attention and evoked a response. The Clinton administration decided to double down on U.S. efforts to get Aidid.

The world offered Americans plenty to think about in the summer of 1993, with dramatic events ranging from the ongoing siege of Sarajevo to the signing of the Oslo Accords, promising an end to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. For the prurient, there was the mysterious suicide of Vince Foster, deputy White House counsel and close friend of the First Lady—the press devoting more attention to Clinton scandals, real or imagined, than to the Clinton administration’s approach to governance. In this environment, the worsening situation in Somalia had received only fitful attention.

Even so, two days after the loss of the four U.S. troops, Ambassador Albright felt moved to rebut any looming doubts about what the administration was doing and why. In a
New York Times
op-ed, Albright fingered Aidid as the problem and defined lifting Somalia “from the category of a failed state to that of an emerging democracy” as the self-evident solution. For the United States at this juncture, Somalia represented less a threat than an opportunity. Here was a chance to demonstrate the efficacy of the United Nations. On that score, Albright declared herself pleased with the progress made thus far. “Plans for re-establishing a national government are on track,” she insisted. “Traditional Somali leaders and others with civilian leadership skills are starting to assert themselves.” The sole responsible option was to “stay the course.” Only “advocates of appeasement” would disagree.
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This was unalloyed drivel, devoid of the vaguest notion of what launching Somalia on the path toward democracy might actually require. Even so, rather than appeasing, the Clinton administration opted to beef up the forces it had committed to getting rid of Aidid. With the soon-to-retire General Colin Powell concurring, President Clinton on August 22 ordered a small element of specialized army troops to assume primary responsibility for the manhunt. This was Task Force Ranger, commanded by Major General William Garrison, its approximately 440 soldiers drawn from the 75th Ranger Regiment, the super-secret Delta Force, and Task Force 160, the army’s special operations aviation unit. The administration was placing a bet that an additional increment of combat power might turn around a failing endeavor. It was a Somalia “surge” before that term had entered the American military lexicon.

The arrival of Task Force Ranger introduced further snarls into already convoluted command relationships. Much as General Bir commanded UNOSOM but not General Montgomery’s QRF, Montgomery commanded all U.S. forces in Somalia but not Garrison’s task force. Formally at least, both Montgomery and Garrison got their marching orders from General Hoar, located over eight thousand miles away at CENTCOM headquarters in Tampa. Yet Garrison also took his cues from General Wayne Downing, who as commander of U.S. Special Operations Command retained a proprietary relationship with the various bits and pieces forming Garrison’s composite organization.
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Occupying a separate headquarters at Tampa, Downing was Hoar’s coequal, with no inclination to defer to CENTCOM. Overall, the arrangement was not conducive to seamless coordination.

The hope was that Montgomery and Garrison might find ways to cooperate. On a very good day in Washington, with nothing much going on, “cooperation” is what the House and the Senate or the CIA and the FBI might be able to manage. In times of stress, such arrangements tend to break down. During wartime in the field, “cooperation” is a recipe for disaster. Such circumstances require unity of command, with absolute clarity about who is in charge. In 1993 Mogadishu, such clarity was nowhere to be found.

Worse still, the Americans underestimated their adversaries. An early chronicler of the intervention charged U.S. commanders with viewing the Somalis as “intellectually primitive, culturally shallow, and militarily craven.”
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Although the judgment may seem unduly harsh, it does not lack for merit. The Americans assigned the mission of taking Aidid out of circulation—Operation Gothic Serpent—assumed that technological superiority conferred advantages. After all, this was—or appeared to be—the great lesson of Operation Desert Storm. Yet here conditions, especially the dense urban environment, differed. In this case, dependence on machines exposed the vulnerabilities of U.S. forces and limited their flexibility. In contrast, Aidid, relatively unencumbered with gadgetry, demonstrated an impressive ability to learn and adapt. Put simply, when it came to agility, the Somalis enjoyed a clear edge.

On August 28, as members of Task Force Ranger settled into their new quarters at Mogadishu International Airport, a routine SNA mortar attack wounded four of the new arrivals. Garrison wasted little time responding. In the early hours of August 30, Gothic Serpent got underway with a neatly executed raid that netted nine detainees, all of whom, embarrassingly, turned out to be United Nations employees rather than SNA operatives. This inauspicious beginning highlighted the dangers of acting in the absence of accurate and timely intelligence.

The first raid served as a template for five more conducted over the next three weeks: Accompanied by Task Force 160 “little boys” providing cover, UH-60 Black Hawks ferried members of Delta Force to the target area; upon arrival, the commandos fast-roped out of their choppers to effect the snatch; rangers arrived in wheeled vehicles to provide backup and to evacuate commandos and captives back to base. According to a declassified history prepared by U.S. Special Operations Command, “These six missions were tactical successes.”
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Yet categorizing them as successful requires a claustrophobically narrow definition of the term. U.S. forces reached the objective area and returned safely: That was success.
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In other respects, the results proved disappointing. Aidid remained very much at large. In a half-dozen attempts, Task Force Ranger had netted only a single one of his associates.
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Yet the unit’s “aura of invincibility remained intact.” Garrison’s command, one otherwise sympathetic historian writes, “behaved with a swagger that was irksome at best and reckless at worst.”
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In the meantime, mortar attacks on UNOSOM continued. Command-detonated mines—U.S. forces had not yet adopted the term
improvised explosive device
(IED)—posed a growing danger. And QRF helicopters were regularly taking—and returning—fire. In their scrupulously balanced account of the Somalia intervention, John Hirsch and Robert Oakley reported that “the use of helicopter gunships against targets in heavily populated areas of south Mogadishu” was becoming commonplace. “A series of incidents between September 5 and 15 resulted in hundreds of Somalis killed and wounded.”
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Although UNOSOM was absorbing far fewer casualties, the lopsided exchange was not indicative of progress. Instead of enforcing order, coalition forces were destroying its last remaining remnants, thereby playing into Aidid’s hands.