Duty: Memoirs of a Secretary at War (70 page)

Liang and I met in Hanoi. President Hu was planning to visit Washington the following January and wanted all aspects of the relationship to appear positive. Thus the PLA, and Liang, had obviously been told to be nice to me. He began by referencing Hu’s forthcoming visit and said that the overall relationship was positive. He went on to say, “Secretary Gates, I know you place great value on military-to-military relations, and I appreciate that, but the key is to respect each other’s core interests and major concerns.” He then invited me to visit China early in 2011, making explicit the Chinese desire to have me visit in January before Hu traveled to the United States.

I accepted the invitation, put down my prepared talking points, and spoke straight from the shoulder. “I hope our military-to-military relationship can be shielded from political ups and downs, just as the intelligence relationship has been.” I said that a strategic dialogue on nuclear weapons was critical to avoid mistrust and miscalculation, and that there was no substitute for a direct government-to-government dialogue on the subject. “Let’s be honest with each other,” I continued. “Taiwan arms sales are political decisions and not made by the secretary of defense or Department of Defense, so if our political leaders continue with their relationship despite this disagreement, it seems strange to stop the military-to-military relationship.” I reminded him that we had discussed an ambitious list of areas where we could expand our relationship when I visited three years earlier and expressed the hope we could return to it. “There are a lot of opportunities,” I said. Always eager for the last word, Liang replied, “Opportunities, yes, but the U.S. should seriously consider our concerns.” Similarly interested in getting in the last word, I said, “As in all things, respect for concerns and perspectives is mutual.”

While in Hanoi, I gave a speech at the Vietnam national university.
It was unlike anything I had ever experienced. The speech was an unremarkable review of the development of the U.S.-Vietnamese military relationship over the preceding fifteen years. But my reception was quite extraordinary. As I entered the hall, funky dance and disco music was blaring, strobe lights were flashing, and the audience—many young military officers but also a lot of young female students—was applauding, whistling, and carrying on. I knew that the only way I would ever get such a rock star’s reception would be at the order of a dictatorship.

D
ISASTERS

Twice during 2010, the U.S. military was called upon to provide major disaster relief. At 4:53 p.m. local time on Tuesday, January 12, a catastrophic 7.0-magnitude earthquake hit Haiti. Ultimately, three million people were affected and 315,000 killed. As the scale of death and destruction became evident, President Obama placed the highest priority on getting U.S. military assets to Haiti for rescue and relief and to maintain order. While there was never any doubt in my mind that the president’s primary motivation was humanitarian, I believed he also wanted to show how fast he could mobilize the U.S. government after a disaster (in contrast to Bush’s response to Hurricane Katrina) and to score as many political points as possible both at home and abroad.

The first request from the White House for disaster assistance for Haiti came to Defense early on January 13, and I was told the president wanted a “highly visible, very fast response.” He said the deployment didn’t have to be perfect, “just get them there as soon as possible.” He also wanted to keep tabs on how well we were doing and so asked for daily morning and afternoon reports on our progress. Two U.S. Coast Guard cutters were the first U.S. assistance to get to Haiti on the thirteenth, and that evening two U.S. Air Force C-130 aircraft from the Special Operations Wing landed with emergency supplies, medical units, and communications gear. A team of thirty military engineers, operations planners, and communications specialists also arrived that first day. I had immediately directed several Navy ships to head for Haiti, including the aircraft carrier
Carl Vinson
. Additional Air Force personnel were deployed to reopen the international airport in Port-au-Prince, and I approved “prepare to deploy” orders for a brigade of the 82nd Airborne Division to Haiti, about 3,000 soldiers. There were sixty-six U.S.
military personnel on the island at the time of the earthquake, and they reported that the port was unusable, there was no fresh water, medical care was urgently needed, and many mortuary officers would be needed to deal with fatalities. We began moving heaven and earth to get ships, aircraft, equipment, and people there as fast as possible. I told the commander of Southern Command, General Doug Fraser, “The president considers this our highest priority. Whatever you need, we will get it to you. Don’t hesitate to ask.”

All this wasn’t good enough. When we briefed the president in the Oval Office that night on our actions and plans, he, Donilon, and others were impatient. Mullen and I tried to explain that there was chaos on the island, roads were blocked, air traffic control at the international airport was down, and the port facilities were largely destroyed. Our first priority was to get the airport operating so it could handle a volume of air traffic far beyond its previous capacity. Donilon was especially aggressive in questioning our commitment to speed and complaining about how long we were taking. Then he went too far, questioning in front of the president and a roomful of people whether General Fraser was competent to lead this effort. I’ve rarely been angrier in the Oval Office than I was at that moment; nor was I ever closer to walking out of that historic room in the middle of a meeting. My initial instinct was to storm out, telling the president on the way that he didn’t need two secretaries of defense. It took every bit of my self-discipline to stay seated on the sofa.

By the fourteenth, the Air Force team had cleared the runway at the airport and begun setting up twenty-four-hour-a-day air traffic control. At dawn on January 15, five C-17 cargo aircraft with more communications and air traffic management equipment, as well as 115 Air Force personnel, landed at the international airport and assumed responsibility for restoring air traffic control and expanding the airfield’s capacity. From January 16 to 18, 330 aircraft landed at the airport, many times the field’s pre-earthquake volume. Half of the flights were civilian relief aircraft, and more than eighty were from other countries. (Our effort at the airport would later be characterized as the largest single-runway operation in history, with 4,000 takeoffs and landings—one every five minutes—in the first twelve days after the earthquake.) The
Vinson
arrived on the fifteenth, with 600,000 emergency food rations and nineteen helicopters. The same day the deputy commander of Southern Command, Lieutenant General Ken Keen, arrived on the island as
head of a joint task force to coordinate the U.S. military effort. Over the weekend, several more large U.S. ships arrived with more helicopters and Marines. Within days of the earthquake, we had 17 ships, 48 helicopters, and 10,000 sailors and Marines on the island or off the coast. In Washington, the administrator of the U.S. Agency for International Development, Dr. Rajiv Shah, was appointed overall U.S. coordinator of the relief effort. In this endeavor and in others, I always gave Shah high marks for competence and compassion. He was also easy to work with.

On the other hand, to my chagrin, the president dispatched the NSS chief of staff, Denis McDonough, to Haiti. He arrived on the fifteenth, accompanied by Navy Captain John Kirby, who was press spokesman for the Joint Staff. After the Iran-Contra debacle, I considered NSC involvement—or meddling—in operational matters anathema. I had nothing personal against McDonough, just that such staffers are almost always out of their depth, and the chain of command is blurred when you have someone from the White House in the field who claims to speak for the president. McDonough’s purported task was to coordinate communications, but his presence was seen as much more than that. Even Jim Jones, who probably had no say in the decision to send his own subordinate, seemed to recognize this was a bridge too far. He called me a day or two after McDonough’s arrival on the island and asked me only partly in jest, “Is our screwdriver too long?” I confided to my staff that I thought this was yet another example of a White House consumed by the crisis of the day and bent on micromanaging—still stuck in campaign mode a year into the presidency.

Our military efforts to assist Haiti were complicated by history and the situation on the island. There was deep suspicion of us in Haiti, for good reason. In 1915, amid political chaos and six Haitian presidents in four years, not to mention Imperial Germany’s domination of the island’s international commerce, President Woodrow Wilson sent in 330 Marines to safeguard U.S. interests. The United States, for all intents and purposes, ran Haiti until the Marines departed in 1934. In September 1994, President Clinton sent 20,000 troops to Haiti to oust a military junta and restore the elected president, Jean-Bertrand Aristide, to office. Just prior to the arrival of the troops, Jimmy Carter arranged a deal under which the junta gave up power and its leader left the country. Shortly thereafter U.S. troops escorted Aristide into the capital to reclaim his presidency. The U.S. forces left some six months later. And then in 2004, President
George W. Bush sent in 1,000 Marines after the ouster of Aristide (amid allegations that the United States had orchestrated or at least abetted his removal), a force quickly augmented with troops from France, Chile, and Canada.

I had this history in mind as we quickly assembled a huge military force to render assistance. Others remembered the history as well. About the same time the
Vinson
arrived offshore, the French “minister of state for cooperation” publicly accused the United States of again “occupying” Haiti, citing our takeover of air traffic control; both he and the Brazilian foreign minister complained about our giving preferential treatment to U.S. aid flights. There was other international political pushing and shoving over our growing military presence on the island and our control of the airport, and other allusions to our past history in Haiti, but my real concern was the potentially negative impact on Haitians of U.S. Marines and soldiers patrolling the streets and performing security duties. I thought our relief effort gave us the opportunity to improve the long-tarnished image of the U.S. military in Haiti, and I didn’t want to blow the chance by taking on missions that might involve the use of force against Haitians.

We also had to work around the collapse of the Haitian government, which had been a fragile and barely functional institution even before the earthquake. How to respect Haitian sovereignty if there was no Haitian leadership or partner? Many officials had been killed, including in the national police, survivors had little or no communications equipment, and President René Préval was initially reclusive and nearly incommunicado. Once he and some of his ministers established offices in the police headquarters at the airport, they formally asked the United States to assume control of the airport, but confusion among the Haitian leaders reigned—including who was in charge of what. That made coordination difficult to say the least.

Our relationship with the UN mission in Haiti was also problematic. The “UN Stabilization Mission in Haiti” (MINUSTAH) had been established in 1994 after the ouster of Aristide. Its roughly 9,000 security personnel from about a dozen countries had been commanded continuously by Brazilian officers. The force commander at the time of the earthquake was Brigadier General Floriano Peixoto Vieira Neto. Keen worked hard to establish a good working relationship with Neto, and after several tense days of jockeying over roles and missions, on
January 22, agreement was reached that MINUSTAH and the Haitian national police would provide domestic security, and the U.S. and Canadian militaries would distribute humanitarian aid and provide security for aid distribution. Our troops were authorized to defend themselves if attacked but otherwise were only to provide a secure environment to get relief supplies to the people.

Criticism that the U.S. military response had been too slow in ramping up came from the press and Congress as well as the White House. We were asked, in particular, why we had not just air-dropped relief supplies to the Haitians. The answer seemed obvious, at least to me. There was the risk that supplies dropped near concentrations of people would actually hit those clamoring to be the first to claim the water and food. Without security and order on the ground, airdrops might provoke riots and widespread violence. We were trying to put in place a relief infrastructure and logistics supply chain that could be sustained for weeks and months. We knew speed was important, but disorganization and more chaos would only hurt the Haitian effort. I told the press on January 15 that I did not see how the United States, and the Pentagon, could have responded any faster.

Some of the forces we deployed to Haiti had been in the pipeline to go to Afghanistan, so I was eager to begin drawing down our relief commitment as early as feasible. Both State and the White House wanted our military there as long as possible. We worked it out amicably, reducing force levels in early May and concluding our efforts in June. I met with the Brazilian defense minister at the Pentagon in early April, and we agreed that, after some “rough patches,” we had developed a positive and effective partnership. I give Keen—and General Fraser—a lot of credit for that, and for the overall effectiveness of our relief effort. Looking ahead, though, the task of rebuilding a ravaged, desperately poor, and badly governed Haiti was not a military mission.

The U.S. military also rendered substantial assistance during the historic flooding in Pakistan during the summer of 2010. By late July, one-fifth of the country was underwater, with 20 million people affected and some 2,000 dead. Many of the roads needed to reach victims were destroyed or inundated. Our military help began on August 1–2 with the delivery of food, water filtration plants, and twelve temporary bridges. I then directed the deployment of six CH-47 Chinook helicopters to Pakistan from Afghanistan on August 11. With the arrival of the USS
Peleliu,
we were able to provide a total of nineteen helicopters for rescue and relief, and toward the end of August, the USS
Kearsarge
was deployed to help as well.