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
