time, Bush’s national security advisor, General Brent Scowcroft, had told Sandy Berger they would be home before my inauguration. That didn’t happen because Somalia had no functioning government, and without our troop presence, armed thugs would have stolen the supplies the UN had been providing and starvation would have set in again. Over the next several months, the United Nations sent in about 20,000 troops and we reduced the American force to just over 4,000, down from 25,000. After seven months, crops were growing, starvation had ended, refugees were returning, schools and hospitals were reopening, a police force had been created, and many Somalis were engaged in a process of reconciliation moving toward democracy.
Then, in June, the clan of Somali warlord Mohammed Aidid killed twenty-four Pakistani peacekeepers. Aidid, whose armed thugs controlled a good part of the capital city of Mogadishu and didn’t like the reconciliation process, wanted to control Somalia. He thought he had to run the UN out to do so. After the Pakistanis were killed, Secretary-General Boutros-Ghali and his representative for Somalia, retired American Admiral Jonathan Howe, became determined to get Aidid, believing the UN mission could not succeed unless he was brought to justice. Because Aidid was well protected by heavily armed forces, the United Nations was unable to apprehend him and asked the United States to help. Admiral Howe, who had been a deputy to Brent Scowcroft in the Bush White House, was convinced, especially after the Pakistani peacekeepers were killed, that arresting Aidid and putting him on trial was the only way to end the clan-based conflicts that kept Somalia mired in violence, failure, and chaos. Just a few days before he retired as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Colin Powell came to me with a recommendation that I approve a parallel American effort to capture Aidid, though he thought we had only a 50 percent chance of getting him, with a 25 percent chance of getting him alive. Still, he argued, we couldn’t behave as if we didn’t care that Aidid had murdered UN forces who were serving with us. Repeated UN failures to capture Aidid had only raised his status and tarnished the humanitarian nature of the UN mission, I agreed.
The American commander of the Rangers was Major General William Garrison. The army’s Tenth Mountain Division, headquartered in Fort Drum, New York, also had troops in Somalia under the overall commander of U.S. forces there, General Thomas Montgomery. They both reported to Marine General Joseph Hoar, the commander of the U.S. Central Command at MacDill Air Force Base in Tampa, Florida. I knew Hoar and had great confidence in his judgment and ability. On October 3, acting on a tip that two of Aidid’s top aides were in Mogadishu’s “Black Sea” neighborhood, which he controlled, Major General Garrison ordered the Army Rangers to mount an assault on the building where the men were thought to be. They flew into Mogadishu in Black Hawk helicopters in broad daylight. It was a much riskier operation during the day than it would have been on a dark night, when helicopters and troops are less visible and their night-vision devices give them the ability to operate as well as they can in daylight. Garrison decided to take the risk because his troops had carried out three previous daylight operations successfully.
The Rangers stormed the building and captured Aidid’s lieutenants and some lesser figures. Then the raid went terribly wrong. Aidid’s forces fought back, downing two of the Black Hawks. The pilot of the first copter was pinned in the wreckage. The Rangers would not abandon him: they never leave their men on the field of battle, dead or alive. When they went back in, the real fireworks began. Before long, ninety U.S. soldiers were surrounding the copter, engaged in a massive shootout with hundreds of Somalis. Eventually, General Montgomery’s Rapid Deployment Force entered the action, but the Somali resistance was strong enough to prevent the rescue operation from succeeding throughout the night. When the battle was over, nineteen Americans were dead, dozens were wounded, and Black Hawk pilot Mike Durant had been captured. More than five hundred Somalis were dead and over a thousand wounded. Enraged Somalis dragged the body of the slain Black Hawk crew chief through the streets of Mogadishu.
Americans were outraged and astounded. How had our humanitarian mission turned into an obsession with getting Aidid? Why were American forces doing Boutros-Ghali’s and Admiral Howe’s bidding?
Senator Robert Byrd called for an end to “these cops-and-robbers operations.” Senator John McCain said, “Clinton’s got to bring them home.” Admiral Howe and General Garrison wanted to pursue Aidid; according to their sources in Mogadishu, many of his clan allies had fled the city and it wouldn’t take much to finish the job.
On the sixth, our national security team convened in the White House. Tony Lake had also brought in Robert Oakley, who had been America’s top civilian in Mogadishu from December through March. Oakley believed that the United Nations, including his old friend Admiral Howe, had made a mistake by isolating Aidid from the political process and by becoming so obsessed with tracking him down. By extension, he disagreed with our decision to try to apprehend Aidid for the UN. I had a lot of sympathy for General Garrison and the men who wanted to go back and finish the job. I was sick about the loss of our troops and I wanted Aidid to pay. If getting him was worth eighteen dead and eighty-four wounded Americans, wasn’t it worth finishing the job? The problem with that line of reasoning was that if we went back in and nabbed Aidid, dead or alive, then we, not the UN, would own Somalia, and there was no guarantee that we could put it together politically any better than the UN had. Subsequent events proved the validity of that view: after Aidid died of natural causes in 1996, Somalia remained divided. Moreover, there was no support in Congress for a larger military role in Somalia, as I learned in a White House meeting with several members; most of them demanded an immediate withdrawal of our forces. I strongly disagreed, and in the end we compromised on a six-month transition period. I didn’t mind taking Congress on, but I had to consider the consequences of any action that could make it even harder to get congressional support for sending American troops to Bosnia and Haiti, where we had far greater interests at stake.
In the end, I agreed to dispatch Oakley on a mission to get Aidid to release Mike Durant, the captured pilot. His instructions were clear: The United States would not retaliate if Durant was released immediately and unconditionally. We would not trade the people who had just been captured. Oakley delivered the message and Durant was freed. I beefed up our forces and set a fixed date for their withdrawal, giving the UN six more months to establish control or set up an effective Somali political organization. After Durant’s release, Oakley opened negotiations with Aidid and eventually secured a truce of sorts.
The battle of Mogadishu haunted me. I thought I knew how President Kennedy felt after the Bay of Pigs. I was responsible for an operation that I had approved in general but not in its particulars. Unlike the Bay of Pigs, it was not a failure in strictly military terms—Task Force Ranger had arrested Aidid’s lieutenants by dropping into the middle of Mogadishu in broad daylight, executing its complex and difficult mission, and enduring unexpected losses with courage and skill. But the losses shocked America, and the battle that produced them was inconsistent with our larger humanitarian mission and the UN’s.
What plagued me most was that when I approved the use of U.S. forces to apprehend Aidid, I did not envision anything like a daytime assault in a crowded, hostile neighborhood. I assumed we would try to get him when he was on the move, away from large numbers of civilians and the cover they gave his armed supporters. I thought I was approving a police action by U.S. troops who had far better capacity, equipment, and training than their UN counterparts. Apparently, that’s also what Colin Powell thought he was asking me to approve; when I discussed it with him after I left the White House and he was secretary of state, Powell said he would not have approved an operation like that one unless it was conducted at night. But we hadn’t discussed that, nor apparently had anyone else imposed any parameters on General Garrison’s range of options. Colin Powell had retired three days before the raid and John Shalikashvili had not yet been confirmed as his replacement. The operation was not approved by General Hoar at CentCom or by the Pentagon. As a result, instead of authorizing an aggressive police operation, I had authorized a military assault in hostile territory.
In a handwritten letter to me the day after the fight, General Garrison took full responsibility for his decision to go forward with the raid, outlining his reasons for the decision: the intelligence was excellent; the force was experienced; the capacity of the enemy was known; the tactics were appropriate; planning for contingencies had been done; an armored reaction force would have helped, but might not have reduced U.S. casualties, because the task-force troops would not leave behind their fallen comrades, one of whom was pinned in the wreckage of his helicopter. Garrison closed his letter by saying, “The Mission was a success. Targeted individuals were captured and extracted from the target…. President Clinton and Secretary Aspin need to be taken off the blame line.”
I respected Garrison and agreed with his letter, except for the last point. There was no way I could, or should, be taken off the “blame line.” I believe the raid was a mistake, because carrying it out in the daytime underestimated the strength and determination of Aidid’s forces and the attendant possibility of losing one or more of the helicopters. In wartime, the risks would have been acceptable. On a peacekeeping mission, they were not, because the value of the prize was not worth the risk of significant casualties and the certain consequences of changing the nature of our mission in the eyes of both Somalis and Americans. Arresting Aidid and his top men because the UN forces couldn’t do it was supposed to be incidental to our operations there, not its main purpose. It
