As the coming months turned hectic, I was glad I had made my "listening" tours. It made the cooperation we badly needed from regional leaders far easier to gain.
ON THE twenty-sixth of November 1997, I was called to the Pentagon to hold a press briefing on the Iraq crisis, the first of many press contacts as CINC.
Though I don't bask in the glow of press attention (I can take it or leave it), I know how important it is to deal honestly and honorably with members of the media, the vast majority of whom are responsible professionals who provide the window of transparency without which a democracy cannot exist. With only a few exceptions, they have treated me fairly. Their interest on the whole has been based on a desire to report and understand, and not to promote a particular agenda. . . .
But a few of them can be pains in the ass--or, worse, irresponsible, shallow, dishonest, or hypocritical. I imagine the ratio of good to bad is not different from any other community.
The Washington bureaucracy has always been more frightened of the media than those of us with field commands. Washington knee-jerks to daily consolidated press clippings, put together each morning by the various government departments' public affairs offices. For DOD, the consolidated morning clippings were called "the Early Bird." I could be virtually certain that any questions, ass-chewing, or directions I was going to get on any given day had been driven by the Early Bird.
I quickly learned that leverage with the media came from the access I could grant or withhold. If a reporter reported accurately, even if the resulting story was not favorable, I made sure I granted as much access as I had time to give. If the reporting was not accurate, that ended my contact with the reporter. To this day, there are a handful of reporters, newspapers, or even networks that I won't deal with.
At press conferences, I've always tried to answer questions with short declarative sentences. I hate rambling, vague, bureaucratic answers that avoid direct responses to questions. This era of "spin" sickens me. I would never have accepted a White House "spin doctor" being assigned to my command to run our public affairs effort, as was done during the Iraq war.
NINETEEN NINETY-EIGHT was a year of nearly continuous turmoil.
It started in Africa.
Though many in Washington see little in the way of vital national interests there, I had long felt that we have important concerns in that continent that merit using our national resources--not to mention our obligation to help the enormous humanitarian needs. Our efforts in Africa have been woefully short of what we should be doing.
On a trip I made to Africa early in January, our ambassador to Kenya, Prudence Bushnell, briefed me on a developing crisis in that country. Severe flooding was washing out roads and bridges, and several hundred thousand people were in danger of being cut off from their sources of food, potable water, and medicine. Because the Kenyans were ill equipped to meet the emergency airlift demands to move emergency supplies, I agreed to send our Special Operations Command (SOCENT) team, supported by a USAF C-130, to assess the situation and then to deploy a Humanitarian Assessment Support Team (HAST) to handle the humanitarian crisis. I had tasked SOCENT to establish a trained HAST ready to go on a moment's notice if a humanitarian crisis developed.
The situation in Kenya quickly worsened; the floodwaters continued to rage; and over 300,000 people were in immediate danger of starving or succumbing to disease. But the Pentagon was reluctant to help them; the mission cost too much, and they didn't want to use our military. I persisted, the "Five-Sided Labyrinth" eventually yielded, and I ordered CENTCOM's Marine component to deploy a task force to Kenya. I had also tasked our Marine component with the responsibility to respond to humanitarian and peacekeeping missions in East Africa. This mission, known as "Operation Noble Response," saved the lives of hundreds of thousands of Kenyans and cost $800,000. Saving so many lives has rarely come so cheaply.
AT THE END of March, I made a trip to the region, primarily to attend a Gulf Cooperation Council meeting in Bahrain. My purpose was to bring the six GCC countries78 together to work security issues collectively. Previously, we had almost always done business with each country individually. I wanted to change that. I wanted our regional allies to begin to think collectively about security issues.
Since our biggest obstacle was the reluctance of the Arab countries to embark on a collective security relationship with the U.S., I knew it would take time to develop what I hoped to achieve. Nevertheless, I felt that if I could put issues of common interest on the table as starting points, and get agreement on these, we'd at least be moving down the right path. I found two such issues--theater missile defense, and environmental security.
The members of the GCC could not fail to be aware that the growing missile proliferation in the region was a real problem, and they all knew they needed a coordinated regional defensive capability to deal with such threats. We had therefore proposed that the U.S. provide the technology and organization skills to pull it all together, and they had agreed to discuss this at the conference.
But first we had to steer through their instinctive suspicion of our motives. Some saw our proposal as an attempt to rope them into buying high-cost U.S. systems, while others saw it as a scheme to pull them into an arrangement that specified a particular enemy. Yet once these suspicions were allayed, the conference really took off . . . especially when we offered to share early warning information. Since we obviously had the best information against missile and air threats, it made sense for us to provide it in a cooperative defense arrangement. Though some of the council didn't believe we would actually give up this information, I explained that this was not only a matter of trust but in our own interest, since it would help protect our military in the region.
Though we had a few rocky moments, the conference was a success. It was followed by a series of other conferences to further develop the initial concepts and capabilities.
In order to keep this momentum going, I decided to schedule another conference on a different issue--environmental security. The Omanis agreed to host it. Again, it was a success.
After the conferences ended, I visited Qatar, where the foreign minister, Sheik Hamad bin Jassim, persuaded me to give an interview to the notoriously controversial Qatar-based network, Al Jazeera. Since I didn't want to be baited or set up in an unfriendly interview broadcast throughout the region, I was reluctant to do it.
Hamad didn't deny that the interview could be rough, yet he explained that the region badly needed to see the "human face" of the U.S. military. So I went ahead with it . . . with no regrets. The interview was tough but fair. And the interviewer's probing questions about ethical considerations in our military operations allowed me to show that human face. Afterward, I agreed to do several more interviews. One interview was videoed by an Iraqi crew who gave me a thumbs-up from behind the camera every time I blasted Saddam.
DURING THE second week of April, I attended the annual Emerald Express Conference (which I had started when I commanded I MEF). What I hoped would come out of the conference was the start of a cooperative regional capability for peacekeeping and the humanitarian mission.
Since Africa has never received much attention from Washington, and it was split between CENTCOM and EUCOM, progress was not going to come easily. When my early attempts to start a coordinated, more expansive program for African engagement did not work out, I decided to piece together a CENTCOM program, focused on peacekeeping and humanitarian capabilities developed with the African countries in our AOR.
This program had three major elements.
The first was the African Crisis Response Initiatives (ACRI), set up earlier by our government for low-level (small unit and individual) training and equipping of African military forces for peacekeeping and humanitarian missions. This program was very rudimentary, and its value was overinflated by our government. It was a solid beginning; yet it wasn't enough. We needed a larger operational element, consisting of major exercises and significant field training at the battalion
level and for the staffs; we needed to work in a real environment; and we needed actual applications, using, for example, real veterinarians, dentists, and doctors in real situations.
With these thoughts in mind, I decided to build on ACRI by adding an annual brigade-sized exercise with African and U.S. forces. The exercise, called "Natural Fire," was designed to bring together regional forces in a realistic peacekeeping and humanitarian operations task that they would work in conjunction with NGOs and international relief organizations. I further combined into this our medical, dental, and veterinarian training, in order to gain the goodwill these provided in the African villages in the exercise area.
Then we needed a third element at the strategic, policy level. That is, we needed to bring in senior political officials, senior NGOs, and senior military to talk about how to make the big operational strategic decisions, and bring the different elements into cooperation on the ground. This was supposed to be the function of Emerald Express.
Once these elements were in place, I hoped to broaden the program into a model for all Africa, and tie it in with the newly formed (and U.S. DOD-sponsored) African Center for Strategic Studies (ACSS)79 to further develop policy issues and reinforce Emerald Express. The truly superb director of the ACSS, Nancy Walker, enthusiastically and skillfully supported our efforts.
Among the attendees at Emerald Express for whom I had special hopes were General Tsadkan of Ethiopia and General Shebat of Eritrea, the heads of the militaries in their countries. These two old friends (and friends of mine) had fought and won the two-decade "Long Struggle" against the oppressive Menguistu regime in Ethiopia; and both had wonderful tales of their rough days in the bush during the guerrilla war.
I was keenly interested in helping their two militaries, and saw a further opportunity to stabilize their portion of the troubled Horn of Africa if I could persuade them to sign on to our proposed cooperative regional initiative. But neither showed much interest in that. I figured they were still consumed with their internal issues after emerging from twenty-plus years of warfare and devastation.
A few months later, their two countries staggered into a tragic war; and the two old friends became enemies.
The one nation that took to my plan was Kenya. General Tonje, the strong and impressive leader of Kenya's military, had instituted deep reforms that had transformed that organization into a noncorrupt and professional force. At the conference, he and President Moi proposed that we run the program through the East African Community (EAC), a regional political organization that included Kenya, Uganda, and Tanzania. This was a good idea, but unfortunately unworkable, since Uganda and Tanzania were not in CENTCOM's AOR. When I asked if they could be assigned to us, EUCOM objected. And when we then tried to run the program jointly with EUCOM, it only barely got off the ground. . . . Those parts of the program that were run in Kenya through the EAC were very successful.
Meanwhile, confusion had crept in about the directions and goals of Emerald Express.
Pacific Command and the Marine Corps (for various legitimate reasons) were claiming part ownership of the conference, while providing very little in the way of funds to support it--most of which were coming from CENTCOM. Their idea was to shift the focus of the conference to their own particular areas of interest. Though I didn't object to their participation, I was not happy to see the shift away from the areas where CENTCOM had concerns.
I therefore decided to make changes to Emerald Express that would reorient it into a solely CENTCOM affair, focused on Africa, and held somewhere in our African region. I MEF agreed to keep sponsorship and run the conference, which was renamed "Golden Spear." It provided a high-level, intergovernmental forum for discussions on planning and lessons-learned development for several types of engagement missions. Kenya agreed to cohost the first Golden Spear conference.
WHEN I returned from Emerald Express, I learned that the CENTCOM AOR had grown. We'd been assigned the Central Asian region that included the countries of Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, and Turkmenistan. We soon began taking on new challenges presented by this assignment.
LATER IN APRIL, Senator Ted Stevens led a seven-senator congressional delegation (CODEL) to the Gulf to look at gaining more burden-sharing support from Persian Gulf nations, particularly Saudi Arabia, for our ongoing military enforcement of sanctions against Iraq.
I picked up the CODEL in my plane (an ancient Boeing 707) and took them to Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, where we met the Saudi Minister of Defense, Prince Sultan, and the Saudi ambassador to the U.S., Prince Bandar. Since I was certain that the CODEL was unaware of the support we were actually receiving from the Saudis, I prefaced the meeting with a briefing that covered the hundreds of millions of dollars of direct support we received each year in fuel, food, water, etc., as well as the additional hundreds of millions the Saudis had spent to build a state-of-the-art housing facility for our forces. We also received indirect support from Saudi purchases of U.S. defense equipment. And, finally, Saudi Arabia and other Gulf nations had provided troops and funding support for our missions in places like Somalia. This information (obviously unexpected) satisfied the CODEL; the Minister of Defense followed this up with a show of personal support and friendship for CENTCOM.
EARLY MAY. In response to an Indian nuclear weapons test, Pakistan was scheduled to test their own nuclear weapon, an act that would drastically escalate tensions in the region--and the world.
In an effort to persuade the Pakistanis not to test, the State Department planned to send Deputy Secretary of State Strobe Talbot and the Assistant Secretary for the region, Rick Inderfer, to meet Prime Minister Sharif and the senior Pakistani leadership. I was to accompany them.
The mission was not going to be easy. Relations between the U.S. and Pakistan were already tense. The Pakistanis had backed our efforts in Afghanistan during the Afghan rebellion against the Soviets; there were now a large number of refugees--and a state of chaos--on their western border as a result; and we had (in their view) dumped them.
Their bitterness had increased when we imposed sanctions over their WMD program. Specifically, we had refused to deliver F-16s they had bought and paid for, or even to return their money; and then we'd deducted storage fees for the planes from what they had paid. No surprise: They were enraged. (The anger was compounded after many pilots flying older planes were lost, which wouldn't have happened if they'd had the F-16s.)
Our treatment of Pakistan was working against our interest. This was a state on the edge; the government was shaky and badly corrupt; and politically powerful Islamists inflamed the population. If Pakistan failed, or turned into an Iranian- or Afghan-style theocracy, we would have major problems in the region . . . and beyond. We did not want nuclear-armed Islamist radicals. Then or now.
The delegation flew to Tampa to join me on the twenty-two-hour flight to Islamabad. As we prepared to board the CENTCOM 707, word came that the Pakistani government had decided not to approve the visit. This triggered a flurry of diplomatic calls from the waiting room at our air base . . . made more urgent by the approach of our drop-dead takeoff time. If we didn't get in the air within two hours, our crew time would run out.
When the calls kept getting negative results, I decided to propose to Secretary Talbot a back-channel approach. If I called General Jehangir Karamat, the chief of staff of the Pakistan military, I thought he would okay the trip. Karamat was a man of great honor and integrity, and a friend. Relations with Pakistan hung on the thin thread of a personal relationship that General Karamat and I agreed to maintain.
"Go ahead," the Secretary told me, though his face was skeptical.
But when I called General Karamat, he promised to take care of the problem; and a few minutes later we were in the air . . . further proof, if the Secretary needed it, that the relationship between our two militaries remained strong, in spite of the strained relationships elsewhere. Though Washington had severely limited the military-to-military connections I could make, I had in
sisted on maintaining that personal connection to General Karamat.
In Pakistan, we met several times with Prime Minister Sharif and his ministers, but were unable to convince them not to test. The domestic pressure to respond to the Indian tests was too great.
As we left, I had a few private moments with General Karamat, who shared with me his frustration with his corrupt government. Pakistan's military leaders had more than once seized power from the elected government. Though others in the military had urged him to follow that tradition, he assured me he could never do that. He kept his word; but that did not stop a military coup later that year.
IN MID-MAY, shooting incidents in Badime, a disputed border area between Ethiopia and Eritrea, had caused the Eritreans to attack in force and seize the area. The Ethiopians were mobilizing for a counterattack.
On the eighteenth, I called General Tsadkan, to get his take on the situation. According to my Ethiopian friend, his old friend General Shebat had been visiting him to celebrate the belated graduation of his wife from college (after leaving college decades before to join the political struggle, she had finally returned to complete her degree). According to Tsadkan, Shebat had abruptly walked out of the celebration; and the attack had come the next day. It was a stab in the back. He was predictably outraged.
Needless to say, when I called General Shebat on the twentieth, he gave me a different version of these events. He claimed the attack had come in response to a series of violent incidents staged by the Ethiopians.
Wherever the truth lay, it was tragic that these two old friends, who had suffered so much side by side, couldn't work out this quarrel peacefully.
As tensions worsened, Susan Rice, the State Department's Assistant Secretary for African Affairs, asked me to intervene; and she and I worked together to try calm everybody down . . . but with no success. Over the next months, the crisis grew to critical mass and exploded. All we could do in response was plan a precautionary Non-combatant Evacuation Operation.
Battle Ready (2004) Page 38
