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.
Our relief help after a massive earthquake in Pakistan in 2005 had been warmly welcomed and led to an overall, if temporary, downturn in anti-Americanism there. But five more years of war in Afghanistan, drone attacks inside Pakistan, and growing problems between our governments had taken a toll. By summer 2010, 68 percent of Pakistanis had an unfavorable view of the United States. I was therefore extremely nervous about security for our helicopters and their crews. They were operating in northwestern Pakistan in areas such as Swat that were hotbeds of extremist and Taliban fighters. Villagers and even local police and Pakistani military accustomed to attacks by U.S. drones looked upon our military arrival with suspicion, if not outright hostility. I insisted that the Pakistani military have an officer on every flight to explain we were there to help and to organize distribution of supplies as the choppers were unloaded.
The Pakistani press reported that villagers waiting for aid showed no enthusiasm for the crews of our helicopters, and that there were no waves, smiles, or handshakes. Our crews reported some favorable reactions from Pakistanis, but overall there was great suspicion of our motives, and questions as to why we weren’t doing more in the way of long-term assistance to improve their roads and bridges. Despite the dour reception, during the first three weeks of August, our aircrews evacuated some 8,000 people and delivered 1.6 million pounds of relief supplies. Nonetheless, anti-Americanism in Pakistan was undiminished.
OTHER DISASTERS
The end of July 2010 brought another kind of flood, from which there would be little relief. On July 25, an online organization named WikiLeaks, created by Julian Assange, posted some 76,000 documents originating from classified Central Command databases in Iraq and Afghanistan. WikiLeaks, as we later learned, operated from computer servers in a number of countries and advertised itself as seeking “classified, censored, or otherwise restricted material of political, diplomatic, or ethical significance.” I told reporters on July 29 that the security breach had endangered lives and damaged confidence overseas in the U.S. government’s ability to protect its secrets. I said the documents released could have “potentially dramatic and grievously harmful consequences.”
From a military standpoint, the release of these documents was much worse than embarrassment. There was a lot of information about our military tactics, techniques, and procedures, as well as the names of Iraqis and Afghans who had cooperated with us. As hundreds of thousands of documents continued to be released through October, we determined that nearly 600 Afghans who had helped us were at risk, and that the Taliban was reviewing the postings to gather the names of those people. Just as worrying was the release of 44,000 documents revealing our tactics for dealing with IEDs, and many others that described our intelligence-collection methods and our understanding of insurgent relationships. There were voluminous documents from Iraq detailing detainee abuses, civilian casualties, and Iranian influence. Nearly all the Joint Task Force Guantánamo documents were released, including all assessments of individual detainees.
The flood assumed a totally different dimension in November when Assange warned that he was going to release hundreds of thousands of State Department documents and cables from more than one hundred embassies. On November 22, he said on Twitter, “The coming months will see a new world, where global history is redefined.” He made good on his threat. These cables revealed private conversations between American officials and foreign leaders and other officials, and embarrassingly candid evaluations of those leaders (including above all President Karzai), as well as intelligence-collection priorities, bilateral intelligence relationships, intelligence sources and methods, counterterrorism-related information, and on and on.
Army Private First Class Bradley Manning was quickly identified and charged with downloading the documents from a computer at his base in Iraq and sending them to WikiLeaks. In violation of security rules, he had apparently carried compact discs disguised as music CDs into a secure facility and spent his duty hours downloading the documents from classified networks.
Manning had gotten such broad access to so many databases because, after the Gulf War, and particularly with the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, there was a concerted effort to make as much information as possible available to every level of command. Huge broadband capacity was developed in both Iraq and Afghanistan, and wide access was provided to all levels. But we would learn, after the fact, that in many forward-deployed areas there was poor physical and operational security in and around facilities holding classified information, a failure to suspend the access to classified information of individuals who displayed behavioral and medical problems, and “weak to no implementation of tools restricting the use and monitoring of network activities.” According to the findings of the undersecretary of defense for intelligence in January 2011:
It is common knowledge that rules are frequently broken in a war zone to accomplish the mission. This may be necessary outside the perimeter and where there is risk of direct hostile action. But these behaviors have extended into garrison culture in forward-deployed areas, where the boredom of routine and limited activity options have exacerbated the problem.… The issue is more about compliance than policy—less about what we share and more about how we share it. Compliance is high at the strategic and operational level, but degrades closer to the fight. In forward-deployed areas, many mandatory practices are ignored or standards lowered.
Secretary Clinton had a lot of explaining to do in capitals around the world for a problem caused by the Defense Department. Both she and I noticed that once open and candid interlocutors around the world now turned silent the second they saw an American official take out pen and paper for notes.
I tried to offer some perspective in one press briefing. I pointed out, for example, that these State Department documents demonstrated for everyone to see that there was no significant difference between what American officials said in public and what they said in private. Drawing on my many years of painful experience, I also reminded people that the American government leaks like a sieve—“and always has.” I cited President John Adams’s lament: “How can a government go on, publishing all their negotiations with foreign nations, I know not. To me it appears as dangerous and pernicious as it is novel.” I also recalled that when serious congressional oversight of CIA began in the mid-1970s, many thought foreign services would stop sharing information with us, but it never happened. I said I thought terms being bandied about such as “meltdown,” “game-changer,” and so on were overstated and overwrought.
Governments deal with the United States because it is in their interest, not because they like us or trust us or because of our ability to keep secrets. Some respect us, some fear us, many need us. We have by far the largest economy and the most powerful military. As has been said, in global affairs, we are the indispensable nation. So, other countries will continue to deal with us. Is this embarrassing? Yes. Awkward? Somewhat. But the longer-term impact? Very modest.
Another disaster, at least as far as I was concerned, was my trip to Bolivia at the end of November 2010 for a meeting of the Conference of Defense Ministers of the Americas. I detested these huge conferences. They are boring beyond words, and little ever results. But because it involves every country in North and South America, the U.S. secretary of defense must go for political and diplomatic reasons. My first such conference, in 2008, was tolerable because it was hosted by the Canadians at the spectacular mountain town of Banff, Alberta. The second, in Santa Cruz, Bolivia, promised to be awful in several respects. In a conference hosted by the government of virulently anti-American leftist Bolivian leader Evo Morales, I foresaw a full day of getting pounded on by my Bolivian hosts and their buddies from Hugo Chavez’s Venezuela. When I made known I was considering not attending, both the Canadian and Brazilian defense ministers promi
sed me they would lean on the Bolivians to behave. I took them at their word and showed up on November 21.
The drive from the airport in Santa Cruz to the hotel was the only time as secretary when I was actually uneasy about my personal security. I was discomforted knowing that Morales didn’t care if I got killed, and I figured that that attitude might well trickle down to my heavily armed Bolivian military escort. The route was along narrow back roads crowded with cows, chickens, dogs, and people—every corner looking like an opportunity for an ambush right out of Tom Clancy’s novel Clear and Present Danger. Each time we had to slow or stop, I got a little more nervous. Then we arrived at the un-air-conditioned Hotel Camino Real, which was open to the street. The doctor traveling with us advised us essentially to curl up on the bed in a fetal position and not to touch anything. Don’t eat the food, he said. Don’t touch the water (even to shower). Don’t go outside the hotel. The staff put a fan in my room that was about three feet in diameter and created the sense of sleeping outdoors during a tornado.
My meeting with the Bolivian defense minister wasn’t too bad. He clearly had gotten the message from the Canadians and Brazilians. The conference opened, however, with a fifty-five-minute-long welcoming diatribe from Morales. He accused former U.S. ambassadors of backing coup attempts against him and the U.S. consulate of “using machine guns against my administration.” He said U.S. embassies all over the world sponsor coups. Then he got personal, looking straight at me and accusing CIA and the Defense Department of being behind all these depredations.
Duty: Memoirs of a Secretary at War Page 55