Mogadishu-KNN-Twenty-five years ago this week, a Somali warlord named Mohammed Farah Aidid offered the American military a glimpse of its future. But neither policymakers back in Washington nor commanders in the field were attuned to what he had on offer.
A mission that had begun 10 months earlier to provide relief supplies to starving Somalis had evolved into a vastly more ambitious nation-building project.
On the night of Oct. 3-4, 1993, an American military operation to capture Mr. Aidid ended in catastrophic failure, including 18 Americans dead. Soon afterward the entire mission collapsed, and the United States withdrew.
Yet any lessons that might have been learned from this debacle stayed in Mogadishu, alongside the smoldering wreckage of the Black Hawk helicopter that Mr. Aidid’s fighters had shot down.
The United States did not go into Somalia expecting this kind of resistance. But Mr. Aidid took exception to the prospect of outsiders imposing a new political order on his country.
From their sanctuaries in the crowded warrens of the Somali capital, his lightly armed but nimble militias ambushed and harassed American and coalition forces throughout the summer of 1993.
Casualties mounted. In response, President Bill Clinton ordered an elite commando task force to Mogadishu with the specific assignment of eliminating Mr. Aidid.
By most measures — training and discipline, firepower and mobility — Task Force Ranger had Mr. Aidid’s irregulars outclassed. His forces were technologically backward while the American troops had all the best gadgets that money could buy.
In the end, little of this mattered. Mr. Aidid himself proved both frustratingly elusive and far shrewder than the Americans expected. On six “snatch” attempts, the Rangers came up empty-handed. On the seventh, the enemy forces that the Americans disparaged as “skinnies” and “sammies” were waiting. In an instant, the hunters became the hunted.
In the ensuing firefight, subsequently enshrined in a best-selling book and a hit Hollywood movie, American troops inflicted many more casualties than they sustained.
Yet ultimately it was the Americans who withdrew from the battlefield while Mr. Aidid’s forces stayed put. As for Mr. Aidid himself, he not only remained at large but as a result of his bloody encounter with crack American warriors, he saw his own status enhanced.
In contrast, back in the United States, the losses suffered by American troops proved politically unacceptable. Mr. Clinton conceded defeat and pulled out the entire American operation. Somalia remained in chaos.
We can choose to remember this event, coming during the grander era of American ideological triumph over the recently collapsed Soviet Union, as a minor embarrassment of little real consequence. Yet seeing the outcome for what it was — a sign of things to come — offers several useful lessons.
Source: New York Times
