The Fourth Star (17 page)

Still, Haiti was a mess. The government ruled in name only. A hastily recruited police force was incapable of even basic law enforcement. Vigilante killings and political reprisals were common. There were more than a hundred murders throughout the tiny country the month the UN arrived, including forty-five classified as assassinations. These were now problems for the UN, which at first was a tiny operation. “There were just a handful of us, literally less than the fingers on one hand, pulling this thing together in Haiti,” Petraeus recalled.

With little help, Petraeus churned out detailed plans and orders covering every conceivable facet of the upcoming operations. There was Operational Plan 95-1, a comprehensive blueprint for the UN military mission, followed by a 159-page manual of standard operating procedures that covered topics as broad as “the practice of peacekeeping” and as basic as “two-way radio communications.” In early March, with the 170-man headquarters staff finally nearing full strength, he ran a weeklong officer training course at the makeshift UN headquarters, an abandoned industrial park that had been converted into a sandbagged fortress. The wide variations in training and experience made it important to build cohesion in the motley force. He arranged for detailed briefings on when UN soldiers could fire their weapons, the basics of peacekeeping, working with humanitarian groups, and Haiti’s unusual history and Creole culture. The training ended with a two-day war game, meant to prepare the headquarters staff for a Black Hawk Down–like crisis.

In Haiti Petraeus was exposed in depth to the problems of reconstructing a society whose government and economy had all but ceased to function. There was no insurgency of the sort he’d face later in Iraq, but many of the problems were similar. In both places, the U.S. military’s plan assumed that civilians from the UN or other entities could quickly restore a working government, electricity, and other essential services. It was a wildly optimistic assumption.

So Petraeus improvised. He worked closely with aid workers and humanitarian groups, scheduling helicopter flights to move them around the
country and providing Army engineers to help with quick construction projects. He brought in noncommissioned officers to train the new Haitian police force. He coordinated raids to arrest the fugitive leaders of the paramilitary groups who had gone underground. The UN had not reserved any money for the military to do its own projects, opting to funnel reconstruction through civilian groups. But Petraeus and his boss, Major General Joe Kinzer, sidestepped the restrictions, spending U.S. funds to repave roads and build police stations when it became clear the normal UN process would take months. They gave a French-speaking U.S. lieutenant colonel the job of getting the lights back on in Port-au-Prince. Without any money, the staff officer went door-to-door to embassies asking for contributions and managed to raise $250,000, which was spent on generators. UN officers remember Petraeus constantly on the phone late at night with Washington, briefing officials at the White House or lobbying the Pentagon’s Joint Staff for more cash.

He believed that he was creating a blueprint for a new kind of military operation, and he wanted his peers to know it. Shortly after returning home, Petraeus and Killebrew penned a military journal article that was triumphantly titled “Winning the Peace.” They argued that “in detail of planning and degree of coordination the effort to stand Haiti back up after taking it down broke new ground… An environment conducive to political, social and economic development has been created in Haiti.” It was exuberant overstatement. His three-month tour was not enough time to make any lasting improvements, and when the last U.S. troops left the island a year after Petraeus, conditions rapidly deteriorated.

The military wasn’t quite sure what to make of the new operations it faced in places such as northern Iraq, Somalia, and Haiti. As the 1990s progressed, it began referring to them as “peace operations,” and later, when that came to seem too narrow, as “military operations other than war,” or MOOTW (pronounced “mootwah”). These clunky terms reflected confused thinking. Every conceivable military operation other than conventional Gulf War–style battles was crammed under this ever-broadening rubric. The list included combating terrorism, providing humanitarian assistance, protecting shipping lanes, interdicting narcotics, enforcing arms control agreements, and ten other unrelated missions. Also buried on
the list was helping foreign governments fight insurgencies, a task the United States would eventually take on in Iraq.

Though these jobs required new skills, the Army and the Marines did very little to prepare for them. Too much time spent on peacekeeping would dull the Army’s combat edge, generals reasoned. The conventionally trained military could always adjust on the fly. It was an idea Abizaid and Petraeus explicitly rejected. As Abizaid had noted in his military journal article, published when Petraeus was in Haiti, the Army still lacked the training, equipment, and specialized personnel for these demanding new missions. “Doctrinal voids exist at every level,” Abizaid warned. “We should avoid the notion that combat-ready troops are ready for peacekeeping.”

In Haiti, Petraeus had picked up lessons that would prove valuable a decade later in Iraq. Near the end of his three-month rotation, he pinned on the silver eagles of a full colonel at a small headquarters ceremony. On June 9, he flew home, heading for Fort Bragg, North Carolina, and his next plum assignment. He was taking command of the 82nd Airborne Division’s 1st Brigade—John Abizaid’s brigade.

On the morning of the change-of-command ceremony, Abizaid walked into his office and noticed Petraeus’s possessions stacked on his gray desk and peeling linoleum floor. There’s a rigid protocol surrounding changes of command, and one of the rules is that the old commander is entitled to keep his office until the swallow-tailed unit streamer changes hands at the official parade ground ceremony. Overcome by eagerness and an ambition that was always propelling him forward, Petraeus had broken it. When Abizaid saw Petraeus’s boxes piled in his office, he was annoyed. “Who does this guy think he is?” he barked to his executive officer.

“On that day I think the two of them really didn’t like each other,” the executive officer recalled. The two men had radically different command styles. Within hours of taking over, Petraeus had already pulled a young soldier out of formation and made him produce his dog tags. “The old commander would have never done that,” Frank Helmick, a battalion commander in the unit, thought. Abizaid trusted his sergeants to check such details. He was loose, funny, and even a bit sarcastic. Soldiers who wandered into his office were always struck that his desk and file cabinets
were virtually empty. He seemed to run the entire 3,000-soldier brigade out of the notebook stuffed in his cargo pants. Petraeus, meanwhile, maintained binders full of rules and regulations. There was even a rule for labeling the binders, complained his officers, who were accustomed to Abizaid’s more laid-back approach.

Despite those outward differences, the two men shared a remarkably similar view of their Army’s future. The U.S. military’s massive technological and firepower edge made it unlikely that anyone would challenge it to a tank-on-tank fight. Instead, they believed, civilian political leaders were far more likely to send soldiers to deal with murky ethnic conflicts, humanitarian crises, and internal civil wars. Only the U.S. Army could get manpower and supplies to such backwaters. Only the military was capable of interceding between these warring parties. To perform these missions well, the Army had to change, they insisted. Theirs was a view that was decidedly out of step with most mainstream military thinking at the time.

It was late afternoon and already growing dark when Brigadier General George Casey and a force of twenty soldiers drove into the tiny mountain village of Dugi Dio. Normally, one-star generals don’t lead patrols. Casey, the assistant commander of the U.S. peacekeeping force in northwest Bosnia, was there because of elderly peasants who had trudged through the mud with their belongings in bundles and on oxcarts, heading home.

The refugees were Muslims who had once lived in Dugi Dio and in nearby Jusici. They had been driven out years before in one of the first Serbian offensives of the war. Now that the fighting was over and the U.S.-led peacekeeping force had arrived, they were going back to their destroyed houses, which currently happened to be in Serb territory. Accompanying the elderly villagers were young, hard-looking men armed with guns to defend them from their former Serb neighbors who were now their enemies.

Their arrival sparked a tense standoff, with Serb police threatening to arrest the Muslim returnees. The refugees, in turn, vowed to defend themselves,
by force if necessary. Casey and several UN officials had spent three weeks negotiating an agreement that allowed the returnees to remain, provided they met two conditions: they had to prove their claims to own property, and they had to promise to get rid of all weapons.

The U.S. Army had crossed the Sava River into Bosnia a year earlier to enforce a peace agreement that ended more than three years of horrific killing among Bosnia’s Muslims, Croats, and Serbs. The force was gigantic, with 20,000 U.S. troops and 40,000 more soldiers from European countries, including Russia. The U.S. military was supposed to stay for only one year (a deadline that was repeatedly extended) and its mission was tightly constrained to exclude anything that smacked of nation building or put soldiers at risk. “The U.S. and NATO are
not
going to Bosnia to fight a war. They are
not
going to Bosnia to rebuild the nation, resettle refugees, and oversee elections,” Defense Secretary William Perry told reporters. “The tasks of our soldiers are clear and limited … They will enforce the cessation of hostilities.”

In theory the job of forging Bosnia into a functioning, multiethnic state was supposed to be handled by the UN-led civilian administration and the Bosnians themselves. As in Haiti, the civilians were quickly overwhelmed, and there was pressure on the military to expand its role—to fill the massive civilian gaps, to arrest war criminals, and to protect refugees who wanted to return home. When officers such as George Casey did try to undertake these tasks, they found out how difficult they could be. Casey had spent four years after the Gulf War with the First Cavalry Division at Fort Hood, Texas, overseeing the division staff and then commanding a 4,000-soldier brigade from 1993 to 1995. He readied his troops to deploy to Saudi Arabia or Kuwait in case Saddam Hussein decided to try to reinvade, and fought big mock-tank battles at the National Training Center against the same Soviet-style enemy that U.S. forces had battled for much of the Cold War. It was demanding work that required smarts and an obsessive attention to detail. Casey had performed well.

Little in his career, however, had prepared him to mediate ethnic civil wars or rebuild broken societies, like Bosnia. In the gathering darkness Casey waited as the last of the Muslim returnees’ homes were searched to make sure that they had abided by their promise to get rid of all of their
weapons. Standing alongside Casey were several Serb officials and the town’s former deputy mayor, a Muslim who had come back with the other returnees. The Muslims warily eyed the Serbian observers. Their presence was a bit like “having Darth Vader in your house,” Casey recalled. An hour passed. Nothing was uncovered in any of the nearly three dozen houses searched, until only the residence where Casey was waiting remained. He began to think he had pulled it off, the peaceful return of refugees to their communities, a small but unmistakable success on his first foray into real peacemaking. Then a Serb policeman found two AK-47s, two hand grenades, and a bag full of ammunition in the very last house—the one where Casey was standing. The weapons belonged to the Muslim deputy mayor. Casey was staggered. The agreement that he’d spent weeks negotiating between the Muslims and Serbs was off. “I’m looking at this guy going, ‘What the fuck were you thinking?’” he recalled.

A standoff ensued. When the Serb police tried to arrest the deputy mayor, dozens of Muslim women lay down outside the house, blocking their departure. Trapped in a surrounded Muslim home as night fell, the Serb police were growing noticeably nervous. Fearing the situation could escalate into violence, Casey took custody of the deputy mayor and left the village. Crestfallen, he returned to the U.S. camp and told Lieutenant General Bill Nash, the cigar-chomping commander of the multinational force, about the collapsed deal.

“George, never forget it’s their country,” Nash told him. It was Nash’s way of saying that even a force as powerful as the U.S. Army couldn’t resolve centuries-old sectarian and ethnic hatreds and shouldn’t try. U.S. troops could separate the Serbs and Muslims and provide basic security, but they should leave the lengthy job of building a functioning country to the civilian experts or the Bosnians themselves. No one could force these people to get along, certainly not the U.S. military. It was a lesson Casey never forgot, and one the entire Army would take with it to Iraq.