In this chapter we will look at the element of the Powell Doctrine that calls for a clear “exit strategy” for US forces. We will look at how, in the case of Vietnam, the US failed to define and execute a viable “exit strategy,” and the impact that this had on the Armed Forces and the formation of the Powell Doctrine. We will then move on to look at how the Military’s insistence upon a viable “exit strategy” was to influence the debate over US policy towards Bosnia. In this chapter, we will look mostly at the policy decisions that took place during the Clinton Administration,1 as this was the period during which military intervention was most actively considered. It will be necessary to review the Clinton Administration’s Bosnia policy in detail, as the argument made in this chapter is not so much that the US failed to come up with an “exit strategy” for its commitment to Bosnia, but that, by the spring and summer of 1995, other concerns had come to outweigh the Military’s concerns about them not having an “exit strategy”. These concerns centered on the continuing credibility and relevance of NATO in post-Cold War Europe, the credibility of the United States as a leading actor on European security issues, and Bill Clinton’s credibility as Commander-in-Chief. To understand how and why these concerns became so important, it is necessary to review the events leading up to the summer of 1995 in detail.
Finally, we will look at how the element of the Powell Doctrine calling for a clear “exit strategy” relates to the other elements of the Powell Doctrine, principally the need for clear objectives and the need for public and Congressional support. But first we need to define what we mean by “exit strategy.”
In this chapter, it is appropriate to talk about the Powell Doctrine, as the case study largely takes place after the publication of Powell’s 1992 Foreign Affairs article and Powell was Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff for part of the case study period, between 1991 and 1993. But we will also look at the intellectual climate that arose out of the way the US went about extricating itself from Vietnam that led to the insistence of the Powell Doctrine on a viable “exit strategy.”
In his 1984 National Press Club speech, perhaps the most public enunciation of the ideas that would form the Powell Doctrine before Powell’s article, Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger, although he never explicitly used the phrase “exit strategy,” did say:
We must continuously keep as a beacon light before us the basic questions: “Is this conflict in our national interest?” “Does our national interest require us to fight, to use force of arms?” If the answers are “yes,” then we must win. If the answers are “no,” then we should not be in combat.2
We can see from this that Weinberger, with Powell as his Military Assistant, is clearly acknowledging that policymakers must have some notion of when and under what circumstances they would wish to end US involvement in a conflict. The logic of Weinberger’s statement leaves three options for US disengagement. The first and most obvious one is that the US achieves whatever objectives it sets itself. The second option is that the US decides that the conflict is no longer in its “national interest,”3 and therefore is free to disengage. The third option is for an Administration to conclude that “winning” is either too costly or not feasible, but that the reading of the national interest that led to a conflict in the first place is still valid. The only option logically left open is to try and alter the nature of the conflict so that the US can leave without damaging its national interest. This could be done in one of two ways: a negotiated settlement that ends a conflict on terms not catastrophically damaging to the national interest, or the US is able to pass on responsibility for its part in the conflict to a third party. The logic of what Weinberger is saying must either lead to victory, withdrawal, a negotiated settlement, or the transfer of the US’s responsibilities to a third party. Either a negotiated settlement or a handing off of US responsibility could be said to constitute an “exit strategy,” that is to say, a means by which the US can end direct involvement in conflicts without undermining either its future credibility or the objectives the US set itself when it originally entered a conflict. As we shall see in the case of Vietnam, the US attempted to hand off responsibility for any future fighting to the South Vietnamese.
By 1968, it had become clear that the war in Vietnam had reached a stalemate4. The stark alternatives facing the new Administration were: an open-ended commitment of US forces on a large scale, which neither US public opinion or the US economy could sustain; alternatively, the Administration did not feel capable of simply withdrawing from Vietnam and letting events take their course. To do so would have been seen by Richard Nixon as abandoning a commitment made by his four predecessors. To Nixon’s eyes, the risk of this was a fatal breach in the credibility of US commitments around the world. “I rejected this option, to [withdraw] … As President, I continued to believe that the moral and geopolitical reasons behind our intervention remained valid.”5
The third alternative was to slowly pull US forces back as South Vietnamese forces became more capable of taking over greater responsibility for the war effort.
This alternative was what we have come to call Vietnamization. Lieutenant General Phillip B. Davidson MACV G-2 [Military Intelligence] describes Vietnamization in the following terms:
The central thrust of the new strategy, then, would concentrate on improving ARVN’s [Army of the Republic of Vietnam—South Vietnamese Army] capabilities and strengthening the government of South Vietnam’s control over the population so that they could eventually oppose the Communists alone. American forces would provide the shield behind which this enhancement would take place, and they would be withdrawn when the RVNAF [Armed Forces of the Republic of Vietnam] and GVN [Government of Vietnam] could defend themselves.6
There are major reasons to believe that this was a doomed effort from the start. First, it ran up against the problem that all US policy towards Vietnam had founded on. Namely that, however much training, money and expertise the US was prepared to throw at Vietnam, it could not force the South Vietnamese people or government to act as the US wanted them to act. Testifying before the House Appropriations subcommittee, the deputy director of AID (Agency for International Development) in South Vietnam described the corruption in South Vietnam with the following anecdote:
For example, speculators hoarded imported American fertilizer and created artificial shortages that sent prices skyrocketing. One of the most notorious speculators was the brother-in-law of General Nguyen Van Thieu [the President of South Vietnam, 1967–1975] … But he was a piker [small-time thief] compared to Thieu himself, who carried away millions of dollars in gold when he fled Vietnam in April 19757.
Added to the problem of venality was the fact that the South Vietnamese government never created a sense of national purpose or an ideology that a large number of the South Vietnamese people would support. Consequently, the best way for it to keep itself in power was by the use of a complicated system of patronage. The AID administrator described South Vietnam’s political system as one which was based primarily on “a style of secular simony [a form of tithe], trafficking in jobs that gave their subordinates the opportunity to make money.”8 The practical effect of this system was to ensure that corruption ran from the very bottom of the administrative and political system to the very top. In order for the system to work, even individually honest members of the government had to engage in a certain amount of corruption in order to pay off their superiors so that they could keep their job. The US was further hampered by the fact that, although South Vietnam was overwhelmingly dependent on US aid, it was de jure a sovereign country. Therefore, the US could not insist upon the removal of corrupt officials. It could merely point out examples of corruption to the South Vietnamese government and hope that action would be taken. Given the situation outlined above, this very rarely happened. Instead, a game of musical chairs took place. The US would point out corrupt officials; the South Vietnamese government would dismiss them. Then they would be reappointed to another post that would not bring them into contact with the Americans who complained about them in the first place.
In theory at least, the US could always threaten to cut off the supply of aid to South Vietnam. But in the context of Vietnamization, this was never a practical option. Such a withdrawal or conditioning of aid would have slowed down or prevented any improvement in the technical capabilities of either the South Vietnamese armed forces or the South Vietnamese government. In that situation, the US would either have had to halt the process of withdrawal or effectively cut its losses from South Vietnam by accepting that the South Vietnamese government could not properly use the assistance it was given.
The first reason why the US could never slow down the rate of Vietnamization was that public opinion at home was becoming increasingly polarized between the two extreme options of either total victory in Vietnam, with all the risk that that entailed of a wider war, or a fast, complete withdrawal from Vietnam. The only way the Nixon Administration could maintain a tenuous hold on public opinion was constantly to reassure the public that the strategy of slowly turning the war over to the Vietnamese was working. The most public way to demonstrate this success was through continued withdrawal of troops. Henry Kissinger describes the trap the Nixon Administration had set itself:
The withdrawal increased the pressures from families whose sons remained at risk. And it brought no respite from the critics … As a result, the Nixon Administration’s commitment to unilateral withdrawal would come to be seen, at home, abroad, and particularly in Vietnam, as irreversible.9
Kissinger was also in no doubt of the effect that this irreversible withdrawal was having on North Vietnamese policy:
The North Vietnamese, on the other hand, were not interested in symbols but in the balance of forces on the ground. They coolly analyzed the withdrawal, weighing its psychological benefits to America in terms of enhanced staying power against the decline in military effectiveness represented by a shrinking number of American forces.10
The second factor that made American withdrawal from Vietnam irreversible once it began was a defense budget that was rapidly declining. In constant dollars, the budget fell from $346.90 billion in January 1969 to $278.80 billion in October 1975, a difference of $67.1 billion.11 On the face of it, this decline would seem natural. After all, US forces were being withdrawn, reducing overall costs. But the sting in the tail was that the Defense Department budgeted on the assumption that US forces would be withdrawing. This meant that any attempt to slow down or reverse the withdrawal would mean that the Defense budget would remain the same but the expected savings from the withdrawal would not materialize, meaning that any shortfall would have to be found by cuts to non-Vietnam-related expenditure. This system of budgeting effectively allowed Secretary of Defense Melvin Laird to pose a cruel dilemma to the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Yes, they could slow down the rate of withdrawal from Vietnam, but they would have to sacrifice a large amount of expenditure elsewhere, particularly in the Defense Department’s research and development programs.12
What Vietnamization amounted to then was an “exit strategy” that was based on hope rather than expectation. It was a strategy whose success depended not on the efforts of the US but on a complete root and branch overhaul of the South Vietnamese systems of government and politics. Ultimately, as Kolko points out, the war in Vietnam was more than just a military struggle: “In wars against revolutionary movements, between social systems and ideologies as well as armies, major changes in either side’s social and economic power can critically affect the outcome of the struggle.”13 As the US withdrew its troops from Vietnam it not only lost leverage over the military situation but also lost what little leverage it had over the evolution of South Vietnamese politics. The US withdrawal from Vietnam in the final analysis was conditioned much more by domestic political and economic considerations rather than any measure of how well South Vietnam could survive without massive US assistance.
We can see then that Vietnamization did not constitute a viable “exit strategy” in the sense that, whilst it provided cover by which the US could terminate its involvement in Vietnam, it did not, and, more to the point, could not provide a means by which South Vietnam could defend itself. This is not a judgment made in hindsight but, as we can see from the quotations given above, even those charged with implementing Vietnamization had the gravest doubts about its usefulness as an “exit strategy.”
However, it is important to stress that the Nixon Administration had to improvise the best “exit strategy” it could because no-one had thought ahead of time how US forces could be withdrawn from Vietnam if total victory for the US seemed impossible.
As early as 1965, shortly after the commitment of large-scale US combat forces, US diplomats were commenting on the fact that, in spite of massive financial, moral, and recently-added military assistance, the government of South Vietnam remained fundamentally weak. The following quotation is an extract from a cable sent by Maxwell Taylor, the US Ambassador to South Vietnam, commenting on the relative merits of the newly-installed Prime Minister, Air Vice Marshal Ky:
He is completely without the background and experience necessary for an assignment as difficult as this one. The American General Officer closest to him describes him as “a proud man and a fine military commander, although a naive, inexperienced politician and civil affairs administrator. I believe he will do his absolute best to succeed in his new position, but he will require a lot of technical assistance, moral support and a normal amount of conscientious understanding.” We will do our best to provide these missing ingredients.14
Although the commitment of half a million US troops had managed to stave off the immediate threat of South Vietnam being overwhelmed by Communist forces, the fundamental weaknesses of the South Vietnamese political system and its leadership were to remain an endemic problem that both the Johnson and Nixon Administrations completely failed to remedy.
Ambassador to South Vietnam, Ellsworth Bunker, summed up the difference between a US and the South Vietnamese views of the conflict:
We’re engaged in fighting a limited war, for limited objectives, and with limited resources. At the same time we’re advising and supporting the Vietnamese in their efforts to carry out—carry through—a social revolution.15
Left unanswered by Bunker was the question of whether or not the US and South Vietnamese had the same ideas about what this revolution ought to look like, or what the outcome should be.
The larger point here is that, although the Nixon Administration’s policy of Vietnamization was unlikely to be successful because of the structural weaknesses of South Vietnam, these weaknesses were not in any way new, nor were they entirely of the Americans’ making. One of the fundamental flaws of US policy towards Vietnam, and one of the principal reasons why the Powell Doctrine was to insist upon a clearly defined “exit strategy” was because no-one at the time of the initial commitment of large-scale US troops to Vietnam in July 1965 had considered the underlying weakness of South Vietnam as a nation, and no-one had seriously considered how this weakness might impact upon the length and depth of the US commitment to Vietnam.
The underlying assumption of US policymakers seems to have been that, with a large enough commitment of US manpower and resources, the US could shape the future of South Vietnam regardless of any underlying weaknesses in its South Vietnamese allies. As one of the chief architects of America’s Vietnam War Robert McNamara would later put it, “We viewed the people and leaders of South Vietnam in terms of our own experience. We saw in them a thirst for—and a determination to fight for—freedom and democracy. We totally misjudged the political forces within the country.”16 McNamara also acknowledges that US policy suffered from the hubris of thinking that there was no problem that America could not solve:
We failed to recognize that in international affairs, as in other aspects of life, there may be problems for which there are no immediate solutions. For one whose life has been dedicated to the belief and practice of problem solving, this is particularly hard to admit. But, at times, we may have to live with an imperfect, untidy world.17
The US commitment to South Vietnam had been designed in such a way that there was no “exit strategy” that the Nixon Administration could have chosen which would have stood a high chance of success. The US could withdraw from Vietnam, but it could not exit from Vietnam in such a way as to not undermine its initial objectives, because the success of those objectives depended upon the South Vietnamese carrying through Bunker’s “social revolution,” and this was something that, no matter how much advice the US gave or however many resources would be dedicated to it, had to be a task primarily for the South Vietnamese. If the US was not able to convince the South Vietnamese to undertake this revolution whilst providing half a million troops for its defense, it was even more unlikely to persuade the South Vietnamese to undertake a revolution whilst these troops were going home.
What does the above discussion tell us about the need for an “exit strategy”? First, that Vietnamization, that is to say, the idea that the US could hand off responsibility for the war to the South Vietnamese, was not in the long run a viable “exit strategy” because it depended ultimately on the will of the South Vietnamese to actually shoulder a greater burden. As we have seen from the above discussion, the basic social, political and economic weakness of the South Vietnamese state meant that, in the first place, it was unlikely to be able to shoulder a greater burden, and second, that, no matter how much time, money and effort the US was prepared to throw at the problem of creating a viable South Vietnamese state, they were ultimately dependent upon the ability and will of the South Vietnamese to put in at least as great an amount of effort as the US in creating a viable state, and the South Vietnamese political elite simply was not prepared to do this. So Vietnamization could not work as an “exit strategy” because it was ultimately dependent upon factors outside of direct American control. Henry Kissinger, one of the principal architects of the US withdrawal from Vietnam, recognized the idea that the US could or should exert decisive influence over the internal affairs of its allies was dangerous hubris: “America cannot—and will not—conceive all the plans, design all the programs, execute all the decisions and undertake all the defense of the free nations of the world.”18 More to the point, in the developing intellectual climate that led to the Powell Doctrine, Caspar Weinberger, at a conference in 1986 to address the issue of counterinsurgency and low intensity conflict, had this to say on how the US ought to go about conducting counterinsurgency and the limits of American power:
if our interests justify intervention … if the leadership of the country threatened is capable of using our assistance to proper effect, which is to say for the security and wellbeing of the nation, rather than merely to sustain itself in power and to reinforce those abuses which may have contributed to the nation’s difficulties from the beginning. We must decide whether an existing leadership is better or worse for its people and our interests than possible alternatives … We must decide what form intervention should take, if we are to intervene, and by what means, and through which agencies.19
It should not be forgotten that, whilst Caspar Weinberger was making his remarks, Colin Powell was Military Assistant to the Secretary of Defense and, as such, had a hand in writing the vast majority of the Secretary’s public remarks.
As Powell himself put it:
The crisis in Bosnia is especially complex. Our policy and the policy of the international community have been to assist in providing humanitarian relief to the victims of that terrible conflict, one with deep ethnic and religious roots that go back a thousand years. The solution must ultimately be a political one. Deeper military involvement beyond humanitarian purposes requires great care and a full examination of possible outcomes.20
Second, what the above discussion demonstrates is that “victory” as an “exit strategy” was, by 1968, extremely unlikely and that, although the process of US withdrawal from Vietnam was halting and erratic, it nevertheless gained irreversible momentum, which meant that, whether or not the US had a strategy, it was certainly exiting Vietnam:
The new concept of Vietnamization was essentially a “cut and run” strategy, designed by and for the United States. Vietnamization was dictated not so much by the increased potential of the South Vietnamese as shown at Tet … but by the collapse of the will to support the war among the decision-making elite in the United States. American policymakers approved and supported the policy of Vietnamization without any assurance that it would leave South Vietnam capable of defending itself. To the American leadership this was not its primary purpose.21
The final point to be taken with this discussion was that it was not completely the fault of the Nixon Administration that, whilst the US left Vietnam, it did not pursue a viable “exit strategy.” The lack of an “exit strategy” was woven into the very fabric of the initial decision to commit US forces to Vietnam. US policymakers in the Johnson Administration were aware of the endemic weakness of the South Vietnamese state, yet chose to commit US forces in spite of this weakness. From the very first, then, US policymakers made any viable “exit strategy” other than victory extremely unlikely.
So what was the kind of intellectual climate that arose from Vietnamization and what were its implications? First, that US policymakers in future needed to have a clear understanding of the local political situation and the history of any particular region before they undertook any intervention. Such an understanding would allow foreign policymakers to frame US objectives in such a way that they were actually achievable and not to be overconfident in the ability of the US, despite its enormous power and wealth, to stamp its authority on a foreign culture
Second, the US policymakers should not find themselves committing to a military intervention that they could not get out of. This requires that policymakers think about how they could extricate themselves from a particular theatre of operations before they enter it. As we have already seen in Chapter 2, the US Military after Vietnam was profoundly skeptical of an idea of an incremental use of force. Another reason for this skepticism is that policymakers may be tempted to use incremental force without thinking through all of the possible ramifications of their actions because a gradual incremental use of force does not seem like an irrevocable commitment of US resources or prestige. David Halberstam reports the following exchange between Powell and Defense Secretary, Les Aspin:
On one occasion when they had been talking about Bosnia, Aspin said something rather casually to the effect that the United States ought to hit the Serbs hard and see if it worked. “And if it doesn’t work?” Powell asked him. “Then we’ll try something else” Aspin said. So Powell quoted to Aspin what he believed was a paraphrase of a remark made by General George Patton Jr.: “When you put your hand to the thing, make sure that the thing works.”22
The major problem with this line of thinking is that the difficult questions always have to be answered by those that advocate intervention, whilst those that advocate non-intervention are always asking the questions. Those advocating non-intervention can always point to the “otherness” of any other country the US might intervene in, and also those advocating non-intervention can always point to the intractability of any problem and the limits of the United States’ ability to change the situation in another country, whereas those advocating intervention have to try and demonstrate the counterfactual that US intervention can work before it has taken place. In short, those advocating intervention will always be treated skeptically; those opposing intervention will always have the advantage of being able to ask questions rather than having to answer them.
We will now move on to look at how US policy towards Bosnia was shaped, and what role these lessons from Vietnam played in shaping it.
There were a number of reasons for the profound reluctance on the part of the US Military to get drawn into the conflict in Bosnia in the mid-1990s. The first of these was simply a matter of time. Those junior officers who had served in Vietnam and had witnessed the catastrophic effect on morale and combat effectiveness that the prolonged withdrawal from Vietnam had created were determined that, when it was their turn to move into senior positions of command, they would do it better. In the words of Powell himself, “I had gone off to Vietnam in 1962 standing on a bedrock of principle and conviction. And I had watched the foundation eroded by euphemisms, lies, and self-deception.”23 Powell certainly saw a connection between Bosnia and Vietnam:
When the nation’s policy was murky or nonexistent—the Bay of Pigs, Vietnam, creating a Marine “presence” in Lebanon—the result had been disaster. In Bosnia, we were dealing with an ethnic tangle with roots reaching back a thousand years.24
The second major cause of concern for a generation of officers who had served in Vietnam was the potential for guerrilla warfare. Bosnia is extremely mountainous, with few large cities; the ideal terrain to mount guerrilla warfare. In fact, so well suited to the task was Bosnia, that before the break up of Yugoslavia, the Yugoslav Army’s plan to defeat an invasion from either east or west was to fight a delaying action in the rest of the country and withdraw to the Bosnian mountains. Also, Yugoslavs had a famous history as guerrilla fighters. In World War II, Tito’s partisans managed to tie down six German divisions in anti-guerrilla operations. And lastly, there seemed to be little idea of what US objectives would be in Bosnia. In her biography of Colin Powell, Karen DeYoung sums up his view of what “doing something” might actually mean:
His view that limited air strikes would accomplish little in getting the Serbs to behave had not changed … “As soon as they tell me it is limited … it means they do not care whether you achieve a result or not. As soon as they tell me “surgical,” I head for the bunker.”25
Added to these concerns was the fact that the Clinton Administration did not seem to place a high priority on matters of foreign policy. Certainly Bosnia had proved a useful stick to beat Bush with26, but that did not necessarily mean that Clinton was going to actually do anything about the situation. Emblematic of the new President’s lack of interest was the last minute way in which the Administration’s foreign policy team was thrown together. Warren Christopher, the Secretary of State, who had denied wanting any job in the Administration all the way through the transition period, was then offered the job which he accepted at the last minute.
The job of National Security Advisor went to Anthony Lake, who had been Clinton’s principal foreign policy advisor during the campaign.
Lake had been one of the Kissinger aides who resigned in protest over the decision to invade Cambodia, and was well aware of the dangers of the US getting sucked into foreign conflicts it did not understand, and that were not vital to its interests. On the other hand, Lake personally had a strong Wilsonian streak.
Lake had also long believed that how the US dealt with conflict in the Third World and the newly emerging Eastern Europe would define American foreign policy well into the twenty-first century. Lake had also held a ringside view of the bitter dispute between the State Department and the National Security Advisor during the Carter Administration. He was determined that on his watch there would be a smooth relationship between Clinton’s foreign policy team. Writing in the mid-1980s about how to improve the quality of national security decision making, Lake had this to say about the ideal relationship between Presidential advisors: “The President should therefore choose his lieutenants not only for their separate talents, but with an eye to how they will work together”27. Overall, Lake’s position on Bosnia was a deeply ambivalent one. On the one hand he felt the US ought to do something, both for humanitarian reasons, and for what he perceived as reasons of national interest. On the other hand Lake was not going to get too far ahead of the President’s willingness to act, nor was he going to propose a course of action that would upset a harmonious relationship with the Secretary of State or the Secretary of Defense.
Clinton’s first Secretary of Defense would be Wisconsin Congressman Les Aspin. Aspin had been the long-time Chair of the House Armed Services Committee, and as such had a deep well of knowledge about issues of strategy and national defense. Before entering Congress, Aspin had served in the Pentagon as one of McNamara’s “whiz kids.” Although Aspin had served in a very junior post, nevertheless he too was aware of the danger of the US making small commitments which gradually snowballed into large ones.
Also, Aspin had ambitions to significantly reduce the Military budget. Although with the end of the Cold War, the Bush Administration had cut the defense budget by $300 billion over 10 years, Aspin believed that there were further cuts that could be found. To say the least, this was not an attitude which was likely to endear him to the Joint Chiefs; however, it did mean that they had a readily formed argument against any intervention in Bosnia. They could, and did, say to Aspin, you can cut the budget, or you can intervene in Bosnia, but you cannot do both: “Putting a division into Bosnia would require a so-called rotational base of three divisions; that, in turn, would prevent Clinton from [reducing] the Army as much as he aims to.”28 Aspin was not fated to have a very easy relationship with the uniformed Military in general; for years, Aspin had been the Congressman who had demanded answers from the Military and on more than one occasion had embarrassed the Military through his dogged questioning of witnesses. It was perhaps too much to ask that they now embrace him as Secretary of Defense: “Powell and Aspin had fought constantly about a number of issues, and Aspin had often seemed in the past like a man going round with a butcher knife to cut force levels.”29 Added to this was the fact that Aspin had a rather relaxed style that tended to irritate the Military. The Secretary frequently showed up late to meetings, and was not a man who seemed to take a great deal of pride in his appearance. This ran counter to the Military’s ethic of efficiency and immaculate uniform: “He could not run the Pentagon because he could not run himself. Stories of Aspin’s lack of discipline flooded the building from the first day—of his exploding in a rage at a subordinate over some minor infraction.”30
To sum up, the key players of the Clinton Foreign Policy team were a Secretary of State who had taken the job at the last possible second, a Secretary of Defense who had a difficult relationship with the Military, and a National Security Advisor, who at least to begin with would not force the issue of Bosnia onto the agenda.
On top of these personal and bureaucratic issues, the Clinton Administration was not free to make policy towards Bosnia in a vacuum. The Administration’s views on foreign intervention, particularly in the area of peacekeeping operations, were heavily influenced by the events in Somalia.31 Here, the US had sent a limited peacekeeping force to ensure the delivery of humanitarian aid, and the US had found itself over a period of time drawn into the Somali civil war. This involvement eventually led to the deaths of eighteen American troops and the wounding of 75. This led to the US mission to Somalia folding shortly afterwards. In the aftermath of the Somali fiasco, President Clinton ordered a review of US participation in peacekeeping operations of the kind that would need to be undertaken in the event of a ceasefire being agreed in Bosnia. This led to what became known as Presidential Decision Directive (PDD) 25.32
PDD 25 expressly limited the role and timescale US forces would be deployed on in US peacekeeping operations and was crystal clear in stating that, before the US would even consider committing troops as part of a multilateral peacekeeping force, there would need to be an “exit strategy” in place: “The operation’s anticipated duration is tied to clear objectives and realistic criteria for ending the operation.”33 PDD 25 also put other roadblocks in the way of US participation in or, indeed, the employment of any effective peacekeeping force to Bosnia, by the US pledging to use its veto to prevent the UN from taking money from other areas and loaning it to peacekeeping missions and also by insisting that Congress would have to approve of any peacekeeping deployments.
The Clinton Administration also faced a more complex situation on the ground than the situation which had confronted Bush. Desperate to show that they were not impotent in the face of a crisis, the Europeans, in particular the British and the French, had deployed troops to Bosnia as part of a UN “peace keeping” force. This force was wholly inadequate either to end the fighting or to provide protection to the civilian population. The best that this force could do was to provide armed escort for humanitarian supplies:
Mr Major [British Prime Minister, John Major 1990–1997] pledged 1,800 British troops for Bosnia, under the UN flag and ready to provide protection to UN relief convoys. Under the rules of engagement, the soldiers would be able to return fire in self-defence if a convoy was attacked, but could not “fight their way through” … The UN had scrapped ambitious plans for a peacekeeping force of 100,000, in favour of a 6,000-strong force compatible with Britain’s offer.34
This force, known ironically as the United Nations Protection Force (UNPROFOR), massively complicated the task of anybody advocating stronger military intervention to end the fighting. The peacekeepers were spread out all over the country in small units, and in line with their mandate they were not heavily armed. This made them extremely vulnerable to hostage taking. The Commander of the UN force in Bosnia between the end of 1993 and 1995, Sir Michael Rose, commented on the difficulty of the US using air power while the UN force was still on the ground: “The peacekeepers referred to this new policy as “stay and pray,” observing that it was, after all, their lives, not American lives, that were put at risk by this policy.”35
The nightmare scenario for London, Paris, and a host of European capitals, was that the US would bomb the Serbs in a hope of either altering their behavior or forcing them to the conference table, and the Serbs would react by killing or kidnapping peacekeepers. This in turn posed a problem for the US: supposing that the situation actually came to pass, what would the US response be? If the bombing was stepped up, that would only increase the risk to any hostages. If the bombing was stopped, then the point would have been made loud and clear that all you had to do was kidnap some blue helmets to get your way. Any rescue attempt would be risky to execute, and even if successful, would escalate the level of US involvement in the conflict. On the other hand the US would be morally obligated to do something. After all it would be US actions, either unilaterally, or through NATO, that would bring this situation to pass:
In Christopher’s view [Secretary of State Warren Christopher], a pullout or collapse of the UN protection force would be a disaster and had to be avoided at all costs because it would obligate the United States to live up to its commitment to supply the 20,000 troops to cover a retreat. Clinton could renege, but at the risk of destroying NATO. It would be unthinkable to abandon NATO, the most important alliance in the post-World War II period.36
The deployment of European peacekeepers to Bosnia meant that any conceivable US action in Bosnia had to consider more than just an air campaign. If the European allies were ever to be sold on the concept of military intervention, there would need to be some guarantee that the peacekeeping troops would either be able to defend themselves, or could be safely withdrawn. In either event, this seemed to imply a massive show of force on the ground by NATO, inevitably with US involvement.
The new Administration also found itself in the awkward position of having to either endorse or reject the latest peace plan for Bosnia within a few weeks of taking office. Since the previous spring, former British Foreign Secretary David Owen and former US Secretary of State Cyrus Vance had been trying to negotiate a settlement on behalf of the European Union and the UN respectively. The plan they came up with would retain Bosnia as a sovereign entity but would divide the country internally into a series of “cantons.” Each of these areas would have broad authority over domestic and policing affairs, whilst leaving the federal government in Sarajevo to deal essentially in Foreign and Monetary Affairs. Each of the cantons was divided along ethnic lines so there would be majority Serb, majority Muslim, and majority Croat cantons. On the one hand, the plan had the advantage of being the first comprehensive plan to end the fighting in Bosnia and reach some kind of a political settlement, and it seemed to meet the basic demands of all sides. From a Muslim point of view, it guaranteed Bosnia’s continued existence. From a Serb and Croat point of view, it promised autonomy bordering on independence. David Owen described the principles of his plan in the following way:
[The plan] defines Bosnia and Herzegovina as a decentralized state, with guaranteed freedom of movement throughout. [The plan] gives substantial autonomy to the provinces while denying them any international legal character. [The plan] provides for democratically elected national and local government and a mechanism for resolving disputes between them. [The plan] stresses strong, internationally monitored human rights provisions.37
However, from Washington’s point of view, the plan had a number of serious defects. First, the cantonal borders reflected gains on the grounds that the Serbs had made rather than the pre-war demographics. So the plan seemed, at least implicitly, to reward the Serb aggression that candidate Clinton had spoken so strongly against: “They were uncomfortable with a settlement that seemed to legitimize Serbian gains made at gunpoint. To do so would not jibe with their campaign rhetoric.”38
Second, the plan had no mechanism for its implementation. How exactly were the boundaries between the cantons to be enforced, and what would be the future of the armed forces of each faction? The only logical answer to this question was that some kind of military force would be necessary in order to separate the warring parties. This task would in all likelihood fall to NATO, so this would require some kind of US participation. David Owen acknowledges that a substantial military force would have been required to enforce his plan: “It is often forgotten that implementation of the Vance-Owen Peace Plan in January 1993 did not involve NATO troops, but envisaged a deployment of 15,000 UN troops, later revised upwards to 25,000.”39
What Owen neglects to mention in his outline of the plan is that it lacked any “exit strategy.” The plan essentially would have resulted in the ethnic hostilities that had started the war being frozen in place by the new Cantonal boundaries he was proposing. What the plan lacked was any means by which Bosnia’s different ethnic communities could live together in peace without outside military forces separating them. Owen’s plan was seemingly predicated on the idea that the UN would remain in force in Bosnia for an indefinite period of time. The Vance-Owen Plan contained the same fatal drawback that Vietnamization had had as an “exit strategy” in that the date at which foreign forces could leave Bosnia would be decided by factors beyond the control of the US. Under the Vance-Owen Plan, foreign forces could only leave when Bosnia’s various communities were prepared to leave in peace with each other without an international military presence. Given the centuries of enmity between these different groups, nobody could say when that would be or how long foreign forces might have to be committed to Bosnia. In other words, it could be said that Vance and Owen were making the same mistake that the Johnson Administration made, that is to say, committing troops in order to mask fundamental underlying weaknesses that a commitment of military force might temporarily alleviate but could not solve.
Added to this was the fact that there did not seem to be a readily available alternative. The same objections to military intervention that had confronted Bush confronted Clinton. Every time the option of airstrikes was considered, the question the military always posed in response was what if airstrikes don’t work? Was the Clinton Administration prepared to commit overwhelming force?40 And was the Administration prepared for the potential long-drawn out commitment to Bosnia? UN Ambassador Madeleine Albright sums up Powell’s attitude with the following observation:
He replied consistent with his commitment to the doctrine of overwhelming force … saying it would take tens of thousands of troops, cost billions of dollars, probably result in numerous casualties, and require a long and open-ended commitment of US forces. Time and again he led us up the hill of possibilities and dropped us off on the other side with the practical equivalent of “No can do.”41
What we can see from Albright’s quotation is that Powell considered by using the option of airstrikes the United States would be committing itself to a role in the conflict without committing enough to ensure that its objectives were met. If airstrikes did not achieve their objective, the US would be left in the position of having to continue to engage in military action on an open-ended basis. In terms of an “exit strategy,” airstrikes alone had the same fundamental problem that the Vance-Owen Plan suffered from, in that the exit from such a commitment relied on factors beyond US control. It would depend on how much punishment the Serbs were willing to take before they changed their behavior, a threshold the United States could not know. It also relied on the Muslims and Croats being able to take advantage of the US airstrikes provided. Again, the US could not guarantee that this would be the case.
The questions the Military were asking of their civilian masters were, how committed are you to military action? What price are you prepared to pay? And if we get into Bosnia, how do we get out again?
So the Clinton Administration was prevented from taking part in a peacekeeping operation in Bosnia by the lack of an “exit strategy.” It was equally unable to devise a form of limited military intervention that offered a viable “exit strategy.” Wherever the Clinton Administration looked it was unable to fashion a coherent policy because the ability of US forces to extricate themselves from Bosnia once committed depended entirely on factors over which the United States had no direct control.
In the absence of a plan to end the fighting, smaller scale military options were also considered, such as the use of US forces to open a permanent land corridor between Sarajevo and the outside world. However, these schemes too ran into problems. When asked how many troops it would take to accomplish this, the Military, in line with the Powell Doctrine, erred on the side of overwhelming force and produced an estimate of up to 50,000 troops. If the Administration was prepared to make that large a commitment of troops to a very limited objective, why not commit more troops and try to find a solution to the war?42 And yet again there was no clear way to bring such a commitment to an end. The end of any military action, the objective of which was the safe delivery of humanitarian aid, would, by definition, lack an “exit strategy,” as the end of this mission would be dependent upon factors that the United States had no means of exerting decisive influence over. The United States could offer to mediate the conflict, it could put forward its own plan to end the conflict, or it could try and hand off the protection of aid to the “international community.” It could do all of these things, but none of them could guarantee a willingness on behalf of the combatants to end the war or guarantee an international willingness to take over any mission from the United States. The US could then simply stop protecting the delivery of aid, but that would be an end rather than an “exit strategy” because, presumably, if the United States simply stopped offering protection, that would not remove the need for that protection.
With Vance-Owen safely disposed of, Clinton’s national security team was free to fashion its own policy. The Bosnia strategy that was finally agreed came to be known as “Lift and Strike.” This policy called for the lifting of an arms embargo on the Bosnian Muslims. However, the problem with simply lifting the arms embargo was that the Serbs’ massive inbuilt advantage in fire power was not likely to be offset for some time, even with an influx of arms to the Muslims, and it would be necessary to mount airstrikes against the Serbs in the interregnum to prevent them from ending the war on their own terms before the Muslims could benefit from new weaponry. The basic premise behind the strategy was that by arming the Muslims the US could create a level playing field between the various armies, thus leading to a stalemate and renewed interest in negotiation. This strategy had three principal advantages: first, it would require no US ground presence as the peace could be maintained by a balance of power between the factions themselves; second, it promised a negotiated end to the war; and third, by linking the airstrikes to the embargo, it promised to reduce the level at which and the period of time that the US was committed to airstrikes. However, such a strategy still carried the risk of developing into an open-ended commitment. What would happen for instance, if the Serbs managed to shoot down a US pilot? The US would naturally have to mount either a rescue operation or negotiate for their release. In either case the US stake in the conflict would have been raised.
The President approved the plan on the condition that it was agreed to by the Europeans. This condition can be seen in one of two ways: either that Clinton was not completely convinced by the policy and hoped that the Europeans would reject it for him, or that, with European troops already deployed to Bosnia, Clinton did not want to strain NATO any further by taking unilateral action. In any event, the European allies were not convinced that “Lift and Strike” was a viable policy, and Secretary of State Christopher was distinctly lukewarm in selling the plan.
Lift and Strike was essentially intervention on the cheap. Halberstam fairly describes “Lift and Strike” in the following terms: “America sought to be internationalist on the cheap and remain partially isolationist.”43 It did not meet at least three of the tests laid down by the Powell Doctrine.
It did not promise intervention with overwhelming force. Its objective was somewhat fuzzy insofar as it had nothing to say about what would happen if the Sarajevo government could not turn its position around, even with additional weaponry. And finally, Lift and Strike threatened to entangle the US in a war where its interests were poorly defined. In terms of an “exit strategy,” Lift and Strike was better than a policy based on airstrikes alone insofar as Lift and Strike did at least offer a mechanism by which Bosnia’s Muslims and Croats could even the military balance with the Serbs for themselves. However, it was still flawed insofar as “exit strategy” was concerned because it still relied, as Vietnamization had, on the ability of an indigenous force to absorb aid proffered by the United States. There was also the question of what would happen if the scales tipped too far in the opposite direction. Would the US be infinitely committed to ensuring a balance of force between the various parties to the Bosnian conflict? Lift and Strike ultimately suffered from the same flaw as the Vance-Owen Plan and all other military options considered by the Clinton Administration in that, in order to get to the end-state the Clinton Adminstration desired, the United States was reliant on other actors behaving as the United States would want them to behave, whilst, at the same time, the US had limited leverage to make sure that other actors would act as the United States wanted them to.
Between the springs of 1993 and 1995, US policy towards Bosnia could accurately be summed up as one of containment to try and limit the conflict’s intensity and to try and alleviate human suffering by continuing the supply of aid and to prevent the conflict from spreading outside the borders of the former Yugoslavia. During this period there was a whole plethora of peace plans and initiatives put forward.
All of these well intentioned plans came to nothing because they did nothing to overcome the fundamental stumbling block to any successful negotiation. Without outside intervention to alter the military balance of power there was no reason for the Serbs to negotiate. They were in by far the strongest military position and could effectively take and keep what they wanted through force. The inverse of that was true in that the Bosnian Muslims wanted negotiations, but had no leverage with which to bargain. And finally, without some neutral but heavily armed arbiter to enforce the peace, no agreement was likely to stick amongst the mutual hate and suspicion of the warring parties.
By 1995, although the situation on the ground in Bosnia remained relatively static, the situation in Washington was beginning to shift dramatically. The Presidency of Bill Clinton had been through a rocky ride. Although for the first two years of his Administration the Democrats had for the first time in 12 years controlled both the Presidency and Congress, yet Clinton had never been able to establish a very comfortable relationship with Congress and had struggled to pass key elements of his economic recovery plan and other important pieces of legislation. On top of these domestic troubles,44 Clinton’s foreign policy was scattered with crises which had either not been dealt with, or were seen not to have been dealt with well. The US humanitarian mission to Somalia had met with loss of life and embarrassing withdrawal, attempts to restore the democratically elected government of Haiti had been halting, if ultimately successful, and there was a general sense that foreign policy was not an area in which Clinton was particularly comfortable. Bosnia had become more than just the facts on the ground, it had become a symbol of an Administration that was skating from crisis to crisis, and had yet to set a firm direction for US foreign policy in the post-Cold War world. As Clinton himself acknowledged:
We’re in the worst possible situation. We are not in a position we can sustain. The Europeans could bring forces to bear but they prefer to whine at us. We have a war by CNN. Our position is unsustainable, it’s killing the US position of strength in the world.45
The second major domestic factor which drove a reappraisal of US policy towards Bosnia was that the Republican Party gained control of Congress after the 1994 mid-term elections.46 Just as Clinton had used Bosnia as a stick to beat George Bush in 1992, so the Republicans had used it against Clinton in 1994. Shortly after Congress reconvened, a Bill was introduced that would mean that the US would no longer enforce the UN mandated arms embargo on the former Yugoslavia, and would provide $ 200 million worth of arms to the Bosnian Muslim government.
From Clinton’s point of view this would be damaging on three fronts; first, to sign such a Bill would effectively seed control over Bosnian policy to Congress; second, it was likely to lead to a major crisis in the relationship between the US and the UN, and by extension a crisis in the relationship between the US and a variety of western European countries, in particular Britain and France, whose troops on the ground would be left exposed to even greater risk, and third, there was the possibility that such an infusion of arms would not do anything to end the war but merely escalate it to new levels of violence, prompting even greater pressure for eventual US intervention. And, to add to President Clinton’s worries, from late 1994 onwards public opinion had begun to turn against Clinton’s handling of Bosnia.47
Also, factors on the international stage were driving the US towards a more robust stance over Bosnia. The war was becoming a road block to improving relations with Russia,48 and also the issue had the effect of completely overshadowing the US’s other priorities for its European policy.
Attitudes in Europe were also changing. Although the British remained stubbornly opposed to the use of force to try to bring the conflict to an end, the French, who were the largest contributors to UNPROFOR, had begun to shift their position towards being ready to consider intervention in order to bring what seemed like a never ending presence in the middle of a civil war to an end.
The position of the US Military had also begun to change in subtle ways. Colin Powell was no longer Chairman of the Joint Chiefs. His replacement was Lieutenant General John Shalikashvilli. Although Shalikashvilli broadly agreed with the Powell Doctrine, his experience of the Military and his background was somewhat different from Powell’s. Shalikashvilli had come to America as a 15 year old, his family was Georgian in origin, and he spent his formative years in Poland. As such, he had direct experience of the fate of refugees as his family had come from the United States as refugees. This may have served to give him a sense of empathy with people facing similar situations, and he certainly had an intimate knowledge of the history of Eastern Europe and the Balkans.
Shalikashvilli had served in Vietnam, his later career had taken him in a very different direction from Powell—whilst Powell had been serving in the military bureaucracy in Washington, Shalikashvilli had served in a variety of European commands. And whilst Powell was serving as Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, Shalikashvilli had been serving as Deputy SACEUR (Supreme Allied Commander Europe). As such he had been responsible for organizing the relief operation for the Iraqi Kurds at the end of the first Gulf War. The lesson he took from this was that whilst the Powell Doctrine was certainly valid, it had to be applied more flexibly in the post-Cold War world, where the US was going to find itself faced with a variety of challenges which would involve civil wars and civilian displacement: “Shalikashvili would go around saying that the chairman of the Joint Chiefs did not have the right to put a notice on his door saying, ‘I’m sorry—we only do the big ones,’ and signed ‘John Shalikashvili.’”49 But engaging in humanitarian missions was not just a matter of finding a rationale for the Military’s existence. Shalikashvili also believed that they were intrinsically worthwhile: “Shalikashvili’s sensitivity to the plight of refugees was genuine, and it was to be a consistent part of his career:”50
I know you’re all tough warriors, and I know that sometimes some of you feel that being here is something of a disappointment and that this is not exactly your kind of mission. But when you wake up tomorrow, I want you to look in the mirror and say to yourselves, “I think I saved a lot of lives today—I think I’ve done something of value.” You have a right to feel good about yourselves and I hope you do.51
Shalikashvilli was not alone in reassessing the Military’s attitude towards Bosnia. Because European NATO members had taken it upon themselves to become involved with the UNPROFOR, NATO had steadily acquired a role in supporting the UN’s activities in Bosnia; this changed the nature of the stakes in Bosnia in a significant way. No longer was Bosnia somebody else’s civil war, it had become a test of NATO’s relevance in the post-Cold War world. As Assistant Secretary of State Richard Holbrooke put it:
We could not remain aloof from this. For larger strategic reasons, for historical reasons, and for humanitarian and moral reasons, American leadership was still needed in Europe, and that leadership was essential, because, left to themselves, the European Union members could not deal with the problem.52
This led senior US officers within NATO, in particular SACEUR George Joulwan, to press for a more forceful response to Serb actions against UN designated safe areas. This brings us on to the final catalyst for US and NATO intervention:
As the war escalated in the autumn of 1994, senior American officers, such as Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General John Shalikashvilli, and the NATO Supreme Allied Commander [SACEUR], General George Joulwan, began to see the reputation of the NATO alliance being undermined.53
If Shalikashvilli and Joulwan were moving towards a more activist stance, then the immediate commander on the ground, Admiral Leighton “Snuffy” Smith, was much more reluctant. Smith’s attitude and biography fitted the Powell Doctrine like a glove. Smith graduated from the US Naval Academy in 1962 and went on to fly combat missions over North Vietnam, earning two Distinguished Service Medals in the process. From his experience in Vietnam Smith carried with him a distrust of politicians:
If you and a politician are bantering back and forth about the use of military, military officers are not trained to be politicians. We don’t eat like them, sleep like them, drink like them, talk like them, think like them. And that’s neither good nor bad, it’s just a fact of life.54
While Shalikashvilli and Joulwan may have been thinking about the broader geopolitical implications of Bosnia, Smith was dealing with the complex and messy reality of day to day operations in Bosnia: “ … now you’re trying to sort out claims of territory, because that’s where my ancestor lived seven hundred years ago. … It’s a terribly terrible complex issue … ”55 Smith was not necessarily completely opposed to any kind of US intervention in Bosnia, but if intervention was going to happen, he wanted it to be as small scale as possible, as short as possible, and with very limited objectives:
… get the military mission as clear as you can. Colin Powell and others before him have said, give me clear statement, give me a clear mission, it’s got to be unambiguous. What you need to understand is, when you’ve got 54,000 soldiers from 34 to 35 different nations involved, you’ve got to make it as plain as possible … 56
In terms of keeping any US commitment as small scale as possible, Smith took the very strong view that the limit of US involvement should be the separation of opposing forces. Smith was very strongly against any kind of policing or humanitarian mission, “ … soldiers do not make good policemen, this is not a good idea. Don’t send these guys on police missions; they are not policemen.”57
So to summarize, by the spring and summer of early 1995, of the three most crucial uniformed military commanders dealing with Bosnia, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, Commander Allied Forces Europe, and the Operational Commander of NATO Forces in the Mediterranean, two out of the three were moving towards a position of supporting US intervention, and the third was prepared to accept intervention under certain very specific conditions. The point to be noted here is that, from first to last, the Clinton Administration never came up with a Bosnian policy that included a viable “exit strategy.” However, by the spring of 1995, this concern had been overtaken by larger concerns about the future credibility of NATO, the credibility of the United States as an actor involved in European security issues, and the credibility of Bill Clinton as Commander-in-Chief.
It fell to National Security Advisor Anthony Lake to be the man who formed the sense that something had to be done into a coherent plan. The strategy Lake developed called for the US and NATO to use a combination of sticks and carrots to cajole all three sides into negotiation. For the Serbs, the stick was to be the threat of strategic airstrikes, and the carrot was to be the removal of sanctions on Belgrade. And for the Muslims and Croats, the carrot was to be the threat of strategic bombing against the Serbs if they did not agree to negotiate, and the stick was to be a threat that the US and Western Europe would walk away and leave Bosnia to its fate if they failed to negotiate. The basis for this negotiation was to be a map which divided Bosnia-Herzegovina into two “entities”—a Muslim-Croat federation, which had been agreed to in 1994, and a Bosnian-Serb entity. Both of these entities would have broad powers over domestic issues, leaving a federal government headed by a joint presidency, including one Muslim, one Croat, and one Serb, to deal with external relations and monetary affairs. The map split Bosnia 51 percent to 49 percent in favor of the federation. This would mean that under the plan the Serbs would have to give up approximately 20 percent of the land they currently occupied. This plan had been formulated by the so-called “Contact Group.” This was the US, Britain, France, Russia, Germany, and the UN. As such, this plan was able to win broad acceptance within NATO.58 Nowhere in the plan Lake devised was much emphasis placed on the lack of an “exit strategy.” Lake’s plan faced the same problems of the lack of an “exit strategy” that the Vance-Owen plan had faced; namely that there needed to be an outside commitment of neutral heavily armed troops to separate the two sides. Nowhere in Lake’s plan was an estimation of how long this force would need to be in place. What had changed between the Vance-Owen plan and the plan Lake drew up was that the US and European contexts in which the war was being fought had changed in such a way as to render the lack of an “exit strategy” less of a critical drawback.
Were airstrikes to be launched by NATO, the man in charge would be Admiral Leighton Smith. Smith already had responsibility for enforcing the UN-mandated no-fly-zone over the former Yugoslavia, and his staff had planned for the kind of air campaign that was being contemplated. However, Smith personally was not convinced that the US should take a major role in enforcing an end to the Bosnian war. He was acutely aware of the possibility for guerrilla warfare and skeptical of the idea that air power alone could guarantee a change in Serb behavior. Nevertheless, Smith was determined that if called upon to execute an air campaign it would be swift and massive.
In late September 1995, the issue was finally settled when a Serb mortar landed in a Sarajevo marketplace. NATO aircraft began a series of coordinated strikes against Serb positions around Sarajevo. These strikes were backed up by artillery fire. Within two days the Serb gun positions around Sarajevo had been silenced and the air campaign had expanded to cover a broad range of military targets across Serb-held areas of Bosnia.
At the same time, although unconnected to the air campaign, the Croatian army launched a massive ground offensive to retake areas of Croatia occupied by a rebel Serbian Croat army in 1991. Since the cease fire in Croatia had gone into effect in 1992, the Croat army had been completely re-equipped with supplies shipped in defiance of the UN arms embargo:
Croatian forces on what was the Serb western front, somewhat belatedly armed by the outside world, had been in training under former American army officers for more than half a year and could for the first time match the Serbs in firepower.59
The net result of this was that the Croats were far better armed and far better trained than their Serb opponents, the predictable result being that the Serb-held enclave in Croatia all but collapsed within a matter of weeks. This Croat offensive threatened to spill over into Western Bosnia. Croat and Federation forces had already been cooperating with each other for some time, and under the cover of allied airstrikes federation forces had already managed to launch their own offensive on Western Bosnia, driving large numbers of Serb refugees before them, and threatening to take the largest city in Serb hands, Banja Luka.
It was at this point that the president of Serbia proper, Slobodan Milosevic, decided to take matters into his own hands. He arranged for a meeting between himself and the Bosnian Serb leaders, at which it was agreed that Milosevic would head a joint Bosnian Serb/Serb delegation to peace talks at an American Air Force base in Dayton, Ohio. This joint delegation served to make the negotiating process much easier:
For sixteen months, the Contact Group had argued fruitlessly with Milosevic over how to get the Bosnian Serbs to participate in negotiations … Now we had the answer to the question we had asked for those sixteen months: who would speak for Pale? And the answer was: Slobodan Milosevic.60
After more than two weeks of talks, an agreement broadly in line with the Contact Group Map was initialed. As part of this agreement, a multi-national peacekeeping force known as the Stabilization Force (SFOR) was formed. As part of this force, the US agreed to deploy 25,000 troops for one year. Holbrooke understood that this one-year deadline would not prove helpful:
Nevertheless, announcing before the peace talks began that we would withdraw in twelve months, no matter what happened on the ground, was not an “exit strategy” but an exit deadline—something quite different, and quite misleading.61
In fact, the last US troops were withdrawn from Bosnia in 2005. US troops were deployed to Bosnia on a one-year timetable so that they would have a guaranteed “exit strategy.” However, this rather neat assumption simply did not take into account the reality of the situation on the ground. It took US forces several months of the year they were notionally supposed to be in Bosnia just to finish deploying to the region. Even without the Holy Grail of a guaranteed exit, US forces in Bosnia were not to suffer a single casualty as a result of hostile action. Far from being a quagmire, US involvement in Bosnia after 1995 was a cakewalk. It is interesting to note that the strictures laid down by PDD 25, as discussed earlier in this chapter, when they came into contact with the reality of the situation on the ground in Bosnia, were ignored as American troops ended up being deployed in Bosnia on peacekeeping duties on an open-ended basis.
What we have seen in this chapter is that a successful “exit strategy” depends on the ability of the US to shape the environment so that it can choose a point at which to exit a conflict. However, conflicts by definition are never susceptible to this level of control. The opponent will always have at least a degree of control over the environment in which the conflict takes place. Therefore, an “exit strategy” in the sense of having a defined means of bringing a conflict to an end before you engage in it, whilst at the same time not undermining the objectives you are fighting for, is almost an impossibility.
So how does the need for a clear “exit strategy” mesh with the rest of the Powell Doctrine? Two relationships in particular stand out; the relationship between an “exit strategy” and the need to maintain public and Congressional support, and the relationship between the need for an “exit strategy” and the need for clear objectives.
The need for an “exit strategy” and the need to maintain public support are linked by the notion that there is a finite amount of time that the public is prepared to support any commitment, and also the fact that it is easier to maintain public support if you can explain in simple terms when and under what conditions you expect to be able to bring military commitment to a close. As we have seen earlier in this chapter, it had become clear to US policy makers by 1968 that the point of diminishing public support had been reached. However, because policy makers had no well thought out plan to leave Vietnam and were essentially dependent upon an improving political and military situation in South Vietnam in order to allow them to withdraw, the US found itself in the invidious position of having to continue to fight with ever diminishing public and legislative support because public support for the war ebbed away faster than US forces could be withdrawn. Therefore in order for these two elements of the Powell Doctrine to make logical sense, they have to work in tandem.
A withdrawal should not go on past the point at which public support has been lost for a particular deployment, otherwise the situation will become corrosive as with Vietnam, and the public will begin not only to lose support for a particular operation or undertaking, but will begin to withdraw support from the Armed Forces themselves and the institutions that support them. Likewise, a well-founded “exit strategy” will inevitably be based on how long the planners think that public support can be maintained.
Interestingly in the case of Bosnia, this initial “exit strategy” was abandoned and public support for the deployment did not significantly suffer. Yet US forces remained extremely reluctant to build on this initial success and carry out some of the more complex and potentially riskier tasks laid down in the Dayton Accords. The logical reasons for this would be that US planners retained the fear that taking on these additional risks might have undermined support or more likely, these tasks may have resulted in increased US casualties which would also have had the effect of undermining public support for the mission.
In terms of the connection between the need for a clear “exit strategy” and the need for clear objectives, one clearly follows from the other. In order to know when the time has come to end a particular operation, there needs to be a clearly defined objective that can be said to have been achieved. An “exit strategy” need not necessarily be one based on a period of time, it could be a strategy based on the achievement of a very clearly measurable objective. For example, if we look at the Bosnian case study, a different “exit strategy” could have been adopted based on setting up the federal structures agreed to in the Dayton Agreement, and returning refugees. US forces could have been deployed to Bosnia for as long as it took to establish these institutions and then begin to withdraw once these institutions were functional. Eventually this was to become the de facto “exit strategy” that the US would adopt.
The problem with tying an “exit strategy” to a particular objective is that the objective needs to be quantifiable. For instance, if an “exit strategy” was predicated on the basis of, for example, creating a stable and secure environment in Bosnia, this would not be a particularly credible “exit strategy” because there are numerous different ways one could go about defining “stable and secure.” It would not be an easy matter to define how far you are from achieving this objective, and so your presence could easily become an open-ended one, whilst a never ending debate about what constitutes progress means that a credible “exit strategy” can never be agreed upon. To some extent this was the problem that the US faced in Vietnam, in that there was consensus within the Nixon Administration that the US forces would not be able to leave Vietnam until the capabilities of the South Vietnamese armed forces had been improved. But the question of how and what measures should be used to define increased capability became a vexed one. Was it a matter of just measuring the size and sophistication of the South Vietnamese armed forces? Was it a matter of how much territory they controlled (and if so, how do you define control)? Or was it a matter of how they performed in combat? And what happens if there is no improvement? It is at least partially because this debate over what constituted progress towards US objectives, that the withdrawal of US ground troops in effect became an exercise that was, to a large extent unrelated to the situation on the ground in Vietnam and a process that owed much more to the state of domestic politics in the US.
Before closing this chapter it seems appropriate to return briefly to the definition of an “exit strategy” given at the opening of this chapter. How often is it possible for the US, or for that matter any single actor, in anything as complex and involved as military operations, to have the degree of control over the circumstances surrounding it as is required by a successful “exit strategy.” Certainly this is easier in the context of a conventional war between two states. In this context the US can simply set its objective as the destruction of the enemy’s capability to make war and with the massive industrial and technological advantage the US enjoys over any conceivable opponent, it can shape the circumstances of the battlefield to achieve this objective and there is little that an opponent can do to prevent this.
However, in the context of a situation such as Bosnia, where the US’s objective is not to defeat an enemy but to create a political and military process which is compatible with its interests; the question of how much control any single actor can have over that process is questionable. On paper, the need for a clear “exit strategy” sounds eminently sensible and the connection between this element and other elements of the Powell Doctrine is a matter of simple deductive logic. However, in reality there are too many competing political, strategic, economic and perhaps even moral considerations to allow the US to have the freedom of action that a true “exit strategy” needs in order to succeed. If the Powell Doctrine had been strictly applied to the Bosnian case study the US would never have become involved. There was simply too much about the situation that the US could not control, and that therefore a clear “exit strategy” could not be envisioned. It was only when the political consequences of doing nothing had reached critical mass for the Clinton Administration, and the “exit strategy” point of the Powell Doctrine for Bosnia was essentially fudged, the imposition of a one year deadline on US involvement was widely seen as being unrealistic, and it came as no great surprise when that deadline was extended and then abandoned.
Perhaps then, rather than insisting upon the need for an “exit strategy” at the outset, a better question for policy makers to ask might be, is the operation that we are about to undertake worth the possibility of an open ended military commitment? The answer to that question ultimately lies in how a President defines a “national interest,” and their confidence in their ability to convince the majority of the American people that this definition is the correct one, and their confidence in their ability to maintain that conviction through potentially serious US loss of life.
What we have seen in this chapter then is that the Powell Doctrine’s insistence on an “exit strategy” was born from the fact that in Vietnam the US found itself continuing to fight a war its political class and the public at large had given up on winning, simply because the Nixon Administration tried to tie US withdrawal to factors that were largely beyond its control. When this effort failed the Nixon Administration unilaterally withdrew from Vietnam, leading to the ultimate defeat of South Vietnam. The result of this was that the US Armed Forces had been asked to fight for five years from 1968–1973 for essentially no purpose and also that the Nixon Administration’s efforts to maintain the US presence whilst simultaneously admitting that the US had to withdraw, led to a political crisis that was to inflict long term damage on the American people’s confidence in their own institutions of government. Second, we have seen how the need for an “exit strategy” was one of the factors that stymied serious US involvement in the worst European war in 50 years, and third we have seen that the need for a clear “exit strategy” has to be an element of the Powell Doctrine if we are to properly to understand the Doctrine’s insistence on the need for clear objectives and public support.
1 For a discussion of Bosnia policy under George H.W. Bush, see Chapter 2, this volume.
2 Caspar W. Weinberger. 1984. “The Uses of Military Power,” National Press Club, Washington, D.C., Nov. 28th 1984. [Online]. Available at: http://www.airforce-magazine.com/MagazineArchive/Documents/2004/January%202004/0104keeperfull.pdf [Accessed January 12, 2008].
3 See Chapter 1, this volume, pp.13–40.
4 There is much historical work detailing US strategy in Vietnam and the events in 1968, which forced US policy makers to the conclusion that the war was a stalemate. See Larry Berman, Lyndon Johnson’s War: The Road to Stalemate in Vietnam (New York: W.W. Norton, 1989); and Lloyd C. Gardner, Pay Any Price: Lyndon Johnson and the Wars for Vietnam (Chicago: Elephant Paperbacks, 1997). See in particular Clark Clifford, “A Vietnam Reappraisal,” Foreign Affairs, 47(4) (1969), pp.601–22.
5 Richard Nixon, No More Vietnams (London: W.H. Allen, 1986). p.104.
6 Lt. Gen. Phillip B. Davidson (Ret.), Vietnam at War: The History 1946–1975 (Novato, CA: Presidio Press, 1988), p.476.
7 William Conrad Gibbons, The US Government and the Vietnam War: Executive and Legislative Roles and Relationships, Part IV: July 1965-January 1968 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995), p.424. For a discussion of just how pervasive and engrained in South Vietnamese politics corruption had become, see Gabriel Kolko, Anatomy of a War: Vietnam, The United States, and the Modern Historical Experience (London: Phoenix Press, 2001).
8 The US Government and the Vietnam War, p.424.
9 Henry Kissinger, Ending the Vietnam War: A History of America’s Involvement in and Extrication from the Vietnam War (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2003). p.84.
10 Kissinger 2003, p.84.
11 US Department of Commerce: Bureau of Economic Analysis. [2013] Defense Spending US- Quarterly [Online]. Available at: http://www.data360.org/dsg.aspx?Data_Set_Group_Id=55 [Accessed December 12, 2013].
12 For the most detailed account of Laird machinations with the JCS, see Mark Perry, Four Stars: The Inside Story of the Forty-Year Battle Between the Joint Chiefs of Staff and America’s Civilian Leaders (Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 1989), Chapter 7.
13 Gabriel Kolko, Anatomy of a War (New York: Pantheon, 1985), p.483.
14 US Embassy in Vietnam. 1965. Telegram from the Embassy in Vietnam to the Department of State, June 17th, 1965. [Online]. Available at: http://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1964–68v03/d5 [Accessed December 12, 2013].
15 Lewis Sorley, A Better War: The Unexamined Victories and Final Tragedy of America’s Last Years in Vietnam (New York: Harcourt Brace & Company, 1999), p.113.
16 Robert McNamara with Brian VanDeMark, In Retrospect: The Tragedy and Lessons of Vietnam (New York: Vintage Books, 1996). p.322.
17 McNamara with VanDeMark 1996, p.323.
18 John Lewis Gaddis, Strategies of Containment: A Critical Appraisal of Postwar American National Security Policy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982), p.298.
19 D. Michael Shafer, “The Unlearned Lessons of Counterinsurgency,” Political Science Quarterly [Online], 103(1) (Spring 1988), p.76. Available at: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2151141 [Accessed 17th January, 2010].
20 Colin Powell. 1992. Why Generals get Nervous. New York Times, 8th October. [Online]. Available at: http://www.nytimes.com/1992/10/08/opinion/why-generals-get-nervous.html [Accessed February 8, 2008].
21 Vietnam at War, p.477.
22 David Halberstam, War in a Time of Peace: Bush, Clinton, and the Generals (London: Bloomsbury, 2001). p.247.
23 My American Journey, p.140.
24 Powell and Persico 1996, p.544.
25 Karen DeYoung, Soldier. The Life of Colin Powell (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2006), p.235.
26 All references to Bush in this chapter refer to George H.W. Bush.
27 I.M. Destler, Leslie H. Gelb, and Anthony Lake, Our Own Worst Enemy. The Unmaking of American Foreign Policy (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1984), p.279.
28 Christopher M. Gacek, The Logic of Force. The Dilemma of Limited War in American Foreign Policy (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), p.331.
29 War in a Time of Peace, p.244.
30 Halberstam 2001, p.246.
31 For an account of the entire Somalian intervention, see John L. Hirschand Robert B. Oakley, Somalia and Operation Restore Hope: Reflections on Peacemaking and Peacekeeping (Washington, DC: United States Institute of Peace Press, 1995). Robert Oakley was the US Special Representative to Somalia between 1992 and 1993. For a specific account of the Ranger mission that led to 18 American deaths and 75 wounded, see Mark Bowden, Black Hawk Down (London: Bantam, 1999).
32 Presidential Decision Directives were used in the Clinton Administration as definitive policy guidelines.
33 Bureau of International Organizational Affairs. 1994. Presidential Decision Directive 25, “US Policy on Reforming Multilateral Peace Operations,” The White House, Washington, May 6, 1994. [Online]. Available at: http://www.fas.org/irp/offdocs/pdd25.htm [Accessed December 12, 2013].
34 Ed Vulliamy, Seasons in Hell. Understanding Bosnia’s War (London: Simon and Schuster, 1994), p.159.
35 General Sir Michael Rose, Fighting for Peace. Lessons from Bosnia (London: Warner Books, 1999), p.13. Italics in the original.
36 Bob Woodward, The Choice (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1996), p.257.
37 David Owen, Balkan Odyssey (London:Indigo, 1996), p.94.
38 War in a Time of Peace, p.198.
39 Balkan Odyssey, p.392.
40 See Chapter 2, this volume, pp.41–62.
41 Soldier, pp.235–6.
42 For a discussion of plans to end the siege of Sarajevo, see, Elizabeth Drew, On the Edge: The Clinton Presidency (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1994), chapter 14.
43 War in a Time of Peace, p.225.
44 For a detailed account of Clinton’s first two years in office, see Elizabeth Drew, On the Edge: The Clinton Presidency (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1994); and Nigel Hamilton, Bill Clinton. Mastering the Presidency (London: Century, 2007), pp.5–383.
45 The Choice, p.261.
46 For a discussion of Clinton’s general relationship with this new Republican Congress, see Elizabeth Drew, Showdown: The Struggle between the Gingrich Congress and the Clinton White House (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1995).
47 In a series of polls commissioned by NBC and The Wall Street Journal between August 1992 and September 1997 in response to the question, In general, do you approve or disapprove of the job (President) Bill Clinton is doing in handling the situation in Bosnia?, between the end of 1994 and the end of 1995, public disapproval of Clinton’s handling of Bosnia averaged 45 percent. See Richard Sobel, “Trends: United States Intervention in Bosnia,” The Public Opinion Quarterly, 62(2) (Summer 1998), pp.262–3. Full text available at: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2749625.
48 Interestingly, the memoirs of Clinton’s second Secretary of Defense William Perry, only ever mention Bosnia in the context of its impact with the relationship with Russia. See, Ashton Carter and William Perry, Preventive Defense: A New Security Strategy for America (Washington D.C.: Brookings Institution Press, 1999).
49 Halberstam 2001, p.391.
50 Halberstam 2001, p.323.
51 Halberstam 2001, p.325.
52 PBS. Frontline, 1999. Interview with Ambassador Richard Holbrooke. Available at: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/military/guys/holbrooke.html [Accessed December 12, 2013].
53 Tim Ripley, Operation Deliberate Force. The UN and NATO Campaign in Bosnia 1995 (CDISS, Lancaster, 1999), p.92.
54 PBS. Frontline, 1999. Interview with Admiral Leighton Smith. Available at: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/military/guys/smith.html [Accessed December 12, 2013].
55 Frontline 1999.
56 Frontline 1999.
57 Frontline 1999.
58 For a description of Lake’s plan by the man who had to negotiate for its acceptance, see Richard Holbrooke, To End a War (New York: The Modern Library, 1998), pp.78–9.
59 War in a Time of Peace, p.293.
60 To End a War, pp.105–6.
61 To End a War, p.211.