We also had to work around the collapse of the Haitian government, which had been a fragile and barely functional institution even before the earthquake. How to respect Haitian sovereignty if there was no Haitian leadership or partner? Many officials had been killed, including in the national police, survivors had little or no communications equipment, and President René Préval was initially reclusive and nearly incommunicado. Once he and some of his ministers established offices in the police headquarters at the airport, they formally asked the United States to assume control of the airport, but confusion among the Haitian leaders reigned—including who was in charge of what. That made coordination difficult to say the least.
Our relationship with the UN mission in Haiti was also problematic. The “UN Stabilization Mission in Haiti” (MINUSTAH) had been established in 1994 after the ouster of Aristide. Its roughly 9,000 security personnel from about a dozen countries had been commanded continuously by Brazilian officers. The force commander at the time of the earthquake was Brigadier General Floriano Peixoto Vieira Neto. Keen worked hard to establish a good working relationship with Neto, and after several tense days of jockeying over roles and missions, on January 22, agreement was reached that MINUSTAH and the Haitian national police would provide domestic security, and the U.S. and Canadian militaries would distribute humanitarian aid and provide security for aid distribution. Our troops were authorized to defend themselves if attacked but otherwise were only to provide a secure environment to get relief supplies to the people.
Criticism that the U.S. military response had been too slow in ramping up came from the press and Congress as well as the White House. We were asked, in particular, why we had not just air-dropped relief supplies to the Haitians. The answer seemed obvious, at least to me. There was the risk that supplies dropped near concentrations of people would actually hit those clamoring to be the first to claim the water and food. Without security and order on the ground, airdrops might provoke riots and widespread violence. We were trying to put in place a relief infrastructure and logistics supply chain that could be sustained for weeks and months. We knew speed was important, but disorganization and more chaos would only hurt the Haitian effort. I told the press on January 15 that I did not see how the United States, and the Pentagon, could have responded any faster.
Some of the forces we deployed to Haiti had been in the pipeline to go to Afghanistan, so I was eager to begin drawing down our relief commitment as early as feasible. Both State and the White House wanted our military there as long as possible. We worked it out amicably, reducing force levels in early May and concluding our efforts in June. I met with the Brazilian defense minister at the Pentagon in early April, and we agreed that, after some “rough patches,” we had developed a positive and effective partnership. I give Keen—and General Fraser—a lot of credit for that, and for the overall effectiveness of our relief effort. Looking ahead, though, the task of rebuilding a ravaged, desperately poor, and badly governed Haiti was not a military mission.
The U.S. military also rendered substantial assistance during the historic flooding in Pakistan during the summer of 2010. By late July, one-fifth of the country was underwater, with 20 million people affected and some 2,000 dead. Many of the roads needed to reach victims were destroyed or inundated. Our military help began on August 1–2 with the delivery of food, water filtration plants, and twelve temporary bridges. I then directed the deployment of six CH-47 Chinook helicopters to Pakistan from Afghanistan on August 11. With the arrival of the USS Peleliu, we were able to provide a total of nineteen helicopters for rescue and relief, and toward the end of August, the USS Kearsarge was deployed to help as well.
Our relief help after a massive earthquake in Pakistan in 2005 had been warmly welcomed and led to an overall, if temporary, downturn in anti-Americanism there. But five more years of war in Afghanistan, drone attacks inside Pakistan, and growing problems between our governments had taken a toll. By summer 2010, 68 percent of Pakistanis had an unfavorable view of the United States. I was therefore extremely nervous about security for our helicopters and their crews. They were operating in northwestern Pakistan in areas such as Swat that were hotbeds of extremist and Taliban fighters. Villagers and even local police and Pakistani military accustomed to attacks by U.S. drones looked upon our military arrival with suspicion, if not outright hostility. I insisted that the Pakistani military have an officer on every flight to explain we were there to help and to organize distribution of supplies as the choppers were unloaded.
The Pakistani press reported that villagers waiting for aid showed no enthusiasm for the crews of our helicopters, and that there were no waves, smiles, or handshakes. Our crews reported some favorable reactions from Pakistanis, but overall there was great suspicion of our motives, and questions as to why we weren’t doing more in the way of long-term assistance to improve their roads and bridges. Despite the dour reception, during the first three weeks of August, our aircrews evacuated some 8,000 people and delivered 1.6 million pounds of relief supplies. Nonetheless, anti-Americanism in Pakistan was undiminished.
OTHER DISASTERS
The end of July 2010 brought another kind of flood, from which there would be little relief. On July 25, an online organization named WikiLeaks, created by Julian Assange, posted some 76,000 documents originating from classified Central Command databases in Iraq and Afghanistan. WikiLeaks, as we later learned, operated from computer servers in a number of countries and advertised itself as seeking “classified, censored, or otherwise restricted material of political, diplomatic, or ethical significance.” I told reporters on July 29 that the security breach had endangered lives and damaged confidence overseas in the U.S. government’s ability to protect its secrets. I said the documents released could have “potentially dramatic and grievously harmful consequences.”
From a military standpoint, the release of these documents was much worse than embarrassment. There was a lot of information about our military tactics, techniques, and procedures, as well as the names of Iraqis and Afghans who had cooperated with us. As hundreds of thousands of documents continued to be released through October, we determined that nearly 600 Afghans who had helped us were at risk, and that the Taliban was reviewing the postings to gather the names of those people. Just as worrying was the release of 44,000 documents revealing our tactics for dealing with IEDs, and many others that described our intelligence-collection methods and our understanding of insurgent relationships. There were voluminous documents from Iraq detailing detainee abuses, civilian casualties, and Iranian influence. Nearly all the Joint Task Force Guantánamo documents were released, including all assessments of individual detainees.
The flood assumed a totally different dimension in November when Assange warned that he was going to release hundreds of thousands of State Department documents and cables from more than one hundred embassies. On November 22, he said on Twitter, “The coming months will see a new world, where global history is redefined.” He made good on his threat. These cables revealed private conversations between American officials and foreign leaders and other officials, and embarrassingly candid evaluations of those leaders (including above all President Karzai), as well as intelligence-collection priorities, bilateral intelligence relationships, intelligence sources and methods, counterterrorism-related information, and on and on.