PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti - There were hugs and there were jeers. But as paratroopers in combat gear swarmed the airport here Monday, it seemed everyone already was asking the same question:
How long?
"We don't know what our job is, what our mission is, and for how long it's supposed to last," said a nervous Pfc. Matthew Knopf of Bradenton, Fla., in the first wave of troops arriving in Haiti. "We've just been instructed not to shoot anybody."
It's not an invasion. And it's not exactly an occupation. The U.S. military mission in Haiti is a post-Cold War amalgam of nation building, peacekeeping and police action.
It is an awkward, new sort of superpower military operation, tested most recently in Somalia.
After only a day, it's clear that policing this Caribbean nation will be fraught with complications. And provocations.
"You Americans better not be trying to plant your flag on Haitian soil," screamed university student Monique LeFevre. "Don't force something upon us that we don't want or we'll start killing you one by one."
Defense Secretary William Perry defined the Haiti mission Monday as it began: "To secure adequate order so that we can turn that job over to the United Nations force which will come in after that. This could take some months."
Sounds simple. But as Americans watched live TV footage of troops in combat gear landing at the airport here, they were probably asking themselves the same question as Pfc. Knopf: How long? At what cost? Why?
Already, members of Congress previewed their impatience for an open-ended military commitment.
House GOP Whip Newt Gingrich sent a memo to fellow Republicans declaring President Clinton's policy "a bad policy with a significant expenditure of American resources and exposure of American troops to danger with little relevance to American national security interests."
Sen. Joseph Lieberman, D-Conn., applauded the peaceful arrival of U.S. troops, but added, "We ought to get them in and out of there as quickly as possible."
No enemy troops ambushed them when they landed, but U.S. troops still could face peril. Haitian soldiers in civilian clothes may think sniper attacks on U.S. troops would make heroes of them. There are 200,000 handguns in Port-au-Prince alone. U.S. forces have no plans to seize them but will try to buy them back.
Under the U.S. military's rules of engagement here, troops are allowed to fire only if directly threatened by a weapon.
"This is the first day in a long series of days," said Gen. John Shalikashvili, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. "It is too early to tell what the next days will bring."
On Monday, one scene underscored the twist of emotions in this capital: Thousands of Haitians who were wildly cheering U.S. forces suddenly were attacked by local police, who beat them with clubs and chased them away.
The danger comes, experts said, if U.S. troops watching or threatened by such skirmishes get drawn in.
If that happens, said Tony Cordesman, a Georgetown University professor of national security studies, "No matter what we do, if we intervene we're going to be seen as the enemy."
And if there are American casualties, the bottom may fall out of public support for the mission. That's exactly what happened in Somalia late last year, resulting in the withdrawal of all U.S. forces and the erosion of order into chaos.
"All it takes is parading one dead naked body through the square and we're out of there," said Martin Binkin, a military analyst at the liberal Brookings Institution. "The American people will stand for this until we start getting casualties."
Army Lt. Gen. Henry Hugh Shelton, commander of U.S. forces in Haiti, said Monday no decisions have been made about the number of ground troops; how long they will stay; how widely they will be dispersed around the country.
"It is going to be no mean task to establish a democracy" in Haiti - if indeed that is the goal, said Binkin. "The administration's end-game is to turn this over, in a period of months, to the United Nations. That is, I think, by any stretch of the imagination overly optimistic."
Two dozen nations have pledged more than 4,000 troops, police and other forces to back up the 20,000-strong U.S. force, but U.N. officials are not enthusiastic about taking over.
There's no deadline for the hand-off. Unless the Security Council intervenes, U.N. Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali and Shelton will decide whether a "secure and stable environment" has been reached.
That definition is certain to be debated in the months to come. "No one knows when you can restore the Haiti military, the Haiti political structure or the Haiti economy," said Cordesman. "When you're engaged in nation building, you only quit when the nation is built - or collapsed."
The delicate balance U.S. forces must maintain as they try to nudge Haiti toward a stable government could also be disrupted without warning by the island nation's people.
"Do Americans think we're stupid enough to believe they're here to help us?" asked unemployed construction worker Lulu Gerard. "We saw what they did in Somalia. You'd think they'd learned their lesson. They'll never be welcomed here."
The enormity and quickness of the mini-invasion left many here feeling overwhelmed and intimidated.
"We have one tank for 7 million people," said Emile Dance. "The Americans have one tank for every soldier. If they're coming in peace, they're scaring us to death."
Proving their goal is restoring peace may be the hardest thing for a fighting force to do. "The invasion was the easy part," said Walter Kansteiner, a National Security Council official in the Bush administration. "They skipped the easy part and jumped to the hard part."
Some wonder how victory will be defined - or if it can be.
"The military will do what they're told to do," said retired Marine Lt. Gen. Bernard Trainor. "But I'm sure there are a lot of troops in Port-au-Prince tonight wondering, `What is this all about? How do you define a win?' "
Contributing: Kirk Spitzer, Lee Michael Katz, Jessica Lee
