How to fight the pirates

In the midst of an emerging West/East struggle, a security issue has come unexpectedly to the fore that everyone can unite around: the safety of the sea lanes.
 
The growth of global commerce in the past two decades has crowded the oceans with cargo vessels and supertankers loaded with every good imaginable. The world currently transports 80 per cent of all international freight by sea, a figure which will increase once energy prices start to rise again, and there are more than 10 million cargo containers moving across the world’s oceans at any one time.
 
Both new and old powers use the sea lanes. More than 99 percent of Japanese trade and 90 percent of U.S commerce is by shipping and China is dependent on the oceans to transport its exports, the key driver of its economic growth.
 
Yet the heavy ocean traffic has spawned a new breed of pirates. More than 2,400 acts of piracy were reported around the world between 2000 and 2006, roughly twice the number reported for the preceding six-year period. This year, Somali pirates have attacked more than 100 vessels in the waters leading to and from the Suez Canal, and earned tens of millions of dollars in ransom money. They are holding 17 ships with around 300 crew members off the Somali coast. The sophistication of attacks against multiple ships suggests that piracy is taking on the characteristics of organized crime. For many young Somali men, it has become the path to quick riches.
 
Realizing this, the international community is beginning to clamp down. In October 2007, two American destroyers sank two Somali pirate vessels after the pirates captured a Japanese tanker. Earlier in the summer, the UN Security Council voted in favour of a new measure that would allow the U.S. military to engage Somali sea pirates and both the EU and the U.S are running maritime operations around the Horn of Africa. 
 
But none of these operations are likely to be successful. First, the swath of piracy-affected areas adjoining the Somali seafront is too large to be kept under surveillance by a dozen warships. Second, the maritime operations address the symptom not the disease. Stopping attacks is fine if it is followed up by policies stemming the problem at its cause; the failure to stabilize Somalia. But so far, there has been no such comprehensive approach.
 
The third problem is a legal one. Under anti-piracy laws established by the UN, countries can lawfully use whatever “necessary means” to stop piracy in international waters. The UN Security Council recognized Somali waters as the “high seas”. But each country has approached the problem differently. The British recently brought eight captured pirates to Mombasa after Kenya agreed to prosecute the case as part of the international anti-piracy agreements. But Danish law does not allow for prosecution of pirates before Danish courts. So the US is suggesting that the UN authorize hot-pursuit into Somali waters and Somalia itself.
 
But this is likely to stoke anti-American sentiments. What the West needs to take these three steps.
 
First, to remove any doubt about jurisdiction, a specialized international anti-piracy court should be set up, preferably in Africa and associated with the African Union. Then the international community needs to take a leaf out of counter-insurgency theory and develop a “port blot strategy”. The “ink blot strategy” holds that the British won in Malaya not by killing the communists, but by taking bits of Malaya and making life “so good” in these bits that people “did not want to fight the British any more” and then expanding these bits “like ink blots”. The same needs to be done on the Somali coast. There is no appetite for a full-scale intervention in Somalia, but capturing and holding towns like Harardhere, Eyl and Bossaso in partnership with a locally-raised force ought to be possible.
 
If this goes hand-in-hand with recognition of Somaliland’s independence and state-like status for Puntland –- and international aid to both — there may be a possibility that the root causes of the piracy problem can be addressed.