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Don't Chase the Pirates
ECPAD-French Defense Ministry / AP Photo
Current talk of invading Somalia ignores our role in causing the chaos.
The rescue of Capt. Richard Phillips from the clutches of Somali pirates is a welcome bit of news in a world that's otherwise been short on happy developments. However, the enormous skill of the Navy SEAL snipers who pulled off the extraordinary feat merely throws into relief the extent to which combating piracy solely at sea is destined to be a difficult endeavor with poor prospects for success. The ocean is extremely large, and the number of people who can successful execute a boat-to-boat sniper shooting is very small. The international antipiracy fleet is heavily clustered in the immediate vicinity of Somalia, but as the journalist Xan Rice has observed, the Indian Ocean is “an area too large for foreign navies to cover effectively."
Meanwhile, not all daring antipirate rescue operations have such happy endings. The French, who've been the most aggressive pirate-fighters of all, recently suffered an incident in which one of the men they were seeking to rescue was killed during the rescue process.
Fighting pirates at sea is bound to fall short but it's the best thing we can do until a coherent government emerges in Somalia.
This has led some to call for the U.S. and its allies to invade Somalia and fight the pirates on land. Impatience with half-measures at sea is understandable, but any realistic land options are likely to further plunge Somalia into chaos and make the piracy problem worse in the long term.
Bloomberg reported on Monday that the U.S. military is weighing options for a land assault. Meanwhile, hawks such as John Bolton who are looking to paint Barack Obama as "soft on piracy" are raising the rhetorical temperature arguing that "unless we go in and really end this problem once and for all, we will simply see it grow over time" so a "coalition of the willing" should storm in and put a stop to things.
Before rushing into an invasion of Somalia, Americans would do well to try to understand the broader context in which the piracy problem has emerged—15 years of anarchy following the hasty collapse of a U.S.-led peacekeeping effort in the early 1990s. Pirates thrive in conditions of political fragmentation, a scenario that certainly describes contemporary Somalia and, importantly, a situation to which recent U.S. military intervention has contributed.
For the past 15 years, the closest Somalia got to a period of stable governance was a roughly six-month period in which an outfit calling itself the Islamic Courts Movement seemed on its way to consolidating control over the bulk of Somali territory. The ICM was not a particularly friendly or humane bunch, but nobody is in Somalia, and they offered the prospect of something resembling governance. Unfortunately, in a little-noticed decision, the Bush administration also decided that they represented a threat to American national security. Thus, while Americans were tuning out the news during the week between Christmas and New Year's in 2006, the administration chose to green-light an Ethiopian invasion of Somalia, aimed at installing the powerless de jure government in Mogadishu as a puppet regime backed up by Ethiopian troops.
The Ethiopians would likely have wanted to invade anyway, but the United States is a major supplier of military aid to Ethiopia so we probably could have restrained them. Instead, bolstered by overblown claims of ties between the ICM and al Qaeda, we egged Ethiopia on and offered indirect military support to the Ethiopian invasion.
This was accompanied by loud cheers from conservative pundits, but as veterans of other recent efforts by Christian powers to invade and occupy Muslim lands could easily have predicted, the result was a popular backlash and a violent Islamist insurgency.
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Banjo1
I don't know this writer -- the left's hive mind is too populous to identify all the principals -- but this paragraph caught my eye:
"The Ethiopians would likely have wanted to invade anyway, but the United States is a major supplier of military aid to Ethiopia so we probably could have restrained them. Instead, bolstered by overblown claims of ties between the ICM and al Qaeda, we egged Ethiopia on and offered indirect military support to the Ethiopian invasion."
Notice all the qualifiers? This is someone who doesn't know what he's talking about but evidently is obliged to fill a certain number of column inches. But that has never stopped the the Daily Kos kids and their friends in JournoList from airing their opinions. C'mon, Tina. Hire some people who actually, you know, have a little understanding of what they're talking about. Leave the flaunting of igoranace to the rest of us. We do it for nothing..
swkidder
I think you just did.
drmarkklein
The author sounds just like the "Radical Chic & Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers" crowd which justified and celebrated the scum bags who made living in pre-Guiliani NYC a living hell.
jaguarxjs
Mr. Yglesias is mistaken, on many, many counts. Piracy has existed throughout history and the only way to counter them is take away their land bases. The Romans did it in the ancient Mediterranean, the English did it in the Caribbean, the Spanish did it along the Barbary Coast.
It was usually done without immediate conquest or without a 'State' being left behind and intact. Simply getting on the ground, identifying where the pirates are launching from and destroying those bases would be the most effective remedy.
We know that Somalia isn't going to form a coherent state anytime soon, the US has tried, the UN has tried and the Ethiopians have tried, no state is going to exist until the Somali people get fed up and actually support one side or the other. They seem happy to live in their chaos and squalor, well let them keep it.
Until they get sick of it, stop patrolling the Indian ocean and simply destroy and port on Somalia's coast that is inhabited by pirates. Sit a few destroyers right on those ports and piracy will cease.
jackee
I am so glad that someone has finally stopped using this moronic "we're not against the [insert nationality here] people, we're against the [insert nationality here] government leaders." Let's place the blame for the government on its people. Jaguarxjs is exactly correct. This situation will improve when Somalis want it to improve.
jaguarxjs
Thank you. We also have to face facts that Somalia was a 'failed state' long before the United States ever got involved. Anyone who blames the United States or United States policy simply has no understanding of the situation in Somalia, or the Horn of Africa.
himat48
war is hell and hell is war. how much killing do we need? let's take care of our home issues before we show the world again how stupid we can sometimes be.
travlr009
banjo1 and drmark have it right.........no matter what the sin, no matter what far-off corner of the world some dip commits a heinous crime, it always comes back to one thing with these folks..... "it's the U.S's fault.....Always!
Pathetic.
camfield
Bolton (and others hoping to put Obama on some sort of spot) is an idiot who apparently has learned nothing from Iraq and Afghanistan, not to mention Vietnam. And where on earth would be be digging up the money and troops to invade Somalia with our continuing commitments in Iraq and Afghanistan?
finderj
Absolutely the world's shipping industry needs help dealing with these pirates. historically, the only way to stop piracy is to blockade or destroy their land bases, the places where they hide their boats/ships, refule, and rearm.
So we can watch pirates 'outraged' by a violent response to their violent actions, escalate their already deadly, violent behavior, or we can chose a course of action and implement it.
Either way, until they are utterly stopped, the pirates will continue.
jtnsr159
Current talk of invading Somalia ignores our role in causing the chaos.
OUR ROLE--please
That is typical crap from the soft left. We are not the cause of all troubles in this world.
persimmonmuse
The west has been pursuing unregulated and boundless self-indulgence by subordinating and exploiting human and natural resourses of the rest of the world.
I want to know more about Samolia fishing rights being exploited by corporados! and toxic waste dumping! off their shores. I was in the peace corps in Niger and these folks are the poorest of the poor. The same thing occurred in Niger with oil. The oil companies badly polluted the fishing environment on the Niger river and when the people wanted some basis rights and goods the were blasted and labeled terrorists.
I am so tired of this 'might makes right' 'rival street gang' mentality bullcrap
Let's bring some Reality and Truth to the situation....you can't speak of holding pirates accountable to the rule of law when governments and corporations have been lawless , unregulated and unaccountable....this must change if we are to live in a world of real laws and principles.
pkimelman
I agree with the other comments. Destroying land bases and the massive homes built on the spoils is not the same as attacking a whole country. The "mother ships" (those that deploy the fast speedboats) should be sunk or disabled and the pirates rescued/captured. The point is to make piracy not worth it anymore. Piracy exists like any crime when the costs/risks are less than the gains.
Stopping piracy does not fix Somalia of course, but when lawlessness overruns the borders, you have to address that 1st.
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n--Y--toodogsccrider27
This is a good and factual article despite what the arm chair right wingnuts are howling about - all three of them.
If John Bolton is in such a rush to invade Somalia, I think he should lead the assault. Go John! Lets see some of that braggadocio in action!
That's all we need...another war. And we see how that turned out in Somalia last time.
What this article and all of the MSM are leaving out is that these 'pirates' used to be simple fisherman. The trouble began when the industrial fishing ships from Japan, China and Russia, illegally using drag nets that catch anything and everything and destroy the ocean floor in the process, started fishing the waters off of E. Africa. They completely decimated most fish life in this area of the ocean. The Somali fishermen were left with the choice of quietly letting their families starve to death or take up what we now call pirating - but what the companies who own these ships normally call the cost of doing business.
The truth is that most shipping companies really don't want to see this escalate to a shooting scenario. It's much cheaper to pay the ransom than to pay the families of dead crew members and loose whole cargos when these sort of 'John Wayne' scenarios turn bad.
travlr009
With our electronic and satellite capabilities, the answer to this piracy problem is simple. These skiffs cannot operate 400 miles at sea without mother ships. the mother ships are where the pirate commanders reside as they send the teenagers to do the more dangerous job of boarding.
Why should they be immune?
Announce once only that we will sink any mother ship dispatching a skiff to attack American shipping.
Then when it occurs, without further warning and without comment, simply sink the mother ship.
dahniuru
Yglesias's opinions are simply anti-American. In 1993 I was pirated in the Riau Islands of Indonesia, simply because I was there and had something the pirates wanted, i.e. $$$. So long as the victim is an American, Yglesias will support the perpetrator. Keep that in mind with people such as Yglesias, who, imo, are the source of a tremendous amount of the problems we have in the US.
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KemCho
Blame USA for all the conflicts and failed governments everywhere. So how do we get a coherent government in Somalia? Send Yglesias to Somalia and talk with pirates? Tina, you must be running out of good columnists.
Thank you.
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