A Multilateral Solution to Somali Piracy
The UN recently decided to do something about Somali piracy this month. They have not said exactly what that something is. Shipping companies are losing hundreds of millions. Navies don’t know how to legally deal with the pirates even if they capture them. Liberals point out that that the Somali pirates are fishermen, merely defending their fishing grounds by asymmetrical means against first and second world fishing fleets that are denuding their offshore harvesting areas. Conservatives claim that the Somali pirates are nothing more than seagoing gangsters who are after quick cash and who find honor and a neat way to get hot chicks by being brigands. Both views have elements of truth. The question is whether this is a national security crisis? It is not. No great American interests are at stake other than international law of the sea and preventing piracy from becoming a trendy thing to do in other places such as the Straits of Malacca which already have a pirate problem. During the recent election, much noise was made about encouraging multilateralism. Eliminating piracy is a problem custom made for a multilateral solution.
We need to avoid becoming entrapped in a “let Uncle Sam do it” situation just because we have the world’s largest and most powerful navy which has excess capacity because Iraq and Afghanistan are mostly land wars. This is why we need to avoid those who call for a blockade of Somalia. Blockades are expensive things. The coast of Somalia rivals the size of the American southeastern seaboard, and it took hundreds of Union ships to blockade the Confederacy during our Civil War. We have the only navy in the world that could do such a thing and not one U.S. merchant ship has so far been lost to the Pirates. The Koreans, Chinese, Japanese, Turks, Chinese, and other seagoing nations have much more at stake than we do; this problem is ripe for a coalition solution, and it can be solved; they need to create an effective coalition in order to solve the problem.
The best way to stop the Somali pirates is not at sea through convoys and blockades; we are not dealing with the German High Seas Fleet or even the Confederate Navy here. The best way to do it is to seize and occupy their fishing village bases along the northern coast of Somalia, which the UN resolution authorizes, and then give the locals something productive to do with themselves besides brigandage. This does not need to be done by U.S. Marines, but it will take good troops. The Somalis like to fight and they are entrepreneurial; if they are not given something productive to do once a coalition stops piracy, they will make armed resistance to an occupation force pay as they did from 1993 to 1995...
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