Saturday, February 26, 2011
Dave Barry is a U.S. humorist who specializes in making the absurd appear plausible.
Of course it is absurd to imagine Somali pirates seizing the Staten Island ferry -but two years ago, it would also have seemed implausible to imagine that navy SEALs would shoot Somali pirates who captured the Maersk Alabama and were holding its U.S. captain hostage. Or that four Americans would be murdered by pirates while the navy was negotiating their release. Or an Ottawa man would be shot to death by pirates in Honduras.
There is an intellectual disconnect in 2011 North American societies in thinking about pirates. Somehow "pirates" prompt the mental popup of the Gilbert and Sullivan comic-operetta The Pirates of Penzance or Walt Disney's Captain Hook in his 1953 comic animation of Peter Pan.
As societies we have totally forgotten the terror struck by pirates throughout the Mediterranean and Caribbean in the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries when pirate galleys manned by slaves ran rampant off the coast of North Africa and various pirate ships (not captained by Johnny Depp) did tremendous damage to Caribbean commerce and ports.
Piracy was not comedy. Nor is it comedy today.
Pirate depredations off the coast of Somalia and ranging far into the Indian Ocean have steadily risen. One can debate "root causes": The pirates are only poor fishermen attempting to respond to the destruction of their normal livelihood, and recognize that the absence of anything even vaguely resembling a coherent Somali governing structure prevents effective local, on-the-ground action. But ultimately that is feckless intellectual fibrillation.
And one can appreciate that only a tiny percentage of the massive traffic moving through the region encounters pirates.
In a put-on-a-happy-face speech in Bahrain on Dec. 3, U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton noted outreach by the Contact Group on Piracy off the Coast of Somalia, had reduced successful attacks by 20 per cent in the last two years. Then she admitted that the total number of attacks has gone up -by a figure she didn't disclose.
In December, one NGO monitoring the problem identified 44 vessels and 688 crew members being held. Another NGO separately estimated in early January that "costs from ransom, security equipment, and impact on trade" ran between $7 billion and $12 billion.
Approximately $2 billion is spent on naval operations by a mixed (and constantly changing) fleet of upwards of 40 warships from 30 countries.
But it has not worked -incentives for piracy, just as is the case for drug production and smuggling, are just too high. Where else in the world can throwaway young males shoot for milliondollar ransom payoffs?
Not to belabour the point, but such trivial results have increasingly frustrated NATO and other national capitals.
The current approach is akin to chasing individual hornets far away from their nests -while ignoring the nests. Moreover, the problem is becoming more threatening as reportedly al-Qaeda variants are moving in on the mom-and-pop pirate operations.
The rules of engagement for the patrolling naval vessels are so convoluted that they transform most anti-pirate action into "catch-and-release" exercises. Warship commanders are highly reluctant to take legal responsibility for national prosecutions of pirates given the massive costs of their juridical care and feeding.
We have attempted to move them to Kenyan legal authority, which has now tired of the judicial expenses of endless trials. We can pay them more, but being the toxic waste dump for a global problem as well as the repository for hundreds of prisoners that their comrades may decide to free is bound to pale on Nairobi. One shudders to anticipate the costs of trying in U.S. courts the 15 pirates we have just seized.
There has been some creativity: Yemen reportedly is "renting" its coast guard vessels for private escort of merchant ships and tankers; private companies bankrolled by anonymous countries are training counter-piracy forces for land operations; and occasional reports of condign punishment for pirates. (A chilling video implied Russians retook a vessel seized by pirates, handcuffed them to their skiff, and blew it up. There have been no recent reports of Russian ship seizures.)
But such measures are obviously inadequate. The pirate bases must be destroyed and the captive ships/crews liberated.
Without pirate bases, Somali government has a better survival chance. Such action is not easy, but well within U.S. military/technical capabilities and could be executed by a Marine Expeditionary Force or troops using bases in the region.
The United States was traumatized by the 1993 "Black Hawk Down" catastrophe and has been living by the aphorism that a cat that sat on a hot stove never sat on a hot stove again -or a cold one for that matter. Canada's Somalia affair has had a similar affect.
However, we took comparable action against pirates on the "shores of Tripoli" early in the 19th century -and it is time that we do so again.
In this instance, prevention will make vengeance unnecessary.
David Jones is a retired U.S. diplomat who served in Ottawa. He is co-author of the book Uneasy Neighbo(u)rs, with former Liberal MP David Kilgour.