Piracy - next steps will be incremental

With the safe return of Maersk Alabama's Capt. Richard Phillips from pirate captivity, the commentati are abuzz with discussion of coming measures against the Gulf of Aden pirates. It has not helped matters that President Obama, feeling his oats, pledged almost immediately to halt piracy in the area. It's a fine sentiment and surely a desirable goal, but it's a bit of an over-promise - and somewhat of an overreach considering all the other things on the United States' military plate and national budget.

(In fairness, from all the accounts I have read, the president's handling of the high seas drama was very well done. He set the parameters and let the commander on the scene call the shots (literally, as it turned out). That's exactly the right way to do it and hopefully will be the model he uses for future events, and there will always be future events.)

The overwrought media euphoria since Sunday's rescue of Capt. Phillips makes me remember Han Solo's advice to Luke Skywalker:



"Don't get cocky." Good advice! So let's take a deep breath, shed the triumphalist jackets we've put on since Sunday, and try to take a cold, dispassionate look at some foundational facts.

1. Piracy off Somalia is not a matter of national security of the United States.

Piracy there doesn't even rate a blip on the screen of international maritime commerce. Barely more than one-half of one percent of ships transiting the waters concerned were even threatened with attack last year, much less actually hijacked. The "piracy tax," or the increased costs to shippers of the piracy, is virtually nil as a percentage of total operating costs. Besides which, what little financial end-costs there are are borne mostly by Europeans, not Americans. Only one kidnapped crewman has died in captivity, and he under circumstances not clear (which does not absolve his captors of culpability, it just means that he might not have been murdered).

This means that combating piracy should not displace, either in urgency or in budget, truly critical security issues such as fighting al Qaeda, stabilizing Iraq, winning in Afghanistan or continuing to discover and shut down nascent networks seeking to bring death and destruction to American citizens or possessions.

At best, anti-piracy has to remain an economy-of-force action.

2. Anti- and counter-piracy measures taken at sea can have near-term effectiveness, but history shows that decisive actions to end piracy have always been on land.

Pirate bases have to be eliminated. Just striking pirate vessels at sea does not solve the problem. There are, off the Horn of Africa, simply too many boats, too large a sea and too much money to be made for piracy to stop just because a pirate boat here and there gets sunk and its pirates killed or captured.

Despite the buzz about taking action inside Somalia, broken by Bloomberg Monday and picked up by other media since then, land actions such as raids or airstrikes will have only short-term success. Defense Secretary Robert Gates pointed out recently (can't find link again, sorry), the success in ending piracy in southeast Asian waters depended on mature, effective governments of local nations, including nations in which the pirates made their bases. No such government exists in Somalia, able to enforce a national will.

While it's true that the pirates want to make money, there's precious little to buy in Somalia, so what's the money for? Answer: to get out of Somalia. A large number, perhaps the majority, of hijackings are done by young men who commit only one or two acts to make enough money to leave Somalia for a better life elsewhere. The AP reports:

Diplomats in Nairobi say many pirates are eager for one-off assignments to make the $10,000 or $15,000 needed to get them out of the misery of Somalia. When they leave, dozens of recruits line up to replace them.

That helps explain why Mr. Gates also said this week that there is "no purely military" solution to Somalia "unless you get something on land that begins to change the equation for these kids." For every pirate who leaves, and for every one who may be captured or killed, many more are waiting in line.

3. The threat level is not higher now than it was before Alabama was hijacked.

Yes, a couple of pirates managed to get quoted by Western media that pirates will now kill crew of vessels of nations that have struck back (meaning the US and France), but this is almost certainly bluster and emotion of the moment. As I've explained before, there's no upside for the pirates to do this. Now, maritime analysts agree.

So despite the president's pledge to crack down, and despite the seizure since Sunday of four more vessels, don't expect an enduring piracy surge in the waters off the Horn of Africa. The AP reports,

Defense Secretary Robert Gates says he doesn't see any immediate need to bulk up the military response to piracy on the high seas. Gates adds, however, that those decisions are being made moment by moment.

According to Crispian Cuss of London's risk mitigation Olive Group,

"The international community has to decide whether the scourge of piracy is so bad that it is worth intervening directly or indirectly in Somalia or, if insurance companies are happy to pay ransoms and shipping companies are happy to pay premiums, shall we just continue with the status quo."

I think the move is toward changing the status quo, but the momentum may be short-lived. If the pirates look upon their criminality from the standpoint of cost effectiveness (let's hope they do), then a lot of shippers and insurers and national-policy setters are going to do so, too.

Costs of patrolling the waters concerned are already very high. With patrolling governments already running national deficits and a deep recession continuing, there will be no shortage of banker's green eyeshades coming out in government ministries. The question simply will be: is the benefit gained from increased enforcement actually worth the costs? That is, is the marginal gain worth the marginal costs? Don't be surprised if the answer is no.

None of this is to say that nothing much more can be done. Already there has been talk of instituting a convoy system of merchantmen, escorted by American or foreign-flag warships. The class of vessels subject to hijacking so far has been fairly limited. Many merchantmen are simply too fast for the pirates to catch. Others are slow enough but lack the size to carry enough cargo to make the ransom worthwhile. So a convoy system may have considerable merit.

It would not be hard to announce to African nations and to coastal Somalis that a convoy would have a mandatory exclusion zone around it, say 1,000 meters, within which other vessels will be assumed to be hostile and may be dealt with accordingly.

There will be some near-term measures taken, but we really don't know yet what they will be. I don't much look for American action ashore in Somalia. For now, we have a momentum shift, but as operational experts start to take a cold-eyed look at things, they will realize that the parameters are less military than they are political and economic, in America, Europe and Somalia itself.

Endnote: As a proviso, I'll note that history also shows that people are controlled by events at least as often as they control events. After all, "rational actors" would never have let the 1914 assassination of Archduke Ferdinand lead to the deaths of almost 10 million people.

If there is a short-term surge in pirate activity, I think the best response is for shippers and navies to step up preventive measures to foil hijackers and not to take direct action against pirates except to save lives. Tribal societies such as Somalia's are heavily built upon honor-shame dynamics. It is not in our interests to catalyze the pirates to strike out to preserve their honor at the cost of their commercial interests. Al la the Godfather, we want them to stick to business, not make it personal. (And so should we.)

Time is on our side. We need to refrain from getting caught up in action-reaction cycles in order to maintain the freedom to plan and act mostly analytically rather than reflexively. We must not become enamored with a "quick fix" under the illusion that the whole piracy problem can be solved as easily or quickly as Capt. Phillips' kidnapping was.