Recognizing realities?

By Dave Anderson:

I have argued that the United States should take a minimalist goal set approach to most foreign policy questions that involve non-cooperative actors.  Minimal goal sets are achievable as they promote the lesser disturbance of pre-existing arrangements and power alignments and they are affordable as they are not an attempt to re-align societies by massive force. 

Under this minimalist mindset, the United States should have two security goals for Somalia.  The first is the maintenance of our two hundred and eleven year goal fro free navigation of international waters.  The second is minimizing the capacity of non-state actors from conducting long range trans-continental strikes against US soil or US citizens.   This is a real, but managable risk.

The first security goal, maintaining freedom of navigation and thus cheap international shipping, is under threat primarily from the maritime bandits and pirates based on the northern portion of Somalia.  The US and many other nations have deployed a fairly significant portion of the previously uncommitted inter-theater sustainable deployment naval capacity to the western Indian Ocean, the Gulf of Aden and the southern Red Sea.  That deployment along with changes in shipping patterns including the creation of "safe lanes" and more importantly and expensively, the diversion of ships from the Suez route to the Cape of Good Hope route has not had a significant impact on the piracy problem.  Year over year, pirate activity and pirate success has been increasing.  There has been a seasonal lull because the weather and winds have put the kibosh on sustained small craft operations.

Piracy has traditionally been effectively suppressed when there are solutions of stability on land.  Naval actions can reduce the effectiveness of any individual pirate action but patrolling warships have historically been limited in their actual ability to suppress piracy in a theatre if there is no change in conditions in the ports and supply/sustainment network.  The key to effective piracy suppression is on land, not at sea.

The problem on land is there is no effective state that can assert control on the northern ports.  There has been no central state in Somalia for most of a generation.  However there are two proto-states that may have both the legitimacy and the possibility of scaling that could effectively clamp down on the pirate ports if thse proto-states are paid to do so. 

Seth Meyers, of CNAS, and writing in the World Politics Review, argues that the United States should recognize at least one of the proto-states in order to encourage the consolidation of the pocket of comparative stability and state capacity in Somalia. 

The first step is to acknowledge Somaliland's independence, and to work with both it and the Puntland government to strengthen their respective militaries and institutions. Already there has been a de facto recognition of Puntland's autonomy through cooperation with Western navies in combating piracy; it is time to expand that relationship.

The United States has engaged in a policy of recognizing realities on the ground and promoting map redrawing of small statelets from previously larger nation states in Europe with the recognition and support for Kosovo, and the tri-state within a state solution for Bosnia.  The United States has engaged non-state actors who have the capacity to bring and enforce order in a region of interest in Iraq by funding the Sunni Arab Awakening movement, and in Afghanistan by choosing and backing our warlords of choice.  Those are moments of recognizing realities and choosing minimalist goal sets in all cases excluding Kosovo. 

Recognizing reality on the Somali coast line and working with somewhat functional governments to fund their militias to effectively control the pirate ports in Somalia will provide a longer term, more durable and less expensive solution to the piracy problem then having the worlds' navies patrol the region for nine months per year.