Piracy and minimal states

By Dave Anderson:

Piracy is a sympton of land based disorder. If pirates do not have secure ports where they can rest, re-fuel, re-arm, recruit and ransom their prizes, then the economic case for piracy disappears very quickly. Most of the time local governments clamp down on any hint of piracy because attacking third party merchant shipping is an act of war or at the very least, an admission of a very weak government. Somalia is not the typical case, and that is why there is piracy that is flourishing and creating a thousand mile deep zone of danger to the world's merchent shipping.

Information Dissemination has been tracking piracy and the deployment of the world's free out of area naval capacity to East Africa and notes that it is not working:

Piracy off Somalia, particularly in the Seychelles, is very active again. This morning, the Maersk Alabama was attacked again, although this time the security team on the ship shot back.

The question is, what is the next step? There are no improvements in the government. Al Shabab has not slowed down. The Naval coalition off the coast is larger than ever, and more expensive than ever even as ships are hijacked and ransoms are paid.

Is it time to look diplomatically at recognizing Somalialand and Puntland independence? Should military operations be escalated to the shores? Should there be a blockade of the known pirate cities?

The current policy is to ignore the complete lack of progress. Is this a good policy, or is the timebomb ticking?

If the trading powers determine that piracy and the free flow of trade over the high seas is the overwhelming interest that they truly have in East Africa, then recognizing land based realities will be the most effective way to re-assert some semblence of control on the ground which will reduce piracy from a nuisance to an annoyance. We have some evidence that any land based government that actually is at least first amongst equals has the ability and the willingness to crack down on pirates when the ICU took power before the Ethiopians invaded.

the Islamic Courts Union was able to effectively assert itself as a quasi-government or at least as the toughest of the tough over large areas of the Somali coast line and dramatically reduce the land based incentives for piracy. And at that point, the ICU was overthrown by the Ethiopian invasion which propped up a very weak and incapable government of exiles and irrelevants. At this time, piracy resumed as a lucrative and attractive exploitation of the lack of state capacity on the Somali coast.

Minimal goals and ignoring the fiction of maps denoting insoluable nation-states will provide the best pay-back with the least investment for the United States and other trading powers in East Africa if the primary concern is the free flow of trade.