The Practical Realist

Piracy made sense in the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries. Pirates could easily hide among ordinary sailors at most ports, and they could set up bases to hold their prizes in any shallow cove. But that ability to hide and evade no longer exists. We can instantly learn when a ship is attacked, and we can know its exact location in real-time. Ships without a valid and official flag-registration (or ones that have been reported hijacked) can’t enter any ports except the few they control off the coast of Somalia. So the pirates can’t hide, and yet somehow they continue to threaten international shipping.

So why have the pirates enjoyed so much success? It’s because we refuse to take the fight to them, and instead we try to engage them only when they actually attack our ships.

Do you think Bin Laden would last long if his base of operations was publicly known?

Today Hillary Clinton released the administration’s new 4-point plan for combating piracy, and to be blunt, I’m unimpressed.

Instead of trying to patrol millions of square miles of ocean for vessels that have no outward indication of hostility until shortly before they attack, we need to go after the infrastructure that actually sustains piracy. Although the state department is going to pursue the pirates’ bank assets, which I agree is a smart idea, the rest of their plan is either reactive, or will take far too long to have an effect.

So, here’s my own 4-point counter plan, arranged by order of importance. Decide for yourself what you think of it.

1. Blockade their home ports: Pirates, like everyone who goes out to sea, have to dock eventually and take on new supplies. Instead of fighting pirates at sea, we have to blockade their ports. The pirates can still put ashore with captured vessels along any shallow coastal area, but this is a far more risky proposition.

   Once they put to shore in some remote cove, we can dispatch a single warship to prevent the pirates from either offloading cargo or taking on supplies and reinforcements. With no easy access to supplies, whether they get a ransom or not, the pirates will eventually be forced to either leave their prize or starve. Even if piracy can continue in some anemic form, without ports, it will be reduced to a mere ghost of its current level.

2. No more ransoms: Shipping companies have been too willing to pay huge ransoms for their crews and ships. I sympathize, but it continues to fund the pirate activities. There have to be serious penalties for funding terrorists through ransoms. Companies that pay them should be barred from entering US ports (and hopefully our allies will be persuaded to extend the same bans to their own ports).

   Pirates aren’t just a bunch of guys who commit piracy for the thrill of it. Without the chance to turn a profit, none of them are going to risk their lives attacking ships. If they have no chance of earning a ransom, the only other way to make money is to steal the cargo and sell it on the black market. But taken together with blockading their home ports, it should prove impossible to offload and sell cargo as well.

   Companies that have employees or ships held now should no longer be allowed to negotiate with the pirates themselves. Instead, an international agency should act as a go-between, and it should only be authorized to offer humanitarian aid and the release of pirates we’ve captured. And to add pressure, the pirates’ bases should face the threat of invasion if the captured sailors are harmed.

3. Letters of marque: While proper navies are blockading pirates’ home ports, privateers should be able to earn bounties on every pirate vessel and crew they manage to disable, sink, or capture.

   Ron Paul has the right idea on this one. It’s a cost-effective strategy that makes it much harder for pirates to be sure when they are attacking an armed or unarmed target. Right now, so long as they avoid obvious warships, the pirates are safe. Under this idea, many of those supposedly innocuous-looking merchants might actually be privateers armed with the weaponry, training and legal authority to not merely defend against raiders, but also come to the aid of other merchants and even actively pursue and attack pirate motherships.

4. Prevent illegal fishing off Somalia’s coast: This gets back to the issue that started it all. Numerous fishermen lost the ability to support themselves because they could not compete against the huge trawlers that fished the coastlines illegally. Somalia, as the uber-failed state, had no way to stop it from happening.

   Many of those fishermen with their own boats and nautical know-how became desperate, and so a few of them were recruited into piracy. Without them, today’s pirates would probably still be a bunch of rough and violent men, but they’d be rough and violent men who stayed on land. If fisherman could once again support themselves, it may not sway the current fishermen-turned-pirates to give up their new occupation, but it could certainly prevent the creation of many future pirates.

Personally, I suspect that all of these (with the possible exception of stopping the illegal fishing) will eventually be implemented, in some form or other. However, I fear that we won’t take these actions until Americans are actually killed.

At least one pirate claimed that today’s attack on the American-flagged Liberty Sun was not an attempted hijacking at all, but an attempted sinking. Descriptions of the attack that I’ve read would seem to support that claim. If that’s true, then the stakes are now considerably higher. The longer we pussyfoot around and refuse to engage with effective strategies, the greater the likelihood of serious tragedy.