A multi-lateral opportunity for Obama

Since Barack Obama is all about working together with other nations and sharing the military responsibility for fighting terrorism, he is presented with a real opportunity to show what he can do in the situation with the Somalian pirates. These pirates have gotten quite aggressive lately attacking ships of all nations. Jonathan Stephenson of the US Naval War College describes the problem and has his own ideas for how to fight it.

Somali pirates don't scare easily.

Last month, they hijacked a Ukrainian merchant vessel loaded with tanks, heavy weapons and ammunition, and still haven't relinquished control of the freighter to the American and Russian navy ships that have besieged it for weeks off the Somali coast.

Last week, they tried to snatch an Indian merchant ship in the Gulf of Aden only to be thwarted by the Indian navy, which had dispatched assets to the region to cope with the pirates' rising threat.

Undeterred, on Nov. 18 in the Gulf of Aden, Somali pirates took over a Hong Kong-flagged Iranian ship carrying Chinese grain bound for Iran. Only a day earlier, Somalis commandeered a Saudi-owned oil supertanker carrying two million barrels of oil almost 500 miles from Somalia. They've been responsible for 84 attacks in 2008 alone--a 75% increase on the 2007 pace.

Given their range of targets, one might think that they are suicidally determined to antagonize as many major powers as possible, perhaps obscurely motivated by jihadism or nationalistic pride. But that would be wrong. Although 97% of Somalis are Sunni Muslim, they are traditionally secular and socially oriented more toward their extended family networks--their clans--than their state, which is in any case dysfunctional.

Prevailing ransom payments range from $500,000 to $2 million, up from only tens of thousands of dollars five years ago. While they may deal for profit with some Islamist militias, they're probably into piracy mainly for the money.

Somalia itself has had no effective government since the end of the Cold War, when strongman dictator Mohamed Siad Barre was overthrown and his vast arsenal of Soviet and American arms--he played both sides of the street--was expropriated by the clans that underpin Somali society.

Although over a dozen "transitional governments" have been formed in exile and anointed by the international community over the past 17 years, none has been able to overcome the clan militias' rule of the gun. Throughout the 1990s, their common practice was to steal food shipments and sell or barter what they didn't need to the unarmed populace. Then Islamists, some with links to al Qaeda, gained political traction by offering a semblance of social cohesion and the refuge of faith.

You have no government to speak of in Somalia and these pirates who have the weapons and the will to act with apparent impunity.

What Stephenson argues is that we need a multi-lateral force with a central command to police the waters and chase down these pirates. Right now the U.S. has been patrolling the waters, but needs help. You would think that these sorts of attacks against merchant shipping is something that all nations can agree that they need to put down. They can ignore the need for true multi-lateral efforts to fight the Taliban and terrorists in Afghanistan, but attacks on merchant shipping are attacks on nation's lifeblood.

India has recently taken some strong action against the pirates in those waters.

An Indian warship came under attack on Wednesday from a suspected pirate "mother ship," but managed to destroy the pirate ship, sending three speedboats packed with pirates fleeing for safety.

Meanwhile, the INS Tabar, a Russian-made, high-tech Indian warship, managed to thwart the attempted hijacking of an Indian cargo ship off the coast of Somalia.

As the global community copes with the mounting pirate threat, India has taken a leading role in the fight. With nearly $100 billion of cargo passing through the pirate-laden Gulf of Aden each month, India cannot afford to let the threat go unchecked. It also puts the emerging Indian Navy front and center on the world stage.

India can't afford to have their shipping from the Gulf endangered from these pirates and they are stepping up to lead this fight. The United States, on the other hand, is claiming that we're too busy in the region to take on the pirates.

The U.S. Navy said Wednesday that it's not about to use its military might to free a giant oil tanker or any other ship captured by Somali pirates because if naval forces recover one ship, they would have to recover them all.

Besides, a Pentagon official asked, what would they do with all the captured pirates?

What a lame response! The Pentagon spokesman is putting the onus on the merchant shippers.

"I also take issue with this whole issue that it's incumbent upon the armed forces of the world, the navies of the world, to solve this problem," Morrell said.

While the Navy has a responsibility to protect shipping lanes, "the shipping companies also have an obligation to secure their ships to prevent incidents such that we've been seeing at alarming rates over the past several months," he said.

Can you imagine if FDR had said in 1940 and 1941 that it was not up to the Navy to protect merchant shipping from attacks from the U-boats?

Here is an opportunity for Obama to put together a multi-lateral force to attack a real problem. This will be more than a naval problem since the heart of the problem is the chaos in Somalia itself. As long as the civil war continues there and Islamic terrorist groups gain strength there, we will have to be concerned about what is going on in Somalia. We'll have to see what sort of direction the Obama administration will take to address the acts of piracy emerging out of failed state in Africa. Imagine Al Qaeda gaining a strong toehold there and then working to take over tankers and warships traveling in the area. As James Phillips of Heritage writes, Somalia is a dangerous candidate for being the new headquarters for Al Qaeda.

Our young nation, lacking much of a navy, finally was able to take care of the Barbary pirates and stop their threat to merchant shipping in the Mediterranean in the early 19th century. It's time to step up again.