Anarchy on Land Means Piracy at Sea

[xiinfaniin]

April 12, 2009

Op-Ed Contributor

Anarchy on Land Means Piracy at Sea

By ROBERT D. KAPLAN

Stockbridge, Mass.

 

PIRACY is the maritime ripple effect of anarchy on land. Somalia is a failed state and has the longest coastline in mainland Africa, so piracy flourishes nearby. The 20th-century French historian Fernand Braudel called piracy a “secondary form of war,” that, like insurgencies on land, tends to increase in the lulls between conflicts among great states or empires. With the Soviet Union and its client states in Africa no longer in existence, and American influence in the third world at an ebb, irregular warfare both on land and at sea has erupted, and will probably be with us until the rise of new empires or their equivalents.

 

Somali pirates are usually unemployed young men who have grown up in an atmosphere of anarchic violence, and have been dispatched by a local warlord to bring back loot for his coffers. It is organized crime carried out by roving gangs. The million-square-miles of the Indian Ocean where pirates roam might as well be an alley in Mogadishu. These pirates are fearless because they have grown up in a culture where nobody expects to live long. Pirate cells often consist of 10 men with several ratty, roach-infested skiffs. They bring along drinking water, gasoline for their single-engine outboards, grappling hooks, ladders, knives, assault rifles, rocket-propelled grenades and the mild narcotic qat to chew. They live on raw fish.

 

The skiffs are generally used to launch attacks on slightly larger crafts, often a fishing dhow operated by South Koreans, Indians or Taiwanese, taking the crews prisoner. In turn, they use the new ship to take a larger vessel, and then another, working up the food chain. Eventually, they let the smaller boats and crews go free. In this way, over the years, Somali pirates have graduated to attacking oil tankers and container ships; the bigger the vessel, the higher the ransoms, which the pirate confederations can then invest in more sophisticated equipment.

 

As Braudel suggested, there is nothing new here. Piracy has been endemic to the Indian Ocean from the Gulf of Aden to the Strait of Malacca, and particularly so after the Western intrusion into these waters, beginning with the Portuguese in the 16th century. Pirate groups, sometimes known as “sea gypsies,” tended to escalate in number and audacity as trade increased, so that piracy itself has often been a sign of prosperity. The Moroccan traveler Ibn Battuta, who was the victim of pirates off western India in the 14th century, informed us that commercial ships in the Indian Ocean of his day traveled in armed convoys as a defense. Slightly earlier, Marco Polo described many dozens of pirate vessels off Gujarat, India, where the pirates would spend the whole summer at sea with their women and children, even as they plundered merchant vessels.

 

The big danger in our day is that piracy can potentially serve as a platform for terrorists. Using pirate techniques, vessels can be hijacked and blown up in the middle of a crowded strait, or a cruise ship seized and the passengers of certain nationalities thrown overboard. You can see how Al Qaeda would be studying this latest episode at sea, in which Somali pirates attacked a Maersk Line container ship and were fought off by the American crew, even as they have managed to take the captain hostage in one of the lifeboats.

 

So we end up with the spectacle of an American destroyer, the Bainbridge, with enough Tomahawk missiles and other weaponry to destroy a small city, facing off against a handful of Somali pirates in a tiny lifeboat. This is not an efficient use of American resources. It indicates how pirates, like terrorists, can attack us asymmetrically. The challenge ahead for the United States is not only dealing with the rise of Chinese naval power, but also in handling more unconventional risks that will require a more scrappy, street-fighting Navy.

 

In a sense, America needs three navies; yet, as this pirate crisis reveals, it may have only two. It has a blue-water force for patrolling the major sea lines, thus guarding the global commons. It packs enough precision weaponry on its warships to project power on land against adversaries like North Korea and Iran. But it still does not have enough of a sea-based, counterinsurgency component to deal with adversaries like Somali pirates and Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps Navy. (The latter’s force features speedboats loaded with explosives hidden in the many coves of Iran’s coastline, which could ram ships on suicide missions.)

 

The Navy has plans to build 55 new Littoral Combat Ships to deal with this deficiency. Yes, these fast, maneuverable ships have low drafts and are thus suited for many different kinds of unorthodox missions close to shore. But the oceans are vast, and ships cannot be in two places at once. Without sufficient numbers of them, it’s hard to believe that they will make much of a difference. Defense Secretary Robert Gates, in his recent budget statement, indicated that only a few of these ships will be built at first, even as he endorsed the whole program.

 

In recent years the American public has been humbled by the limits of our military power in dirty land wars. But navies have historically been a military indicator of great power. That a relatively small number of pirates from a semi-starving nation can constitute enough of a menace to disrupt major sea routes is another sign of the anarchy that will be characteristic of a multipolar world, in which a great navy like America’s — with a falling number of overall ships — will be in relative, elegant decline, while others will either lack the stomach or the capacity to adequately guard the seas.

 

Robert D. Kaplan is a national correspondent for The Atlantic and a senior fellow at the Center for a New American Security

[NASSIR]

Xiin, you should read Robert Kaplan's essay at Foreign Affairs mag, latest edition, March/April 2009.

 

"Center Stage for the Twenty-first Century: Rivalry in the Indian Ocean"

 

Here's the theme of this great article:

 

"Already the world's preeminent energy and trade interstate seaway, the Indian Ocean will matter even more in the future. One reason is that India and China, major trading partners locked in an uncomfortable embrace, are entering into a dynamic great-power rivalry in these waters---a competition that the United States, although now a declining hegemon, can keep in check by using its navy to act as a sea-based balance....as the Pirate activity off the coast of Somalia and the terrorist carnage in Mumbai last fall suggest, the Indian Ocean--the world's third largest body of water---already forms center stage for the challenges of the twenty-first century"