“Taking a wasps nest… is more effective than catching the wasps one by one”. So said Lord Palmerston in 1841, in reference to the destruction by British forces of slave quarters controlled by the Spanish on the West African coast. World leaders agitating over how best to deal with the problem of Somali piracy would do well to heed his words.
The current approach, involving the patrol by a dozen warships of over a million square miles of water in the hope of apprehending a pirate in the act cannot possibly eliminate this multi-million dollar problem. The capture by pirates of 111 vessels off the Somali coast in 2008, marking a 200 per cent rise on the previous year, was what helped resolve the United Nations Security Council to the unanimous adoption of Resolution 1851 on 16 December 2008, which appeared to mark a turning point in the international community’s readiness to engage seriously with the issue.
Acknowledging repeated calls for assistance from the then president of Somalia, Abdullahi Ahmed, the resolution authorises states to “undertake all necessary measures that are appropriate in Somalia, for the purpose of suppressing acts of piracy and armed robbery at sea” including land based operations should they be necessary. Unfortunately, as is so often the case with UN resolutions, it seems that words have spoken louder than actions.
Yet it is becoming increasingly clear that if the international community wishes to deal with the problem of Somali piracy then land-based operations will be not only necessary but essential.
An analysis of the International Maritime Bureau’s Live Piracy Map supports concerns that the present approach may in fact be exacerbating the problem. Though successful attacks in the Gulf of Aden are down on the same period last year (a fact some observers attribute to poor weather at the start of 2009), reports of attacks on vessels way out in the Indian Ocean that didn’t happen in 2008 suggest that some pirates may simply be circumnavigating the task force and conducting their operations further afield.
If this problem is ever to be resolved, what is needed is a concerted international effort to take the fight to 
the pirates, which means destroying their bases of operation on land. The indiscriminate threat to global trade posed by the problem of piracy has already resulted in an unprecedented level of international co-operation. Countries with normally frosty relations such as Britain and Russia have at times literally been fighting side by side against the Somali pirates. 19 countries currently have ships deployed to combat or deter pirates in the region and at the start of 2009 there was even talk of Switzerland sending soldiers to contribute to the effort.
Unfortunately, this international effort has thus far not extended to a serious consideration of land based operations. When, on 20 November 2008, Russia’s Ambassador to NATO Dmitry Rogozin proposed just such an incursion he received short shrift. On the same day, NATO’s Secretary General Jaap de Hoop Scheffer iterated his belief that Africa must take the lead in combatting piracy in Somalia. The African Union does currently have a mission in Somalia but it is characteristically short of funds, equipment and personnel. The AU has called for greater international assistance for the mission and there is no question that it will not succeed unless such assistance is forthcoming.
It goes without saying that a long term solution to Somalia’s piracy problem (or to this fragmented war-torn country’s myriad of wider problems for that matter) cannot be achieved without very serious progress achieved endogenously. The lack of effective governance that has blighted the country since the ousting of the repressive regime of Siad Barre in 1991 is what has enabled the piracy problem to develop to its current state in the first place, and not until the government gets a genuine handle on the country will it be eradicated. In a country that ranks at or very near to the bottom of virtually all socio-economic indicators, piracy is one of the most lucrative professions a Somali can currently hope for. Estimates for the total in ransom payouts in 2008 vary from $30m to $150m, huge sums of money for a country where the annual GDP is just $600.
Abdirahman Farole, the recently elected president of the semi-autonomous region of Puntland, from where the majority of attacks are launched, has affirmed his commitment to eradicating the problem on the back of a critical UN report that accused his predecessors of complicity in piracy. On 10 April 2009 Mr Farole reasserted his conviction that paying ransoms only encourages further attacks and called for the use of force against the pirates as the only realistic way to deal with the problem.
Both history and common sense suggest Mr Farole’s analysis is probably correct. If ransoms are the incentive for piracy, then paying those ransoms will only increase that incentive. This was the unhappy experience of the United States with the Barbary pirates in the 19th century and it is the same unhappy experience of the international community now. Unfortunately, as things stand at present, the companies that own the hijacked ship prefer to pay the ransom than risk the loss of cargo and a bloodbath.
The international set up off the coast of Somalia is inadequate at present because it is reactive: A distress call from a ship results in a rapid though all-too-often not rapid enough response from the nearest warship. Once the ship is captured, the liklihood, in spite of recent events to the contrary, is that the ransom will be paid. Only a proactive response can hope to make a genuine impact by reducing or even eliminating the ability of the pirates to launch attacks in the first place.
The international legitimacy for an invasion to eliminate the pirates’ bases on shore - granted by UNSC Resolution 1851 - is now in place. The will of Somali politicians for that to happen is also there. The ever-increasing economic, and more importantly human cost of allowing the piracy problem to continue unabated should convince the international community of the very real need to act on this problem, and to act on it soon.