Picture the scene. Unable to tolerate his authoritarian tendencies any longer, Luxembourgers rise up and overthrow Jean-Claude Juncker, execute Grand Duke Henri and seek to implement a representative people’s government. Competing interests, factional rivalries and negative external interference from Belgium and the Netherlands, who are themselves in an ill-disguised state of unofficial war, thwart the efforts of the new government to restore stability. In the abscence of proper jobs and security, Luxembourgers resort to crime and violence to sustain themselves and their families. Lured by offers of money, food, and a measure of personal security, Luxembourgers join the militias of the highest bidder, whilst others head to see, ravaging German and French fishing fleets in ever more brazen acts of piracy.=The international community, led by the United Nations Security Council, expresses its “deep concern”, “calls upon” all parties to reject the use of violence and work for a sustainable solution and agrees that the best thing would be to do very little other than issue reports and strong words, if indeed, such words could be considered strong.

This scenario is so unlikely as to rightly appear absurd. There would be massive injections of international aid,  intervention on a massive scale to guarantee as swift a return to normality as is humanly possible, whilst the international courts would swing into action to prosecute the worst offenders.

Yet almost two decades after the ousting of the repressive regime of Siyad Barre in 1991, the international community has failed comprehensively to assist a return to normality in Somalia. What is it, exactly, that makes Somalis less worthy of our efforts and attention? Skeptics of international action in Somalia will doubtless cite the failed UN and US-led interventions between 1992-1995, and more recently the Ethiopian invasion in 2006, as evidence that international intervention will only serve to inflame an already dire situation in the world’s most comprehensively failed state. In his most recent report on the situation in Somalia, the UN’s Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon has warned that the UN peacekeeping force mooted by Security Council resolution 1863 could have precisely that effect if not handled properly.

In spite of this, skeptics must realise that the situation on the ground at present does not lend itself well to parallels with past interventions, and if international action is not taken in Somalia quickly, the political progress brought about through the already faltering Djibouti agreement will be undone completely. The incumbent Transitional Federal Government (TFG), led by Sheikh Sharif Sheikh Ahmed since January, is an unusually broad coalition of old enemies and current friends, that seeks to represent all of the country’s main clans and represent some form of compromise on questions of ideology and religion. The appointment of Sheikh Sharif as president is a good example. Formerly head of the Islamic Courts Union (ICU), the rebel Islamist movement that briefly took power before being ousted by an Ethiopian invasion in 2006, he is nonetheless seen as a reformer on the more liberal Islamic wing. However, any progress the government might have hoped to make is now being dangerously threatened by advances by Al-Shabaab, the main Ismalist opposition in the country.

One senior source in the Somali government said recently that in his view, the military capabilities of the TFG and the militants were roughly equal. This does not bode well for a quick end to the fighting. The TFG’s current strategy of trying to undermine the hardline Al-Shabaab leadership by trying to coax away the younger, perhaps more mercenary elements in the movement, is almost certainly being nullified by the influx of foreign militants to swell Al-Shabaab’s ranks.

The only international military presence for the TFG to rely on at present is AMISOM, the African Union Mission in Somalia. AMISOM is, however, both undermanned and under-resourced. Only two countries, Uganda and Burundi, have so far committed forces to the mission, and two and a half years after its creation, the force is barely at 50 per cent of its mandated strength. What forces there are are short of armoured personnel carriers, body ar mour and other vital equipment, and Burundi recently declared that it would not contribute any further forces to the mission until such time as the international community agrees to do more. In addition, its mandate is too weak to allow it to effectively combat militants.

As Ban Ki-moon re-emphasised in his recent report, the key to a sustainable solution in Somalia is capacity building, that is, strengthening the internal institutions of Somalia to enable them to independently maintain a handle on the situation rather than externally imposing a solution that is ultimately unsustainable. However 18 years of almost uninterrupted chaos has clearly demonstrated that the Somali Transitional Federal Government (TFG) is unable to resolve its problems alone. Only if it is given the space and the security to strengthen its position will the TFG have a realistic chance of succeeding, and that space and security can only be provided by a properly manned and resourced international peacekeeping force.

On 18 August last year, Somalia’s Joint Security Committee (JSC) called for the deployment of UN peacekeepers, a call that was repeated on 10 December by the African Union, who would like to see the UN assume responsibility in place of AMISOM. Few people on the ground in Somalia are in any doubt that the TFG needs real support if it is to succeed. The recent assissination of Somalia’s Security Minister, Omar Hashi Aden, by a suicide bomb is a bitterly ironic proof of the TFG’s inability to provide proper security, even in the one third of the country it currently controls. The UN refugee agency’s representative to Somalia, Guillermo Bettocchi, said on Wednesday the recent bout of bloodletting in the country was the “worst ever” in nearly two decades of chaos.

Yet in spite of this, there is good evidence that the militants enjoy but little support amongst the majority of Somalis. Contrary to the worst fears of some observers, Al-Shabaab did not overrun the country following the withdrawal of Ethiopian forces in January, and clan militias opposed to the group’s radicalism have plugged the gaps in many areas. Militants have endeared themselves still less to the country’s Sufi element with their desecration of Sufi graves in the south of the country as “idolotrous”. In his March report, Ban Ki-moon concurred with the view that Al-Shabaab do not enjoy the support of most Somalis. Indeed, the motivation for most Somalis to take up arms appears not to be religious fervour but money. Nowhere is this better demonstrated than with the country’s piracy problem. Pirates who have given interviews freely admit they are in it for the money, and perhaps also the women. Payouts can sometimes be in the tens of thousands of dollars, and ransom demands often exceed $1 million, huge sums in a country where per capita GDP is just $600. Similar motivations seem to drive many of the country’s land based militants.

One does not need to be familiar with Thomas Hobbes to know that if the state cannot provide protection and the rule of law, then a people will become a law unto themselves to ensure their own protection. Until the TFG is able to provide a genuinely stable environment, in which jobs can be both created and guaranteed, there is no hope for Somalia. Two decades of out and out civil war have demonstrated they cannot do this alone.

The international community has taken upon itself the Responsibility to Protect, the logic being that if a government was either unable or unwilling to protect its people, then the international community had a moral duty to intervene. There is no doubting the TFG’s willingness to protect its people, but its ability is quite another matter. The Security Council’s most recent resolution on Somalia has once again re-iterated the UN’s “intent” on deploying a UN peacekeeping force in Somalia to follow on from AMISOM. Unfortunately, the Secretary General has reported a fairly universal unwillingness amongst the international community to commit any soldiers to such a force at the present time. One wonders, giving this apathy, whether any proposed force would be given an adequate mandate even if it were to be established. It is almost as though the international community has become numbed to the chaos in Somalia, as though the fact that some 3.2 million Somalis, almost one third of the populaion, relying on aid does not really matter. Yet in the TFG, there is a government genuinely committed to restoring order, if only it were given the capability to do so. Few decisions of any international significance were ever borne of altruism alone. But the cost to international shipping of the piracy problem, and now the influx of foreign militants in to the country, threatening to turn it into an unregulated Islamist hotbed in north-east Africa, should convince the international community that meaningful action in Somalia is in everyone’s best interests.

“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.