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Pirates “Around the Clock”

By John Batchelor on April 10, 2009 at 12:26 PM in "Blackhawk Down", Foreign Policy, Gen. David Petraeus, Pentagon, Piracy, President Barack Obama, Somalia, United Nations

Blackhawk Down In Deep Water.  


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Suddenly the Obama administration has a foreign policy problem that does not permit simple blame-shifting to the previous presidency, and the problem has the face of the worthy Maersk Alabama’s Captain Richard Phillips.  Joe Biden knows this is alarming and ignored his smug aide to comment that DNI Blair and his team are working “around the clock” on the hostage scenario.

The Maersk Alabama was reported in-bound to Mombassa with food aid for East Africa when it was boarded and captured several hundred kilometers at sea.  Early reports are that Phillips exchanged himself for his crew, and that the attackers then set off in a fully-provisioned, enclosed lifeboat that can sustain them for at least a week as they negotiate with the U.S. Navy’s Bainbridge.  The Somali pirates are not random scavengers.  They may very well have been tipped or guided to their target by Mombassa based sources.  The whole of the Somali coast is rich with two clans who practice piracy as a business plan.  This is measured and sober hostage taking for ransom.  Robert Wright, FT, told Simon Constable and I weeks ago that the dip in piracy incidents off Somalia was weather related not because the surface navies of the US, Italy, Germany, Britain, India, Russia, France have intimidated the pirates.  This is 

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now chiefly an American tactical puzzle.  Why American?  The old Colin Powell rule, you break it, you own it.  The 1992-93 intervention by both the George H.W. Bush and the Bill Clinton administrations, with the UN standing by like a pet, turned into the horror moment of Blackhawk Down and then America bugging out as if Mogadishu was Saigon.   In a gesture of guilt, America welcomed tens of thousands of Somalis as war refugees and distributed them in peculiar places, such as frigid Minnesota and Maine.   The George Bush administration ignored Somalia as if it was an unemptied ashtray for the morning clean-up.  The pirates are a piece of the nightmare.  The whole of the Sahel, the shore of the Sahara, is in turmoil with jihad,  drought, famine, gun-running and anarchy.


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 Hostages.  

The warships cannot solve the problem, because the answers  are on land.   The FT’s Robert Wright told us that there are two clans that dominate piracy, the Hawiye and the Darod, and they work in parallel.  The Hawiye command the Haradere area.  _45647302_africa_piracy_maersk_226.gifThe Darod command the Puntland Coast around Eyl.  Only ground-based suppression will work, but that means Marines, air support, naval support, United Nations cooperation, civic and humanitarian structure — the comprehensive approach that the US has not wanted to risk since 1993.   Now the hostage scenario may force the Obama adminstration’s hand.   CENTCOM’s General Petraeus says that more ships are in-bound for the region, though this is an impotent and tardy gesture.  The FBI hostage negotiators are headed to the USS Belknap to open conversation with the pirates.  The demands are simple: food, fuel, cash and free passage back to our dens.  The Obama administration must now struggle with the policy that the US does not ransom hostages.   No appeasement, no concessions, no peace.  Surrender or die.  There is more than one hostage on that bobbing Maresk line lifeboat.  The US, the pirates, the POTUS and VPOTUS could become hostages, too.  It is not idle that the President would not answer a reporter’s question today about the pirates.  This is dangerous policy.  Blackhawk Down in deep water is make-believe, so far.    The pirates operate in packs; they may have land-based command and control; they may welcome jihadists into their mix; they know that one in two captured pirates have been set loose.   Easy to imagine there are tens of pirate boats pushing off from the coast and preparing to grab anything American.   Fat pickings, big pay-day possible, and the new bosses won’t shoot, will they?

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