Plan would take pirate fight into Somalia - Navy News | News from Afghanistan & Iraq - Navy Times

Plan would take pirate fight into Somalia

Sailors and Marines could begin hunting Somali pirates where they live — on land, in the coastal towns they use as havens for hijacked ships — if the U.N. Security Council approves a resolution offered in mid-December by President George W. Bush.

The resolution would authorize the allied navies patrolling off Somalia to enter its airspace and go ashore in pursuit of the pirates who have ramped up their attacks this year off the Horn of Africa. Experts and analysts have agreed that patrolling offshore or escorting merchant ships only deals with the symptoms of piracy; its cause is the anarchy on land in Somalia, specifically the ability of hijackers to take refuge in sympathetic pirate havens.

But the commander of U.S. naval forces in the region said Dec. 12 it wouldn’t be a good idea to fight pirates ashore. Vice Adm. Bill Gortney told reporters that striking pirate camps presents problems because it is difficult to identify them and the potential for killing innocent civilians “cannot be overestimated.”

Still, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice was scheduled to present the U.S. resolution Dec. 16 at a meeting of the U.N. Security Council. For one year, it would authorize allied anti-piracy forces to “take all necessary measures ashore in Somalia, including in its airspace, to interdict those who are using Somali territory to plan, facilitate or undertake acts of piracy and armed robbery at sea and to otherwise prevent those activities.”

It’s the second piracy resolution the Security Council will have considered in the same month, reflecting the widespread concern among merchant shippers about the danger to the thousands of vessels that pass off Somalia’s eastern coast or in the narrow Gulf of Aden. The Security Council voted unanimously Dec. 2 to authorize the international naval coalition off Somalia to pursue pirates and operate inside its territorial waters, if necessary.

By the middle of the month, after outlaws chased or fired on two cruise ships in the Indian Ocean, cruise lines were taking extraordinary steps to keep their customers away from the pirates. The passengers of the cruise ship MS Columbus got off their ship Dec. 10 in Yemen and flew to Dubai, so they weren’t aboard the ship when it passed through the Gulf of Aden.

Attacking or invading the Somali pirate havens is a major tactical sidestep from the current strategy of patrols and escorts. It solves the problem of needing a major armada to safeguard the waters of the Gulf of Aden, which would take a fleet of 61 warships, as Gortney told CNN on Dec. 8. But it would require a different force, which would probably include more amphibious warships, and be much riskier for sailors and Marines than today’s cop-on-the-beat approach.

The potential escalation of U.S. and allied anti-piracy operations also runs counter to the counsel offered by many analysts in Washington, who have said a permanent solution would require ground action but advised against U.S. forces landing in chaotic Somalia.

Managing the problem

Piracy will never be completely eliminated, Rand Corp. researcher Peter Chalk said Dec. 9, but it can be managed and defended against to the point that it becomes just another cost of international commerce. What’s more, the international system can probably withstand a great deal more attacks and hijackings beyond the recent spike off Somalia, he said, given the scale of global trade.

Although Chalk cautioned that there are few reliable figures when it comes to the costs of piracy, he said a rough estimate is that global piracy costs the world about $16 billion per year, although he noted that figure is a conservative guess because many pirate attacks aren’t reported. The total yearly value of international maritime trade is more than $7.8 trillion, making the losses to piracy comparatively minor.

Chalk suggested there were nonmilitary techniques that could at least help cut back on the number of hijackings. If foreign agencies tried to spur local development in the pirate-haven towns, it could lessen the appeal of the money that came in from piracy, he said, although he cautioned that some attacks probably would still take place.

He also cautioned that pirates’ recent successes could presage new maritime terrorist attacks. There’s little evidence linking Somali pirates with Islamic terrorists, Chalk said, but terrorist groups could use the lessons from pirate attacks for future operations. Terrorists could also become regular third-party buyers of weapons and other goods seized by pirates.

Cruise ships and civilian ferries — “the softest of the soft targets” — are at particular risk for small-boat suicide attacks, Chalk said. Most governments treat ferries more as mass transit than as commercial vessels, he said, and the way such ships are built makes them especially susceptible to catastrophic attacks. The 2004 bombing of the Philippine SuperFerry 14, which killed 116 people, cost just $400 for 8 pounds of dynamite hidden in a television set, Chalk said.

———

The Associated Press contributed to this report.