Against All Flags

Questions and answers about pirates and Somalia

Jesse Walker | April 17, 2009

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The warlords used the aid to pursue their own agendas, and the fighting ramped back up. The chaos pushed ordinary Somalis into the arms of the Islamic Courts Union, a confederation of sharia-based arbitrators that gradually took over roughly half the country, including the nominal capital, Mogadishu.

Displeased with this result, Washington backed an Ethiopean invasion and occupation of the country. This was supposed to establish a central government for once and for all. Instead it was a gory failure whose chief effect was to rip apart civil society and turn the country into a violent free-for-all. As Human Rights Watch reported in 2008, "the last two years are not just another typical chapter in Somalia’s troubled history. The human rights and humanitarian catastrophe facing Somalia today threatens the lives and livelihoods of millions of Somalis on a scale not witnessed since the early 1990s."

One effect was to push more people into desperate and risky ways of making a living. Such as piracy.

That wasn't the beginning of the piracy, though.

No, pirates had been active off the Somali coast since the '90s. At first, to give the devil his due, this was a sort of self-defense, as fishermen fought off foreigners poaching in their waters and seized European boats illegally dumping nuclear waste. Such targets made the freebooters into folk-heroes, and it is one of the two main reasons the pirates have a fair amount of popular support onshore.

What's the other reason?

A wise thief learns to spread the wealth around.

The buccaneers still describe themselves with PR-savvy names like the "National Volunteer Coast Guard." But as it became clear that there were enormous profits in piracy, any innocent sailor on an inadequately defended boat became potential prey. Once the war wiped out many other means of making a living, the number of pirate attacks increased further.

Now Ethiopia has withdrawn and left the "transitional government" in charge, to the extent that anyone in Somalia is in charge. The newly elected president of the transitional government, incidentally, is Sheikh Sharif Sheikh Ahmed, whose previous job title was commander in chief of the Islamic Courts Union.

Let me get this straight. To combat communism in east Africa, the United States propped up a Marxist dictator. After sending troops to battle the warlords, it intervened again to assist the warlords. It did this about-face to stanch the growth of Islamism, but the effect was to put an Islamist group in charge of the country. And after Washington backed an invasion and occupation of the nation to end the Islamic Courts Union's control, the result was a government run by a former commander of the Islamic Courts Union?

You can see why I'm skeptical about a war on the pirates. It'll probably end with Obama dedicating a 60-foot statue of Blackbeard in the middle of Mogadishu.

So how do we fix the problems on the mainland, if we don't invade and don't send aid?

We butt out. If we can't solve Somalia's problems, we can at least refrain from making them worse. The closest the country has had to a period of optimism and growth came when the international community—with the ignoble exceptions of the fish thieves and waste dumpers—largely left the place to its own devices. Do that long enough, and the Somalis may develop institutions strong enough to help rein in the pirates. In the meantime, the best place for us outsiders to focus our efforts is in finding smarter, more effective ways to defend our ships.

That isn't a very optimistic conclusion.

Sorry, but the region isn't exactly bubbling over with reasons for hope. It's easy to call vaguely for humanitarian assistance or for military action. It's harder when you think through the likely consequences of such interventions, especially in light of the consequences of all the earlier aid and war.

Whether you're building a working society on the land or protecting ships at sea, real solutions are only going to come incrementally, experimentally, and at the initiative of the people directly affected. The best thing the world's governments can do is to figure out what they might be doing that blocks rather than facilitates such gradual, bottom-up change, and then to stop doing it.

Jesse Walker is managing editor of Reason magazine.