Published 19 Feb 09

Strategic Interests

by J. Peter Pham, Ph.D.
World Defense Review columnist

Despite Progress, Somali Piracy Threat Persists – and May Grow Larger

Last Thursday, more than four months since it was first seized by Somali pirates and more than a week after a record $3.2 million ransom was parachuted onto its deck, the Ukrainian-owned, Belizean-registered freighter MV Faina entered the Kenyan port of Mombasa. Two days later, after a delay caused by low tides, its cargo of thirty-three refurbished Russian-designed T-72 tanks, grenade launchers, anti-aircraft guns, and other armaments was offloaded and put onto rail wagons for the 500-kilometer trip to Nairobi. Unfortunately, the conclusion of the more than nineteen-week standoff over the Faina on a relatively peaceful note – the only casualty was the hapless captain, Vladimir Kolobkov, a Russian national who died two days after the September 25, 2008 hijacking from complications related to high blood pressure and whose body was stowed this whole time in the ship's freezer – hardly signals the end of the threat posed by piracy in the Gulf of Aden and nearby waters. In fact, last week alone, Somali pirates tried to hijack six other merchant ships and already this week a Royal Saudi Navy's HMS Al-Riyadh, a modified La Fayette-class light stealth frigate, thwarted a pirate attack on the brand-new Turkish tanker MV Yasa Seyhan. If anything, the challenge of piracy is not just ongoing, but incidents of attempted hijackings may actually increase, notwithstanding the increased attention which the international community has focused on the phenomenon.

As I observed in this column three months ago, the attacks should come as no surprise. Given that Somalia has lacked an effective national government since 1991 – and, as I noted last week, it is wishful thinking at best to expect much out of the newly installed head of the country's "Transitional Federal Government" (TFG), Sheikh Sharif Sheikh Ahmed – and that piracy has become the most lucrative economic activity in Somalia since ship owners and some governments have been all-too-willing to pay amounts in excess of $1 million for the return of their hijacked vessels and seamen (before the Faina, the previous record ransom was the $3 million paid in January for the MV Sirius Star, a Liberian-flagged supertanker owned by a United Arab Emirates-based subsidiary of Saudi Aramco), the temptation is simply too great when the country's per capita GDP (purchasing power parity) is barely $600. When one weighs the potential riches to be derived from the illicit activity against the extreme unlikelihood of any government enforcement action, it is no wonder that the number of attacks last year were double those recorded in 2007 and that those this year are already trending upwards.

However, there might be a silver lining to these dark clouds. The spike in incidents of piracy has been so dramatic that it has provoked a global response, resulting in an unprecedented level of international political and security cooperation.

In 2008, the United Nations Security Council passed no fewer than five separate resolutions (1816 on June 2, 1838 on October 7, 1844 on November 20, 1846 on December 2, and 1851 on December 16) dealing with Somali piracy, thus devoting more attention to it than to any other single issue last year. These documents, each of which invoked Chapter VII of the world body's charter dealing with threats to international peace ands security, expanded the scope for military action against the pirates beyond the limits which customary international law permitted, including authorization to take action within Somali territorial waters and, under certain circumstances, on land.

A "Contact Group on Piracy off the Coast of Somalia" was also convened at UN headquarters in New York at the beginning of this year. Participants included representatives from Australia, the People's Republic of China, Denmark, Djibouti, Egypt, France, Germany, Greece, India, Italy, Japan, Kenya, the Republic of Korea, the Netherlands, Oman, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Spain, Turkey, United Arab Emirates, the United Kingdom, the United States, and Yemen, as well as Somalia's TFG, the African Union, the European Union, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), the UN Secretariat, and the International Maritime Organization (IMO). The participants formed four smaller "working groups" charged, respectively, with activities related to military and operational coordination and information sharing and the establishment of the regional coordination center; addressing judicial aspects of piracy; strengthen shipping self-awareness and other capabilities; and improving diplomatic and public information efforts on all aspects of piracy.

Furthermore, recognizing the lack of a functioning judiciary in Somalia, a number of countries, including the United States and the United Kingdom, have reached agreements with neighboring Kenya in recent months to turn over captured pirates for prosecution in that country. While both customary and conventional international law clearly give the capturing nation the authority to try pirates – piracy is the original crime admitting "universal jurisdiction" – the complications of conducting modern day piracy trials has generally discouraged Western countries from undertaking prosecutions.

On the military side, a multinational flotilla, Combined Task Force 151 (CTF 151), was stood up in mid-January with the mandate of focusing solely on counter-piracy operations in and around the Gulf of Aden. CTF 151 was created out of Combined Maritime Forces (CMF), a coalition of more than twenty nations cooperating in counterterrorism and anti-trafficking operations throughout the Persian Gulf, the Arabian Sea, the Gulf of Aden, and parts of the Indian Ocean and coordinated by U.S. Naval Forces Central Command (NAVCENT). The creation of CTF 151 draws a clearer distinction between its mission and that of Combined Task Force 150 (CTF 150) which was established at the beginning of Operation Enduring Freedom to counter terrorism in the Gulf of Aden, the Gulf of Oman, the Arabian Sea, and the Red Sea. The new task force, under the command of U.S. Navy Rear Admiral Terence E. McKnight, currently comprises several U.S. Navy ships – including the Ticonderoga-class Aegis guided missile cruiser USS Vella Gulf and the Arleigh Burke-class destroyer USS Mahan – and the Royal Navy's Type 23 HMS Portland, all tasked specifically with the anti-piracy mission. The task force – which, in addition to naval vessels, includes a specially-trained U.S. Navy visit, board, search and seizure (VBSS) team, a U.S. Coast Guard Law Enforcement Detachment (LEDET), several U.S. Marine Corps detachments, and unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) capabilities – collaborates with units similarly detailed by European allies and other coalition partners.

In addition to coalition forces, navies from Russia, China, India, Turkey, and other countries have also deployed to the region. The three ships in the Chinese People's Liberation Army Navy flotilla – the Guangzhou-class destroyer Wuhan, the Lanzhou-class destroyer Haikou, and the Qiandahou-class supply ship Weishanhu – represent China's first extended deployment outside home waters since the fabled voyages of the Ming Dynasty Admiral Zheng He in the 15^th century, while the Turkish G-class frigate TCG Giresun, which sailed from the Aegean this week, will be the first warship from the country to patrol off Somalia since the Ottoman Empire. Although the vessels of these non-coalition countries are not formally part of the U.S.-coordinated effort, they have performed escort duties and, in the manner of professional seamen, responded to distress signals irrespective of the national flag of the boat under attack. Last Friday, for example, the Russian nuclear-powered Kirov-class battlecruiser RFS Pyotr Velikiy ("Peter the Great") stopped an assault on an Iranian fishing trawler and destroyed three pirate skiffs, capturing ten of the attackers.

In announcing the operational stand-up of CTF 151 during a Pentagon news briefing last month, the commander of U.S. Naval Forces Central Command, Vice Admiral William E. Gortney, made a point of noting the lengths open channels of communication between the various naval forces converging on the region. In response to one reporter's question about how he managed "command and control of all these nations," the three-star admiral responded:

It's coordination of effort; it's not a command and control, because there are so many different nations involved that don't belong in the Combined Maritime Forces in a clean chain of command. So we coordinate at the operational level in my headquarters at the Combined Maritime Forces with those nations that are there. The EU has liaison officers in my staff, embedded into my staff, and we coordinate at that level.

And at the tactical level or on the waterfront, CTF-151 is now responsible to manage that tactical deconfliction. And we do that by publishing our intentions and our effectiveness and our schedules. It's all unclassified. We share that through all unclassified means. With the Chinese, we're exchanging e-mails with them on the unclassified net. With the Russians it's a little different. We're transmitting that over bridge-to-bridge radio. So it's from the most basic form of radio transmission to – for the nations that are part of CENTRIX [CENTCOM Regional Intelligence Exchange System], that are part of our coalition – a very networked operation.

While the admiral was also careful to emphasize that the by themselves the new task force and its partners would not be able to solve the problem of piracy off the Horn of Africa, the increased naval presence has already had a positive effect. In the month immediately after the deployment of CTF 151, only one vessel, the Bahamian-registered, German-owned tanker MV Longchamp has been successfully hijacked – and that attack took place in an area far from maritime security zone patrolled by naval ships. Last week alone, the crew of the USS Vella Gulf apprehended sixteen pirates, seven captured while they tried to forcibly board the Marshall Islands-flagged merchant ship MV Polaris and nine while attacking the Indian-flagged MV Premdivya. The pirates were taken by helicopter to the dry cargo ship USNS Lewis and Clark where they are being held pending transfer, most likely to Kenyan authorities per the memorandum of understanding between Washington and Nairobi which was signed late last month, just after the inauguration of President Barack Obama.

Countries in the region, after having long neglected the maintenance of their maritime security capabilities, if they ever had them at all (see my article last year on "Engaging Maritime Africa"), are beginning to adopt a more proactive posture, recognizing the threat that the ongoing attacks have on their own interests. Earlier this month after a four-day summit in Djibouti organized by the IMO, Djibouti, Ethiopia, Kenya, Madagascar, Maldives, Seychelles, Tanzania, and Yemen as well as representatives of the Somali transitional authorities, signed a code of conduct strengthening their anti-piracy cooperation, specifically mentioning collaboration in the "arrest, investigation and prosecution" of suspected pirates as well as boarding and seizing suspected pirate vessels. The agreement, which is open for signature by other regional states, also provides for the establishment of three information centers in Mombasa, Dar es Salaam, and Sana‘a and an anti-piracy training center in Djibouti. Of course, given the limited resources of the states party to the Djibouti code, outside security cooperation assistance and other support will be critical to realizing the aspirations contained therein, much less to building up anything like the joint regional coastal patrol which a number of maritime experts have suggested would be the proportionately adequate response to the piracy phenomenon.

To assist these East African states to develop the skills and capabilities they will need as well as to strengthen military-to-military ties with their navies, U.S. Naval Forces Europe/U.S. Naval Forces Africa announced last week that its Africa Partnership Station (APS) initiative would extend to that region for the first time, a step I called for last year when wrote in this column:

While currently being piloted only off the Atlantic coast of Africa, there is not reason why [APS] cannot be developed also in the Indian Ocean waters off the continent's eastern littoral ... piracy is on the rise even while the maritime capabilities of African countries affected are virtually nonexistent. Since the threat, especially from Somali pirates, is one that affects many nations, the architecture of APS readily permits their incorporation into the eventual response.

The Oliver Hazard Perry-class frigate USS Robert G. Bradley was in Maputo last week, the first time APS had expanded beyond West and Central Africa and the first time any American warship was tied up pier-side in Mozambique since its independence. After conducting small boat drills and maintenance training with Mozambican naval units, the Bradley will make similar calls in Tanzania, Kenya, and Djibouti.

In addition to these hopeful signs, however, there are also some less promising indicators, all coming from among the Somali.

While the Security Council resolutions have undoubtedly facilitated the subsequent involvement of a number of countries in anti-piracy efforts, it needs to be acknowledged that they also undermine the effectiveness of military operations by predicating the legal authority for any action in territory of the former Somali Democratic Republic on the approval of the TFG. As I argued here five months ago, the problem is not just that the Somali government is no government, but that many of its members are part and parcel of the problem. At the time, object of my remarks was the TFG's irascible head, Abdullahi Yusuf Ahmad, who a decade earlier was the first pirate chieftain to get a $1 million payoff from the hijacking of vessel and whose fellow Majeerteen Darod sub-clansmen have a disproportionately high representation in the ranks of the pirates. Now, the same observation goes for the TFG's newly-appointed "prime minister," Omar Abdirashid Ali Sharmarke, a Cisman Mahmoud sub-sub-clansmen of the Majeerteen. Considering that the sole qualification of Omar, a Canadian citizen whose family lives in northern Virginia, for his office is his paternity (his father, Abdirashid Ali Sharmarke, was the president of Somalia whose 1969 assassination in 1969 precipitated the military coup of Mohamed Siad Barre), it is extremely doubtful he will have much ability to rein in his pirate kinsmen. If anything, the opposite is likely to be truer since he will have to rely on the Darod for support.

Moreover, I previously quoted the Special Representative of the UN Secretary-General for Somalia, Ahmedou Ould-Abdallah, who had accused the rulers of the semi-autonomous northwestern region of Puntland of being complicit in the attacks on shipping, going so far as to tell journalists in early September that "the Puntland leadership has made it easy for pirates to establish a base there" and alleging that some of ransom money collected would "be used to fund the 2009 presidential elections in Puntland." While I have differed with the Mauritanian diplomat on a number of issues, on this point he was right on the mark. On January 8, Abdirahman Mohamed Farole, a wealthy businessman whose interests reportedly include the Garowe Online news portal, was elected president of Puntland. An Issa Mohamud sub-sub-clansman of the Majeerteen Darod, Farole previously served as Puntland's minister of finance, during which tenure he acquired a reputation for a corruption and general thuggish behavior. He also enjoys a close relationship with the pirate crews operating out of Eyl and is alleged to be one of their major financial backers, the proceeds from last year's piracy apparently having played a significant role in his successful presidential bid.

While Somalia's putative "leaders" carry on with their various machinations, licit and illicit, in the tiny pockets of territory which they have managed to hold on to, the country's various armed Islamist factions continue to consolidate their control of most of the rest of Somali territory. Last week, militants from al-Shabaab ("the youth"), an al-Qaeda-linked group that was formally designated a "foreign terrorist organization" last year by the U.S. Department of State and which has been spearheading the Islamist insurgency, vowed to target materiel being brought into Mogadishu for the undermanned African Union Mission in Somalia (AMISOM) peacekeeping force and made good on the threat by staging nearly a dozen attacks on a supply boat which berthed at the port and the subsequent convoy into the city. Meanwhile, various Shabaab leaders have established themselves as de facto governors of Somali regions. For example, Ibrahim Haji Jama, a.k.a. "al-Afghani," who trained also with al-Qaeda in Afghanistan and is a veteran of terrorist campaigns there as well as in Kashmir and in the northwestern region of Somaliland, as emerged as the wali of the critical Juba Valley region controlling access to the Kenyan frontier. While there is yet no evidence of anything other than opportunistic instances of cooperation between Somalia's Islamists and pirates – the latter have played no small role in the ferrying of the estimated 1,500 non-Somali jihadists into the country – the ongoing ascendancy of al-Shabaab and its allies does not bode well for efforts to stem the contemporaneous rise of the pirates.

Perhaps an even more unsettling development is the erosion of the one oasis of stability in the former Somalia, the hitherto internationally-unrecognized Republic of Somaliland which, as I noted here two months ago, has been "a bulwark for the international community's security interest in preventing the spread of the chaos emanating from the rest of the former Somalia." Not only have the Islamists targeted it – including Shirwa Ahmed, a Shabaab recruit from Minneapolis who became America's first suicide bomber when he participated in the October 29 attack in the Somaliland capital of Hargeisa – but apparently the pirates have gotten in on the act. Up to now Somaliland's 740 kilometer-long coastline on the south of the Gulf of Aden has been relatively free of pirate activity. In fact, just last week Somaliland's small coast guard apprehended seven pirates armed with AK-47s and RPGs, all from neighboring Puntland, who were alleged to have been planning attacks in the Gulf. However, this week the Somaliland press is reporting that a notorious Puntland crime boss originally from Eyl, Fu'ad Hanano, who is linked to the kidnapping of a German couple in eastern Somaliland last June for which a huge ransom was paid, had set up a base in the Sanaag region with the apparent purpose of carrying out pirate attacks along the littoral between Las Quray and Elayo.

Complicating matters further is the fact that Somaliland's presidential and legislative elections, long-deferred by mutual consent of the political parties for a variety of technical reasons, are currently scheduled for March 29. Not only will the poll distract the Somaliland government and its security services from their anti-piracy operations, but, as I told the Middle East Times earlier this month, the democratic politicking presents an irresistible target for Islamist extremists like Ahmad Abdi Godane, a.k.a. "Abu Zubeyr," whose minions have carried out operations in Somaliland before with the goal of undermining its secular government. Moreover, not only is the popular participation in and legitimacy of its institutions of governance critical for the case for an independent Somaliland, but if for some reason the electoral exercise is not carried out successfully, one can see how Somalilanders can begin a slide into the type of disorder that sadly characterizes the rest of the Somali.

No doubt considerable progress has been made in recent months in the international community's appreciation of the challenge represented by the Somali pirates. However, much more remains to be done before the threat can be diminished. Ultimately, as I noted in the New Atlanticist policy blog of the Atlantic Council of the United States shortly after the taking of the Faina, the problem of Somali lawlessness at sea will only be definitively resolved when the international community summons up the political will to adequately address the underlying pathology of Somali statelessness onshore. Absent a minimal framework of legitimate and effective governance in what was formerly the territory of the unitary Somali state – and I would include as an essential attribute of such governance some sort of coast guard capability, probably externally supported, perhaps with its resources divided between Somaliland (assuming the upcoming elections are held, their conduct legitimate, and the aftermath stable) and Somalia proper (under United Nations, African Union, or subregional tutelage until the TFG or whatever alternative interim arrangement might emerge in its stead proves itself effective and capable of handling such responsibilities) – the specter of piracy will always be looming just over the horizon.

— J. Peter Pham is Director of the Nelson Institute for International and Public Affairs at James Madison University in Harrisonburg, Virginia. He is a Senior Fellow at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies in Washington, D.C., as well as Vice President of the Association for the Study of the Middle East and Africa (ASMEA). In addition to the study of terrorism and political violence, his research interests lie at the intersection of international relations, international law, political theory, and ethics, with particular concentrations on the implications for United States foreign policy and African states as well as religion and global politics.

Dr. Pham is the author of over two hundred essays and reviews on a wide variety of subjects in scholarly and opinion journals on both sides of the Atlantic and the author, editor, or translator of over a dozen books. Among his recent publications are Liberia: Portrait of a Failed State (Reed Press, 2004), which has been critically acclaimed by Foreign Affairs, Worldview, Wilson Quarterly, American Foreign Policy Interests, and other scholarly publications, and Child Soldiers, Adult Interests: The Global Dimensions of the Sierra Leonean Tragedy (Nova Science Publishers, 2005).

In addition to serving on the boards of several international and national think tanks and journals, Dr. Pham has testified before the U.S. Congress and conducted briefings or consulted for both Congressional and Executive agencies. He is also a frequent contributor to National Review Online's military blog, The Tank.

© 2009 J. Peter Pham

J. Peter Pham story archive

NOTE: The opinions expressed in this article are solely those of the author, and do not represent the opinions of World Defense Review and its affiliates. WDR accepts no responsibility whatsoever for the accuracy or inaccuracy of the content of this or any other story published on this website. Copyright and all rights for this story (and all other stories by the author) are held by the author.