Yarrrrrr! Ye Sank Me Battleship!
November 19th, 2008 by AlexAllow me to tell you a tale of intrigue on the high seas…
A major naval power, protecting its interests in Asia and the Middle East, is patrolling international waters off the Gulf of Aden, just south of the Arabian Peninsula. Tensions are high - only days before, a pirate ship had hijacked a large ship containing valuable cargo belonging to one of the naval power’s allies, and a ransom demand is expected soon. The naval vessel comes across a suspected African pirate ship, and orders the ship to submit to an inspection. Predictably enough, the pirate ship refuses, and instead, opens fire. Returning fire, the navy ship hits the pirates’ ammunition dump, which catches fire, setting off a series of explosions which sink the pirate ship. Some of the pirates flee in a pair of lifeboats; one is later found without any passengers, and the other is never found.
Sounds like a tale of swashbuckling adventure from a time long gone, right? I’m sure you can almost see the Union Jack flying over the naval vessel, and the pair of nineteenth-century style wooden ships that were engaged in this battle. Heck, telling the story, I can practically see the hook on the pirate captain’s arm.
There’s only one problem with that vision of this story, though: this battle took place yesterday, between the Indian navy - currently the world’s fifth-largest - and Somali pirates.
For those who may not have heard, Somali pirates are becoming an increasing problem along what is one of the world’s busiest shipping lanes. Attacks have increased dramatically over the past several months, including the hijacking of a Saudi Arabian oil supertanker, which was carrying roughly $110 million worth of oil, on November 15. All sorts of commerce is being impacted, from oil and wheat shipments all the way on down to Nintendo Wii systems and games. Things are so bad that shipping insurance has increased tenfold for cargo going through the region over the past year. It’s like the region has suddenly decided to go on a retro kick to a couple of centuries ago.
Given that we’re in the early phases of a major global recession, you’d think that the nations of the world would be uniting to stage an effective response to what is almost certainly just a rag-tag group of tribal warlord types who’ve decided to go for the big time. Surely, the combined naval power of nations like the US, the UK, India, and China could easily blast these idiot pirates to smithereens in no time flat, before they cause even more economic problems…right?
As of this writing…not so much.
Helping to prove their irrelevance, the UN has done nothing but issue a resolution asking its members to go fight the pirates, but telling them to do so in cooperation with the Somali government - which analysts have noted is part of the piracy problem (note that I single out the UN for their lack of real action because, if there’s anything they should be able to deal with effectively, piracy in international waters should be pretty high on that list). The New York Times is busy running articles telling the pirates’ side of the story, and the NATO warships that arrived in the region in October are only being used for defensive purposes. Confusion surrounding the international legal standards for dealing with these pirate scum has slowed the process of punishing pirates who are captured, and none of the world’s major naval powers appear to be interested in aggressively going after the problem. Proving that the world order is going completely upside-down, the French - they of such dubious military prowess that a Google search for “French military victories” produced a page asking if the searcher had meant “French military defeats” for some time - have provided the most bad-ass response thus far, including a commando raid that freed a pair of French tourists who were being held ransom by Somali pirates, while the Russians chose not to use force to help free a Ukranian ship taken hostage by the pirates.
I realize that the nations of the world can’t exactly just summarily execute suspected pirates, and that a full-scale attack on land inside that country is unlikely given the current global political environment (and the major military powers’ pressing engagements elsewhere). But for heaven’s sake, how difficult can it be to motivate enough countries to put together an offensive force to go and eradicate this problem (or at least make it unprofitable enough for the pirates that they dial back to a minimal number of attacks)? Has the civilized world become so weak that we can’t actually deal with a problem like this - which everyone agrees needs to be stopped - effectively? If so, I fear for the future of our world, and the insanity that is sure to ensue in it as rebel groups like this become more and more brazen.