Statelessness and Disorder is the problem, not a goal

By Fester

I think Galrahn at Information Dissemination is providing an interesting, seductive and ultimately strategically counter-productive analysis of the Somali piracy situation and US response to it. I think his analysis justifies a failure of strategic vision and a misdiagnosis of threats:

 US perspective it is important to remember that JTF-HOA has a purpose, is very active, and has nothing to do with piracy. Somalia represents a major front in the Global War on Terror, and the US National Security Strategy for Somalia is essentially to wait for a government that can manage the nation to emerge. The United States destroyed the Islamic Courts because they represented a future likely Taliban. The United States, and specifically JTF-HOA is working towards building up every nation surrounding Somalia. The United States is essentially allowing Somalia to remain an ungoverned country because the status quo gives us more freedom of action in fighting al Qaeda and other extremist terrorism allies in Somalia. Piracy is a side effect, and not necessarily a terrible side effect, of that strategy.

 His argument is that it is in the US's best interest to allow for significant ungovernable and ungoverned zones adjacent to major international trade routes so that the US can engage in whack a mole while propping up an ineffective and fundamentally irrelevant government that can not control the neighborhood in which it is based, much less the entire coast line. The goal then is to conduct continent-wide 'ink spot' nation building.

 I think there are a couple of core mistakes in this analysis. The first is that the US is hegemonic power who sells security services as a partial justification of the massive foreign capital inflows that we require. This is the justification for Admiral Mullen's 1,000 ship multinational navy, this is a good chunk of the justification for the littoral focus that we have spent hundreds of billions to develop and maintain over the past two generations, this is a key component of US strategic power --- protecting the sea lanes. Insecurity over a major trade route, especially one that has a significant transit of an economic chokepoint commodity (oil) is a strategic threat to US security.

Secondly, ungovernable lands where there is no one who has a vested interest in cutting a deal and maintaining a reasonable degree of order is a direct threat to the continental United States. It is in these areas that small networks of individuals who want to conduct interontinental terrorist strikes have a chance of coming together, collaborating, training and carrying out their plans. This is the fear, combined with the known expertise, of the Pakistani tribal areas, and it is a potential fear of Somalia as there is no one who has the ability to impose order. The combination of deliberate statelessness and degradation of the hegemonic security services is horrendous policy.