Creating Varangians

By Fester:

The USNI blog has an interesting graph concerning the pace and timing of pirate incidents off of the Somali coast over the past few years.  At the beginning of the post, they note that there is strong seasonality to attacks as winds, waves and general weather conditions make some times much more favorable for small craft operations than others, but they also note the political conditions on land.

Basically the Islamic Courts Union was able to effectively assert itself as a quasi-government or at least as the toughest of the tough over large areas of the Somali coast line and dramatically reduce the land based incentives for piracy.  And at that point, the ICU was overthrown by the Ethiopian invasion which propped up a very weak and incapable government of exiles and irrelevants.  At this time, piracy resumed as a lucrative and attractive exploitation of the lack of state capacity on the Somali coast.

Dave Schuler at Outside the Beltway has put together a fairly comprehensive link fest on a variety of takes on Somali piracy and Western policy responses that range from the unthinking and counter-productive shock and awe Viagra to interesting responses.  I want to focus on just a couple that he pulled up as I think they support the chart from the US Navy Institute.

John Robb has suggested that “anti-piracy” is the inevitable but self-defeating solution to the problem:

The Pyrrhic solution that will eventually be adopted is a combination of A) funded militias (Somali anti-pirates that raid pirate dens) and B) business as usual (private sector management ala the symbiosis detailed above).

His estimate of the cost of these “anti-pirates” is approximately $2-3 million per month. What could possibly go wrong?

Pay off the pirates

It’s been suggested that tributes be paid to the pirates to save them the trouble of actually attacking ships. I see no straightforward way to enforce this solution and it certainly lowers the already low cost of entry for piracy.

Create a pirate chief

Combining Eric Posner’s line of reasoning:

It would be much better if a single pirate leader controlled entry. Then we could do business with him, paying him a tribute (we might prefer to call it a “toll”) in return for a promise not to molest our ships. As a monopolist, he would have an incentive to limit “production” of piratical activity, relative to the unregulated market we currently live in. The monopolist essentially would be selling passage off the coast of Somalia, and would be constrained by competition from people who control alternative routes (which, unfortunately, seems limited). We might even expect the pirates to start organizing, or fighting among themselves, in an effort to establish a single firm that could obtain these monopoly rents. In the happy event that an organization emerged, we could call it a “state” and deal with it as we deal with any other state—paying it or pressuring to act as we want it to act, in light of its interests and capacities. We could even call this state “Somalia.” If the gains from rational management of this newly discovered resource—the power to block important sea lanes—provide sufficient incentives for Somalia’s warring clans to make a deal and reestablish a state that can control entry into the market, we should be sure to keep paying Somalia money (we might call it “foreign aid” if “tribute” or even “toll” is too irksome) rather than yield to the temptation to smash it to pieces.

with John Robb’s we could create a pirate chief whom we’d pay to prevent competition. Again, what could possibly go wrong?

I have argued that piracy is merely a symptom of disorder and incapacity on land. 

Piracy is a sympton of land based disorder.  Until there is a quasi-functional government with sway and legitimacy in every Somali fishing town, piracy will continue to be an issue.  If piracy is a major policy issue then the trading powers will not be able to care too much about any entity's politics if it has legitimacy and capacity to exert its will on the coastal towns.  A weak but functional state that is able to accept foreign cash for local piracy suppression on the supply side of the problem would be a vast improvement over the failed statehood of Somalia. 

The trading powers, of which the United States is the greatest one due to the combination of our net trade position and the unchallenged blue water dominance of the Navy can either decide to support a state-like entity in Somalia that may or may not perfectly conform to Western interests in areas other than piracy suppression or decide to get involved in another generation long nation building process that will most likely result in a permanent weak client government that lacks resiliency and local legitimacy at the end of the process. 

Paying off the Vikings so that they become Varangians who buy into the current state system is most likely a much cheaper and more sustainable policy initiative.