Piracy as Insurgency

Robert Kaplan has an interesting piece on Piracy in today's NYT. For him, this anarchy at sea is a direct result of anarchy on land. And Somalia, along whose coast this is occuring, is the ultimate failed anarchic state.

Piracy, of course, has the potential to disrupt major trade routes and hence trade at the same time that global trade is under assault from protectionist reactions to the economic crisis. Kaplan suggests, however, that the assymetric nature of piracy represents a greater threat -- its potential use as a terrorist weapon:

The big danger in our day is that piracy can potentially serve as a platform for terrorists. Using pirate techniques, vessels can be hijacked and blown up in the middle of a crowded strait, or a cruise ship seized and the passengers of certain nationalities thrown overboard. You can see how Al Qaeda would be studying this latest episode at sea, in which Somali pirates attacked a Maersk Line container ship and were fought off by the American crew, even as they have managed to take the captain hostage in one of the lifeboats.

The obvious response to this is military (in this case, naval) interdiction. Yet as Kaplan notes, this presents the usual problems of a massively powerful response to asymmetric attacks:

So we end up with the spectacle of an American destroyer, the Bainbridge, with enough Tomahawk missiles and other weaponry to destroy a small city, facing off against a handful of Somali pirates in a tiny lifeboat. This is not an efficient use of American resources. It indicates how pirates, like terrorists, can attack us asymmetrically. The challenge ahead for the United States is not only dealing with the rise of Chinese naval power, but also in handling more unconventional risks that will require a more scrappy, street-fighting Navy.

Sadly, however, this overlooks a half century of lessons on asymmetric warfare. As both the recent groundbreaking work of the U.S. Army in the Counterinsurgency Field Manual (pdf file) and in the widely influential work by John Nagl, Learning to Eat Soup with a Knife, counterinsurgency is a multifaceted task of which military response is only one (usually relatively small) part. This is the lesson ignored in Viet Nam, learned in Iraq and currently being relearned (and learned for the first time by Canada) in Afghanistan.

Let's hope we don't forget it in the Indian Ocean