Piracy and Permission

In 2005 the International Maritime Organization recognized that Somali pirate hijacking of ships and holding of vessel and crew for ransom was becoming a serious problem. In October 2011, BBC News reported that the British Prime Minister has signed into law the limited authorization for British-flagged ships to carry defensive weapons -- only in defined areas where Somali pirates threaten maritime commerce. What is wrong with this picture?

The onus in such matters remains with the party best able to adapt to the exigencies of circumstance. Small wonder, then, that the pirates retain the adaptive edge. They extort millions for return of ship and crew, and do this so consistently as to now attract the equivalent of venture capital financiers to buy in advance AK-47 assault rifles and rocket-propelled grenades from Yemeni arms dealers in exchange for a share in the pirates' profits.

This situation shows how nimble rogues governed by boldness and a sense of market forces outmaneuver government bureaucracies constrained by regulatory impulses and fundamental distaste for allowing unauthorized people to take the lead in their own defense. Perhaps some of the abductees, like a British couple held for 388 days before being ransomed, might prefer an alternative approach.

What if armed passage became the default, and every unrecognized Somali skiff racing towards a freighter or tanker met with warning shots and the possibility of being outgunned by return fire? Then the likely outcome would be what the security industry knows as displacement. The pirates would have little alternative but to seek other prey or to enter a less risky line of business.

There are precedents for such security victories, but success favors bold strokes over bureaucratic hand-wringing. In the same time between recognition of the pirate problem and the anemic recognition of a right to self-defense, a more robust British administration eradicated a 300-year-old menace similarly affecting commerce. This involved the Thugs in India, who combined thievery, murder, religion, and secrecy to get away with victimizing travelers for centuries and leaving no trace. Slow to come to grips with the situation, the British eventually realized the problem and their own self-imposed limitations in a legal system that discounted evidence of informants. This favored the Thugs, for whom killing of witnesses had both religious and practical merits. So the British modified their laws to meet the threat. They rounded up Thugs and their families, encouraged informants, imposed severe penalties. In six years, the British effectively eradicated Thugs as a 300-year-old plague. More impressively, once the problem was over, the British restored a more permissive legal system that was in place before draconian measures were imposed.

There are lessons, here, for those who would harvest them. A bold enemy finds little incentive to succumb to feeble deliberations. Getting tough can be focused on a time and situation, then reversed once its purpose is served. It need not be a sentence to living under irreversible martial law. Finally, pirates, rogues, and thugs of all stripes do follow business rules and obey market forces -- even if they don't realize it. They favor activities where the risk is lower for them than for their targets, and they don't stick to what no longer pays.

Have we learned this ourselves?

-- Nick Catrantzos