Yo Ho, Yo Ho, A Pirate's Life For Me

Like most people, I'm completely gobsmacked that Somali pirates can take over a giant oil tanker and plunder enough to make $150 million a year in ransoms. But as Matt Yglesias notes, this is a failure of policy as well as just something to snicker at.

In particular, at the end of the day it’s not easy to fight pirates at sea. The ocean is extremely large, boats move around, and circumstances are generally unfavorable to law enforcement. You need to fight the piracy on land. If you tried to run a pirate ring out of San Diego, you wouldn’t get very far — there are police in southern California. But Somalia has, obviously, been in a state of political chaos for a long time now. And when the country looked like it was heading for a measure of political stability under the Islamic Courts Movement, the US decided it would be smart to back an Ethiopian invasion-and-occupation of the country that ultimately wound up resulting in more chaos than ever. But whatever you think of the past, going forward you would ultimately want to solve this issue on land. In other words, by creating some kind of political stability in Somalia.

Interestingly enough, it's the Islamists who are stepping into the vacuum and claiming that they will now fight the pirates. If they succeed they will have the trust of a nation and probably a free hand to regain power, until we decapitate them again. That would be a mistake. It would be far better to create stability rather than let anarchy reign. That means that you make peace with those who can keep it.

...that said, if the pirates want to buy Citigroup that's OK with me. As long as my ATM card still works. (warning: parody ahead!)