How to Deal

In the dusty pirate havens of Puntland, a province in the country formerly known as the nation of Somalia, today's Kalashnikov-bearing buccaneers are said to be leery of the French flag. If they're not, they certainly should be. Three times since April of last year Somali gunmen have seized pleasure boats with French passengers and crews—and all three times, including just last week, the French have negotiated, stalled (in the first case even paid a ransom), then attacked. The French response to Somali piracy is now so well known that "in Puntland they talk about avoiding 'the French option'," says John S. Burnett, author of the prescient 2002 study of modern piracy, "Dangerous Waters." "They know French commandos will come after them," says Burnett, "and some of these French guys are really tough mothers." Burnett says that to his knowledge the Somalis have never attacked a cargo ship carrying France's flag. On Wednesday, the French defense ministry announced that the frigate Nivôse had intercepted and detained 11 pirates on a small "mother ship" about 500 nautical miles east of Mombasa, Kenya. The French Navy had tracked the pirates through the night after using a helicopter to foil their attack on a Liberian-flagged vessel.                     

There are lessons for the United States in the French actions, some of which may already have been learned. The dramatic rescue of the American Capt Richard Phillips of the Maersk Alabama on Easter Sunday was carried out with tactics very similar to the French operations. But the most important lessons are about what goes on before the first round is fired, then what comes after. Confrontations already are escalating. Pirates attacked another American container ship, the Liberty Sun, with automatic rifles and rocket-propelled grenades Tuesday evening. If they intended to board, they failed. They damaged the ship but none of its crew members was hurt and the U.S. Navy destroyer Bainbridge arrived on the scene three hours later to escort the Liberty Sun onward. Earlier Tuesday, a Greek-operated vessel and a Lebanese owned one were hijacked successfully. And as what had been largely bloodless hijackings evolve toward hit-and-run warfare, the most important thing to understand is that no one country can solve this problem simply by protecting, or rescuing, its own people.

Some 260 sailors from all over the world are now held hostage by various Somali pirate organizations. Most are from developing countries, and as French counterterror consultant Alain Bauer warns, the message ought not to be that the Somalis "have the right to kill Filipinos and other Third World mariners but mustn't kidnap French tourists or an American captain." The message ought to be that the world will act in concert to end such threats. The French and Americans, among others, have called for such unity. Yet the armada assembled in the Gulf of Aden and the Indian Ocean includes dozens of warships from many different navies willing to act only when their own nationals are under threat, if then.

The reasons are well understood in the shipping industry. No navy or collection of navies could patrol all of the vulnerable waters off Somalia all the time, and the pirate syndicates have very good intelligence out of Europe about what ships to hit and when and where, according to Burnett. Why don't the merchantmen defend themselves? Gunplay on boats filled with volatile chemicals could lead to disastrous explosions. Vessels could be sunk. The mostly untrained men and women aboard could be slaughtered.  Losses and liabilities could multiply astronomically. So owners and underwriters think it is safer and indeed cheaper to insure crew and cargo, then pay the ransoms, than to fight off the hijackers or call in the fleet—even if there were a fleet ready to respond. "The shipping companies don't want blood on their decks," says Burnett. Piracy becomes part of the cost of doing business.

What is largely left out of these calculations, however, is the matter of national prestige. And that was what French President Nicolas Sarkozy set out to defend when he ordered commandos into action against the pirates twice last year and again last week. National prestige was also at the core of the showdown over the Maersk Alabama. An America severely weakened economically and still feeling physically vulnerable after 9/11 and the botched wars that followed cannot let itself be faced down by a pirate rabble. So the global 24/7 news cycle touted the Alabama incident as President Barack Obama's first big foreign-policy test. And try as he might to keep his response low key—to allow the hostage negotiations to proceed like a police matter, a sort of "Dog Day Afternoon" in a lifeboat—he was portrayed first as absurdly ineffectual, then as gloriously triumphant.                   

The danger of such hype, says Burnett, is that it inflates the self-importance of the pirates even as it gives proud and vengeful Somalis reason to move from banditry to something more like guerrilla warfare on the water. Whether that will extend to alliances with terrorist-linked Somali groups like Al-Shabab is an open and worrisome question. But the pirates are almost certain to develop their organization and their tactics more quickly than any combination of international players. So we will see a growing number of showdowns at sea that follow an increasingly predictable pattern, and as the French now know, they don't always have happy endings.