Monsoon: The Indian Ocean and the Future of American Power (50 page)

From Kuwait the
Nassau
headed back south, halfway down the Persian Gulf to Bahrain, headquarters of the U.S. Fifth Fleet, where it got orders to join an international naval task force in the northwest Indian Ocean, off the coasts of Arabia and the Horn of Africa. The Americans found themselves patrolling the lawless Somali coast in international waters, from the twelve-mile territorial limit to five hundred miles out. Here pirates preyed on all manner of ships, from small dhows, to cruise liners, to liquefied natural gas carriers. Only a few weeks earlier in the region the cruise ship
Seaburn Spirit
had been attacked unsuccessfully by pirates. Most of the time, though, the victims were Asian fishing boats.

It was no coincidence that Somalia was a failed African state and that these were the most dangerous waters in the world. Piracy constitutes the
maritime ripple effect of anarchy on land. The job of the international task force, which at the time included ships from the Netherlands, Great Britain, France, Pakistan, and Australia, as well as from the United States, was simply to “suppress through presence.”

On the morning of January 21, 2006, Berke’s ship, the USS
Nassau
, 150 miles off the Somali coast, got a distress call from the Bahamian-flagged cargo ship
Delta Ranger
, which had sped up to avoid capture by pirates. The
Delta Ranger
had a twenty-five-foot freeboard, meaning the pirates would have had to climb twenty-five feet to reach the deck of the cargo ship while under fire from the
Delta Ranger’s
crew. The willingness to attack the high freeboard indicated just how brazen and unafraid these Somali pirates were.

The U.S. Navy dispatched a P-3 surveillance plane to the area around the
Delta Ranger
to hunt for the pirates. Soon the P-3 located exactly what it was looking for: several skiffs pulling a dhow fishing boat. The Somali pirate confederations are often broken up into cells of ten men, each cell distributed among three skiffs. The skiffs are old, ratty, roach infested, rarely painted, made of decaying wood or fiberglass, and offer no shade. The pirates navigate by the stars. West is home—Somalia; east is the open ocean. A typical pirate cell goes out into the open ocean for about three weeks at a time. The pirates come equipped with drinking water, gasoline for their single-engine outboards, knives, grappling hooks, short ladders, AK-47 assault rifles, and rocket-propelled grenades. They also bring along millet, narcotic qat to chew, and lines and nets with which to catch fish, which they eat raw. One captured pirate skiff held a hunk of shark meat with teeth marks all over it.

The idea is to take over a larger dhow, usually a fishing ship manned by Indians, Taiwanese, or South Koreans, and then live on it, with the skiffs attached. Once in possession of a dhow, the pirates are then in a position to take and seize an even bigger ship. As they leapfrog to ever bigger ships, they allow the smaller ships that they plundered earlier to go free.

The sea is vast. Only when a large ship issued a distress call did the
Nassau
know where to look for pirates. If all the pirates ever did was hunt small ships, none of the warships in the international coalition, with all of their electronic paraphernalia, would have known of it.

Once the P-3 spotted the dhow and three skiffs, it alerted the warship closest to the area, the destroyer USS
Winston S. Churchill
. The
Churchill
immediately got between the pirates and the twelve-mile limit that marked the entrance into Somali territorial waters. If the pirates made it back to within those twelve miles, they were not legally liable to capture except by the Somali government, which barely exists. Once alongside the pirates, the destroyer fired warning shots from its loud and massively reverberating five-inch gun, in addition to sending helicopters low over the captured dhow and attached skiffs. The ten pirates surrendered, and the sixteen-man Indian crew from the dhow,
Bahkti Sagar
, was rescued fifty-four miles off the Somali coast. All were transferred to the
Nassau
, where Lieutenant Commander Berke debriefed them, with the help of his translators.

The pirates had beaten, bullied, and semi-starved the Indian crew for the previous six days. They had thrown overboard a live monkey that the crew was transporting to Dubai.
*

What did the pirates wear? What were they like? I asked Berke.

“Tank tops, light jackets, flip-flops, and 1980s shorts. They were arrogant and petrified at the same time. They assumed that since we had caught them, we would soon kill them, and that we, being Americans, would also eat them.” The youngest kept pleading, “Please don’t shoot me.” They were severely malnourished, dehydrated, and needed dental work, which the U.S. Navy provided to them.

Berke’s references to “due process” and “the police” brought blank stares from the pirates. “Their concept of the police was guys in parts of uniforms in Somali towns who robbed you,” Berke told me. The pirates looked to be between the ages of fifteen and thirty. Only one of the ten had family members to contact. Two of the ten knew their birth dates. The others knew only that they had been born during “the fighting” and had no family. In Somali culture, they were untouchable, without any clan affiliation. Though the civil war in Somalia began in the 1990s, the country had in effect been broken up since a decade earlier. About half of the pirates had scars from old bullet and knife wounds.

From their own point of view, Berke explained, they had done nothing wrong. “They were guys hanging around the docks who were dispatched by a local warlord to bring back income for him and to defend local waters.
They saw themselves as a rudimentary coast guard, trying to make a living, and exacting a form of taxation from foreign ships in their own brutal way.”

The strike group’s staff judge advocate, Lieutenant Michael Bahar, asked them about the weapons they had. One pirate replied: “I am a Somali. In Somalia, the gun is our government.”

Why did they choose to be pirates? Lieutenant Bahar asked them. Their answer: because the chances of getting killed on land in Somalia were even greater, they braved the open ocean. Piracy is organized crime. Like roving gangs, each cell patrols specific parts of the sea. “Forget the Johnny Depp charm,” Bahar said. “Theirs was a savage brutality not born of malice or evil, like a lion killing an antelope. There was almost a natural innocence about it.”

The Somali piracy crisis merely confirms a critical feature of the post–Cold War era: the rise of sub-state actors. For example, it is the pirate-state of Puntland in northeastern Somalia that, like Hezbollah and al-Qaeda, confounds the international community.

The international community has largely misdiagnosed the issue of Somalia because of insistence on viewing Somalia as one static, albeit failed, state. In fact, Somalia is three separate entities, and thus exhibits different levels of governance: independent Somaliland in the northwest, the autonomous region of Puntland in the northeast, and the chaotic southern area where an extremely weak Somali government continues to combat the rising power of
al-Shabab
(the youth) Islamist extremists. It is largely from Puntland where piracy has originated, and it is largely through Puntland that it can be addressed.

Named after the ancient Land of Punt mentioned in Egyptian hieroglyphics, Puntland declared limited autonomy from the rest of Somalia in 1998, opting against a declaration of full independence because of obligations to fellow members of the Majerteyn clan across the border in the southern Somali city of Kismayo. Throughout Somali history, clans have served as the preeminent form of political, legal, and social representation—a reality reflected in the organization of the Puntland government, which gives significant influence to local elders, and largely relies on clan militias instead of more formal defense forces like those found in neighboring Somaliland. Thus, while not as functional as the government of Somaliland, the Puntland government is still a significantly greater presence than anything found in the south of the country.
Puntland has an organized parliament, and in January 2009 a new president, Abdirahman Mohamed Faroole, was elected. Because it is here where pirates are based, the spoils of piracy are overwhelmingly in evidence, compared to the rest of the country.

For example, in the town of Eyl—widely regarded as the hub of piracy in the Gulf of Aden region—piracy is a veritable industry, with an influx of large amounts of cash from ransoms fueling a surge of growth in the city. Although the nature of clan politics in Puntland makes it almost inconceivable that the government is not in some way involved tacitly, the Puntland government ostensibly has taken a hard line on piracy, claiming that it is simply not powerful enough to curtail piracy and even issuing convictions in some circumstances. Indeed, since the widely publicized April 2009 incident involving the
Maersk Alabama
, a U.S.-flagged ship that was attacked by pirates—who were later killed by U.S. Navy SEALs—the government of Puntland has requested international aid to build an anti-piracy task force.

In Puntland, piracy is popularly seen as both a lucrative and legitimate practice—lucrative in as much as pirate ransoms are comparable in one of the poorest areas on earth to the entire budget of the Puntland government, and legitimate inasmuch as piracy is seen as helping to curtail the rampant illegal fishing and dumping of toxic waste in Somalia’s territorial waters. An extremely weak but nonetheless viable sub-state entity thus has produced ripe conditions for a criminal enterprise now threatening to subsume the entire governmental apparatus.

Whereas the emergence of a de facto pirate state is greatly problematic to the international community, the existence of an organized central authority of sorts in the region also creates an opportunity to address the problem at its roots. In other words, the international community will need to offer the carrot of aid and the stick of retaliation on land to concentrate the mind of the clan-based government. After all, Somali piracy cannot be addressed solely as a sea-based issue. And unless the United States is willing to commit significant numbers of troops on the ground to engage in nation building (highly unlikely), it must accept the necessity of working with the government of Puntland to combat piracy in the Gulf of Aden and Indian Ocean, regardless of its lack of international legitimacy. Because the government of Puntland has been in conflict with the
al-Shabab
extremists, bolstering Puntland’s institutional capacity could point a way to not only deter piracy, but also to fight radical Islam in the
Horn of Africa. Puntland is important because it shows that so-called anarchy in Somalia and elsewhere is often something else: the slow breakdown of European-drawn states and the restoration of sturdier forms of identity built on clan and tribe and region.

Indeed, as we have seen, from antiquity onward, pirate states like Puntland and pirate confederations have been very much a part of the Indian Ocean reality, and a direct consequence of lucrative trade routes. Though the Cold War, by providing a certain order in the third world, obscured this historical truth, pirates are back because in a sense they never left. The Romans, the Chinese of the Song and Ming dynasties, and the Portuguese, Dutch, French, and English imperialists all confronted pirates in these waters, and now it is the turn of the United States and its allies. Especially as India and China rise, the scourge of piracy will provide opportunities for cooperation among these new powers in the region. But for the time being, American power remains essential. Lieutenant Commander Berke’s experience is emblematic in this regard.

F
rom Somalia to South Africa, the western side of the Indian Ocean is bordered by four thousand miles of African coastline, much of it Muslim and Swahili-speaking. If Puntland and its environs concentrate the mind on African chaos, then Zanzibar, farther south, might suggest an equally strong case for African possibilities. For centuries, the island of Zanzibar, “land of the blacks” in Arabic, lying off the Tanzanian seaboard, has been a principal node of Indian Ocean commerce and culture, a melting pot of Islamic and Hindu civilizations. Truly, in the latter Middle Ages, an Islamic scholar from the Hadhramaut in Yemen would have felt just as comfortable in Zanzibar as he would have in Indonesia. In the early nineteenth century hundreds of dhows clogged this port, laden with haj pilgrims, drugs, coffee, fish, ivory, hides, red pepper, ambergris, beeswax, cloves, maize, sorghum, and spices. For the Omani sultans who governed it, Zanzibar was not just an Indian Ocean port, but, in historian Richard Hall’s words, “the hub of a vast trading empire with its tentacles deep into Africa,” reaching into the Kenyan highlands, the Great Lakes, and the eastern Congo.
¹
And this hub continued thus well into the twentieth century. On one March day in 1937, Alan Villiers counted more than fifty dhows at the anchorage, thirty-four of them Arab, and the others from the Comoro Islands, India, and nearby Somalia.
²

I awoke before dawn my first night on the island to rain crashing on the rusted and rattling corrugated iron roofs of Stone Town, the heart of old Zanzibar. I was renting two rooms from a friend above the cassava souk. From my wooden and cast-iron balcony, with its simple floral designs, I could almost touch the opposite lime-washed wall of the snaking alley. My rooms featured the usual oriental carpets, a poster bed with mosquito netting, colored-glass windows, and furniture made of wood and brass and copper: an effortless confection of Arab, Persian, Indian, and African aesthetics. In the morning I ascended to the “tea house” on the roof, a raised and open platform embraced by bougainvillea and the boisterous sea winds that granted a prospect of Stone Town’s dizzying roofscape. Below the slanting roofs were the building materials that gave this vast maze of an urban quarter its name: stones mixed with mortarized mud and sand, and covered with lime wash. The view was punctuated by Mughal-style minarets with their triple folio arches and the scabby, weather-beaten steeples of a late-nineteenth-century French cathedral. There were, too, the pencil-thin cast-iron pillars of the House of Wonders, a palace built in 1883 for Omani Sultan Barghash bin Said in tropical Victorian industrial style. With iron and rust so ever present, this was a vista that, rather than merely picturesque, seemed bursting with a sturdy spirit. My eyes met the horizon with freighters, outriggers, dugouts, and plank-built dhows all plopped in the milk-turquoise water of the Indian Ocean, so unreal a shade that it conjured up a water color more than it did the sea itself.