At first blush, in hijacking the U.S.-flagged container ship Maersk Alabama and taking its American captain hostage (leading, of course, to a dramatic Navy SEAL rescue staged from an American destroyer), Somali pirates seemed finally to have overreached. Over the past couple of years, the sneering audacity of Somali pirates has become a constant in international affairs. More than 150 ships were attacked off the coast of Somalia and in the Gulf of Aden in 2008. But have Somali pirates spelled their doom by finally awakening a sleeping, or at least distracted, giant in the United States? Perhaps not. Even with this new level of outlaw insolence, it isn't clear that greater attention and more resources from the U.S. Navy--by far the world's most powerful--and its estimable maritime partners will stop the Somali pirates.
Like anti-drug forces in Latin America, anti-piracy patrols in the Indian Ocean confront the so-called balloon effect, which refers to how when you squeeze a balloon in one place, you'll merely send the air to another. When security forces eradicate coca crops or crack down on cocaine processing in one area, drug cartels simply relocate operations.
Similarly, while navies have deployed more ships to the Somalis' area of operation in the past several months, the pirates have still been successful in evading them. Even with European, Iranian, Russian, Indian, Chinese, and Japanese forces--East African nations have no appreciable blue-water maritime capability--engaged, the anti-piracy coalition has the unenviable task of patrolling a million square miles of water in the Indian Ocean. Quite understandably, the U.S. Navy and its partners concentrated their assets on the Gulf of Aden, which provides the strategically and commercially vital link to the Arabian Peninsula. But the pirates were still able to target the Maersk Alabama when it was 300 nautical miles away from the nearest anti-piracy ship.
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