Somali Pirates Go Way Over The Edge

The pirates of Somalia have never been humorous. There is nothing amusing about their banditry on the high seas. But, the Thugs of the Somali Coast have now joined with al-Qaeda, Taliban, and other Islamist jihadist groups by practicing terrorism pure and simple.

The motive for the escalation on the part of the pirates is not hard to find. Despite the increase in the number of pirate attacks, and regardless of their increasing range of operations, the tide is not running in the favor of the maritime criminals. The increased naval patrols have resulted both in an increase in the number of thwarted attacks and the number of pirates captured. (But, unfortunately, not in the "killed" category."

The pirates have responded to this state of affairs by threatening to kill or torture their captives unless their demands are met. And, the demands? No shock here, they want prisoner pirates released instantly if not sooner.

The crew holding a British couple kidnapped on board their yacht just over two weeks ago have raised their requirement for release from a several million dollar ransom to threats to "punish" or even "torture" the pair unless seven captive pirates held onboard a German warship are released. How seriously to take the threats and demand made by phone from "Omer" a pirate media relations wallah is hard to tell.

On the one hand the Germans do have seven bad guys in custody, taken quite red handed. On the other the pirates are reportedly "frustrated" because they have not had any positive message from the British Foreign Office or the family of the kidnapped couple regarding their simple request for seven million bucks.

Apparently this particular crew could and can not differentiate between a well insured commercial vessel and a small yacht owned by people of modest means. Caught by their own stupidity and greed, the only recourse seen was a dramatic escalation in threats. Balancing this is the possible belief by the less than worldly wise knuckle draggers as to the possible influence the British government can exercise on the Germans.

The threat against at least three members of a Spanish tuna boat seized some days ago must be taken more seriously. The pirates have stated they will kill the three men who have been taken ashore if the Spanish government does not release two pirates captured by their navy.

As is to be expected the families of the three threatened men have tearfully begged the Spanish government to let the pirates go. The government has said, "No."

How long Madrid will hang tough is hard to predict. The pirates are aware of the dramatic effects exercised on a Spanish election by the Madrid train bombings. The capitulation of the new government to the demand that Spain withdraw its forces from Iraq are well known throughout the Islamic world.

The Deputy Defense Minister of Spain has already pointed to a face saving way of getting the pirates out of Spain. He dilated at some length about the potential of sending the pirates to another jurisdiction. Presumably the alternative jurisdictions include either Somalia or the semi autonomous region of Puntland.

While the pirates might be spirited by such a measure from Spanish custody to that of a, shall we say, less rigorous place, it would not assure the freedom of the captive Spaniards. Nor would it preclude further demands, more conditions, ramped up requirements.

The unfortunate reality that insurance companies as well as ship owners have been willing to pay ransom over the past several years of ever increasing pirate depredations has propelled both the acceleration of piracy and the escalation of demands. If no ship owners paid, no ships would be seized. The equation is both simple and, to ship owners, cargo consignees, and others in the business, quite unacceptable.

Unless and until two factors are changed in the equation of pirates versus civilization, the sea east from Somalia will be both ever more unsafe and the rapacity of the pirates ever more expansive.

The first factor which must change is that of ransom. There must be an absolute prohibition on the payment of ransom by any ship owner, any maritime insurance company, any consignee.

The second factor is less palatable to the refined sensitivities of the West. The costs of doing business for the pirates must be increased--greatly. In the real world this means the rules of engagement must be altered to allow the use of lethal force against suspected pirate boats and the "mother ships." It also means armed guards on commercial vessels crossing the pirate zone as well as immunity from liability if mistakes are made.

By decreasing rewards and increasing costs, the young men, even those of an Islamist jihadist frame of mind, would be encouraged to seek alternative employment. Without these measures there is little doubt but that the pirates will become more numerous, more aggressive, more given to threats, and, worst of all, ever more Islamist jihadist in nature.

Up until this past year the pirates have been seen by shipowners, shipping line executives, the insurance industry as nothing but an additional cost of doing business. Up until recently the pirates have been seen by ship crews as just one more hazard in their underpaid trade. Up until very recently the pirates have been seen by most governments as a nuisance requiring the diversion of expensive assets to a secondary zone justifiable only in terms of domestic politics or in the interests of more realistic training.

Now, with intentionally terrorist threats being credibly uttered, with the documentable presence of Islamist jihadist sentiment, influence, and effects, the halfway measures employed to date are no longer appropriate. Now there is no alternative to more robust approaches.

Well, there is an alternative. Do nothing and hope for some miracle which will end the pirates before they actually carry out some of their threats. And, that seems to be the American and Western way of doing things.

Not a pleasant thought if the pirates have your personal hind end in a sling, is it?

Probable Reactions To A Proposed US Course----

There was a time when the Geek feared and loathed more than any other imaginable words, a tasking which started, "Estimate probable reactions to a proposed US course of action." Those dull, heavy, pedestrian words sent far more chills down the Geek's back than the shrill shriek of a fragment passing a few inches from his ear.

The cause of fear was simple. There is no way the estimate writer could possibly be both right and certain as to his correctness. Neither could the senior level "decider" personnel.

That is the horrid, brutal truth about policy choices. They are never certainly correct, no matter how carefully they are researched, staffed, and refined. There is, in fact, as we all should know, nothing more inherently risky in life than making a choice, a decision. Particularly if that decision involves something of greater, more lasting import than what to eat tonight, which sneakers to buy, or, even whether or not to accept a date.

There are three bases for the risk residing in decisions.

The first is that every choice made limits the number of future options. The result is a cone. At the top, the number of possible options is wide. Each decision, each specific option selected, results in the cone becoming ever more narrow. Finally, at the bottom tip, the options are effectively reduced to zero or, best case, one.

The second reason decision making is so darn risky is that both the direction and the magnitude of the response(s) to the choice cannot be accurately predicted. This is the necessary consequence of the reaction being essentially non-linear in nature. This means that there is no direct, predictable linkage or proportionality between the input (the decision) and the output (the reaction(s) by the target of the decision and others.) The relation between course of action and response(s) to that course is what math types call a "chaotic" or "emergent" system.

(A parenthetical note: One can be certain that a coercive decision, a course of action intended to apply pressure on the target will result in enhanced opposition to the desired result. To put it simply, pressure consolidates long before it fragments. The analogy between the process of turning loose snow into an ice ball and the effect of coercion on a target is precise.)

The third reason is the nature of human group dynamics. This is a universal, running from the smallest, most informal groups to the largest, most complex. All human groups are self-organizing systems which means they are all emergent in nature. Self-organizing systems are dynamically stable, ever changing, and remarkably immune to external pressure.

(Don't believe the old Geekmo? Check it out for--and on--yourself. Presuming you are alive, your body, your mind, your personality are all self-organizing emergent, dynamically stable systems which can resist an extraordinary amount of external threat and assault--at least by a virus and other icky little critters even if not fast moving pieces of metal.)

The three features of the context surrounding each and every policy choice, each and every "proposed US course of action" conspire, no, combine, to assure that the Law of Unintended Consequences will be invoked to greater or lesser extent. That's right, each and every option chosen will call in the Unintended Consequences in all their many forms and furies.

"Prove it, Geek!"

Well, bucko, the Geekmeister can try. Fortunately this is not a court of law and proof beyond a reasonable doubt is not required. History abounds in examples, indeed it can be argued fairly that most of the dismal history of the human race is the record of the Law of Unintended Consequences being applied and the effects of its application. The Geek will confine his examples to a few from recent US foreign policy.

When the US blithely announced the "Open Door" policy regarding China, it (inadvertently or not) established a cone of options regarding its relations with the emergent Japanese Empire. This high spirited action of attempting to provide a level playing ground so that all countries could plunder China equally rather than allowing only one to do so cast the US in the role of special protector of the territorial integrity and governmental sovereignty of an enormous land mass filled with people who owed no particular allegiance to a rapidly transforming governmental system which was both in the process of self-organization and establishing existential or at least functional legitimacy.

The Open Door was intended to be a sort of warning shot across the bows of both Germany and Japan. The latter was still in the process of self-organization following the Meiji Restoration, which meant it was in the full bloom of new nationalism and its concomitant, militarism. The American course of action increasingly was seen in Tokyo as an attempt to limit the "natural growth" of the new Empire.

The Naval Arms Limitation Treaty of the Twenties was not so much the "step toward peace" that it was touted to be as another course of action which both limited the cone of options and stimulated the Japanese to a non-linear reaction. The reaction was to exploit the categories of warship not covered by the Treaty, submarines and aircraft carriers, as well as to cheerfully violate on a wholesale scale the provisions of a later agreement barring fortification of Pacific Ocean possessions.

The unforeseen (but eminently foreseeable) rise of National Socialism in Germany coupled with the Great Depression and the triumph of the Army in internal Japanese politics to provoke the Japanese multi-step invasion of China. The US had few "courses of action" available to it.

The course of action selected was a continuous ramp-up of economic sanctions. Starting with chopsticks and ending with a total embargo on the sale of scrap metal and refined petroleum products, the sanction regime was truly (to use SecState Clinton's term) "crippling." This left the Japanese with few responses possible.

Tokyo had precisely two choices at the bottom of the cone: A humiliating capitulation to US policy demands or war. They chose war hoping that the US, being preoccupied with the greater threat presented by Nazi Germany and stunned by the naval attacks on Pearl Harbor and the invasion of the Philippines, would accept an accomplished feat.

The Japanese were wrong in their hope. But, the resulting war opened the door in China not for a universal opportunity for exploitation but for the success of the Communists of Mao. War, more than any other human interaction is an emergent system, with consequences which are totally non-linear and, thus, impossible to predict. The ChiComs were a self-organizing system existing in a resource rich environment, thus, their success was both certain and easily predicted, as some US diplomats and military personnel did (at later great personal cost.)

At war's end when the US made a set of casual, off-hand decisions, it insensibly created cones of options with respect to both the Korean peninsula and Indo-China. The US was preoccupied with the "big matters" of dividing Europe, the beginnings of the Cold War, and converting from a wartime to a peacetime economy; the margins of Asia simply were too unimportant to deserve any real attention. (Not unlike Osama bin Ladin's declaration of war on the US in the mid-Nineties.)

Had it not been for the context of the rapidly blooming bifurcate world of the Cold War, the hasty and negligent decisions regarding the division of the Korean peninsula and the repatriation of the Japanese forces in Indo-China would not have mattered. But, the context made these two courses of US action--dividing the Korean peninsula at the thirty-eighth parallel and allowing the Chinese Nationalists and British to temporarily occupy Indo-China while ignoring the de facto government in the north of Vietnam headed by Ho Chi Minh--"world historical" in effect.

Both cones rapidly narrowed until the US seemingly had no options except war. In the case of the slow slide into war in Vietnam, the US effort at coercion resulted in a non-linear increase in North Vietnamese will to resist, to accept pain, to endure, to outlast, to win.

The same narrowing cone of options, non-linear response, and self-organization can be seen in miniature in the months leading up to Operation Just Cause when the US military became the world's largest SWAT team in Panama. It can be seen in larger form with the US course of action regarding Cuba and, years later, Iran following the Islamic Revolution.

In these last two examples, Cuba and Iran, the net effects of the assorted US courses of action have not only been to limit options, but also to strengthen the adversaries. Both Cuba and Iran following their respective revolutions were self-organizing systems. Their processes of self-organization were facilitated by the US opposition. Even when the American actions were relatively low scale in impact (as in severing diplomatic relations), the consequences were non-linear in effect. Greater actions, such as sanctions, had greater but still not truly linear results.

In a very real sense, the Law of Unintended Consequences dictated what has happened in both countries. They exist in their present form in large measure because of US actions over the years.

Enough said.

The real deal is how decision makers can limit the application of the Law of Unintended Consequences. How they can choose policy options which have a less open ended, less non-linear outcome?

The very first requirement is to recognize that human systems are self-organizing. This means there are very real limits as to what can be imposed from without. The historical record demonstrates convincingly that outsiders can only effect the self-organizing features of a target population on the margins. The pace of events can be accelerated or retarded--slightly. The precise direction of self-organization can be modified--slightly. But, self-organizing systems cannot be started or stopped simply by external parties--unless the outsider is willing and able to create a desert and call it peace.

Because systems are self-organizing, it is critical to act as soon as possible while the emerging system is new, friable, and most susceptible to inducement or coercion. The only two profitable areas which can be addressed are the new leaders or the context from which the new self-organizing system draws its membership. Since each system--and each leader--is unique, there is no "one size fits all" approach or combination of approaches which will be viable. Each must be addressed in terms relevant to it and it alone whether those terms are soft or very, very robust.

The second requirement which must be met if the Law of Unintended Consequences is to be limited in its application is the narrowing of decisions. Decisions, the course of action, must be sharply focused, narrow in application, and directed toward a limited, even a very limited, goal--an achievable end, not a global one. For example, in Afghanistan the goal of killing Talib and Taliban leadership as well as that of al-Qaeda was appropriate, but the open ended notion of nation building was not.

By narrowing the focus it is possible to reduce to a manageable level the probabilistic smear of reactions. The broader the goal, the fuzzier the focus of the course of action, the more impossible it is to evaluate probable reactions--other than to say they will be bad if not worse for us.

Government leaders seem to have a pathological need to believe that the apparatus they control is somehow both all-powerful and always right. The governments of major countries have this pathology to a high degree. They are to be pitied for this delusion.

The reality is that self-organizing systems have a power far surpassing that of any government or any armed force--unless the goal is to work with the emergent system on the margins, to smooth the roughest edges, to advance favorable trajectories with the goal that the favorable ones will crowd out the unfavorable ones. That reality loops to another one, one which is particularly detested by decision makers who crave certainty (and they all do.)

The second reality is simply that events never play out according to either desires or intents. As Clausewitz correctly observed, "no plan survives first contact with the enemy," no attempt to impose external will on another nation will go according to planned intent. Dynamic stability, which is the normal course of human organizations, assures resiliency--and resistance.

There it is. The general answer to the requirement that one assess "probable reactions to a proposed US course of action." Now you are smarter than the Deep Thinkers in Beltway Land.