Onion Eater,
I believe some form of military action might be helpful, but such action would need to comply with the Laws of War e.g., compliance would rule out indiscriminate bombardment. Attacks that target pirates, pirate facilities/boats and/or weapons would be legitimate.
Several possible steps might include:
1. Scheduling the passage of shipping so as to allow for naval escorts.
2. Capturing strategic points on the Somali coastline e.g., major ports used by the pirates. Merely raiding or clearing the villages probably won't provide a sustainable solution.
3. Creating a temporary secured zone comprised of those captured areas, with the African Union taking charge of security arrangements.
4. If or when--probably if, in the near-term--Somalia has a government capable of exercising jurisdiction in the captured areas, those areas could revert to Somalia. That understanding should be explicit, as Somalia is presently a failed state, but it should not be assumed that Somalia will remain a failed state over the longer-term. There needs to be flexibility to allow Somalia to regain control over its territory once it overcomes its failed state status.
5. Some form of international assistance for the Somali coastal communities so that the economic environment would become less attractive to piracy.
A UN Security Council resolution would be quite helpful in pursuing some of the above steps e.g., setting up a temporary protected zone. An understanding that is reached with the nominal Somali government and any leading Somali tribal elders could also be beneficial.
There is a possibility that agreements forged with Somali tribal elders might reduce the need for military action by reducing piracy. If that avenue is productive, then military operations might not be necessary or they could be more limited than described above.
Don-
The Laws of War only apply to state-to-state conflicts and there is no state in Somalia.
1) We are already doing this, but it is a costly and incomplete solution. It is a big area and there is far to much commercial shipping to organize everybody into convoys.
2, 3) Capturing territory is a really bad idea unless you have some plan for managing that territory. If we learned nothing else from the debacle in Iraq, we should have learned
that, at least.
Anyway, there are no "strategic points" because the pirate ships do not need deep-water ports. They can be based almost anywhere along the Somali coast.
4)
"It should not be assumed that Somalia will remain a failed state over the longer-term."
This is the fundamental flaw in your reasoning, Don. As a Westerner, you assume that a national government, a "state," is the natural form of government for all people everywhere and that the lack thereof is somehow unnatural.
Your use of the term "failed state" implies that a state is the ideal and that any other type of government is a failure to live up to what everybody acknowledges is the ideal. But not everybody acknowledges or even understands this ideal, Don.
People, in their present form, have been around for a hundred thousand years and the concept of national governments has only existed in a few places for the last thousand years or so. For the great majority of people in the world, the concept of "state" is completely foreign to them.
Westerners see pictures of Africans cutting each other up with machetes and they think, "Tsk, tsk. The lines are drawn badly on the map of Africa. If we just re-draw the map correctly, everybody will be happy in their own state."
But the problem that the Africans face is not that the map of their continent is drawn badly, but that there
is a map with
any lines on it. National governments are just not natural to the Africans - tribal governments are. And tribes do not now and never have controlled well-defined territories. A
village is held by a tribe but, between the villages, they only have influence, not territory.
Also unnatural to Africans is the concept of a court of law that tries individuals for crimes. If an individual has defied the will of his tribe, they will kill or exile him. But, if they have not, then
all of his actions can be assumed to have been taken on behalf of his tribe.
Thus, if an individual African has crossed you, the appropriate and entirely natural response is to decimate his tribe. While "indiscriminate shelling" may be abhorrent to the Western mind, the fact is, that is just the way things work in Africa.
Trying to bring an individual to trial is completely foreign and incomprehensible to Africans. They just don't get it. But killing one out of ten members of their tribe and then telling the rest, "don't f*ck with us again;"
that is something they understand. That is the way things have
always worked in Africa.