But sea marshals, SEAL snipers and even punitive expeditions destroying pirate strongholds won't stop 21st century piracy. U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates fingered one of the wicked problem's larger facets: anarchic regions whose hapless governments cannot fight pirates and terrorists even if they have the will to fight them. Somalia has a national government, the Transitional National Government (TNG), but it controls little territory. At the moment, the Somali Islamist organization al Shabaab (an al-Qaida affiliate) holds greater sway -- and several press sources mention financial links between al Shabaab and Somali pirates.
Contemporary pirate gangs and contemporary terrorist groups exploit ungoverned voids. While 17th century pirates pulled the same trick, in those days nation-state navies could hunt them and hang them. One can make an argument that fighting pirates helped promote what we know as codified international law.
Today's pirates and terrorists, however, find surprising safety in complex legal tangles, where human rights laws, definitions of sovereignty and claims of jurisdiction produce a crazy quilt of restrictions, qualifications and functional contradictions that frustrate rational programs to combat the killers.
Sept. 11 gave former president George W. Bush the opportunity to convene a new international conference to create a legal framework for confronting the new class of enemy al-Qaida represented. The Geneva Convention did not foresee transnational actors with potential access to nuclear weapons and the millenarian nihilism to use them to beggar or destroy entire nation-states. Bush didn't do it -- that was a mistake, and he ended up in the quagmire of "lawfare" battles.
While pirates have existed for millennia, access to high technology, bases in failed states, potential alliances with transnational terrorists and a global economy dependent on secure commercial shipping magnify their contemporary threat.
If the civilized want unarmed ships to safely sail the seas, then our international legal framework must permit swift, harsh police and military action against pirates. Convicted pirates must also face certain punishment.
International laws addressing both piracy and terror are dated and inadequate. If Barack Obama wants to stop both, it's time to make new laws and enforce them.