Events this week only heightened the sense of alarm embodied by Chaturvedi's article. On Sunday, two bombs exploded in Kampala, Uganda, killing 74 people. Al Shabab, the main Somali Islamic group, claimed responsibility -- describing the attacks as retaliation for Uganda having sent peacekeepers to Mogadishu to back Shabab's main opponent, the moderate Islamic Transitional Federal Government.
If Shabab can strike at neighboring Uganda from its Somali base, the reasoning goes, imagine the long-range terror the group might inflict with hundreds of pirates providing additional funding and transportation to the Islamists.
The problem is, Chaturvedi's claim entirely lacks credibility. Not only did he fail to provide evidence in his article to prove a connection between terrorists and pirates, he ignored a growing body of evidence that proves exactly the opposite. Far from teaming up, Somalia's pirates and Islamists appear increasingly at odds as the Islamists gain ground against the weak and corrupt TFG and spread their harsh interpretation and enforcement of Islamic law deeper into Somalia's formerly lawless regions.
Charturvedi is not the first observer to conflate pirates and Islamists. In November 2008, just as Somali piracy was beginning to make headlines in the U.S., a University of Maryland researcher published a brief study highlighting what she described as piracy's "connection with terrorist or militant groups."
"Al Shabab seems to profit from the piracy business," Jana Shakarian wrote, "engaging in some kind of weapons trade with the pirates, providing them 'safe havens' and, of course, money."
But Shakarian offered no firm evidence of this connection, instead basing her argument on a quick reading of highly debatable circumstantial inferences. While admitting that "the majority of [piracy] perpetrators are based in northeast Somalia -- hitherto a relatively stable part of the country called Somaliland," Shakarian noted that "some hijacked ships seem to have anchored in southern ports -- a part of Somalia that is currently controlled by Al Shabab."
"If you have control over these parts of the country, you also control the ports -- who's getting in and who's not," Shakarian told World Politics Review. "It nurtures suspicion of some kind of cooperation."
But suspicion is not proof. And the coincidence that some pirates and some Islamists reside in the same port town does not imply a close relationship between the groups, especially considering Shabab's often tenuous hold on the territory it claims. Indeed, where Shabab and other Islamic groups truly do control territory, pirates are usually among the first targets of the groups' emphasis on law and order.
In 2008, Somali Islamists threatened to attack pirates who had hijacked a Saudi oil tanker, on the principle that piracy is bad and pirating the property of other Muslims is worse. By 2010, Islamists finally had the power to make good on such threats. In May, the Hizbul Islam group, a sometimes rival of Shabab, marched on Haradhere, a notorious pirate enclave in central Somalia. Hizbul Islam promised to arrest any pirates and free their hostages. Scores of pirates reportedly fled in advance of the group's arrival, and no hostages remained when Hizbul Islam fighters reached the town.
Islamists' opposition to piracy makes sense. Shabab and other Islamic groups place great emphasis on lawfulness. It's the harsh nature of the law they advocate -- not its absence -- that provokes conflict with the developed world. For that reason, it's inaccurate to call all of Somalia "lawless." In the Islamist-controlled regions, Somalia suffers an overabundance of law, including bans on music and movies and severe punishment for petty crimes.
It's no coincidence that Dr. Muhammad Shamsaddin Megalommatis, a Somali writer who advocates for Al Shabab, last year called for the "termination of . . . Somali piracy," placing it on his list of priorities alongside the destruction of the U.N.-backed peacekeeping force that helps preserve the unpopular TFG.
Megalommatis even proposed ways to improve pirate-fighting tactics, including -- ironically -- the creation of a U.N.-funded "Somali fishermen registration committee." The body would "move across the Somali coast from Mogadishu to Djibouti, enroll all the local fishing boats and the fishermen [that] express the interest to work in the National Somali Fisheries, and then deliver the record to the international armada that will be tasked with the sea control around the Horn of Africa."
Despite this preponderance of evidence that pirates and Islamists don't mix, developed-world officials continue to conflate the two. The U.S. Navy's "Vision for Confronting Irregular Challenges"
strategy document highlighted "counterpiracy operations in the Gulf of Aden and the Horn of Africa which remove financial support to terrorists ashore and reduce instability and criminality at sea."
In fact, counterpiracy operations off Somalia will do nothing to diminish the growing power of Islamist terrorist groups ashore. When it comes to pirates, the U.S. Navy and its Islamist enemies are actually pursuing the same goal. The Islamists, moreover, stand to achieve far better results than the Navy can with its sea-based approach. "Piracy has its roots on land," Dr. Martin Murphy, a piracy analyst with the Washington, D.C.-based Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessment, told World Politics Review. The developed world has no meaningful presence on land in Somalia; the Islamists do.
In Somalia, stronger Islamists could mean less piracy. But the rise of radical Islam in Somalia also means a greater risk of international terrorism, as Sunday's twin bombings demonstrated. The best solution to piracy might lie with the Islamists, but is the solution worth its cost? In the same issue of Proceedings, Murphy mulled that dilemma. "The United States needs to reconcile the tension that exists between
its desire to suppress piracy and its need to prevent Somalia from becoming the next Afghanistan."
**David Axe is an independent correspondent, a World Politics Review contributing editor, and the author of "War Bots." He blogs at War is Boring. His WPR column, War is Boring, appears every Wednesday.
