Days before Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice is to ask the United Nations to authorize "all necessary measures" against piracy from Somalia, a leader of the U.S. military, which would help carry out that policy, said in effect: Not so fast.
The commander of the U.S. Navy's 5th Fleet expressed doubt Friday about the wisdom of launching attacks against Somali pirates on land, as the draft U.N. resolution proposes. A Pentagon spokesman warned against the urge to grasp for a quick and easy military solution to a complex international problem.
Personally, I think any group of men with fishing boats that are equipped with speed boats, assault rifles, and rocket-propelled grenades can be safely killed and their equipment destroyed. But that's just me.
Second, regardless of the authority granted, I think that the proper focus of going into Somalia will be on killing jihadis. If our Djibouti-based forces haven't been tracking them well enough to hammer them from the air, sea, and land, I don't know what we've been doing there the last several years.
Killing and disrupting pirates will be a bonus. Killing and dispersing jihadis will be the most important goal with the strengthening of non-jihadi clans who can suppress pirates a side effect of the operation.
If it's to be a multi-national operation, let our forces go after the jihadis and have Egyptian troops or possibly Indian forces go after the pirates. The latter two could get away with far more in fighting the pirates than we could.
And honestly, there's something sad about the heirs of Edward Preble going on in public about how hard it would be to fight pirates.
