Monsoon: The Indian Ocean and the Future of American Power

by Robert D. Kaplan

  On the morning of January 21, 2006, Berke’s ship, the USS Nassau, 150 miles off the Somali coast, got a distress call from the Bahamian-flagged cargo ship Delta Ranger, which had sped up to avoid capture by pirates. The Delta Ranger had a twenty-five-foot freeboard, meaning the pirates would have had to climb twenty-five feet to reach the deck of the cargo ship while under fire from the Delta Ranger’s crew. The willingness to attack the high freeboard indicated just how brazen and unafraid these Somali pirates were.

  The U.S. Navy dispatched a P-3 surveillance plane to the area around the Delta Ranger to hunt for the pirates. Soon the P-3 located exactly what it was looking for: several skiffs pulling a dhow fishing boat. The Somali pirate confederations are often broken up into cells of ten men, each cell distributed among three skiffs. The skiffs are old, ratty, roach infested, rarely painted, made of decaying wood or fiberglass, and offer no shade. The pirates navigate by the stars. West is home—Somalia; east is the open ocean. A typical pirate cell goes out into the open ocean for about three weeks at a time. The pirates come equipped with drinking water, gasoline for their single-engine outboards, knives, grappling hooks, short ladders, AK-47 assault rifles, and rocket-propelled grenades. They also bring along millet, narcotic qat to chew, and lines and nets with which to catch fish, which they eat raw. One captured pirate skiff held a hunk of shark meat with teeth marks all over it.

  The idea is to take over a larger dhow, usually a fishing ship manned by Indians, Taiwanese, or South Koreans, and then live on it, with the skiffs attached. Once in possession of a dhow, the pirates are then in a position to take and seize an even bigger ship. As they leapfrog to ever bigger ships, they allow the smaller ships that they plundered earlier to go free.

  The sea is vast. Only when a large ship issued a distress call did the Nassau know where to look for pirates. If all the pirates ever did was hunt small ships, none of the warships in the international coalition, with all of their electronic paraphernalia, would have known of it.

  Once the P-3 spotted the dhow and three skiffs, it alerted the warship closest to the area, the destroyer USS Winston S. Churchill. The Churchill immediately got between the pirates and the twelve-mile limit that marked the entrance into Somali territorial waters. If the pirates made it back to within those twelve miles, they were not legally liable to capture except by the Somali government, which barely exists. Once alongside the pirates, the destroyer fired warning shots from its loud and massively reverberating five-inch gun, in addition to sending helicopters low over the captured dhow and attached skiffs. The ten pirates surrendered, and the sixteen-man Indian crew from the dhow, Bahkti Sagar, was rescued fifty-four miles off the Somali coast. All were transferred to the Nassau, where Lieutenant Commander Berke debriefed them, with the help of his translators.

  The pirates had beaten, bullied, and semi-starved the Indian crew for the previous six days. They had thrown overboard a live monkey that the crew was transporting to Dubai.*

  What did the pirates wear? What were they like? I asked Berke.

  “Tank tops, light jackets, flip-flops, and 1980s shorts. They were arrogant and petrified at the same time. They assumed that since we had caught them, we would soon kill them, and that we, being Americans, would also eat them.” The youngest kept pleading, “Please don’t shoot me.” They were severely malnourished, dehydrated, and needed dental work, which the U.S. Navy provided to them.

  Berke’s references to “due process” and “the police” brought blank stares from the pirates. “Their concept of the police was guys in parts of uniforms in Somali towns who robbed you,” Berke told me. The pirates looked to be between the ages of fifteen and thirty. Only one of the ten had family members to contact. Two of the ten knew their birth dates. The others knew only that they had been born during “the fighting” and had no family. In Somali culture, they were untouchable, without any clan affiliation. Though the civil war in Somalia began in the 1990s, the country had in effect been broken up since a decade earlier. About half of the pirates had scars from old bullet and knife wounds.

  From their own point of view, Berke explained, they had done nothing wrong. “They were guys hanging around the docks who were dispatched by a local warlord to bring back income for him and to defend local waters. They saw themselves as a rudimentary coast guard, trying to make a living, and exacting a form of taxation from foreign ships in their own brutal way.”

  The strike group’s staff judge advocate, Lieutenant Michael Bahar, asked them about the weapons they had. One pirate replied: “I am a Somali. In Somalia, the gun is our government.”

  Why did they choose to be pirates? Lieutenant Bahar asked them. Their answer: because the chances of getting killed on land in Somalia were even greater, they braved the open ocean. Piracy is organized crime. Like roving gangs, each cell patrols specific parts of the sea. “Forget the Johnny Depp charm,” Bahar said. “Theirs was a savage brutality not born of malice or evil, like a lion killing an antelope. There was almost a natural innocence about it.”

  The Somali piracy crisis merely confirms a critical feature of the post–Cold War era: the rise of sub-state actors. For example, it is the pirate-state of Puntland in northeastern Somalia that, like Hezbollah and al-Qaeda, confounds the international community.

  The international community has largely misdiagnosed the issue of Somalia because of insistence on viewing Somalia as one static, albeit failed, state. In fact, Somalia is three separate entities, and thus exhibits different levels of governance: independent Somaliland in the northwest, the autonomous region of Puntland in the northeast, and the chaotic southern area where an extremely weak Somali government continues to combat the rising power of al-Shabab (the youth) Islamist extremists. It is largely from Puntland where piracy has originated, and it is largely through Puntland that it can be addressed.

  Named after the ancient Land of Punt mentioned in Egyptian hieroglyphics, Puntland declared limited autonomy from the rest of Somalia in 1998, opting against a declaration of full independence because of obligations to fellow members of the Majerteyn clan across the border in the southern Somali city of Kismayo. Throughout Somali history, clans have served as the preeminent form of political, legal, and social representation—a reality reflected in the organization of the Puntland government, which gives significant influence to local elders, and largely relies on clan militias instead of more formal defense forces like those found in neighboring Somaliland. Thus, while not as functional as the government of Somaliland, the Puntland government is still a significantly greater presence than anything found in the south of the country. Puntland has an organized parliament, and in January 2009 a new president, Abdirahman Mohamed Faroole, was elected. Because it is here where pirates are based, the spoils of piracy are overwhelmingly in evidence, compared to the rest of the country.

  For example, in the town of Eyl—widely regarded as the hub of piracy in the Gulf of Aden region—piracy is a veritable industry, with an influx of large amounts of cash from ransoms fueling a surge of growth in the city. Although the nature of clan politics in Puntland makes it almost inconceivable that the government is not in some way involved tacitly, the Puntland government ostensibly has taken a hard line on piracy, claiming that it is simply not powerful enough to curtail piracy and even issuing convictions in some circumstances. Indeed, since the widely publicized April 2009 incident involving the Maersk Alabama, a U.S.-flagged ship that was attacked by pirates—who were later killed by U.S. Navy SEALs—the government of Puntland has requested international aid to build an anti-piracy task force.

  In Puntland, piracy is popularly seen as both a lucrative and legitimate practice—lucrative in as much as pirate ransoms are comparable in one of the poorest areas on earth to the entire budget of the Puntland government, and legitimate inasmuch as piracy is seen as helping to curtail the rampant illegal fishing and dumping of toxic waste in Somalia’s territorial waters. An extremely weak but nonetheless viable sub-state entity thus has produced ripe
conditions for a criminal enterprise now threatening to subsume the entire governmental apparatus.

  Whereas the emergence of a de facto pirate state is greatly problematic to the international community, the existence of an organized central authority of sorts in the region also creates an opportunity to address the problem at its roots. In other words, the international community will need to offer the carrot of aid and the stick of retaliation on land to concentrate the mind of the clan-based government. After all, Somali piracy cannot be addressed solely as a sea-based issue. And unless the United States is willing to commit significant numbers of troops on the ground to engage in nation building (highly unlikely), it must accept the necessity of working with the government of Puntland to combat piracy in the Gulf of Aden and Indian Ocean, regardless of its lack of international legitimacy. Because the government of Puntland has been in conflict with the al-Shabab extremists, bolstering Puntland’s institutional capacity could point a way to not only deter piracy, but also to fight radical Islam in the Horn of Africa. Puntland is important because it shows that so-called anarchy in Somalia and elsewhere is often something else: the slow breakdown of European-drawn states and the restoration of sturdier forms of identity built on clan and tribe and region.

  Indeed, as we have seen, from antiquity onward, pirate states like Puntland and pirate confederations have been very much a part of the Indian Ocean reality, and a direct consequence of lucrative trade routes. Though the Cold War, by providing a certain order in the third world, obscured this historical truth, pirates are back because in a sense they never left. The Romans, the Chinese of the Song and Ming dynasties, and the Portuguese, Dutch, French, and English imperialists all confronted pirates in these waters, and now it is the turn of the United States and its allies. Especially as India and China rise, the scourge of piracy will provide opportunities for cooperation among these new powers in the region. But for the time being, American power remains essential. Lieutenant Commander Berke’s experience is emblematic in this regard.

  * Berke was assisted in his debriefing of both the pirates and their captives by a Somali linguist, provided by a private contractor, that the Nassau had brought along on the deployment; and by a Hindi-speaking enlisted American sailor of Indian descent. The crew of the Bahkti Sagar were Gujaratis who also spoke Hindi.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  ZANZIBAR

  THE LAST FRONTIER

  From Somalia to South Africa, the western side of the Indian Ocean is bordered by four thousand miles of African coastline, much of it Muslim and Swahili-speaking. If Puntland and its environs concentrate the mind on African chaos, then Zanzibar, farther south, might suggest an equally strong case for African possibilities. For centuries, the island of Zanzibar, “land of the blacks” in Arabic, lying off the Tanzanian seaboard, has been a principal node of Indian Ocean commerce and culture, a melting pot of Islamic and Hindu civilizations. Truly, in the latter Middle Ages, an Islamic scholar from the Hadhramaut in Yemen would have felt just as comfortable in Zanzibar as he would have in Indonesia. In the early nineteenth century hundreds of dhows clogged this port, laden with haj pilgrims, drugs, coffee, fish, ivory, hides, red pepper, ambergris, beeswax, cloves, maize, sorghum, and spices. For the Omani sultans who governed it, Zanzibar was not just an Indian Ocean port, but, in historian Richard Hall’s words, “the hub of a vast trading empire with its tentacles deep into Africa,” reaching into the Kenyan highlands, the Great Lakes, and the eastern Congo.1 And this hub continued thus well into the twentieth century. On one March day in 1937, Alan Villiers counted more than fifty dhows at the anchorage, thirty-four of them Arab, and the others from the Comoro Islands, India, and nearby Somalia.2

  I awoke before dawn my first night on the island to rain crashing on the rusted and rattling corrugated iron roofs of Stone Town, the heart of old Zanzibar. I was renting two rooms from a friend above the cassava souk. From my wooden and cast-iron balcony, with its simple floral designs, I could almost touch the opposite lime-washed wall of the snaking alley. My rooms featured the usual oriental carpets, a poster bed with mosquito netting, colored-glass windows, and furniture made of wood and brass and copper: an effortless confection of Arab, Persian, Indian, and African aesthetics. In the morning I ascended to the “tea house” on the roof, a raised and open platform embraced by bougainvillea and the boisterous sea winds that granted a prospect of Stone Town’s dizzying roofscape. Below the slanting roofs were the building materials that gave this vast maze of an urban quarter its name: stones mixed with mortarized mud and sand, and covered with lime wash. The view was punctuated by Mughal-style minarets with their triple folio arches and the scabby, weather-beaten steeples of a late-nineteenth-century French cathedral. There were, too, the pencil-thin cast-iron pillars of the House of Wonders, a palace built in 1883 for Omani Sultan Barghash bin Said in tropical Victorian industrial style. With iron and rust so ever present, this was a vista that, rather than merely picturesque, seemed bursting with a sturdy spirit. My eyes met the horizon with freighters, outriggers, dugouts, and plank-built dhows all plopped in the milk-turquoise water of the Indian Ocean, so unreal a shade that it conjured up a water color more than it did the sea itself.

  Tracing the rooftops with his finger, from one end of the cassava souk to the other, my host, Emerson Skeens, an American who has lived in Stone Town for twenty-two years, registered for me his neighbors: Indian Hindus, Pembans (from the adjacent island), Indian Muslims, Yemenis, Persian Shiites, Ithna’sheris (Twelver Shiites, in this case from Pakistan), Bohras (another branch of Shiites, from Gujarat), Omanis, Goans, more Bohras, Africans, Shirazis, more Africans, and Comorians. “Zanzibar is African, yet different from Africa. It is Arabian and Persian, yet different from Arabia and Persia; and Indian, yet different from India,” said Ismail Jussa, a Zanzibari friend from the Gulf of Kutch in Gujarat. From different parts of the ocean they came, united by Islam and eventually, too, by the Swahili language, which, with its Arabic gutturals and loanwords, and its Bantu grammar, functions as pure, heated expression.*

  After the indigenous Africans, the Shirazis arrived here with their dhows from the coast of Iran around a thousand years ago, when Zanzibar, primarily owing to the winds of the northeast monsoon, was already being visited by traders from as far away as China. The Shirazis were not only Persians, but minority Arabs, too, from the city of Shiraz, who might well have been refugees from ethnic oppression. The Portuguese were the first westerners in Zanzibar, plying the East African coast since the time of da Gama at the end of the fifteenth century, and introducing cassava and maize. They built a chapel that the Omanis, who were importing silk from China, destroyed in the early eighteenth century, using the stones to build a fort. The Stone Town that the visitor sees today is mainly an Omani architectural affair, with strong Indian influences.

  Yet above all, Zanzibar, and Stone Town in particular, was, well into the nineteenth century, a “sad, dark star, a grim address” of the slave trade, in the words of the late Polish journalist Ryszard Kapuscinski.3 Hundreds and even thousands of slaves domesticated by years of captivity—men, women, and children—roamed through every street, along with those slaves who had just arrived from the interior, half mad and half dead through maltreatment. It was a scene that was like “looking into another age and another world,” somberly writes the journalist and historian Alan Moorehead about mid-nineteenth-century Zanzibar, which was the jumping-off point for Richard Burton and John Hanning Speke’s expedition to discover the source of the Nile.4 So as captivating as Zanzibar was to me, let me say at the outset that this island is not without its ghosts. First and above all there was slavery, the original sin and the lifeblood of the Omani Indian Ocean empire.

  In fact, Stone Town, rather than a cute Greek island village of a place, is a battered, roughened, gritty, exhausting, salt-stained monument to the historical process itself, somewhat intimidating and easy to get lost in, especially at night. Wandering around the first morning, when women with rapid br
oom strokes were spreading away the water from the nighttime rains, I first noticed the doors, more elaborate and replete with stories than the houses themselves. John Baptist Da Silva, an artist and lifelong resident of Stone Town from Portuguese Goa, in western India, read the doors for me as if they were books, with words between the lines. There was the simple, square Omani mango wood door with large cast-iron nails. Along the frames were designs of fish scales indicating fertility, and lotus flowers indicating power and wealth. The geometrical patterns were symbols of mathematics and, hence, of navigation. The rope patterns evinced the dhow trade, so this had been the home of a wealthy Omani merchant trader with many children.

  There are the Gujarati doors made of teakwood with massive nails and square patterns below semicircular frames carved with plants and sunflowers, each sect painting its door a different color. Whereas these Indian doors are primarily square and floral, the Arabic doors, made of wood from mahogany, breadfruit, and jackfruit trees, among others, feature Koranic inscriptions. The Persian and Baluch door frames are carved into the shape of pillars, evincing a neoclassical bent. The Swahili doors are shorter than the other ones and painted in garish colors.

  The breath of early morning carried with it the scents of sweet basil, lemongrass, and jasmine … of cloves, nutmeg, cinnamon, and cardamom. The yams and cassavas laid out on the barazas (stone benches) looked like petrified stones. The barazas were built primarily for gossiping and socializing, ignited by sips of Omani coffee, and were already getting crowded. Everyone had their favorite baraza, which need not be near their home. Men wore knitted caps (kofias) and traditional white Omani robes called kanzus in Zanzibar. Women wore khangas (patterned cotton dresses in African style). There was a pellucid intimacy to the morning here, with everything and every person manifesting an iconic aura that made it memorable.