Foreign Correspondence

[Amaunet]

Pirates and terrorists: Yo ho ho, infidel

Gal Luft and Anne Korin International Herald Tribune Friday, October 29, 2004

WASHINGTON Since the attacks of Sept. 11, security experts have frequently invoked a 200-year-old model to guide leaders contending with the threat of Islamist terrorism: the war on piracy. But the popular perception that sea piracy has been eliminated is far from true.

Not only has piracy never been eradicated, but the number of pirate attacks on ships has tripled in the past decade, putting piracy at its highest level in modern history. According to the International Maritime Bureau, ship owners reported 445 attacks by pirates in 2003 - almost double the number of the year before.

Most disturbing, piracy is turning into a key tactic of terrorist groups. Unlike the pirates of old, whose sole objective was quick commercial gain, many of today's pirates are maritime terrorists with an ideological agenda. This nexus of piracy and terrorism is especially dangerous for energy markets, since most of the world's oil and gas is shipped through the world's most pirate-infested waters.

Some 4,000 tankers carry 60 percent of the world's oil on the high seas. And while much has been done to improve maritime security since Sept. 11, the sea remains relatively unpoliced. Terrorists are well aware that an oil market with little wiggle room offers an ideal target for undermining the world economy. Oil supplies are, in the words of Al Qaeda, "the provision line and the feeding to the artery of the life of the crusader nation."

With oil prices at an all-time high and spare capacity gradually eroding, the implications of a terrorist attack at sea would be profound.

If an oil tanker were attacked in the open sea, the impact on the energy market would be marginal. But geography forces tankers to pass through strategic chokepoints, such as the Strait of Hormuz, the entrance to the Red Sea, the Bosporus, the Strait of Gibraltar and the Suez Canal - all areas in which Islamist terror groups with maritime capabilities are already active.

The Strait of Malacca, which separates Indonesia and Malaysia, is the conduit for more than half of East Asia's oil supply. Were terrorists to hijack a tanker, sail it into the Strait and blow it up, the immediate outcome would be a dramatic spike in oil prices, an increase in the price of shipping and maritime insurance, congestion in sea lanes and ports, and a likely environmental disaster.

In some chokepoints, maritime attacks have already been attempted. In his 2003 State of the Union address, President George W. Bush revealed that U.S. forces had prevented terrorist attacks on ships in the Strait of Hormuz.

According to Indonesian state intelligence agency, detained members of the Al Qaeda-linked Jemaah Islamiyah group have admitted that the group planed to launch attacks on Malacca shipping.

In June 2002, the Moroccan government arrested a group of Al Qaeda operatives suspected of plotting raids on tankers passing through the Strait of Gibraltar. The attack on the French oil tanker Limburg in October 2002 took place off the coast of Yemen, only 300 miles from Bab-el-Mandeb.

Terrorists who want to cripple the global economy need not bother attacking countries where security is tight. They can inflict the same damage by launching attacks in the territorial waters of countries lacking the will or the resources to police their own maritime back yard.

To reduce the risk of such attacks, industrialized nations that depend on imported oil must help bolster the naval capabilities of countries located near strategic chokepoints - and, if necessary, send their own navies to patrol these areas. Joint naval exercises, cooperation in law enforcement operations and the creation of information-sharing mechanisms can help monitor, identify and intercept suspicious vessels in national and international waters.

But tactical solutions are not enough. As with the broader war on terrorism, the war on terrorists at sea is a long-term effort. Major energy consumers and producers should focus not only on ways to fight terror at sea, but also on how to better cushion the blow to their economies in the case of a major disruption of oil traffic. For example, they should build strategic petroleum reserves sufficient to replace weeks of imports, similar to the one the United States already has.

Projects designed to bypass the dangerous chokepoints, or at least reduce some of the traffic through them, such as the Strategic Energy Land Bridge - a 150-mile pipeline traversing the Kra isthmus in Thailand and bypassing the Strait of Malacca - are no less important.

Of course, as the world's energy supply is likely to remain a target, oil consumers should also begin to replace imported energy with next-generation energy derived from domestic resources.

Such a shift will not only increase energy independence for the free world, it will also reduce the need to ship oil through anarchic, pirate-infested waters and thus reduce the world's vulnerability to a catastrophic disruption of its energy supply.


http://www.iht.com/articles/2004/10/28/opinion/edluft.html