U.S. weighing new piracy strategies

WASHINGTON - The United States is considering new strategies in the aftermath of the Indian Ocean hostage drama, including adding Navy gunships along the Somalian coastline and launching a campaign to disable pirate "mother ships."

Sunday's nighttime rescue of an American cargo-ship captain and the killing of three of his Somalian captors by Navy SEAL snipers increases pressure on U.S. and international leaders to use newly granted authority to hunt pirates on land, where they plan and nurture attacks.

One day after his direct order allowing military force ended in success, President Obama committed the United States to "halt the rise of piracy," without saying exactly how his administration and its allies would do so.

Obama added the lawlessness off the coast of Africa to a lengthy must-fix list that already includes two wars and a struggling economy.

"We have to continue to be prepared to confront them when they arise, and we have to ensure that those who commit acts of piracy are held accountable for their crimes," Obama said.

U.S. officials privately outlined several options yesterday, even as the Pentagon cautioned that the solution won't come at the point of a gun.

Somalian pirates say they will retaliate for the killing of three pirates who held merchant Capt. Richard Phillips hostage - pirates who Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates said yesterday were 17 to 19 years old. A fourth, unidentified pirate surrendered.

"Untrained teenagers with heavy weapons," Gates said at the Marine Corps War College in Quantico, Va.

Pirates still hold about 230 foreign sailors hostage in more than a dozen ships.

It was not yet known when or how Phillips, 53, would return home. But in Vermont, where he lives with his wife and two children, his family appeared in public yesterday to thank the military, supporters, and Obama.

Phillips' wife, Andrea, hoarse from laryngitis, said in a statement read by family spokeswoman Alison McColl that "with Richard saved, you all just gave me the best Easter ever."

McColl said Andrea Phillips spoke with her husband earlier yesterday and quoted him as saying: "The real heroes of the story are the U.S. military. They are the most dedicated, professional, and capable group around."

Military officials said that the precision of Sunday's rescue may be a testament to the skill of the U.S. military but that it should not become a rationale for a major expansion of the Pentagon's role in what is fundamentally a criminal problem.

One official said bluntly that piracy is a crime, not an act of war or even terrorism. The official spoke on condition of anonymity because no decisions have been made, including about whether to expand or change the military's role in fighting piracy.

Defense officials, speaking under the same terms for the same reason, said planners would examine whether Navy ships could or should escort or otherwise expand the protection they provide to private U.S. commercial ships along the Somalian coast. The United States has already committed several ships to an international patrol force.

There are too many commercial ships and too few military ones to provide full escorts, and additional U.S. or international warships would probably be a temporary response.

As Somalian pirates have become bolder and more sophisticated, they have begun to capture more and larger vessels for use as "mother ships," or mobile command and supply centers. Navy officials theorize that was the goal of the attack on Phillips' ship, the Maersk Alabama.

Any new strategies at sea will have to take the mother ships into account, officials said, perhaps with new authority to hunt for them.

U.S. officials are looking for what they can do unilaterally and with other nations to buttress a loose strategy of seaborne patrols. Any real solution, military officials and diplomats said, must focus as much on the collapsed economy and government structure in Somalia as on the explosion of increasingly sophisticated piracy near the Horn of Africa.

Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, ordered a wide review of military options yesterday, said his spokesman, Navy Capt. John Kirby.

Gates said piracy would be a top priority for the administration in the weeks ahead.

"All I can tell you," he said, "is I am confident we will be spending a lot of time in the situation room over the next few weeks trying to figure out what in the world to do about this problem."

Assailants fired mortar shells at the Mogadishu airport yesterday as a plane carrying U.S. Rep. Donald M. Payne (D., N.J.) took off, a police officer said. The plane departed safely and its occupants were unharmed, but 19 Somalis from nearby residential areas were reported hurt.

Payne, chairman of the House Foreign Affairs subcommittee on Africa, said he didn't learn of the shelling until his plane landed in Nairobi, Kenya. He confirmed a State Department report that he had been warned before his trip about the security problems in Somalia, an unstable country with a history of violence. But he said that he felt the visit was necessary, saying, "I believe that a stable Somalia is really a key to a stable Africa."

A Somalian Islamist rebel group, Al-Shabaab, took responsibility for the attack. In a statement, it said it knew Payne was on the plane it targeted.

Payne met with Somalia's president and prime minister during his one-day visit to discuss piracy, security, and U.S.-Somalia cooperation.

- Inquirer wire services

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