Be it from the tiny inlets of the Malacca Straits, the remote islands of the Java Sea, or fishing villages on the Somali coast, piracy is back. It went out of fashion after the Napoleonic wars, but has been rising steadily ever since the end of the cold war. Reports of four-hour gun battles between the Indian navy and pirates in the Gulf of Aden, or the seizure of one of the world's largest tankers with $100m of crude oil aboard, or a vessel carrying 33 Russian tanks, should not be surprising.
What is eye-catching about the latest attacks is the scale of the pirates' ambition. At least 92 ships have been attacked this year in and around the Gulf of Aden, more than three times the number in 2008. But is it so remarkable that the Sirius Star, a Saudi supertanker, was seized 450 nautical miles off the Kenyan coast, when fully loaded supertankers sit low in the water and travel slowly, and pirates now use mother ships with GPS positioning devices and speed boats in tow to extend their range? Most of their targets are sitting ducks and there are flocks of them - 20,000 oil tankers, freighter and merchant vessels transiting the Gulf of Aden each year. All the pirates have to do is to find one of them.
Many of the attacks off the Horn of Africa have taken place under the nose of a large US military presence. The US Fifth Fleet, which is responsible for US naval forces in a vast area of sea from the Persian Gulf to the coast of Kenya, has rightly appealed for help from other navies, including the Russian. The fleet has established a shipping corridor which can be policed - if the ships stay inside it. But that is not happening. Nor should all the attention focus on Somalia, the ultimate failed state. The attacks are being launched from fishing villages in Puntland, the northern quasi-independent part of Somalia, which is not a stronghold of Islamic rebels. Indeed in the short period when the Islamic Courts were in power piracy dropped. The obvious truth is a naval one. The logistical challenge of policing more than a million square miles of ocean is beyond the capacity of one nation. It is an international problem that requires an international solution.
The shipping industry, which has never liked being bound by national laws, is now in need of protection. There is an irony to the industry's call for help. Ships, such as the Liberian-registered Sirius Star, have been found flags of convenience. They employ low-paid polyglot crews, who are often exempt from strict labour laws or high tax. Shipping has become an almost invisible industry, the silent motor of global trade, but its consequences are not all benign. Big ships burn dirty fuel and are not subject to any form of carbon emissions regulation, and pump out polluted ballast water, soiling seas. Now the industry needs assistance. But its behaviour should change too.
Ship owners are curiously uninterested in the fate of their vessels and their crews because they are fully covered by insurance, and the pay-out on the life of a crew member is 20 times the average annual salary in the Philippines. Paying the ransom is more often than not the easier thing to do. Spiralling insurance premiums that are sure to result from the current wave of attacks may shake them out of their complacency. And there are other specific measures that can be taken. The creation of a multinational coastguard service for east Africa and the Horn of Africa is one. Putting transponders on ships and equipping them with armed guards and radar that covers the flanks from where they are boarded are others. Ships should respond to the advice of the International Maritime Bureau, which monitors all attacks, to stay 250 miles away from the coast. But to expect a central government to emerge in Somalia anytime soon is pie in the sky. Piracy will be overcome, but not until the international will exists to do something about it.