KEY POINTS:
On one side are the eight navies, the world's largest shipping companies, the rich Gulf states that need to get their oil to market, and the great powers, whose commerce depends heavily on the shipping lanes around the Horn of Africa.
On the other side are a few thousand Somali pirates in small boats with light weapons. So why are the pirates winning?
Not only are they winning, but the forces of law and order are almost completely paralysed. The pirates have seized dozens of ships, extracting ransoms totalling about US$30 million ($54.5 million) this year alone. About 14 ships are anchored off the Somali coast awaiting ransom.
Yet with the honourable exception of the Indians and the French, nobody has used force against the pirates of the Horn.
The Danish Navy arrested 10 in September, but freed them because the government believed it did not have jurisdiction to prosecute them while the UK Foreign Office has advised the Royal Navy not to detain pirates of certain nationalities, including Somali, as they might claim asylum in Britain under human rights laws.
As the boldness of the pirate attacks increases, the international response is to retreat. Major shipping companies have ordered their tankers to stop using the Suez Canal route, which takes them past the northern Somali coast, and go round southern Africa, adding a fortnight to the voyage at a cost of US$20,000 to US$30,000 a day.
What to do? Most pundits declare this problem cannot be solved at sea. Instead, it will only end when order has been restored in Somalia, the pirates' base. Since Somalia is divided between three different governments, only one of which (Somaliland) exercises even a modest degree of control over its territory, that seems a tall order.
The last major international attempt to take Somalia out of the hands of the warlords and their militias was in 1992-93. It ended with the hasty retreat of American troops from the country, followed by all the United Nations forces as well.
If we wait for a central government with authority to take charge in Somalia before the pirate threat is brought under control, that happy event is unlikely before the 2020s.
Why not solve the problem at sea, where clan militias and suicide bombers are not a problem? Why not just capture or kill enough of the pirates to persuade the others to choose a different career?
Do not believe the nonsense about how it's too big an ocean area to monitor and control effectively. This is one of the tasks great-power navies are designed to perform.
And they have the right equipment to do it and moreover, the navies are usually looking for work, since there is not that much call for their services in peacetime.
The problem is not the reluctance or incompetence of the navies. It is the whole body of international law and human rights legislation that has emerged in recent decades, which has made the traditional remedies for piracy very hard to apply.
The UN Convention on the Law of the Sea, for example, requires a warship to send a boarding party, led by an officer, on to any suspected pirate vessel to confirm its criminal intent. Until that has been done, the warship may not open fire.
The colloquial term for the members of any such boarding party is "hostages".
In the early 18th century, when the pirates of the Caribbean were finally being eliminated by the navies of the major European powers, there was no such foolishness.
Pirates were defined as "enemies of all mankind," and there was a right of "universal jurisdiction" against them.
Any country could arrest pirates from any other country and try them for their crimes. If they were captured in battle, they were liable to summary execution. And while it is not the 18th century any more, a UN Security Council resolution decreeing universal jurisdiction would certainly transform the situation.
Suppose that such a declaration were made, and it was announced any non-military vessels carrying armed men within 500km of the Somali coast faced arrest. If they did not submit when challenged, they would be sunk.
Do that a couple of times - as the Indian warship Tabar did recently - and the pirate threat drops away very fast.
Has the UN got the spine to declare those rules for the Gulf of Aden and the oceans bordering East Africa? Perhaps.
It has just given the Indian Navy the right of "hot pursuit" of suspected pirate vessels into Somali territorial waters, but it needs to go a good deal further. This thing can be stopped, with very little loss of life, if we just change the rules of engagement.
