Omar vs. The Pirates

According to the BBC, Farah Ahmed Omar could have the worst job in the world. Why you ask? Because he's just taken the job as commander of the navy in pirate-plagued Somalia.

Somalia's incredibly shaky interim government is thinking boldly - they claim they've recruited 500 Somalis to train as sailors in the navy, even though they currently have no ships, and they pledge to stop their country from being a modern day Port Royal (the Jamaican city that was Pirate Central back in the golden days of piracy), even though they control virtually none of Somalia's coastline and are basically not welcome in the Puntland region, which is home to most of the Somali pirate bases.

But it wasn't always this way, Mr. Omar points out. Thanks to some clever playing of the US off the Soviet Union during the Cold War, Somalia once had one of the best navies in Africa, something Mr. Omar thinks could be true again with some help from the international community.

What struck me though from the BBC piece was something Mr. Omar said that echoed a claim from Abdiweli Ali Taar, commander of Puntland's ad-hoc Coast Guard, as quoted in MacLean's magazine's story "This Cabbie Hunts Pirates" from January (Ali Taar was once a Toronto cab driver, hence the title of the article) - that if the coalition of nations patrolling the waters off the Somali coast were to spend some of that money ashore, the piracy problem would likely disappear.