On February 22, four Americans were killed by pirates in the Indian Ocean. But while Somali gunmen pulled the triggers, evidence is emerging that it was the action of FBI agents that killed the four Americans. Monday morning, CNN reported that shortly after the 58-foot yacht Quest was captured by Somali pirates off the coast of Oman, negotiations began between the Somalis and the USS Sterett, a US Navy warship that had responded to the Quest's distress call. Two Somalis went aboard the Sterett to continue negotiations face-to-face, but before they left they ordered their compatriots aboard the Quest to shoot the hostages if they were detained. In an act that not only smacks of arrogance but also violates hostage-negotiation protocol, the two Somali representatives were arrested aboard the Sterett, meanwhile their partners carried out their orders, murdering the four hostages before a Navy SEAL team could board the Quest.

The capture of the Quest once again propelled the largely-ignored issue of piracy off the Somali coast back onto the front pages across the United States; unfortunately the discussion it sparked was one of empty political rhetoric. Ari Fleischer, the former press secretary to George W. Bush, tweeted that “this is the 3:00am call” for President Obama that Hillary Clinton had warned about during their 2008 debates (odd that with protests roiling the Arab world, Fleischer would key in on Somali pirates as Obama's “3am moment”); meanwhile Donald Trump boasted to potential backers at the recent Conservative Political Action Committee convention that he could end the Somali piracy problem with a couple of good admirals and a few ships, showing how amazingly uninformed Mr. Trump is about the scope of the Somali piracy problem: since 2008, at any given time, nearly two dozen warships from a host of the world's navies - the United States included - patrol the waters off Somalia, yet the piracy continues.

For their part, the Somali pirates have long contended that they are a de facto Coast Guard for lawless Somalia. Many are, or were, fishermen who contend that factory fishing vessels from Europe and Asia have taken advantage of the fact that there is no Somali navy to protect their coastline to pillage the waters off the Somali coast, driving the indigenous subsistence fishermen out of business. Still others, they contend, have used the Somali coast as a dumping ground for hazardous waste, a claim at least partially verified by the 2004 tsunami, which pitched barrels of unknown waste onto the beaches in Somalia. The pirates contend that their seizure of foreign vessels is the only way they have to protect their home waters.

Perhaps there is a certain logic, even a peculiar honesty to their argument, or perhaps it's best to say that there was, since in the past two years, Somali piracy has transformed into a multi-million dollar business. Not content to merely patrol the coast, Somali pirates are now employing sophisticated strategies, including the use of “motherships” - often captured fishing trawlers from which they can launch the speedboats they use in their attacks - to extend their range over a broad swath of the Indian Ocean, as far east at the Seychelles and the coast of Oman, nearly 1,000 miles from Somalia. Piracy is now the backbone of the economy of Somali port cities including Haradhere, Eyl and Hobyo. Once a captured ship is brought to Somali waters, an existing infrastructure kicks into action: lodging and food is provided for the captive crew, security for the prize ship, and middlemen open a dialog between the pirate gang who captured the vessel and the ship's rightful owners. One of those ships currently at anchor off Somalia is the Irene SL, a supertanker with a cargo of two million barrels of Kuwaiti crude originally headed for refineries in the United States. It is a prize that will likely net a few million dollars in ransom for the pirates. So lucrative has piracy become that a stock exchange of sorts was even established in Haradhere, allowing average Somalis to “invest” in future pirate missions for a cut of any ransom they may net.

While commentators in the United States are citing the capture of an American-owned yacht as an escalation of the Somali piracy problem, the real issue to be concerned about is one currently not getting any attention (in the American press at least): the final establishment of a formal linkage between Somalia's pirates and its Islamic militants. Previous fears of such a link were largely baseless . Somalia's pirates are young men, and like young men around the world who find themselves suddenly flush with cash, they tend to spend it on alcohol, drugs, fancy clothes and cars and of course, on women – all actions that Somalia's deeply ascetic Islamic militants find extremely distasteful (and not to mention un-Islamic). Last December, one of Somalia's primary militant groups, Hizbul Islam moved in on Haradhere, ostensibly to “clean-up” the town of the sinful pirates. Since then Hizbul merged with Somalia's top militant group, al-Shabaab. For their part, al-Shabaab knew a moneymaker when they saw one and last week struck a deal to allow the pirates to continue to use Haradhere as a base in return for a lump-sum multi-million dollar payment, plus a 20% cut of future ransoms.

It is a source of income that will fund al-Shabaab's attempts to break the tenuous hold Somalia's Transitional Federal Government (TFG) maintains over the capital, Mogadishu. The TFG keeps this grip on power thanks to an underfunded, underequipped peace keeping mission from the African Union, made up primarily of troops from Uganda. The African Union has asked for additional support for the mission that would allow them not only to firmly control Mogadishu, but also to try and rout out pirates and militants in the surrounding countryside. The international community though has largely turned a deaf ear to these pleas, and that's a mistake. For all the tough talk on the part of Trump, Fleischer, et al., the true solution to Somalia's pirate problem lies not at-sea but onshore, namely in reestablishing a functioning government and a functioning security apparatus in Somalia and allowing the country to rejoin the ranks of the world's functioning nation-states. Yet for the past two decades the global community has shown remarkably little interest in putting in any effort towards this goal. Perhaps that's something to consider as Congress goes through its machinations about the 2011 Budget, which will include $100 billion to fund a war in Afghanistan; a country largely abandoned by al-Qaeda, yet nothing to improve the situation in Somalia, home to one of their fastest growing franchises (al-Shabaab), a franchise soon to be flush with pirate booty.