The media continues to be infatuated with the pirates operating off the coast of Somalia. The swashbuckling Somalis have gotten a lot of media attention, and in terms of media bandwidth, the pirates have gotten much more coverage than the intense violence in eastern Congo and Darfur. To be fair, when you hijack oil tankers and cargo ships full of Ukrainian tanks, it is big news and the stories almost write themselves. But two interesting points have gotten lost among the Pirates of the Caribbean analogies. First, it now seems clear that the Europeans and the U.S. are far more willing to deploy their military assets to deal with piracy and the fallout from a failed state than they are to commit military assets to ongoing peacekeeping operations badly in need of help in Darfur and eastern Congo. Second, while the hijacking of the shipment of tanks generated much attention, fewer commented on where these tanks were destined: southern Sudan. With an independence referendum looming on the horizon, both the Government of Southern Sudan and the Government of Sudan in Khartoum are engaged in an escalating arms race.
