Bravo to the Navy SEALs, though it’s too bad the fourth pirate was “on board the Bainbridge as part of ongoing negotiations.” Negotiations? In any case, maybe the president did learn something useful in Chicago: “You wanna know how to get Capone? They pull a knife, you pull a gun. He sends one of yours to the hospital, you send one of his to the morgue. That’s the Chicago way!”

In all the discussion of how to respond to the larger piracy problem — arming merchant ships, more naval patrols, assaults on the port towns pirates operate from — it remains the case that the core problem is the lack of government in Somalia. I loved this headline to a recent VOA story: “Somali Government Ready to Resolve Piracy Problems” — Somali’s internationally recognized “government” doesn’t even govern all of its own capital city, let alone be in any position to resolve piracy.

But one part of Somalia does have a real government — the northern part called Somaliland (it was the British portion, that joined with the Italian colony to form what the maps still call “Somalia”). Somaliland has a functioning government that rules over a defined territory — not recognizing it is not only absurd (nonrecognition of governments is yet another part of Woodrow Wilson’s lamentable legacy), but it interferes with our ability to work with them to battle piracy. The Washington Post reported a year and a half ago that the Pentagon was pushing for recognition for precisely this reason. As Nick Gvosdev put it recently:

We lament the failure of a central Somali government to restore law and order, yet are unwilling to recognize potentially more viable governing structures because we remain committed to the notion that there exists a Somali state whose territorial integrity needs to be preserved. Given the logic behind the U.S. recognition of Kosovo, it seems foolhardy to continue to insist on a united Somalia if entities like Somaliland might be able to help stem piracy, or at least reduce the number of ungovernable zones.