Pirates and Terrorists aren't likely to team up

A combination of Osama bin Laden and Johnny Depp would have been unstoppable! But it's not likely to happen, according to a new RAND study cited in The Atlantic. A summary:

Pirates are increasingly marauding on the high seas, a Rand report finds, but the dreaded (and terrifying-sounding) “terrorism-piracy nexus” won’t emerge anytime soon. Pirate attacks increased drastically between 2000 and 2006, to an average of more than 350 per year. In part, pirates just have more targets because of the huge boom in global maritime shipments. But they also take advantage of the shipping industry’s growing dependence on a few dangerous “chokepoints” like the Strait of Malacca, as well as widespread government corruption and lax port security. Most conditions advantageous to piracy would seem to benefit terrorists as well, and rumors of extremists hijacking ships to train for a “9/11 at sea” have led to worries that terrorists might start subcontracting their work to buccaneers. But the author argues that such a partnership is highly improbable. For one thing, terrorism in remote stretches of the ocean is unlikely to generate spectacular news footage. And no single attack would be likely to have wide-ranging economic consequences (for all their plundering, pirates cause at most $16 billion in losses a year—in an industry that handled upward of $7 trillion worth of goods in 2005). Perhaps most important, while jihadists would presumably aim for the destruction of the maritime economy, pirates depend on it for their livelihood.