Protecting the World's Economic Arteries
by Stanley A. Weiss

WASHINGTON -- It's been an economic blow to the U.S. economy that Osama bin Laden could only dream of. By knocking out the Port of New Orleans, the largest port in America, Hurricane Katrina wreaked hundreds of billions of dollars in damage and long-term recovery costs.

Governments and businesses around the world take note: Today's Information Age economy of bytes, portals and fiber optic cables still depends on barges, ports and shipping lanes that are highly vulnerable to natural or man-made disasters.

New Orleans underscores the geopolitical significance of a single port or passageway when 80 percent of world trade still moves by ship. Fed by the Mississippi River and its tributaries, the Port of New Orleans is the conduit for most of American grain exports and large quantities of imported oil, steel, rubber and cement. But more than two months after the hurricane, the port is accepting only a handful of ships a day.

Still, the consequences of Katrina pale beside those of a storm or terrorist strike that could potentially disrupt even larger ports like Hong Kong, Singapore, Shanghai and Rotterdam. Even more vulnerable are the half-dozen navigational "choke points" through which passes 75 percent of maritime trade.

Virtually all the world's oil passes through two narrow passageways - the Strait of Malacca, which is only 1.5 miles wide at its narrowest point between Singapore and Indonesia, and the 34-mile-wide Strait of Hormuz between Iran and Oman, the only exit for Gulf oil.

Other vital bottlenecks include the Suez Canal, the Bab el-Mandab Passage between Yemen and the Horn of Africa, and the Bosporus and Turkish Straits, now the largest outlet for Russian oil exports. The Panama Canal remains a strategic asset for the U.S. Navy.

Osama bin Laden, for one, didn't need a hurricane to know that open ports and narrow passageways are the Achilles heels of the West's economic and military power.

The suicide attack on the USS Cole in Yemen in 2000 was followed two years later by a similar attack nearby on the French oil supertanker Limburg, which bin Laden hailed as a strike against "the provision line" that feeds "the artery of life of the crusader's nation."

The ultimate nightmare scenario, however, remains a maritime 9/11, the hijacking of an oil or gas tanker by terrorists who turn it into a floating bomb that could devastate a major port city. Compared with the 50,000 gallons of fuel aboard the two aircraft that crashed into the World Trade Center, today's supertankers carry more than 30 million gallons of highly flammable liquefied natural gas.

The International Maritime Organization, the London-based UN agency that regulates global shipping, imposed new rules last year that have strengthened port defenses around the world and made it harder for terrorists to infiltrate crews with fake documents.

But a lack of international cooperation has left too many ports too vulnerable. Although U.S. customs officers are now stationed at more than 30 foreign ports, one recent study found that nearly one-third of high-risk containers are still not inspected before being shipped to the United States. Likewise, a two-year-old American initiative to install radiation detectors at high-risk foreign ports has so far succeeded only at Rotterdam and Piraeus.

Ultimately, safeguarding the world's vital ports and passageways will be a matter of showing the flag, as the U.S. Navy has done in the Gulf for decades. But that requires something still missing in other corners of the world - the cooperation of local governments and capable navies.

Only after the U.S. Pacific commander suggested last year that he might send ships to protect the piracy-plagued Malacca Strait did Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore and Thailand agree to start joint naval patrols. And only after Lloyd's of London listed the strait as a "war risk zone" this year did the countries launch joint patrols in September.

With local navies under funded and overstretched, private security companies are stepping into the void by offering armed escorts through the strait, including shipping lanes that pass through the territorial waters of Indonesia and Malaysia.

"Sovereignty is still a sensitive issue for the two countries," according to James Van Zorge of Van Zorge, Heffernan and Associates, Indonesia's leading political risk consultancy firm. But regional leaders "have realized that a greater role for foreign powers is necessary."

Likewise along the coast of West Africa, which is expected to provide 25 percent of U.S. crude imports within 10 years. Bandits and rebels rule the waves off Nigeria, Africa's largest oil producer, but the region's navies are outgunned and local leaders seem unfazed.

General Chuck Wald, deputy commander of the U.S. European Command, which covers most of Africa, tells me, "Our single greatest challenge is the cooperation and willingness of African coastal nations to see maritime security as a regional problem and to act on known security issues."

With global oil supplies stretched and demand at record highs, a single terrorist strike against one of these ports or waterways would be an economic shock the likes of which the world has never seen. For Osama bin Laden, it's a dream too good to be true. For the rest of the world, it's a nightmare too real to ignore.