COMMENTARY
Philippine presence holds risks for U.S.
By John Griffin
I have often said that attractive foreign countries where you first lived or worked are like first loves: You overlook much in the beginning, then tend to be more critical later.
Associated Press
So it is with me now looking at the Philippines — still our best friend in Asia — as it figures in the complex campaign against world terrorism.
Members of various agricultural organizations protested the Philippine military's joint exercises with U.S. troops Thursday outside an air force base in Angeles.
There is a real danger of terrorism in and from Southeast Asia, as has been well documented. That can't be ignored. And yet I also have a few misgivings about our new war's "second front," now scaled back and presented as a military training operation in the southern Philippines.
Some wonder if it's necessary or advisable to send 600 U.S. troops and much equipment in an operation against perhaps 60 brutal bandits and kidnappers who maybe once had ties to the al-Qaida terrorist network, and who have been largely beaten back by the Philippine military.
Nicholas Kristof, veteran correspondent and now columnist for the New York Times, is among those who sees mixed motives. From the smallish battleground island of Basilan he wrote:
"The real aim of the American mission is political: to demonstrate momentum in the war on terror, deploy troops in a country where they are welcome, show the flag in Southeast Asia, and find an enemy that can be quickly beaten."
That doesn't shock me. Politics is part of war. American as well as Philippine troops can benefit in joint exercises. But you also have to worry about unintended consequences.
The loss of 10 American servicemen in a helicopter crash at sea looks like it was an accident (unless someone slipped a bomb aboard when it stopped at Basilan). But it dramatizes routine risks.
More telling, the southern Philippines especially, with its large Muslim minority in Asia's only Christian nation, is a complicated mixture of cultures shaped in part by centuries of Spanish and then decades of American colonialism.
This history included much military action by both Spanish and American forces against Muslims, or Moros as they are called there. Jose Guevara, longtime Manila Bulletin columnist, said that in a comment about the new coming of U.S. troops on Basilan:
Associated Press
"Are the Americans going to fire back if they are attacked? You bet they will — 10 Moros for every American killed, just like the old juramentado days," he said in a reference to machete-wielding Muslim Filipinos who had taken an oath to kill as many Christians as possible.
A pro-American Filipino rallies to show support for the military exercises between the United States and his nation.
Christian-Muslim tensions have ebbed and flowed over the years around the huge island of Mindanao, which is Moloka'i-to-Maui distance from Basilan. (Things were so quiet in the early 1960s when I was with the Peace Corps that they moved the Philippine program's headquarters from Manila to Zamboanga — a short-lived logistical nightmare under the program's first director, Lawrence Fuchs, who earlier was at UH and wrote the fine social history, "Hawaii Pono.")
Now complicating the new situation are the fears of some that the presence of U.S. advisers could somehow enflame more conflict with the much larger Muslim separatist group, the Moro Islamic Liberation Front. It has signed a cease-fire but not a peace accord with the Manila government and for now remains mostly on the sidelines.
Serious and newsworthy as the situation remains in the south, the bigger question remains the future of democratic growth in the entire Philippines.
For, above all, this remains a country in need of a social revolution that will carry the poor masses farther across the massive gap that remains with the rich upper-class people who run things.
Much has been made of the United States providing $100 million in arms to the Philippine military with its mixed record of achievement and corruption. That's a temporary boost for the embattled government of President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo, an early ally in the war on terrorism.
More important, ultimately, is other aid we have pledged to give for food, debt cancellation, trade guarantees and poverty reduction programs.
The jury is still out on Arroyo, an economist from the same upper class. But she is better than the ousted, corrupt, populist president Joseph Estrada — and she is right in wanting to expand the international campaign against terror to fight poverty. That is a key need.
Finally, the Philippines should not prove to be some "next Vietnam" unless our best and brightest in Washington and in the field again prove inept.
Nor is it some "next Afghanistan," another country that will continue to teach us lessons in complexity.
No, the Philippines is what it is — a mixture of unmet social needs, many friends who look to us for help and understanding, and some protesters who reflect the mixed affection-and-abuse history Americans should also remember.
John Griffin is a former Advertiser editorial pages editor. He writes frequently for these pages.
