U.S. mission in Philippines poses risks
By John Hendren
Los Angeles Times
WASHINGTON — Military and diplomatic experts yesterday questioned a new mission that is expected to send American combat troops to the Philippines, warning that the U.S. force faces a complex web of local politics and a danger that the effort could backfire.
Associated Press
By most accounts, the presence of U.S. military advisers in the Philippines over the past year has helped to suppress and fragment the Muslim extremist group Abu Sayyaf on the southern island of Basilan. But the expected arrival of 3,000 U.S. sailors, Marines and Army Special Forces troops in the southern Philippines in the coming weeks will escalate what had been a training and advisory mission.
Students pray for peace in suburban Manila. A plan to send U.S. troops to the Philippines could bring about a constitutional challenge to the Arroyo government.
With an apparent authorization to engage in combat alongside Philippine troops, the U.S. forces also threaten a constitutional crisis in the Southeast Asian nation, which bars foreign troops from combat. And it could disrupt a fragile truce between the government in Manila and Muslim political groups in the Islamic region of the predominantly Catholic nation, analysts warned.
"It's a volatile soup of issues, controversies, tensions, resentments and vendettas, and there it seems to me is the real risk," said Donald Emmerson, director of the Southeast Asia Forum at Stanford University. "One hopes the Americans can improve the situation rather than inadvertently worsening it."
In a less-than-auspicious beginning to the U.S. mission, Philippine officials continued to maintain that the Americans would be coming as part of a joint military exercise, not a combat operation.
In Manila, Defense Secretary Angelo Reyes, Foreign Affairs Secretary Blas Ople and a spokesman for President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo asserted that the troops would be authorized to fire in defense only.
"In other words, no combat troops," presidential spokesman Ignacio Bunye said. "Everything will be for training and advice."
Reyes was scheduled to leave Manila tomorrow for meetings with U.S. defense officials in Washington.
The force announced by the Pentagon on Thursday includes 2,200 U.S. naval forces and 750 Green Berets, Navy SEALs and other special operations troops. Diverging from the Philippine statements, the Pentagon said these troops will enter the country in an "operational role" rather than a strictly advisory capacity.
The stepped-up role raises concerns of escalating involvement that have dogged the Pentagon since the Vietnam War, when an advisory mission eventually grew into a deployment of hundreds of thousands of U.S. soldiers.
Unlike Vietnam, however, the Philippines mission holds little potential to draw American forces into a bloody civil war, experts say. The relative handful of Abu Sayyaf rebels — 208 at last count — are separatists who want to split off from the Philippine government, not take it over.
But analysts warn that the combined U.S. and Philippine forces will have to tread lightly to avoid antagonizing a broad array of other Muslim groups in the southern Philippines and prompt them to unite and become more active throughout Southeast Asia.
Since 1996, the Philippine government has maintained a fragile truce with the main rebel group in the region, the Moro National Liberation Front, that allows the group to oversee small swaths of autonomous territory. Abu Sayyaf and another group, the Moro Islamic Liberation Front, splintered off and continue to wage an armed campaign against the government.
Philippine troops, with the advisory backing of U.S. forces, already have regained control of Basilan Island, once a stronghold of Abu Sayyaf. The American and Philippine troops would now take their campaign to the Sulu islands further south, a largely lawless region rife with piracy and kidnapping. Angry over the lack of economic development in the impoverished region, many residents continue to support the rebels.
"Our military forces can help keep a lid on things," said Andrew Krepinevich, executive director of the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments. "But the (Abu Sayyaf) movement is a product of disenfranchisement and is something that is going to have to be solved politically and economically."
Inevitably, the heightened U.S. involvement will expose more Americans to attack. Last year, 10 U.S. military people were killed when a helicopter crashed during a training exercise, and a Green Beret was killed by a bomb that exploded outside the base housing the Americans.
"This is a case where we are beginning to take more risks," said Dan Goure, a former Pentagon official in charge of monitoring future threats. He is now at the Lexington Institute, an Arlington, Va., defense consulting company.
Nevertheless, he said, the Bush administration appears to have chosen its target carefully. Abu Sayyaf activists have been among the pro-Taliban fighters captured in Afghanistan, defense officials say.
The Manila government expelled an Iraqi diplomat last week after an Abu Sayyaf member allegedly phoned him in the wake of the bombing that killed the Green Beret. The CIA "has no doubt" the person expelled "was an Iraqi intelligence officer," a U.S. intelligence official said.
"These are places where al-Qaida-connected people are doing planning," Goure said.
Complicating matters are internal politics and the complex relationship between Washington and Manila, which ejected U.S. military forces from their two bases in the Philippines more than a decade ago.
Yesterday, just a day after the Pentagon outlined the new role for U.S. troops, Philippine nationalists protested their expected involvement. There were almost daily protests outside the U.S. Embassy during the exercises with American troops last year.
If the United States sends in combat troops, the move could also bring about a constitutional challenge to the Arroyo government.
