Alan's Point

The Bangsamoro Insurgency: An International History by Mark Snakenberg

2011-09-26T13:02:00.000+08:00

The Republic of the Philippines. Vibrant democracy. Former American possession. Predominantly Christian. Not the type of place or conditions readily associated with Islamist-inspired insurgency. Yet nowhere else in East Asia over the last forty years has an Islamist movement garnered greater public support amongst its base or enjoyed equal success; so much so that the central government actually recognized its claims as legitimate and initiated a peace-process to address the underlying issues. For all the concern over Indonesia and its 243 million Muslims,[1] it is the Philippines that occupies center-stage in the Global War on Terrorism in Southeast Asia.

Despite this reality and the presence of significant numbers of U.S. personnel in the region advising the Armed Forces of the Philippines, few Americans know of this insurgency, and fewer understand it. This paper seeks to provide a working knowledge of the so-called Bangsamoro insurgency’s origins to Americans involved in the region, or others interested in better understanding it. As a primer there is nothing new or novel in this paper’s observations; however, it does place the Bangsamoro insurgency into the context of global Islamic political developments, a perspective other studies sometimes lack. Because the development of Bangsamoro identity is the result of regional and global interactions centered on the Southern Philippines dating back over a millennium, its political manifestation since the 1960s is likewise a product of importation and adaptation of outside ideas; the Bangsamoro movement cannot be understood in isolation.

The Origins of the Bangsamoro Ideal

The term Bangsamoro is loosely translated as “Moro Nation,”[2] a term used by secessionists to identify the predominantly Muslim inhabitants of the Southern Philippines (centered mainly on the western side of the major southern island of Mindanao and the islands of the Sulu Archipelago) versus the majority Christian northerners.[3] For all its currency however, Bangsamoro is a fairly recent construct with little historical justification.[4] Prior to the arrival of the Americans in 1898, the inhabitants of the Philippines were generally considered part of the broader ‘Malay’ race occupying present-day Malaysia and Indonesia by Westerners;[5] the term ‘Filipino’ reserved only for local elites of Spanish stock born in the Philippines.[6] The reality is more complex. The modern Bangsamoro homeland consists of 13 historically distinct ethno-linguistic entities dominated by the Maguindanao and Tausog tribes,[7] each often pursuing competing local interests resulting in inter-ethnic conflict. The common element is faith. While conducting routine trade and interaction with the islands of present-day Indonesia and Southeast Asia these tribes imported Islam in the four centuries preceding Spanish colonization, producing an ‘other’ identity between these Muslim converts and their pagan neighbors to the north. This identity was further reinforced after Spanish contact as the Spaniards first converted the northern tribes to Christianity, then pursued the forced conversion of southern Muslims in a series of wars to exert direct Spanish control.[8]

The United States recognized the cultural heterogeneity of the Philippines upon assuming control of the archipelago in 1898[9] and deliberately fostered a new ‘Filipino’ identity through education and civic government. Ironically this would foster the development of the Bangsamoro ideal. The Filipino identity was centered on the Christian, Tagalog-speaking communities of Manila and the north; integration was the process of bringing all inhabitants closer in line with this Filipino ideal using American-imported concepts of public education, representation, and mass media as the vehicles. In the south these developments cut against Muslim sensibilities; the Moro insurgency of the first two decades of the twentieth century left the traditional sultan and datu leadership structure in shambles and replaced shari’a law with secular Western practices.[10] Further, in order to facilitate the integration of Muslims into the new Filipino ideal, the government initiated an immigration policy bringing landless Christians from the north south to settle in Muslim areas;[11] a practice continued throughout the 1960s.[12] These developments resulted in “marginality, dissatisfaction, and ultimately, among many, rejection of the Philippine nation-state,”[13] driving the development of the Bangsamoro identity in opposition to the imposed ‘Filipino’ identity.

The Political Origins of Bangsamoro Unrest

Despite discussions over Moro independence during the 1936 constitutional convention, the Bangsamoro identity—with Islam as its core—“was not used as a tool for political mobilization until the 1960s,”[14] because the requisite internal and international conditions did not support such a move. In order to fully understand the Bangsamoro insurgency, one must place events in the Southern Philippines within a global—specifically pan-Islamic—context.

Conditions radically changed in 1941 with the Japanese occupation of the islands. As in other colonial possessions—Indonesia and Malaya included—the Japanese occupation authorities sought to develop competing identities within their newly acquired territories to disassociate the local power-base from their former masters while dissuading resistance to Japanese administration.[15] Religion played a key role in this process.

Following the war, an independent Republic of the Philippines unwittingly facilitated the further development of Muslim autonomy by tolerating a major black market economy centered on the Southern Philippines conducting illicit trade in American cigarettes through traditional Muslim trade routes with Malaysia and Indonesia.[16] Along with trade however, these cross-border contacts facilitated Philippine Muslims’ integration in a wider Islamic world undergoing radical change.

The same post-colonial forces responsible for Philippine independence were also transforming the Muslim world. Across Africa, the Middle East, and South/Southeast Asia newly independent Muslim states were emerging from collapsing European empires. Just as it did during the centuries before Magellan, and again at the turn of the twentieth century,[17] trade and pilgrimage from the Arab core through the Straits of Malacca was importing new ideas into the Muslim communities in Southeast Asia. What scholar Bruce Lawrence terms Islamic revivalism and reformism began to transform communities in Malaysia, Indonesia, and ultimately the Southern Philippines. Lawrence defines revivalism as “the affirmation of Islamic identity and values” while reformism was “the product of the colonial presence” that sought to blend the secular nationalism of the West with Muslim identity.[18] Revivalism came first, initially penetrating the Southeast Asian Muslim community in the first decades of the twentieth century through the movement of students to Arab universities in, among other places, Egypt; and by pilgrims exposed to contemporary Arab thought as a byproduct of their hajj to Mecca.[19] This strain of thought exhorted Muslims to return to the roots of their religion, purging the faith of impurities as a reaction to the challenge of Western colonialism. As such, it became a lighting rod for the anti-colonial struggle throughout Muslim Southeast Asia,[20] particularly in Indonesia. Revivalism, however “was timid on the question of the state… [it] provided no comprehensive blueprint for political organization,”[21] which limited its intellectual usefulness as an engine for political change. Revivalist thought primarily manifested itself in increased Muslim religiosity—the self-expression of one’s personal faith[22]—rather than in political action. This is one explanation for the lack of political momentum behind Moro separatism prior to World War II.

The concomitant rise of independent Muslim states and reformism began to change this dynamic in the Southern Philippines. The perceived success of secular Islamic governments throughout the Muslim world convinced some Bangsamoro that independence was possible. Gamal Abdel Nasser’s Egypt personified secular Islamic reformism during the 1950s and 60s, with its strong emphasis on the borrowed Western concept of ethnic nationalism. The Philippine Government unwittingly fueled the Bangsamoro separatist movement during this period by enacting educational reform exposing Muslim youth to imported Islamic education. 200 Southern Philippine Muslims received scholarships to attend al-Azhar Islamic University in Cairo, with reciprocal visits by Egyptian teachers and Indonesian graduates of the university to preach and educate in the islands. These 200 graduates would then return to teach in Islamic education centers and madrasas funded by Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC) members Egypt, Libya, and Saudi Arabia.[23] As a result, Bangsamoro exposure to outside pan-Arabic and Islamic ideas surged.

Compounding the heightened religious awareness were a series of internal threats to Philippine Muslims. Thousands of college graduates educated in the north returned to communities with little economic opportunity. Moreover, a recently concluded peace settlement with communist insurgents in the north resulted in increased migration of landless Christian peasants awarded land titles in the south.[24] The situation was primed for ethnic conflict.

Rise of the MNLF

Although the history of Muslim insurgency in the Southern Philippines extends back centuries, the proximate cause of the current Islamist-inspired movement can be traced directly back to the 1968 Jabidah massacre. In response to a territorial dispute with Malaysia, Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos directed a covert action against Malaysian authority in the territory of Sabah. All the commandos involved were Muslim, and evidence suggests that these operatives mutinied when informed that their targets were fellow Muslims (diplomatically claimed by the Philippine Government), resulting is a government crackdown and the death of all but one.[25] This event initiated a chain of events both within and outside the Philippines that resulted in the emergence of a full-scale insurgency.

Externally, the political leader of Sabah—Tun Mustapha, a Tausog with relatives in Jolo—began arming small groups of Bangsamoro to fight the Philippine Government. This led to the creation of the first violent separatist group—the Moro Islamic Movement (MIM)—which conducted low-intensity violence against Christians in Mindanao.[26] The Arab defeat in the 1967 Six Day War further fueled the insurgency as OIC states consciously sought out pan-Islamic causes to support as an extension of the Arab reaction to what it perceived as Western hostility to Islam.

Internally the massacre prompted mass student protests and increased activism. Violence increased throughout 1968-71, with increased government control of southern towns and villages. Simultaneously, a small group founded by Nur Misuari—the Moro National Liberation Front (MNLF)—trained and equipped with Libyan weapons in Sabah and Malaysia prepared to commence full-scale operations.[27] With violence spiraling out of control, in July 1971 all sectors of Bangsamoro society published a manifesto calling for government intervention, an action the government treated as a threat to Philippine sovereignty.[28] The Marcos regime retaliated in 1972 by declaring martial law and restructuring the lucrative black market trade, denying the Bangsamoro elite traditional laizze faire and awarding control to the army. In a stroke Marcos intensified the insurgency by directly challenging local elite and engendered a strident independence platform heretofore constrained only by the economic benefits of illicit trade. From 1972-1972 the 30,000 strong MNLF—funded by Malaysia and Libya—tied down 70-80 percent of the Philippine military, inflicting an average of 100 casualties per month.[29] The MNLF movement itself however was woefully uncohesive; outgunned, it quickly lost popular support because of spiraling civilian casualties. Moreover, in the mid 1970s a turn of Malaysian policy induced by that country’s own Islamist challenge—the Dakwah movement[30]—and the electoral defeat of Tun Mustapha in Sabah deprived the MNLF of critical outside support.

The Marcos regime exploited the MNLF’s loss of momentum with a multi-faced strategy. While maintaining military pressure the Philippine President directed relief and reconstruction operations in the worst affected areas while establishing the Southern Philippines Development Authority to address Bangsamoro social and economic concerns. Marcos also reached-out to non-MNLF Muslim leaders—further exploiting the wedge between the MNLF and populace—and realigned his foreign policy to court international Muslim favor.

First Interregnum

Marcos’ approach combined with the shifting international environment finally brought the two sides to the negotiating table. In 1975 the government and MNLF leaders entered negotiations in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia while the Philippine military sent negotiating panels to insurgent field commanders. While MNLF leaders debated, international Muslim leaders—anxious for resolution—endorsed ‘autonomy’ as the basis for Philippine-MNLF negotiations at the 5th Islamic Conference of Foreign Ministers (ICFM), damaging insurgent aspirations for independence. Local cease-fires and presidential guarantees of immunity for MNLF leaders eventually resulted in a Libyan-brokered peace-treaty on 23 December 1976—the Tripoli Agreement—that accepted MNLF grievances subject to a local plebiscite.[31]

Fundamentalism and the MNLF/MILF Split

The Tripoli Agreement proved to be little more than a cease-fire with long-term implications. Fighting resumed in 1977 despite the government’s adoption of a Code of Muslim Personal Laws—incorporating shari’a courts into the national system—in part due to another major influx of Christians into the region, and partly over significant disagreements over the settlement’s implementation.[32] Relying on his almost unlimited powers, Marcos sought to manipulate the plebiscite process in his favor; a move strongly resisted by the MNLF. The political deadlock prompted Misuari to address the MNLF’s concerns to the 8th ICFM, which voted to continue negotiations.[33]

The 8th ICFM’s decision compounded by the movement’s earlier decision to accept autonomy rather than outright independence prompted an irrevocable split in the MNLF, separating Misuari’s supporters from hard-line elements led by Salamat Hashim, a Maguindanao.[34] This splintering of the movement dramatically shaped the course of the Bangsamoro insurgency over the next decade, first because it split Muslim political and financial supporters into opposing camps, with Libya continuing to support Misuari while Hashim established himself in Cairo. Most significantly however, the split coincided with the emergence of fundamentalist undercurrents throughout the Islamic world; a development that would shape the future character of the political process, and which may only be understood in the larger context of pan-Islamic fundamentalist thought.

Islamic fundamentalism emerged in the 1970s as the result of a number of factors including the emergence of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC), and as an intellectual and popular reaction to secular states’ perceived failure to crush a vulnerable Israel in the 1967 Six Day and 1973 Yom Kippur Wars.[35] It essentially filled the political void in Islamic revivalism, offering an alternative to the secular nation-state inherited by Muslim countries from the West. At its core, fundamentalism rejects the Western concept of a separation of church and state, arguing that because Islam is “both the spiritual and the political, the private and the public domains… to talk about a mosque-state division in Islam is to talk about dividing Islam.”[36] In this regard, fundamentalism—like its antithesis, communism—is an all-encompassing ideology; and like its communist antecedent, fundamentalism is politically divided between radicals, bent on reforming the prevailing political order, and moderates, who are content to work within the present order.[37] In the fundamentalist case radicals wholly reject the legitimacy of existing states[38] on the grounds that nationalism is simply a recurrence of the Arab tribalism prevailing at the time of Mohammed;[39] tribalism the prophet vehemently opposed and only overcame by the unification of believers under the political banner of faith. Moderates on the other hand are content to build Islam in one state for the foreseeable future. Both share in common a literal interpretation of the Qur’an and the shari’a tradition. Contrary to conventional wisdom, fundamentalism is not inherently violent—although many fundamentalist movements employ violence as a means to their end—but is certainly anti-progressive and anti-modern.

1979 proved a crucial year for both the Bangsamoro insurgency locally, and fundamentalism globally. The establishment of the Islamic Republic of Iran provided Misuari with another supporter as he continued to resist the Marcos regime,[40] while the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan galvanized Muslim militants worldwide and provided the impetus for renewed Bangsamoro resistance in the Southern Philippines.[41] Capitalizing on the revolutionary momentum initiated by the mujahidin resistance to the Soviets, Hashim moved his partisans to Pakistan, establishing key links with pan-Islamist militants worldwide.[42] There, 600 of his followers underwent structured military training, with 180 going on to conduct active operations against the Soviets.[43] This cadre returned to the Philippines and established training camps and programs to indoctrinate a new generation of insurgents, led by bloodied commanders.[44]

Throughout the early 1980’s Misuari’s MNLF continued to suffer battlefield setbacks, resulting in increased ICFM pressure to return to the negotiating table. By 1982 the situation was so dire that the MNLF agreed to join with local communists of the National Democratic Front (NDF) in a joint insurgent campaign, alienating large segments of the religious public and their leaders, the ulama.[45] In 1984 Hashim perceived the opportunity to establish a separate entity, the Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF) to prosecute an independent Bangsamoro agenda. Unlike the secular MNLF, the MILF demanded total independence and the adoption of fundamentalist political ideals to recast the Bangsamoro homeland into a moderate fundamentalist entity.[46]

The MILF enjoyed tremendous popular support initially, attributed by its leaders to the movement’s twin pillars of Islam and independence. In reality, the deteriorating situation caused by conflict and a decade of martial law was the real source of popular support.[47] Marcos attempted to undercut MILF support by lifting martial law, but was himself ousted in 1986 as a result of mounting national backlash against his rigging of elections.[48]

The ARMM

The ouster of Ferdinand Marcos and inauguration of Corazon Aquino provided impetus for a new round of peace negotiations. Although both the MNLF and MILF were engaged, the MILF broke off talks as a result of the government recognizing Misuari’s MNLF as its negotiating partner—thanks in large part to that movement’s close association with many government elite. The MILF responded by reinitiating military operations, and establishing a shadow government in the south with the ultimate goal of Islamization, build-up, and self-reliance.[49] Drawing on the political and cultural capital of its Islamist credentials, the MILF was able to expand its base from the urban poor and ulama to include growing numbers of urbanites and professionals disillusioned with the MNLF and the peace process.[50] Throughout the late 1980s, sporadic fighting continued between rounds of failed negotiations, with the government pursuing legislative and constitutional solutions to Muslim grievances. The MNLF and MILF enjoyed a period of tacit cooperation while improving their own political positions. The 1989 establishment of the Autonomous Region of Muslim Mindanao (ARMM) prompted hope for a final settlement that degenerated into conflict over the results of further plebiscites and elections.[51]

Rapprochement: SZOPAD

By 1990 the insurgency entered its third decade and all parties sought a settlement. Real progress was imminent as the country went to the polls in 1992. The opposition candidate—Fidel Ramos—visited Libya and secured Muammar Quadaffi’s cooperation in finding a peaceful settlement to the Bangsamoro issue. Upon his election in May, Ramos initiated a National Unification Commission (NUC) that opened peace talks with the MNLF and MILF backed by Libya, Indonesia, and other OIC nations.[52] Progress was slow, but by 02 September 1996 an official peace agreement between the government and the MNLF was reached, establishing the Southern Philippines Zone of Peace and Development (SZOPAD). Although the MILF denounced the agreement, it publicly agreed to support peace, observing an intermittent cease-fire through 2000.

A subsequent election named Misuari governor. Corrupt and fond of large-scale projects such as mass transit at the expense of simple local projects designed to address grass-roots concerns such as health and education, Misuari’s administration quickly lost popularity and the support of many in and outside the MNLF,[53] paving the way for a new type of group and a new type of tactic.

International Terrorism in Bangsamoro: From Afghanistan to Yousef

Diplomatic efforts were not the only external developments affecting the Bangsamoro question during the 1990s. Starting in the late 1980s and accelerating through the mid-1990s, the nexus of local and pan-Islamic militancy born of the Afghan war was transforming the Southern Philippines into a bastion of international Islamic terrorism. In 1987 the Philippine police exposed a large cell of the Abu Nidal terrorist group, and the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) began funneling weapons to both major Bangsamoro movements. The following year, an obscure Saudi fundamentalist—Osama bin Laden—dispatched his brother-in-law to the region to develop a support network for the operations of his own organization, al-Qaida. Funding would follow, as al-Qaida “effectively united with other groups, backed them, found common cause, and linked them into a global network.”[54] In 1991 Iraqi terrorists even sought to target Americans in Manila as retaliation for Operation Desert Storm, although the plot was foiled.[55]

The introduction of trans-national terrorism again transformed the environment in which Bangsamoro unrest manifested itself. It shifted the source of funding and material assistance for both the MNLF and MILF away from state sponsors such as Libya—facilitating the peace process—toward international terrorist organizations using civic organizations as fronts.[56] It also sparked the growth of new Bangsamoro movements employing new tactics towards familiar ends.

Al-Qaida money and support directly facilitated the creation of the Abu Sayyaf Group (ASG) in 1991 by a former Bangsamoro mujahidin veteran of Afghanistan, Ustadz Abdurajak Janjalani, as an al-Qaida affiliate committed to establishing a pure Islamist state based on the precepts of Salafi Wahhabism.[57] Capitalizing on militant discontent with Misuari and the MNLF, Janjalani’s movement offered a radical alternative to the more moderate MILF. Importing international explosives experts provided by al-Qaida and using ASG sanctuaries as training areas, Janjalani’s group rapidly established itself as a significant local terrorist cell, receiving covert Libyan support.[58] This group’s terror attacks between 1991 and 1996 would hamper, but not stop the peace process.

Even MILF, publicly committed to supporting the SZOPAD agreement, began to resort to terror to advance its political agenda. Mimicking al-Qaida’s methods, the group expanded from a traditional guerilla movement to diverse areas including international crime and legitimate business enterprises to compensate for reduced funding from the OIC nations.[59] MILF also increased its direct association with al-Qaida, receiving increased funding and technical assistance in the form of imported trainers from elsewhere in the Muslim world, and even exported members to train in camps located in Taliban-controlled Afghanistan and Pakistan.[60] Of particular significance was the increased cooperation between MILF and regional terrorist organizations including Malaysia’s Kampulan Mujahidin and Indonesia’s Jemaah Islamiya (JI). Because of their close physical proximity and kinship, the intersection of all three movements complemented the rise of the others; an example being JI fund-raising for MILF in exchange for training.

Of greater international concern should have been the wider al-Qaida network in the Philippines that facilitated spectacular attacks against Western targets. The ARMM/ SZOPAD served as a virtual sanctuary for international terrorists—particularly the cell belonging to Khalid Sheik Mohammed, mastermind of 9/11 among other high-profile attacks, and Ramzi Yousef—who used the Philippines as a safe-haven after conducting the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, and in preparation for further attacks both against and using jetliners as weapons.[61] Unfortunately, after capturing Yousef and a number of his associates as a result of the botched Oplan Bojinka operation to down major jetliners in 1995, both Philippine and U.S. investigators failed to appreciate the extent and significance of the al-Qaida network in the region, allowing crucial nodes to remain in place until 1996.[62]

International Terrorism in Bangsamoro: From Yousef to 9/11

Following Yousef’s capture, the Philippines decreased in importance for al-Qaida as bin Laden centered his emerging network on Sudan and then, the radically fundamentalist Taliban in Afghanistan. Although contacts continued between the organization and both MILF and ASG, the funding stream was reduced prompting increased MILF/ASG conflict over support. By the late 1990s however, support for ASG virtually evaporated as the organization resorted increasingly to criminal activity in the wake of Janjalani’s death in 1998.[63] By 9/11, the ASG retained no discernable ties to international terrorism.[64]

MILF’s connection with international, and especially, regional terrorist groups on the other hand was increasing. In addition to continued al-Qaida support, during the mid-1990s Hamas and the Tamil Tigers both sought sanctuary in the ARMM/SZOPAD[65] and JI also greatly facilitated MILF establishing its own terrorist organization—Special Operations Group—in 1999;[66] the ultimate manifestation of MILF’s dual game of overtly supporting peace in the SZOPAD while pursuing its own political agenda.

The Post-9/11 Response to Bangsamoro

In 2000 a hard-line President—Joseph Estrada—was elected and promptly ended three years of government-sponsored relief and reconstruction programs initiated at Hashim’s request, triggering the resumption of major MILF operations against the government.[67] The MNLF however remained committed to peace. In April 2001 a potentially explosive situation failed to materialize as the movement itself expelled Misuari as governor over corruption charges.[68]

The 11 September 2001 terrorist attacks on the United States had profound implications for both sides of the Bangsamoro dispute. The Philippine government—now headed by President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo—perceived the benefits of American aid to combat Muslim separatism and quickly aligned itself with Washington, offering bases for combat operations against Afghanistan and intelligence-sharing. In return she secured American financial and logistic support as well as training in combating the ASG, which continues to struggle for survival.[69]

The MILF situation was trickier. Despite clear ties to al-Qaida, the Arroyo government lobbied hard to exclude the group from both the U.S. and United Nations’ lists of terrorist organizations. These efforts were critical to the ongoing peace process; the government regarded Muslim grievances as legitimate, and recognized the MILF as a military extension of Bangsamoro political aspirations. While international labeling of the group as terrorists would have irrevocably ended the government’s efforts towards negotiations, international acquiescence enabled the Arroyo administration to continue its pursuit of a negotiated end to the long-running insurgency.[70]

Given the new international environment, MILF seemed inclined to bargain. Immediately after 9/11 the group publicly disavowed all association with al-Qaida, and by dropping its long-standing demand for independence in favor of autonomy, visibly increased its efforts toward working through the political system by participating in and winning local elections.[71] In 2003 the latest cease-fire was brokered by Malaysia, anxious to emerge as a political as well as economic leader in Southeast Asia and a model Muslim democracy. Despite the presence of peacekeepers as monitors however, sporadic fighting continues. 2007 and 2008 agreements on the boundaries of ancestral domain were viewed as preliminaries toward a comprehensive peace,[72] but as of early 2011 no such agreement has been reached.

Following an abortive rebellion by Misuari and a splinter cell of supporters in November 2001, MNLF seemed committed to observing the 1996 agreements. Then in 2005 the group resumed small-scale fighting in Sulu—ostensibly as retaliation for operations against the ASG. In 2007 Misuari returned to the helm of MNLF and the same year, was implicated in further attacks against government forces.[73] The MNLF remains a weak and divided movement, with many supporters tacitly supporting either the MILF or ASG agenda.

Although peace remains elusive, mainstream MNLF and MILF are decreasingly a military threat and increasingly a political force in the Southern Philippines. Of greater concern are the remnants of ASG and fringe groups of the MNLF and MILF—including Special Operations Group—with possibly enduring ties to both al-Qaida and regional terrorists such as Indonesia’s JI.[74]

Conclusion

For all its indigenous allure, the concept of Bangsamoro can be woefully inadequate as either an identity or comprehensive term for analyzing Muslim unrest in the Southern Philippines. While Bangsamoro implies unity, the reality is that the Muslim movements in the region are fragmented, often competing, and nearly impervious to central control. Further, although the central element of commonality remains faith, local politics and tribal identity do play a role in manifesting local politics through violence. Despite governmental efforts to address the underlying causes of the insurgency—economic opportunity, basic quality of life, and an autonomous ethno-religious homeland—history suggests that external political and intellectual Muslim movements over the coming decade may decisively influence the ultimate fate of peace in the region.

[1] From the CIA Fact Book < https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/geos/id.html > accessed 26 January 2011.

[2] Zachary Abuza, Militant Islam in Southeast Asia (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 2003), p. 34.

[3] Eric Casino, Case Studies of Islam in Asia: The Moro’s of the Philippines (unpublished; cited with author’s permission), p.11.

[4] Abuza, p. 34.

[5] Donna J. Amoroso, “Inheriting the ‘Moro Problem’: Muslim Authority and Colonial Rule in British Malaya and the Philippines” from Julian Go and Anne L. Foster (Editors), The American Colonial State in the Philippines (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003), p. 118-21.

[6] Casino, pg. 10.

[7] Abuza, p. 34; Amoroso, pg. 126; Casino, pg. 1-2.

[8] Abuza, p. 34; Casino, pg. 4; Soliman Santos Jr., The Moro Islamic Challenge (Quezon City, Philippines: University of the Philippines Press, 2001), pg. 185.

[9] Amoroso, pg. 118-19.

[10] Ibid, pg. 135-41.

[11] Ibid, pg. 138; Abuza, pg. 35.

[12] Ibid, pg. 36.

[13] Amoroso, pg. 143.

[14] Ibid, pg. 142.

[15] Examples from other Muslim communities include Robert Hefner, Civil Islam (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000), pg. 41; and Hermawan Sulistiyo, “Greens in the Rainbow” from Robert Hefner (Editor), The Politics of Multiculturalism (Honolulu, HI: University of Hawai’i Press, 2001), pg. 293-4.

[16] Abuza, pg. 36.

[17] Specifically the ‘modernist’ ideas of Jamal al-Din al-Afghani and Muhammad ‘Abduh. See Giora Eliraz, Islam in Indonesia (Portland, OR: Sussex Academic Press, 2004), pg. 1-2.

[18] Bruce Lawrence, Shattering the Myth (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998), pg. xv.

[19] For more on this transference of thought and religious interpretation from the Arab core to the Muslim hinterlands, see Giora, pg. 1-17 and 56-65.

[20] Abuza, pg. 33.

[21] Hefner, pg. 40.

[22] Mehran Kamrava, The New Voices of Islam (Berkley, CA: University of California Press, 2006), pg. 5.

[23] Abuza, pg. 36-7.

[24] Ibid.

[25] Ibid, pg. 37.

[26] Ibid, pg. 36-7.

[27] Ibid, pg. 38; Kristina Gaerlan and Mara Stankovitch (Editors), Rebels, Warloards, and Ulama (Quezon City, Philippines: Institute for Popular Democracy, 2000), pg. xiv.

[28] Gaerlan and Stankovitch, pg. xiv.

[29] Abuza, pg. 38.

[30] For more on this Malaysian Islamist movement see Shamsul A.B., “Identity Construction, Nation Formation, and Islamic Revivalism in Malaysia” from Robert Hefner and Patricia Horvatich (Editors), Islam in an Era of Nation-States (Honolulu, HI: University of Hawai’i Press, 1997), pg. 207-27.

[31] Gaerlan and Stankovitch, pg. xvi-ii.

[32] Abuza, pg. 39.

[33] Gaerlan and Stankovitch, pg. xvii-iii.

[34] Abuza, pg. 39-40; Gaerlan and Stankovitch, pg. xviii.

[35] Lawrence, pg. 51.

[36] Ibid, pg. 67.

[37] Ibid, pg. 104.

[38] Kamrava, pg. 8.

[39] Lawrence, pg. 68.

[40] Gaerlan and Stankovitch, pg. xix.

[41] Abuza, pg. 90-91.

[42] Ibid, pg. 91.

[43] Ibid.

[44] Ibid.

[45] Ibid, pg. 39-40; Gaerlan and Stankovitch, pg. xix-xxi.

[46] Ibid, pg. 40; Gaerlan and Stankovitch, pg. xxi.

[47] Abuza, pg. 40.

[48] Gaerlan and Stankovitch, pg. xx-xxii.

[49] Abuza, pg. 41.

[50] Ibid.

[51] Gaerlan and Stankovitch, pg. xxii-xxiii.

[52] Ibid, pg. xxiii-xxv.

[53] Abuza, pg. 41-3.

[54] Ibid, pg. 90.

[55] Ibid.

[56] For more on this strategy see Abuza, pg. 91-9.

[57] Ibid, pg. 94, 99-100.

[58] Ibid, pg. 100-1.

[59] Ibid, pg. 96.

[60] Ibid, pg. 96-7.

[61] Ibid, pg. 101-8.

[62] Ibid.

[63] Ibid, pg. 111.

[64] Ibid.

[65] Ibid, pg. 90.

[66] Ibid, pg. 95-9 and 136-8.

[67] Ibid, pg. 46.

[68] Ibid, pg. 43.

[69] Ibid, pg. 202-3.

[70] Ibid, pg. 207-10.

[71] Ibid, pg. 47.

[72] From the BBC News Website < http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/7887521.stm >

[73] Ibid.

[74] Abuza, pg. 110-15 and 202-12.

45th Special Forces Anniversary

2011-07-14T09:00:00.002+08:00

Defining greatness, defining Jose W. Diokno

2010-10-04T20:14:00.001+08:00

HINDSIGHT By F Sionil Jose (The Philippine Star) Updated October 03, 2010 12:00 AM
A nationalist like no other: Jose W. Diokno

Jose “ Ka Pepe” W. Diokno: Makatao, Makabayan By Bernardo Noceda Sepeda

Diokno On Trial is a complete guide to the handling of a case in court by Jose Manuel (Chel) Diokno, the lawyer-son of Jose W. Diokno, who is now dean of the La Salle College of Law. It is a slim book that should be in the hands of every Filipino lawyer for it includes not just lawyerly techniques but some of his distinguished father’s speeches. It should be read not just by lawyers but by all Filipinos who want to know more about their unhappy country and how this brilliant lawyer and patriot served his people.

The new Diokno biography is by Professor Sepeda who teaches at La Salle in Dasma-rinas; he has added insightful information about this patriot. His book is in Tagalog so I haven’t thoroughly read it but Professor Sepeda’s credentials are impeccable; I am sure it is a good book because by some arcane osmosis, the subject is also good. It was launched last week at De La Salle on Taft and present were Mrs. Carmen (Nena) Diokno, her daughters Maris and Cookie and her son Chel. All three are chips off the old block I hope that Maris will be president of the University of Philippines and Chel a future Supreme Court justice. He has revived FLAG the pro bono covey of lawyers originally set up by his father during the martial law years; FLAG defended the victims of martial law oppression in the courts.

The truest leaders of a nation are not always anointed by elections or popular acclaim. They do not preen before an adoring populace, or strut in the perfumed corridors of power in fact, they stay away from the sharp focus of media, from the rambunctious pulpits of quasi-religious charlatans. It is in their nature, their sterling character, to work quietly, persistently, often at their own expense and personal sacrifice or discomfort. And some, as a matter of fact, are reduced to penury by their own virtue. What they do is voice the aspirations of the silenced and the silent, and are the pithy conscience of a people often mired in ignorance and apathy. Apolinario Mabini of the Revolution of 1896 was one crippled, poor, but enlightened, he provided the ideological underpinning of that revolution, and though thrust away from the inner councils of the President of the first Republic, Emilio Aguinaldo, he went on to write and speak for the nation that had become an American colony. Jose Wright Diokno is another the truly marmoreal opponent to the Marcos dictatorship, in a sense stronger than Ninoy Aquino because he never aspired to take over from Marcos. And also because he stayed home.

I first knew Pepe Diokno when I was in the old Manila Times in the 1950s; I had gravitated to politicians like him Raul Manglapus, Manny Pelaez, Manny Manahan all of whom championed agrarian reform. I really got to know him best after my return from Sri Lanka in 1964 and I opened Solidaridad Bookshop late that year. I often saw him in Joaquin Po’s Popular Bookstore at Doroteo Jose where, in the ‘50s, Manila’s tiny circle of writers/intellectuals often perused Joaquin’s latest books from the United States and the United Kingdom.

I was fascinated by Pepe primarily because of what he had done in 1962 the year that I left for Sri Lanka for a diplomatic posting. As Secretary of Justice in the Macapagal cabinet, he prosecuted Harry Stonehill and had the American businessman thrown out of the country.

Harry Stonehill came to the Philippines with the US Army of Liberation in 1945 and had stayed on like a few of those GIs who saw opportunities in the erstwhile American colony. He had married into one of the wealthy local families and, with his business savvy, had started a conglomerate of enterprises pioneering and innovative. It included a ramie plantation in Mindanao that would have developed into a major textile industry, glass manufacturing, and whatever else. He had allied himself with Filipino industrialists and was far ahead of so many of them in vision and energy.
Addressing a crowd in Manila: Pepe was a very good writer and a brilliant speaker in English and Tagalog.

But Stonehill was too loudmouthed, even for Filipino politicians who were adept at boasting. He made it known that he could have any politician in his pocket, and to me personally, he said that one reason for his success was that he diligently followed the 11th commandment: Never get caught.

But he did. Jose W. Diokno was his nemesis. Stonehill was banished, the enterprises he started dismantled and taken over by his lackeys.

Was the ousting of Stonehill evidence of Diokno’s anti-Americanism? In those many years that I knew Pepe, we had a continuing argument on two issues: his pronounced opposition to the American presence in the Philippines, and violence as a final option in revolutionary change.

Many in my generation had opposed the Parity Agreement imposed on us by the Americans upon the grant of our independence in 1946 that they have equal rights in the exploitation of our natural resources. And above all, the military bases the huge tracts of land which they controlled in Clark, Subic and elsewhere.

I had argued that his anti-American stance was politically bad for him because he was a politician in a country whose population is so pervasively pro-American.

As for violence as an option in a revolution against a tyrannical regime, I had argued that the state uses “white” violence against its own people when the justice system, which it controls, does not provide even simple justice to the oppressed. The answer to this intransigence is “red” violence which the people must exercise.

Pepe was truly a man of the law, of peace. “When you accept violence,” he said, “there is no way by which you can control it.” While he did not accept violence as such, many of those he defended in the courts subscribed to this belief.

Diokno’s opposition to the American bases was anchored on nationalist principles. I recall a lunch with the New Yorker writer, the late Robert Shaplen an old Asia hand and one of America’s foremost journalists covering the Philippines.

Bob had asked what the root of his opposition to the bases was, why he wanted them out when countries like Japan a very nationalistic country had them and so did Thailand. So many countries had defense treaties with the United States.

Diokno said, “We are a young country. We cannot develop without a strong sense of nation. The very presence of the bases here impedes precisely that feeling. You mention Japan, the other countries these are mature countries, they do not need to emphasize the importance of nationalism.”

I was in complete agreement with him. The American bases, the tremendous American influence in the country inhibited Philippine development because they perpetuated dependency and the teacher/pupil relationship.

Bob Shaplen understood that. Diokno admired America, so many of the egalitarian qualities of American society. He sent his children there to study, and when he was finally stricken with cancer, it was to the United States where he hurried for treatment.
From solitary imprisonment: Jose W. Diokno with wife Carmen, upon release from detention. Diokno was among the first jailed by the Marcos dictatorship, but he was never charged of any crime.

Diokno’s opposition to the American bases was shared by a vociferous minority. I had worried about it for the simple reason that it was not productive for any politician to harbor such sentiments. Even the New People’s Army could have gotten more mass support if it was not anti-American and pro-Chinese.

But later on, I changed my thinking. The Japanese were paying for the American bases in their soil. There were American bases in Korea, in Taiwan, and these countries were forging ahead of us. Verily, the American presence did not obstruct progress. On the contrary, these countries were able to take advantage of the best market in the world the United States.

Pepe was a very good writer and a brilliant speaker in English and Tagalog. Wherever it was, at the halls of Congress, a small caucus or a massive crowd at a political rally, his audience listened raptly, attentively for he was no common rabble rouser, spouting big words and hurling bombas as the rabble would call bombast.

Recounts Chel, his lawyer son, sometime in 1978 or there abouts, Diokno spoke at Liwasang Bonifacio in Manila. His theme: Marcos and his oppressive regime. The crowd was huge; it hung on to every word that he uttered, and at the end of his speech, as Chel observed, had he urged the crowd to march to Malacañang, he was sure that it would have done so. Was it Lenin who said that “power was in the streets, and all one had to do was pick it up”?

But after that speech, he asked his sons to go with him for a cup of coffee and Diokno told them why he had held back his mesmerized listeners: it was the right thing to do.

He was also a very good photographer; this not many knew. I saw his pictures, I saw him work in the dark room. He had vision, an artist’s clear and observant eye.

I say all these to illustrate the wide arc of his talents. I enjoyed visiting Pepe; for one, his secretary Perla Castillo is a schoolmate at the elementary school in the old hometown. It was also at his office were I often met the late Haydee Yorac, one of the stalwarts of the Free Legal Assistance Group (FLAG) which Pepe set up. And there was Cookie, his ever-helpful daughter.

When Marcos declared martial law in September 1972, Pepe was arrested and confined in solitary in Fort Magsaysay in Laur, Nueva Ecija at the same time that Ninoy Aquino was also jailed there. That month during which he was in solitary, he almost lost his sanity. The imprisonment was psychologically designed to humiliate and demean him. The tiny room was bare except for a cot. The window was barred, the door had no knob, and the fluorescent lamp couldn’t be switched off. He was denied reading and writing materials as well as material possessions.

He said Marcos was deliberate he released him but he continued to imprison Ninoy because Marcos knew Diokno was not a real threat to him. He did not aspire for the presidency, he did not have the political machine that Ninoy had.

He could now oppose Marcos in the open and that is what he did. More than this, he continued to work for the workers and the peasants. There were occasions when I accompanied him to the provinces where he went at his own expense to defend the poor in court trials.

He confided that he intimidated the judges with his presence, a national figure, a political and legal luminary, on the side of the peasantry. Almost always, he won the court battles with his presence alone. The peasants adored him.

As with most of those who opposed Marcos, Diokno suffered financially. He had to let go of his house in Magallanes to transfer to a more modest and accessible house in Quezon City. But even with his diminished income, he continued his free legal service to the poor.

He was already on his deathbed when I last visited Pepe. Nena, his devoted wife, no longer permitted visitors, but because she recognized our long friendship, she allowed me to see him. I almost broke down when I saw him so wan, so emaciated. I did not want to tax his mind any further but I just couldn’t help myself. That Mendiola tragedy had just transpired; President Cory had refused to see the farmers asking for agrarian reform; they had demonstrated and 19 were killed.

“Pepe,” I said, “those who were killed in Mendiola how will they ever get justice? Their fate argues for revolution.”

He smiled. “Frankie, hindi nag-iba ang isip ko. Once you accept violence, there is no way you can control it.”

When he died, his body was brought to that church near his house. I went there one morning and on my way out, I came across them along the sidewalk outside the churchyard, recognized some the farmers whom Pepe had helped.

I asked, “Why aren’t you there inside close to him?”

One of them said, “We are here because Cory’s security people do not want us inside.”

I was so shocked and angry, as I left them tears burned in my eyes.

Achievers become popular, famous, rich even. But greatness? This exalted condition is reserved for those who have transcended themselves and given themselves sincerely to others, helped them in their time of need, comforted them in their grief, and lifted them from the sorry drudgery of this world. Jose W. Diokno was not an ordinary Filipino the way most of us are with our passports. He was a great Filipino, like all those paragons who make us proud.

My generation, which survived the Japanese Occupation, Marcos and the gross incompetence of the Cory and Erap administrations can make infallible judgments on our history and the decrepit quality of our leadership. History has always tested us the Revolution of 1896 and the subsequent coming of the American imperialists tested our grandfathers. The Japanese Occupation did the same to our fathers and my generation was sorely tried by the Marcos dictatorship. We know now why, alas, we failed.

We have honored so many political leaders who never deserved to be even on the shortest of pedestals, men who collaborated with our enemies, men who should be labeled as prostitutes and traitors.

Jose W. Diokno has yet to be fully recognized for what he has done, for what he stood for. At long last, there is a street named after him, a stretch of highway not often used, parallel to Roxas Boulevard; if comparisons are to be made, I would say that Pepe Diokno was greater than President Roxas although Diokno never achieved the eminence, the high office which Roxas reached as President of this Republic.

What is greatness in a man? Not all famous people to my mind are great in spite of their widespread popularity or fame; greatness presumes more than achievement, which makes an individual famous. Greatness is the essence of a person, the compassion that he exudes, the moral influence that he holds over people and events.

The young film director Pepe Diokno, who writes for this paper, has already won several awards for his brilliant work. I would urge him now to do a documentary on his grandfather and in this documentary, juxtapose Apolinario Mabini in it. It is my belief that Pepe Diokno, Sr. belongs to the same breed as the Sublime Paralytic. Like Mabini, Pepe Diokno possessed adamantine integrity; in his fight for the oppressed, he often stood fiercely alone from among his class of politicians. I am sure that among the very young today are many who will inherit not just his vision but the guts to fructify that vision.

65 years ago: World War II ended in Cebu!

2010-08-28T11:02:00.000+08:00

SHOOTING STRAIGHT By Bobit S. Avila (The Philippine Star) Updated August 28, 2010 12:00 AM Comments (0)

Today Cebu celebrates a very little known historical fact that is not marked in the province because it was never written in our history books. So allow me to inform our readers that today is the 65th anniversary of the formal surrender of the Japanese occupation troops in Cebu. Among my books on World War II history that my uncle Dr. Alfredo Segura gave me is a treasure entitled “Orchids in the Mud: A Personal Account by Veterans of the 132nd Infantry Regiment from 1941-1945” edited by Robert C. Muehrcke. The 132nd Infantry Regiment was part of the Americal Division formed in New Caledonia. They fought in Guadalcanal (this is the most known about the historic battles that the Americal Division fought) Bougainville, the Philippines (specifically Samar, Leyte and Cebu) and Japan.

Little do our Filipinos know that while Japan officially surrendered to the United States on Aug. 10 when Foreign Minister Mamoru Shigemitsu and Premier Hideki Tojo accepted the joint declaration of unconditional surrender issued in Potsdam on July 26, 1944, it was only on Aug. 15 that Emperor Hirohito made the historic broadcast of his message to the Japanese people on Japan’s surrender and on this same date, US President Harry Truman made this announcement over the radio. But in Cebu, the Americal Division was still fighting the Japanese 13 days after the official surrender of Japan.

Hence, 65 years ago at 10 a.m. in Barangay Ilihan, Tabogon in northern Cebu, the Japanese Imperial Forces led by Gen. Katoaka, together with Gen. Fukue, Admiral Harada and two other Japanese generals and along with 2,667 Japanese soldiers (including Japanese women nurses from the Japanese field hospitals), stood on a grassy knoll where each Japanese officer surrendered his samurai to the regimental commanders of the Americal Division. Surrender was a humiliating act for Japanese soldiers.

After Gen. Kataoka surrendered his samurai to Gen. William H. Arnold, he barked orders to the Japanese troops in Ilihan who then stacked their weapons, mortars, grenades and ammunition in one big pile. The Japanese troops were immediately boarded on six-by-six trucks for the 50-mile journey from Ilihan to the port of Cebu City.

In the next two days, an additional 7,200 Japanese troops surrendered in Ilihan, bringing the total number of Japanese troops who surrendered to the Americal Division in Cebu to 9,867. They were all transported back to Cebu City and loaded into waiting troopships for the trip back to Japan. American intelligence reports said there were only 12,000 Japanese troops in Cebu. But the Cebuano guerrilla force led by Col. James Cushing reportedly killed some 8,000 Japanese in the entire war.

As the author noted: “The Cebu surrender was humiliating for the Japanese; it was one of the most serious emotional disturbance inflicted on them. During the long drive back to Cebu City, the American soldiers and Filipino men along the highway stared at the passing Japanese soldiers. The Filipino women screamed, threw stones and waved fists at the Japanese.”

Arriving in Cebu City, the Japanese prisoners were loaded into the waiting troopships together with the 132nd Infantry Regiment as they were ordered by Gen. Douglas MacArthur to be among the first US troops to occupy defeated Japan. The Americans never expected so many Japanese soldiers to surrender in Cebu. They did not have the logistics to incarcerate or even feed them in Cebu. Hence, they brought the Japanese soldiers on their way to Tokyo. At least the Japanese soldiers did not have to suffer a death march.

The brigadier who saved Sierra Leone

2010-05-16T10:26:00.000+08:00

In 2002, Sierra Leone emerged from a decade-long civil war and as Allan Little discovers, much of it was thanks to a little-known British brigadier.

Para in Sierra Leone
The Paras had been sent to Freetown to simply evacuate foreigners

It was an astonishing thing to witness: the fortunes of a whole country transformed in the space of a few days by a single, decisive intervention.

Eight hundred British paratroopers landed at Freetown airport just as the city was about to slip into the terrifying chaos of a rebel invasion and suddenly, unexpectedly, the shape of Sierra Leone's decade-long civil war was altered.

Or so it seemed to me at the time.

It was, in fact, a little more haphazard than that. And, I've subsequently learned, the British reporters on the ground in West Africa - myself included - seem, unwittingly, to have played a small part in it all.

Brutal rebels

The British Government sent paratroopers to the capital Freetown as a precautionary measure and to carry out a very limited operation.

Their task was to secure the airport and evacuate a few hundred British and other foreigners who were living in the city. The operation would take seven to 10 days, after which time the British troops would get out and leave Sierra Leone to its fate.

Sierra Leone

Freetown, we reported, was in a state of terror. Its citizens knew what a rebel assault would mean.

The rebel force, the Revolutionary United Front, or RUF, was known for its brutality.

Its soldiers, often children, sometimes fuelled by drugs and drink, were merciless. The hacking off of limbs was their signature atrocity.

When the British arrived, the people saw them as saviours, and in the end that is what they turned out to be.

'Taking sides'

For the force commander, a little-known brigadier called David Richards, had other ideas. He saw a chance, took a risk, and changed the fate of the country.

David Richards is now General Sir David Richards and head of the British Army. I went to see him this week in London and this is his story.

"I could see," he told me, "that with a little robustness, we could make a difference."

General Sir David Richards
If it had gone wrong, they'd have cut me off at the knees
General Sir David Richards

He went to see the president, Ahmed Tejan Kabbah, who was preparing to flee the country.

"There was a helicopter parked beside his house," General Richards told me. "I told him, you won't be needing that I promise you."

At that meeting, held within hours of the British landing in Sierra Leone, Richards promised the president that Britain would supply arms and ammunition to the government forces.

British helicopters would be made available to move men and material around the battlefield.

And he, General Richards, would, with a small team of British staff officers, take personal command of the war and seek to end it by defeating the rebel forces. In other words, Richards was committing Britain to taking sides in Sierra Leone's civil war.

However, there was one important difficulty. The general's political bosses in London had sent him to carry out a quick evacuation and then leave.

"So," I asked him 10 years on, "you were promising the president all this before you had the political authority from London to do so?"

"Er, yes," he said, "I'm afraid I was, yes."

War plans

For several days, the political leaders in London stuck with the evacuation narrative, while their man on the ground got on with fighting a war.

I needed to get a message up beyond the Ministry of Defence
General Sir David Richards

"Fortunately," he told me, "the military activities and equipment we needed for an evacuation were remarkably similar to what I needed to push back the rebel forces. So in terms of constructing a tale for London, that was useful."

"So wait a minute," I said, "London was kitting you up for a quick evacuation operation, and you decided to use that kit to intervene in the war?"

"Yes," he said.

For a few days he came under pressure from the Ministry of Defence to carry out his evacuation and then get out.

The problem was now that the British were there, Freetown felt safe and most foreigners did not want to be evacuated.

Blair's backing

"I needed," he told me, "to get a message up beyond the Ministry of Defence. I needed to get to the next level up. I needed to get to Prime Minister Tony Blair. And I did that through you reporters on the ground, including you."

I look now at some of my reports from the time. "There is no longer any pretence," I say in one, "that this operation is about evacuation. It is about much much more than that."

Very quickly, it became clear that the intervention would be successful. The British government backed the brigadier's bold change of plan.

"If it had gone wrong," he said, "they'd have cut me off at the knees."

It became, after Kosovo, the second of what would come to be known as "Blair's wars", an early example of the kind of liberal interventionism that would later take Britain to war in Iraq and Afghanistan.

"Did it," I ask, "embolden British politicians, and lead them to think of war not as a last resort but as just another policy option?"

"There might," he said, "be something in that."

Winning the Wars We’re In By John A. Nagl November 2009

2009-12-22T12:26:00.000+08:00

Your mission remains fixed, determined, inviolable. It is to win our wars.—General Douglas MacArthur[1]

The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have spurred long-overdue changes in the way the U.S. military prepares for and prioritizes irregular warfare. These changes are hard won: they have been achieved only after years of wartime trials and tribulations that have cost the United States dearly in lives of its courageous service men and women, money and materiel. However, these changes are not universally applauded. Yet I believe they should continue, particularly regarding the ongoing war in Afghanistan.

Today, the United States is not winning a counterinsurgency campaign in Afghanistan. And in Iraq, it just managed to turn around another that was on the verge of catastrophic collapse only two years ago. A continued U.S. commitment to both campaigns is likely necessary for some years to come. America’s enemies in the Long War—the al Qaeda terrorist organization and its associated movements infesting other states around the world—remain determined to strike. A host of trends from globalization, to population growth, to weapons proliferation suggests that the “era of persistent conflict” against lethal nonstate irregular foes will not end any time soon.[2] For these reasons, the security of the United States and its interests demand that the nation continue to learn and adapt to counterinsurgency and irregular warfare and that it institutionalize these adaptations so that they are not forgotten again.
Forgetting Yesterday’s Lessons—On Purpose

Our military capability to succeed in today’s wars can only be explained in light of our experience in Vietnam. In the wake of that war, the Army chose to focus on large-scale conventional combat and “forget” counterinsurgency. Studies criticizing the Army’s approach to the Vietnam War were largely ignored. The solution was to rebuild an Army focused exclusively on achieving decisive operational victories on the battlefield.

The dark side of this rebirth was rejecting irregular warfare as a significant component of future conflict. Rather than rethinking and improving its counterinsurgency doctrine after Vietnam, the Army sought to bury it, largely banishing it from its key field manuals and the curriculum of its schoolhouses. Doctrine for “low-intensity” operations did make a comeback in the 1980s, but the Army regarded such missions as the exclusive province of special operations forces. Worse, these revamped doctrinal publications prescribed the same enemy-centric conventional operations and tactics that had been developed in the early 1960s, again giving short shrift to the importance of securing the population and countering political subversion.[3] It was as if the Vietnam War had never happened.

The military’s superlative performance in Operation Desert Storm in 1991 further entrenched the mindset that conventional state-on-state warfare was the future, while counterinsurgency and irregular warfare were but lesser included contingencies. The United States did not adjust to the fact that its peer competitor had collapsed, spending the decade after the Cold War’s end continuing to prepare for war against a Soviet Union that no longer existed.

Deployments to Somalia, Haiti, and the Balkans in the 1990s brought us face to face with diverse missions that did not adhere to the Desert Storm model. Despite the relatively high demand for its forces in unconventional environments, the U.S. military continued to emphasize “rapid, decisive battlefield operations by large combat forces” in its doctrine and professional education. The overriding emphasis on conventional operations left the military unable to deal effectively with the wars it ultimately had to fight.
A Failure of Adaptation

After the wake-up call of September 11, 2001, our lack of preparedness was exacerbated by our failure to adapt fully and rapidly to the demands of counterinsurgency in Iraq and Afghanistan. By early 2002, the Taliban appeared defeated and Afghanistan firmly under the control of America’s Afghan allies. The fall of Baghdad in April 2003 after a three-week campaign initially appeared as further confirmation of the superiority of U.S. military capabilities. In both instances, the enemy had other plans. Inadequate contingency planning by both civilian leaders and military commanders to secure the peace contributed to the chaotic conditions that enabled insurgent groups to establish themselves. With some notable lower- level exceptions, the military did not adapt to these conditions until it was perilously close to losing these wars. U.S. forces faced with insurgencies had no doctrinal or training background in irregular warfare and reacted in an uncoordinated and often counterproductive fashion to the challenges they faced. Many of these early ad-hoc approaches to counterinsurgency failed to protect the population from insurgent attacks and alienated the people through the excessive use of force.[4] Although some units did develop and employ effective population-centric counterinsurgency techniques independently, such improvements were not emulated in a coordinated fashion throughout the force.[5] It was not until 2007 that we finally adopted a unified approach that effectively secured the population and co-opted reconcilable insurgent fighters in Iraq—and we are currently attempting to make that leap in Afghanistan, a campaign that we neglected to focus on the war in Iraq. The price for those decisions is now coming due.
Toward a “Better War” in Afghanistan

Preventing Afghanistan from again serving as a sanctuary for terrorists with global reach or serving as the catalyst for a broader regional security meltdown are the key objectives of the campaign there. Securing these objectives requires helping the Afghans to build a sustainable system of governance that can adequately ensure security for the Afghan people— the keystone upon which a successful exit strategy depends. We should instead aim for a sustainable system of governance that can effectively combat the insurgency, and in doing so prevent a re-emergence of transnational terrorist safe havens.

Achieving these goals will require more military forces, but also a much greater commitment to good governance and to providing for the needs of the Afghan people where they live. The coalition will need to use its considerable leverage to counter Afghan government corruption at every level.

While an expanded international commitment of security and development forces can assist in achieving these goals in the short term, ultimately Afghans must ensure stability and security in their own country. Building a state that is able to provide a modicum of security and governance to its people is the American exit strategy from Afghanistan. The successful implementation of a better-resourced effort to build Iraqi security forces, after years of floundering, is now enabling the drawdown of U.S. forces from that country as Iraqi forces increasingly take responsibility for their own security; a similar situation will define success in Afghanistan. The classic “clear, hold, and build” counterinsurgency model was relearned over several painful years in Iraq, but at present there are insufficient Afghan soldiers and police to implement that approach by holding areas that have been cleared of insurgents. As a result, U.S. troops have had to clear the same areas repeatedly— paying a price for each operation in both American lives and in Afghan public support, which suffers from Taliban reprisals whenever we “clear and leave.”

U.S. and allied forces must ensure that their uses of force are not counterproductive to the operational necessity of population security and gaining local support against the insurgency. As in the early years of the Iraq war, U.S. troops previously tended toward both heavy-handed tactics and reliance on air strikes that have served to alienate the Afghan population. While the new U.S. command in Afghanistan has taken steps to rein in counterproductive uses of force, these incidents have left a legacy of Afghan mistrust that will be difficult to overcome.

Secondly, while considerable focus is now on the direct counterinsurgency role of U.S. forces, more attention and resources must be devoted to developing Afghan security forces. More U.S. soldiers are required now to implement a “Clear, Hold, and Build” counterinsurgency strategy, but over time responsibility must transition to the Afghans to secure their own country. If the first requirement for success in a counterinsurgency campaign is the ability to secure the population, the counterinsurgent requires boots on the ground and plenty of them. The long-term answer is an expanded Afghan National Army and effective police forces. Currently the Afghan Army, is at 70,000 and projected to grow to 135,000, and is perhaps the most effective institution in the country. It must be substantially expanded, and mirrored by sizable local police forces, to provide the security that will prevent Taliban insurgent infiltration of the population. Building Afghan security forces will be a long-term effort that will require U.S. and international assistance and advisers for many years, but there is no viable alternative. There is also, unfortunately, no viable alternative to the international community underwriting most of the Afghan security forces, although it is worth remembering that more than fifty Afghan soldiers can be fielded for the cost of one deployed American soldier.

The United States and International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) also need to get smarter about the way they engage Afghan communities at the local level. Insurgencies can be won or lost at the local level because securing the support of the population requires understanding the specific issues that cause it to sympathize with one side or another. Insurgencies are rarely monolithic: they comprise numerous local factions and individuals fighting for personal gain, revenge against real or perceived slights, tribal loyalties, or other reasons that may have little to do with the insurgency’s professed cause. The Taliban is an amalgam of local fighters and mercenary and criminal elements around a hard core of committed jihadists. U.S. commanders are interested in trying to “flip” less ideological factions and promoting the development of local self-defense militias to encourage the Afghan tribes to defend against Taliban infiltration.[6] Exploiting divisions within an insurgency paid dividends in Iraq, where the emergence of Anbar Awakening and Sons of Iraq played a major role in crippling al-Qaeda in Iraq (AQI) and dramatically reducing violence.

However, local communities are unlikely to turn in favor of ISAF and the Afghan government until these institutions demonstrate that they are fully willing and able to drive out the Taliban and provide some level of lasting security and competent governance. Local communities won’t resist the Taliban or help the security forces as long as the insurgency appears to hold the upper hand while the government remains weak at best and abusive at worst. Seizing the initiative from the Taliban and reestablishing the political order’s legitimacy requires securing the population and developing a sophisticated, nuanced understanding of local communities, particularly the conflicts within them that insurgents can exploit to their own ends.

Building host nation security forces and “flipping” elements of the Taliban are not sufficient to succeed on their own, but they are important components of a counterinsurgency strategy that can succeed in Afghanistan if properly resourced.
Learning from our Mistakes

Saint Augustine taught that “the purpose of war is to build a better peace,” but we have not built the capacity to create that better peace in the American national security establishment. A close look at the historical record reveals that the United States engages in ambiguous counterinsurgency and nation-building missions far more often than it faces full-scale war. Similar demands will only increase in a globalized world where local problems increasingly do not stay local and where “the most likely catastrophic threats to our homeland—for example, an American city poisoned or reduced to rubble by a terrorist attack—are more likely to emanate from failing states than from aggressor states.”[7]

Trends such as the youth bulge and urbanization in underdeveloped states, as well as the proliferation of more lethal weaponry, point to a future dominated by chaotic local insecurity and conflict rather than confrontations between the armies and navies of nation-states.[8] This future of persistent low-intensity conflict around the globe suggests that American interests are at risk not from rising peer competitors but from what has been called a “global security capacity deficit.”[9] As such, the U.S. military is more likely to be called upon to counter insurgencies, intervene in civil strife and humanitarian crises, rebuild nations, and wage unconventional types of warfare than it is to fight mirror-image armed forces. We will not have the luxury of opting out of these missions because they do not conform to preferred notions of the American way of war.[10]

Both state and nonstate enemies will seek more asymmetric ways to challenge the United States and its allies. America’s conventional military superiority, which remains substantial, will drive many of them to the same conclusion: When they fight America conventionally, they lose decisively in days or weeks. When they fight unconventionally by employing guerrilla tactics, terrorism, and information operations, they have a better chance of success. It is unclear why even a powerful enemy would want to risk a costly head-to-head battlefield decision with the United States. As Secretary of Defense Robert Gates has said, “Put simply, our enemies and potential adversaries—including nation states—have gone to school on us. They saw what America’s technology and firepower did to Saddam’s army in 1991 and again in 2003, and they’ve seen what [improvised explosive devices] are doing to the American military today.”[11]

The developing strategic environment will find state and nonstate adversaries devising innovative strategies to counter U.S. military power by exploiting widely available technology and weapons and integrating tactics from across the spectrum of conflict. The resulting conflicts will be protracted and hinge on the affected populations’ perceptions of truth and legitimacy rather than the outcome of tactical engagements on the battlefield. This is the kind of war we are struggling to understand in Afghanistan; it is the kind of war we are most likely to face in the future.
Notes

* This essay draws upon John A. Nagl, “Let’s Win the Wars We’re In,” Joint Force Quarterly 52 (1st Quarter 2009), available at www.ndu.edu/inss/Press/jfq_pages/editions/i52/7.pdf

1. ^ Douglas A. MacArthur, farewell speech before the West Point Corps of Cadets, West Point, NY, May 12, 1962, available at www.nationalcenter.org/MacArthurFarewell.html.
2. ^ Geren and Casey, “Strategic Context,” available at www.army.mil/aps/08/strategic_context/strategic_context.html.
3. ^ Andrew F. Krepinevich, Jr., The Army and Vietnam (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986), pp. 271–273.
4. ^ See Nigel Alwyn-Foster, “Changing the Army for Counterinsurgency Operations,” Military Review, November/December 2005, pp. 2–15; Daniel Marston, “Lessons in 21st-Century Counterinsurgency: Afghanistan 2001–2007,” in Counterinsurgency in Modern Warfare, ed. Daniel Marston and Carter Malkasian (Oxford, UK: Osprey Publishing, 2008), pp. 226–232; Thomas E. Ricks, Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq (New York: Penguin, 2006), pp. 214–297.
5. ^ George Packer, “The Lesson of Tal Afar,” The New Yorker, April 10, 2006, available at www.newyorker.com/archive/2006/04/10/060410fa_fact2.
6. ^ See Fontini Christia and Michael Semple, “Flipping the Taliban,” Foreign Affairs, July/August 2009.
7. ^ Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, September 29, 2008.
8. ^ For more on this point, see John A. Nagl and Paul L. Yingling, “New Rules for New Enemies,” Armed Forces Journal, October 2006, available at www.armedforcesjournal.com/2006/10/2088425.
9. ^Jim Thomas, Sustainable Security: Developing a Security Strategy for the Long Haul (Washington, DC: Center for a New American Security, April 2008), 9, available at www.cnas.org/attachments/contentmanagers/1924/Thomas_SustainableSecurity_April08.pdf.
10. ^ Gates, September 29, 2008.
11. ^ Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, October 10, 2007.

Ted Kennedy

2009-08-27T11:30:00.002+08:00

Ted Kennedy became the only one of the four brothers (Joseph Jr., John, Robert)to live over 50. He became the person to offer eulogy for his loved ones.

Who can forget the words of Ted Kennedy's eulogy for his brother Robert in 1968? “My brother need not be idealized, or enlarged in death beyond what he was in life; to be remembered simply as a good and decent man, who saw wrong and tried to right it, saw suffering and tried to heal it, saw war and tried to stop it. Those of us who loved him…” and here Ted Kennedy’s voice broke in heartache, and he struggled to go on “… and who take him to his rest today, pray that what he was to us and what he wished for others will some day come to pass for all the world.”

Here is what he said of his sister-in-law, Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, at her funeral in 1994:

“I often think of what she said about Jack in December after he died: ‘They made him a legend, when he would have preferred to be a man.’ Jackie would have preferred to be just herself, but the world insisted that she be a legend too. She never wanted public notice—in part I think, because it brought back painful memories of an unbearable sorrow, endured in the glare of a million lights. In all the years since then, her genuineness and depth of character continued to shine through the privacy, and reach people everywhere. Jackie was too young to be a widow in 1963, and too young to die now.”

Five years later, when his nephew John F. Kennedy Jr. was lost in his plane at sea, Uncle Teddy recalled a poem that the Irish ambassador had recited in his honor shortly after his birth, and invoked its tender imagery to honor a fallen prince:

“We thank the millions who have rained blossoms down on John's memory. He and his bride have gone to be with his mother and father, where there will never be an end to love. He was lost on that troubled night, but we will always wake for him, so that his time, which was not doubled, but cut in half, will live forever in our memory, and in our beguiled and broken hearts. We dared to think, in that other Irish phrase, that this John Kennedy would live to comb gray hair, with his beloved Carolyn by his side. But like his father, he had every gift but length of years. We who have loved him from the day he was born, and watched the remarkable man he became, now bid him farewell.”

Monuments

2009-08-04T21:46:00.002+08:00

By Conrado de Quiros
Philippine Daily Inquirer
First Posted 01:33:00 08/04/2009

“I am announcing today that we will officially observe a 10-day period of national mourning,” said President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo.

Is this a gesture of grace? No, it is a gesture of disgrace.

It is at least a gesture of cheek. It presumes that without her to command it, Filipinos would not be profoundly grief-stricken at the passing of someone they look up to as the Mother of the Nation, without that person ever having claimed it. It presumes that Arroyo may, like King Canute, bid the waves hold still, or cause them to flow. Or, as has this country’s artists in an uproar today, cause Carlo Caparas to be a National Artist by decree.

When in fact she can forbid a period of national mourning for someone she owed everything to, chief of them an increase in political height, but whom she repaid by spitting on her after she called upon her to resign for talking to Garci, and the world would continue to weep and gnash its teeth. Aided now by the reminder she exists, which is cause for national lamentation for a period to last until her countrymen see the last of her. Or she could announce a 10-day period of national rejoicing for all the accomplishments she mentioned in her State of the Nation Address (SONA), and only Mikey Arroyo would be there to enjoy the pleasure of her company. His father would still be elsewhere enjoying the pleasure of other people’s company.

I am glad in this respect that the Aquino family has opted for a private rather than a state funeral. It’s not merely that this prevents Malacañang from taking over the sacred event of the laying to rest, if only physically, of the one person who continues to live among us. Which would truly lay the Cory legacy to rest, or bury it in a shallow grave along with the “salvaged” activists, an obscenity beyond contemplation.

It’s also that it sets things aright, or stands an upside-down world on its feet. That is by showing that the State that we have now has absolutely nothing to do with the People. That State, as in Marcos’ time, is a state of mind only of the people who lie in State.

A state funeral has no meaning today. It can only be carried out by a government that has no right to exist to escort true heroes to the Libingan ng mga Bayani, or the Tomb of the Heroes, half of whose occupants are scoundrels, decreed to lie in state there by the people who lie in State.

A state funeral today is the most private of funerals, a gathering of a small circle to lament in a small way the expunging of small lives. Or epically vicious ones. A private funeral today is the most public of funerals, a gathering of the world to extol the virtues of those who touched its life. And did so grandly, like Cory, whose passing has caused an outpouring of grief on a national scale, on a worldwide scale. Cory’s funeral will be a private funeral, but by that token today, it will be a truly public funeral. Cory’s funeral will be a private funeral, but by that token today, it will be a truly national funeral. Cory’s funeral will be a private funeral, but by that token today, it will truly be a funeral of the people, by the people, and for the people.

More than cheeky, Arroyo’s gesture is empty. If it does anything, it is only to limit the period of mourning of Filipinos for the passing of a deeply loved one to 10 days. It will last considerably longer than that, aided by the persistence of a deeply loathed one in addition to the loss of a deeply loved one.

Do you really need anybody, however less galling, to tell you to grieve Cory’s passing? No one formally announced it when it happened. Noynoy merely confirmed it to dispel doubts it was a repeat of the other Friday’s fiasco. Yet Cory’s death took a life of its own, news of it spreading across the country faster than the cells that ravaged her body, bringing everyone to feel the lash of loss upon hearing it though they knew it was inevitable, though they knew it was near. It was spontaneous. It was unbidden. Those things cannot be decreed. I do know that when some people die, they will spark only dancing in the streets, completely spontaneously, completely unbidden.

The sensation you got last Saturday, paradoxical as it may seem since even the heavens wept that day, was that the sun had just broken through the clouds and shone radiantly upon the earth. The sensation was of truth breaking through a skein of lies. This was a leader the people loved. This was a leader the people wanted to speak for them—in death as in life. This was what a leader meant, not one who has the lie of her deeds greeted with canned applause or, what is but the same thing, the applause of congressmen. This was what a true leader meant, one who had the truth of her life greeted with the embrace of heaven or, what is but the same thing, the gratefulness of a nation.

The sensation you got last Saturday was of decency routing madness, reality dispelling illusion, good sweeping away evil in a flood of rain and tears. This is a country that loves to build monuments, above all the people who have done so little, or have done so much only to make the world darker than when they found it. Marcos did so with his bust at Agoo, and Gloria does so with her paeans to herself with each SONA. Both saw, or see, themselves as larger than life, as colossuses that straddled the world. Both in fact were, or are, just smaller than life, dwarves that irritated the world and were soon forgotten. Marcos’ bust in Agoo now peels away, its stony eyes pecked by crows and pounded by rain till it has bled rivulets of tears. And Gloria’s Sonas will soon be drowned by the howling of the winds.

Last Saturday, Cory proved again something all the saints and sages of this world have always known. The only monuments that last forever are those you build in the heart.

Will history repeat itself in Afghanistan?

2009-07-18T11:58:00.003+08:00

British military intervention in Afghanistan has a chequered history, making it easy to conclude that British forces will fail again. But such a conclusion is a mistake and does a disservice both to troops fighting there and to history itself, writes military historian Dr Huw Davies.

General comparisons of Britain's first three wars in Afghanistan and the current conflict, are difficult and fraught with pitfalls and traps. However, if one compares the specific experiences of soldiers and officers, there is much to learn from Britain's history in Afghanistan.

Many know that the British tried three times between 1839 and 1919 to subjugate Afghanistan, and each time they failed.

But when dealing with the history of British military involvement in Afghanistan, and in the difficult business of looking for parallels between then and now, it is necessary to separate the general from the specific.

The reasons for the wars in the 19th Century were somewhat different and incomparable with the reasons for the war now. If general comparisons of the conflicts are made, without looking at the specifics, it might be easy to conclude that there is little hope for success in Afghanistan.

The First Anglo-Afghan War broke out when Britain invaded Afghanistan because she feared Russian encroachment into Central Asia. The British were eventually routed and the 16,000 strong army forced to flee Kabul in the winter of 1841. Only one man survived the retreat.

Britain invaded Afghanistan again in 1878 for largely the same reasons. Despite a terrible defeat at Maiwand on 27 July 1880, the British were surprisingly successful elsewhere on the battlefield.

Unlike today, the Afghans showed an inability to adapt their tactics and the British dominated in several battles. Yet the British failed to achieve a political settlement and, as they were unable to occupy the country, chose instead to isolate it, while retaining influence in Afghan foreign affairs.

The third war broke out when Afghanistan declared independence from this quasi-British rule in 1919. However, for Britain, the Bolshevik Revolution had reduced the Russian threat and, with military spending crippled in the wake of the World War I, interest in Afghanistan gradually waned.

General comparisons, then, suggest that Britain has neither the military capability, nor the political will, to complete or attain victory in a conflict in Afghanistan.

Much has changed since 1919, though. The British Army has fought innumerable counter-insurgency campaigns elsewhere, the lessons of which are proving useful now. Technological advancements have also allowed swifter and more reliable analysis of intelligence, a critical aspect of any counter-insurgency campaign.

The Cultural Dimension

It appears that there is also a renewed focus on the importance of understanding the culture, traditions and customs of the Afghan population. It is here that the specific experiences of British officers and soldiers in 19th Century Afghanistan can prove useful.

During the First Anglo-Afghan War, for example, certain British officers spent much of their time learning about the culture of the local populations. In doing so, political, economic and social solutions to violent problems were unearthed.

In 1839, the British military had the difficult task of convincing the Afghan population to accept the new ruler, Shah Shuja, as he was from a different tribe to that of the deposed ruler, Dost Mohammed.

Shah Shuja's ascension to the throne in Kabul inevitably caused a shift in the balance of power, and those who had enjoyed political power under Dost Mohammed were cast aside and replaced with their rivals. This in turn caused widespread political disenfranchisement that manifested itself in violent rebellion.

Why, then, did the British fail in Afghanistan in 1841, and will the same thing happen today?

The instinctive reaction of the British then, as now, was to meet violence with violence. But then, as now, commanders quickly recognised that violence was not necessarily the solution.

Instead, the granting of some reasonable demands might buy off the support of those that were politically disenfranchised. Then, as now, the difficulty for the British lay in identifying and separating those who were die-hard supporters of the rebellion against British authority, from those who simply felt oppressed and whose loyalty could be bought.

Cultural understanding proved critical for the British in reaching these conclusions.

Inevitably, then, as now, there were those whose resistance to and hatred of the West could never be defeated without recourse to violence.

Why, then, did the British fail in Afghanistan in 1841, and will the same thing happen today? In 1841, those in political charge in Afghanistan and British India did not perceive this "cultural solution" as being worthy of any merit. Despite the efforts of a minority of officers and soldiers, the preferred British method was retaliatory violence.

For most, the "cold, hard steel of the bayonet" enforced the authority of the British Empire. Ultimately, this almost indiscriminate use of violence alienated that segment of the population that might otherwise have supported Britain and Shah Shuja.

The difference now is that much more attention is being devoted to understanding the culture of Afghanistan and to finding solutions that do not necessarily involve military action. Efforts are being made, with some success, to incorporate cultural understanding in all military activities, from fighting to reconstruction.

But with a resurgent Taliban, apparently committed to an extremist vision of Islam and harbouring terrorists, it will also be necessary and unavoidable to use military force. Awareness of the cultural dimension will not necessarily guarantee victory, but ignorance of it, history shows us, will guarantee defeat.

Dr Huw Davies is a lecturer in Defence Studies, King's College, London based at the UK Defence Academy.

The Gathering Storm: From World War I to World War II

2009-06-29T17:43:00.000+08:00

by Williamson Murray

May 2009
Vol 14, No 19

Williamson Murray is a senior fellow at the Institute for Defense Analyses. This essay is based on his talk at the FPRI Wachman Center’s History Institute for Teachers on What Students Need to Know About America’s Wars, Part 2: 1920 - Present, held May 2-3, 2009. The Institute was cosponsored and hosted by the Cantigny First Division Foundation at its First Division Museum in Wheaton, IL. See www.fpri.org/education/americaswars2 for videofiles, texts of lectures, and classroom lessons. The History Institute for Teachers is co-chaired by David Eisenhower and Walter A. McDougall. Core support is provided by the Annenberg Foundation and Mr. H.F. Lenfest. Additional support for the military history program is provided by the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, the Stuart Family Foundation, and the Cantigny First Division Foundation.

On September 1, 1939, twenty years and three months after the signing of the Treaty of Versailles, war broke out again in Europe. It is one of the great conundrums of history that after the catastrophe of World War I, another massive catastrophic war could have happened, one that brought even more destruction to Europe and world civilization than World War I.

One of the many explanations historians have given is that the origins of World War II are directly attributable to the Treaty of Versailles—that Versailles was much too harsh a peace, and that the Germans should have been given an easy peace that brought them into the European community. From my perspective, this is simply wrong.1 Too often historians fail to take into account the context within which events happen. Certainly from our perspective today, a wonderful, easy peace on Germany might have made some difference in preventing World War II. But that misses the context of 1919 and how World War I had broken out. It had been deliberately instigated and caused by the German Reich—perhaps not quite to the extent that World War II (at least in terms of Europe) was caused by Nazi Germany, but German behavior in the first months of the war was extraordinary by any account. This is something historians have begun to notice as we come to understand the profound impact World War I had on world history.

Six thousand civilians—men, women and children—were executed in Belgium and northern France by German troops in August-September 1914. The Germans claimed the civilians were engaged in guerrilla warfare; in fact, historians’ reconstruction of these events indicates that these were friendly-fire incidents or simply retreating troops. It was an extraordinary atrocity, notwithstanding that it has been overwhelmed by later crimes in places like Auschwitz, where the Germans moved from killing thousands to millions. In 1914, the excuse was military necessity as Germany invaded Belgium and Luxembourg, countries with which Germany had signed treaties promising to respect their neutrality. (The German chancellor told the British ambassador in July 1914 that these treaties were just “scraps of paper.”)

In addition to the Germans’ criminal treatment of Belgian and French civilians in German-occupied areas, Operation Albrecht in winter 1916-17, as the Germans retreated, devastated approximately 10,000 square miles of French territory. Every single tree was cut down, every well was poisoned, the entire population was removed, and all the bridges and infrastructure were ruined. As late as October-November 1918, German troops retreating from the French territories were poisoning the landscape, flooding coalmines, and destroying factories.

The way World War I ended gave the peacemakers at Versailles an impossible problem. First, no Allied troops were on German territory when the war ended. Consequently, Germans across the political spectrum almost immediately claimed that their army had stood unbroken and unbeaten in the field. But German records and the testimony of German officers before the Reichstag in 1924 prove that this is false. Some German divisions were down to 200 men, companies were down to as few as 10-20 men, and platoons no longer existed. There were 700,000 deserters by fall 1918. The German Army had been defeated and crushed, but the Germans simply hid that reality. They pretended that they had accepted the armistice because they believed doing so would aid Woodrow Wilson’s 14 points campaign. The result, within a year or two of the armistice, was a sense of deep wrong on the part of the German people that had virtually no justification.

Of course, there was no possibility of an easy peace, nor indeed of a harsh peace as in 1945. Versailles fell between two stools. It did not address the fact that Germany was the most powerful country in Europe and (had it not waged World War II) over the next 20-40 years was clearly going to resume its pre-1914 position as a semi-hegemonic power in Europe.

British and French politicians would have been lynched by their populations had they proposed an easy peace. The sacrifices of the French and English people were such that there was no way they were going to allow such an outcome, nor should they have, given German behavior. When General Pershing was told about the armistice in October 1918 and asked what terms the allies should give the Germans, he warned that unless the peace was dictated in Berlin, we risked repeating such a war. He was right.

World War I had a huge, baleful influence on Europe’s entire political spectrum in the 1920s and 1930s. Those years saw the emergence of the Soviet Union, a state that rejected the entire European past—both economic and political and the state system—and believed in world revolution. The second great strategic result of World War I was the appearance of what the Germans called the saison states in Eastern Europe (Poland, Hungary, Yugoslavia, the Baltic States, Finland) that had been part of the great empires of 1914 (Austria-Hungary, Russia, and Germany). These new states were incapable of cooperating with each other politically, militarily, or economically. So while Germany had suffered military defeat, its economic and political potential remained and gave it an easy road to dominating Eastern Europe. In 1914 Germany had three great powers on its frontier, which had given it great strategic and military angst. In 1919, it had only one—France, which had been severely damaged psychologically and economically by the results of World War I.

The European powers’ reaction to World War I in the 1920s is extremely important for understanding the context of how Nazi Germany and fascist Italy arose and the events of the late 1930s. There was a sense in Britain when the war was over and the German fleet had been surrendered that Germany was no longer a strategic threat. The conundrum was that economically, prewar Germany had been Britain’s most important trading power. For Britain to regain its economic position in the world, it needed a strong trading partner in Germany.

Moreover, by the late 1920s popular thinking about the war was heavily influenced by a number of stunning literary pieces. Unfortunately, some of the greatest literature of the twentieth century is no longer read in literature courses in universities and high schools because it involves war. Robert Graves’ Good-bye to All That (1929), Siegfried Sassoon’s Memoirs of an Infantry Officer (1930), Guy Chapman’s Passionate Prodigality (1933), Frederic Manning’s The Middle Parts of Fortune (1930) were brilliant books, great literary triumphs. There was the poetry of Wilfred Owen among others. All of these were deeply antiwar and understandably so, because all of these men had experienced World War I close up. This literature underlines the crushing impact of battles like the Somme and Passchendaele on the British psyche, which had been completely unprepared for that kind of sacrifice and catastrophe. If you have the chance to travel around northern France and any of the battlefields, it’s well worth seeing the great Thiepval memorial to British soldiers, at which there are inscribed 76,000 names of soldiers whose bodies were never recovered. At the Menin Gate there are another 20,000; the list goes on and on.

The attitude in the British polity from the early-mid 1930s through to spring 1939 was that there was no reason why a country should go to war—there was absolutely nothing worth defending. In a world of reasonable men, war could be avoided. The result was a complete ahistoricism and an incapacity to understand the danger that fascist Italy and Nazi Germany represented. That explains a great deal about the British response—in particular, the response of Neville Chamberlain, the British Prime Minister from March 1937 to May 1940. To Chamberlain, all one needed to do to settle differences between the democratic powers of Europe and the dictators was to sit down with them and list one’s desiderata; all matters could be settled peacefully. No matter how disastrous that looks from our perspective, this was the view of nearly the entire British polity at the time. Winston Churchill held a quite different position as he commented in the Daily Mail in summer 1934, when Europeans were going on vacation and deporting themselves as if there were no troubles at all even as Germany was arming. Right from the beginning, Churchill understood and made it clear in his speeches and writings that Nazi Germany represented not only a terrible moral danger but a terrible strategic danger. We know that Churchill was right, but his warnings went unheeded at the time.

The American response to the end of World War I was “Good, we can go back and stick our heads in the sand; what happens in the rest of the world doesn’t matter.” The war was seen as the fault of the merchants of death and the bankers. Combined with that was the kind of irresponsibility that Congress can show at times. The Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act of 1930 destroyed the world economy. It turned a major recession into a catastrophic world depression, which had a huge impact across the board in Europe and the Pacific, particularly on the political leaderships of Germany and Japan.

The French recognized that the Germans were going to come back. They feared Germany, dreaded the future, and understood that they could not handle the German problem by themselves. France had to depend on the British, Russians, Poles, and anyone else who would sign up to help them. When help was not forthcoming, the French were incapable of acting on their own.

As to the Germans, right from the beginning, from 1919 on, there was a deep bitterness, not at the Treaty of Versailles—that was the excuse—but at the fact that they had lost the war. The sense was that somehow history had been unjust and the world had ganged up on Germany, that Germany had been completely mistreated. Moreover, there was a very different reaction to World War I that is difficult for us to understand unless we’re willing to read some first-class literature. The greatest twentieth-century novelist in Germany was arguably Ernst Juenger, who wrote probably the best book on World War I, Storm of Steel (1920). It’s a very disquieting book. Juenger served as a front-line combat infantry officer on the Western Front. He was wounded 17 times. He was awarded the pour le Mérite, which was given to very few combat veterans. Juenger thought World War I was wonderful, that every generation should have the opportunity to experience it. He wrote many other novels before he died in 1998 at the age of 102, and his collection of books and other writings is extraordinary. But his great book on World War I was Storm of Steel (In Stahlgewittern, retranslated excellently by Michael Hofmann in 2003). This was not Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front (1929), which was as unpopular in Germany as it was popular in Britain, France, and the United States. Storm of Steel represented the German intellectual and literary reaction to World War I. That in itself should tell us a great deal.

There is another important element here having to do with government’s use of history. We now know that beginning in 1919 the German government waged a massive disinformation campaign on the subject of who had caused World War I and how Germany had acted during the course of that war.2 The arguments of the German government persuaded not only the German population but a substantial number of American and British academics in straight-out misuse of the documents and history of the period. The books of historian Sidney Fay, notably The Origins of the World War (1928; rev. 1930) are utter nonsense. The German government got him to write this nonsense by providing him with numerous fellowships to Germany, where they showed him a selected choice of documents which he further distorted.

We also have to understand that while World War I bears a major responsibility for bringing the Nazis to power, the French occupation of the Ruhr in 1923—the one case where the French acted decisively on their own—also played a role, as did the Great Depression. By winter 1932-33 some 40 percent of the German working population was jobless. Adolf Hitler came to power by creating an ideology based on race. The Nazis identified the enemy as racial, where the communists and USSR identified the enemy as class. Both of them threw huge numbers of innocent people into categories that allowed their respective states to follow their murderous paths to the future.

I highly recommend the HBO movie “Conspiracy” (2002, Kenneth Branagh and Stanley Tucci), which I’ve shown to my classes at the Naval Academy. It depicts the January 1942 Wannsee Conference in which the leadership of Nazi Germany decided bureaucratically how they were going to solve the problem of there being 6-7 million Jews on the European continent and how they would get rid of them. It is a chilling, frightening meeting.

In addition to an ideology that defined the Jews as the enemy of world civilization, Hitler argued that the Aryans, exemplified by the Germans, were the center of all advances in world civilization. In order to survive, the Aryans were going to have to expand and enslave the populations of Eastern Europe, which began on September 1, 1939. The German actions in the first six months of the occupation of Poland were not aimed at the Jews, but at the mass extermination of Polish professors, religious leaders, and intellectuals. Jews were crowded into concentration camps. The Nazi aim was to enslave Europe from the Urals to the Bay of Biscay.

After Hitler came to power on January 30, 1933, Nazi Germany undertook a massive rearmament. Four days after he took power, Hitler met with his senior generals and made clear that he was willing to give them a blank check to rebuild Germany’s military into the most powerful instrument in Europe. He also made clear that it was going to be used not to restore Germany to the position that it held in 1914, but to overturn the European state system as it had existed since the seventeenth-century Treaty of Westphalia.

The world now entered into the truly depressing period of the 1930s. In 1933 Hitler withdrew Germany from the League of Nations; in 1935 he began rearmament and conscription and announced the formation of the Luftwaffe. In 1936 the Germans remilitarized the Rhineland, from which the French had withdrawn in 1931, well before the Treaty of Versailles had said they had to. There were of course other signposts along the way to the destabilization of Europe. There’s a tendency to look at this period as if there was a linear set of events. Yes, there was the Japanese occupation of Manchuria in 1931, the Italian invasion of Ethiopia in 1935, in 1936 the Spanish Civil War. But those were peripheral events. In fact, Hitler had a meeting in 1937 where a number of his followers argued for giving additional aid to Franco in order to end the Spanish Civil War. Hitler disagreed, arguing that that war was a wonderful smokescreen as German rearmament proceeded on its course.

In 1938, the chickens came home to roost. Chamberlain’s government made a major effort throughout the year to appease Germany at almost any cost. The result was the occupation of Austria in March 1938, which was greeted by the Austrians with huge enthusiasm, notwithstanding the continuing Austrian claim that they were the first country to be raped by the Nazis. That was followed in summer 1938 by the Czech crisis, in which the Germans demanded that the Sudeten Germans be brought back into Germany, of which they’d never been a part. A crisis was manipulated by Hitler with the aim of causing a European war. Hitler never believed that the British and French were going to enter the conflict. He believed he could get away with an invasion of Czechoslovakia and wanted to try out his new military. In retrospect, it would have been a disaster for the Germans. We’d be talking right now about a small war that had occurred in 1938-40 and Germany’s defeat. But Chamberlain set in motion a set of events that eventually resulted in the Munich agreement of late September 1938 and the destruction of Czechoslovakia.3 Chamberlain believed in sitting down with the dictators and getting them to agree to a reasonable settlement, but of course the settlement was not reasonable. It destroyed Czechoslovakia’s independence and chance to defend itself and turned over to the Germans not only the Sudeten Germans but within six months the rest of Czechoslovakia, which the Germans occupied in March 1939.

The British missed the entire strategic framework within which the crisis was taking place. The Czech divisions were a key component of France’s capacity to defend itself in 1938, and the Czech army would have been in 1939. When it was all over, Chamberlain returned to Great Britain to huge acclamations and popularity. On October 5, Winston Churchill gave what may be the greatest speech of his entire career to a House of Commons that booed him and was outraged by what he said:

“All is over. Silent, mournful, abandoned, broken Czechoslovakia recedes into the darkness. She has suffered in every respect by her association with France, under whose guidance and policy she has been actuated for so long…. Every position has been undermined and abandoned on specious and plausible excuses.

I do not grudge our loyal, brave people, who were ready to do their duty no matter what the cost, who never flinched under the strain of last week, the natural, spontaneous outburst of joy and relief when they learned that the hard ordeal would no longer be required of them at the moment; but they should know the truth…. They should know that we have sustained a defeat without a war, the consequences of which will travel with us along our road; they should know that we have passed an awful milestone in our history, when the whole equilibrium of Europe has been deranged and that the terrible words have for the time been spoken against the Western Democracies: ‘Thou art weighed in the balance and found wanting.’ And do not suppose that this is the end. This is the beginning of the reckoning. This is only the first sip, the first foretaste of a bitter cup.”

How right he was. Occupation of the rest of Czechoslovakia in March 1939 turned around the European situation to the point that the Chamberlain government confronted a storm of outrage in the country. Accordingly, within two weeks of the German occupation of the rest of Czechoslovakia, Britain extended guarantees to Poland and virtually every country in Eastern Europe, none of which it could actually honor militarily, because the Chamberlain government had not rearmed Britain seriously.

Hitler’s response to this probably would have happened anyway. He ordered the German high command to prepare German forces for an invasion of Poland to take place on September 1, 1939. The German forces were ready, and the invasion took place.

Chamberlain was not preparing the allies for war, but attempting diplomatically to deter Germany from going to war. That’s why the guarantees were given, why the support for the French was now forthcoming both militarily and politically, and why the British were so willing and enthusiastic about reestablishing the connections they had had with France in World War I.

The great question mark in summer 1939 was what the Soviet Union would do. Most of the liberals expected that it would sign up for a great antifascist crusade. We now understand that this was not a liberal democratic regime but a regime of enormous evil. What Stalin understood in March 1939 when the guarantees began to occur was that he had two choices: dealing with the Germans or the Western powers. It took the Germans until June 1939 to wake up to the reality that if the Soviet Union struck a deal with Germany, it could avoid a war, sit back and watch the capitalist powers (according to Soviet ideology) destroy themselves and then come in and pick up the pieces when the war had severely damaged both the Germans and the Western powers. Or it could join the Western powers, defend Eastern Europe, the governments it did not like, and confront a war in the immediate future. It’s easy to see what direction Stalin was going to go in. The result was the Nazi-Soviet Nonaggression Pact, or Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, of August 1939. Stalin and his advisors believed this would minimize the German danger. Again, according to the country’s Marxist ideology, Hitler was the puppet of the capitalists. But Germans would follow him much more enthusiastically than the Russian, Ukrainian, and other populations were going to follow Stalin. The Soviet regime had grossly misread the Nazis’ power and intentions.

The signing of the August 1939 pact sealed the fate of Poland, which was now in an impossible situation. Again, one of the great tragedies of World War II is the fate of Poland. Nearly 2 million Polish civilians (non-Jews) died in the war. One of the most moving memorials in Normandy is to the Polish armored division, which fought through to Falaise in August 1944. They knew their country was going to go down the drain, that it would be occupied by the Soviet Union. They had few illusions.

The attitude of the Soviets themselves is best summed up by three remarks. The first is a toast Stalin made at the signing of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. He toasted “Heinrich Himmler, the man who has brought order to Germany.” The second came in June 1940, in which Molotov congratulated the German ambassador on the spectacular and wonderful victory of the German Army over the French and the British. The third remark occurred on June 22, 1941, when Molotov commented to the German ambassador “What have we done to deserve this?” He was right. The one agreement the Soviet Union lived up to faithfully from beginning to end was the Nonaggression Pact, and the results for the Russian and Ukrainian populations would be 27 million dead by the time the war was over.

Our massacred peasants

2009-06-29T13:37:00.001+08:00

HINDSIGHT By F Sionil Jose Updated June 29, 2009 12:00 AM

The murder the other week of Rene Peñas, who led the Sumilao farmers in their march from Bukidnon to Manila, and the violent eviction of the demonstrators from the premises of Congress at about the same time, evoked painful memories of peasant travail in the past. Rene Peñas was certainly not the first farm leader to die at the hands of those who oppose agrarian reform. And those demonstrators in Congress belong to a devoted lineage of farmers who tried — and failed — to redress their sorry lot. Sure, the comprehensive agrarian reform program has been extended but so much has yet to be done, particularly in the coconut and sugar lands.

We are an agricultural country that should be able to produce enough food for ourselves, but this government, dominated as it has always been by landlords, has long ignored the peasantry. In a sense, its hierarchs have never grasped the profound nationalist and religious roots of the aspirations of our very poor as well as their rigid compulsion to revolt.

Let us start with the Colorums of Tayug, Pangasinan in 1931. My first informant on that mini-rebellion was the late Narciso Ramos, father of President Fidel V. Ramos. He was then a journalist in Asingan near Tayug, just like Rosales where I was born. He had written about the uprising, knew its origins in landlord oppression for in Asingan, as in Rosales, were believers of the faith.

Colorum is not the official name of that peasant group. The word is from the Latin mass, and they believed in quasi-religious chants and anting-anting (charms), which supposedly endowed them with superpowers. Soon after the word came to mean illegal objects like colorum jeepneys, colorum firearms and the like. Indeed, peasant organizations here and elsewhere in the developing world derive their triumphalist motive from religion.

I interviewed the Colorum leader Pedro Calosa twice in Tayug in the ‘50s when I was with the old Manila Times. It was the harvest season and I came upon him and his wife at work in the fields just outside the town. He was small and very dark. In his youth he had gone to Hawaii like so many young Ilokanos to work in the sugar and pineapple plantations there. While in Hawaii, he organized the farm workers. Deported home, he worked the land as a tenant farmer and started organizing the barrio folk.

Pedro Calosa claimed that the spirits of Rizal, Bonifacio, Mabini—all these illustrious dead—had entered his body. Why these heroes? Because they sacrificed for this land. We see in this simple explanation then the nationalist cant become flesh.

Calosa also said all the peasants in the country were bonded together by the soil and when the Colorums struck, they expected the entire peasantry would rise with them. It did not happen for though suffering had fired them, the rest who were oppressed had become comfortable with their chains. The Colorums holed up in the Catholic church until the following day when a Constabulary company from Manila arrived and dislodged them.

Like Rene Peñas of Sumilao, Pedro Calosa of Tayug was murdered; his passing evoked no outcry even from the poor he so tenaciously defended.

The Sakdal revolt erupted a scant four years after the failed Colorum uprising. The acknowledged founder of the Sakdal (to defend) movement was Benigno Ramos, a minor government functionary, Tagalog writer and eloquent rabblerouser. He advocated the partitioning of the haciendas and the expulsion of the United States. He was also pro-Japanese as were some politicians at the time who saw in the Japanese experience a possible model for our own modernization, as well as emancipation from Western imperialism. As a political party, the Sakdalistas were well knit, welded together by class feelings. On May 2, 1935, they seized municipal buildings in Laguna and Bulacan. The revolt was immediately crushed but not after many were killed. Benigno Ramos fled to Japan and returned during the Japanese Occupation. The Sakdals then morphed into the Ganap Party and formed the dreaded Makapili which brought death to many Filipinos. We see in the Sakdals, a nationalist peasant-based movement, corrupted into a tool of Japanese conquest.

In spite of its ignoble deterioration, like the Colorums, the Sakdals signify peasant support for revolution.

In the mid ‘50s in Laguna, in the shadow of Mt. Makiling, which is deified by many of the people in its environs. I met Valentin de los Santos, the leader of the Watawat ng Lahi — the Rizalista faction, later known as the Lapiang Malaya. He figured in the front pages of the newspapers in May 1967 when he led a motley band in a planned Malacañang demonstration. They paused in Taft Avenue in Pasay.

They were in gaudy red and white uniform with yellow capes, and were armed with long bolos. Like the Colorums, they believed that their pig-Latin chants and amulets made them invincible. The Constabulary challenged them and when the smoke of battle cleared, more than 30 of De Los Santos’ ignorant followers lay dead on the pavement. What a waste of human life! Had the military any sense of the past and learned from the Colorums and other nativistic peasant movements, they would have simply sent a sergeant in the resplendent regalia of a high-ranking officer, with golden epaulets and all that gleaming braid to mollify the farmers. Valentin de los Santos was arrested and confined to the Mandaluyong Psychopathic Hospital where he was murdered like Pedro Calosa,

The Hukbalahap (short for Hukbo ng Bayan Laban sa Hapon or the People’s Army Against the Japanese) started as guerrillas during the Japanese Occupation and became the best organized guerrilla force; later demonized by the United States at the start of the Cold War in 1946. It became HMB (Hukbo Magpalaya ng Bayan) (Army to Liberate the People). I followed closely its genesis and eventual decay. I knew some of its leaders, Fred Saulo, Casto Alejandrino, the Lava brothers and Luis Taruc who became my compadre. Their iron commitment, their tremendous capacity for sacrifice were truly admirable.

Only the other day, Francisco Lava of the succeeding Lava generation and I were reminiscing about his forebears who certainly were not dirt poor tenant farmers. The Lavas, Casto Alejandrino belonged to the wealthy principalia as did Pedro Abad Santos whom Luis Taruc idolized. Juan Feleo of Nueva Ecija who was elected member of Congress in the early Forties was also one such paragon — rich, urbane, he gave up everything, his lands, his family, his life for the peasantry. I recreated Luis Taruc whom I knew best as Ka Lucio, the faded revolutionary in my novel Mass.

The Huks were eventually fractured not really by ideological disagreements or ethnic loyalties but by the unsinkable egoism of its leaders — the very same tragic flaw which sundered the New People’s Army and almost all of our fledgling political institutions.

An element of religiosity also suffused the Huks, not so much in their allegiance to the communist creed. Among the lower echelons was the same religiosity that infused the Colorums and the Sakdals. As Luis Taruc himself had confided — if he was a bit more opportunistic, he would have exploited that religiosity of his followers, some of whom had regarded him as possessed with unearthly powers, which explained his miraculous escapes.

The greatest tragedy during the administration of President Cory Aquino happened in the late afternoon of January 22, 1986 when some 20 farmer demonstrators were killed in Mendiola street by the military. How could such a tragedy occur? Whose fault was it? The farmers under Jaime Tadeo had wanted to see the President to press their claims for agrarian reform which Cory, in the previous election campaign, had promised. She was not ignorant of the agrarian unrest that cankered Central Luzon where her vast 6,000 hectare-hacienda is located — the sanctuary no less of the New People’s Army Commander, Dante Buscayno. She refused to see the farmers because, as she explained, “they had no appointment.”

It was all there on television for us to see — the volleys of gunfire, the frenzied dash for cover of the demonstrators, the dead and wounded sprawled on the pavement.

Prof. Toru Yano of the Kyoto Center of Southeast Asian Studies told me later that Cory was elected to get the Nobel Peace Prize that year after the triumph of EDSA I. Professor Yano who was the Asian member of that Nobel Committee said that senseless massacre aborted it.

In death, that tiller from Sumilao, at the very least, will be remembered for he had a name. But those who fell in Mendiola, and all over the world as well, those selfless men with the plow who feed us, will pass as anonymously as the beasts of burden that help make this sweet earth bear fruit. We who survive, who are sustained by their labor are yoked with them. If we can, nameless though they were, we must always remember what they did, render imperishable the terrible injustice of their dying — an outrage which will never be redressed. This, too, is the indelible shame we must bear for having elected to power the very same tyrants who forged their chains, and worse, became their remorseless executioners.

In the Senate, the most important agenda in Senator Loren Legarda’s 2010 platform is her espousal of agriculture, her hopes that eventually we will be able to feed 90 million Filipinos. In media, I salute the economist Solita Monsod for her dogged support for the peasantry, an advocacy backed by competent scholarship. Cardinal Gaudencio Rosales, the Catcholic Bishops’ Conference, too, and all those religious orders, the Jesuits— demand agrarian reform. We are grateful to the late Fr. Hector Mauri who devoted a lifetime to the welfare of the sacadas of Negros, so, too, to Fr. Arsenio C. Jesena, Archbishop Antonio Ledesma, and to so many young priests and nuns.

The revolutionary tradition fortified by the peasantry is the dimly remembered continuum in our history. Even the New People’s Army — in spite of its wretched failure after 40 years — is agrarian in its inspiration. I had asked Luis Taruc if any of the NPA cadres ever visited him to learn from him or, at the very least, establish that connection — and he said, no.

There, of course, lies what ails so many of the attempts to reform this country. The methods are not indigenized, the young revolutionists think they are reinventing the wheel.

For those of us who have plowed a fallow field and planted rice, who have watched the greening of the land, the transformation of emerald expanses into vistas of shimmering gold as the grain ripens — we know there is no sight more evocative than this, or a scent as fragrant as that of the newly harvested field. Verily, it is the peasants who understand the vibrant meaning of all these, of mother earth as the nation we must love and worship, our most precious gift from God. Such devotion is enshrined in our national anthem, sang by every schoolchild. To sing the anthem in its prescribed form, to honor our flag — these are much too little a price for us Filipinos to pay.

So then, if the peasant is the true nationalist — he could also be the sterling revolutionary who subscribes implicitly to what that Sakdal general, Salud Algabre said in 1935. “No rebellion ever fails — each one is a step in the right direction.”

Remembering the decisive Battle of Ising

2009-06-28T17:28:00.000+08:00

By Germelina Lacorte
Inquirer Mindanao
First Posted 20:27:00 06/27/2009

Filed Under: Culture (general), Veterans Affairs, People
DAVAO CITY—“It was a foggy morning when I received a special order to proceed to Ising.”

Former Lt. Silverstre Gavina, a World War II veteran from Davao City, was referring to the river in Carmen town in Davao del Norte, where one of the most decisive battles against the Japanese forces in the country took place 64 years ago.

“We left Maco (now a town of Compostela Valley) at midnight,” he recounts in the book, “Battle of Ising: The Untold Story of the 130th Infantry Regiment in the Liberation of Davao and Mindanao.”

“It was raining hard and we had to penetrate untrodden jungles for a shorter route to Ising,” he said. “Vines were tied to the waistline of a guide, my men following him to prevent being separated and getting lost in the jungles.”

Gavina’s account, which he narrated again to his children, Guia and Remy Gavina, is one of the stories of 22 veterans in the book written by Marie Silva-Vallejo.

Hastening liberation

The writer is a daughter of Lt. Col. Saturnino Silva, the commanding officer of the 130th Infantry Regiment, who led 1,500 of his men in the Battle of Ising. Silva issued the special order that reached Gavina on May 1, 1945.

The 272-page book, released in May, documented the May 3-10, 1945 battle that, according to Vallejo, hastened the liberation of Mindanao from the Japanese.

Gavina, a Davao City police detective before the war, escaped to the hills and joined the resistance after the Japanese overran the city on Dec. 8, 1941. In that decisive battle at the Ising River, he brought in 55 men who joined Silva’s troops. Along with the American forces sweeping Davao, Silva’s unit effectively sandwiched the Japanese garrison in Carmen town.

But Vallejo, who grew up and studied in the United States, did not hear about Ising until a few years ago, when she read a brochure of the battle’s reenactment at a Carmen high school.

The man who led the battle

“What caught my attention was the man who led that battle,” she said in an interview. “He was my father.”

“I wanted to know more about my dad and what he did during the war, because I never knew about it,” she said. “But as I kept searching for him, Ising kept coming up.”

Silva landed in Butuan Bay with four Filipino radio specialists on May 2, 1945, on board the USS Narwhal. The submarine arrived from Australia, the training ground of coast watchers, radio specialists, commando and intelligence agents during the war.

It was also in Brisbane where US Gen. Douglas McArthur based his command in the Pacific.

In the book, Vallejo noted how the headquarters of the US South West Pacific Area (SWPA) regarded the Mindanao guerrilla movement as the best organized among the resistance groups in the Philippines and that radio signals from Darwin, Australia, were heard very clear in Mindanao, allowing McArthur to keep constant communication with the guerrillas.

Professor Ricardo Trota said in the foreword that most of the stories about the war had always been focused in Luzon though there were significant battles in the Visayas and Mindanao.

Ising was one of them, said Vallejo. “It was not the most important battle, nor the biggest and only battle in Mindanao, but it was one of the most decisive ones,” she said in an interview.

The battle practically stopped the Japanese soldiers, then garrisoned in Carmen, from escaping to northern Davao and the jungles of Agusan when the American troops were already approaching from Digos town in Davao del Sur.

North Davao and Agusan were still “unconquered wilderness” at that time and would have given refuge to the Japanese soldiers.

WHAT STUDENTS NEED TO KNOW ABOUT THE VIETNAM WAR

2009-06-28T10:26:00.002+08:00

by Ronald Spector

The Vietnam War--or as the Vietnamese call it, the American
War--is the longest war in American history (so far) and the
first one the U.S. clearly lost. More significant for our
purposes, its history is also the most contested. How
contested it is can be readily illustrated by the titles of
two influential books published during the last three years.
The most recent, by John Prados, is called Vietnam: The
History of an Unwinnable War (University Press of Kansas,
April 2009). The other, by Mark Moyar, is called Triumph
Forsaken: The Vietnam War, 1954-65 (Cambridge University
Press, 2006). Whether the American war in Vietnam was an
intractable mess or a near triumph tragically missed, in
other words whether the war was "winnable" or not, is at the
heart of most historical discussions about the U.S. in
Vietnam. (Both sides in the debate usually cheerfully
disregard the question of how "winning" is to be
understood.)

Of course there is an important subtext to this debate. The
Vietnam War called into question many of the most widespread
assumptions that Americans had held about their country:
that the U.S. was a special nation, that it adhered to a
unique set of values, that its foreign policy was designed
to promote freedom and safeguard democracy, that American
soldiers were always good-hearted and patriotic, that
American leaders could be trusted to carry out the complex
and often secret tasks of national security with competence
and integrity. Some writers and politicians would like to
partially restore some of this faith and confidence by
showing that the U.S. loss in Vietnam could have been
avoided and that it was not, in any case, due to systemic
faults in American government and society. It is therefore
rather difficult to identify with precision what "students
ought to know about the Vietnam War" because much of what
they probably ought to know about is subject to dispute.

As a start we need to remember that, in a sense there were
several separate, though related, Vietnam Wars going on at
the same time between 1965 and 1973. There was the air war
against North Vietnam and against the Ho Chi Minh Trail in
Laos. There was the ground war in South Vietnam waged by the
North Vietnamese Army, the Americans, the South Vietnamese
and the Viet Cong (who called their army the People's
Liberation Armed Forces--PLAF). There was the "Other War" to
establish the South Vietnamese government's control over the
rural areas and destroy the Viet Cong presence there, often
referred to as the pacification campaign. In the U.S. there
was the "war at home"--the growth of both organized and
unorganized opposition to the war, the movement of public
opinion, and the impact of those developments on domestic
politics. And there was what might be called the diplomacy
of the war involving negotiations, at first through
intermediaries, between the United States and North Vietnam
as well as relations with U.S. allies, the Soviet Union, and
eventually China. Of these, the two that have been subject
to most argument are the air war and the Pacification
campaign.

AIR WAR
The sustained bombing of North Vietnam began in the Spring
of 1965. By the end of that year American aircraft had flown
over 55,000 sorties and dropped 33,000 tons of bombs on the
Democratic Republic of Vietnam. By the end of 1967 the U.S.
had dropped 860,000 tons of bombs on North Vietnam. That was
more than the 630,000 tons of bombs dropped during the
Korean War and far more than the 500,000 tons dropped in the
War against Japan. About 35,000 North Vietnamese are
estimated to have died in the bombing, which the communists
reported to have destroyed virtually all industrial and
communications facilities built since 1954.

There was heated disagreement about what all this bombing
had accomplished. When the initial air attacks against North
Vietnam were launched, strategists in the White House had
expected that the pain and shock inflicted by the bombing
would soon compel the North Vietnamese to stop, or at least
slow down, their support of the war in South Vietnam. They
also believed that the bombing would boost the morale of the
Republic of South Vietnam, sorely beset by increasingly
destructive attacks by the Viet Cong.

The bombing did boost the morale of South Vietnamese
leaders--or at least they told the Americans it did.
Unfortunately, this display of will and determination had
little apparent effect on the North Vietnamese, whose
commitment to the war in the south showed no sign of
abating. Washington leaders were acutely aware that
unleashing dozens of aircraft and thousands of pounds of
bombs against a country on the border of the People's
Republic of China and closely allied to the Soviet Union
carried considerable risks. Many of them held vivid memories
of the Chinese intervention in Korea fifteen years before.
For those reasons the bombings were carefully regulated and
modulated from Washington. Each list of targets to be bombed
was submitted one (later two) weeks at a time through a long
chain stretching from the military commands to the
Department of Defense, the State Department, the White
House, and often the President himself. Washington officials
even determined the strength, altitude, and direction of
each strike.

The President and his top civilian advisers also saw the
bombing as a slow and deliberate means of compelling the
North Vietnamese to ease their pressure on the south. The
carrot of stopping the bombing was deemed as important as
the stick of continuing it, and bombing pauses were provided
for. But the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the Army, Navy, and
Air commanders in Vietnam had no use for carrots and sticks.
Their preference was for sledgehammers. They wanted to
attack North Vietnam rapidly, unrelentingly, with
overwhelming force. Instead they had to settle for a finely
adjusted mix of restraints, of fits and starts emanating
from Washington. Aviators saw this approach as absurd and
dangerous, and the generals saw it as militarily unsound and
futile.

With the commitment of American combat troops to Vietnam in
the summer of 1965, Washington's emphasis shifted from
bombing as a way of breaking North Vietnamese will to
bombing as a way of depriving Hanoi of the means to wage war
in the south. The list of targets was steadily increased,
along with the rate and scale of attacks. Yet the increase
was gradual, and entire areas of North Vietnam, including
the cities of Hanoi and Haiphong, which contained important
industrial and port facilities, were spared. Also off limits
were areas within 25 miles of the Chinese border.

As the bombing continued, North Vietnam greatly strengthened
its air defenses. China and Russia supplied it with
sophisticated antiaircraft guns, radars, and missiles, as
well as jet fighter aircraft, until by 1967 it had one of
the most modern air defense systems in the world. The
limited bombing campaign in the north, while increasing
numbers of American troops were being committed to combat in
the south, seemed ineffective and illogical to the Joint
Chiefs and to most military commanders in the field. The
Commander-in-Chief, Pacific, Admiral Ulysses S. Grant Sharp,
expressed a view that would be repeated by military leaders
many times throughout the war when he declared at the end of
1965, "The Armed Forces of the United States should not be
required to fight this war with one arm tied behind their
backs"

On the other hand, the Central Intelligence Agency
emphasized that North Vietnam was an agricultural nation
with a primitive transportation system and few industries.
Almost all of the communists' military equipment came from
China and the Soviet Union.

As for the Viet Cong and North Vietnamese forces in the
South, they were dependent on the North for only a very
small amount of supplies and equipment, estimated at about
100 tons a day. To the intelligence analysts, then, North
Vietnam looked like a very unrewarding object of air attack;
there simply weren't enough high-value targets. Defense
Secretary Robert McNamara's analysts calculated that the
United States was spending almost ten dollars in direct
operational costs for every one dollar of damage inflicted
on North Vietnam. Those operational costs also included
almost five hundred planes lost and hundreds of aviators
killed or captured by the end of 1966.

"To bomb the North sufficiently to make a radical impact
upon Hanoi's political, economic, and social structure,"
McNamara told the President in October 1966, "would require
an effort which we could make but which would not be
stomached either by our own people or by world opinion, and
it would involve a serious risk of drawing us into war with
China."

The debate over the strategy and operational approach to the
air war is far from settled. However, with the availability
of documents from the "other side" due to the end of the
Cold War, it is now possible to evaluate the criticism of
Johnson's direction of the war in a new light. On the one
hand, there were factions in North Vietnam who had doubts
about the policy of waging all-out war in South at any cost.
To these doubters, the bombing provided further evidence
that the attempt to win the south was not worth the costs to
the progress of building socialism in the North. So the
bombing did have an impact on some communist leaders. On the
other hand, the doubtful faction was quite powerless to do
anything against the much stronger "liberate-the-south-now"
faction, headed by Le Duan, that completely dominated
decision making in Hanoi through early 1968.

Similarly, we can now see that Johnson and his advisors were
probably right in being super-cautious about the danger of
intervention by China. Thousands of Chinese military
engineers and antiaircraft units were heavily involved in
the defense of North Vietnam. China had explicitly promised
Hanoi that it would intervene should the U.S. invade North
Vietnam. And, unlike in the case of Korea, the Chinese
government had given the United States clear and firm,
albeit secret, warnings about Beijing's reaction should the
U.S. go too far in Vietnam.

PACIFICATION
Another subject of lively debate is pacification and the
question of whether the U.S. actually won the war in South
Vietnam between 1968 and 1972 by shifting its emphasis to a
greatly enhanced counterinsurgency effort to win the "hearts
and minds" of the rural population. This effort was made
more feasible by the heavy losses that the National
Liberation Front (NLF) had suffered during Tet and follow-up
offensives in 1968. A new intelligence and surveillance
program called "Phoenix" was launched, intended to
specifically identify and neutralize the remaining Viet Cong
cadre.

By early 1969 it was apparent that the security situation in
the countryside was improving. Communist defections reached
an all-time high, and thousands of Viet Cong agents and
functionaries were reported killed or captured. By the end
of 1969 over 70 percent of the population were rated by
American pacification analysts as living in areas under
government control, as opposed to 42 percent at the
beginning of 1968.

Even those who had come to regard all Saigon reports and
statistics with deep skepticism could not deny the physical
evidence of improved security. Roads and rivers that had
been closed for years were reopened to civilian traffic.
Bridges were repaired, and even the railroad began regular
service again. By 1970 the dangerous "Street Without Joy"
area of coastal Quang Tri province had been cleared of major
enemy units for the first time since 1963.

William Colby, the CIA official who headed CORDS, the
American umbrella organization for direction and support of
pacification, not surprisingly sees that effort as a great
success, a "lost victory" as Colby termed it in his memoirs
(Lost Victory, 1989). General Creighton Abrams' biographer,
Lewis Sorley, expressed a similar view in one of the more
memorable passages in Vietnam War literature. "There came a
day," Sorley wrote, "when the war was won. The fighting
wasn't over but the war was won. This achievement can
probably best be dated in late 1970_ By then the South
Vietnamese countryside had been widely pacified_"

Despite the confidence of Colby and Sorley, it remains
impossible to know a lot about the counterinsurgency
situation between 1969 and 1972 without more detailed
studies for many of South Vietnam's widely varying
provinces. None of the few that have been published so far
provided much support for the idea that the pacification
struggle was "won" by 1970.

My own view is that during 1969-71 the South Vietnamese and
Americans came as close as they ever would to winning the
war for the countryside, but not close enough. The Viet
Cong, beset by losses and shortages of supplies, hounded by
South Vietnamese government security forces, still hung on
and did not disintegrate. They retained a number of their
base areas in the more inaccessible parts of the Mekong
Delta, along the Cambodian and Laotian borders, and in
southern I Corps, the military region bordering North
Vietnam. Even in the provinces that appeared to be most
firmly under Saigon's control, communists were far from
extinct. "We rid the country of larger enemy forces and
armed every South Vietnamese who could stand still," Colonel
Jack Weissinger, a senior adviser with extensive experience
in Vietnam, stated. "Yet the government forces were still
fearful. They were more afraid of the dedication,
persistence, and uncompromising attitude of [the Viet Cong]
than they were in their numbers. In some villages we got the
Front cadres down to two or three but that was just enough
to hang in there."

Colby's reports themselves revealed that in 1971 nearly 45
percent of rural villagers in I Corps lived within 1,000
meters of a recent terrorist incident. In Hau Ngia Province
in III Corps near Saigon during the same period, an official
or a Hoi Chanh was killed or wounded every few days
throughout the year. More important, the top leadership of
the Saigon government and army remained as dependent as ever
upon the United States, not only for military support but
for ideas, strategy, doctrine, and tactics. The same
problems of sloth, incompetence, corruption, and nepotism
that had always plagued the military and administrative
organs of the South Vietnamese government remained generally
unchanged. A province or district chief might be removed
here, a more competent and honest commander or administrator
might be promoted there, usually as a result of relentless
prodding, but the general picture remained unchanged.

AMERICAN GI EXPERIENCE
Compelling as the Pacification debate may be to
counterinsurgency experts (who have begun to crawl out of
the woodwork again), they are unlikely to be of great
interest to students. Instead, what most fascinates young
men and women about the war are the individual experiences
of American GIs in Vietnam. Teachers are unlikely ever to
have a class that is not well-supplied with students who
have stories from their parents, uncles, aunts,
grandparents, neighbors, et al. about what it was really
like "in the Nam." Perhaps the best way to regard these
stories is to recall the observation of one of my Quantico
instructors many years ago. "No Vietnam story is ever
completely true or completely false."

It could hardly be otherwise. Well over two million men
served in Vietnam between 1963 and 1974. The great majority
served there only about one year during the eight-year
period the U.S. was directly involved in combat. The
conditions and intensity of operations in Vietnam varied
enormously; from the World War I-style warfare of Khe Sanh
to the "amphibious" riverine warfare of the Mekong Delta,
from fierce clashes in the mountains and jungles to endless
patrols in the agricultural lowlands, where the main menaces
were often mines and booby traps. Even in a single province,
the pattern of battle and death could vary enormously. A
study prepared for the Pentagon of operation by a single
Marine division in one province during 1968 and 1969 showed
wide variations in the tactics employed by the U.S. and
communist forces, the terrain, and the cost in U.S.
casualties. The causes of the casualties also varied. In one
operation, almost 30 percent of the casualties were due to
mines and booby traps. In another, there were virtually no
losses to those devices.

Despite the attention paid in the media to such large
engagements as Khe Sanh, An Loc, and the struggles around
Hue and Saigon during Tet, most of the "battles" of the
Vietnam War were short, sharp clashes between company-,
platoon-, or squad-size units. The majority lasted only a
few hours, often only a few minutes. There were hundreds of
such small engagements during 1968 in Vietnam, and, although
clashes between large units continued to capture the
attention of the Pentagon and the press, these small
engagements remain the characteristic "battle" for most GIs.

Short as they usually were, these small battles could be
costly indeed. Most U.S. casualties occurred during the
first few minutes of a fight, before the U.S. unit could
bring supporting artillery aircraft to bear on the enemy.
The head of the MACV operations center, Brigadier General
J.R. Chaisson, estimated that in engagements in the rugged,
jungle-covered mountains of the central highlands, it was
not unusual for a U.S. company to sustain twenty to fifty
casualties in the first few minutes of contact.

In popular culture the Vietnam veteran is almost always
portrayed as a man (never a woman) who spent most of his
time in the jungle confronting the elusive Viet Cong; a man
who had experienced many terrifying and tragic events in the
course of frequent combat and now suffers from some sort of
post-traumatic stress disorder. Given this widely accepted
image, it may come as a surprise to your students that the
majority of GIs who served in Vietnam were seldom, if ever,
in direct contact with the enemy. What proportion of men
actually experienced combat in the television sense is hard
to measure exactly. One method is to count the percentage
serving in maneuver battalions. A maneuver battalion is a
combat unit of battalion size, usually infantry, armored
cavalry tanks, or mechanized infantry, that is able to move
under its own resources and engage the enemy with its
organic weapons. In 1968, the U.S. had 112 maneuver
battalions, and Department of Defense figures showed 29
percent of total Army personnel in Vietnam and 34 percent of
the Marines as serving in maneuver battalions.

The large majority of GIs who did not operate in the field
served as supply, service, or administrative troops
stationed in or near one of the dozen-odd American base
complexes such as Quang Tri and Dong Ha in the north near
the DMZ, Phu Bai near Hue, Da Nang, Qui Nhon, Nha Trang, and
Cam Ranh Bay along the central coast, and the Saigon-Bien
Hoa complex, the largest of all. All were located near large
airfield or port facilities and housed upwards of 10,000
U.S. troops.

In general, the larger the base or headquarters, the greater
were the amenities. Troops at the major installations often
enjoyed hot food, electricity, hot showers, a club, athletic
facilities, movies, and plenty of beer. Many clubs were air-
conditioned, and the larger ones featured dining rooms where
hamburgers, French fries, fried chicken, or steak were
always available.

This is not to imply that GIs "in the rear" had a wonderful
time--despite the derisive and contemptuous comments to that
effect by troops in the field. Most men in service units
worked hard at mind-numbing jobs 10 to 12 hours a day, seven
days a week. The heat, insects, blowing dust, flooding and
seas of mud during the rainy season were experienced by
soldiers in all types of jobs. There was also the
disquieting understanding that no place and no job was
completely safe.

"You could be in the most protected space in Vietnam and
still know that your safety was provisional; that early
death, blindness, loss of legs, arms, or balls, major and
lasting disfigurement-- the whole rotten deal--could come in
on the freaky fluky as easily in the so-called expected
ways," the reporter Michael Herr wrote, "the roads were
mined, the trails booby-trapped, satchel charges and
grenades blew up jeeps and movie theaters, the VC got work
inside all the camps as shoe-shine boys and laundresses and
honey-dippers; they'd starch your fatigues and burn your s--
- and then go home and mortar your area. Saigon and Cholon
and Da Nang held such hostile vibes that you felt you were
dry-sniped every time someone looked at you."[1]

For the minority of GIs serving in combat units in the
field, life was not safe at all. Although officials in
Washington were fond of pointing out that the casualty rate
of American forces in Vietnam was considerably lower than in
World War II and Korea, this had far more to do with the
larger percentage of personnel in support units and the
availability of improved medical care than with any
differences in the intensity of combat. Men in maneuver
battalions, the units that actually did the fighting,
continued to run about the same chance of death or injury as
their older relatives who had fought in Korea or in the
Pacific. Indeed, during the first half of 1968 the overall
Vietnam casualty rate exceeded the overall rate of all
theaters in World War II, while the casualty rates for Army
and marine maneuver battalions was more than four times as
high.

So if we are going to make any sweeping generalizations
about a war that defies generalization, we might say that
the great majority of Vietnam GIs did not spend their time
patrolling or fighting in the mountains, jungles or rice
paddies, but for those who did, the dangers and the costs
were comparable to other twentieth-century American wars.

Like other disasters in American history--the Civil War, the
Great Depression, Pearl Harbor--the Vietnam War inspires
denial, rationalization, and finger-pointing. Americans
don't like stories without happy endings or problems without
solutions. But so as not to end on a completely negative
note, I would like to read a short portion of one of Jan
Herman's dozens of interviews in his Navy Medicine in
Vietnam (McFarland, Oct. 2008):

"I went back to Vietnam in 1997 with a few of the
Marines I knew from that era_. We remembered a village
called Nhi Ha. If you went to Nhi Ha in 1968 you were
going to die. That was guaranteed. [In 1997] the village
was still small but it had an elementary school. Some
kids came out of the school onto a grassy little slope
where we were eating our box lunches. One of the guys in
our group had a bottle of bubble soap. He stood upwind
from the kids. They stood on the grassy slope while Greg
blew bubbles across their faces. As they reached up and
tried to grab the bubbles they screamed with delight.
Watching this, I realized the war was over."

THE ANATOMY OF THE LONG WAR'S FAILINGS

2009-06-28T10:24:00.000+08:00

by F. G. Hoffman

What we now sometimes refer to as the Long War began much
earlier than the 9/11 attacks on America. But that day was
seared into our collective national consciousness and
animated our collective response. That sunny morning in
Manhattan marked the second most violent day in U.S.
history, exceeding Pearl Harbor and even D-Day in
fatalities. Only Antietam's bloody wheat fields have
witnessed more carnage in a single day. Since then, our
country has mobilized for a global conflict against
extremism with a multidimensional approach that has relied
heavily on our military forces.

Just what have we accomplished to date in the Long War? Any
ledger is going to identify some clear gains. Our campaign
in Afghanistan quickly toppled the Taliban, and as a result
al Qaeda no longer enjoys any sanctuary in Afghanistan. A
major multinational invasion of Iraq led by the United
States sliced though the remnants of the Iraqi Army and
destroyed Saddam Hussein's regime. We have generated and
exploited a degree of international cooperation and
intelligence sharing--much of it very discrete--to foil
several plots against ourselves or our partners. We have
substantially reduced al Qaeda's infrastructure around the
world, including its leadership, training facilities, and
financial networks. And the nation has begun to shore up our
home defenses. Notably, no similar attacks have occurred
here at home.

But the ledger has both black and red ink. Bin Laden is
alive and apparently well, although al Qaeda is a more
diffuse organization. The core leadership of al Qaeda itself
has probably been weakened, but its cause has been amplified
and a generation of Muslims has been mobilized if not
radicalized.

Afghanistan remains a key campaign in this war. Our initial
campaign was brilliantly conceived by the CIA. An American
force of CIA operatives and special forces aided no more
than 15,000 Afghan troops to drive out some 50,000 Taliban
and foreign fighters in late 2001.[1] But six years later,
Afghanistan remains a troubled land. The Taliban, once
vanquished, is resurging.

Like the early phases in Afghanistan, the early military
operations in Iraq were also conducted in accord with the
U.S. military's preferred style and exploited its
overwhelming conventional military superiority. The early
successes were ephemeral and temporary. The early occupation
of Iraq went well for six months, but then turned sour as
political enemies vied for national and local control. What
Tom Ricks has called "perhaps the worst war plan in American
history" failed to secure victory as defined by our
political leaders. The planning shortfalls helped create the
conditions for the difficult occupation that followed.[2]
For two years, American commanders and diplomats looked for
a way out, and tried to nurture along a weak government in
Baghdad and shift the fight to the slowly developing Iraqi
Army.[3]

The cost for what has been accomplished to date is
completely disproportionate to the limited gains. How did we
get to this point?

ASSESSMENT FRAMEWORK
In a highly regarded evaluation of modern military history
entitled Military Misfortunes: The Anatomy of Failure in War
(1990), two noted historians, Eliot Cohen and John Gooch,
defined a useful framework or taxonomy for analyzing
military failures and their institutional origins. This
taxonomy lays out three types or sources of organizational
failure derived from a superb assessment of the
institutional shortcomings that can lead to lost
opportunities and operational defeat.

The first type of failure is the ability to properly
anticipate. Anticipation is a crucial function of military
services during peacetime as they attempt to discern key
trends and the impact of new technologies on the conduct of
war. It requires the ability to look past the last war, and
anticipate where future threats could arise, and what the
ever evolving character of conflict will be in that
scenario. Strategic anticipation is abetted by understanding
the enduring continuities of war, while ruthlessly looking
for potential discontinuities and opportunities.

The second type or source of misfortune is the failure to
learn. The U.S. Navy's failure to learn from Britain's
experiences in World War I or during the Royal Navy's
desperate efforts against the Nazi U-boats in 1940-41 is a
notable example. The Navy was slow to implement convoys
needed to conduct successful antisubmarine warfare. This
resulted in relearning the hard way--in combat--a rather
bloody education.

The final and perhaps most puzzling failure is the inability
to adapt. "Where learning failures have their roots in the
past," Cohen and Gooch stress, "adaptive failures suggest an
inability to handle the changing present."[4] The U.S. Army
Air Corps' insistence that daylight strategic bombing
without fighter cover over Europe during World War II would
materially contribute to the war effort, and its deadly
persistence despite evidence to the contrary over Germany
represents one notable example.[5]

The remainder of this paper will break down these three
sources of misfortune and their relevance to the Long War in
greater detail.

Failure to Anticipate

The failure to anticipate is perhaps the easiest to
understand, as it usually relates to a failure in
intelligence or some sort of strategic surprise. The failure
to anticipate is often abetted by the use or imposition of
false assumptions. These too can be explicit or implied. As
one strategic analyst has noted, "Making assumptions can be
a double edged sword, correct assumptions can minimize
surprise and aid a desired outcome; errant assumptions can
ensnare a nation and its armed forces in the unexpected.
Sometimes assumptions, rather than physical inferiority,
result in fiasco or defeat. The corridors of power are
filled with consequential officials boasting of "slam dunk"
certitude."[6]

The American failures in Iraq and the Long War come from
such assumptions. They also come from a fundamental
misreading in the evolving character of conflict, and an
implicit net assessment that did not consider irregular
adversaries worthy of study. In fact, rather than conduct
serious net assessments, American planners generally
worshipped at the altar of technology and imagined future
conflicts as a mechanistic engineering exercise rather than
a contest of wills with a determined adversary with a
different culture and his own rule book.

For far too long American military planners and civilian
policymakers have imagined future military capabilities
through rose-colored glasses. The Bush administration
embraced the Revolution in Military Affairs argument and
promised to "skip a generation" in military modernization to
exploit precision technology and information systems.[7]

Many if not most of these visions and concepts were not
solving existing and evident military or security problems,
but were simply advancing military revolutions devoid of
political context or historical understanding. They were
also often devoid of any opponent, reflecting a rather one-
sided misconception about warfare.[8]

The technophiliacs in the Pentagon were abetted by a
military culture that since Vietnam had retreated to a
narrow view of its professional domain. Military culture is
a prime factor in military effectiveness, adaptation, and
innovation.[9] The Army didn't just ignore its Vietnam
experience; it deliberately jettisoned the lessons learned
and chose not to study it, or to determine what actually
worked. Moreover, "it deliberately reconfigured itself
physically as well as intellectually only to fight major
war."[10]

The combination of civilian policymakers and a narrow
military conception of its professional jurisdiction set the
stage for serial failures in anticipation in the run-ups to
both Operation Enduring Freedom in Afghanistan in the fall
of 2002 and Operation Iraqi Freedom in March 2003. These
include failures to anticipate al Qaeda's resilience in
battle and its ability to elude capture in Afghanistan; the
extensive timelines and costs of reconstruction in
Afghanistan and Iraq; the long-term implications of its
military/kinetic approach against the broader Muslim
community and well as potential allies; the effect of its
poor strategic communications and public diplomacy
resources; the decrepit nature of Iraq's infrastructure and
its implications for post-conflict stability; the need to
secure Iraq's critical infrastructure from damage or to
secure its vast stocks of conventional military arms and
munitions; the need for comprehensive guidance for the
detention, control, and interrogation of large numbers of
Iraqis; how improper interrogation techniques would
undermine U.S. moral authority and undercut its standing
internationally and its legitimacy in Iraq; and the
implications of a de-Baathification policy or the impact of
the dissolution of the Iraqi army.

Failure to Learn

Each of the above failures of anticipation were ultimately
compounded by failures to learn. Even when one fails to
anticipate problems, it is usually beneficial to recognize a
problem when it arises and immediately seek out historical
precedents to compress the learning curve. It is always
better to use the experience of others, if only to minimize
losses. History is our best source of professional
experience, and as General Mattis of the Marines once noted,
it provides a professional edge to those willing to invest
the time. To simply improvise out of ignorance, "by filling
body bags as we sort out what works" is an act of
incompetence.[11] With thousands of years of historical
knowledge before them, our military has no excuse not to
have made better use of its storehouse of history.

These lessons were quite accessible to American policymakers
and military planners. But the Army and Marines did not make
this portion of the conflict spectrum a focus of effort.
"It's not unfair to say," Dr. John Nagl has observed, "that
in 2003 most Army officers knew more about the U.S. Civil
War then they did about counterinsurgency."[12] Thus, in
Iraq and Afghanistan, our forces relearned irregular war the
hard way--in combat.

The basic tenets of counterinsurgency warfare can be
captured by a set of principles or better yet by a
collection of best practices. A number of Americans have
produced sets based off of historical case studies and
vetted by a variety of counterinsurgency experts.[13] These
best practices include the following:

1. Integrated Civil-Military mechanisms. How all
government agencies were coordinated, either under the
command of a single individual or if "unity of effort"
was gained by overall campaign plans and coordination
committees.

2. Governance/Political Reforms. The degree to which
government or political reforms were instituted to
counter weaknesses or enhance credibility of the state.

3. Socio-Economic Services. The degree to which social
development and economic projects were employed to
better support the local civilian population.

4. Integrated Intelligence. The degree to which special
intelligence organs were constructed or existing
agencies integrated to deal with the insurgency.

5. Special Units for Foreign Internal Defense. The
degree to which special units or local indigenous units
were created as counters to the insurgents.

6. Unique Military Training. The degree to which the
counterinsurgent forces are uniquely trained to deal
with an incipient or full-blown insurgency.

7. Information Operations. How the counterinsurgency
employed psychological operations to isolate the
insurgents, to degrade their morale, to minimize their
accomplishments or promote the government's themes.

8. Population Control. How the civilian population was
isolated from the insurgents through security,
identification cards, barriers or forced relocation and
reestablishment into safer and cordoned centers.

9. Resource Control. This factor accounts for efforts to
limit or isolate the insurgents from food, weapons or
other forms of support.

10. Discriminate Force. The degree to which
counterinsurgent forces limit the use of military power
to the minimal degree necessary to avoid antagonizing
the local population and to preclude collateral damage
being exploited as propaganda.

The literature suggests a high correlation between all the
best practices and operational success. When governments and
their supporting allies and partners used these elements as
key components of their overall campaign, they were
generally successful. The same is true in Iraq. Regrettably,
too many U.S. commanders were not familiar with these
practices. Only a few officers understood this mode of
conflict and this aspect of their profession. Population-
centric and kinetically disciplined operations were
successfully implemented by then Major General David
Petraeus in Mosul in 2003 and in Tal Afar by the 3rd Armored
Combat Regiment later in 2005.[14]

In almost all cases, some sort of learning curve was
evident, and eventually policymakers and military leaders
reassessed themselves and made numerous strategic or
operational changes. Some adapted faster than others. Those
who ignored history, continued to underestimate the
opponent, and failed to learn from the experience of others
fared much worse.

The failure to learn is quite understandable if you think of
the U.S. military culture. For several decades, thanks in
large part to lingering attitudes from the Vietnam War,
irregular warfare has been an intellectual and strategic
orphan in U.S. professional military institutions. The heavy
cost of both wars is the price paid for ignoring known
historical lessons and for a narrow military cultural prism
that constrained U.S. strategic and operational planning and
the intellectual readiness of our Officer Corps.

Failure to Adapt

The final factor in evaluating military failures involves
operational adaptation. Adaptation is the ability "to handle
the changing present" and the interactive nature of war.
Strategic and operational adaptation is a key element in
warfare, one often retarded by ideological policies or by
military cultures that fail to recognize how critical
assumptions in prewar planning have been proven to be false
on the battlefield.
The velocity of organizational learning and adaptation is
important in insurgencies. The U.S. military has made a
number of adaptations in its approach to these conflicts, in
how they prepare for them, and for how they train, education
and organize their forces:

* The military has moved from ad hoc headquarters to
robustly staffed structures to better coordinate the
comprehensive activities they are managing with the Iraqis
and with NATO.

* Military Transition Teams (MTTs) and Provincial
Reconstruction Teams (PRTs) have been formed and employed in
both Iraq and Afghanistan to assist in training indigenous
personnel and to provide development and economic assistance
at lower levels.

* There have been substantial changes to the training and
educational base to better prepare U.S. service members for
irregular warfare.

* The Services have stood up a variety of special
cultural and language programs, and centers of excellence
for the study of culture, for counterinsurgency, and for
stability operations.

* The Army and Marines have adapted their forces to
increase the skills sets that are of greater salience in
these kinds of war (intelligence personnel, translators and
interrogators, explosive ordnance personnel, and military
policemen, civil affairs specialists and information or
psychological operations experts). But both the Army and
Marines have bureaucratically resisted innovative
organizational structures dedicated to preventing or
prevailing in irregular warfare.[15]

* Probably the most significant shift was the
intellectual surge produced by the development and
promulgation of an updated counterinsurgency doctrine.[16]

Adaptation, however, is not yet complete. While the Army and
the Marine Corps have seen changes in their structures, and
more substantively in their training systems, the Air Force
is still mulling over what it should do. We still lack the
non-military personnel and skill sets from the rest of the
U.S. government, although steps are being taken to increase
the size of the Foreign Service and establish a Civilian
Response Force. The State Department has also stood up a
cell to improve cross-agency crisis planning, but the
ability of the National Security Council and the broader
national security community to develop coherent strategic
and operational plans for protracted complex contingencies
remains a subject of numerous studies and
recommendations.[17]

These are merely operational forms of adaptation. Many were
obvious after 2004 but were only eventually implemented
after trial and error. This compounded the failure to
anticipate and learn.

The more substantial adaptation was the shift in strategy
that was approved in late 2006 and executed in 2007 in Iraq.
At some point, members of President Bush's NSC staff,
energized by external criticisms and the media and the worst
public opinion in U.S. presidential history, started looking
for a new strategy. After the better part of a year of
various reviews and external study groups, the
administration finally settled on a shift in leadership in
the Pentagon and in theater. It also crafted a change in
priorities and operational focal points, shifting from
training Iraqi forces to a population-centric approach that
put "boots on the ground" in their neighborhoods.
Ultimately, President Bush elected to endorse the strategy
shift and the manpower resources to support it. This is
often referred to now as the "surge strategy." This approach
is founded on best practices and principles that should have
been employed in 2004.[18] Thanks to the combined leadership
of Generals David Petraeus and Ray Odierno and then
Ambassador Ryan Crocker, the strategy was actually carried
out. They made a critical situation more palatable in Iraq,
and the turnaround they created will be studied for many
decades to come.

CONCLUSION
In their multilevel taxonomy, Cohen and Gooch noted that the
presence of two kinds of misfortune can produce what they
called "aggregate failures." These are usually the result of
anticipatory and learning failures. However, when all three
kinds of failure simultaneously happen, it is usually
catastrophic. Catastrophic failure is most often fatal to
nations. Fortunately, a catastrophic failure in the Long War
has been averted by the painfully slow adaptation of
American strategy and implementing tactics. The sclerotic
American strategy process reacted to several years of
diminishing results and rising criticism. Key individuals
with fortitude, intellectual capacity, and an eye for
opportunity were placed in charge.

Continued adaptation in institutions, processes and human
capital remain critical if the United States and its allies
are to ultimately prevail. Yet, the issue is still in doubt.
Whether adaptation and innovation will be locked in is being
contested in the Pentagon, and only time will tell if
Secretary Gates is successful in adapting long-held mindsets
in the armed forces.[19]

History teaches us that rigorous study of the past,
questioning received wisdom and reconsidering assumptions
are the best security against catastrophic failure.

GULF WAR I

2009-06-28T09:58:00.000+08:00

by LTG (Ret) Bernard Trainor

If you tell your class that "Today, we are going to study
the first Persian Gulf War," you will get an unenthusiastic
response. That war took place almost twenty years ago, in
1991. Today's students weren't born yet. To them, it's
ancient history.

And yet Gulf War I was a watershed in American history,
especially American military history. By the time today's
students graduate, the stream of events that was set in
motion by that War will still be affecting America's youth,
who will still be fighting and dying in the deserts and
mountains of the Middle East.

Youngsters who are learning history, and particularly
military history, in today's academic world see it as a
recitation of events almost like a movie script. It starts,
it goes through, and then it ends. It's devoid of drama or
uncertainty. And yet military history has a human dimension
that surpasses any other subject. Human beings are killing
one another. Teachers should try to imbue these events with
some of their drama.

Gulf War I is a case study of the drama. It was a war of
erroneous assumptions and miscalculations on both sides. The
end was full of surprises and disagreements that have stayed
with us to this very day. This was the first major post-Cold
War U.S. military engagement. From it came a new organizing
principle. The U.S. has always had to have organizing
principles. In the 1930s, it was getting out of the
Depression. Then came WWII, the defeat of fascism and the
Japanese. During the Cold War, the organizing principle was
dealing with the Soviet Union and the possibility of nuclear
war. After the Soviet Union collapsed, there was no
organizing principle. Then events in the Middle East took a
turn. Since that time, the United States' organizing
principle has been dealing with the Middle East, with its
many ramifications--fundamental Islam, terrorism,
insurgencies, failed states, WMD. It all starts with the
Kuwait war. But to understand that, it's well to understand
the context of the times.

Through the 1970s, Arab Iraq and Persian Iran both sought
hegemony in their own right, but each was somewhat of a
satellite of one of the two great powers, with the U.S.
supporting the Shah in Iran and the Soviet Union supporting
Saddam Hussein in Iraq.

Things changed when the Ayatollah Khomeini came on the scene
in 1979 and there was the Islamic revolution in Iran, which
ousted Shah Reza Pahlavi. Iran under Khomeini turned against
the U.S., which they saw as a supporter of the hated Shah.
Meanwhile, the Soviet Union was waning as a threat.

In a reversal, the U.S. began to support the Iraqis against
its former friend Iran. Meanwhile, Saddam decided to take
advantage of the weakness he perceived in Iran as a result
of the fall of the Shah and the dissolution of the Iranian
Army to attack across the Euphrates into Iran. This led to a
long, bitter, and enormously costly war that finally came to
an unsatisfactory conclusion with millions of casualties on
both sides.

The war left Saddam badly in debt. He came to see himself as
Saladin in the Arab world, leading the fight against the
hated Persians, and felt that Iraq had borne the brunt of
the fighting. His campaign had been funded largely by war
loans from Kuwait and Saudi Arabia. Now the bill was coming
due, and the Kuwaitis in particular were anxious to be paid
back. Saddam sought forgiveness of the debt, claiming the
Kuwaitis were ungrateful. Besides, he reasoned, looking for
excuses to get out of paying the debt, Kuwait was not really
a legitimate government, but was carved out of the Iraqi
portion of the Ottoman empire. It was no more than the 14th
of the Iraqi provinces, to Saddam. Moreover, he claimed that
Kuwait was stealing oil from the Iraqi Ramallah oil field by
slant drilling. That may have been true, but it was largely
a pretext.

Saddam was uncertain how the international community would
receive his claim that Iraq was entitled to reclaim Kuwait.
The Arab states interpreted this as mere saber-rattling. As
to the U.S., Saddam called in U.S. Ambassador April Glaspie
for a long conversation about Iraq's complaints against
Kuwait. In the version published by the New York Times,
Glaspie told Saddam the following, which was music to his
ears. "We have no opinion on the Arab-Arab conflicts, like
your border disagreement with Kuwait." Saddam heard that the
U.S. would stand clear, interpreting it almost as a green-
light to go ahead with aggression against Kuwait.

The U.S. government was perfectly aware that Saddam was
starting to mass his armies down along the border with
Kuwait. Discussions were held in the Pentagon and NSC on
whether to send a signal to Saddam to deter him. It was
proposed to send some F-15s over to Saudi Arabia and to move
an amphibious task force into the Gulf waters. But the Arab
leaders told us that sending planes or a fleet might be
provocative, so we didn't do it. This, beside Glaspie's
comments, convinced Saddam that the U.S. was not going to
intervene, because if we were really concerned, we would
have deployed some forces to the region signaling him to
back off.

It came as an enormous surprise to the U.S. when Saddam made
his move in August 1990. The Iraqis took the Kuwaiti capital
and then moved toward the Saudi-Kuwaiti border.

The concern in the U.S. was not so much for Kuwait per se
but oil--if Saddam had been able to surprise us as he had in
Kuwait, he might just surprise us and continue on into Saudi
Arabia for its oilfields. Saddam was aware of this and
afraid of the U.S. reaction, so he pulled back from the
border to a line further back. The area in between became no
man's land, and he started to build two unoccupied lines of
defense, one a couple of miles back from the first. While it
was devoid of troops, it became heavily mined, crisscrossed
with barbed wire entanglements and fire trenches.

President George H.W. Bush sent Secretary of Defense Dick
Cheney and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Colin
Powell to talk to the Saudi king and princes to convince
them to allow American forces on Saudi soil. Saudi Arabia is
a holy land, with Mecca and Medina on its ground. Bringing
foreign, Christian infidel forces into the country was a
very big thing to do. Cheney and Powell had difficulty doing
so, but finally their delegation convinced the king that
Iraq really was a threat to his nation and the king acceded
to our request to land our forces, which we began to do. We
flew in aircraft and units of the 82nd Airborne Division. We
put in a Marine regiment in what was known as Operation
Desert Shield.

These forces dug in as a signal to Saddam that he had best
not move against Saudi Arabia (which he had no intention of
doing, although he did come up with contingency plans). But
he had bitten off more than he could chew. He didn't know
the Americans were going to react this way. How would he get
out of this? In the meantime his soldiers started to steal
anything that was moveable in Kuwait.

The idea of getting involved in Kuwait was not very popular
with the American people. We had had the experience of
Beirut in 1983 where we'd gotten a bloody nose and an
embarrassing retreat. There was no desire to repeat the
experience. The Kuwait-Iraqi dispute was perceived in the
eyes of many Americans to be about the oil companies'
interests. But there were three people in Washington who
were of a different view and they controlled the decision
process: President George H.W. Bush, Secretary James Baker,
and Brent Scowcroft, the national security advisor.
(Officials like Cheney and Powell were on the periphery.)
The troika was determined to force Saddam to back down. But
they could not use force unless a coalition could be built
to support direct action--not only a foreign coalition, but
a bipartisan American coalition. They would first build up
support abroad and then focus on the American people, able
to say to them "See, the international community supports
our efforts, you should, too."

President Bush worked the outside world and succeeded in
gaining support. The UN passed resolutions condemning the
Iraqis and told them to withdraw. Once this international
community had been built, and it was clear that even Arab
states would join a multinational coalition army to face the
Iraqis, President Bush went to the Congress to get American
support for any military action that he might deem
necessary. When it came to giving the President the right to
use military force, it came down to a 52-47 vote in the
Senate on January 12, and 250-183 in the House, which was
pretty close. So the idea that the American people
enthusiastically supported the war was suspect.

Even within the DoD and Pentagon, there was great
disagreement over how to deal with the Iraqi threat. Cheney
was a hawk, and felt we had to do something about the
invasion of Kuwait. Powell disagreed, arguing that Kuwait
wasn't worth the life of one American soldier. He proposed
drawing the "line in the sand" at the border of Saudi
Arabia; if the Iraqis crossed it we'd fight; otherwise we
wouldn't. Cheney told Powell he was not reading the
president very well; Bush had decided that Iraq must be
forced from Kuwait, by force, if needed.

Initially, the American forces rushed to Saudi Arabia in
August under were small. But the build-up had started and
eventually reached half-million troops, backed by an awesome
array of air and sea power with the latest in modern weapons
and technology.

Saddam made the terrible miscalculation in challenging the
U.S., which at that time had a formidable army that was
"unemployed"--i.e. the Cold War was ending, leaving us with
a big army in Europe with no one to fight. We sent our
forces from Germany and from the U.S. to Saudi Arabia not to
only defend that kingdom but to prepare for an assault on
the Iraqi army in Kuwait if it did not withdraw. So it was
not a very smart move on Saddam's part to invade Iraq at
this particular time.

The UN sanctions and resolutions were taken, but nothing was
happening in Kuwait to convince the president and the
coalition that they wouldn't have to resort to force to
expel Saddam. Soviet president Mikhail Gorbachev sent
Yevgeni Primikov, his foreign minister, to Iraq to advise
Saddam to withdraw from Kuwait, but Saddam wasn't convinced
the Americans would do more than drop some bombs, if that.
Knowing that the American public was casualty-averse, he did
not believe the U.S. had the stomach for war. After all, it
had pulled out of Vietnam and Beirut after some blood was
shed. He also believed that in the long run, the Soviet
Union and the international community would deter the U.S.
from attacking. He was adamant about remaining in Kuwait.
Once again, he miscalculated.

There were Cassandras here in the U.S. The Iraqi Army had
fought the Iranians for eight years and was battle-hardened,
they held. We were sending into war a relatively untested,
post-Vietnam all-volunteer force whose quality was unknown.
There were dire predictions of American casualties in the
range of 10,000 during the first 24 hours. Americans were
nervous about liberating Kuwait by force.

In the White House, there was certainty of a swift victory,
but concern about Saddam's chemical, biological, and nuclear
weapons programs. There was abundant evidence of very active
Iraqi programs aimed at developing those weapons. This was
fully acknowledged by the international community. We knew
of two particular sites where the Iraqis had nuclear weapons
development sites: al Qaim and al Tuwaitha.

We wanted to see Saddam withdraw, but didn't believe he
would. Therefore we would invade and drive him out by
defeating his field army in Kuwait. The assumption was that
he would then probably be overthrown by an internal military
coup, The Administration wanted a regime change, but
assuming a coup, there was no need to go to Baghdad to oust
the Iraqi president. Indeed, the UN resolution which finally
authorized force restricted the action to the liberation of
Kuwait. It said nothing about regime change in Baghdad.

How were we going to take on the Iraqi field army? The plan
according to General Colin Powell, Chairman of the Joint
Chiefs of Staff, was to isolate it in Kuwait and destroy it
with superior firepower and deft maneuver. As was mentioned
earlier, the Iraqis had built up the two lines of defenses.
But they left the open desert in the west undefended. They
did not anticipate an attack coming from that direction. The
plan devised by General Norman Schwarzkopf, commander of the
coalition forces, was to conduct a prolonged air campaign
against the Iraqi infrastructure--political, economic, and
military. At the same time a multidivisional armored and
mechanized corps would secretly move to the west, blind to
Iraqi intelligence and surveillance. Two Marine divisions in
the east would directly face the Iraqis. When the order to
attack was given, the Marines directly facing the Iraqis
were to engage the Iraqis and hold them in place while as
planned the western task force cut behind them severing
their line of retreat, leaving them isolated and open to
either surrender or destruction.

When the air campaign started on January 17, 1991, the
Iraqis attempted to draw Israel into the fight by launching
Scud missiles at Tel Aviv. Saddam reckoned that the Israelis
would retaliate. This, he reasoned, would outrage the Arab
members of the coalition and undermine it. Once again he had
miscalculated, although, it took great pressure from the
White House to persuade the Israelis to stay out of the
fight.

As the bombing campaign progressed the Saudi government and
CIA conducted a psychological campaign encouraging the Shia
population in southern Iraq, always suppressed by Saddam, to
"Rise up! Throw off your chains! This is your opportunity to
rid yourself of your tormenter! Be prepared for the
Hallelujah day." The hope was that between the destruction
of Saddam's field forces, an uprising by the Shias, and
possibly an army coup it would be the end of Saddam.

Meanwhile, oblivious to an attack from the west, the Iraqis
planned to fight the Americans the same way they had fought
the Iranians. They established sequential defensive
positions behind the unoccupied barrier zone just above the
border with Saudi Arabia. The positions were occupied by the
regular army, backed up by armored Republican Guards
divisions. The Iraqis planned to turn the barrier zone into
a killing zone in which to entrap and inflict intolerable
casualties on the attacking Americans with their abundance
of artillery. Any Americas that made it through the
firestorm would be met by Iraqi infantry and counter
attacked and destroyed by the Republican Guard. It was
exactly what Schwarzkopf hoped they planned to do. His end
run behind them from the west would come as a complete
surprise.

What the Iraqis also hadn't counted upon was the
effectiveness of the prolonged coalition air attacks. Iraq
was being devastated. Saddam decided to seize the initiative
and start the ground war. He would make Schwarzkopf react to
a provocation and draw the Americans into a premature
counterattack. To do this, at the end of January, he sent a
mechanized task force south across the border into Saudi
Arabia to the seaport town of al Khafji, which had been
evacuated of civilians. The town was defended by a small
Saudi Arabian force backed up by Americans some miles to the
south. Saddam planned to bait the Americans.

The Iraqis succeeded in taking Khafji without difficulty,
but Schwarzkopf reacted, not with ground forces, but with
air power. Saddam had taken the potency of our air power
into account, but had equipped his forces liberally with
air-defense weapons. He was convinced that he could provide
an air defense bubble over his forces that would drive off
the Americans. He was wrong. The mechanized corps that went
into Khafji was devastated by air strikes.

Faced with prima facie evidence that his air defenses were
no match for the Americans he radically changed his
strategy. No longer would he attempt to hold Kuwait and
bleed the Americans in a brutal defensive battle - whose
outcome he assumed would lead to a negotiated settlement.
Now he recognized that he was outmatched. He decided that if
and when the Americans attacked he would abandon Kuwait, but
preserve his army, particularly the loyal Republican Guards.
He would conduct a fighting retreat out of Kuwait back into
Iraq.

Not aware of the radical turn of events, the assumption was
made by Schwarzkopf that the Iraqis would defend in place.
Indeed, as we noted, until Khafji, that's exactly what they
had planned to do. Schwarzkopf never understood the
importance of the Khafji battle and made no analysis on what
impact the Iraqi defeat might have on Saddam. He was totally
unaware of the dramatic change in Iraqi strategy. His
attention was focused on monumental enterprise of
positioning multiple divisions in the western desert. He
remained committed to his basic plan to hold the Iraqis in
place and envelop them from the rear. On February 21 Desert
Shield became Desert Storm. The coalition attack went in
against the Iraqi forces as planned, with the Marines
leading the way to engage their attention and lock them in
battle. A day later the surprise corps-sized attack of three
armored and a mechanized division in the west was launched
against the Iraqi flank and rear.

It turned out that the "battle-hardened" Iraqis weren't
battle-hardened at all. They were tired, undernourished, and
under-equipped army, largely unwilling to fight. So many had
deserted earlier that it was a hollow army. (Managing
surrendering Iraqis posed a greater problem than the
fighting.) Some of them were even surrendering to
helicopters and reconnaissance drones There was very little
fighting. The Iraqis gave up all along the line. Some
Republican Guard units fought, but most of the Guard was
under orders to flee back to Iraq and let the regular army
cover their retreat. The unexpected collapse of the Iraqis
upset Schwarzkopf's careful plan. The Marines advanced so
fast that instead of holding fast to the Iraqis so that the
western attack could trap them, the attack acted like a
piston and rapidly drove them north towards escape over the
Iraqi border before the American armor engaged them.

Schwarzkopf also had trouble with the heavy armored corps'
field commander, Lt. Gen. Frederick Franks, a very cautious
man. He didn't realize that the Iraqis were on the run and
that he had an opportunity to go hell-bent across the desert
and cut the Iraqis off. He was moving very slowly so that
all units would be synchronized into a steel fist when they
met the Iraqi Republican Guard. The result was that while
Franks cautiously advanced, over half the Guard units along
with their equipment, were escaping back into Iraq.

Saddam was quickly defeated at an astonishingly low cost to
the coalition. But the idea of destroying his field forces
was gone; the best and most loyal ones had escaped to pose a
subsequent threat.

That was the first undesirable outcome of the war. And while
there was a clamor by some to continue on to Baghdad and
overthrow Saddam, President George Bush rejected the idea
and stuck with the UN mandate, which limited its warrant to
ousting the Iraqis from Kuwait. Secondly, the President did
not want to get tied down in administering the occupation of
Iraq. This decision was to have unfortunate consequences for
the Iraqi Shias just across the border.

With the Iraqis fleeing and coalition forces pummeling them,
it brings us back to Washington and discussions on ending
the war. Bush and his advisors knew that the Iraqis were
thoroughly beaten in the fast moving war, but they had
little idea of the actual situation on the ground. When
asked about it, Schwarzkopf reported that the weather was
bad, it was raining, there were sandstorms, units were
scattered all over the desert. He confessed that didn't
have a clear idea of where each of his units and those of
Saddam's army were located . But, as he boasted in a
televised news conference, the "gate was closed," meaning
that the Iraqi's escape route into their own country was
blocked and the Iraqi army was trapped. Of course that was
not the case as his field commanders knew. Schwarzkopf had
again based his remark on an assumption that was wrong.

Bush presided over an oval-office meeting of his advisers
and Douglas Hurd, Britain' foreign minister, whose country's
forces were fighting next to the Americans. Although there
was utter confusion on the battlefield, it didn't make any
difference. The decision to stop the war was a political,
not a military one. To continue killing already retreating
soldiers was viewed as impolitic and unethical, particularly
in light of media accounts of what was happening on the
highway from Kuwait City to the Iraqi border. Iraqis in
Kuwait city were headed home on the main highway with
everything they could loot from Kuwait. Theirs was an
endless stream of every conveyance that would move headed
north, bumper to bumper. They became a target-rich
environment for American aircraft, which flew up and down,
blasting away at "fish in a barrel." Scenes of devastation
garnered bad press for the administration. This prompted
Colin Powell to step out of his military role and recommend
a ceasefire on humanitarian grounds because the enemy was
already beaten and he was afraid of sullying the American
escutcheon by continued attacks on what was becoming known
as the "Highway of Death." With imperfect intelligence of
the military situation, the President announced a ceasefire
on February 28.

Schwarzkopf was authorized to enter into ceasefire
arrangements with the commanders of the Iraqi field forces,
not realizing that all decisions would actually be made by
Saddam from his Baghdad sanctuary. The general, still
ignorant of the opposing troop dispositions on the
battlefield, announced Safwan, a small community just inside
of Iraq, as the site for the talks. Much to his chagrin he
was told that Safwan was still in Iraqi hands. Under threat
of annihilation, despite the ceasefire, the Iraqis were
finally persuaded to withdraw. Tents were erected for a
meeting between Schwarzkopf, his Arab forces counterpart,
and three Iraqi generals. Here was an opportunity to use
coalition leverage to make substantial demands upon the
Iraqi military under threat of resumed violence. But
Schwarzkopf received no guidance from Washington. His only
concern was cementing the ceasefire on the ground and of
recovering the few coalition captives who had fallen into
Iraqi hands. Instead of dictating terms as a conqueror, he
treated the Iraqi delegation as equals. There were no
draconian options presented. Moreover, Schwarzkopf
acquiesced to an Iraqi request for freedom to use
helicopters for logistic and administrative purposes as the
bridges in southern Iraq had been destroyed.

You will recall that the CIA had been urging the Shias of
southern Iraq to revolt against the regime. With the defeat
of the Iraqi army, they saw their opportunity to do so and
expected American support. But the White House had no
intention of providing it. As far as the President was
concerned the war was over and it was time to come home.
When the Shias rose up, the coalition forces did nothing to
help them even as refugees fled across the border into
Kuwait with horrifying tales. Saddam brutally suppressed the
uprising, notably using armed helicopters to attack the
insurgents. That use was not what Schwarzkopf had in mind
when he authorized the use of helicopters. The Shias were
left to a dismal fate. It was another unfortunate
consequence and a shameful footnote to a notable American
victory.

And so Gulf War I ended. It was marked throughout by a
series of miscalculations and faulty assumptions on both
sides. It turned out to be a precursor for another war in
2003, the results of which are still with us. In 1991 Saddam
remained in power, his Republican Guard was intact, revolt
had been suppressed and his quest for WMD, particularly
nuclear weapons continued--at least temporarily. As
mentioned earlier, we had identified two WMD sites prior to
the war. At its end when UN and IAEA inspectors had access
to Iraq, under provisions of the ceasefire and UN
authorization they found not two but 19 nuclear sites with
39 separate facilities. So there was no question about
Saddam's intent. This was to have a bearing on the events
over the 12 years of sanctions on Iraq and the events
leading up to Gulf War II.

With the war over, the troops came home, many of them were
embarrassed because they saw very little of any fighting.
For most ground troops it was little more than a motor-march
through the desert. Saddam was discredited in much of the
world, but he was a canny survivor and cast himself at home
as a hero of the war. He told the Iraqi people that under
his leadership the Iraqi army had defeated the Americans and
their puppets in the "Mother of All Battles." As proof he
noted that the Americans were defeated in their attempt to
invade Iraq, something an enemy army would have done if it
was victorious. The sacred soil of Iraq was preserved. He
liberally handed out medals and awards to the warriors of
his victorious army. But beneath the bravado, Saddam was
shaken to the core by the performance of his army, the Shia
uprising, and the fear of a coup. All three concerns were to
influence his postwar decisions and the way he would fight
Gulf War II.

What independence?

2009-06-15T17:15:00.000+08:00

Outside Looking In By Jerick Aguilar Updated June 14, 2009 12:00 AM

I usually think of the next topic to write for my column a week or two before submitting the final draft to my editor. But it just occurred to me that June 12 is our Independence Day and that it is timely to write something about it. I should have remembered it earlier since I was part of celebrating it last year while I was still in the Middle East. I was asked to host SPY’s (“Samahan ng mga Pilipino sa Yemen,” the Filipino Association in Yemen) annual “Araw ng Kalayaan” (Day of Independence) party at the Sheraton Hotel in the capital Sana’a.

I remember emailing pictures of the event to my family and close friends and unusually greeting them a “Happy Independence Day” as an excuse to boast my fifteen minutes (okay, seconds) of fame in a place that I had just relocated to less than two months before the actual event. They are used to something like this from me so very few bothered to give me a reaffirmation, or make that, a reply. But I received a different response from a kababata (childhood friend) of mine. He basically wrote, “Happy Independence Day to you, too! Although I guess we haven’t really achieved true independence yet, have we? Independence is not just about civil liberties but also independence from poverty, hunger, and abuse.”

He did hit the spot. So it begs to ask the questions, “Are we really independent?,” and, “Is there truly a reason to celebrate?”

As a matter of trivia, June 12, 1898 was our day of independence from Spain but not from the United States. The Spanish government sold our country to the Americans in the same year for $20 million so we were never really independent. We finally became sovereign on July 4, 1946 when Uncle Sam relinquished its authority over our islands (and we – fortunately or unfortunately – missed out on being the 51st state of America).

Our Independence Day was actually observed every year on this day until 1964 when nationalist politicians urged then President Diosdado Macapagal to sign into law our first day of sovereignty from a foreign entity, June 12, as our official day of independence.

But are we in fact independent from the United States? I have lived in America for a number of years and I have met conspiracy theorists who obviously believe otherwise. They say that the Philippines has an ideal geo-political location so the American government will never allow us to eclipse our developing country status and become less dependent on their aid, hence, less cooperative to their needs. In other words, our entire political and economic direction is not only within our hands. To them (and I, at some level, agree), our government is a puppet on a string with both the US Congress and White House moving some, if not the whole of, its parts. They argue that we are America’s 100-percent ally in the region so they cannot afford to lose us by ensuring that they have control over the key players in the current administration (and even in business).

Are we also independent from poverty? The latest poverty statistics in 2006 show that at least three out of 10 Filipinos live below the annual poverty threshold of P15,057. In other words, a person is considered poor in the Philippines if he or she earns only P41.25 per day. Assuming this person spends all of the money on food (ignoring the other basic necessities of shelter and clothing), this means that he or she can survive with a measly P13.75 per meal per day. But a cup of rice nowadays already costs P7. So even if he or she skips breakfast, this “thin” person only has a few pesos left to buy “ulam” (main dish) and most likely has to drink tap water to prevent himself or herself from choking.

In short, the official estimate that 32.9 percent of Filipinos are poor is grossly understated. My doctoral research that computed a realistic poverty threshold (based on the 2000 Family Income and Expenditure Survey data) came up with a figure of around 60 percent. This is not far from the Social Weather Stations’ (SWS, a private nonprofit social research institution) self-rated poverty statistic of 56.5 percent (average of the quarterly results) in the same year.

Hence, majority of Filipinos, and definitely not a third, are still poor. SWS also has statistics on hunger and the figure for February 2007 is 19 percent. This is the proportion of families who answered yes to the question of whether or not they felt hungry at one time or another and had nothing to eat in the last three months.

And are we independent from abuse? The abuse of power, to be exact, like graft and corruption, vote-buying and -rigging, and political dynasties? We have a President who has been accused many times over of being corrupt such as receiving massive kickbacks from the national broadband network agreement with China as well as the Northrail and the Mt. Diwalwal projects. She was also allegedly involved in the fertilizer fund scam as well as the swine scam under the Rural Credit Guarantee Corp. She is even said to give bribes to members of the House to sway them to be at Malacañang’s beck and call.

It is not just the President herself but almost everybody else in our government who arguably takes much more than what they promised to give. Every year, each congressman receives an average of P70 million as pork barrel and each senator, P200 million. I am no mathematician but if they gave a million pesos each to the 53.1 million Filipinos who are “unofficially” poor, then there would be no more poverty (and hunger) in the Philippines. They would also still have a lot of money left to finance projects for themselves and their families, I mean, their constituents. They most probably wouldn’t have to pay for votes anymore in the upcoming elections because the people no longer need the money, but they might have to spend some of it instead on manipulating the election results to their advantage.

With regard to our elections next year, how many more wives of incumbents will run for mayor or governor? Siblings for senator? And children of past and present presidents (and congressmen) for congressman? Yes, our country is a democracy and anyone has the right to enter the realm of politics. But democracy also means the voice of the people so the more people from different families are represented, the louder their voice, and the greater chances of everybody being heard. As they say, “Give chance to others.” So public service or, more appropriately and apparently in the Philippines, power need not be a family affair.

Despite the aforementioned, my kababata (and I) is still hopeful about the Philippines. He believes that we are still a young nation so we have a long way to go. Historically speaking, the Spanish colonized us in 1565 and it took us more than three centuries to be independent from Spain. I just hope that it won’t take that long for our country to be independent from America, poverty, hunger, and the abuse of power. And when that time comes (hopefully in my lifetime), I will always remember this day of independence and have plenty of reasons to celebrate it.

How Sri Lanka's military won

2009-05-24T11:29:00.001+08:00

By Anbarasan Ethirajan BBC News

Few believed him when Sri Lanka's powerful defence secretary said he required three years to defeat the once invincible Tamil Tiger rebels.
When Gotabaya Rajapaksa made the assertion, the Tamil Tigers, or Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam [LTTE], controlled nearly one third of the country, had a well-organised, ruthless fighting unit, sufficient stocks of heavy weapons, a small navy and a rudimentary air force.
They had no problems of fresh supplies as they had enough resources pouring in from their supporters abroad and through their commercial ventures.
Only a handful of military analysts believed that the rebels could be wiped out completely.
Today, Sri Lanka is among the few nations that can say it has successfully quelled a nearly three-decade insurgency by military means.
The entire rebel-held territory has been captured, huge caches of weapons have been recovered and destroyed, and the entire Tamil Tiger leadership is thought to have been wiped out.
So what led to the military success of a force that had been at the receiving end for many years?
'No ambiguity'
"So many factors have contributed to the success of the Sri Lankan forces. There was a clear aim and mandate from the political level to the official level and to the military level to destroy the LTTE at any cost. There was no ambiguity in that," Gotabaya Rajapaksa told the BBC.

The rebels thought the international community, especially neighbouring India, would intervene looking at the civilian suffering
DBS Jeyaraj
When the current president, his brother Mahinda Rajapaksa, came to power in 2005, he made it clear that he would go all out against the rebels if they were not sincere in peace talks.
Once the peace process failed, he gave the go ahead for the war to his brother and the hard line army commander Gen Sarath Fonseka.
A massive recruitment drive for the armed forces was launched (it increased from about 80,000 to more than 160,000). New weapons, including fighter jets, artillery guns and multi-barrel rocket launchers were bought from countries like China, Pakistan and Russia and new military strategies and tactics were evolved.
"That was the time when the international community was totally disappointed with the rebels because of their insincerity in peace talks. So countries like India and the US gave their tacit support for the all-out offensive against the LTTE," says Sri Lankan analyst DBS Jeyaraj.

Air force superiority was a key factor for the government
Hostilities between the two sides broke out first in Eastern Province in August 2006. After months of intense battles, the government declared it had completely dislodged the rebels from the east.
One of the main reasons for the rebels' eastern debacle was the split in 2004 - when the Tigers' influential eastern commander, Col Karuna, broke away because of differences with the leadership.
"The LTTE could never recover from that. Thousands of fighters went away with Karuna and the LTTE could not recruit fresh cadres from the east, dealing a severe blow to their manpower. They struggled hard to replace fallen cadres in the subsequent northern battle," says Col R Hariharan, former chief of military intelligence of the Indian Peacekeeping Force in Sri Lanka from 1987 to 1990.
It was only a matter of time before the Sri Lankan military launched the second phase of its offensive to recapture the rebel strongholds in the north.
In the meantime, the Sri Lankan navy had also hunted and destroyed many Tamil Tiger supply ships in deep seas, dealing a crucial blow to the rebels.
Battlefield plans
The army also changed its tactics and became better able to cope with the kind of warfare waged by the guerrillas.
Small teams of commandoes were sent behind enemy lines to carry out attacks against rebel leaders and key defence lines.

Brigadier Shavendra Silva said the Tigers were taken by surprise
The military also started to stretch them thin by opening up a number of fronts in the north.
The Tamil Tigers had no answer to the bombing missions by air force jets.
"The rebels never knew about the battlefield plans. We surprised them in many areas. For example, they didn't expect me to capture the strategically important town of Paranthan, near Kilinochchi, by outflanking them," Brig Shavendra Silva, commander of the Sri Lankan army's 58th division, told the BBC in a recent interview from the frontline.
The capture of Paranthan forced the rebels to withdraw from the strategically important Elephant Pass, a small land bridge that connects northern Jaffna peninsula with the rest of the country.
From Paranthan, Sri Lankan security forces battled their way into the Tamil Tiger de-facto capital of Kilinochchi.
The 58th division, which is credited with a series of military successes against the rebels, battled hard to forge ahead from Mannar up to Matalan beach on the eastern coast in Mullaitivu district.
"It was not an easy walk. But we went ahead with a huge momentum and kept our pace and there were clear-cut instructions and leadership from our superiors," Brig Silva said.
But many argue that the military's success has come at an enormous humanitarian cost.
The UN believes that nearly 7,000 civilians may have been killed and 13,000 injured in the conflict since January.
Aid agencies say around 275,000 people have been displaced.
A number of villages and towns have either been damaged or destroyed.
Both the military and the rebels are being accused of gross violations of international humanitarian law. The two sides deny the charges.
"The Sri Lankan military juggernaut cruised ahead despite mounting civilian casualties. The rebels thought the international community, especially neighbouring India, would intervene looking at the civilian suffering and bring about a ceasefire in the final stages. When that did not happen, they ran out of options," says Mr Jeyaraj.

Knowing the Enemy Can social scientists redefine the “war on terror”?

2009-05-07T10:37:00.001+08:00

by George Packer December 18, 2006

In 1993, a young captain in the Australian Army named David Kilcullen was living among villagers in West Java, as part of an immersion program in the Indonesian language. One day, he visited a local military museum that contained a display about Indonesia’s war, during the nineteen-fifties and sixties, against a separatist Muslim insurgency movement called Darul Islam. “I had never heard of this conflict,” Kilcullen told me recently. “It’s hardly known in the West. The Indonesian government won, hands down. And I was fascinated by how it managed to pull off such a successful counterinsurgency campaign.”

Kilcullen, the son of two left-leaning academics, had studied counterinsurgency as a cadet at Duntroon, the Australian West Point, and he decided to pursue a doctorate in political anthropology at the University of New South Wales. He chose as his dissertation subject the Darul Islam conflict, conducting research over tea with former guerrillas while continuing to serve in the Australian Army. The rebel movement, he said, was bigger than the Malayan Emergency—the twelve-year Communist revolt against British rule, which was finally put down in 1960, and which has become a major point of reference in the military doctrine of counterinsurgency. During the years that Kilcullen worked on his dissertation, two events in Indonesia deeply affected his thinking. The first was the rise—in the same region that had given birth to Darul Islam, and among some of the same families—of a more extreme Islamist movement called Jemaah Islamiya, which became a Southeast Asian affiliate of Al Qaeda. The second was East Timor’s successful struggle for independence from Indonesia. Kilcullen witnessed the former as he was carrying out his field work; he participated in the latter as an infantry-company commander in a United Nations intervention force. The experiences shaped the conclusions about counter-insurgency in his dissertation, which he finished in 2001, just as a new war was about to begin.

“I saw extremely similar behavior and extremely similar problems in an Islamic insurgency in West Java and a Christian-separatist insurgency in East Timor,” he said. “After 9/11, when a lot of people were saying, ‘The problem is Islam,’ I was thinking, It’s something deeper than that. It’s about human social networks and the way that they operate.” In West Java, elements of the failed Darul Islam insurgency—a local separatist movement with mystical leanings—had resumed fighting as Jemaah Islamiya, whose outlook was Salafist and global. Kilcullen said, “What that told me about Jemaah Islamiya is that it’s not about theology.” He went on, “There are elements in human psychological and social makeup that drive what’s happening. The Islamic bit is secondary. This is human behavior in an Islamic setting. This is not ‘Islamic behavior.’ ” Paraphrasing the American political scientist Roger D. Petersen, he said, “People don’t get pushed into rebellion by their ideology. They get pulled in by their social networks.” He noted that all fifteen Saudi hijackers in the September 11th plot had trouble with their fathers. Although radical ideas prepare the way for disaffected young men to become violent jihadists, the reasons they convert, Kilcullen said, are more mundane and familiar: family, friends, associates.

Indonesia’s failure to replicate in East Timor its victory in West Java later influenced Kilcullen’s views about what the Bush Administration calls the “global war on terror.” In both instances, the Indonesian military used the same harsh techniques, including forced population movements, coercion of locals into security forces, stringent curfews, and even lethal pressure on civilians to take the government side. The reason that the effort in East Timor failed, Kilcullen concluded, was globalization. In the late nineties, a Timorese international propaganda campaign and ubiquitous media coverage prompted international intervention, thus ending the use of tactics that, in the obscure jungles of West Java in the fifties, outsiders had known nothing about. “The globalized information environment makes counterinsurgency even more difficult now,” Kilcullen said.

Just before the 2004 American elections, Kilcullen was doing intelligence work for the Australian government, sifting through Osama bin Laden’s public statements, including transcripts of a video that offered a list of grievances against America: Palestine, Saudi Arabia, Afghanistan, global warming. The last item brought Kilcullen up short. “I thought, Hang on! What kind of jihadist are you?” he recalled. The odd inclusion of environmentalist rhetoric, he said, made clear that “this wasn’t a list of genuine grievances. This was an Al Qaeda information strategy.” Ron Suskind, in his book “The One Percent Doctrine,” claims that analysts at the C.I.A. watched a similar video, released in 2004, and concluded that “bin Laden’s message was clearly designed to assist the President’s reëlection.” Bin Laden shrewdly created an implicit association between Al Qaeda and the Democratic Party, for he had come to feel that Bush’s strategy in the war on terror was sustaining his own global importance. Indeed, in the years after September 11th Al Qaeda’s core leadership had become a propaganda hub. “If bin Laden didn’t have access to global media, satellite communications, and the Internet, he’d just be a cranky guy in a cave,” Kilcullen said.

In 2004, Kilcullen’s writings and lectures brought him to the attention of an official working for Paul Wolfowitz, then the Deputy Secretary of Defense. Wolfowitz asked him to help write the section on “irregular warfare” in the Pentagon’s “Quadrennial Defense Review,” a statement of department policy and priorities, which was published earlier this year. Under the leadership of Donald Rumsfeld, who resigned in November, the Pentagon had embraced a narrow “shock-and-awe” approach to war-fighting, emphasizing technology, long-range firepower, and spectacular displays of force. The new document declared that activities such as “long-duration unconventional warfare, counterterrorism, counterinsurgency, and military support for stabilization and reconstruction efforts” needed to become a more important component of the war on terror. Kilcullen was partly responsible for the inclusion of the phrase “the long war,” which has become the preferred term among many military officers to describe the current conflict. In the end, the Rumsfeld Pentagon was unwilling to make the cuts in expensive weapons systems that would have allowed it to create new combat units and other resources necessary for a proper counterinsurgency strategy.

In July, 2005, Kilcullen, as a result of his work on the Pentagon document, received an invitation to attend a conference on defense policy, in Vermont. There he met Henry Crumpton, a highly regarded official who had supervised the C.I.A.’s covert activities in Afghanistan during the 2001 military campaign that overthrew the Taliban. The two men spent much of the conference talking privately, and learned, among other things, that they saw the war on terror in the same way. Soon afterward, Condoleezza Rice, the Secretary of State, hired Crumpton as the department’s coördinator for counterterrorism, and Crumpton, in turn, offered Kilcullen a job. For the past year, Kilcullen has occupied an office on the State Department’s second floor, as Crumpton’s chief strategist. In some senses, Kilcullen has arrived too late: this year, the insurgency in Iraq has been transformed into a calamitous civil war between Sunnis and Shiites, and his ideas about counterinsurgency are unlikely to reverse the country’s disintegration. Yet radical Islamist movements now extend across the globe, from Somalia to Afghanistan and Indonesia, and Kilcullen—an Australian anthropologist and lieutenant colonel, who is “on loan” to the U.S. government—offers a new way to understand and fight a war that seems to grow less intelligible the longer it goes on.

Kilcullen is thirty-nine years old, and has a wide pink face, a fondness for desert boots, and an Australian’s good-natured bluntness. He has a talent for making everything sound like common sense by turning disturbing explanations into brisk, cheerful questions: “America is very, very good at big, short conventional wars? It’s not very good at small, long wars? But it’s even worse at big, long wars? And that’s what we’ve got.” Kilcullen’s heroes are soldier-intellectuals, both real (T. E. Lawrence) and fictional (Robert Jordan, the flinty, self-reliant schoolteacher turned guerrilla who is the protagonist of Hemingway’s “For Whom the Bell Tolls”). On his bookshelves, alongside monographs by social scientists such as Max Gluckman and E. E. Evans-Pritchard, is a knife that he took from a militiaman he had just ambushed in East Timor. “If I were a Muslim, I’d probably be a jihadist,” Kilcullen said as we sat in his office. “The thing that drives these guys—a sense of adventure, wanting to be part of the moment, wanting to be in the big movement of history that’s happening now—that’s the same thing that drives me, you know?”

More than three years into the Iraq war and five into the conflict in Afghanistan, many members of the American military—especially those with combat experience—have begun to accept the need to learn the kind of counterinsurgency tactics that it tried to leave behind in Vietnam. On December 15th, the Army and the Marine Corps will release an ambitious new counterinsurgency field manual—the first in more than two decades—that will shape military doctrine for many years. The introduction to the field manual says, “Effective insurgents rapidly adapt to changing circumstances. They cleverly use the tools of the global information revolution to magnify the effects of their actions. . . . However, by focusing on efforts to secure the safety and support of the local populace, and through a concerted effort to truly function as learning organizations, the Army and Marine Corps can defeat their insurgent enemies.”

One night earlier this year, Kilcullen sat down with a bottle of single-malt Scotch and wrote out a series of tips for company commanders about to be deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan. He is an energetic writer who avoids military and social-science jargon, and he addressed himself intimately to young captains who have had to become familiar with exotica such as “The Battle of Algiers,” the 1966 film documenting the insurgency against French colonists. “What does all the theory mean, at the company level?” he asked. “How do the principles translate into action—at night, with the G.P.S. down, the media criticizing you, the locals complaining in a language you don’t understand, and an unseen enemy killing your people by ones and twos? How does counterinsurgency actually happen? There are no universal answers, and insurgents are among the most adaptive opponents you will ever face. Countering them will demand every ounce of your intellect.” The first tip is “Know Your Turf”: “Know the people, the topography, economy, history, religion and culture. Know every village, road, field, population group, tribal leader, and ancient grievance. Your task is to become the world expert on your district.” “Twenty-eight Articles: Fundamentals of Company-Level Counterinsurgency”—the title riffs on a T. E. Lawrence insurgency manual from the First World War—was disseminated via e-mail to junior officers in the field, and was avidly read.

Last year, in an influential article in the Journal of Strategic Studies, Kilcullen redefined the war on terror as a “global counterinsurgency.” The change in terminology has large implications. A terrorist is “a kook in a room,” Kilcullen told me, and beyond persuasion; an insurgent has a mass base whose support can be won or lost through politics. The notion of a “war on terror” has led the U.S. government to focus overwhelmingly on military responses. In a counterinsurgency, according to the classical doctrine, which was first laid out by the British general Sir Gerald Templar during the Malayan Emergency, armed force is only a quarter of the effort; political, economic, and informational operations are also required. A war on terror suggests an undifferentiated enemy. Kilcullen speaks of the need to “disaggregate” insurgencies: finding ways to address local grievances in Pakistan’s tribal areas or along the Thai-Malay border so that they aren’t mapped onto the ambitions of the global jihad. Kilcullen writes, “Just as the Containment strategy was central to the Cold War, likewise a Disaggregation strategy would provide a unifying strategic conception for the war—something that has been lacking to date.” As an example of disaggregation, Kilcullen cited the Indonesian province of Aceh, where, after the 2004 tsunami, a radical Islamist organization tried to set up an office and convert a local separatist movement to its ideological agenda. Resentment toward the outsiders, combined with the swift humanitarian action of American and Australian warships, helped to prevent the Acehnese rebellion from becoming part of the global jihad. As for America, this success had more to do with luck than with strategy. Crumpton, Kilcullen’s boss, told me that American foreign policy traditionally operates on two levels, the global and the national; today, however, the battlefields are also regional and local, where the U.S. government has less knowledge and where it is not institutionally organized to act. In half a dozen critical regions, Crumpton has organized meetings among American diplomats, intelligence officials, and combat commanders, so that information about cross-border terrorist threats is shared. “It’s really important that we define the enemy in narrow terms,” Crumpton said. “The thing we should not do is let our fears grow and then inflate the threat. The threat is big enough without us having to exaggerate it.”

By speaking of Saddam Hussein, the Sunni insurgency in Iraq, the Taliban, the Iranian government, Hezbollah, and Al Qaeda in terms of one big war, Administration officials and ideologues have made Osama bin Laden’s job much easier. “You don’t play to the enemy’s global information strategy of making it all one fight,” Kilcullen said. He pointedly avoided describing this as the Administration’s approach. “You say, ‘Actually, there are sixty different groups in sixty different countries who all have different objectives. Let’s not talk about bin Laden’s objectives—let’s talk about your objectives. How do we solve that problem?’ ” In other words, the global ambitions of the enemy don’t automatically demand a monolithic response.

The more Kilcullen travels to the various theatres of war, the less he thinks that the lessons of Malaya and Vietnam are useful guides in the current conflict. “Classical counterinsurgency is designed to defeat insurgency in one country,” he writes in his Strategic Studies article. “We need a new paradigm, capable of addressing globalised insurgency.” After a recent trip to Afghanistan, where Taliban forces have begun to mount large operations in the Pashto-speaking south of the country, he told me, “This ain’t your granddaddy’s counterinsurgency.” Many American units there, he said, are executing the new field manual’s tactics brilliantly. For example, before conducting operations in a given area, soldiers sit down over bread and tea with tribal leaders and find out what they need—Korans, cold-weather gear, a hydroelectric dynamo. In exchange for promises of local support, the Americans gather the supplies and then, within hours of the end of fighting, produce them, to show what can be gained from coöperating.

But the Taliban seem to be waging a different war, driven entirely by information operations. “They’re essentially armed propaganda organizations,” Kilcullen said. “They switch between guerrilla activity and terrorist activity as they need to, in order to maintain the political momentum, and it’s all about an information operation that generates the perception of an unstoppable, growing insurgency.” After travelling through southern Afghanistan, Kilcullen e-mailed me:

One good example of Taliban information strategy is their use of “night letters.” They have been pushing local farmers in several provinces (Helmand, Uruzgan, Kandahar) to grow poppy instead of regular crops, and using night-time threats and intimidation to punish those who don’t and convince others to convert to poppy. This is not because they need more opium—God knows they already have enough—but because they’re trying to detach the local people from the legal economy and the legally approved governance system of the provinces and districts, to weaken the hold of central and provincial government. Get the people doing something illegal, and they’re less likely to feel able to support the government, and more willing to do other illegal things (e.g. join the insurgency)—this is a classic old Bolshevik tactic from the early cold war, by the way. They are specifically trying to send the message: “The government can neither help you nor hurt us. We can hurt you, or protect you—the choice is yours.” They also use object lessons, making an example of people who don’t cooperate—for example, dozens of provincial-level officials have been assassinated this year, again as an “armed propaganda” tool—not because they want one official less but because they want to send the message “We can reach out and touch you if you cross us.” Classic armed information operation.

Kilcullen doesn’t believe that an entirely “soft” counterinsurgency approach can work against such tactics. In his view, winning hearts and minds is not a matter of making local people like you—as some American initiates to counterinsurgency whom I met in Iraq seemed to believe—but of getting them to accept that supporting your side is in their interest, which requires an element of coercion. Kilcullen met senior European officers with the NATO force in Afghanistan who seemed to be applying “a development model to counterinsurgency,” hoping that gratitude for good work would bring the Afghans over to their side. He told me, “In a counterinsurgency, the gratitude effect will last until the sun goes down and the insurgents show up and say, ‘You’re on our side, aren’t you? Otherwise, we’re going to kill you.’ If one side is willing to apply lethal force to bring the population to its side and the other side isn’t, ultimately you’re going to find yourself losing.” Kilcullen was describing a willingness to show local people that supporting the enemy risks harm and hardship, not a campaign like the Phoenix program in Vietnam, in which noncombatants were assassinated; besides being unethical, such a tactic would inevitably backfire in the age of globalized information. Nevertheless, because he talks about war with an analyst’s rationalism and a practitioner’s matter-of-factness, Kilcullen can appear deceptively detached from its consequences.

An information strategy seems to be driving the agenda of every radical Islamist movement. Kilcullen noted that when insurgents ambush an American convoy in Iraq, “they’re not doing that because they want to reduce the number of Humvees we have in Iraq by one. They’re doing it because they want spectacular media footage of a burning Humvee.” Last year, a letter surfaced that is believed to have been sent from Ayman al-Zawahiri, bin Laden’s deputy, to the leader of Al Qaeda in Iraq, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, nine months before Zarqawi’s death; the letter urged Zarqawi to make his videotaped beheadings and mass slaughter of Shiite civilians less gruesome. Kilcullen interpreted the letter as “basically saying to Zarqawi, ‘Justify your attacks on the basis of how they support our information strategy.’ ” As soon as the recent fighting in Lebanon between Hezbollah and Israeli troops ended, Hezbollah marked, with its party flags, houses that had been damaged. Kilcullen said, “That’s not a reconstruction operation—it’s an information operation. It’s influence. They’re going out there to send a couple of messages. To the Lebanese people they’re saying, ‘We’re going to take care of you.’ To all the aid agencies it’s like a dog pissing on trees: they’re saying, ‘We own this house—don’t you touch it.’ ” He went on, “When the aid agencies arrive a few days later, they have to negotiate with Hezbollah because there’s a Hezbollah flag on the house. Hezbollah says, ‘Yeah, you can sell a contract to us to fix up that house.’ It’s an information operation. They’re trying to generate influence.”

The result is an intimidated or motivated population, and a spike in fund-raising and recruiting. “When you go on YouTube and look at one of these attacks in Iraq, all you see is the video,” Kilcullen said. “If you go to some jihadist Web sites, you see the same video and then a button next to it that says, ‘Click here and donate.’ ” The Afghan or Iraqi or Lebanese insurgent, unlike his Vietnamese or Salvadoran predecessor, can plug into a global media network that will instantly amplify his message. After Kilcullen returned from Afghanistan last month, he stayed up late one Saturday night (“because I have no social life”) and calculated how many sources of information existed for a Vietnamese villager in 1966 and for an Afghan villager in 2006. He concluded that the former had ten, almost half under government control, such as Saigon radio and local officials; the latter has twenty-five (counting the Internet as only one), of which just five are controlled by the government. Most of the rest—including e-mail, satellite phone, and text messaging—are independent but more easily exploited by insurgents than by the Afghan government. And it is on the level of influencing perceptions that these wars will be won or lost. “The international information environment is critical to the success of America’s mission,” Kilcullen said.

In the information war, America and its allies are barely competing. America’s information operations, far from being the primary strategy, simply support military actions, and often badly: a Pentagon spokesman announces a battle victory, but no one in the area of the battlefield hears him (or would believe him anyway). Just as the Indonesians failed in East Timor, in spite of using locally successful tactics, Kilcullen said, “We’ve done a similar thing in Iraq—we’ve arguably done O.K. on the ground in some places, but we’re totally losing the domestic information battle. In Afghanistan, it still could go either way.”

However careful Kilcullen is not to criticize Administration policy, his argument amounts to a thoroughgoing critique. As a foreigner who is not a career official in the U.S. government, he has more distance and freedom to discuss the war on jihadism frankly, and in ways that his American counterparts rarely can. “It’s now fundamentally an information fight,” he said. “The enemy gets that, and we don’t yet get that, and I think that’s why we’re losing.”

In late September, Kilcullen was one of the featured speakers at a conference in Washington, organized by the State and Defense Departments, on bringing the civilian branches of the government into the global counterinsurgency effort. In the hallway outside the meeting room, he made a point of introducing me to another speaker, an anthropologist and Pentagon consultant named Montgomery McFate. For five years, McFate later told me, she has been making it her “evangelical mission” to get the Department of Defense to understand the importance of “cultural knowledge.” McFate is forty years old, with hair cut stylishly short and an air of humorous cool. When I asked why a social scientist would want to help the war effort, she replied, only half joking, “Because I’m engaged in a massive act of rebellion against my hippie parents.”

McFate grew up in the sixties on a communal houseboat in Marin County, California. Her parents were friends with Jack Kerouac and Lawrence Ferlinghetti, and one of her schoolmates was the daughter of Jefferson Airplane’s Grace Slick and Paul Kantner. Like Kilcullen, she was drawn to the study of human conflict and also its reality: at Yale, where she received a doctorate, her dissertation was based on several years she spent living among supporters of the Irish Republican Army and then among British counterinsurgents. In Northern Ireland, McFate discovered something very like what Kilcullen found in West Java: insurgency runs in families and social networks, held together by persistent cultural narratives—in this case, the eight-hundred-year-old saga of “perfidious Albion.” She went on to marry a U.S. Army officer. “When I was little in California, we never believed there was such a thing as the Cold War,” McFate said. “That was a bunch of lies that the government fed us to keep us paranoid. Of course, there was a thing called the Cold War, and we nearly lost. And there was no guarantee that we were going to win. And this thing that’s happening now is, without taking that too far, similar.” After September 11th, McFate said, she became “passionate about one issue: the government’s need to actually understand its adversaries,” in the same way that the United States came to understand—and thereby undermine—the Soviet Union. If, as Kilcullen and Crumpton maintain, the battlefield in the global counterinsurgency is intimately local, then the American government needs what McFate calls a “granular” knowledge of the social terrains on which it is competing.

In 2004, when McFate had a fellowship at the Office of Naval Research, she got a call from a science adviser to the Joint Chiefs of Staff. He had been contacted by battalion commanders with the 4th Infantry Division in a violent sector of the Sunni Triangle, in Iraq. “We’re having a really hard time out here—we have no idea how this society works,” the commanders said. “Could you help us?” The science adviser replied that he was a mathematical physicist, and turned for help to one of the few anthropologists he could find in the Defense Department.

For decades, the Pentagon and the humanistic social sciences have had little to do with each other. In 1964, the Pentagon set up a program called, with the self-conscious idealism of the period, Project Camelot. Anthropologists were hired and sent abroad to conduct a multiyear study of the factors that promote stability or war in certain societies, beginning with Chile. When news of the program leaked, the uproar in Chile and America forced Defense Secretary Robert McNamara to cancel it. “The Department of Defense has invested hardly any money in conducting ethnographic research in areas where conflict was occurring since 1965,” McFate told me. After Project Camelot and Vietnam, where social scientists often did contract work for the U.S. military, professional associations discouraged such involvement. (“Academic anthropologists hate me for working with D.O.D.,” McFate said.) Kilcullen, who calls counterinsurgency “armed social science,” told me, “This is fundamentally about the broken relationship between the government and the discipline of anthropology. What broke that relationship is Vietnam. And people still haven’t recovered from that.” As a result, a complex human understanding of societies at war has been lost. “But it didn’t have to be lost,” McFate said. During the Second World War, anthropologists such as Margaret Mead, Gregory Bateson, Geoffrey Gorer, and Ruth Benedict provided the Allied war effort with essential insights into Asian societies. Gorer and Benedict suggested, for example, that the terms of Japan’s surrender be separated from the question of the emperor’s abdication, because the emperor was thought to embody the country’s soul; doing so allowed the Japanese to accept unconditional surrender. McFate sees herself as reaching back to this tradition of military-academic coöperation.

By 2004, the military desperately needed coöperation. McFate saw Americans in Iraq make one strategic mistake after another because they didn’t understand the nature of Iraqi society. In an article in Joint Force Quarterly, she wrote, “Once the Sunni Ba’thists lost their prestigious jobs, were humiliated in the conflict, and got frozen out through de-Ba’thification, the tribal network became the backbone of the insurgency. The tribal insurgency is a direct result of our misunderstanding the Iraqi culture.” In the course of eighteen months of interviews with returning soldiers, she was told by one Marine Corps officer, “My marines were almost wholly uninterested in interacting with the local population. Our primary mission was the security of Camp Falluja. We relieved soldiers from the 82nd Airborne Division, and their assessment was that every local was participating or complicit with the enemy. This view was quickly adopted by my unit and framed all of our actions (and reactions).” Another marine told McFate that his unit had lost the battle to influence public opinion because it used the wrong approach to communication: “We were focussed on broadcast media and metrics. But this had no impact because Iraqis spread information through rumor. We should have been visiting their coffee shops.”

The result of efforts like McFate’s is a new project with the quintessential Pentagon name Cultural Operations Research Human Terrain. It began in the form of a “ruggedized” laptop computer, loaded with data from social-science research conducted in Iraq—such as, McFate said, “an analysis of the eighty-eight tribes and subtribes in a particular province.” Now the project is recruiting social scientists around the country to join five-person “human terrain” teams that would go to Iraq and Afghanistan with combat brigades and serve as cultural advisers on six-to-nine-month tours. Pilot teams are planning to leave next spring.

Steve Fondacaro, a retired Army colonel who for a year commanded the Joint Improvised Explosive Device Defeat Task Force in Iraq, is in charge of the Human Terrain project. Fondacaro sees the war in the same terms as Kilcullen. “The new element of power that has emerged in the last thirty to forty years and has subsumed the rest is information,” he said. “A revolution happened without us knowing or paying attention. Perception truly now is reality, and our enemies know it. We have to fight on the information battlefield.” I asked him what the government should have done, say, in the case of revelations of abuse at the Abu Ghraib prison. “You’re talking to a radical here,” Fondacaro said. “Immediately be the first one to tell the story. Don’t let anyone else do it. That carries so much strategic weight.” He added, “Iraqis are not shocked by torture. It would have impressed them if we had exposed it, punished it, rectified it.” But senior military leadership, he said, remains closed to this kind of thinking. He is turning for help to academics—to “social scientists who want to educate me,” he said. So far, though, Fondacaro has hired just one anthropologist. When I spoke to her by telephone, she admitted that the assignment comes with huge ethical risks. “I do not want to get anybody killed,” she said. Some of her colleagues are curious, she said; others are critical. “I end up getting shunned at cocktail parties,” she said. “I see there could be misuse. But I just can’t stand to sit back and watch these mistakes happen over and over as people get killed, and do nothing.”

At the counterinsurgency conference in Washington, the tone among the uniformed officers, civilian officials, and various experts was urgent, almost desperate. James Kunder, a former marine and the acting deputy of the U.S. Agency for International Development, pointed out that in Iraq and Afghanistan “the civilian agencies have received 1.4 per cent of the total money,” whereas classical counterinsurgency doctrine says that eighty per cent of the effort should be nonmilitary. During Vietnam, his agency had fifteen thousand employees; it now has two thousand. After the end of the Cold War, foreign-service and aid budgets were sharply cut. “Size matters,” Kunder said, noting that throughout the civilian agencies there are shortages of money and personnel. To staff the embassy in Baghdad, the State Department has had to steal officers from other embassies, and the government can’t even fill the provincial reconstruction teams it has tried to set up in Iraq and Afghanistan. While correcting these shortages could not have prevented the deepening disaster in Iraq, they betray the government’s priorities.

In early 2004, as Iraq was beginning to unravel, Senator Richard Lugar, the Indiana Republican who chairs the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, and Senator Joseph Biden, the Delaware Democrat, introduced legislation for a nation-building office, under the aegis of the State Department. The office would be able to tap into contingency funds and would allow cabinet-department officials, along with congressional staff people and civilian experts, to carry out overseas operations to help stabilize and rebuild failed states and societies shattered by war—to do it deliberately and well rather than in the ad-hoc fashion that has characterized interventions from Somalia and Kosovo to Iraq. Lugar envisioned both an active-duty contingent and a reserve corps.

The bill’s biggest supporter was the military, which frequently finds itself forced to do tasks overseas for which civilians are better prepared, such as training police or rebuilding sewers. But Colin Powell, then the Secretary of State, and other Administration officials refused to give it strong backing. Then, in the summer of 2004, the Administration reversed course by announcing the creation, in the State Department, of the Office of the Coordinator for Reconstruction and Stabilization; the office was given the imprimatur of National Security Presidential Directive 44. At the September conference in Washington, Kilcullen held up the office as a model for how to bring civilians into counterinsurgency: “True enough, the words ‘insurgency,’ ‘insurgent,’ and ‘counterinsurgency’ do not appear in N.S.P.D. 44, but it clearly envisages the need to deploy integrated whole-of-government capabilities in hostile environments.”

But the new office was virtually orphaned at birth. Congress provided only seven million of the hundred million dollars requested by the Administration, which never made the office a top Presidential priority. The State Department has contributed fifteen officials who can manage overseas operations, but other agencies have offered nothing. The office thus has no ability to coördinate operations, such as mobilizing police trainers, even as Iraq and Afghanistan deteriorate and new emergencies loom in places like Darfur and Pakistan. It has become insiders’ favorite example of bureaucratic inertia in the face of glaring need.

Frederick Barton, an expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a Washington think tank, considers failures like these to be a prime cause of American setbacks in fighting global jihadism. “Hard power is not the way we’re going to make an impression,” he told me, and he cited Pakistan, where a huge population, rising militancy, nuclear weapons, and the remnants of Al Qaeda’s leadership create a combustible mix. According to Barton’s figures, since 2002 America has spent more than six billion dollars on buttressing the Pakistani military, and probably a similar amount on intelligence (the number is kept secret). Yet it has spent less than a billion dollars on aid for education and economic development, in a country where Islamist madrassas and joblessness contribute to the radicalization of young people. On a recent visit to Nigeria, Barton heard that American propaganda efforts are being outclassed by those of the Iranians and the Saudis. “What would Pepsi-Cola or Disney do?” he asked. “We’re not thinking creatively, expansively. We are sclerotic, bureaucratic, lumbering—you can see the U.S. coming from miles away.”

If, as Kilcullen says, the global counterinsurgency is primarily an information war, one place where American strategy should be executed is the State Department office of Karen Hughes, the Under-Secretary for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs. Hughes is a longtime Bush adviser from Texas. One of her first missions, in September, 2005, took her to the Middle East, where her efforts to speak with Muslim women as fellow-“moms” and religious believers received poor reviews. Last year, she sent out a memo to American embassies urging diplomats to make themselves widely available to the local press, but she also warned them against saying anything that might seem to deviate from Administration policy. The choice of a high-level political operative to run the government’s global-outreach effort suggests that the Bush Administration sees public diplomacy the way it sees campaigning, with the same emphasis on top-down message discipline. “It has this fixation with strategic communications—whatever that is,” an expert in public diplomacy with close ties to the State Department told me. “It’s just hokum. When you do strategic communications, it fails, because nothing gets out.” She cited a news report that the Voice of America wanted to produce on American-funded AIDS programs in Africa. The V.O.A. was told by a government official that the Office of the U.S. Global AIDS Coördinator would have to give its approval before anything could be broadcast. (The decision was later overruled.) “We’re spending billions of dollars on AIDS,” the expert said—an effort that could generate considerable gratitude in African countries with substantial Muslim populations, such as Somalia and Nigeria. “But no one in Africa has a clue.”

After the Cold War, the government closed down the United States Information Service and, with it, a number of libraries and cultural centers around the world. Since September 11th, there has been an attempt to revive such public diplomacy, but, with American embassies now barricaded or built far from city centers, only the most dedicated local people will use their resources. To circumvent this problem, the State Department has established what it calls American Corners—rooms or shelves in foreign libraries dedicated to American books and culture. “It’s a good idea, but they’re small and marginal,” the expert said. She recently visited the American Corner in the main library in Kano, Nigeria, a center of Islamic learning. “I had to laugh,” she said. “A few Africans asleep at the switch, a couple of computers that weren’t working, a video series on George Washington that no one was using.” She mentioned one encouraging new example of public diplomacy, funded partly by Henry Crumpton’s office: Voice of America news broadcasts will begin airing next February in the language of Somalia, a country of increasing worry to counterterrorism officials. In general, though, there is little organized American effort to rebut the jihadist conspiracy theories that circulate daily among the Muslims living in populous countries such as Indonesia, Pakistan, and Nigeria.

According to the expert, an American diplomat with years of experience identified another obstacle to American outreach. “Let’s face it,” he told her. “All public diplomacy is on hold till George Bush is out of office.”

I once asked David Kilcullen if he thought that America was fundamentally able to deal with the global jihad. Is a society in which few people spend much time overseas or learn a second language, which is impatient with chronic problems, whose vision of war is of huge air and armor battles ended by the signing of articles of surrender, and which tends to assume that everyone is basically alike cut out for this new “long war”?

Kilcullen reminded me that there was a precedent for American success in a sustained struggle with a formidable enemy. “If this is the Cold War—if that analogy holds—then right now we’re in, like, 1953. This is a long way to go here. It didn’t all happen overnight—but it happened.” The Cold War, he emphasized, was many wars, constructed in many different models, fought in many different ways: a nuclear standoff between the superpowers, insurgencies in developing countries, a struggle of ideas in Europe. “Our current battle is a new Cold War,” Kilcullen said, “but it’s not monolithic. You’ve got to define the enemy as narrowly as you can get away with.”

President Bush has used the Cold War as an inspirational analogy almost from the beginning of the war on terror. Last month, in Riga, Latvia, he reminded an audience of the early years of the Cold War, “when freedom’s victory was not so obvious or assured.” Six decades later, he went on, “freedom in Europe has brought peace to Europe, and freedom has brought the power to bring peace to the broader Middle East.” Bush’s die-hard supporters compare him to Harry S. Truman, who was reviled in his last years in office but has been vindicated by history as a plainspoken visionary.

An Administration official pointed out that the President’s speeches on the war are like the last paragraph of every Churchill speech from the Second World War: a soaring peroration about freedom, civilization, and darkness. But in Churchill’s case, the official went on, nineteen pages of analysis, contextualization, and persuasion preceded that final paragraph. A Bush speech gives only the uplift—which suggests that there is no strategy beyond it. Bush’s notion of a titanic struggle between good and evil, between freedom and those who hate freedom, recalls the rigid anti-Communism of Whittaker Chambers, William F. Buckley, Jr., and Barry Goldwater. Montgomery McFate noted that the current avatars of right-wing Cold Warriors, the neoconservatives, have dismissed all Iraqi insurgents as “dead enders” and “bad people.” Terms like “totalitarianism” and “Islamofascism,” she said, which stir the American historical memory, mislead policymakers into greatly increasing the number of our enemies and coming up with wrongheaded strategies against them. “That’s not what the insurgents call themselves,” she said. “If you can’t call something by its name—if you can’t say, ‘This is what this phenomenon is, it has structure, meaning, agency’—how can you ever fight it?” In other words, even if we think that a jihadi in Yemen has ideas similar to those of an Islamist in Java, we have to approach them in discrete ways, both to prevent them from becoming a unified movement and because their particular political yearnings are different.

Kilcullen is attempting to revive a strain of Cold War thought that saw the confrontation with Communism not primarily as a blunt military struggle but as a subtle propaganda war that required deep knowledge of diverse enemies and civilian populations. By this standard, America’s performance against radical Islamists thus far is dismal. Bruce Hoffman, of Georgetown University, a former RAND Corporation analyst who began to use the term “global counterinsurgency” around the same time as Kilcullen, pointed to two Cold War projects: RAND’s study of the motivation and morale of the Vietcong in the mid-sixties, based on extensive interviews with prisoners and former insurgents, which led some analysts to conclude that the war was unwinnable; and a survey by Radio Free Europe of two hundred thousand émigrés from the East Bloc in the eighties, which used the findings to shape broadcasts. “We haven’t done anything like that in this struggle,” Hoffman said, and he cited the thousands of detainees in Iraq. “Instead of turning the prisons into insurgent universities, you could have a systematic process that would be based on scientific surveys designed to elicit certain information on how people joined, who their leaders were, how leadership was exercised, how group cohesion was maintained.” In other words, America would get to know its enemy. Hoffman added, “Even though we say it’s going to be the long war, we still have this enormous sense of impatience. Are we committed to doing the fundamental spadework that’s necessary?”

Kilcullen’s thinking is informed by some of the key texts of Cold War social science, such as Eric Hoffer’s “The True Believer,” which analyzed the conversion of frustrated individuals into members of fanatical mass movements, and Philip Selznick’s “The Organizational Weapon: A Study of Bolshevik Strategy and Tactics,” which described how Communists subverted existing social groups and institutions like trade unions. To these older theoretical guides he adds two recent studies of radical Islam: “Globalized Islam,” by the French scholar Olivier Roy, and “Understanding Terror Networks,” by Marc Sageman, an American forensic psychiatrist and former covert operator with the mujahideen in Afghanistan. After September 11th, Sageman traced the paths of a hundred and seventy-two alienated young Muslims who joined the jihad, and found that the common ground lay not in personal pathology, poverty, or religious belief but in social bonds. Roy sees the rise of “neo-fundamentalism” among Western Muslims as a new identity movement shaped by its response to globalization. In the margin of a section of Roy’s book called “Is Jihad Closer to Marx Than to the Koran?” Kilcullen noted, “If Islamism is the new leftism, then the strategies and techniques used to counter Marxist subversion during the Cold War may have direct or indirect relevance to combating Al Qaeda-sponsored subversion.”

Drawing on these studies, Kilcullen has plotted out a “ladder of extremism” that shows the progress of a jihadist. At the bottom is the vast population of mainstream Muslims, who are potential allies against radical Islamism as well as potential targets of subversion, and whose grievances can be addressed by political reform. The next tier up is a smaller number of “alienated Muslims,” who have given up on reform. Some of these join radical groups, like the young Muslims in North London who spend afternoons at the local community center watching jihadist videos. They require “ideological conversion”—that is, counter-subversion, which Kilcullen compares to helping young men leave gangs. (In a lecture that Kilcullen teaches on counterterrorism at Johns Hopkins, his students watch “Fight Club,” the 1999 satire about anti-capitalist terrorists, to see a radical ideology without an Islamic face.) A smaller number of these individuals, already steeped in the atmosphere of radical mosques and extremist discussions, end up joining local and regional insurgent cells, usually as the result of a “biographical trigger—they will lose a friend in Iraq, or see something that shocks them on television.” With these insurgents, the full range of counterinsurgency tools has to be used, including violence and persuasion. The very small number of fighters who are recruited to the top tier of Al Qaeda and its affiliated terrorist groups are beyond persuasion or conversion. “They’re so committed you’ve got to destroy them,” Kilcullen said. “But you’ve got to do it in such a way that you don’t create new terrorists.”

When I asked him to outline a counter-propaganda strategy, he described three basic methods. “We’ve got to create resistance to their message,” he said. “We’ve got to co-opt or assist people who have a counter-message. And we might need to consider creating or supporting the creation of rival organizations.” Bruce Hoffman told me that jihadists have posted five thousand Web sites that react quickly and imaginatively to events. In 2004, he said, a jihadist rap video called “Dirty Kuffar” became widely popular with young Muslims in Britain: “It’s like Ali G wearing a balaclava and having a pistol in one hand and a Koran in the other.” Hoffman believes that America must help foreign governments and civil-society groups flood the Internet with persuasively youthful Web sites presenting anti-jihadist messages—but not necessarily pro-American ones, and without leaving American fingerprints.

Kilcullen argues that Western governments should establish competing “trusted networks” in Muslim countries: friendly mosques, professional associations, and labor unions. (A favorite Kilcullen example from the Cold War is left-wing anti-Communist trade unions, which gave the working class in Western Europe an outlet for its grievances without driving it into the arms of the Soviet Union.) The U.S. should also support traditional authority figures—community leaders, father figures, moderate imams—in countries where the destabilizing transition to modernity has inspired Islamist violence. “You’ve got to be quiet about it,” he cautioned. “You don’t go in there like a missionary.” The key is providing a social context for individuals to choose ways other than jihad.

Kilcullen’s proposals will not be easy to implement at a moment when the government’s resources and attention are being severely drained by the chaos in Iraq. And, if some of his ideas seem sketchy, it’s because he and his colleagues have only just begun to think along these lines. The U.S. government, encumbered by habit and inertia, has not adapted as quickly to the changing terrain as the light-footed, mercurial jihadists. America’s many failures in the war on terror have led a number of thinkers to conclude that the problem is institutional. Thomas Barnett, a military analyst, proposes dividing the Department of Defense into two sections: one to fight big wars and one for insurgencies and nation-building. Lawrence Wilkerson, a retired Army colonel and Colin Powell’s former chief of staff, goes even further. He thinks that the entire national-security bureaucracy, which was essentially set in place at the start of the Cold War, is incapable of dealing with the new threats and should be overhauled, so that the government can work faster to prevent conflicts or to intervene early. “Especially in light of this Administration, but also other recent ones, do we really want to concentrate power so incredibly in the White House?” he asked. “And, if we do, why do we still have the departments, except as an appendage of bureaucracy that becomes an impediment?” In Wilkerson’s vision, new legislation would create a “unified command,” with leadership drawn from across the civilian agencies, which “could supplant the existing bureaucracy.”

Since September 11th, the government’s traditional approach to national security has proved inadequate in one area after another. The intelligence agencies habitually rely on satellites and spies, when most of the information that matters now, as Kilcullen pointed out, is “open source”—available to anyone with an Internet connection. Traditional diplomacy, with its emphasis on treaties and geopolitical debates, is less relevant than the ability to understand and influence foreign populations—not in their councils of state but in their villages and slums. And future enemies are unlikely to confront the world’s overwhelming military power with conventional warfare; technology-assisted insurgency is proving far more effective. At the highest levels of Western governments, the failure of traditional approaches to counter the jihadist threat has had a paralyzing effect. “I sense we’ve lost the ability to think strategically,” Field Marshal Sir Peter Inge, the former chief of the British armed forces, has said of his government. He could have been describing the White House and the Pentagon.

Kilcullen’s strategic mind, by contrast, seems remarkably febrile. I could call him at the office or at home at any hour of the night and he’d be jotting down ideas in one of his little black notebooks, ready to think out loud. Kilcullen, Crumpton, and their colleagues are desperately trying to develop a lasting new strategy that, in Kilcullen’s words, would be neither Republican nor Democratic. Bruce Hoffman said, “We’re talking about a profound shift in mind-set and attitude”—not to mention a drastic change in budgetary and bureaucratic priorities. “And that may not be achievable until there’s a change in Administration.” Kilcullen is now in charge of writing a new counterinsurgency manual for the civilian government, and early this month he briefed Condoleezza Rice on his findings in Afghanistan. But his ideas have yet to penetrate the fortress that is the Bush White House. Hoffman said, “Isn’t it ironic that an Australian is spearheading this shift, together with a former covert operator? It shows that it’s almost too revolutionary for the places where it should be discussed—the Pentagon, the National Security Council.” At a moment when the Bush Administration has run out of ideas and lost control, it could turn away from its “war on terror” and follow a different path—one that is right under its nose. ♦

HEBREW CATHOLICS By Tim Franks BBC News, Jerusalem

2009-05-05T10:18:00.002+08:00

Father David Neuhaus, a Jewish convert to Catholicism, sometimes finds a discreet welcome at a reform synagogue

It is evening prayers. In a small hall in Jerusalem, the service is being conducted in Hebrew. Some of the words - indeed some of the prayers - chime exactly with those of a synagogue prayer-book. But this is a Catholic Mass.

There are, it is estimated, more than one billion Catholics around the world. Within the Middle East, the great majority celebrate Mass in Arabic. A tiny sliver - about 400 - celebrate Mass in Hebrew.

Leading the service this evening is Father David Neuhaus. Hebrew, he says, has the distinction of being the first language, other than Greek or Latin, in which the Vatican allowed Mass to be said.

I had to then deal with what it meant for a Jew to join a church which is perceived by the Jewish people as one of the enemies in the history of the Jewish people

Father David Neuhaus

That was in 1956, almost a decade before the decision was taken to allow Mass to be celebrated in any language. The argument, from the petitioners to the Vatican, was that Hebrew was one of the three languages used to inscribe Jesus's cross.

A few days before conducting the evening Mass, Father Neuhaus relates his own, remarkable story in measured and thoughtful tones.

We are sitting in the garden of the Pontifical Biblical Institute, in the centre of Jerusalem - the end to a convoluted journey.

David Neuhaus's parents were German Jews who fled the Nazis and settled in South Africa. As that country descended deeper into the grim mire of apartheid, the teenaged David was sent to Israel, to continue his schooling. There he met a "powerful, mystical" Russian Orthodox nun, and he discovered Jesus.

"I had to then deal with what it meant for a Jew to join a Church which is perceived by the Jewish people as one of the enemies in the history of the Jewish people."

A compromise was struck within David's family. Everyone would draw breath, and wait. David's will did not waver. At the age of 26, he was baptised.

But he insists that through that period, and since, he has integrated what he calls "my two identities".

"I feel very strongly historically, socially, ethnically - in all senses other than religiously - a Jew. And then, integrating with that, who I am as a person in relationship with God. And it's not easy. There are no simple solutions."

Some of the community to whom Father Neuhaus ministers, as one of the five vicars of the Latin Patriarch of Jerusalem, are Catholics who are living for a short time in Israel, and who want to attend a Mass in the local language; some are expatriates who have married Israelis; and some, as with him, have converted from Judaism.

Did he, I asked him, still go to synagogue? A pause. "I do go, discreetly," Father Neuhaus replied. And then a laugh: "Now I'm saying it [in] public."

Father Grzegorz Pawlowski allowed himself to be baptised out of fear, but eventually became a Catholic priest

He often goes to the Friday night services in a reform synagogue which welcomes non-Jews.

"I'm not exactly a non-Jew," he says. "In a certain sense, I'm worse than a non-Jew. And yet I've been welcomed for who I am, and with a sensitivity to this tension."

Not often will you hear a Catholic priest say that part of his identity is fulfilled through the synagogue service, or through participation, with friends and family, in Jewish feasts.

But Father Neuhuas is not unique. Grzegorz Pawlowski, a 78-year old Holocaust survivor from Poland, lives in a small and simply-furnished apartment in Jaffa.

In a level voice, but with his eyes still wide with the memory, Grzegorz related the long story that wound on from the moment, at the age of 11, he was separated from his mother and sisters - whom the Nazis then shot and dumped in a mass grave.

Grzegorz survived for three years by wandering the streets and the countryside, and hiding.

He ended up, after the war, in an orphanage run by the Red Cross.

"I'm afraid to speak that I was Jew," he told me, swapping for the moment from Polish-accented Hebrew to halting English.

I am a Catholic priest, and I also see myself as Jewish. I am connected to the Jewish nation. On Yom Kippur, I fast. At Passover, I eat matzah

Father Grzegorz Pawlowski

"I'm afraid. Because Jew - you can kill him, yes?" And so Grzegor allowed himself to be baptised, before the orphans were to receive their first communion.

It was the start of a journey to Catholicism, which ended with him being ordained as a priest in 1958. But he kept his secret identity for another eight years.

"I felt uncomfortable that I was denying, to my mother and to my father, the fact that I'm Jewish. And so in 1966, I wrote an article in a Catholic Weekly, and there I told my whole story… how I got through the Holocaust, and how I became a priest."

Through that article, Father Pawlowski made contact with the one surviving member of his family - his brother, whom he thought was still living in Russia, where he had first escaped to.

Instead, his brother had made it to Haifa, in Israel. Grzegorz's conversion was a source of pain to his brother. "He never accepted it, never accepted it."

A long sigh followed. "He was a very religious Jew. We had very good relations. But he prayed that I come back to Judaism."

Much as Father Neuhaus explained, Father Pawlowski says that his identity, too, cannot be folded into neat boxes.

"I am a Catholic priest, and I also see myself as Jewish. I am connected to the Jewish nation. On Yom Kippur, I fast. At Passover, I eat matzah."

Sometimes, in synagogue, he says, he has to remember not to cross himself, and kneel; in church he has to make sure he is not wearing his kippa (skull-cap). Father Pawlowski delivers this last reminder to himself in a flat voice, before breaking into a loud, wheezy laugh.

And he has one final commitment to his Jewish roots.

"Close to where my mother and sisters were killed [in Poland], there's a Jewish cemetery, where there is a memorial to my mother and all those who were shot. And I will be buried there, next to my mother, in the Jewish cemetery."

Rizal’s bakhaw formula

2009-04-30T11:42:00.000+08:00

By GEMMA CRUZ ARANETA

April 29, 2009, 5:21pm

You will probably agree that Jose Rizal’s most depressing poem is “Mi Retiro,” written shortly after he arrived in Dapitan, which must have seemed like a veritable hinterland after his sojourn in Western Europe. But Rizal never wasted time wallowing in his personal tragedies. He always embarked on projects that would redound to the good of his fellow Filipinos. In Dapitan, he left a legacy that Zamboanguenos cherish to this day.

Aside from installing a waterworks system, a clinic and a school, he made a relief map of Mindanao at the public plaza which has become, Dapitan’s must see destination. Not many of us know that with the encouragement of his former Ateneo professor, Fr. Francisco de P. Sanchez, who was assigned to Dapitan, Rizal came up with a paste made of bakhaw ( bakawan) which could have been used for construction material suitable to these tropical climes.

Noting Rizal’s interest in that mangrove plant, Fr. Sanchez lent him the “Historia de Filipinas,” authored by fellow Jesuit Juan Jose Delgado, where on page 589 mentioned that local carpenters make a pasty substance with the bakhaw fruit and use this to fill in and smoothen the imperfections of wood.

Intrigued by what he had read, Rizal began to experiment with the bakhaw to see if it could become hard enough to carve and mold into particular shapes. According to Fr. Sanchez, after a few days, he received a rather triumphant note from his ex-pupil starting with “Eureka!,” claiming that he had discovered the formula for bakhaw paste.

This is how I did it, Rizal wrote, “with a knife I peeled the fruit and boiled the pulp until the water turned reddish and while it was still hot, I mashed the pulp, mixing it with a little lime water to make a water-resistant paste.” Significantly, at note, written with a pencil as he had ran out of ink, was dated 30 December 1892.

In a report to his superiors, Fr. Sanchez said Rizal made several sculptural studies using the bakhaw paste. He molded figurines, frames, tiles and observed that the bakhaw paste or masilla had three properties that made it ideal for tile roofing; it’s water resistant, fireproof and very light in weight. Their next project was about potable water.

2009-04-19T12:14:00.002+08:00

The Galleon Trade

2009-04-06T11:10:00.001+08:00

By Floro L. Mercene

April 5, 2009, 9:59pm

More than 40 years after Magellan set foot on the Philippines, Spain sent an expedition to formally settle the islands. The expedition led by Miguel Lopez de Legaspi, a businessman who made a fortune in Mexico, was composed of about 300 men, mostly Mexicans. It left the small town of Barra de Navidad in Jalisco in 1565 and landed in Cebu three months later. Legaspi later moved to Manila and founded it as a city in 1570.

While in Cebu, Legaspi sent the galleon San Pablo back to Mexico to obtain supplies. It was commanded by his grandson, Felipe Salcedo, with a famous navigator, Andres de Urdaneta, as second in command.

Under Urdaneta’s expert guidance, the San Pablo was able to reach Acapulco in a record 100 days, the first successful crossing of the Pacific Ocean from east to west.

The eastward route pioneered by Urdaneta was to serve as the basis for the establishment of a trade monopoly by Spain in what we now know as the galleon trade.

***
It was the oldest shipping line that ever existed, traveling over the longest and most dangerous ocean route, from Manila to the Mexican seaport of Acapulco, and lasting for almost 250 years, from 1575 to 1815.

Almost every year, two galleons left Manila for Mexico loaded with exotic goods from Asia, mostly from China and Japan, to be sold in Mexico and Europe and countries in South America, such as Chile and Peru.

The 'Araw ng Kagitingan' commemoration

2009-04-06T11:07:00.000+08:00

The Pacific War started on 08 December 1941 with the Japanese Imperial Forces and the United States Army Forces in the Far East (USAFFE). On January 1, 1942, major units of the United States Army Forces in the Philippines retreated to Bataan and Corregidor for a “last ditch stand” against invading Japanese, until assistance from the United States (which never came) shall arrive.

Meanwhile, the Fall of Bataan became inevitable because of continuous Japanese onslaughts. Twenty-seven days later, the citadel of Corregidor fell on May 6, 1942.

Three years of Japanese occupation ensued, during which, the Filipino-American forces gathered strength. The momentum of their combined effort culminated in the American Landings at Leyte on Oct. 20, 1944 and their subsequent return to Luzon on January 9, 1945.

Although most of the Philippine territories were already “liberated," many battles had yet to be fought in view of the tough resistance to the enemy. With the presence of General Tomoyuki Yamashita’s Shobu Army Group in Northern Luzon, the Battle of Bessang Pass became inevitable. The Pass, a key terrain, was the gateway to the Japanese Redoubt in the Mountain Province. On June 14, 1945, Bessang Pass was finally recovered by the Filipino forces, the USAFIP-NL.

As expected, these three epics in the fight for freedom and justice were immortalized in the memories of the Filipino people, immediately after the defeat of the enemy in Northern Luzon on Sept. 2, 1945. Many of those who participated in the epic battle began to work in commemorating the valor of those who participated in the last stand of Bataan, Corregifor and the Victory at Bessang Pass.

On April 9, 1946, the Fall of Bataan was commemorated in simple but meaningful rites, the Fall of Corregidor followed shortly on May 6, 1946. Eventually, the celebration of Bessang Pass Day on June 14, 1946 was capped by the putting up of a marker on the spot where victory was attained.

After thirty years of commemorating these three important historical events, it was decided to celebrate the events at Bataan, Corregidor and Bessang Pass into one memorable day. This led to the issuance of Letter of Instruction No. 1087 dated Nov. 26, 1980, displacing April 9 and every year thereafter, set as “Araw ng Kagitingan” honoring those who sacrificed for the defense of democracy and freedom. Executive Order No. 203 dated June 30, 1987, proclaimed April 9 of every year as “Araw Ng Kagitingan.”

In 1989, Pres. Corazon Aquino issued Proclamation No. 466 declaring the period from April 5 to April 11 of every year as Philippine Veterans Week with the view to promote, preserve, and memorialize the principles, ideals and deeds of the Filipino war veterans as a means to enhance patriotism and love of country, especially among the youth.

The long road to justice

2009-03-30T09:40:00.000+08:00

HUMMING IN MY UNIVERSE By Jim Paredes

Computer graphics by Rey Rivera

The recent surfacing of explosive affidavits pertaining to the Dacer-Corbito murders years ago has once again riveted us. Are people telling the truth? What about the so-called existing counter-affidavits? Can justice really be served? Really, now.

As a people, we are hungry for justice. Why? Because historically, we have been unsuccessful in seeing justice played out. Thus, we continue to distrust our justice system. One result of this is, as a society, we have failed in defining categorically who our villains are. Aguinaldo, Marcos, the Filipino collaborators during the Japanese occupation, just to name a few, have gotten off largely scot-free for the crimes they committed against their countrymen. Sometimes, I wonder why we continue to ask people to be heroes when we cannot even call the villains as they are.

Today, I would like to open an unsavory can of worms and list down cases of “unsolved” crimes and what to me are cases of undelivered justice that have plagued us and continue to warp our sense of identity, history and what we really profess to believe in as a people. We can’t get past what we cannot acknowledge. It may require a truth commission similar to what South Africa had to do to confront their apartheid past for us to move on as a people.

If I had a magic wand and could compel historical figures, both dead and alive, to tell the truth, I would certainly do so to finally put to rest certain questions that have bogged us down as a people. Here are just some people I would like to get the truth out of:

1) Emilio Aguinaldo — Historians tell us that he ordered the killing of the Supremo Andres Bonifacio and his brother, but he never categorically admitted to it. I remember a story told by one of my older sisters. Her history class was on an excursion in the house of Aguinaldo in Cavite in the ‘50s. The general was already old but still quite sprightly. He was walking the students around his house showing them mementos and other historical stuff when one of the students asked out loud and in all innocence if it was true that he had Bonifacio killed. The host was clearly caught off-guard. Emilio Aguinaldo became quiet for a few seconds before he replied, quite evasively, “History will tell the truth.”

2) World War II collaborators — I am not talking here of the small-town traitors who snitched on the guerrillas since they probably got their comeuppance from their own neighbors. I am talking here of the big ones that society still whispers about — from President Jose B. Laurel to Ninoy Aquino’s father and many other politicians, including possibly some of my own relatives. I would like to ask them whether, in their heart of hearts, they actually believed they were serving the Filipino people by sleeping with the enemy, so to speak. I ask this seriously, and not just for historical but also for moral, spiritual clarity.

In other countries, like France, Italy and others, people — big and small — who did what they did were summarily shot or hanged and condemned forever in history books. There was no ambiguity about how to treat such people, and this probably redounded to something good in terms of how these countries look at themselves and their history.

3) The Marcoses — To this day, the Marcoses admit to no theft, abuse, torture, unlawful deaths or murders, or any violation of any law. They also offer no remorse or apology. The courts have not delivered any justice. We have a deep national debt to pay, wounds that refuse to heal and justice not served thanks largely to our courts and our penchant as a people for forgetting, and administering cheap forgiveness. While the Marcoses may have staged a comeback into our national life, and though some quarters give them some respect, they are still considered low-lives by a large sector of our population.

If we had moved quickly right after EDSA and delivered swift justice, things would have turned out differently. I think we would have had a better chance at honest governance in the administrations that followed.

4) Joseph “Erap” Estrada — He was the only president ever convicted of plunder. His trial ran for six years and he was convicted beyond reasonable doubt. And yet, even before the verdict was handed down, many people in government — and to my big disappointment Mar Roxas himself — were already preparing resolutions to pardon him. It’s as if we are uncomfortable when someone from the political elite, the upper class, is found guilty.

5) Plaza Miranda — Marcos claimed it was the communists who did it. Ninoy claimed it was Marcos who ordered it. Curiously, some former Communist Party members claim it was CPP chairman Joma Sison himself who ordered the attack that almost decimated the Liberal Party in 1971. The case has never been resolved but it is important to know who the real perpetrators are so that we can know our own history.

6) Who killed Ninoy Aquino? — We may have brought to justice all 12 soldiers involved in escorting Ninoy to his death, but we have not found the mastermind. Some really prominent people have been mentioned in connection with this heinous crime but again, no direct proof has been presented and none will probably emerge. We still do not know whether or not they are innocent. It seems that, most of the time, accusations against prominent people fail to prosper in this country. Neither will the accusations ever be truthfully erased because our justice system, for the most part, seems incapable of doing anything that will be perceived to be aboveboard.

7) President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo — This woman alone elicits questions that could fill volumes. Throw in her family and our courts and historians will have their hands full. I leave that to them. But a simple question I want answered is what compelled her to say “sorry” for talking to a notorious Comelec operative while the counting of votes was going on after the presidential elections of 2004, even if she claims it was not her voice on the “Hello Garci” CD. What was that all about?

Because we are unable to find answers to the big questions, we have become obsessed with answering the trivial, unimportant ones. Is this why we love gossip shows? We live in a society where very little of what actually transpires can be truthfully verified. Everything is lost in a maze of denials, legalities, outright lies and obfuscations.

The poetess Adrienne Rich could have been describing the Philippines when she wrote, “False history gets made all day, any day; the truth of the new is never on the news.”

Thus, our moral compass is defective. We elect people in spite of our knowledge or suspicion that many of them are plunderers, coup plotters, murderers, genuine low-lives. A history of failed justice has crippled our judgment.

In contrast, just last week, a well-known and respected national figure in Australia by the name of Judge Einfeld was found out to have lied about a traffic ticket that would have cost him 75 Australian dollars and some demerit points. Because of his perjury, he was sentenced to serve two years in jail and stripped of his license and perks for the rest of his life. His proud family was reduced to pleading before a TV audience that the justice be spared for all the good things that he has done for society. I sat watching all this in disbelief.

In our society where no one admits to any wrongdoing, much less apologizes, it’s a long, hard road we must still travel to get to where we want to go.

Afghanistan: New tactics, same strategy?

2009-03-25T15:20:00.000+08:00

By Paul Reynolds
World affairs correspondent BBC News website

Can more US troops help improve life for Afghans?

The new "strategy" under consideration by the Obama administration might end up being a repackaging of elements that have been tried before.

Some of old Afghan hands tend to think that the new team is coming in painting as dark a picture as it can in order to show how well they can do.

"The strategy is not going to change in real terms," said one such former Western official. This is the concept of the three-legged stool - security, development and governance. It's called the 'comprehensive' or 'integrated approach' and it has been applied since 2002.

"It's saying that everything needs to work in a synergistic way. That is not going to change, it can't change, everyone knows that, it is classic and fundamental.

The issue is not one of strategy, it is one of implementation

Former Western official

US envoy weighs Afghan challenge

"Nobody has ever said you can defeat the Taleban by military means alone. Richard Holbrooke [the new US envoy to the region] talks as if we have been trying to do that.

"That's not to say it is going well. But the issue is not one of strategy, it is one of implementation. And military force is going to be a big element in the new package anyway, with 17,000 extra US troops being sent, some around Kabul but many to the south where the Taleban is making its main effort."

"Before, the US was undertaking an economy of force operation. In Iraq it did what it had to do. In Afghanistan it did what it could do. It needs more men to implement the four principles of its counter-insurgency strategy - shaping the battlefield, clearing the ground, holding the ground and rebuilding the communities. It has not been able to hold the ground sufficiently."

Way forward

So how are the elements likely to be repackaged?

The role of Afghan forces in providing security will be vital

• First, the increase in troops should enable the US and Nato to search more easily for the Taleban on the ground and at the same time maintain a visible presence in the towns, which is regarded as vital in showing the population that the forces can protect them.

• Second, there will be a new emphasis on training the Afghan army and building up the police. Nobody thinks that foreign troops can win this war by themselves.

• Third, what has previously been called reconciliation will be pressed, though in what ways remain unclear. This is an attempt to wean more moderate elements away from the Taleban.

Obama does not mean retreat, he means success - even if at the same time he is downgrading the definition of success

One idea is to pay them, something that reportedly has led to strong disagreements in Washington. This would build on the idea that many of the fighters are there not out ideology but of necessity.

David Kilcullen, the Australian counter-insurgency expert who advised the Bush administration, calls them "accidental guerrillas".

• Fourth, a renewed effort to deal with the Taleban's safe havens in Pakistan. However, this is not a new policy either. Richard Holbrooke has spoken of a comprehensive strategy for both Afghanistan and Pakistan but if the Pakistani army cannot do the job, then the solution will remain as elusive as ever.

• Fifth, better governance. There is talk of a new prime ministerial figure in the government to counterbalance President Karzai. The Afghan constitution gives considerable power to the centre but that power might also need to be devolved to give local governors more control.

• Sixth, more development. There could be another attempt to co-ordinate the military and civilian sides better (always difficult as foreign aid groups are suspicious of the military).

What is success?

President Obama himself has said that the US needs an "exit" strategy.

By that, he does not mean retreat, he means success - even if at the same time he is downgrading the definition of success.

He refers to the US aim as one of preventing al-Qaeda from using Afghanistan to mount attacks on the US again, a shift away from the Bush aim of developing a workable democracy in Afghanistan.

"It's going to be a long, abrasive effort," said the former official.

Countering a changing terror threat

2009-03-25T15:19:00.000+08:00

By Gordon Corera
BBC Security Correspondent

The strategy looks more at dealing with unconventional attacks

The UK's strategy for countering international terrorism is a reworking rather than a fundamental overhaul of the existing framework known as Contest.

The document does though contain a far more detailed analysis of where the threat has come from, why it has changed and where it may go in the future.

Officials say it is unprecedented to place this much analysis in the public domain.

The strategy argues that al-Qaeda as an organisation is likely to fragment and may not survive in its current form.

However its ideology and the factors that sustain terrorism will persist -leading the threat to mutate, with a greater role for self-starting groups.

New technology

Additionally, there are fears that terrorist organisations may have access to new technology and so become capable of conducting more lethal operations.

Terrorist groups have long sought to use unconventional weapons - biological, chemical, nuclear and radiological - but it is now feared that greater availability of technology coupled with problems like theft and smuggling means they are more likely to be able to get their hands on what they have been seeking.

As a result, the focus on dealing with unconventional attacks has been upgraded from the previous strategy (coming closer to the US pre-occupation with this particular danger).

More is also written about the enablers for terrorism. Much has been said about radicalisation and why individuals turn to violence, but the authors of the report have sought not to lose sight of the bigger issue of what makes terrorist groups as a whole thrive - such as conflicts, failing states and ideological trends.

Pakistan connection

The international context also receives more attention than in the past, with sections on Pakistan and Afghanistan and on the relationship between counter-terrorism and counter-insurgency.

This is a clear recognition that since the majority of UK terrorist plotting has some connection to Pakistan, improving co-operation and communication with both the government in Islamabad and the population in Pakistan will be vital to combating terrorism within the UK.

The 2012 Olympics also now looms large in the mind of counter-terrorist officials with an awareness that counter-terrorism is going to have to be integrated in a vast security operation not just in London, but other parts of the country which will be involved in staging aspects of the games.

There had been speculation that the government might take a more aggressive line in the new strategy but that does not appear to be the case

Dirty bomb threat 'increased'

Making sure that delivery of the strategy filters down to the local level by working with the right people is one recurring theme.

The strategy covers four main areas of work known as 'the Four Ps' - Pursue, Prevent, Protect and Prepare.

The most sensitive part of the strategy relates to Prevent - which aims to deal with radicalisation. There has been considerable debate and often argument both inside and outside government over which groups should be engaged with and funded as part of this work.

Some argue that groups whose views are often distasteful to the majority of the population need to be dealt with since they have the capacity to reach individuals vulnerable to radicalisation. Others say that doing so legitimises and supports them and risks undermining community cohesion.

There had been speculation that the government might take a more aggressive line in the new strategy, but that does not appear to be the case and the agenda largely seems to have been tweaked with some new projects and a greater focus on the internet.

There is talk of doing more to challenge non-violent, extremist ideology and promoting shared values like democracy, tolerance and human rights. Exactly how this will work in practice though, remains unclear.

The hunt for the last Nazis

2009-03-25T15:17:00.000+08:00

By Mario Cacciottolo
BBC News

Serge Klarsfeld does not look like someone who would put a gun to a man's head.

This avuncular 73-year-old is the epitome of politeness in his large office, with a photocopier whirring in the corner, brightly coloured document folders stuffed in many shelves, and cats tiptoeing over papers and desks.

But once, in 1973, Mr Klarsfeld, brandished a pistol in the street at a former World War II Nazi - Kurt Lischka, wartime Gestapo chief for Jewish affairs in France who was living comfortably in Cologne.

This was just one of many dramatic moments in the life of Mr Klarsfeld and his wife Beate, who have carried out a battle over almost 40 years to seek justice for the Nazis' victims in France.

All my troubles in the past started when Madame Klarsfeld came to Bolivia

Klaus Barbie, convicted Nazi

This battle is now over, because either all those linked to the crimes are dead, or, the Klarsfelds say, there is not enough evidence to prove their guilt in court.

Mr and Mrs Klarsfeld had already failed in a previous attempt to kidnap Lischka, who was instrumental in planning the deportation and subsequent murder of thousands of French Jews and other "enemies" of the Third Reich.

Mr Klarsfeld's ploy with the gun was designed to persuade the West German government, which had been refusing all calls to prosecute Lischka, to think again.

"I went to Cologne and approached Lischka in the street. I put a gun to his forehead - he had a gun himself, but he just threw up his hands. The eyes of a man are terrible when he thinks he's going to die.

PURSUED BY THE KLARSFELDS

Kurt Lischka: Responsible for deportations to concentration camps, jailed for 10 years

Klaus Barbie: 'Butcher of Lyon', sentenced to life imprisonment for crimes against humanity

Maurice Papon: Sentenced to 10 years in jail for helping send more than 1,600 French Jews to die in concentration camps

Paul Touvier: Former aide to Klaus Barbie, executed seven Jews, convicted of crimes against humanity and jailed for life

Alois Brunner: Sent tens of thousands of Jews to their deaths, convicted in absentia in 2001 and sentenced to life imprisonment, last seen in Syria and considered likely to be dead

"I didn't shoot, and escaped, and then wrote to the West German government to say that if they did not deal with this man, then we could. We told them to do their duty and apply the law."

That did not happen right away, and instead a warrant was issued for both the Klarsfelds' arrest. But Lischka was eventually tried and convicted, in Cologne in 1980, receiving a 10-year prison sentence.

Mr Klarsfeld's wife Beate, 70, explains there were not actually any bullets in her husband's revolver.

The daughter of a German soldier, she left Germany in 1960 and married Serge in Paris in 1963, becoming a famed pursuer of Nazis in her own right.

Confronting the past

The couple's comfortable offices, in Paris's eighth arrondissement, are covered with documents and books on the Holocaust - they are piled on chairs, tables and floors.

Mr Klarsfeld explains that when they began to realise in the 1960s that former Nazis leading respectable lives in German society, as judges, politicians and businessmen, then "this was something that we could not stand".

Beate and Serge Klarsfeld have dedicated their lives to pursuing Nazis

And so the couple dedicated their lives to the pursuit and the prosecution of former Nazis, by what they describe as both "legal and illegal" measures, forcing French people to confront the truth of their compatriots' widespread complicity in Nazi crimes.

Mrs Klarsfeld said the couple were not Nazi hunters, "because we didn't have to hunt them, we knew where they were, living openly". A lack of political will meant prosecutions of Nazis had dried up.

"In France we changed the memory of the Vichy government, showed up the crimes of the Vichy, like deporting children from France," he said.

"We did it by providing information and research on how the Vichy co-operated with the Nazis. We were involved in the prosecutions of collaborators like Maurice Papon and Paul Touvier.

"The French population forgot what had happened. In 1970 the French public thought those who were arrested in our country were arrested by the Germans, but we showed that most often it was by those in French uniforms."

Making history

Most famously, Mrs Klarsfeld, a German from a Christian background, publicly slapped the West German Chancellor Kurt-George Kiesinger in 1968, because of his former role as director of Nazi propaganda broadcasting, a blow that resonated around Europe and that helped bring about Kiesinger's fall from power.

That slap is still discussed in German schools today, such was its significance.

Mrs Klarsfeld in particular has carried out protests over former Nazis and anti-Semitism in countries such as the former West Germany, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Chile and Syria, mostly leading to arrests and frequently deportation.

You have to have documentary evidence that you can use in court, and there no longer is any such evidence available on anyone still alive, in France at least

Serge Klarsfeld

"I knew I had to go wherever the people were suffering," Mrs Klarsfeld said. "Sure, it could be dangerous. But if you really want to do something with your life, you have to do more than just speak."

The couple also tracked down the infamous Nazi Klaus Barbie, member of the Gestapo and known as the Butcher of Lyon. There is evidence Barbie personally tortured prisoners and was blamed for 4,000 deaths and a further 7,500 deportations during the war.

The Klarsfelds found Barbie in Bolivia and helped organise his extradition in 1983, after first conspiring to kidnap him. Mr Klarsfeld legally represented more than 120 of Barbie's torture victims.

Barbie was sentenced to life imprisonment for crimes against humanity in 1987, and died in prison in 1991. On his first court appearance he said: "All my troubles in the past started when Madame Klarsfeld came to Bolivia."

The Klarsfelds stopped looking for Nazis themselves after a trial in absentia of Alois Brunner in 2001 in Paris, which they had pressed for and in which they presented evidence. Brunner was sentenced to life imprisonment.

Brunner is the former head of an Austrian SS anti-Jewish team, and the man whose orders led to Mr Klarsfeld's father being gassed in Auschwitz in 1943.

Although Brunner could still be alive - he was once sighted in Syria - he would be almost 97 and both the Klarsfelds believe that he is long dead.

"He was ill and had been sent two letter bombs, which blinded him in one eye and took off most of his fingers on one hand - he undoubtedly died a long time ago," Mr Klarsfeld said.

Nor do the Klarsfelds expect to be dealing with any further cases of Nazi war criminals.

"You have to have documentary evidence that you can use in court, and there no longer is any such evidence available on anyone still alive, in France at least," Mr Klarsfeld said.

'People like us'

He says he always kept an emotional distance from the people he was pursuing. He didn't hate them.

"After all, they were people like us. We spoke with some of them. They like animals, we like animals, for example.

"But we never met anyone who had changed, never met a former Nazi who showed remorse. They were only interested in their own situation and that of their family.

The Klarsfelds tracked Klaus Barbie down to Bolivia

"I never felt frustrated if a Nazi died before we could bring him to trial. I cannot wish these people a long life."

Mrs Klarsfeld, however, takes a different view.

"You can hate them. If you look at the documents, look at what they've done, and how they've never show remorse. Awful, awful."

These days the Klarsfelds are busy with many projects - Mr Klarsfeld runs an organisation called the Sons and Daughters of Jews Deported from France, and has published several volumes of a book which catalogues the names, ages and addresses of French children deported in the war.

As a result of their efforts, the Klarsfelds themselves have been arrested, deported, beaten, had two attempts made on their lives and even been put on trial, but they have also been showered with international honours.

Among many other awards, both were given the Legion of Honour by France in 1984. Mr Klarsfeld has also been awarded full Israeli citizenship.

"Having left Germany when I was young, I couldn't have dreamed one day to be what I am today," Mrs Klarsfeld said.

"We tried to do quite a lot. We acted very often illegally, but our illegality is nothing compared with the people we had in front of us."

278th Birth Anniversary of Gabriela Silang

2009-03-19T12:56:00.000+08:00

March 18, 2009, 11:38pm

THE inhabitants of the Philippines, even before the coming of the Spaniards, were "fierce lovers of freedom and enemy to subjection." The couple Diego and Gabriela Silang exemplified this libertarian trait. They are among the most important personages in the history of Filipino struggle for freedom. They helped lay the foundations of the Filipino nation.

Gabriela Silang was born in Caniogan, Santa, Ilocos Sur. Adopted while a young girl by the wealthy Don Tomas Milan, she married an elderly but wealthy man. Widowed three years later, she remarried in 1757 to Diego Silang, a man obsessed with libertarian ideals. In 1762, Diego Silang launched his nationalist rebellion. Treachery, however, ended his quest. His friends Miguel Vicos and Pedro Becbec, bribed by the civil and religious authorities, assassinated Diego Silang in 1763.

Gabriela Silang was undaunted by the death of her husband. She carried on his struggle. In the battle at Vigan on September 10, 1763, she and her revolutionary forces were defeated. Captured with several of her officers, she was executed at the plaza of Vigan, Ilocos Sur, on December 29, 1763.

The Silang Rebellion was a milestone in the Filipino struggle to end foreign rule in the country. Their efforts to unify the various ethnic groups in Luzon predated the Philippine revolutionary leaders’ call for national unity. The measures implemented by Diego and Gabriela Silang to curtail the extra-religious activities of the friars heralded the end of the union of Church and State in the Philippines. In these efforts, Diego and Gabriela Silang were Filipino rather than simply Ilocano. They showed that tribal or ethnic loyalties could be subsumed to a national unifying identity for all the Philippine inhabitants.

Historians honored Gabriela Silang in their accounts of the rebellion. They called her the "First Filipina Freedom Fighter" and the "Joan of Arc of Ilocandia." Ilocos Sur’s provincial officials named the provincial hospital in her honor. And in 1984, advocates of women empowerment established a non-government organization and named it after her. Indeed, as one American colonial official remarked, the "best men in the Philippines were the women," Doña Gabriela Silang is a concrete example.

‘Philippinitis’

2009-03-19T12:47:00.002+08:00

By Gemma Cruz Araneta

March 18, 2009, 11:27pm

SOONER than later, American colonial administrators began to feel extreme nervousness and fatigue, an alarming lack of concentration and unusual forgetfulness. Mysteriously, their mental apparatus, considered superior to that of colored races, was vulnerable to heady tropical climes.

While benevolently civilizing and Christianizing their "newly caught anthropoids" (read Filipinos) and planting the seeds of democratic and republican virtues these hardy white bureaucrats felt a weakening of mind and morale, once "displaced" to tropical Philippines.

Who would have imagined a Harvard football hero like Governor-General W. Cameron Forbes scribbling in his personal journal from a sickbed "I had worked my head until I had what they call brain-fag." At the end of his term, after nearly fourteen years in the tropics, he felt absolutely worn-out. Dr. Percy Ashburn of the Army Board for the Study of Tropical Diseases affirmed that white men and women "go to pieces and become neurasthenic in the Philippine Islands."

"Philippinitis" was actually a dreaded disease that afflicted white Americans and its symptoms included forgetfulness, with the patient unable to recall things that happened only within a few hours, fatigue described as a "depletion of nerve force" and frazzled nerves. As early as 1867, Neurologist George M. Beard concluded that Anglo-Saxons and non-Catholics were most susceptible to neurasthenia, "philippinitis" or "brain-fag," even in the prime of life.

David P. Barrows, once head of the Bureau of Education wrote in his diary after three years in the Philippines: "In my office work, my dictating is now halting, confused and badly put together – a great change from say 1903-4-5 …This is in part due to the nervousness which assails me at my work and sometimes makes clear thinking and expression almost impossible for me."

For his part, Herbert I. Priestly, a teacher at Nueva Caceres ( now Naga City) Win 1902, was reported to have said: "I am worn thin, and my nerves are a little out of gear from the climate but I believe that if I hadn’t been so foolish as to wear nainsook and cotton I wouldn’t have felt my nerves so much." He complained of "morbid spells" and a "sensitive temperament" from which he could not recover despite bromides and bicycle rides. For health reasons, he was repatriated after a year.

Soon after the Philippine-American War, it became evident that the Philippine climate was taking its toll on the new conquerors because humidity prevented free evaporation of perspiration , "forcing the white organism to reduce its production of heat in order to maintain a physiological equilibrium." As a result of this loss of energy, mental faculties suffer "a diminution of capacity for intellectual labor, an inability to do work requiring continued concentration." I suppose, "philippinitis" or "brain-fag" was easily and permanently eradicated with the invention of air-conditioning.

Aerials from Manila's urban past

2009-03-14T10:25:00.000+08:00

CITY SENSE By Paulo Alcazaren

The old Congress building was rebuilt after its destruction in the Liberation of Manila. It is now the National Museum.

Last week I featured ads from the 1960s. This week we go back to the past — 60 years in the past, that is. Not to look at advertisements or illusions of what could be, but at the reality of what Manila and its suburbs were in the long recovery from the damage of the Second World War.

The pictures are from another of my old prized copies of the Sunday Times Magazine dated August 1949. The reason I procured this particular copy was for the priceless aerial photographs of Manila and its surrounding landmarks.

Another reason why I love old publications is the quality of the writing back then; not that we don’t have good writers today, but back then, writing, even for weekly magazines, took a very literary bent.

The introduction to the series of aerial images entitled “Manila from the Air” is a good example of Filipino writers’ way with words then:

“A pedestrian walking the streets of Manila will seldom pause to appreciate the sights around him and, rather than give a second look at a new edifice that has risen above some ruins or what new patterns have been shaped on a plot of city ground, would hurry to his office or appointment. For one thing, the closeness inspires no unfamiliar perspective, and the angle from which he sees them has long become but a straight-backed routine that whips them into line, as it were, disrobing them of whatever novelty they once had.”

The article credits the pictures to an intrepid photographer named Pedro F. Aquino Jr., who took the pictures from a single-engine Philippine Air Force plane piloted in three flights by Lt. Godofredo Fernandez, Capt. Victoriano Bautista and Master Sergeant Brigoli.

Aquino took the pictures using a Leica 3C, a classic 35mm rangefinder camera. Built like a tank, the camera was a favorite of famous photographers like Henri Cartier-Bresson. From the looks of the pictures, Aquino probably had on a Summitar f2/50 mm lens. If the pictures were more vignetted he would have been using a Hektor 28mm f6.3. (This is just for you camera collectors and enthusiasts out there.)

The first picture is that of the Manila Post Office with the Escolta skyline in the background. Designed by Juan Arellano and completed in 1931, the Neoclassic masterpiece was heavily damaged in the battle for Manila. It was quickly rebuilt afterwards since post-war communications depended on mail. Cable and radio links were tenuous and all important dispatches had to be sent by sea.

On the opposite page was the UP Diliman campus. The facility had only two major buildings built right before the war, the education and nursing (now the College of Law) buildings both also designed by Juan Arellano. The campus was commandeered by the US Army until 1949, which explains all the Quonset huts in the picture.

Other pictures include one of Binondo, Manila’s old central business district, on the north side of the Pasig River. In the picture are the still extant landmarks of El Hogar and the National City Bank of New York (later FNCB), as well as the tallest pre-war headquarters building of La Insular on Plaza Cervantes (now known as Insular Life, which has since then moved twice, to Makati and then to Alabang).

There’s an interesting picture of the old Philippine Legislative Building (Congress) being reconstructed with the Philippine Normal School (now PNC) and the Art Deco Jai Alai building in the background. The Jai Alai was lost to the wrecking ball 10 years ago and the old Congress building is now the National Museum.

Postwar traffic at its worst is shown in a picture of Plaza Miranda, which was closed for political rallies. The country’s first pedestrian bridge, a wooden one, is seen at the top of the image, crossing Quezon Avenue, the busiest city road next to Avenida Rizal.

A nearby district is shown with the FEU campus as the focus. The buildings were designed by architect Pablo Antonio Sr., whose Art Deco creations should be designated as part of our national built heritage. It is still one of the greenest campuses in the district.

Flying southeast, Aquino photographed the Sta. Ana Racetrack. Nearby, but not captured on film, was the world-famous Sta. Ana Cabaret, the largest dancehall in the world at one time. Today the racetrack is one of the largest open areas left in the city and targeted for redevelopment (like the San Lazaro course). We’ll have to wait for the next construction boom, though.

Other landmarks are featured. North of Manila was the pre-war gateway with the Bonifacio monument. The grand rotunda is one of the only appropriate settings in the metropolis for monuments even to this day. Guillermo Tolentino’s masterpiece (designed with the help of architect Serafin de Lara) marks the vehicular entry into Manila from points north. I wonder if the planned LRT to MRT connection will respect this old landmark, or mess it up like much of what our recent inelegant city infrastructure has done.

The Grace Park airfield was nearby but closed after the war to be redeveloped into a residential subdivision. Also lost in the area after the war was a golf course and what was to be the new Ateneo campus. The Jesuits opted for Loyola, leaving the MCU to take its place.

Also at the edge of Manila was the Quezon Institute. The QI was located on España Extension, considered the outer fringe east of Manila. They had to locate the tuberculosis hospital in the clean air and undeveloped fields of the area. Today the QI is still there but in the middle of a highly urbanized area. We should lobby to keep all its green open spaces green and open.

Finally, we go back to the bay and the first landmark that most people saw when arriving in Manila. The Manila Hotel’s silhouette greeted millions until travel shifted to jetliners. To this day, the hotel stands as an iconic Manila landmark.

The north harbor and Luneta districts, as well as Intramuros, need an integrated master plan, though. All around the world, waterfronts have been redeveloped to stage cities’ urban and economic renewals. It would be timely to embark on an ambitious plan for this district now. The current economic slowdown is a lull we can use to redo and rebuild our old historic centers, both to pump up the economy and to recover the urbanity we lost before the war.

These aerials, from 60 years ago, give us a perspective of the past. It makes us take a step back and have a larger view of the way we shape our cities, create our landmarks and physically frame all our endeavors.

We should realize from images like these that we need to rationalize our metropolis’ evolution. First, to acknowledge our historic past via the conservation of our architectural legacy, and second, to make sure that any future way of building structures and districts is environmentally and socially sustainable. All this is needed to be able to create a Metro Manila that will recover its sense of place, rediscover its economic and cultural vibrancy and, most importantly, to make all future residents proud to be a Manileño.

Magsaysay: An earnest look at a legend

2009-03-10T14:51:00.000+08:00

By F Sionil Jose

When Eugenia Duran Apostol received the Magsaysay Award for Journalism last week, she made public for the first time what many in my generation believed – that the plane crash in March 1957 which killed President Ramon Magsaysay was no accident. The plane was bombed.

Nestor Mata, the journalist, now columnist of Malaya, was the only survivor. But as he said, he was asleep and when he regained consciousness, he was on the ground, severely burned.

When Magsaysay campaigned for the presidency in 1955, he was mobbed by everyone. When he died, people in the streets wept.

The presidential plane, a C-47, was an old reliable in World War II craft – so sturdy it continued to be used during the Vietnam War, into the ’70s. The pilot of the plane, Colonel Ebuen, was one of the Air Force’s best. An accident was unlikely.

Who could have planted the bomb? To those of us who knew Magsaysay, there was only one credible suspect – the oligarchy which was fearful that Magsaysay would seize power and destroy them. Twenty years later, Ferdinand Marcos did just that. Like Magsaysay, he was Ilokano but the wrong Ilokano and, worse, the wrong leader as well.

Was Magsaysay planning on a long tenure to change the country’s political structure? For sure, he would have easily won a second term; for sure, too, he was fed up with an entrenched oligarchy that obstructed his pro-masa program.

This was never explicit, for who could know what Magsaysay’s political plans were? One thing is sure – he had the support of the US government, which was willing to fund the sweeping land reform program that he wanted – a program which he could not push through a Congress then dominated by landlords.

How to explain Magsaysay’s bonding with the masa?

Magsaysay’s guerrilla days during the Japanese Occupation exposed him to the harsh realities of peasant life; he had personal relationships with the peasantry who supported the guerrillas. It was with this experience that he also felt kinship with the Huks who were, during the Japanese Occupation, the largest and best organized of all the guerrillas fighting the Japanese but were demonized by the government and the Americans at the end of the war when the Cold War between a communist Russia and the United States started.

Ninoy Aquino, a Magsaysay follower, was responsible for bringing Luis Taruc, the Huk leader, to the government fold.

Taruc would not have been imprisoned if Magsaysay had his way but he was dependent on American assistance and couldn’t resist the pressure from them. He knew well enough that a country, battered by World War II, cannot recover from that damage without American assistance. He also had the promise of the Americans that they would help him push through agrarian reform.

His sympathy for the masses, for the Huks, was genuine. As he said, "Ricricnaec ti ricricnaen da." (I feel what they feel.)

At the time, he already knew the basic economic difficulties of the country, the monopolies that were protected by government, the evils of landlordism. The elites had a real but unspoken fear of him. Claro M. Recto opposed agrarian reform not because of principle, but because, in his own words, "Yung mangmang na iyan, ninakaw niya ang pagka presidente sa akin (That ignoramus stole the presidency from me)." And Lorenzo Tañada opposed agrarian reform because he was himself a wealthy landlord.

These two nationalist icons had a strong influence on the direction of foreign policy.

Magsaysay despised them not so much because they opposed him but because their nationalism had no relevance to the masa.

The late Manny Manahan, one of Magsaysay’s trusted men, vouched for Magsaysay’s granite integrity. It was incredible that it was "elitists" such as Manahan, Emmanuel Pelaez, Jose W. Diokno and Raul Manglapus who supported Magsaysay’s land reform agenda.

As Manny Manahan recounts, Magsaysay had asked him to go to Castillejos to attend his birthday party. Magsaysay gathered his whole clan, including his aged father. And in their presence, Magsaysay told Manahan, "These are my relatives. Look at them, recognize them all. And if there is ever any one of them who commits dishonesty, jail him…"

Manny Manahan, recounting that incident, said he was never so embarrassed in his life.

Magsaysay was no angel; he had his faults. He was impatient, impetuous, but he was quick to rectify mistakes before they did more harm. I fault him for having pampered media, bestowing privileges, lucrative jobs in government to journalists. No President did this. But no President got the same mileage, either; he deserved those hosannas for the transparency and the fresh air he brought to stuffy offices like Malacañang which, in his time, was open to the public unlike the forbidding fortress that it became under Marcos – and on to this day.

Magsaysay died poor. He did not take advantage of the tremendous power of the presidency as so many of our leaders had done. His family had no house to go to when they left Malacañang. The real estate owner, Francisco Ortigas, donated a lot for Magsaysay in Mandaluyong. Each of the stevedores in the piers donated a tile for the roof of the house.

Fortunately for the Magsaysay children, they were enterprising and were able to provide for themselves.

There are still Filipinos – in their eighties and seventies – who knew Magsaysay personally, who heard him articulate his vision. Among them is the publisher of this newspaper, Max Soliven. Nestor Mata, the only survivor of that plane crash on Mt. Manunggal, retired Army officers, and one of his closest friends, Frisco San Juan.

They would tell, for instance, the officials of the Ramon Magsaysay Foundation – the agency tasked to commemorate his name – that Magsaysay would turn in his grave if he found out that members of the oligarchy were among its board of trustees.

Magsaysay left several important legacies. After him, it was no longer possible for any candidate to run for the presidency without going to the people. Until Magsaysay came, politicians just appealed to their leaders in the provinces to campaign for them.

He left an Armed Forces that was disciplined, aware of its duties, but Marcos destroyed this legacy when he politicized and Ilokanized the Armed Forces – something which Magsaysay, an Ilokano, never did.

He recognized the rural areas as the core of a progressive and democratic Philippines. He emphasized community development and land reform. He opened up areas in Mindanao and Luzon. In the Fifties, there were still available lands for resettlement.

Conrado Estrella, a longtime ally of Magsaysay since he was a small-town mayor, served under several presidents. When asked by the foreign correspondent Robert Shaplen whom he thought was the best president ever, because he was Marcos’ longest serving agrarian reform secretary, I was wondering if he would give Marcos that honor.

"Magsaysay," he said without a second thought.

An army to serve the people

2009-03-09T20:09:00.001+08:00

By F Sionil Jose

The army is never a good master — it is always a good servant. — Horacio dela Costa, SJ

Every so often, particularly when the newspapers scream about corruption in the highest places and replay the tragic encounters with the NPA and Moro rebels, what comes to mind is no other than Ramon Magsaysay — how come there isn’t a single Filipino leader today who has surfaced to follow his lead?

Any politician who aspires to lead this fractured nation should bear in mind that he must have a real power base from which to rule and be obeyed.

What will this power be? The bureaucracy? It is unwieldy, lazy, undisciplined, bloated and inefficient.

The masa? It is erratic and too easily manipulated by charlatans and ignoramus movie stars turned politicians.

The Church? As Stalin asked, how many divisions has the pope?

Big business? Most businessmen have only one aim — to get richer. Avarice motivates business. Its logic is profit while the logic of government is service.

What, then, is the best power base for a Filipino leader? The army. First, it is an excellent servant. And it is the only institution that can hold this country together before the threat of explosion or implosion.

To build a power base in the army, then, is a leader’s imperative. But that leader, like Magsaysay, must set the example of discipline and rectitude to be credible. Then the soldiers will follow. More than this, they will be united. Their morale will be high. They themselves will clean up their own ranks.

First on the agenda is reform. As in media or the bureaucracy, men in uniform know who among them is upright; they also know of the jockeying for promotion, the racketeering and the stealing that afflict the enlisted men the most. But that bonding in the military academy now binds them in corruption as well, and besides, good servants seldom snitch on one another. It is for this reason that a forceful commander-in-chief — and that is no less than the president — must set the example if the Armed Forces is to be a good fighting machine and a disciplined institution as well.

With the army as the real power base, the state will then have strong coercive power to push through a clean government. With all those brilliant officers, graduates mostly of the Philippine Military Academy, government can formulate a plan to defang both the NPA and Moro rebellions and give the country real peace and security — the basic conditions necessary for economic development. A strong state will then create equally strong institutions which, in turn, will make for a strong people out of apathetic and undisciplined Filipinos used to the mindless anarchy of the jungle.

Just think back to the first days of martial law when Filipinos obeyed. The simple truth is that most Filipinos do not really care much about their freedoms; they want security, first and foremost, and with it, all those primary necessities taken for granted in the West but which are so lacking in this country that is a colony of its own elite.

But what is the reality today? Many graduates of the Philippine Military Academy, now turned politicians, bureaucrats or businessmen, glibly talk about virtue and government with such sincere, ringing clarity. These same men have grown flabby and remorseless in their pursuit of lucre. What has happened to them? To the code of conduct which they imbibed in the academy? Why have they become so hypocritical?

So Marcos let the military out of its barracks. So the army today is politicized, fractured and in disarray because of the manipulation of politicians.

That the army is out of the barracks, and even politicized, is not altogether bad. In fact, it is good that it is imbued with practical knowledge of how politicians can dislocate national security through their pursuit of their motives. It is not good for the military to be insulated from the push and pull of the political process, sensitive to the modernization process.

One of the most efficient armies in the world, that of Israel, is a citizen army that can be called to duty within a moment’s notice. So is the Swiss army. And of course, the most technologically advanced army in the world, continuously in confrontation in all sorts of wars — the United States National Guard. It has never been in the barracks. And American officers, as we can see, became politicians, statesmen to name just a few — George Marshall, Dwight D. Eisenhower, Colin Powell — they did not shun political life.

Two kinds of officers graduate from the Philippine Military Academy — those whose fathers and relatives were graduates of the academy themselves, and the remaining majority: bright young men and women who have no access to the elite schools but who are brilliant enough to pass the rigid PMA entrance examinations. This disciplined training must not be wasted by politicians; it must be zealously maintained and guarded so that the PMA’s stature as a first-class institution is protected, and so that the loyalty of graduates is not to their class, their mistahs with whom they share so much camaraderie and bonding, but to the nation and its constitution.

Sometime back, I got a letter from a PMA cadet who doubted the military’s capacity to deliver this country from the termites that were nibbling at its fragile foundations.

I urged him not leave the academy for the army needed men of integrity and idealism, which brings us to those noisy young officers and their involvement in coup plots and what else.

Senator Antonio Trillanes, for instance, should know that those 11 million votes for him were not for him as a soldier. What does he know of government and how it should be run? Even as a soldier he has not been exposed to the gory stress of the battlefield. What tests of courage and strategic frontline decision-making has he passed?

He should understand that that vote was for the idealism of the young, an expression of opposition to President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo and the corruption that swirls around her.

If Trillanes and the other young officers understood this, then they would be more humble in their approach to the problems of the country. They would be less arrogant in their thinking that, perhaps, only they have the light and the right to lead.

This is no argument for a dictatorship; rather, it is a plea for that kind of firm leadership that Washington Sycip espouses (an article on that interview is forthcoming). Such leadership will also eschew the violence that a revolution may entail. And this revolution is waiting in the wings.

Which brings us to an exemplar soldier, Gen. Jose T. Almonte. He has put his writings and speeches together in a thoughtful book, To Put Our House In Order, We Must Level The Playing Field. As éminence grise of President Fidel Ramos — himself a graduate of West Point — General Almonte held real power. The presidency of General Ramos was the best to come after the Marcos debacle. For one thing, he reversed the hobbling incompetence of the Cory regime, the power outages, the coup attempts, and the general disarray of that government which promised so much and did so little.

But in the six years of the Ramos government, with all that power at its command, it failed to turn the country around.

Reading General Almonte, we can see glimpses of the reasons why.

The intentions of both military men were impeccable but they behaved like traditional politicians: they did not use the military as Magsaysay did.

Again, the basics: to modernize — meaning to industrialize — begins with capital. How can it be amassed and built when the government failed to coerce or convince the oligarchs to keep their money at home? Maybe it couldn’t because this oligarchy is not a modernizing elite. It is composed mostly of conservative, feudal seguristas. Its origins are in colonialism — most were its agents, and therefore, imbued with the attributes of the colonizer, which explains its siphoning of loot out of the country. This elite has no loyalty to this country, which it regards as a colony.

Both generals know this. On one occasion, a few years ago when he was no longer in Malacañang, President Ramos did excoriate the Makati businessmen, told them to their faces that they were the culprits behind our poverty and backwardness. Why didn’t he do this in the beginning of his term? Why didn’t he diminish the hemorrhage of capital?

General Almonte’s political analysis of the power structure is very sound; he recognizes the elements that make for a strong state and those which inhibit its development. An interesting insight is his conclusion that self-doubt among Filipino elite turned the nationalist spirit inward; and from this assumption, he correctly deduces that Filipinos must undergo tremendous inward change, for the greatest obstacle to modernization is ourselves.

But this is where leadership becomes crucial and it is leadership that has failed to recognize the necessity of coercive force which can emanate only from a strong state — as he puts it — with its base, not so much in the democratic ethos, but in a disciplined army molded into what Fr. Horacio dela Costa called “an ideal servant of the people.”

President Ramos, whom he advised, and today’s leaders, in spite of their industry, have missed out on this most important ally in modernization. Other military men turned leaders in the region have not.

Here is the height of irony: government leaders are begging foreign investors to come in, while at the same time the rich Filipino elite are sending their money out by the billions unabated, compelled as they are by avarice and the compulsion of colonialism. And if they invest money at all, it is in non-productive enterprises: in shopping malls and luxury spas, resorts and fancy condominiums.

You cannot appeal to the civic virtue of such people because they have none, because they have no loyalty to the country, which they are bleeding. How should a strong state handle then? How else but through the coercive force of a state led by leaders of integrity and by a military not composed of mercenaries.

In this readable and lucid exposition on the Philippine malaise, there is a section wherein the young Jose Almonte and Fidel Ramos were in the Sierra Madre, fighting the Huks. There, both realized that the army was killing fellow countrymen. Indeed, this is the saddest contradiction in our country today — the men and officers of our Armed Forces come from the lower classes, and the cadres of the New People’s Army also come from the poor. So, as I have long pointed out, when the poor kill one another, who profits?

Sometime in the ‘80s, when the army was still very much in cahoots with Marcos, I spoke before officers at the National Defense College in what was once Fort Bonifacio. I told them that though they come from the lowest rungs of society, once they become generals, they forget their origins and they side with the oligarchs who oppress the people.

If I have a similar opportunity again, I would ask them to name 10 of the richest and most politically powerful Filipinos. Then I would ask them if they would die for them — for that is what the army does today, preserving an abominable status quo, and the vaunted privilege of a corrupt and irresponsible elite.

There are still men of courage and integrity in our Armed Forces who, I am sure, will shout a resounding “No!” to this question.

Romancing colonialism and the colonized mind

2009-03-09T20:02:00.000+08:00

By F Sionil Jose

attended the tail-end of the two-day conference on the Augustinian friar Andres de Urdaneta at the Instituto Cervantes recently. Before going into what I said at that last session, let me recount how I came to Manila in 1938 to enroll at the Far Eastern University High School in Azcarraga, now Recto. In the afternoons, after class, I swam in the Pasig or crossed through Escolta, to the Walled City then to the Luneta to swim in the bay behind what is now the Quirino Grandstand. I often idled in Intramuros, to gaze at the ornate altars of its dozen or so churches, notably Santo Domingo during the La Naval festival in October. Shortly after World War II when Intramuros was a desolate wilderness of grass and squatter huts, I sometimes visited the San Agustin church, the proud survivor of that war. It was not yet rehabilitated, the walls scarred, the huge paintings of departed Augustinians torn, and the garden at the back in shambles.

On those occasions that I pilgrimaged to the Ilokos, I marveled at the beauty, the durability of those old churches, particularly those architectural jewels in Santa Maria and in Paoay, and lamented, too, the laziness of their parish priests for not cleaning them up or sprucing up their yards. When I wrote that novel Po-on — the first in the chronology of a five-novel saga spanning a hundred years of our history — I delved deeper into the past of those churches and the friars who built them. A wise and compassionate Augustinian in the novel, Padre Jose Leon, teaches the main character, the peasant Eustaquio Salvador, Spanish and Latin and what he knew of the elementary sciences that the Augustinians took with them in their epic voyage to the New World and to Filipinas.

As Jose Ma. Fons of the Instituto Cervantes later said, “At least, there is one good Spaniard in the novel.”

Much as I appreciate the Augustinians, they are not my favorite Spanish order; the Dominicans are, in spite of the criticisms that have been leveled at them. The reason for this is personal — I spent four happy years in the Dominican-run University of Santo Tomas and had a memorable teacher, the Spanish Dominican Juan Labrador.

Pio Andrade was speaking when I arrived. He said that what Rizal wrote about agrarian discontent in Laguna was not true. I flared up immediately and said he had just called Rizal a liar. Onward in his presentation, as he extolled Spanish contributions to the country, I asked if he was apologizing for Spanish colonialism.

For those who were at the conference who heard my remarks and have wondered why I said them at all, let me elaborate.

The logic or primary purpose of colonialism/imperialism is the domination of a powerful country over a weak nation or people. It is exploitation, the plunder of the resources of a country to send to the mother country. Whether the colonizer is ancient Rome, or Spain, the Dutch in the 15th century or much later, the English, the Europeans, or in more recent times the United States and Japan, they are all the same.

They colonize often under several dulcet guises, to spread Christianity and Western Civilization, to give law and order to primitive societies, to make the world “safe for democracy.” What for is the United States in Iraq, if not for Iraqi oil?

And to repeat, the logic of colonialism is exploitation. It is immoral. No amount of romanticizing it, or apologizing for it as some Filipinos are now doing with Spanish colonialism, can banish the stain, the indelible stigma of colonialism.

For all his sterling qualities as a writer — and he was such a dear old friend — I fault the late Nick Joaquin for being an apologist of Spanish colonialism. We have had strident arguments when he repeated so often that gross statement that “everything good in this country came from Spain.”

I always reminded him that before Spain came, we had a commercial relationship with China whose civilization is much, much older than that of Europe.

All he had to do was go to the Central Bank to look at the gold collection there, which was found in Surigao; the collection illustrates the scientific and cultural finesse of the earliest Filipinos — although we were not called Filipinos then. At the Newberry Library in Chicago is the Codex, the earliest account of the people of these islands. The upper classes wore fine clothes, jewelry, footwear. We had five indigenous alphabets before the Spaniards came.

I always silenced him thus: “Don’t forget the Spaniards killed Rizal.”

The paper of that brilliant scholar, Fernando Zialcita, is one more apology for Spanish colonialism. In his summary, he states, “Christianity did effect meaningful change. It taught that low-status people had dignity in themselves and could not be sold, or even sacrificed, as chattel. It sought to create a community that was broader than just an individual clan. Though social stratification was not abolished, a more humane stratification, one based on ownership of land rather than on ownership of human beings, was introduced.”

Had he stopped here, he would have been factual, he would have made his case. But then he concluded: “The challenge for us today is how to move up to a higher level of consciousness where every individual is truly cared for. But this level of consciousness could not have been possible without the transformation of consciousness that the missionaries — despite their flaws — effected during the 17th to 19th centuries.”

This is pure speculation. How could he know? Are the Indonesians because they are Muslims, the Vietnamese because they are Buddhists and the Indians because they are Hindus — not colonized by Spanish Catholics — any less imbued with “higher consciousness”?

So why then apologize for Spanish colonialism? Maybe those who do are not just nostalgic about the Spanish past — perhaps they also long for this country to be a Spanish colony again. After all, as a British historian stated, if the Axis powers — Germany, Japan, Italy and Spain — had won in World War II, Franco would have wanted the Philippines to revert to Spain.

And the Americans?

The poet Robert Frost, the writer Mark Twain and the industrialist Andrew Carnegie were among those who opposed the American invasion of the Philippines in 1898. When I visited Robert Frost at his cottage in Ripton, Vermont in 1955, he asked how the American occupation turned out. I told him, but for the public schools which the Americans built, on that very day I would probably be an unlettered peasant atop a water buffalo in my village in Luzon. I said, probably.

Indeed, America’s legacy to us is the public school system for which I am grateful. But I will never apologize for American imperialism, for their atrocities during the Philippine American war, their “free” trade, for Parity in 1946 and for the fact that their “benevolent neglect” also left in us a lingering hangover, a crippling dependency that hinders our development.

As for the Japanese, who in my generation will ever forget their bestiality in World War II? But that, too, we must transcend to realize what we can learn from them.

Ambeth Ocampo said something significant the other week when he was decorated by the French government. He said, “Let us not be prisoners of history.”

I would add, “Let us use it instead.”

History has its uses. For us who are colonized, it is important that we are freed from it, to use it not to glorify the colonizer, but to remember he was the enemy and could still be — and that from history, we should be able to extract those aspects of it which could bind us, which could lead us to freedom and justice.

The former colonizers and their acolytes certainly would like to romanticize the past for so many reasons, not so much to rewrite history from their point of view, but out of a sense of guilt, for a desire to re-impose their dominance or, if they are still around, their influence or residual power. This is a normal and understandable exercise.

But the colonized should never be party to this resuscitation of their glory which is our bondage and our shame. On every occasion, that they try to, the colonized should reject it, expose it for the fallacies that lie underneath such glowing reminiscence.

The intractable logic of colonialism demands such rejection. Just ask this simple question: All those profits from the galleon trade, those monopolies, to whom did they go? Certainly not to the Indios.

And more than this, the colonizers laid down the structures of oppression, the institutions of coercion which exist to this very day, for colonialism dies hard—it persists in actual forces of domination, of control, of helplessness and apathy in the colonized. And this is perhaps the most enduring and formidable obstacle in the building of a nation — the colonized mind.

Because colonialism is exploitation and therefore immoral, it is impossible to dignify it. It can, of course, be romanticized, and this only selectively, for certainly, the native did profit from colonialism’s collateral acolytes — the heroic friars, the Thomasites, the missionary doctors — all have deodorized colonialism to a limited extent.

Capitalism, with its logic of profit, is easy to dignify — the Rockefellers, the Fords have done this with their outstanding philanthropies, and certainly Bill Gates most of all. Too, all those businessmen who practice sincerely “corporate social responsibility” do fulfill capitalism’s humanitarian incremental functions.

And most of all, as we have seen in recent times, capitalism has morphed authoritarian regimes into democracies — to wit, South Korea, Taiwan, even Japan. But colonialism? The sooner the colonized writers, intellectuals and leaders recognize its unerring logic, the sooner, too, will they be able to get rid of their colonized minds that have warped their reasoning, their attitudes without their being fully aware these are destroying them and their country as well.

Speculations are worthless just as hindsight is the lowest form of wisdom. It is for this reason that memory is important, why we should always remember so that we will not repeat the mistakes of the past.

If the Americans remembered their loss in the Philippine-American war, they would never have gone to Vietnam. Or if they remembered Vietnam at all, they would not have gone to Iraq. And we should remember also that our revolution failed primarily because we couldn’t get our act together, we couldn’t unite. If we learned that lesson then, we would not be where we are today.

So, then, if I abhor Spanish colonialism, why do I like visiting Spain and even writing there? Why do I have Spanish mestizo friends and, most of all, why do I go to Instituto Cervantes?

Because I am one of the 90 million citizens called Filipino and Filipinas — how I love that name and all that it evokes, the land and its history, and most of all, the essence of what we are: human beings whose consciousness of nation and that nation’s boundaries were created by a colonial power.

Let me be very clear about this. I pay homage to the heroic Spain which sent those sailors in those puny ships to the New World, to Filipinas, and with them, those equally heroic priests like Andres Urdaneta, Miguel Benavides and so many more. I admire the noble Spain that nurtured Rizal — not the Spain that martyred him, the Spain of Cervantes, Zurbaran, Lope de Vega, Miguel de Unamuno, and Goya, the Spain of that poor Loyalist who declared: In my hunger I command! The writer Salvador de Madariaga (I invited him some 30 years ago to deliver our Jose Rizal PEN Lecture; he had sought me out in Berlin in 1960 because he, too, had read Rizal) — it was he who told me that a country need not be colonized by a foreign power — it can be a colony of its own leaders — the awful truth which describes us today.

We are destined to be free — but that destiny is not up for grabs, nor does it come easily. Often, it is denied us because we deny ourselves the free mind imprisoned in attitudes of our own making, implanted in us by miseducation, by our misunderstanding of history.

And so, to paraphrase that famous Manifesto: Filipinos, sugod! You have nothing to lose but your chains and a nation to gain.

Racism as colonialism: Jefferson, Obama and us

2009-03-09T19:35:00.000+08:00

By F Sionil Jose

Way back in the early ‘90s, I was asked to speak about our American colonial experience before a university audience at the International House in Berkeley. I went to the United States for the first time in 1955 and for three months, with a US State Department grant and a princely per diem of $12 a day, I crisscrossed that vast continent. Since then, I had visited that land of milk and honey on so many occasions; if I were to name the three most deadly sins of the Americans, the first is racism, then wastefulness and the third, smugness. After my talk, a retired black professor commented that I had glossed over racism. I told him they were doing so much about it from what I know of that problem in the ‘50s when I visited the South and saw segregation at its worst. He agreed; indeed, the Americans have narrowed the racial divide but not their wastefulness and smugness.

The entry on January 20 of Barack Obama and his family in the White House — the residence of this world’s most powerful single individual — has elicited universal encomia, and so many expectations as well.

Let us now peruse briefly racial discrimination by our former colonizers bearing in mind that they passed on to us not just their genes but their vices, not their virtues.

For all its might America is a young country of immigrants. The first went there because of religious persecution in England. The United States then should be the last nation on earth where racial discrimination would thrive, given this background — but it flourished when succeeding settlers brought slaves from Africa to work in the plantations in the South.

It is one of those historical ironies that Thomas Jefferson, who wrote the American Declaration of Independence, was not only the owner of several slaves but had a mistress who was one.

When his wife, Martha Wayles Skelton, died, it would seem that he promised her he would never marry again. His wife’s half sister, Sally, was black. She was with Jefferson when he was in Paris; Jefferson was 46 and Sally was 16. She bore Jefferson’s child and six others; all of whom bore Jefferson’s name.

Sally could have stayed on in France as a free woman because there was no slavery in France, but she went back to the United States and lived in Jefferson’s beautiful home, Monticello.

It is presumed that there was affectionate bonding between the two and that when their children reached the age of 21, Jefferson would free them. When Charles Dickens, the English novelist, visited Washington, he heard of this not-too-secret story and he satirized it. All these delicious details, dug up through extensive research, are in Annette Gordon-Reed’s new book, The Hemingses of Monticello.

The American Civil War (1861-1865) resolved the conundrum of slavery. Great moral issues create equally great moral leaders, Abraham Lincoln in this Civil War. Great writers as well, from the oppressed — Ralph Elison, James Baldwin and Toni Morrison, to name just a few of the blacks who brought their artistic skills to fruition in their depiction of the injustices their forebears suffered. And in South Africa, non-Blacks like Nadine Gordimer and Alan Paton.

Racism in America is directed not just to the blacks but to the Jews who, though a small minority, have a lot of economic and cultural clout. Asians, Latinos have not been spared. And of course, Filipinos, as the writer Carlos Bulosan tells it only too movingly in his book, America is in the Heart.

Anti-miscegenation laws in California, for instance, were aimed at Asians and a Filipino was even lynched for cohabiting with a white woman.

From time immemorial, racism has existed all over the world in so many forms, as religious bias, and not just as color. We are only too familiar with how Hitler massacred millions of Jews in gas chambers in the concentration camps in Dachau, Auschwitz and Buchenwald.In Japan, racial discrimination is subtle but very demanding and real. The Japanese believe they are a superior and divine race; they regard all other Asians as inferior — but not Caucasians. The natives who do dirty jobs, the burakumin, are regarded as low caste and are avoided in marriage. So are the Koreans though they have lived in Japan for generations. Birth records are well preserved and it is not difficult to check and trace one’s lineage.

The term gaijin, though it refers primarily to foreigners, illustrates the quiet subtlety of Japanese racial discrimination. It is easy to justify the exclusivity of the natives, the need for harmony of millions packed tightly in a small island nation. Ever polite, ever hospitable, discrimination in Japan does not scream at outsiders; it lurks behind those ritual bows, beneath the dizzying patina of modernity that suffuses this powerful, well-bonded nation — the second richest in the world.

And what about Mother Espana which once shaped an empire where “the sun never sets”? The ultimate specter of racial discrimination is in the Spanish Inquisition, which started in the 14th century, was revived two centuries later and persisted all through the 19th century. Led by the Dominicans and those exemplar rulers, Ferdinand and Isabella, it was first established by Rome to combat the Reformation; it burgeoned in Spain independent of the Vatican. Its inquisitors burned books, seized properties of infidels, drove the Jews out, enforced conversions on them and the Moors. By its “acts of faith” it tortured and burned at the stake thousands upon thousands. With its fanatical search for doctrinal purity and cleansing of the blood (limpieza de sangre), it crippled the financiers, the royalty. It eventually defined the Spanish character; as the Spanish writer, Marcelino Menendez Pelayo, explained it: there was no industry in Spain; the bullfights, the long siesta, the laziness of Spaniards — all these were the after-effects of the Inquisition.

Maybe so, but this vaulting aberration also produced the world’s greatest novel, Don Quixote de la Mancha.

And for us, the Noli and Fili.

What about us brown Indios? Of course, we are racists, too; and we discriminate most against our ethnics — the aetas, the manyans…

But first, we as victims. Serapio/Canceran, President Quezon’s private secretary, told me about a pre-war Caucasian club in Manila that did not admit Indios until one evening when this club was celebrating an annual ball. Quezon marched into it with a Constabulary sergeant and a huge Doberman and announced to the well-groomed assembly that he would close the club, if…

And among us are Spanish mestizo families still who do not want their bloodline diluted with mongrel genes. I know of a very sophisticated, pretty Indio girl whose boyfriend was a Spanish mestizo. All long I presumed that they had gotten married and were now living happily somewhere in Pangasinan. It didn’t turn out that way; the mestizo dumped her in accordance with the family dictate, went to Spain and married a Spanish girl instead.

We grow up mouthing limericks like Intsik Baboy, tulo laway, bahay silong knowing only too well that Chinese parents don’t want their daughters to marry Indios.

Lilia G. Hernandez, my doctor when I am in America, is semi-retired after a very successful practice in California. Her family has a beautiful home in Pleasanton an hour away from San Francisco. She and her husband, an engineer, founded Tambalan, an NGO devoted to helping Filipinos. She visited Manila the other week and here is her latest communication:

“The more time I spend in my country of birth, the more I feel so discriminated against by people whose language I speak, whose skin color is mine, whose poor I dedicate more of my time to.

“On one of my trips in 2006, an Italian-American came with me to see the programs my group in the Bay Area help support financially. On that same trip, my husband was finalizing plans for a house with the architect. My husband (a Filipino-American), the Italian-American and myself went to the site. Standing close to my husband, I stepped aside for a local woman to pass. She asked ‘Are you and your husband (pointing at the Italian-American some meters away) the ones who are building a house here?’ I was so surprised, and pointed at the man beside me as my husband. I soon realized that people thought I had to have a white man to be able to build a nice house in the Philippines!

“One of the reasons I travel to the Philippines is to bring Americans to see what locals do to help improve themselves through community effort. These people going on an ‘exposure’ may be native-born Americans, Caucasians, or Filipinos who have immigrated to the United States.

“Upon arrival at the airport, one customs officer mumbled questions concerning what was in my suitcases (cheap school supplies I got from Target to give away, a few medical supplies donated by health professionals). Before I stepped aside to open my suitcases, I mentioned to him in Bisaya that the lady after me was my guest. My friend noticed the sudden change in his facial expression when he saw her, and how quickly we were sent through (without opening my suitcases), so quickly that my friend had to ask ‘What was that all about?’ Perhaps the guy thought I was a returning domestic helper, an easy target for a bribe, until he saw that I had to be someone ‘important’ to have a white guest.

“On checking in at hotels, in department stores, she was always given more attention. The most blatant was our visit to the Cultural Center of the Philippines (CCP). At the door, I was asked to open my tiny purse and to surrender my camera. My white friend, with a 24”x18” bag, bulging with a high-powered camera, breezed through. I did not say anything until after coming out, when I told the chief of security, the very guy who insisted on taking my camera ‘unit,’ that their discrimination against their kapwa (fellow) Filipinos was truly disgusting.

“As I was leaving, I proceeded to the Cathay Pacific Business Class check-in line. (Being a frequent flyer, I have the privilege of checking in through business even if I am traveling economy.) “Ma’am,” a guard said, “that’s the business class line.” So why didn’t he stop the brusque-looking white man with a young Filipino lass, and a Chinese man before me? I recalled what Barack Obama wrote in his book, when he and his half-sister were waiting to be served at a bar in Kenya — ignored, as the white patrons were attended to!”

Indeed, Filipinos also ridicule their countrymen because of their looks, because someone has a low chin (baba), cubitus varus (kumang), slit eyes (singkit) or is bald. The journalist Arsenio Lacson poked fun at President Carlos P. Garcia because he was quite dark. The antic could be considered funny, as it was staged in the past by the Reycard Duet, or the comedians Pogo and Togo. But it can also be disastrous when such remarks impede recognition of integrity, or intellectual and artistic rigor.

What is often said of us can be self-fulfilling: Caviteños are dangerous. Batanguenos are naked without their balisong. Pangasinenses are filthy. Warays and Negrenses are profligate and indolent. So the Capampangans have dugong aso, the Boholanos are stupid, the Moros are traitors, the Ilokanos may be hard working and thrifty but they are dumb like carabao. And nobody now takes us seriously, for as a famous American editor confided, how can he when our leaders are “silly”?

All such farcical clichés have a way of insinuating themselves into the national psyche and every day, they are aggravated by the nonsense on our TV screens, on the front pages of our newspapers. And we are outraged when the BBC pokes fun at our maids in London. So we ask again, whose fault is it?

What event of such apocalyptic magnitude or epiphanic redemption would rid us of racism and truly humanize us? Maybe it will be the forthcoming catastrophe of climate change, maybe an invasion from outer space that will threaten the whole world itself, or some such pandemic that threatens to decimate the human species.

Shakespeare said it is conscience that makes cowards of us all.

This is one of those asinine afterthoughts; perhaps, it is best that the Spaniards colonized us, that we did not become Hindus, else we would have the caste system which ordains that “we are born unequal, live unequal and die unequal.”

What, then, makes us all equal?

So the beautiful Taj Mahal commemorates a loved one’s passing, and the pyramids are supposed to last as a refuge in the afterlives of the pharaohs. All those hundreds of terra cotta warriors excavated in China are to safeguard an emperor’s journey to the great beyond.

Whatever, death is the great leveler and if we only thought more often of this ultimate truth — that we cannot bring anything with us — then, perhaps, ours would be a safer and more just society.

Remember when the Nazis grabbed a contiguous piece of real estate in the late ‘30s? Hitler crowed: “Today Sudetenland, tomorrow the world.”

In a way, Obama’s victory is a shining triumph of democracy. It signifies not just the final liberation of the Black Man but all of the world’s oppressed from the bondage of race. Truly this is the greening of America, and prayerfully, tomorrow, the world as well.

But I have news for all of us who placed our bets on Barack Obama. Racism will continue in America, and everywhere, though possibly in a more muted form.

The Challenge Of History: Why, where and how we failed, and what will we do now

2009-03-09T19:25:00.001+08:00

By F Sionil Jose

Last week, the Na-tional Commis-sion for Culture and the Arts brought together more than a hundred writers from all over the archipelago to the UP and Ateneo campuses in Diliman for a three-day conference. The convener, the brilliant poet Ricardo M. de Ungria, asked me to speak at the conference opening. This is what I told them:

Given the nostalgic and magisterial inclination of the elderly, please don’t mind too much the grandiose title of this brief.

We are writers. What impact do we have on our history? We do not make the decisions that alter the nation’s destiny. And what can the solitary writer do now that will make a difference?

There will even be those who will insist that we have not failed. Those of you who are nearly as old as I am — look at the stunning skyline of Manila, there weren’t these many skyscrapers before, nor as many shiny cars in the streets and tony restaurants everywhere. Multitudes of Filipinos are traveling abroad — we have become a very cosmopolitan nation.

Indeed, the grass-roofed houses such as the one where I lived as a boy are nowhere to be seen. Almost all the houses all over the country are now roofed with tin.

I have also said again and yet again that be-hind our flamboyant fiestas, our bright smiles, deep within us is deep unhappi-ness. Just consider these: we are now 90 million and half of our people consider themselves poor, hunger stalks our land bountiful though it is with verdant plains. So many Filipinos now eat only once a day. An economist predicted that there will be 11 million Filipinos this year who will be jobless. And the corruption! The businessman Vicente Paterno said recently only two cabinet officers in the Arroyo government are honest; the secretary of the Department of Social Welfare, Esperanza I. Cabral, and the National Defense Secretary, Gilbert C. Teodoro. Jr. I have great respect for Mr. Paterno; of the many technocrats who backstopped Marcos, only he had the courage and humility to come out and say, Mea culpa.

Our courts are discredited, we have the highest drug addiction rate in Southeast Asia. Given these grim conditions, it is very possible that our country could implode — a failed state. What is our response to the coming deluge?

Our history tells in the last hundred years, three momentous events tested us as a people: the Revolution of 1896, the Japanese Occupation in 1942, and the declaration of Martial Law in 1972 by Ferdinand Marcos.

How did our writers respond to these watershed events? I will mention just a few: in 1896, Jose Rizal, Marcelo H. del Pilar, Apolinario Mabini, and yes, even Andres Bonifacio. Lest we forget. Bonifacio also wrote essays and poetry.

So much has been said about Rizal repudiating that revolution but his novels — by citing in them (primarily the Noli) the injustices of Spanish colonialism — argued for revolution. In writing the Noli, Rizal signed his own death warrant. He did not have to but he returned to Filipinas where the battle was to be fought; he could have easily stayed abroad and, being a medical doctor, he would not have starved like Marcelo H. del Pilar. Mabini provided the intellectual underpinning of that struggle. He also served the very poor. Exiled in Guam by the Americans, he decided to pledge allegiance to the United States so he could return home to die.

The other day, I was accompanied by Sylvia Roces, the daughter of Rafael Roces, Jr., writer, patriot and one of the founding members of the pre-war Civil Liberties Union. We visited the unimposing mausoleum in the Manila North cemetery where the bones of her father are interred with 27 others, including Manuel Arguilla whom we all know. Roces, Arguilla and the others were executed by the Japanese in August 1944 for their guerrilla activities. I never got to meet Liling Roces but I did see Arguilla in the afternoons before World War II when I read at the National Library which was then in the basement of what is now the National Museum. Arguilla was easily recognizable because he had a big dark mole on his left cheek. In 1950, I went to Bauang in La Union where I met his father, a peasant like my grandfather, whose toes were splayed “like ginger.”

In the late ‘60s, Ferdinand Marcos was able to convince some of our best writers to work for him. Among them, OD Corpuz, Blas Ople, Adrian Cristobal, Francisco “Kit” Tatad. When he declared Martial Law in 1972, one young poet, Emmanuel Lacaba fought the regime, one of the few writers who really cared. I published his poetry in my journal Solidarity, shared his company, his conversation. I was stunned when I learned he joined the New People’s Army, and that he had died in Davao.

It is now a generation since Marcos has passed away but the stigma he left behind is much too indelible to be erased.

As for those who worked with him, those who are still alive, the challenge to them now is to tell us what they knew, show us why Marcos failed. They owe this not just to history, but to us.

And now, this global crisis that is battering our shores. For so many of us, time is just a simple sequence with no other meaning, except for those whose work is defined by either hours or the seasons. Punctuality is a virtue that has yet to be acquired by most Filipinos. Time is, of course, history — wherein events occur, wherein people live and die and act out their fates.

For so many people in our part of the world, ancestors are worshipped and re-membered and a person’s lineage or that of a family or a clan is not only recorded but revered and held precious. Not so for so many of us, particularly those in the lower classes, where family members are now strewn all over the globe as the agrarian culture which promotes family closeness is shattered by the modernizing process; thus, time renders even more difficult the development of the community spirit, from where the sense of nation grows.

Without this sense of community/nation, memory fades and history is disregarded, or even rejected. So Filipinos do not remember the past, except that past which has affected them as individuals — the personal past, not the past which impacts on communities and people.

I bring this process of erosion to mind so we can locate ourselves, so we can perceive the necessity of how important it is for us to be contextual — not just in our writing but in our very lives, the way Rizal was, and Arguilla, and that young poet, Eman Lacaba.

But even contextuality is not enough; ethics also matters, perhaps more so than contextuality. Remember always: writers are also teachers.

If art and literature are moral, if literature is the noblest of the arts — it follows that writers should then be of noble bearing, capable of lofty deeds or, at the very least, living in a manner that enables us to look others straight in the eye. In these times of want, of cowardice and compromise, this requires of us not just courage but compassion.

But we also know that virtue can be punishment and thus knowledge is what drives us to seek refuge in the cave, in the eyrie of loneliness itself.

As writers, we know only too well this profound loneliness which torments us and also sustains us — this loneliness from which emanates the melancholy that suffuses the best, the loftiest of the arts. This loneliness is humankind’s fate, though not often recognized as such; it grows from the darkness of the womb, and we immerse deeper in it into a larger darkness of the soul. From this loneliness, we try to connect with other human beings, and in the process, we then form the coterie, the ethnic community, and hopefully, as it is with us today, the nation.

In striving to free ourselves from the loneliness of ourselves, we derive some strength and also some meaning by giving our struggle a definition, a purpose, an ideology, even, to which we can then subscribe, to which we can then gather around and be bonded with our kith and kin, our neighbors, our tribe and our race. This hankering for belonging, for an identity, is sometimes labeled as racism, or nationalism, and this nationalism never really dies although it has been corrupted, debased and condemned. It will persist because it is also one illustration — perhaps the only valid illustration — of how we banish our loneliness, how we triumph over it. For as Jean Paul Sartre said, “man is doomed to be free.”

This freedom, even though it be nurtured only in the mind, is elusive — not an illusion. As artists, we will always be alone. We are self-centered, narcissistic and hypersensitive. We are constantly at war with one another, envious of the success of others and forever finding fault with them, and the world even, and never with ourselves. We are whiners, building plots and myths about ourselves, dramatizing our failures and enlarging our little sorrows into mega tragedies. Suffering, particularly the emotional kind, is the ambrosia on which we feed.

We die early when we celebrate only ourselves.

It is those among us who can transcend the narrow compass of our egos, who can then elaborate on our virtues not just as singular individuals but as bonded people of a nation, who do not die young, who are also capable of realizing themselves, who know they have to strive always and do better every time.

It is they who can see also beyond themselves, who know what the larger truths in life that are not expressed should be — that they must always emphasize the obvious. This is not just function but duty, which we often do not recognize — those wrinkles in our faces and in the social fabric that we take for granted, the vile corruption, the inchoate evil that pervades the atmosphere.

For us, then, the challenge of the past, of our own history, is constant and unending, ever alive every moment of the day. All through time, while artists have persevered to achieve excellence and permanence, they have also tried to mirror their times, not just to express themselves but to locate themselves in the vortex of their societies.

For those of us who have grown old stirring the rubble around us, and aware of the frailty of our response, let us take comfort in our youth for, indeed, not just our people but our country as well are very young. The oldest document that validates our youth is that brass relic found in a Laguna riverbed some two decades ago — it is not more than 900 years old.

In the context of history, therefore, we are in the founding stage, the age of Honor, or Chaucer. As I sometimes tell young writers, we have no Confucius looking down over our shoulder, nor even Cervantes, but only Rizal and before him Balagtas, and for the Ilokanos, Pedro Bukaneg although, I suspect, he wasn’t that ancient.

What we are writing now, if excellent, will survive the severest critic of all — which is time. These will be the classics a few centuries hence although, of course, we will never know what the future will bring. And thank God for our youth because we are not crippled by tradition, by necrophilic bondage to the past.

We can be comforted, too, by our own history, brief though it be; of how we fought colonialism and its depredations upon us, and most of all, upon our minds.

No, colonialism is not dead! It hovers over us every day, right in this hall, in those of us who think that the imprimatur of recognition is to be published in the United States, in those of us who ape the literary pyrotechnics of the latest best sellers over there. Just think back, how many among us tried to imitate Gabriel Garcia Marquez when he first bloomed two decades ago. How many among our teachers to this very day still parrot the tenets of the New Criticism, when it died long ago in American academe where it started.

As I always say, write for our people and not for the Americans — if we are good, not just they, then the whole world will recognize us. But first we must be read by our own people and this, indeed, is very sad for we don’t even read one another.

Be that as it may, our history tells us with force and certitude that above the travail that we have gone through in these calamitous events that I have mentioned, although we did not prevail, we persevered.

That perseverance must now be channeled into a struggle versus a virus we often don’t recognize. For too long, we have regarded ourselves as victims of oppression, of oligarchic exploitation, and in us is the accretion of anger against injustice. We understand all these burdens, in many instances they are what fuel our striving, our sense of purpose. We must now go beyond this syndrome, this labeling of ourselves as victims, not to forget the condition as it has warped us but as the durable cocoon from which we must emerge into the freedom of a larger vision and effort, into thinking beyond our geography to recognize that the larger world outside is threatening us, engulfing us as with the economic crisis which we cannot escape.

We know that it is greed — untrammeled and wanton — which has caused so much grief not just on our shores but elsewhere. How to regulate this greed within and beyond us, how to help build the fragile institutions that will save us, show us how to morph this avarice into a more meaningful hunger for knowledge, for truth, for fulfillment.

Back to the solid, sordid reality of our times.

My generation failed; I pray that yours will not, must not — that in whatever language you write, wherever you will live, on native soil or in exile, nurture your roots with steadfast integrity, as did Rizal, Arguilla, Eman; you may not have read them, you may not even think of them, but like them; you will then build the marmoreal foundation for this nation.

All of us know that our country does not realize how important literature is, or the arts, for that matter. We know that we will never earn enough with our writing and we will be lucky if our families understand this for our greatest support comes from our loved ones. But even if we will not be appreciated or amply rewarded, we also know that we have to plod on, to write as best and as honestly as we can and we will do this not because we are masochists or because a munificent bonus awaits us in the afterlife. We must bear this duty, endure it, if we are to be true not just to the vocation we have chosen but to this land that sustains us, which gave us life and a reason to be.