Looking back at that, I’l say that this:

Virtually every politician on Mindanao maintains a private armed force accountable to nobody but the boss.

…was an exaggeration. Northern and Eastern Mindanao do suffer from the same syndrome, but not to nearly the same extent. It would be more accurate to say that virtually every prominent politician and political clan in the conflict zones of Mindanao (and in some areas that are not currently conflict zones) maintains a private armed force accountable to nobody but the boss.

A few other comments:

Someday soon, someone is going to make his fortune in hardwoods from Tawi-Tawi. He will find a skilled, willing, English-speaking workforce. He will find it cheap and easy to get the goods to the shipping route that takes it to Japan or California, where he will get the best prices in the world. He will find that Sanga-Sanga is “going green,” as the Special Forces soldiers say.

Cutting down the trees seems a strange way of “going green”, but possibly there’s a meaning there that I’m not picking up.

It is very likely that someone, someday soon, will make a fortune out of Tawi-Tawi hardwood. It’s already happened on a lot of other islands. Generally the fortune is made by an influential local clan working with influential people in Manila. The only part of the money that will come to Tawi-Tawi will be the derisory wages paid to those who do the cutting, which will be spent before the last log is shipped out. The real profits will end up in Manila or abroad, and the only way anyone in Tawi Tawi will see any of it is if one of the principals is kidnapped and pays ransom.

The logging itself will be absolute. You can talk about reforestation and sustainable logging, but that’s not the way it works in the Philippines: when it’s done the island will look like the “after” picture in a Gillette ad. If you want to see what happens next, you can look at any one of hundreds of islands that serve as an example. Without the trees the topsoil washes off with the first rains, choking reefs under masses of silt. Agriculture on these islands depends on inland forest cover: without it rainfall runs off in destructive flash floods and when the rain stops the land goes dry. Without surface water retention streams stop running, and people rely on pumping more and more ground water. Without forest cover the rainfall runs off too fast to replenish the aquifers (these islands are not large), and soon groundwater pumping leads to salt water intrusion, and the wells start yielding salt water.

This is not imagination, it has happened on too many islands to count. You can make a good quick buck from cutting the trees, but the long term implications for the populace are very harsh.

And this is what’s suggested as the kind of economic development that can provide a long term solution to insurgency? Allah weeps.