Charles Bohannan and Guerrilla warfare in the Philippines (1939-1954)

[Dayuhan]

Excellent points on the "limited" or "unfinished" nature of the victory against the Huk. That it was seen as a victory in 1954 does not mean in the long run the initial reforms became manifest or successful, especially after Magsaysay's death.

One thing I've learned in 30+ years in the Philippines is that it's very easy for national leaders to announce reforms in Manila. Getting those reforms implemented on the ground in the face of overt and covert opposition from entrenched local and regional elites is extremely difficult, more difficult than Manila-centric analyses of Philippine governance often admit.

The division between the more socialist/nationalist members of the Huk, vis a vis the more doctrinaire or hardline communists, was one of the seeds of discord that thrived as Magsaysay, Lansdale and Bohannan shifted the strategy between 1950-1953.

There's a bit of a semantic challenge in describing the not-quite-communist elements of the Huk, and "nationalist and socialist" has often been the accepted default. I'm not really sure it's appropriate. The peasant unions of the 1930s, the precursor of the Huk movement in Central Luzon, might better be described as reformist. That's not to say they weren't militant - many of them were - but few of them had any consistent national agenda or coherent ideology. They were driven primarily by grievances specific to the peasantry of Central Luzon, and had little interest in wider agendas. The Communist presence was pretty minimal, mainly because the PKP wasn't interested. Prewar Philippine Communists followed a strict Marxist dogma focused on the urban proletariat as the driver of revolution, and held the peasantry in generally low regard. Disinterest in mucking about in the rice fields may have played a part in that.

Of course that changed post-war, but the continued inability of the urban Communists to connect to a primarily reform-minded peasantry proved a major internal constraint for the Huks.

While both Malaya and the Philippines in the age of the Huk might be seen as COIN "successes" in the immediate military sense, I'd be hesitant to apply lessons extracted from those conflicts elsewhere. It seems to me that both movements failed more due to their inherent limitations (ethnic in Malaya, geographic in the Philippines) and their relative lack of sophistication than due to the effectiveness of the COIN strategies applied. Lansdale found Vietnam a much tougher nut to crack, and I'm not convinced that the approaches used in Malaya or against the Huk would have much impact on a more modern and more capable insurgency. Not to say it's not worth studying, but any recipes deduced would have to be applied with caution elsewhere.

One lesson that can I think be deduced would fall in the "how not to do it" column. One of the key events that drove the reform minded Huks into alliance with the PKP was the government's refusal to allow the six Democratic Alliance candidates who won in the 1946 elections to take office. In retrospect it's fairly clear that if they had been allowed to take office they could easily have been co-opted and/or marginalized, just as left-wing party list representatives are today, and that they'd have been less a threat in office than they were in the hills. Of course according to the Cold War ethos of the day that was unthinkable, but it's worth remembering today!