Small War on Basilan (catch all)

[Dayuhan]

The realization that I have come to over the years is that much of good "COIN" is in many ways counter-intuitive. Governments are, by definition, the legal actor. Insurgents, by definition, are the illegal actor. When the populace, regardless of how morally just their cause may be, decides that acting out through illegal actions and violence is their only option it is natural for the state to respond through the application of greater security. All the more so if one is armed with a COIN doctrine that tells you that "insurgency and COIN are forms of complex war and warfare."

One of the great dangers of doctrines and models is that once we adopt them we become enamored of them, and when reality doesn't fit the doctrine or model, we try to modify reality instead of changing our perceptions.

In the southern Philippines the core conflict, the conflict that kicked off the violence in the early 70s and sustains it today, is not between "the government" and "the populace". It's between two portions of the populace, both of which consider themselves aggrieved. One of the great failures of governance in this conflict was the decision of government to take the side of one portion of the populace against the other. One of the major causes of the failure of the recent US-supported "peace agreement" was that it treated the problem as a dispute between government and insurgents, and excluded one of the contesting populaces from the process. The task of government is not to reach a peace agreement with the insurgents, but to broker a peace agreement between two portions of its own populace that have irreconcilably different demands, neither of which trusts the government or each other. Not easy even for a functional government with some popular support for a peace process. For a largely dysfunctional government with a populace clamoring for a hard-line approach... beyond not easy.

I don't believe that the US has much to fear coming out of the Philippines, or really anywhere in South East Asia.

There we agree.

This is not about Muslims, this is about Muslims who are held in bad political situations that they perceive are both beyond their control, and that they equally perceive are kept beyond their control due to the actions of some manipulative foreign power.

The perception of "kept beyond their control due to the actions of some manipulative foreign power" doesn't really exist here. The bulk of the Muslim populace here has a reasonably positive perception of US involvement, which they see as a controlling factor on the Philippine government. There's probably more distrust of US motives on the settler side. One of the odd quirks of all this is a widespread belief among Mindanao settlers that the US has cut a devious deal with the MILF to support a breakaway in return for access to "the oil" and base rights. There's no hard evidence that there is any oil or that the US wants a base in Mindanao, but that never stopped anyone from believing!

Most of the South East Asian nations worked through these issues on nationalism and sovereignty in the post WWII social upheaval. This is always a roller coaster journey, as cultures as well as governments must evolve in fits and starts toward what works for them.

Thailand has an intractable problem with Muslims in the south, Indonesia has all kinds of simmering ethnic issues and separatist sentiments, Vietnam and Laos have issues with their ethnic minorities... it's still being worked through all over SE Asia.

This is a journey that can be guided or encouraged, and perhaps facilitated in some degree.

I'd be very, very hesitant about trying to assert a US role in that effort. It's possible that we could help; it's also possible - and I think rather more probable - that we can make things worse. We don't understand these issues as well as we think we do, and we often seem reluctant to listen to those who do understand them. Subtlety is needed, and that's not traditionally a US strong point.

Our problem is that we are so enamored over what works for us is that we forget that our own populace had to evolve in the isolation of the Colonies for a couple hundred years first, and then had to work through another couple hundred years of trial and error democratic experimentation to get to the "masterpiece" we enjoy to day (tongue firmly in cheek).

Yes... not to mention a civil war of positively African proportions, one of history's great genocides, and various other digressions. Europe was even worse: it took them centuries of almost continuous war to arrive (assisted by exhaustion) at the current level of peace and stability. In much of the world that process was frozen by the colonial imposition of order at the expense of stability. Now it's thawed out. No real reason why we should expect it to be any prettier for them than it was for us.