Quote Originally Posted by Bob's World View Post
I don't know what happened in the Philippines. I know the Philippine security forces have the capacity to execute such an operation when supported by US forces within the rules, laws and agreements that have long defined and constrained that operation.
There are actually some questions being asked about that supposed capacity. Obviously there are limits to what's known, but the strike appears to have involved very precise placement of munitions in a night strike, a capacity the Philippine air force has previously either not had or kept very quiet. Even in daytime the track record is not all that good. Whether this is a new capacity developed with US help or whether the US carried out the strike is not possible to determine with the information ublicly available.

Quote Originally Posted by Bob's World View Post
The great strength of the operations conducted with the government of the Philippines was that we constrained ourselves, that we sacrificed "effectiveness" in a recognition that when working with a friendly government one cannot simply ignore the law or their sovereignty, or act is such away as to call in question in the eyes of the populace the legitimacy of their own government.
True enough... but the great weakness of those operations is that ultimately very little has changed. The core of the problem - the neo-feudal clan governance that prevails in the affected areas - is still in place. US intervention hasn't changed that and the Philippine government hasn't the will (or arguably the ability) to do anything about it.

Of course success or failure are relative to goals. If the US goal was to alter the pattern of recurring insurgency, we've probably not accomplished much. If the goal was to break or reduce the connection between that insurgency and international Islamist movements, there may have been some success. The connection between AQ and ASG was tenuous and fairly transient to begin with, and the JI connection is largely opportunistic. The "global Islamist" narrative has never had much traction in Mindanao; the fighting is over local concerns. Those concerns remain largely in place, but the area is a much less hospitable place for the international operatives than it once was.

Whether the operation was or is perceived to be a US strike, the impact will probably not be that great. The Als will sell it as further evidence of a global US campaign of drone-based destruction raining down on innocent Muslims. That will carry some weight in some places, but not much in the Philippines. The left will howl, but they've little real political influence. The average Christian Filipino is delighted to see Muslim militants being blown up, no matter who does it. Filipino Muslims have little exposure to the Als and will continue to have a generally positive view of US involvement, driven less by "hearts and minds" development projects than by the widespread perception that the US presence is a restraint on the Philippine military's customary and unwelcome mode of operations.

In short, more of the same. The US presence can keep the symptoms of insurgency, but it's not doing anything about the causes and the insurgency will probably re-emerge. It may be a constraint on internationalization of that insurgency, and strikes such as this one will certainly give JI people a disincentive to move here (they're here in the first place because Indonesia is no longer safe for them).

The question, of course, is how long to we want to stay in the picture.