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

[Bob's World]

Jay,

I assume you have a copy of "In the Midst of Wars- An American's Mission to Southeast Asia" by Ed Lansdale?

Interesting read. I agree with Dayuhan and John T. as to the Huks only being suppressed, rather than defeated. Insurgency has never been resolved in the Philippines, as that resolution demands a change of governing philosophy that the ruling class is either unable or unwilling to adopt.

In Lansdale's book one gets a clear look into how he participated in the suppression of the Huk rebellion, and then carried those lessons learned to Vietnam to shape the strategic framework for a similar suppression there. This was the height of the Cold War and any effort that prevented an expansion of Communist Chinese/Soviet influence into Southeast Asia was a "win," even if the legitimate governance concerns of the affected populaces were merely suppressed to achieve our larger policy win.

As an aside, and I toss this to Dayuhan for his more informed opinion, there may well be a cultural trait in the Philippines that makes it very difficult to truly resolve insurgency there. A friend and former Joint Special Operations Task Force-Philippines Commander and I were discussing the situation there and he offered this insight:

The Filipino people do not take personal responsibility for things. For example, if one were to knock a plate off of a table, causing it to fall to the floor and break, he would say 'the plate fell on the floor,' or 'the plate broke' rather than 'I knocked the plate on the floor' or 'I broke the plate.

It is my position from my study of insurgency that a critical early step to designing and implementing an effective COIN campaign is the understanding and acceptance of responsibility by government for what actions and policies are contributing to the conditions that create the type of political vulnerability that is then in turn exploited by some internal or external actor for their own purposes, employing some ideology or another that is tuned to the populace in question.

So my theory is that the cultural aversion to accepting responsibility for actions is a major attribute of why the Philippines has been in a nearly continuous state of suppressed and active insurgency since the Spanish first arrived.

Therefore, any strategic COIN campaign for the Philippines would not begin by sending security forces out to seek to exert control over the NPA on Luzon, or the MILF, MNLF, ASG, etc in the south; but rather to get the Philippine government to admit: "Hello, I am the government of the Philippines, and I have a problem."

Cheers!

Bob