Quote Originally Posted by Bob's World View Post
The key to victory (i.e., some enduring state of peaceful good governance in the Southern Philippines), has always been in Manila. The military effort helps create conditions for success, but until the government in Manila seriously addresses the legitimate concerns and perceptions of the entire populace it is only a finger in the dike.
I agree. The defect in the model, from the start, was that it relied on the Philippine Government doing what it has neither the will nor the capacity to do.

I should note that I think the model has virtues and is by no means a bad thing: my criticism is of the wave of simplistic and naive pronouncements of success that emerged from it, which seemed to me to be both deceptive and self-defeating. Announcing "success" prematurely reduces the will to carry on and complete what has been begun, and generates disillusionment when the inevitable complications arise.

Quote Originally Posted by Bob's World View Post
The Supreme Court's decision to stymie the peace process was devastating to good results coming from the Basilan Model. This in no way invalidates the model, it actually proves the model. What it invalidates is the positions of those who think these things can be wholly addressed through military means; or engagement by US military.
I'm not really sure how much impact the court decision would have had in Basilan. The MOA/AD was a primarily Maguindanao initiative that was viewed in the Tausug/Sama/Yakan regions with a fair amount of suspicion and cynicism from the start. The negotiations took place almost entirely between the GRP and the MILF, with little effort made to include the numerous other stakeholders among both indigenous and immigrant populations. I personally think the agreement ws doomed from the start; even before the Supreme Court decision I thought it a likely candidate for a "peace agreement least likely to produce peace" award. In some ways it's a positive thing that it never came around to implementation, which would have been a major mess. Given the degree to which immigrant and indigenous settlements are mixed, an ancestral domain/territorial autonomy "solution" is going to raise massive problems: either you will have an autonomous region that is not even close to geographically contiguous, or you will include numerous people in regions where they will violently resist integration, or you will have to move large numbers of people: not an attractive set of alternatives.

A far better approach, IMO, would be for the Manila government to try to reverse the tragic and stupid mistakes of the 1970s by positioning itself as a neutral arbiter between the immigrant and indigenous populations, targeting equitable justice and fair resolution of disputes instead of taking sides... but unfortunately, that won't happen either.

At this stage very little is going to happen, and all I could suggest would be for the GRP and MILF to agree to cease hostilities until after the 2010 elections and pick up negotiations from there. The current administration is so controversial and so unpopular that anything it initiates is going to be rejected out of hand by both the legislature and the majority of the populace.

It will be difficult and probably not advisable for the US to take a direct or even an open role in negotiations. The (generally exaggerated) involvement of USIP in the MOA/AD negotiations was widely perceived as a US attempt to promote a breakaway entity for some self-interested purpose (resource extraction privileges, a military base, whatever), just as the Arroyo administration's promotion of an agreement that would have required constitutional revisions was perceived as a backdoor attempt to open an amendment process that could be used to remove term limits and keep her in power. Whether or not these ulterior motives actually existed (in the first case probably not, in the second not at all unlikely) is less important than the impact of their perceived existence on public opinion.