U.S. mission in Philippines has almost nothing to do with Basilan Seattle Post-Intelligencer
Friday, February 22, 2002
Nicholas D. KristofISABELA, Philippines -- Wahab Akbar is a congenial man in blue jeans and flip-flops who, by all accounts except his own, helped found the Abu Sayyaf "terrorist" group that we're now trying to exterminate. So you might expect to find Akbar cowering in the jungle.
Nope. Instead Akbar is sipping a cold Coke in the nicest building here on Basilan, the island where Part 2 in America's war on terror is unfolding. He's the governor of Basilan and is helping to preside over the campaign against Abu Sayyaf.
A bit confusing, perhaps. But so is the entire American deployment of troops in the Philippines.
As far as I can tell, the American mission here has almost nothing to do with Basilan. President Bush offered troops in a White House meeting with the Philippine president before his aides knew where Basilan was.
The real aim of the American mission is political: to demonstrate momentum in the war on terror, deploy troops in a country where they are welcome, show the flag in Southeast Asia and find an enemy that can be quickly beaten.
Abu Sayyaf is a particularly brutal group of extremist Muslim kidnappers, and they number only about 60 on this jungle island. So at first glance they made an appropriate target.
That's the problem with deploying 660 American troops based on first glances.
In fact, there's some evidence that the Philippine army itself nurtured Abu Sayyaf in the early 1990s, as a way of splintering a more formidable rebel group. (Marites Vitug and Glenda Gloria explore this issue in their 2000 book on the southern Philippines, "Under the Crescent Moon.")
To get a better sense of Abu Sayyaf, I arranged to meet a few members of the group. The first one I met uses the code name Habib, and he painted a spectacularly unappealing picture of the group: He said that Guillermo Sobero, an American hostage whom Abu Sayyaf killed last year, had pleaded tearfully for his life, but that the leaders beheaded him anyway.
According to Habib, the Abu Sayyaf fighters may slip away by boat to the nearby Sulu islands. Military officers acknowledge that they have no way to stop Abu Sayyaf boats, which are faster than Philippine navy vessels. (Indeed, I visited a navy boat and afterward was tempted to reach into my pocket and lend the crew $10 to buy oars.)
One clue that the American aim in the Philippines is a feel-good declaration of victory more than a defeat of terrorism is that we have no plans to pursue anyone to Sulu. Likewise, we have no plans to mess with the Moro Islamic Liberation Front, which has much stronger ties to terrorism and to al-Qaida, but which has thousands of fighters and is thus more formidable.
My guess is that Abu Sayyaf will soon be wiped out on Basilan -- that was already in the cards before the Americans showed up -- but that the group may become even stronger in Sulu. There it will be inflated by escapees from Basilan, by anger at the American incursion into Muslim territory, and by the prestige that comes from having your group survive an attack by a superpower.
Instead of sending troops to Basilan, where they risk doing more harm than good, the United States should focus on handing over intelligence. As a Philippine military officer puts it: "Fighting them is not the problem; the problem is finding them."
For example, Abu Sayyaf's leader uses a satellite telephone, but a senior Filipino military officer laughed in embarrassment when I asked why the army does not trace the signal; it lacks the technology. The Americans could easily home in on the signal and tell the Philippine army just where in the jungle Abu Sayyaf fighters are hiding.
The irony is that American troops are desperately needed -- not in the Philippines but in Afghanistan. Yet the White House keeps stiffing the interim Afghan leader, Hamid Karzai, as he pleads for troops as part of an international security force to keep that country from disintegrating again.
Instead we're sending soldiers to the southern Philippines -- where they risk making terrorism worse. That's what comes of White House decisions to deploy troops in places no one there has ever heard of.
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