Center for a New American Security

So here I am, on AM, as the resident “Asia Pundit,” if you will. I’ve spent most of my intellectual life and a great deal of my physical one in and near <?xml:namespace prefix = st1 />Asia, and for anyone who studies political violence, it isn’t as if there isn’t enough to talk about in that region. Operation Enduring Freedom is, after all, more than Afghanistan, and OEF-P (for Philippines) is at the heart of what has been called the “second front” in the war against terror. The threat that groups in the Southern Philippines pose not just within the country but as part of a regional threat is understandable. How one responds to that threat, ah, now there’s the point.

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Many things are problematic with the imagery of a “second front.” On the purely sensible military note that opening up another front isn’t often the smartest of moves, on the whole war analogy in the first place, “second fronts” aren’t usually good things. (Gershman’s article focuses not on whether we should be concerned with Al-Qaeda type radicalism inserting themselves into Southeast Asia, but whether the military instrument—how one responds to another “front”—is the best way to address such a concern in SE Asia).

News on OEF-P frequently is articulated as the “good stuff the military is doing in the war on terror.” There has been great validity to that, but that’s not the big story. At least, it shouldn’t be. The thing that is more important to know and understand is how not only the US military, but other aspects of both American and Philippine power are being applied to handle tensions in the southern Philippines. One of those things has been the establishment of the Autonomous Region of Muslim Mindanao (ARMM), an effort to give to folks in Mindanao some political buy-in to the central government in Manila by opening up some political space and internal self-rule on some issues. The ARMM, however, isn’t a very large part of Mindanao writ large, so the sense of meaningful representation is, shall we say, a little questionable. August 12 2008 saw the most recent ARMM elections, and while there were some instances of violence, the Philippine government is viewing the elections (so far) as a success. And with an estimated 84 percent turnout (of 1.7 million potential voters), there’s good reason to be optimistic, but not complacent. That same day reports discussed about 130,000 displaced persons in the southern Philippines.

A great deal of the work for the Philippine government and the effectiveness of their programs to bring the people of the south into the national fold will be seen not in the potential increase of the territory covered by the ARMM, but more in the movement by the population either for or against a larger ARMM territory. Economically, the Southern Philippines is the poorest region, and overlaying gap that is the religious difference (a majority Muslim population in the south, but still a minority to the overall Catholic population in the Philippines total). That’s an easy recipe for discontent. What is critical is whether this domestic grievance can be tied to a larger regional or even global one. On that score, the worst thing for the situation in the Philippines (or SE Asia more generally) is to be any front in the “Global War on Terror.”