910-01-08, 9:22 am

Except for natural disasters such as the eruption of Mt. Pinatubo, or the sinking of a ferry with hundreds of victims, nobody notices what's going on in the Philippines today. But now that Britney Spears just belted out her tempting warble of 'sneaking into the Philippines, ' can the PENTAGON Special Forces not be far behind to get a piece of the action? Before you can say 'Yo Mama!' US troops are found already 'embedded' in the Empire's most Americanized islands where savage class wars have been raging for decades.

The US invaded the Philippines in 1898 during the Spanish-American War, but it created the 'first Vietnam' (to quote the historian Bernard Fall) when 1.4 million Filipino recalcitrants had to be 'neutralized' to convert the revolutionary Philippine Republic into an 'insular possession.' Mark Twain praised the US government's success in acquiring 'property in the three hundred concubines and other slaves of our business partner, the Sultan of Sulu,' referring to the 'civilizing mission' of US diplomacy over the Muslim inhabitants of the southern Philippines (E. San Juan, US Imperialism and Revolution in the Philippines, 2007). But in the 1906 siege at Mt. Dajo and the 1913 rout at Mt. Bagsak, both in Jolo, the US military had to massacre thousands of Muslim men, women and children to complete the islands' pacification. The victors seemed not to have learned anything, so history is repeating itself.

A hundred years after, the US seems to be doing the job again. By the last week of September, the total casualty figure surpassed three hundred as government troops (with their US advisers/trainers) and Moro (Muslim citizens of the Philippines) militants clashed in the southern Philippines. The scale of violence and magnitude of civilian suffering reached a crescendo enough to alarm the European Union, but not Bush, Condoleeza Rice, nor the two US presidential candidates. BBC News (9/26/2008) reported that the International Committee of the Red Cross bewailed the plight of tens of thousands of refugees and evacuees, the indiscriminate killing of civilians, and the potential for sectarian 'ethnic cleansing.' More than 120,000 people have died since fighting broke out 40 years ago between the Muslim separatists and the neocolonial state, with no end in sight.

With full-scale war between the formidable Moro guerillas and the Armed Forces of the Philippines (AFP) about to sweep the country, the US military presence suddenly caught media attention. It was confirmed by government officials that the headquarters of the US-Philippines Joint Special Operations Task Force Philippines (JSOTF-P) is found inside Camp Navarro of the AFP's Western Mindanao Command in Zamboanga City, Mindanao. Accessed only by US personnel, the physical infrastructure was sealed by permanent walls, concertina wires and sandbags, with visible communication paraphernalia (satellite dishes, antennaes, etc.). From this place, US military operations against domestic insurgents – whether belonging to the Abu Sayyaf Group (ASG) or to the Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF), the Moro National Liberation Front (MNLF), or the New People's Army (NPA) – are launched and directed. In lieu of economic-social reforms, the government's militarist solution to poverty, unemployment, and extra-judicial killings and kidnappings – over 1,000 victims so far – will only create a refugee crisis, more atrocities and 'collateral damage' of innocent civilians, loss of national sovereignty, and impunity for criminal violence committed by the military and police.

Re-occupying 'Our Possessions'

The Camp Navarro US outpost is only one of many disposable, low-profile 'lily-pad' stations of 'forward deployment' for the US military in the post-9/11 period. Tom Engelhardt recently counted more than 750 US military facilities in 39 countries. But many more are not officially acknowledged, such as the 106 bases in Iraq or those in Afghanistan; or in countries like Jordan and Pakistan where bases are shared (Tomgram 2008; Chalmers Johnson, Sorrows of Empire, 2003). This applies to US military installations in the Philippines. US troops in the Philippines refer to their Jolo launching-pad as 'Advance Operating Base-920' devoted to 'unconventional warfare'(Herbert Docena, Focus on the Global South Media Advisory, 8/15/2007). The JSOTF-P started in 2002 in Mindanao, part of the Pentagon's realignment of overseas basing network (Michael Klare, 'Imperial Reach,' The Nation 4/25/2005). The bases are now called 'cooperative security locations' (CSL), a euphemism mentioned in the May 2005 report of the US Commission on Review of Overseas Military Facility Structures, or Overseas Basing Commission. CSLs can be existing military or private facilities available for US military use. These are located in Clark, Subic, Mactan International Airport in the Visayas, in General Santos City airport, in the aforementioned Zamboanga AFP outpost, and in other clandestine areas (Julie Alipala, Philippine Daily Inquirer, Mindanao Bureau, 11/26/2007).

The Arroyo regime readily hands out apologias for the presence of 400-600 US military personnel in the country purportedly serving 'mutually beneficial ends,' as the US Embassy claims. Retired General Edilberto Adan of the Presidential Commission on the VFA (Visiting Forces Agrement) openly excuses the US embedded military headquarters as a necessary fixture to maintain 'control over their units.' When Arroyo visited the US in May 2003, she boasted of having obtained from Washington $356 million in security-related assistance, the largest military aid package since the closing of US bases in 1992. She claimed that US military aid had grown to 'more than $100 million annually from $1.9 million three years ago' (Inquirer News Service, 5/27/2003). Two million dollars were allocated for 'Sulu rehabilitation' while four million was allocated to Basilan, the site of the Balikatan exercise in 2002. As a 'major non-Nato ally,' Arroyo announced that Bush will continue to give aid to support the Philippines' 'war on terrorism,' not for economic development or for social services, much less for social justice and equity.

'War on terrorists' ('terrorists,' of course, refer to those opposed to US policies; the exploitative neoliberal impositions of the World Bank, World Trade Organization, International Monetary Fund) becomes the Arroyo regime's blanket term to legitimize US infringement and violation of Philippine sovereignty. What results is a war of terror on humanity, a 'homeland security imperialism' whose latest symptomatic crisis is the collapse of the US financial system and the erosion of US economic capacity to maintain hegemony (John Bellamy Foster and Robert McChesney, Pox Americana, 2004).

Visiting to Overstay: Penetration and Bondage

Immediately after the U.S. invaded Afghanistan after 9/11, the Philippines became the second battlefront in the 'war on terrorism.' In February 2002, Arroyo allowed the US Special Operations Command-Pacific to conduct 'training exercises' in Mindanao. Earlier, 660 US soldiers arrived in the Philippines, expanding Washington's 'preventive' war to southeast Asia. The San Francisco Chronicle (18 Jan. 2002) editorialized on the 'Next Battle: Philippines,' pointing out that the demonized ASG is so discrepant from Al Qaeda, and that poverty and land reform are the causes of conflict in the US neocolony. The first Balikatan war games were held involving 4,773 Filipino and US troops. About 2000 US soldiers participated in counterinsurgency operations disguised as 'civic action' in several provinces where the NPA was active: Pampanga, Zambales, Nueva Ecija, Cavite and Palawan. This intrusion of the US military was considered legal under the VFA ratified in 1998, just seven years after the Philippine Senate rejected the renewal of the 1947 RP-US Military Bases Agreement, thus closing the two huge US bases in Asia Clark and Subic) where the US enjoyed extraterritorial rights and inflicted all kinds of abuses and indignities on Filipinos (see Teodoro Agoncillo and Milagros Guerrero, History of the Filipino People, 1970). In June 2002, at least 1,200 military personnel comprised the largest US mission outside Afghanistan (Bobby Tuazon, Unmasking the War on Terror, 2002).

The VFA signifies the legitimized sell-out of Philippine sovereignty. Under the VFA, the US can enter the Philippines anywhere and hold military operations. It restricts the Philippine government in checking US aircrafts and ships for nuclear weapons banned by the Constitution. US authorities have jurisdiction over their servicemen who commit crimes in the Philippines while on duty. The flagrant example is the case of Marine Corporal Daniel Smith, convicted for rape last Dec. 4, 2006. Even before his appeal could be acted upon, the Arroyo government surrendered Smith to the custody of the US Embassy, placing him beyond the jurisdiction of local authorities. In October 2007, US officials promised that rape will no longer be committed during war games. Col. Ben Matthews II, commander of the Marine Aircraft Group and co-director of the Talon Vision '08 exercise (in which Smith and his three co-accused officers were involved), spoke about 'the ethics and morality of individuals, not just soldiers' (Tonette Orejas, 'US Marines promise no more rape,' Inquirer 10/21/2009). Meanwhile, the whereabouts of Smith has become a matter of public speculation, or 'rumor-mongering' (to use the Marcos dictatorship's neologism) as the Supreme Court investigates the legality of his transfer.

Aside from the VFA, US troops, attached employees, and their war materiel have been given unlimited and unrestricted freedom of movement, flexibility and maneuver by the Mutual Logistics Support Agreement (MlSA, 2003; renewed 2008), and the Security Engagement Board (SEB, 2006). The MLSA permits US forces to use government facilities for storage and pre-positioning of equipment as part of strategic deployments during US war maneuvers in the Asian-Pacific and Middle Eastern regions. All three agreements (reinforcing the Cold-War vintage 1951 Mutual Defense Pact and the Joint US-RP Military Advisory Group) that legalize a permanent 'temporary' US military base of operations within the country eviscerate national sovereignty. Both the Arroyo bureaucracy and the mercenary AFP continue to demonstrate their function as tried-and-tested instruments of US global foreign policy and imperialist aggression.

Today, the new agreement covers 'non-traditional threats,' a rubric covering a wide spectrum of reasons including terrorism, drug trafficking, piracy, and disasters such as floods, typhoons, earthquakes and epidemics. According to Arroyo's factotums, the US is not engaged in actual fighting; instead, US servicemen are merely providing critical combat support services by way of intelligence purveyance, logistics and emergency evacuation for AFP counter-terrorism operations. In addition to Balikatan, Kapit-Bisig war exercises have been carried out with three components: training and equipping the AFP, giving humanitarian and civil assistance, and supporting local military campaigns against Muslim militants (E-Balita, 7/25/06). Counter-terrorism thus merges with anti-narcotics and disaster preparedness to produce the public-relations mantra of fighting 'transnational crimes' (E-Balita 5/25/2007).

Ancestral Domain as 'Killing Fields'

Events have overtaken the good intentions of everyone. Arroyo's abrupt scrapping of the already initialled Memorandum of Agreement on Ancestral Domain (MOA-AD) between the neocolonial state and the MILF last August 4 exploded into fierce bloodletting. Over 250,000 civilians became refugees, with several hundreds killed, chiefly due to the indiscriminate aerial and artillery bombardment of the AFP against two small MILF detachments. Why the sudden unilateral deceit and treachery?

After more than four years of peace negotiations facilitated by the Malaysian government and the US Embassy (through the US Institute of Peace), Arroyo's officials initialed a peace pact that would end several decades of conflict between six million Moros (the 2008 CIA World Factbook counts only 4.5 million out of 96 million Filipinos) and successive administrations since Marcos. But local officials appealed to the Supreme Court to stop the final signing, thus precipitating the hostilities. MILF chair Al Haj Murad Ebrahim said that Arroyo failed to inform her constituencies (local officials, other indigenous groups, etc.). It turned out that the real motivation behind the agreement was a secret stratagem to change the Constitution and install a federalist system so that Arroyo and her clique can maintain power after 2010 when her term ends. Clever ploy, indeed, but easily exposed and deflated.

Apart from the possibility of charter change, one may ask: Was Arroyo really intent on pacifying the MILF, just as former president Fidel Ramos pacified the MNLF? One lesson that escaped both parties today is the neutralization if not dismantling of MNLF gains won through enormous sacrifices by way of Misuari's acquiescence to the 1996 peace agreement, which provides a working model for the MOA. Kenneth Bauzon drives home a point not fully articulated by academic pundits: the 1996 agreement 'is essentially a neoliberal formula designed to bring to an end the MNLF's more than two decades of insurgency. At the same time, the agreement provided legal cover for the entry of capital--both domestic and foreign, and both commercial and philanthropic--to facilitate the integration of an otherwise untapped region, the ARMM, into the global neoliberal world economic order' (in Rethinking the BangsaMoro Crucible, ed. Bobby Tuazon, CENPEG 2008). This explains why US Special Forces have tenaciously and not so surreptitiously embedded themselves in the deeply compromised state apparatus. And why the US Embassy (via the US Institute of Peace and Islamic mediators) insinuated itself in the peace talks, hoping that the Moro 'ancestral domain' would easily become grist to the predatory 'free market' machinery, the global capitalist commodifying engine, now suffering serious breakdown in Wall Street and Washington.

Amid this stormy landscape enter the 'humanitarian' do-gooders. In the AFP's pursuit of two MILF commanders (Ameril Ombra Kato and Abdullah Macapaar, alias Commander Bravo), US Special Forces were sighted inside the 64th Infantry Battalion Camp in Datu Saudi Ampatuan, Maguindanao. Bai Ali Indayla of the Moro human rights group Kawagip testified that the soldiers were engaged in covert operations, such as the supervision of drones or spy planes (used in 2006 to track down the ASG leaders) and predator missile strikes. This was confimed by Major Gen. Eugenio Cedo, then commander of the Western Mindanao Command (Philippine Daily Inquirer 9/10/2008). As usual, the US Embassy denied that the soldiers were involved in actual combat; they were only responding to the AFP request for aerial surveillance to determine conditions of the terrain and visibility, for 'future civil-military projects,' to quote Rebecca Thompson, US Embassy Information Officer.

In January 2002, veteran journalist Carlos H. Conde already reported on how fully-armed US Special Forces were deployed in late 2001 in Basilan and Zamboanga specifically to help the AFP pursue the ASG. Admiral Dennis Blair, then commander of the US forces in the Pacific, told the Washington Post that the US training of Filipino soldiers was 'the largest and most comprehensive' in recent times (Bulatlat/Minda-News, 1/6-12/2002). In 2007, Conde quoted Henry Crumpton, coordinator for counter-terrorism at the US State Department, in confirming US involvement in escalating and exacerbating the violence and insecurity in Mindanao: 'US and Filipino forces worked together in Basilan to eradicate ASG havens on the island through a combination of civil-military operations and improved counterterrorism coordination' ('Abu Sayyaf in Basilan: A Deadly Redux,' Bulatlat/Davao Today 9/1/2007). The Arroyo-initiated 2002 Balikatan exercise already mentioned served as the model for the permanent basing of US troops, one endorsed by US neoconservative pundit Robert Kaplan: 'Unconventional warfare in the Philippines provides a better guidepost for our (US) military than direct action in Iraq and Afghanistan' (The Atlantic, October 2005). Arroyo in 2002 boasted to George W. Bush that she had finally solved the ASG problem; but today, the ASG remains the chief excuse for US military presence in the exploding battlefronts of Mindanao and Sulu.

Amid daily testimonies of the carnage and destruction affecting millions of inhabitants in the southern Philippines, progressive representatives in the Philippine Congress have urged a thorough probe into the permanent presence of US troops. Personalities such as Rep. Maria Climaco of Zamboanga City and Amina Rasul, lead convenor of the Philippine Council for Islam and Democracy, have also urged action to stop US meddling on behalf of the corrupt, bankrupt Arroyo despotism. BAYAN and other civil-society groups recently petitioned the Legislative Oversight Committee on the VFA to terminate all agreements allowing foreign troops (not only the US but also the Australians and other nationalities) interfering in the ongoing hostilities, thus violating the Philippine Constitution (News Release, 9/25/2008). They also demanded that the Department of National Defense and AFP arrange 'the immediate pull-out of US troops and the dismantling of their facilities in Mindanao. However, unless millions of Filipinos commit open civil disobedience and paralyze traffic, business, and government operations--that is, unless massive 'people power' erupts to protest the corruption, puppetry and criminality of the US-Arroyo regime – it is unlikely that the Arroyo clique and its American patrons would scrap the VFA and all other instruments of US control. Fighting in the jungles and countryside, in synchrony with parliamentary mass urban mobilizations, may have to accelerate until the comfortable lives of the elite and the complacent middle class becomes impossible to sustain.

--E. San Juan Jr. heads the Philippines Cultural Studies Center based in Connecticut.