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All right, you guys, Scott Horton's show here, introducing Bob Logan.
He is a retired professor of economics and a consultant living in interior Alaska.
And he wrote this great article for antiwar.com that we ran on June the 27th, Understanding ISIS in the Philippines.
Welcome to the show, Bob, how are you doing?
Doing great, Scott, thanks for having me.
Very happy to have you here and relieved, I mean, to have this just arrive in my email box.
I've been hunting everywhere trying to find somebody who knows what's really going on in the Philippines.
And apparently you know, but so can you tell us, first of all, how you know so much?
Apparently you lived there for some period of time recently.
Yes, I've been married to a Filipina from Mindanao that grew up about an hour from where the current battle is being fought with relatives all over that area in and about what is called the autonomous region of Muslim Mindanao.
And when I married her in 2009, we were very encouraged about a peace agreement that had been made with one of the major Muslim groups.
But since that time, several things have happened.
The Supreme Court threw out some of the baron gays that had tried to join the autonomous region.
And within a couple of days, they were blowing up the bridge near our house.
Pardon me, the what they tried to join?
A baron gay is like a county in the lower 48.
And some of them were subsumed into the autonomous region of Muslim Mindanao without the vote that was necessitated by the agreement.
And so the Supreme Court threw it out and immediately the bombing started again.
And since then, it's just gotten worse.
I see.
All right.
So now, yeah, you mentioned now this has been a problem for a long time.
I remember at least some talk of the group Abu Sayyaf in the Philippines causing problems, at least from back in the 90s.
You mentioned in this article, Ramzi Youssef and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed.
They had hid out down there in Cebu City for a while, apparently.
And then after September 11th, there were some reports here and there.
I'm searching my memory banks here.
Some mention of special forces or special operations forces going to fight against Abu Sayyaf.
But there's really been very little coverage ever since then.
It sounds like the long story short is they made matters worse rather than better.
If this is what we're dealing with now, if now they're declaring themselves loyal to Baghdadi and the Islamic State, what happened?
That's an accurate assessment.
The long history is that when the Spanish first arrived in 1521, the entire region was Muslim.
They arrived in the Visayas and Magellan demanded that they convert to Christianity and pay tribute every year to the Spanish crown.
Their response was to kill Magellan.
Since then, they've been under imperialist attack from not only the Spanish, but the Japanese, the Americans after the Spanish-American War.
And they've just never given up.
And the more recent history is that in the late 1950s and 1960s, there were rebel groups all over Philippines that were told by the Philippine government that if you lay down your arms and go down to Mindanao and settle the land down there, we will assist you with the army and you can use their bulldozers and their troops to guard you and you can take the land from the Muslims and we'll back you.
And that of course led to the same kind of fighting that had happened historically.
And they forced the government into some peace agreements with the promise of an independent Muslim region spanning part of Mindanao and some islands like Tawi-Tawi and Basilan.
But the government never followed through with all the elements of the agreement.
So various rebel, more violent rebel groups have arisen and Abu Sayyaf is one of them.
They're a kidnap for ransom and extortion and a terrorist outfit and have been operating with the likes of Sheikh Khalid Mohammed and Ramzi Youssef who were responsible for both World Trade Center bombings in the United States.
So as time has gone on and the agreements have not been fulfilled by the Philippine government, there's been ever more restless and violent organizations cropping up in the Southern Philippines.
And we are now seeing the result of the failure to follow through with those promises.
All right, so what about the role then of American Special Operations Forces and even the CIA over the last 15 years, 16 years since the September 11th attack and the start of the global terror war here?
It's been caused for the divisiveness.
There are two different strains of thought, two different kinds of people in the Philippines.
In the North, the Americans are looked upon with great favor.
In the South, because of the Muslim heritage and some extremely violent actions on the part of the Americans historically, like the Moral Massacre where 900 people were slaughtered in one event, having hidden in a volcano from the American forces.
These people remember that history.
That's their grandfathers and grandmothers that were slaughtered in that particular massacre.
And they look upon both the Philippine government and the United States government as their enemy.
Now, they have harbored certain international terrorists, mostly from over in Malaysia, who are in solidarity with them because there's a part of Malaysia, the Sultanate of Sulu that they believe is wrongly claimed by the Malaysian government.
So these people are working together towards the same goal of an independent Muslim state, spanning not only portions of the Philippines, but also Malaysia and beyond.
And the United States has offered rewards, high dollar rewards, like $25 million and for the capture of some of these international terrorists being harbored by people like the Bang Samoro Islamic Freedom Fighters.
And in trying to, quote, arrest, unquote, those guys recently, it led to destruction and death for both elements of the Philippines Special Operations Police and members of the Moro Islamic Liberation Front and the BIFF.
They botched their raid.
There were 44 Filipino Special Action Forces Police that were killed.
18 on the side of the BIFF and MILF, some civilians.
The government then came in with a retaliatory military strike with mortars and heavy guns and caused 30,000 refugees.
And all that does is anger the local people and push more people over into the arms of these violent separatists.
Yeah, so now, and I think you say in here that this group, Abu Sayyaf, I mean, I guess back then, they had their ties to old Al-Qaeda then if you wanted to lump them in with the few hundred Al-Qaeda guys in the world.
You know, obviously they're local fighters, but associated there.
But now, in 2017 or in the last couple of years, they've gone ahead and declared themselves loyal to the Islamic State.
And you're saying, I think in the article, these are the same groups now.
They've all merged together.
The most violent groups on the east and west of the Desaias have now merged together in this battle that's ongoing right now in Marawi City, next to the city where I have my house.
There are some less violent, but armed groups like the MNLF, the Moro National Liberation Front, and the MILF, Moro Islamic Liberation Front, on the western and eastern sides of the Desaias that have made peace agreements with the national government.
And splinter groups have formed underneath each of those eastern and western organizations that have now joined together in this current battle in Marawi City.
Well, without knowing enough about it, I mean, it sounds like what you're saying is if the government lived up to their peace agreements with the moderates, they would marginalize the cooks themselves, and there wouldn't be so much of a problem.
Exactly so.
Instead, they're sending fighters to hunt down the bad guys and kill them, which is only gonna make more and radicalize those that they've been negotiating with all this time.
That's right, and there are many who believe that the peace agreements were not genuine to begin with because they really did offer a level of independence that the Congress of the Philippines hasn't showed the willingness to follow through with.
It's one thing for the president to affix his signature to an agreement, but to get the Congress to follow through and declare legislation, that's an entirely different matter.
Regardless, the promises were made.
They weren't followed through with, and so the more violent elements are now gaining more support from the people.
All right, well, so how's the war going?
I mean, Lord knows the Navy SEALs and the Army Rangers or whoever they sent are capable of delivering fire to targets as they like to put it, right?
So maybe they'll just win and this won't be a problem anymore.
Well, I'd say the parallels over in Iraq with Mosul, for example, are apt comparisons that we have a history of destroying cities in order to save them and then turning our backs on the people and that leaves them in a state of resentment against both the United States and the Philippine national government.
We are not quite to a point yet where it's the majority of Muslims.
It certainly isn't because both the MILF and MNLF are assisting the government both in evacuating Marawi City and if the MNLF is serious, they've offered 5,000 of their own fighters to take on the Maute group.
This new group is calling itself the Mautes after the Maute brothers.
But the longer it goes on without the agreement being fulfilled and the violence continuing, the more the, most like ISIS, they've done nothing but grow.
The more war we make on them, the more resentment people have and the more resources they attract from outside.
Right, and then politically, it makes it more difficult to deal with them and go back to the old promises when now we're dealing with ISIS and all that hyperbole undercuts the solution.
But so, now what exactly is the agreement?
What is it they're supposed to be doing?
Well, it's really talking out of both sides of their mouth.
What the Muslims are interested in is having complete sovereignty, meaning their own taxation authority, their own military, the ownership of the resources.
And in this area, the most central resource is the hydroelectric plants that run in an array from the lake where Marawi City is, where the battle is being fought right now, to a city where we live called Iligan City.
There's a series of hydroelectric plants along there.
And if the agreement is serious, that they are supposed to have control over the resources, then in theory, they own the water and the lake and they own the rights to the power production.
And that set of hydro plants produces over 90% of the electricity for Mindanao.
So, this is a really important strategic asset for them that were the agreement true, they'd be the ones who are selling, they feel they would be the ones who would be selling the power to the national government or to the cities around.
So, I'd say we're really at an impasse.
It doesn't look like the national government really is serious about granting them ownership of all of the resources and they're calling the government on it.
And hence this attack on Marawi City, this is a strategic move.
That's where the start of the hydro chain is.
And if they can control the area from Marawi City to Iligan City, they've got the hydro plants, they've got the electric production in all of Mindanao.
So- Well, so how goes the war now?
I mean, in terms of the fighting on the ground, is there progress being made by the national government?
And then I guess, I don't know how much you know about this, but is it safe to assume, or do you know for a fact that the Americans are embedded with them?
Oh, there's no question the Americans are embedded with them.
That's an open secret here.
And also an open secret that there were U.S. intelligence assets in place long ago in the capital city of this province in Marawi City, and it was the source of great resentment.
The battle is being won by the national government.
They've got much greater firepower, both from the air and heavy weapons on the ground, and they've killed hundreds of fighters.
Civilians have died too, but there's a lot of property destruction very similar to what's going on in the rest of the Middle East, where we bomb and fire heavy weapons and reduce a city to rubble in the interest of saving it.
So the fighters are being vanquished, but the destruction is pretty severe.
All right, well, so I guess, not to take the empire's side and completely divorce this conversation from morality or anything like that, but just in terms of the military solution, the national government's point of view, is this the kind of situation like Iraq where they're just gonna make more and more and more enemies, it's always gonna be completely self-defeating, or there really is a finite number of fighters here that they have to deal with, and then after that, they'll be able to impose their solution.
And that can't be outside the realm of possibility, right?
Well, I think if we look at the track record, if you back things up to where, under the previous presidential administration, a mere arrest warrant was being served that led to a battle that had 30,000 refugees.
Now we're in a battle that has several hundred thousand refugees and an attempted takeover of a strategic city and electric power production was attempted.
And they brought people from outside the Philippines to help them do it.
So the trajectory recently simply doesn't look good.
Yeah, well, and it doesn't sound like I've heard from you even a hint of somebody who can kind of maybe bridge the difference really and get this thing negotiated, right?
I mean, you're saying there's the side that, I mean, in other words, that could encourage with enough force, with enough weight, really encourage the government to live up to their side of these bargains so that then the other guys can, on the other side, who would rather negotiate, have a leg to stand on when they're trying to marginalize those who would prefer to keep fighting.
It seems like if anybody was strong enough to impose that kind of thing, it would be the Americans.
But of course, they're the ones making all these matters worse on the side of the national government.
They're not.
But who else could do it?
The Pope or something?
Well, there was great hope that Duterte himself was the one who could do it.
And that's quite logical.
Duterte is from Mindanao and he's part Moro.
Oh, really?
Okay.
He was the mayor of Davao City for 23 years.
He wasn't the mayor for all of that time.
He was vice mayor while his daughter was the mayor for part of that, but he was the de facto mayor the entire time.
And Davao City was rated as one of the most peaceful places, not just in Philippines, but on Earth.
The rebels simply left him alone for a couple of different reasons.
One is that he was Moro himself.
And the other was because when he dealt with anyone in terms of criminality, you know his reputation.
He assassinated people.
So on the one hand, he could publicly validate their historical claims to their homeland and recognize that it had been taken from the Moro by force and unjustifiably.
But on the other hand, he dealt with troublemakers by killing them.
So there was actually a great hope that Duterte, once he assumed the presidency, would be the person to push through the finality of the realization of the autonomous region of Muslim Mindanao and also keep the rebels in line.
And what happened instead was when he got into the presidency, they slipped into his former city of Davao and started blowing things up.
So a message was sent pretty early on that the most extreme elements were not of a mind to negotiate, they wanted total independence even beyond what was promised in the peace agreements and they were willing to fight for it.
All right, so what if I was magic and I could somehow be the negotiator here and I said, well, let's split the difference that you don't get to have your own military and your own state, but you can have real autonomy.
We'll let you have the dams.
That's what you really want, right?
Is economic control over your own economic life rather than having that controlled from afar.
That's fair, but we're gonna go ahead and still call you a part of the Philippines.
Like autonomous Kurdistan under Iraq, something like that.
And that seems like a reasonable compromise, right?
Because, and I'm not saying that's right.
I'm just saying in the face of obviously the Philippine government annihilating the place before they give it up entirely, which is the reality of how states look at these things.
I'd say that's right because what they've done instead is they've retained ownership of the power plants and tried to bribe the ARMM officials with money from the national government.
And a lot of the people that are in the ARMM has said that's led to corruption, that if we had their resources ourselves, we could make the decisions on the best use of those resources and the politicians in Manila wouldn't be controlling the people that oversee us.
All right, hang on.
We'll be right back after this.
Hey, y'all, I'm Scott.
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So, yeah, I don't know.
Is it that easy, though?
So if I offer that compromise, but I could somehow make it stick, that that really would be good enough for the people of Mindanao?
Or at least it would give the more moderate factions a real leg to stand on to argue to the rest of the population that we're gonna go ahead and take this half a loaf here, kind of thing.
I'd say your proposal would be accepted with great cheers on the part of the Muslims.
I really should be president.
In Mindanao, and it goes beyond just the power plants.
For example, the mineral resources.
Philippines is famous for the national government giving insider deals to their crony buddies for not just the ownership and extraction rights to the mines, but the complete waiving of any kind of environmental regulations whatsoever.
And when Duterte was running for office, he held up pictures of both the extensive environmental damage in some of these mines and the pictures of the people, the corrupt politicians and cronies who were involved in essentially resource theft.
And here you have, again, the national government having promised control over the resources to the local people, and yet that hasn't come to fruition.
Instead, it's crony capitalism.
All right, so now, I realize, I mean, I just don't even know all the right questions to ask.
I'm so ignorant on the Philippines, it's ridiculous.
But so, am I right that the Navy had been kicked out decades ago, right?
Was it when Imelda Marcos was, no, not Imelda Marcos.
I'm sorry, was it when Corzine Aquino was elected?
Was that when the Navy was kicked out, but now they're back?
Well, it was after the eruption of Pinatubo, and- So what year are we talking?
I'm sorry, I'm just lost in space.
It was in the 90s.
So it was Corzine Aquino, she came to power in the late 80s, right?
Like in 87 or something like that.
Right.
Okay.
And there were people who were upset with the US military presence.
That would be the Southerners, and there were people who were in favor of the military presence because the military bases meant money.
These were economic engines for the local community, like at Clark Air Force Base.
Now, after Pinatubo erupted, there's a couple different schools of thought on this.
Pinatubo's eruption covered Clark Air Force Base and the surrounding area with its tremendous amounts of ash.
I've been in there looking over the housing, even here recently, to try to put in a bid for rehabilitating some of that housing so many years later.
And it still sits there, like all the officers' housing, still sits there destroyed as it was the day Pinatubo went off.
And there are some who believe, well, it was just too expensive for the United States military to reconstruct the base, and they were getting flack from Filipinos, and so we just left.
There are other people that pushed the line that, no, it's the Filipinos who kicked them out.
Nevertheless, the national government was theoretically not permitted to bring the US military back on any kind of permanent basis without the permission of the people through the legislature.
And we've just been shipping special forces people there and intelligence assets there, chasing anyone who is associated with violent Islam, and everyone knows it.
So there's resentment that we haven't really followed to the letter the law that requires agreement of stationing US forces in the Philippines.
And they've used various funds from the Americans to beef up ports in the Southern Philippines and over in Palawan and build airports and so forth.
And people who are in the know understand that that's a de facto US military presence that is not legitimate under the laws of the Philippines.
It's that overbuilding and overstocking, or they call it a Philippine base, but boy, there sure are a lot of Americans there all the time doing stuff as their excuse that.
That's right.
And they've been swinging in recent years over to the West, over by Palawan, where the South China Sea has heated up.
Yeah, I was gonna ask you about, I know in all the disputes over islands with China these days that we hear about, the dispute with the Philippines gets the least attention.
Does anybody have a more obvious historical claim than the other when it comes to that, or it's all ancient history?
Well, it's actually Vietnam that has the largest number of little island settlements that it's made.
There's seven different countries that have all pursued the same strategy.
You go out to either an island or a reef that's partially above water, sometimes partially below, and maybe you sink a old ship or you erect some kind of a minor building and house some soldiers or fishermen there, and then you lay claim to it as part of your country, and the surrounding waters, therefore, are also part of your country.
Well, so wait, so the Philippines are in an island dispute, not just with China, but also Vietnam, and who else?
Malaysia, let's see who else is...
It sounds like the Middle East, right, where people try to draw a chart of who's backing who and who's on whose side and who's against each other at what time, and all the lines go all over the place, right?
Who owns all these islands?
Everybody lays claim to all of them.
Yes, and it's been something that's been working out in the ASEAN, A-S-E-A-N, the Southeast Asian countries.
They've been negotiating this for many, many years, and what happened is the United States had changed its policy to containing China, so it started hooping up this dispute as merely a contest between the Philippines and China, because the United States has this historical relationship with the Philippines, it felt that it could frame this dispute as China versus the Philippines, make China look like, not that I'm a fan of China or anything, but they could misframe it as China just picking on the Philippines and give sympathy towards the U.S. defending the hapless Philippines against Chinese aggression, when the reality of the situation is that all of the countries around the South China Sea have competing claims on these islands, and we ought to just leave it to them to settle this dispute instead of stepping in ourselves.
Yeah, sounds like the kind of thing that could be a real problem, but really doesn't have to be, if the incentives are right for people to make a deal.
Yeah, the U.S. wants backing for what it calls the Asian pivot, and it points to China's aggression against the Philippines as a way of excusing its greater military presence, and the Filipinos are famous for saying, the United States wants us to fight to the last Filipino over the South China Sea.
Right, well that's good, I'm glad that they at least have that attitude, you know, could see reality for what it is, whether we're really on their side or not.
They might be on ours, but they don't really have a choice.
Sure, you know, there are businessmen who, you know, in their little parallels of chambers of commerce and so forth, who welcome the construction for the aircraft facilities and the naval ports and the men who will be stationed there, and that pollutes much of the Filipino political discussions over whether it's wise to be used as pawns in an international power game.
All right, well listen, I'm all out of time here, but thank you very much for coming on the show, Robert.
I really appreciate it.
You're very welcome.
I'm glad there's interest in the Philippines.
Yeah, yeah, and thank you again for this great article.
You guys can find it at antiwar.com, original.antiwar.com.
It's called Understanding ISIS in the Philippines.
I'm Scott Horton, this is my show.
Check out the archives at scotthorton.org, and follow me on Twitter, at Scott Horton Show.
Thanks.
