After a sweet quiet spell, albeit far too brief, the NPA's SMRC, or Southern Mindanao Regional Committee, has once again greased up its rifles and begun making itself heard. On September 17th in Davao City's Barangay Paradise Embac in Paquibato District the NPA's PBC1, or 1st Pulang Bagani Company (1st Red Warrior Company) harried a combat patrol from the AFP's (Armed Forces of the Philippines) 69IB (Infantry Battalion). As the AFP detachment entered Sitio Guinobatan in Purok #7 the NPA targetted it with sniper fire. The AFP denied that any casualties had been incurred but after the NPA released claims that it had managed to kill one soldier the AFP sheepishly admitted that, yes, it had in fact suffered a single casualty but that it was a very minor wound when a single round grazed an extremity...Suuuuuure, don't worry, I won't tell anyone.
Speaking of Barangay Paradise Embac, the outlying settlement recently became the focus of an interesting debate in the Davao City Municipal Council when Councilors Leah Librado Yap and Jimmy Dureza co-authored a Resolution seeking to oust a garrison of the 69IB from a post located nearly 300 meters away from the Paradise Embac Annex Primary Elementary School. The NPA and its puppets, including Councilor Yap who is herself a member of Bayan, a legal above board political party doing the bidding of the NPA and its political arm, the CPP or Communist Party of the Philippines, is of course opposed to any AFP control within the long established, albeit technically unofficial, NPA Territory in that district, Paquibato, along with two adjoining districts. The garrison has been on site since 2002 and yet this past Spring, 2011, the NPA and its coterie of multi-sectoral front organisations got a gigantic bee in their bonnet about its existence, as if they had gone to bed the night before only to discover an AFP post smack dab in the middle of "their" territory.
According to the Resolution, which passed its first of three Readings on August 16th, it hopes to take aim at the emplacement and its checkpoint on the road in front of the school because it is placing both students and their teachers in grave danger. Vice Mayor Rodrigo "Roddy" Duterte has interestingly defended the emplacement saying that his friends, the NPA, do not attack schools NOR children and so the garrison endangers nobody. I suppose Big Daddy Duterte failed in Logic 101 on his way into Law School because those rationalisations mean absolutely nothing. By placing armed men in proximity to small children you are automatically placing the children in danger. How much more so when there are two competing armed groups in that area? Even more interestingly, his daughter, the MAYOR, Sarah "Inday" Duterte Carpio has ALSO come out in support of the military post. Though Vice Mayor Duterte has long enabled the NPA to play house in three of his city's districts Mayor Carpio had gone much further and actually tried to have the military, aside from the anti-terrorism Task Force Davao, pulled out of the city. This nearly 360 degree turn is quite marked and all the more so when one realises that she had had to sign off on the military operation that captured the NPA's main camp in the Davao Region, but alas THAT sordid tale must be relegated to a subsequent entry.
At about the same time as the NPA began sniping in Davao City another NPA element in the municipality of Malita in that same province as Davao City, Davao del Sur, another of the AFP's "security patrols" stumbled upon 20 NPA guerillas in that town's Barangay Datu Danwata's Sitio Tambolang. The 30 minute firefight that ensued led to the AFP capturing one M1 rifle and 4 IEDs, or Improvised Explosive Devices (as in "bombs"). Interestingly the military is claiming that two of the devices aren't IEDs at all but rather Claymore Mines. Claymores, or M18s in American speak, are still controlled detonation devices as opposed to pressure plate mines that detonate when something steps on, or rolls over the device. This distinction is extremely important because the AFP engages in ignorant propaganda attacks against the NPA in which it claims that the Maoist guerillas are breaking International Law by utilising landmines.
First, even if the NPA engaged in non-controlled detonation devices, it still would not be contravening any part of LOAC, or the Laws of Armed Conflict, the genre within International Law that applies to warfare. There are widely adhered to treaties, Ottawa for example, in which nations that have ratified the treaty are then bound by International Law not to use such devices. I definitely view such treaties as positive to the nth degree but with controlled detonation there is no discernible chance of "accidentally" killing a group of children as they walk to school or even a peasant family's caraboa (Philippine water buffalo) because in a controlled detonation a person detonates the device from a close distance almost always within the detonation's line of sight. Ergo, even if the NPA had some acquired Claymores, and I highly doubt it since they haven't externally sourced weaponry since the mid-1970s (and never, ever in Mindanao), they wouldn't be illegal. The use of the word "landmine" in and of itself lends definite connotations to laymen. They naturally envision pressure detonated devices. This is why the AFP spin meisters cling to that ignorant phrasing. It is a shame because just in its day to day actions the NPA is guilty enough of many things. Yet, when you disseminate FALSE PROPAGANDA and people see through it you then lose all credibility.
The AFP has entered the age of Political Correctness where combat patrols have become "security patrols in support of PDTs." PDTs, or Peace and Development Teams, are the cornerstone of the AFP's new gameplan, OPlan Bayanihan, or Operational Plan Bayanihan (Operational Plan Helping Hand), which turned the traditional AFP ethos on its head. Whereas in the past, under the preceding OPlan Bantay Laya II (Operational Plan Guarding the Nation II) and all preceding OPlans, the COIN, or Counterinsurgency strategy has always been an 80:20 combination of Tactical Engagement:Hearts and Minds Engagement, Bayanihan has the 80:20 skewed into a converse dynamic as Hearts and Minds:Tactical Engagement. For the uninitiated, "Hearts and Minds" refers to actions and programmes designed to win over the "hearts and minds" of civilians in CAAs, or Conflict Affected Areas (not to be confused with the AFP COIN Tactical cornerstone, Civilian Active Auxiliaries like CAFGU, et cetera).
The idea is to defeat the NPA on its strongest facet, its Mass Base of Support. Mass Base of Support refers to peasants and others on the bottom part of the Philippine socio-economic totem pole who offer the NPA support both emotionally as well as materialy. For example, the farming family who happily hands over a half kilo of rice because he or she sympathises with the NPA's goals and outlook. Usually the NPA finds it easy to win such people over because the Maoists are the first outsiders who have ever taken even a scant interest in their needs or concerns. The state cannot be said to have "failed" such people because in almost all cases the state has never even stopped to consider such people exist EXCEPT when divvying up their lands for mineral and timber extraction. There is an old adage in COIN, "Insurgency begins where good roads end."
So, in Hearts and Minds Operations the Government wishes to win over these heretofore ignored citizens by providing marked improvements in their lives. This is done via MEDCAPs, DENCAPs, and VETCAPs, where the military, either by itself or by teaming up with charitable institutions, organisations, and individuals provides no-cost medical, dental and vetinary care for the peasants and their livestock. Schools are built or otherwise rehabilitated and/or expanded if extant. Farm to Market Roads and in the case with offshore islands, Circumfrential Roads which link communities by land where heretofore they have been 100% reliant upon seatravel are constructed and so communities do see their lives vastly improved.
Sounds fine but one needs to understand that the Government is not operating out of altruism but rather with a medium range plan that offers no real supportive infrastructure to make these improvements sustainable over the long haul. You are told that the military's engineering battalions have built a new Farm to Market Road but a few locals may see it very differently. A tribal leader may see that his tribe is now threatened by the consumerist materiel-centred culture that has defined much of the modern Philippines. Villagers may see it as the Access Road it so often is, helping to spped up the Development Aggression that has destroyed so much of Mindanao's once pristine environment.
In the autumnn of 2010 the AFP launched its first PDT. With three weeks of training nine man teams are deployed into targetted communities. They usually garrison themselves in schools, houses of worship or even private homes. They blanket a barangay and engage in a very intrusive surveying process in what amounts to a naked grab for intelligence though the military, lying through its teeth swears it is to zero in on a given community's needs. Often the questioning even focuses on the average amount of food consumed by a given family in any random month so that just as in Hamleting sustenance is measured so as to control diversion to the NPA.
This Summer, 2011, the AFP expanded its PDP programme to include the villagers themselves working side by side. On August 21st 118 civilians graduated from a three day seminar on their role(s) within the PDT programme. The ceremony in the municipality of Mati's municipal gymnasium in Davao Oriental Province featured that province's Governor del Rosario giving the keynote speech. The PDT programme, which began in Davao Region in the Autumn of 2010 has now gone nationwide after becoming the key protocol within OPlan Bayanihan.
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