No tall order: those military probes

By CHITO DELA TORRE, delatorrechito@yahoo.com
July 15, 2010

"...the New People’s Army... had always been able to prove that it could not be wiped out."

Warays should welcome calls for investigation to the reasons that forced the military during the period of from 2006 to 2009 to consistently proclaim, pursuant to a goal pronounced by Gloria Arroyo herself as then president, to the whole nation and the whole world that it can crush and put an end to insurgency in the Philippines.

Of course, when those proclamations were being made, one undying unit of the insurgent group (against which the military declared war when talks to end hostilities failed during the presidency of Fidel Ramos) always kept laughing, and rebuffing.

That group was the New People’s Army, the armed rebels’ unit of the Communist Party of the Philippines that the combined forces of the government continued to fail to defeat during the mighty Marcos regime, during the next 20 years, and during the almost 10 years of Arroyo, had always been able to prove that it could not be wiped out.

The investigation being asked today will also look into how much exactly did the military receive from out of the people’s money, and maybe even from foreign debts and foreign donors, to crush and end insurgency.  The calls, from various concerned groups and some legislators, want to see the logic which served as basis for those proclamations and tremendously huge funding.  It has seemed, after all, that that logic never existed and that the bases and reasons advanced by Arroyo and the military did not produce deaths to the rebels and the insurgency itself.  As the probe may begin soon, examiners should also dig into the truths of the military’s claim that only about 1,000 more active and armed rebels are on the loose, and then force the military to name and establish the locations of these ubiquitous rebels.  It will not be enough that taxpayers and the very people whom the military itself says it is sworn to protect and defend is citing numbers of its enemies and numbers of its overrun enemy lairs.  The enemies themselves should be named and fully described in a published and publicly posted document.  The enemy lairs should also handled similarly.

Why this public responsibility revelation was not being done by the military before the current Aquino Administration should be interestingly investigated as well.  Imagine, here is a country called the Philippines whose denizens are being claimed to be protected and defended but who do not even know who are those against whom their protection and defense is pressed for and must be a sworn-to duty.

There should likewise be an accounting demanded, why the military inveterately reported that the discovery of enemy camps or the presence of armed rebels had to be attributed to the people themselves, usually in the rural and almost uninhabited sections in often mountainous areas.  The government needs to get that information out to the public so that the people would know that the military actually failed heavily in its intelligence and counter-intelligence, or espionage, activities.  There actually are other things that the military should be doing in order to pinpoint exact locations of enemies and their hideouts or camps, but which it does not do.  That embarrassing failure is always embarrassingly cured by the participation of ordinary, often unschooled, citizens in barrios and sitios who have no military training and are not receiving any salary as does every soldier.  In technical military sense, it is not acceptable to claim that information or tips volunteered by private citizens is a product of effective military intelligence strategy.  That claim is self-defeating and an excusable denial of the military’s foible – the military’s quirk that is almost tantamount to a dereliction of duty.

The investigations – I hope there will be a series of intensive, no-holds barred probes – may build scrutinizing arteries to where intelligence funds have been going for during the past many years until an Oakwood mutiny made a senator and an Ampatuan massacre rocked the whole world.

President Noynoy Aquino is in the right track.  He has vowed to provide the military – and the police – with more funds, more men, and more better arms.  In the case of the military, he has seen that as an urgent need in order to enable the government’s armed forces to win in the government’s --- not the military’s --- war against insurgency and truly end insurgency and its shadows.  PNoy doesn’t like the military lying to the Filipino people.  He wants it to tell the people that its soldiers couldn’t yet win and that they can’t yet end the war, and that it was not honest in its claims of minuscule victories in the past when in fact it was only chipping off a tip of an iceberg, in a manner of talking.

Thus, Lieutenant General Ricardo David is the right officer and gentleman to lead the entire military towards this objective of President Aquino.  He may have been a silent witness of the excesses of military officers in the past but certainly he is committed to enforce the command of his commander-in-chief to make the military and all its personnel at par with the highest expectations of the New Government and the wishes of the Filipino people.  The conduct of investigations, with his fullest support and cooperation, in addition to his participation, apart from what he may be initiating by himself as the most powerful armed officer in the Philippines, will vigorously, albeit strenuously, guide his commitment which, by its quintessence, is a valorously noble step towards professionalizing the military service.