Reply to Comments I'm can't reply to comments due to the extremely slow performance of Blogger, but the posting works a little bette...
Reply to Comments
I'm can't reply to comments due to the extremely slow performance of Blogger,
but the posting works a little better.
Baron
Bodissey said...
The tactics the terrorists used -- the assault into the teargas, the fire
and smoke, the locking up of the other prisoners -- were they something
learned at jihad school, at the al-Qaeda camps, maybe? Or were they ad-hoc?
I don't know whether any of this is standard Jihadi doctrine. My guess
is they're ad hoc. Philippine prisons are some of the weirdest places on
earth. Greg Sheridan has an article in
National Interest, the Jihad Archipelago, in which he makes these
revealing remarks about the Philippines, the Abu Sayyaf and its principal ally,
the Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF).
The Philippines is the strangest nation in Southeast Asia and the one with
the strongest Islamic extremist movement. It is predominantly Catholic
(though with strong mystical influences) and more American than anywhere else
in the region. Hispanic in political culture, it is schizophrenic at many
levels of national identity.
The MILF is a very strange beast ... State Department officials would like
to list it as a terrorist organization but don't because that would
torpedo the peace process, such as it is. ... MILF-controlled areas of
the south provide both the training camps and the vital rest and
recreation hinterland for the region's Islamist terrorists, especially
JI operatives from Indonesia ... there is no doubt that they have
provided, and continue to provide, training camps for JI terrorists. This
allows JI to constantly replenish its stocks through new training programs ...
At the same time, corrupt members of the Philippines armed forces
have aided the MILF. ... The papers described in shocking detail
the involvement of the Philippines navy in dozens of incidents of
seaborne smuggling of military and other supplies to the MILF. A
smaller Islamist terrorist outfit, the Abu Sayyaf group, is ... much more
overtly linked to Al-Qaeda, and among its leaders are veterans of the
Afghan war against the Soviet Union. The broader picture in the southern
Philippines is of the failure of the state. Substantial Philippines
military operations, backed at times by hundreds of U.S. troops in a
so-called "advisory" role, have made little progress against either Abu
Sayyaf or the MILF. Until its military becomes more effective, and
numerous other arms of the state can deliver the services and order they
are supposed to, the prospect is for more of the same. In many ways it
is the most disturbing piece in the Southeast Asian jigsaw.
All of which you would have guessed from reading bits and pieces of the
Belmont Club but Greg Sheridan puts it together in a respectable and
scholarly way. Philippines prisons are places where inmates devote nearly
limitless ingenuity to devising mind-boggling schemes. It's a place where
inmates implant plastic pellets in their Johnsons using razor blades,
merthiolate and ignorance; it's a place where inmates have passed messages to
each other using cockroaches tethered to thread; it's a place where people play
a game of 'attract the fly' by betting on which coin a fly will choose to light
upon in the toilets. It's a place where your life depends on your shiv and the
guys you've chosen as your friends. Poetry has been written and forgotten within
its walls. It is a place of closely held ritual, where by tradition all
prisoners beat their cups against the bars when a man is led to the electric
chair. It is as alien to the Philippine ruling elite as the surface of Mars.
I can imagine the Abu Sayyaf assaulting the police raiders in the teargas
clouds, running with that peculiar comedic gait characteristic of people
sprinting in flip-flops, lighting up the mattresses with a spluttering match
possessed with the indomitable spirit of Bahala Na (I don't give a damn) and
the cops shooting them down in the same part. One day, after the action has died
down in the Middle East, popular culture may turn its attention to the Second
Front against terror in Southeast Asia. Instead of the desert the images will be
of small boats flitting among islets under a whitening moon and of strange
chases in stinking cities between grotesques that would do justice to the
Army of Darkness. Kipling would have been the writer of choice to capture
the atmosphere, only he is seventy years dead.
COMMENTS