Second of three parts
The deliberate use of terror is “a legitimate and highly effective tactical tool of unconventional warfare.” This unconventional warfare is designated as a “national policy” with the military assigned the primary responsibility in “the conduct of punitive operations” backed by police, paramilitary and civilian agencies.
BY BOBBY TUAZON
Bulatlat.com
Accounts of government’s internal security plan or of the OBL do not of course show that the military and other security forces are under explicit orders to kill leaders and members of suspected front organizations of the underground left. However, government’s record of counter-insurgency in the Philippines sheds some light on how such campaign operates.
Since the Marcos dictatorship (1972, when martial law was declared, to 1986 when he was ousted from power), the doctrine of counter-insurgency has been waged through unrelenting military suppression campaigns, psychological warfare and assaults on civil liberties. The doctrine was refined further during the Aquino presidency’s “total war policy” through the CIA-inspired low-intensity conflict (LIC) that tapped local government units, paramilitary units and – unclassified secret documents reveal – about 50 vigilante bands or death squads. Counter-insurgency campaigns have been launched not only against the Marxist guerrillas but also Moro rebels fighting for self-determination and autonomy. The cost of such brutal campaigns in terms of human lives lost and communities displaced would be huge and lengthy to mention in this paper.
Both previous campaigns and the current OBL – which is actually recycled from the old ones – have the makings of the counter-insurgency or “counter-terror” doctrine devised by the U.S. military since the 1950s and which, according to former CIA operatives, had been used extensively in at least 43 countries particularly in the Philippines, Indochina and Korea. Similar doctrines have also been crafted in Central and Latin America and, today, in Colombia, Iraq and other countries.
Based on U.S. military field manuals, the heart of this counter-insurgency doctrine is the deliberate use of terror “as a legitimate and highly effective tactical tool of unconventional warfare.” This unconventional warfare is designated as a “national policy” with the military assigned the primary responsibility in “the conduct of punitive operations” backed by police, paramilitary and civilian agencies. Operations used for this terror campaign include assassinations, disappearances and mass executions. Although terror is supposed to be part of the counter-insurgency program, experience shows that it may in fact gain primacy thus making the program primarily an unconventional war.
The doctrine further suggests that the use of terror as a “legitimate weapon” for counter-insurgency aims to instill fear among the population and, as a result, deny suspected cadres and members of target political organizations their mass support. Mass executions or massacres often take place alongside selective political assassinations for maximum effect. The psywar message these operations try to send is that advocacy – especially the radical type – is risky and is not worth fighting for. Being highly-secretive and known only to top military officials, terror invests both the hit men and architects of these punitive operations with the license to kill as well as immunity from prosecution.
