Clear and present danger - Why And Why Not

It's hard to tell if it's Mindanao's on-again, off-again Muslim secessionist struggle that's being exported to the nation's capital or Manila's nasty power struggles that are spilling over to the long-troubled southern frontier. Perhaps both ugly scenarios apply, although it's not easy to determine where one begins and the other ends.

All we know is that everybody's pointing fingers at each other. Malacañang piously insists the Muslims, this time the Maguindanao-based Moro Islamic Liberation Front, is behind this most recent terrorist campaign. The MILF, seconded by its "tactical ally," the communist-led National Democratic Front, defiantly swears that the real culprits belong to some military faction that's moving covertly to depose the shaky Estrada regime.

Caught in between were those innocent victims of last week's bus bombings in Ozamiz City, not to mention countless other people, Christians and Muslims alike, who have had to endure the seemingly eternal cycle of insurgency and violence in Southern and Central Mindanao.

And not too long after Malacañang bragged that the bus bombings had been confined strictly to Mindanao, there erupted that precision raid at the Department of Energy in Metro Manila itself, not to mention attacks on oil depots in Negros Oriental and an NPA ambush in Bohol which saw 10 Special Forces soldiers dead.

A couple of firefighters do not a civil war make, any more than the arrival of a few birds add up to the coming of spring. But as the saying goes, where there's smoke, there must be fire.

Still, President Estrada hardly inspires confidence by talking tough and at the same time pretending the insurgency will go away that easily. He has repeatedly given a June deadline for the just-resumed peace talks to settle the age-old problem or else there will be all-out war against the MILF.

But apart from strong protests from church, human rights and opposition groups, Estrada has to face certain wrenching questions: What if no agreement is reached in the next two to three months? How prepared is either party to fight it out in the battlefields? Who, pray tell, stands to win a war among brothers, the most cruel war of all? And how long will the bloodletting last and at what dreadful cost to the nation's future?

One does not have to be a military expert to contemplate the horror that awaits the Filipino people, Christians and Muslims alike, in the event the proverbial doves are pushed aside by the war hawks.

The military predominance in terms of troops and equipment probably belongs to the government, although nobody is certain this will prove decisive in a conflict fought by the MILF in its home territory.

What's painfully obvious, however, is that the MILF is no pushover when it comes to weaponry and battle-tested personnel. Even more forbidding is that the group's open adherence to Islamic fundamentalism, backed up by generous financial and military assistance, including training in guerrilla warfare, by certain Muslim states.

Precisely because the MILF's long-declared purpose is to establish a Muslim state in Mindanao, its exact boundaries and character still to be fought over, the group's primary strategy calls for the "internationalization" of the conflict -- to put it squarely before the United Nations where the Philippine government can only be on the receiving end of the messy debates on human rights. In other words, to gain early belligerency status in the manner of the victorious East Timorese rebels against Indonesia. This, too, has been the NDF's cherished goal in its own 30-year war against Manila.

Thus, for Estrada to blunder into all-out civil war against the MILF is to fall into the most stupid political and military trap of all.

And what the MILF and the NDF, acting more or less in tandem, have to do is to keep applying pressure on Estrada's ever-thinning patience. With just a few more bombs, they could soon be on the strategic offensive.

Fitting into these cynical moves is the nation's unfortunate descent into a state of crisis, specifically fueled by Estrada's collapsing personal popularity and entanglement in one embarrassing scandal after another. With the stock market badly crippled, the peso much-battered and foreign investments flying off to safer shores, the stage is set for political disorders of the most dangerous kind. "We're nearing that point of no return in 1986 when Ferdinand Marcos was pitifully reduced to fending off one coup rumor after another," says one veteran analyst who has covered five administrations.

To reverse this suicidal turn of events, it has been argued, Estrada would have to rethink his priorities and humbly backtrack on his obsession to give the MILF extremists the war it fervently wants. He would have to realize that the only way to peace, tortuous at best, is to keep all the parties bolted to the negotiating table and therefore buy some more precious time to put into place genuine political and economic reforms, the lack of which has pushed Mindanao on the road to war in the first place.