US suffers first casualties / Mayor Mitra and who else?

It wasn’t auspicious, successful or spectacular at all, the first US commando raid in deep Afghanistan. A US helicopter crashed, killing two servicemen aboard, the first blood shed by America in a war different from any other war in all of history. The casualties bent the proud and lordly head of President George W. Bush. A sadness crept into his face as he told America there would be more US casualties, more sacrifices, "bear them" for the war against terrorism was just and would be pursued to its very end whatever it took. Justice would be done.

There was no photographic coverage of that first ground battle, very strange, no journalists on the ground, stranger still. All we know from unofficial sources was that there was a "ferocious firefight" and if there was, there must have been casualties on both sides. As it was, the commandoes landed under heavy air cover and bombardment in a three-hour hit-and-run assault outside Kandahar by 100 crack Army Rangers.

American troops never fought that way before. In Normandy, in southern Italy, in Iwo Jima, in the Battle of the Bulge, in Vietnam and Korea, in a hundred other wars and battles, they stormed the beaches or the rice paddies or the forests and jungles. They engaged in bloody bayonet engagements, if need be, and fought on, even if the Stars and Stripes at times was a besieged flag riddled by enemy bullets. They fought. Now the impression is that despite Afghanistan being pounded to rubble – or rubble being pounded repeatedly to rubble – by US air might, American ground troops are leery of invading Afghanistan in any kind of battalion or regimental strength. And for any extended length of time.

Why? We don’t know and we can only guess.

The Taliban are known to be among the world’s most savage fighters. In the war against the Soviet Union, every captured Russian was killed by being stripped of his flesh. And every invader eventually fled in terror.

Among the Taliban today is Osama bin Laden, assuming The Bearded One is still there. Although there are loose reports he may already have escaped and found concealment in either Indonesia, Malaysia or the Philippines where sympathetic Muslims abound, whose young warriors consider him a hero and scream jihad in full-throated roar. How do you get bin Laden?

Simple. If it is true that they have already leveled all of his training camps, all of the al-Qaeda strongholds stripped to useless bits of cement, shriveled steel and twisted bailing wire, then the only thing to do is storm those caves. In one of them, Osama bin Laden is presumably in hiding. He is waiting, flexing his forces, eager to pounce. But those caves could lead to subterranean labyrinths or tunnels and here all the high-tech in the world would be useless.

America indeed rules the air. She dominates the sea. She claims mastery of the ground and everything the Yankee can see via infra-red and satellite. But subterranean war was something she never bargained for. Here the Taliban warrior is a snarling, prehistoric beast, a cobra when he wants to be, a hundred scorpions itching to feat on Yankee flesh.

Eventually, of course, America will win the war in Afghanistan, overthrow the Taliban by sheer might and with the help of the United Nations set up a new government. But by that time, US casualties will have mounted to hundreds, maybe thousands, of body bags returning to American soil to the wail of stricken trumpet sounds. By that time, will the multination coalition forged by America still be around to back up the Yankee? By that time, will the US home front still be united behind Bush’s war? By that time, would other and more sophisticated terror attacks on the American homeland have drained America’s will to fight a long war? By that time, wouldn’t the world of Araby have deserted America because Israel, in an orgy of revenge against what it describes as Palestinian terror, would have bloodied the West Bank and Gaza to endless rows of cross-crissed sepulchers? And by that time, wouldn’t the Palestinian uprising against Israel, the intifada, have brought the war to Israel with suicide commandos shouting the name of Allah as they leap and fall upon helpless Israelis in their very homes? Hamas and Hezbollah would have erupted as never before. And by that time, wouldn’t the international economy have cracked up even more? Would GMA still be around? And wouldn’t the Philippines have rounded the Cape of Bad Hope to twist at the edge of the cliff? If not, fall over?

It’s a war, I tell you, that I cannot understand. In the only war I really fought in and readied for sure death, the guerrilla war against Japan, we gained terrain inch by inch as we crawled up the hills and mountains leading to the lair of General Tomoyuki Yamashita. Daily, hundreds of us died. But we fought on, heedless of the fatalities and the casualties, knowing only the ground under us was Filipino ground, a land we cherished, a land we could never, ever cede to the brutal Japanese. Eventually, Yamashita crept out his Mountain Province cave and capitulated. I figured that was the kind of war America would fight against the Taliban, would fight regardless of the casualties to beat Taliban and capture or kill Osama bin Laden.

But it seems the manuals of war have been altered, the face and the physiology, the temperament of war. Americans are not as willing to die as they did before. In Afghanistan, they have to get out of their high-tech armor, which they used to great advantage in Kosovo without a single US soldier losing his life. Now the enemy is inside caves and tunnels and labyrinths, and the fight there is mediaeval, if not primeval. The Yankee can only win if, like the Taliban, he descends to the level of an aroused beast, for that is where war began, the growl of the primitive man in or outside his cave, enemy sighting enemy, the screams of pain and approaching death. And only the knife or the bludgeon mattered.

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And now we go back to the only issue that matters today in the Philippines. Drugs and narco-politics.

The Senate has realized the media and the public will not let go. And the Senate – particularly the opposition Puwersa ng Masa – cannot pretend there are other issues, that the spectacle of turning Mike Arroyo slowly on the barbecue pit is the foremost issue now gripping the Republic. As we said before, that is rubbish and balderdash. It is a pretext to divert national attention from drugs and build an insulated, protective wall around the embattled Senator Panfilo Lacson, accused by Col. Victor Corpuz of riding the lead saddle on the P250 billion narcotics traffic. At one time, Colonel Corpuz, completely unafraid of the Senate, asked whether the Upper Chamber would join him in the war against drugs or join Lacson in his "evil campaign" to eventually impose a narco-state on the Philippines.

So today, fine, we understand the Senate will reopen its hearing on drugs and allow Mary "Rosebud" Ong to discharge all her ammunition against Ping Lacson. We add a caveat. If today’s hearing does not suffice, the drug probe will have to continue until the whole thing has been divested of all its rot and stink. I had a verbal altercation with an opposition senator recently and his rationale was that, unlike the impeachment Senate trial of Joseph Estrada, they had all the evidence while there was not enough to indict Ping Lacson.

Dammittohell, Mr. Senator, the Senate is not a court that will rise or fall on available evidence. It is the only sounding board the citizenry has to get the inside track on the drugs issue and the culpability of the police and Ping Lacson, and officials on high. The evidence may still be lacking but the testimony of the witnesses, particularly of Mary "Rosebud" Ong, is deadly, devastating and credible, as is that of the others. And Ping Lacson, Mr. Senator, is not the Ark of the Covenant. The latest survey by Pulse Asia shows he is close to touching bottom which means the public believes Rosebud and disbelieves Lacson. And the time will come, believe you me, when the clamor for Lacson to resign from the Senate or be censured will crash the gates like an elephant stampede.

I look at Mayor Ronnie T. Mitra of Panukulan, Quezon province, and I can almost see the drug’s depravity in all its entirely. Here was formerly an honest mayor, or so they say, poor, living in humble surroundings, his wife a simple schoolteacher, his children unaccustomed to the nice things of life. Neighbors say he still owed people money, and a fishing business he set up went bankrupt. So why was Mayor Mitra caught aboard his Starex van, following an ambulance which contained the 500 kilos of shabu? And why were they nabbed? How did he come to own a Starex van?

In the end, I suppose, Mayor Mitra, who looks like a plodding stevedore foreman, was blinded by the lure of narcotics money. Millions were to be had, unlike only thousands or tens of thousands in jueteng. A single shipment and he could be rich beyond his dreams. What the hell was the use of being honest? He had been honest all his life, and where did that bring him? And there, I say, is the evil of narcotics that destroys and devours, as it has destroyed and devoured the integrity of many men and women high in our government who have yet to be exposed as it has already destroyed and devoured the integrity of the bulk of the Philippine National Police. Notice, I said bulk.

It is possible that this time, the honest and still largely untainted members of the PNP, some officers and some men, knew about the 500-kilo haul from Panukulan. They couldn’t take it anymore and so they squealed.