The Davao blast was around the world in only twenty minutes

What would we do nowadays without a cellphone? My cellphone tinkled yesterday afternoon. A friend was calling. He said his sister-in-law had rung his mobile phone from Davao airport six minutes ago. She had been driving into the airport driveway to catch her flight to Manila when a bomb exploded.

Chaos. Dozens dead or injured. That was her panicked message to Manila which was, within two minutes, passed on to me. I rang up The STAR. In less than 15 more minutes I was watching the Davao airport explosion being announced to the world over the British Broadcasting Corp. (BBC). Five minutes later, it was also on Cable News Network (CNN). The two overseas reports pegged the dead at 10, but with expectations of the death toll rising.

Indeed, they did. An hour after the explosion, the death toll had risen to 17, with 144 wounded. By the time this appears, it will probably be higher.

We are truly a planet in which news coverage, just like terrorism, is tightly interconnected. Bad news rockets around the globe with a speed surpassing that of winged Mercury of mythology.

As was discovered when al-Qaeda’s CEO of operations, Khalid Shaikh Mohammed (a longtime Manila terrorist-cell-organizer) was nabbed in Rawalpindi, Pakistan, last Saturday at 3 o’clock in the morning, Mohammed coordinated al-Qaeda’s worldwide terrorist network by cellphone. Other detainees, arrested after Mohammed was seized in a lightning raid, confirmed that the Number Three of Osama bin Laden "was often seen talking on one mobile phone while simultaneously sending a text message on a second mobile phone". Sounds exactly what our kids and teenage bagets do constantly – but with a completely sinister and deadly purpose.

Should we be surprised by the deadly Davao bombing? Or the others reported downtown there and in Tagum? Shocked, yes. But surprised, no. When our Army troops and Marines smashed into the Buliok complex of the Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF) the other week, including the somewhat lavish compound of its chieftain, Ustadz Hashim Salamat, the Southcom reported finding evidence that the rebels had been utilizing the "ceasefire" and peace-negotiating period to conduct bomb-making and "planting" classes, and undertake military training. That’s why they’ve been able to bomb power transmission towers and destroy pylons in a bid to throw Central Mindanao into darkness.

Was the Davao blast an MILF attack, or one staged by the New People’s Army? The MILF and NPA, it was reported earlier, had forged a tactical alliance. This is not news: Since the buddy-buddy days of Joma Sison and Nur Misuari, the National Democratic Front had featured an alliance between the NPA and the Moro National Liberation Front (MNLF).

You have to keep a sharp eye on "history" in evaluating the long-lasting and virtually open-ended Mindanao conflict. Otherwise, history will rear up, unexpectedly, and bite you.

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Davao City was the most logical place to be targeted by terrorists wishing to create maximum havoc. For the past few years, under the vigilance of its iron-fisted "peace and order" mayor, Rod Duterte, Davao had appeared to be an oasis of peace in conflict-troubled Mindanao.

Rumors flew thick yesterday that Duterte himself had, indeed, been scheduled to arrive at the airport to take a 6 p.m. flight to Manila when the bomb exploded. He may not have been the target, of course. The bomb had apparently been directed at a waiting shed outside the terminal where greeters and well-wishers generally congregate to meet friends and relatives arriving from out-of-town. A Cebu Pacific aircraft, radio-TV reporters said, had just landed.

The Davao incident is another reminder that we’re embroiled in a war with terrorists and rebels seeking to take over Mindanao, and, beyond that, to overthrow the government. Those who keep bleating that our soldiers and policemen mustn’t attack the rebels, because this only provokes them, miss the point entirely. The rebels and saboteurs are waging war on us – they need no provocation. What they need is periods of "peace", "ceasefire" and "truce", so they can restock, rearm, retrain, and enjoy some R & R. They take advantage of these weeks or months of relative calm to bring in weapons and ammunition from abroad, bought on the arms blackmarket or supplied by friendly Islamic providers.

I recently returned from Hanoi, where I interviewed the legendary North Vietnamese General Vo Nguyen Giap, the architect, among his other military exploits, of the 1968 Tet (New Year) Offensive in which 84,000 National Liberation Front (NLF, or Viet Cong) guerrillas and North Vietnamese Army (NVA) regulars had attacked South Vietnamese and US installations throughout that country.

Giap lost 45,000 of his 84,000-member attack force in the weeks of fighting; the South Vietnamese ARVN lost 2,300, while the United States lost 1,100 in combat.

The offensive, launched under the cover of New Year celebrations, was a military failure for Giap, and he incurred grave losses in manpower – but, as he did in Dien Bien Phu to defeat the French, and subsequently in the final drive in 1975 to conquer the South and seize Saigon, Giap had been ready to sacrifice men for psychological victory. If you "psych out" the enemy, it seems to have been his principle, you ultimately and inevitably win. Truly, the shocks of Tet, and the later Khe Sanh "bloodbath" rattled the American leadership. US President Lyndon B. Johnson lost the political momentum. Public frustration in the US escalated as American casualty figures mounted, and there were increasingly vocal anti-war rallies.

It’s important to note that, while Giap’s cadres were licking their wounds and his decimated units were being beefed up by reinforcements and restocked with wea-pons, and North Vietnam itself was seeking a respite from US bombings to "rebuild" for future offensives, the Viet Cong and North Vietnamese shifted to what they called "danh va dan, dam van danh" (fighting and talking, talking and fighting), which included, aside from "negotiations" and "parleys", a coordinated military, diplomatic and political effort to stimulate "internal conflicts" within the American and South Vietnamese camps, and invite anti-war individuals from academe, media, and the political establishment, as well as students, to cry out "give peace a chance", "stop the war!", and "bring our boys home!" The Americans pulled out of Vietnam in 1973, leaving the South Vietnam in the lurch.

Sounds familiar? Danh va dan, dam van danh – fighting and talking, talking and fighting – that tactic certainly worked.

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Speaker Joe de Venecia told me yesterday that the problem of sanctions being imposed by the 28-nation Financial Action Task Force has been "solved". After friendly discussions here in Manila with representatives of nine key FATF member-countries, he reported, members of the Senate and House of Representatives would reconvene a bicameral conference committee session to hammer out an acceptable version of a new Anti-Money Laundering Law (AMLA) to be completed and signed into law before the "deadline" of March 15 on Saturday next week.

Since the Speaker is known as "Sunshine Joe", while this is good news, let’s not count on this happening until it finally happens. Although Senate President Franklin Drilon has chimed in to announce that an effective AMLA will shortly be in place. I’m not inclined to cheer yet. But we live in hope.

How soon can the Philippines really be taken off the list of "Non-Cooperative Countries and Territories" (NCCTs) on which it was put in June 2000 after an adverse evaluation by the FATF that we lacked a basic set of anti-money laundering regulations, such as a customer identification and record-keeping regime in our banking system? The AMLA, Republic Act 9160, which was signed into law by President GMA on September 29, 2001 – barely a day before that first deadline set by the FATF – was rejected as defective and inadequate by the FATF when it met in February 2002.

On November 25, 2002, Senator Ramon "Jun" Magsaysay, as chairman of the Senate Committee on Banks, Financial Institutions and Currencies, sponsored legislation containing the amendments strongly urged by the FATF. The Senate, frequently indulging in acrimonious and sarcastic debate, dithered and deliberated on the amended law from December 3, 2002, to February 10, 2003. The crucial condition decreed by the FATF had been that the new measure should reduce the threshold of P4 million to P500,000 for accounts to be subjected to scrutiny. The Senate stubbornly insisted that the P4 million level be maintained.

The tougher version of the proposed law was narrowly rejected by the Senate, by a vote of 11 to 10, because four senators belonging to the majority bloc surprisingly switched sides and voted along with the minority – namely, Senate Majority Floor Leader Loren Legarda, Senators Joker Arroyo, Manuel Villar and Noli de Castro!

Let’s fix that situation now. It’s high-time we earnestly went after dirty money, drug money and terrorist funding. Winning redemption and being dropped from the blacklist won’t be as easy as imagined. The FATF group now in town isn’t authorized to make decisions, only to discuss. There’s a lot of hard work still ahead of us, if we want to bring our AMLA up to par, and prevent being sanctioned.

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Today is Ash Wednesday, the beginning of Lent.

It’s timely to remember: Ashes to ashes, dust to dust. That’s the only way, I guess, to regain our focus on what really matters.

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While we’re embroiled in the continuing "war" in Mindanao against terrorists and a determined Moro rebellion, it’s also timely to recall the principles enunciated by Vietnam’s General Vo Nguyen Giap when he led the Vietminh (Vietnam Doc Lap Dongminh-Hoi) in the successful liberation war against the French colonizers. He exhorted his guerrillas:

"The war of liberation is a protracted war and a hard war in which we must rely mainly on ourselves – for we are strong politically but weak materially, while the enemy is very weak politically but stronger materially.

"Guerrilla warfare is a means of fighting a revolutionary war that relies on the heroic spirit to triumph over Modern Weapons.

"It is the means whereby the people of a weak, badly-equipped country can stand up against an aggressive army possessing better equipment and techniques.

"The correct tactics for a protracted revolutionary war are to wage guerrilla warfare, to advance from guerrilla warfare to regular warfare and then closely combine these two forms of war; to develop from guerrilla to mobile then to siege warfare.

"Accumulate a thousand small victories to turn into one great success."