Offensive

All of a sudden, it seems, the communist insurgency is all over the place.

A few weeks ago, the Army announced the capture in Central Luzon of a large cache of explosive devices along with documents indicating a flow of financing from someone called "Ka Satur." The cache of explosives, the Army warned, was intended to be used in a campaign of terror soon to be launched by the communists in aid of destabilization.

The significance of that was played down by the media. The leftist militants effectively snowed under the matter by engineering a number of media events shifting the focus of public attention on charges of human rights violations by the Army. They accused the security forces of once more using Red-baiting tactics – a line that resonates well with the orthodoxy of "political correctness" that permeates our media culture.

Then, a few days ago, a large roadside bomb was detonated by communist insurgents in Iloilo, killing several soldiers. That event demonstrates the lethal capability the communist insurgency has been developing while we all tried to look the other way and pretended the peace process was making some headway in bringing placidity to our injured national community.

Almost simultaneously, the NPA attempted to blow up yet another cell site in Quezon province, leading to a running battle with Army units that continued for a few days. That running battle forced the evacuation of several communities, creating refugees of the sort we imagined happened only in Muslim Mindanao.

A few days earlier, if we noticed, a bus was torched by communist insurgents in Bataan. An encounter in Leyte over the weekend resulted in several casualties on the rebel side that the party-list congressmen of the left-leaning Bayan Muna are now trying to depict as a military attack on unarmed farmers.

From the looks of it, it seems that we have a major-scale insurgent offensive in the offing.

This is more than the usual cycle of "tactical offensives" mounted by the communist insurgents that begins after the monsoon season ends. From the very mouth of NPA southern Luzon commander Ka Roger, we are told this is an orchestrated nationwide effort directed by the top leadership of the Communist Party of the Philippines.

I fear there will be more violence on this front in the coming days, before the traditional ceasefire is called for the Christmas holidays. The insurgents appear to have put in play a major strategic move whose strategic goals we have yet to unveil.

If this offensive blossoms, we will be forced to rethink the policy of active defense vis-à-vis the insurgency that we maintained for many years. If this insurgent offensive makes any political gains, we will reap the bitter fruit of what could have been a self-delusory strategy adopted for too long by government.

For years, it was fashionable to think that if we tried hard enough to ignore the communist insurgency, it would go away. Trying hard to ignore the insurgents was the path of least political resistance – although probably a dangerous route to take.

After the 1986 Edsa Revolution, there was much euphoria over the thought that national unity was finally at hand. The idealist democrats who had just scuttled a dictatorship imagined that the wind on the sails of the communist insurgency, provided largely by the popular resistance to dictatorship, would soon be gone and this archaic movement would soon wither in the white light of a vibrant democracy.

For a while, events appeared to validate that optimistic view. The communist movement split into several mutually hostile factions, and public enthusiasm for this bizarre cause waned. The rifle strength of the NPA dwindled rapidly and the quality of the cadre attracted by the CPP deteriorated.

So overpowering was the optimism of democrats that the insurgency was soon declared a mere police matter. Principal responsibility for dealing with it was transferred from the military to the woefully unprepared police forces.

Through most of the nineties, against the tide of contrary evidence, that optimistic policy was maintained. Military operations against the armed leftist insurgents were reined in. Much hope was pinned on progress at the negotiating table.

After almost two decades of negotiations, not much progress has been won by the optimist democrats. But the optimism, probably misplaced, has not waned.

In the meantime, the harder-line wing of the communist movement consolidated its hold over what remained of the fanatical flock. They nursed an old and dying orthodoxy. They reworked the strategy of combining legal and extralegal forces and tactics that created sufficient synergy to keep the party faithful bound to the idea that some grand political cataclysm would soon happen and the angels would victoriously descend from the mountains.

The rifle strength of the NPA might have declined. The quality of the CPP cadre might have drastically deteriorated. But the tenacity of the fanatical faith still held.

That, in itself, poses much danger.

A fanatical movement will be prepared to use homemade bombs to make their point. They would use acts of terror to be heard. The more cynical elements that have now gained control of the insurgency, largely because the intelligentsia long abandoned this movement, are prepared to make pacts with the devil to gain political ground. And so we see all the strange "tactical alliances" now being initiated with every anti-democratic, every opportunistic and every patently insane faction in sight.

Recently, faced with the cruel facts on the ground, government policy shifted. Principal responsibility for dealing with this pesky insurgency was transferred back to the military.

But the communists, in the meantime, have developed a sophisticated multi-front, multi-level politico-military strategy. They have learned to use electoral processes to build unlikely alliances and exploit every possible source of public discontent to enlarge their political clout.

Now we know the are prepared to combine filibustering in Congress with really lethal explosives. And yet, having transferred responsibility to the military, the rest of the civilian apparatus of governance does not seem ready to run against the inertia of political correctness by supporting the military effort with a more sophisticated, more encompassing strategy.