Battle Raises Heat on Manila, U.S. Over Counterterrorism Capability

From the Wall Street Journal (Apr 10): Battle Raises Heat on Manila, U.S. Over Counterterrorism Capability

America has spent hundreds of millions training the Philippines’ military over a decade and a half



Rolando Del Torchio, a former missionary from Italy, waits for medical treatment hours after his release from Abu Sayyaf militants on Saturday in the Philippines. Photo: Associated Press 

The deaths of 18 Philippine soldiers in a firefight with Islamist militants deepened concerns about the effectiveness of the country’s counterterrorism forces, despite hundreds of millions of dollars of U.S. investment in training them over almost 15 years.

The Philippine military said 52 troops were wounded in ferocious fighting Saturday with Abu Sayyaf guerrillas, who law-enforcement officers believe are holding nearly two dozen hostages in jungle camps in the country’s south.

One army official said an entire platoon had been “wiped out in the encounter.” Four soldiers were decapitated.

Five Islamists were killed in the 10-hour fight on the island of Basilan, some 550 miles south of Manila. Among the dead was a militant fighter from Morocco, military officials said. An army statement identified him as Mohammad Khattab, a bomb-making instructor.

The soldiers had been instructed to capture or kill the primary Abu Sayyaf commander, Isnilon Hapilon, as the deadline for the payment of a ransom for three foreign hostages—two Canadians and a Norwegian—approached on Sunday, an intelligence official said. Those three are believed to be held with other hostages, including individuals from Indonesia and Malaysia, on the nearby island of Jolo.

Abu Sayyaf had demanded around $21 million for each Western hostage. There was no news of their fate late Sunday.

The encounter on Basilan suggested that Filipino forces are ill-equipped to tackle well-armed terrorists like Abu Sayyaf, and that long-standing U.S. efforts to tilt the balance in the military’s favor have yielded few results, said Zachary Abuza, a specialist on Southeast Asian security issues at the U.S. National War College in Washington.

“My assessment is that [the U.S. training program] has been an absolute waste of money and a terrible investment: $50 million a year since 2002 with very little to show for it,” Mr. Abuza said.

A Pentagon spokesman declined to comment Sunday.

The U.S. provided $441 million in security assistance funding to the Philippines between 2002 and 2013, according to a newly published study by Rand Corp., a U.S. think tank. Much of that money was spent on improving the Philippine military’s counterterrorism units. The U.S. military’s Special Operations Command operated from a base in the southern Philippines from 2002 until May last year from where it worked closely with the Philippine military to strike Abu Sayyaf and other Islamist militant groups.

The results of these efforts have been disappointing compared with those of a similar training program in Indonesia, where the U.S. spent half as much on security assistance, the Rand study found. While militant attacks in Indonesia declined substantially, in the Philippines they “increased 13-fold between 2002 and 2013,” it said, highlighting the “varying returns on investment” between the U.S. security programs in the two countries.

The prolonged U.S. deployment to the southern Philippines was credited with helping the country’s military to degrade Abu Sayyaf’s corps of fighters to an estimated 300 individuals restricted to a handful of jungle strongholds. The group, pegged back within its base islands, for several years has been unable to stage the kind of spectacular attacks it once launched farther afield, such as in 2004 when it blew up a passenger ferry in Manila Bay, killing 116 people.

But enabling the Philippine military to combat Abu Sayyaf without close U.S. support has proved harder to achieve, the Rand study suggests.

On Saturday, Abu Sayyaf militants freed a former missionary from Italy who had been held for six months on Jolo, prompting speculation that a ransom had been paid to release Rolando del Torchio. The army has said it was unaware whether any money had changed hands.

Mr. Hapilon, 50 years old, is one of the most dangerous members of Abu Sayyaf, which was formed in part by al Qaeda in the 1990s to radicalize a broader Muslim secessionist movement in the south of the predominantly Christian Philippines.

Instead, it turned into a specialist kidnapping operation, seizing groups of foreigners and locals from tourist resorts and holding them in fortified camps while foreign governments and local authorities negotiated ransom payments for their release. Tens of millions of dollars flowed into the impoverished region as a result.

Mr. Hapilon is one of the group’s higher-profile leaders, and the U.S. has offered a reward of up to $5 million for information leading to his capture or death. The Philippine military said a man believed to be one of his sons, Ubaida Hapilon, was reported killed in Saturday’s clash.

Philippine soldiers came close to seizing him in an offensive on an Abu Sayyaf base in 2013. He was wounded, but other rebels managed to pull Mr. Hapilon to safety and he later appeared in a video released in 2014 pledging allegiance to Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the self-declared caliph of Islamic State.

Since then, Abu Sayyaf has launched a fresh campaign of kidnappings. Authorities have blamed the group for taking 10 Indonesian crew from a tugboat in Tawi Tawi province in the southern Philippines, while four Malaysian crew were plucked from another boat off the coast of Sabah, on Malaysian Borneo.

Intelligence officials in the Philippines said they were concerned by the firepower the Abu Sayyaf fighters had been able to muster despite years of U.S. training and assistance.
http://www.wsj.com/articles/soldier-deaths-raise-questions-about-effectiveness-of-philippines-counterterrorism-1460285852