• This Day (Nigeria) aagm: Political Economy of Sustainable Democracy in Nigeria (2)

mobile US ground and air forces in the region will be required.
Moreover, a return to Southeast Asia will add impetus to the slow process of alliance-building now afoot in the region. It is conventional wisdom that the nations of Southeast Asia are resistant to a NATO-like regional alliance, but the regional response to the East Timor crisis-including that of the new Indonesian government-has been encouraging. Indeed, forces from the Philippines have replaced those from Australia as the lead element in the UN peacekeeping mission there. And certainly efforts through the Asian Regional Forum suggest a trend to closer regional coordination that might develop into a more permanent alliance-like arrangement. In this process, the United States has the key role to play. A heightened US military presence in Southeast Asia would be a strong spur to regional security cooperation, providing a core around which a de facto coalition could jell (Kagan et al. 2000, 19).
Notably absent from this vision of the US military role in Southeast Asia is any serious analysis of the ways in which China might actually be a threat to regional stability. Nowhere in the report is there any discussion of China's economic dynamism or problems (including its considerable dependence on foreign investment and foreign markets to drive its high rates of growth), its enormous internal demographic and political challenges (including unrest rooted in remarkably uneven development), or its complex relationships with overseas Chinese populations throughout East and Southeast Asia. In place of all these complexities, the report substitutes a blanket notion of China's rise to "great-power status," a term that itself goes unanalyzed.
The PNAC report is notable in one further respect. Though mentioning "instability" and "volatility" in Southeast Asia, it nowhere makes any point of a specifically Islamic or terrorist threat to regional stability. Rather, in spite of pre-9/11 recognition that political Islamist and terrorist organizations exist throughout the region, the threats foregrounded by the PNAC report are far more conventional, and therefore demand a fairly conventional US military response-namely, more high-tech weaponry and deployment of large numbers of US troops.
The PNAC report thus gives clear evidence of two points: (1) prior to 9/11, US neo-conservatives had already targeted Southeast Asia as a key site for the build-up of US military forces; and (2) this emphasis on Southeast Asia had nothing to do with the presumption of a threat to US security from Islamic terrorist organizations but instead had everything to do with the goal of attempting to re-assert US hegemony in a part of the world conceived as home to the next "great-power" threat to US hegemony and, related to this, to one of the world's most dynamic and promising regional economies.
That these PNAC visions of the US role in Southeast Asia were not the mere fantasies of a marginal group in official Washington can be seen by briefly examining two other, contemporaneous reports, the first, a year 2000 RAND study on China, the second, a mid-2001 Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) study on Southeast Asia. The RAND report, authored by Richard Sokolsky, Angel Rabasa, and C. R. Neu and entitled "The Role of Southeast Asia in US Strategy Toward China," was researched under the auspices of RAND's Project AIR FORCE division and can be taken (like the PNAC report) to represent the thinking of many neo-conservatives.1 The CFR report, authored by an independent CFR task force with 27 members and entitled "The United States and Southeast Asia: A Policy Agenda for the New Administration," can be taken to represent to a greater extent the consensus opinions of both "conservatives" and "liberals" in Washington, DC.2 Both reports were issued before 9/11 and both converge on similar propositions regarding the need to re-orient US foreign policy in East and Southeast Asia. As such, they confirm that what has become the post-9/11 US project in Southeast Asia is very much part of a vision shared by US elites across the spectrum of those with power.
The RAND study, like the PNAC report, is entirely neo-realist in geo-political approach and thus assumes states to be unified actors seeking political and military power commensurate with their economic prowess-in this case, especially, China, whose "geopolitical ambitions will play a crucial role in shaping the future of Southeast Asia and the US military posture in the region" (Sokolsky et al. 2000, iii). Yet while China s ambitions in Southeast Asia provide the necessary "defense" pretext, it is US objectives and interests in Southeast Asia which occupy the first substantive chapter of the RAND study. It is in this context that the RAND authors raise the issue of Southeast Asia's sea-lanes, and their importance to regional trade as well as to the movement of US military forces (Sokolsky et al. 2000, 10-14). The authors state that a terrorist act such as the sinking of a ship in any of the four crucial straits through which Southeast Asian shipping must pass (the straits of Malacca, Sunda, Lombok or Makassar) could cause significant disruptions. Yet they also note that the economic costs of such disruptions would not likely be large, and thus such a threat is largely symbolic, so that the main purpose in controlling these "ch^kepoints" is that they "present the United States with an opportunity to demonstrate its commitment to the region's security" (Sokolsky et al. 2000, 14).
That security, the report suggests, is most threatened by China. Yet this threat itself is highly conditional-dependent upon the evolution of China's policies under the impact of factors that go fundamentally unanalyzed-and not substantial at the moment, given that China has a strong economic interest in maintaining favorable economic relations with Southeast Asian countries and a limited military capacity to seriously threaten those countries at present (Sokolsky et al. 2000, 16-19). In light of this, the main source of a potential direct Chinese military threat to Southeast Asia, as the authors see this, is through the gradual escalation of a conflict such as the dispute (primaiily with the Philippines) over the Spratly Islands (Sokolsky et al. 2000, 19-24). In the absence of a conflict of this sort, the most the authors are willing to assert is that if unchecked, China might choose to practice '"island hopping' salami tactics," gradually encroaching on Southeast Asia in ways that increase its leverage in the long run (Sokolsky et al. 2000, 24-25).
Significantly, though the RAND authors did their best to find Southeast Asian voices that stated concern over the China threat and a demand for a US-organized regional security project-fundamentally, by limiting their interview sources to defense ministers and conservative military analysts-their conclusion is rather that most Southeast Asian countries do not see China as an immanent and serious military threat and would prefer to engage China's leaders constructively, even with regard to territorial disputes like those over the Spratlys (Sokolsky et al. 2000, 29-62). Nonetheless, by the end of the report, the RAND authors have managed to turn what might be a logical inference of limited need for US military presence into an argument that the US military will need to take a leading role in the region and should develop a policy of "congagement" that gradually builds US military forces in the region in such a way as to both constrain Chinese ambitions and prevent its leaders from feeling encircled (Sokolsky et al. 2000, 61-62,77-79).
For this project, the RAND authors place a special emphasis on restoring military relations with the Philippines, building on the 1999 Visiting Forces Agreement to bring back naval and air forces, as well as developing stronger military relations with Malaysia, Indonesia, and Singapore (Sokolsky et al. 2000, 34, 73, 75). In the case of Indonesia, it is argued that "Indonesia's democratic evolution since the fall of Suharto has opened a window of opportunity for closer military-to-military ties with the Indonesian armed forces (TNI)" (Sokolsky et al. 2000, 73). Notably, the task of securing US relations with Indonesia is seen to demand that the TNI successfully suppress regional uprisings in places such as Aceh and West Papua, since the separatist movements in these places "threaten to destabilize Indonesia's fragile political transition and perhaps unleash a process of fragmentation" (Sokolsky et al. 2000, 67, 77). Moreover, the authors suggest that while the involvement of the TNI in human rights abuses in such internal operations has created barriers to US military-to-military cooperation, the US should "walk a fine line between the need to engage ASEAN militaries and influence their values, security doctrines, and political actions and to avoid association with questionable activities" (Sokolsky et al. 2000,77). Beyond the major states of insular Southeast Asia, the RAND authors also recommend building broad security alliances throughout the region-what they call a "portfolio approach"-so as to limit the possibility of losing access to military facilities from a change in relationships with any one particular country (Sokolsky et al. 2000, 74).
As with the PNAC report, the RAND authors place virtually no emphasis on regional terrorist threats, and internal security matters such as those occupying Indonesia and the Philippines are in fact seen as problems that prevent Southeast Asian governments from adopting the kinds of outward-looking military policies the US military would prefer of its allies (Sokolsky et al. 2000, 39, 49). Interestingly, however, the notion of a terrorist threat is in fact raised in one context-beyond the quickly dismissed likelihood of terrorist disruption of shipping mentioned above. In a footnote at the end of the report the authors note that tangible signs of US military support for Southeast Asian allies could include "US military reengagement with the Philippines now that the Visiting Forces Agreement has been ratified by the Philippine Senate; willingness to transfer NATOreleasable advanced military technology to states with which the United States has a close and ongoing military relationship; and cooperation with ASEAN states on counterterrorism and regional order-keeping initiatives" (Sokolsky et al. 2000, 72 fn).
It would take little cynicism to simply invert the terms of the RAND report and suggest that what it does with China is to project US neo-conservatives' own aspirations onto leaders in Beijing, using these projected aspirations as an excuse for promoting an enhanced US "defense" role in the region. Rather than attempting to present the ways in which China might threaten Southeast Asia (and US interests there), the report could be seen as presenting the ways in which the United States might threaten Chinese interests-by, for example, controlling the strategic "chokepoints" of Southeast Asian trade (including oil and gas shipments)-and thus attempt to re-assert its own declining hegemony in Asia (Sokolsky et al. 2000, 1, 68-70, 75). Be this as it may, the relevant point for my subsequent discussion is simply that what has been the clearly stated project of the neo-conservatives in Southeast Asia since before 9/11 is to restore military relations with key countries such as the Philippines (bases) and Indonesia (aid and training to the TNI), while expanding regional defense alliances to include other countries (Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand). These goals have everything to do with US neo-conservatives' military and economic ambitions in East and Southeast Asia-including vis-à-vis China-and little or nothing to do with real or imagined Islamic terrorist threats.
Such ambitions are not solely those of US neo-conservatives, however, as the CFR study indicates. The CFR report's 27 authors represent a greater range of opinions within official Washington than what is represented in the PNAC or RAND reports, and the focus of their report is more directly on Southeast Asia. Yet the major findings and recommendations are strikingly similar to those of the PNAC and RAND studies. Like the more narrowly neo-conservative reports, the CFR report frames the issues around the need for the US to overcome inhibitions on involvement in Southeast Asia that have developed since the Vietnam War era: "A quarter of a century has elapsed since the culmination of the war in Vietnam," the authors state in their foreword, "a bitter experience whose imprint continues to shape a generation of Americans and whose impact is still felt on US policy toward Southeast Asia and beyond" (CFR 2001, ix). Yet, even if US policy has not focused intensively on the region since the Vietnam era, "Southeast Asia remains important to American economic, strategic, political, and humanitarian interests, and while not in itself vital, holds the potential to trigger major crises absent sustained attention and cogent policies" (CFR 2001, 2).
The "cogent policies" CFR authors have in mind are designed especially to deal with "the aftershocks from the economic crisis and rising political turmoil" which are making for "fractious polities, fragile economies, and a loss of investor confidence" in places such as Indonesia and the Philippines, as well as stimulating an "undercurrent of rising political Islam in the archipelagic countries" (CFR 2001,6, cf., 15). Yet despite this brief mention of Islam and internal political turmoil, the major recommendations of the report foreground the same kinds of outward-looking security projects as the PNAC and RAND studies. "The highest American priority," the authors state, "should still be assigned to maintaining regional security through the prevention of intra-regional conflict and domination by an outside power or coalition" (CFR 2001, 9, 45). The accusing finger, here, points rather quickly to China: "The United States should pay close attention to other extraregional actors, carefully monitoring Chinese behavior in Southeast Asia and expanding coordination with Japan and Australia" (CFR 2001, 12, cf., 17-18, 56).
The CFR report does highlight other objectives besides containment of China, including promoting "market-oriented economic reform, technology-driven development, and measures for poverty alleviation," as well as more ambitious goals like taking "active steps to promote social stability and the rule of law and to foster an environment that diminishes the forces of ethnic and religious-based separatism and extremism in the region" (CFR 2001,10,51 ). Yet, in the same breath, the report argues for rekindling the US military's relationship with perhaps the major regional force fanning the flames of ethnic and religious-based separatism: "The United States must cease hectoring Jakarta and instead do its utmost to help stabilize Indonesian democracy and the Indonesian economy, as well as to re-engage Indonesia's army" (CFR 2001, 11; cf., 20-1, 53). That these goals might be incompatible is observed in a dissenting opinion written by several of the task force members (CFR 2001,66), but nonetheless the CFR report ends up essentially arguing for a variant of the same project pushed by the neo-conservatives: increased US military presence in the region to strengthen US economic opportunities and contain potential Chinese expansion, including through the ever-important project of protecting sea-lanes and shallow-water gas pipelines (CFR 2001, 17, 22, 29-30, 3839). As with the RAND study, this demands taking advantage of the Voluntary Forces Agreement to expand the US military presence in the Philippines (CFR 2001, 22-23, 46) and resuming military training and cooperation with the TNI in Indonesia (CFR 2001,54). Moreover, as with the RAND study, the CFR report asserts that this necessitates approaching the issue of democracy and the rule of law in the region "more realistically and more adroitly"-in particular, by not expecting "to export its own, unique brand of democracy to the region" (CFR 2001, 58-9).
Since the CFR report does say somewhat more about political Islam than the PNAC or RAND reports, it is worth briefly noting where this issue sits in the broader CFR analysis. As mentioned, the authors note an undercurrent of militant Islam that bears watching-not surprisingly, given that their report was authored after a series of coordinated December 2000 bombings in different Indonesian cities, credited to the political Islamist organization Jemaah Islamiyah (JI, discussed below).3 The CFR notes that politicized Islam attracts adherents in places such as the lower ranks of the Indonesian army (CFR 2001,33). Yet, interestingly, they do not conclude from this that US support for the TNI might indirectly abet political Islamist terrorist groups. Rather, the authors note that Islam also plays a role in the separatist struggle in Aceh, which turns the topic back to ways in which the TNI can be strengthened to deal more effectively with such struggles (CFR 2001, 33-35). Notably, the reputedly al-Qaeda-connected JI organization is not mentioned, in spite of the prominence it was to have subsequently in discussions of Islamic terrorism in Indonesia. On the other hand, the CFR report does mention the Philippine organization Abu Sayyaf Group (ASG, discussed below), which has been seen as al-Qaeda's connection in the Philippines. Yet Abu Sayyaf is referred to by the CFR only as one of a number of "terrorist gangs" in the southern Philippines, not as a high-profile regional or separatist group like the Moro National Liberation Front (MNLF) or the Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF) (CFR 2001, 31).
In sum, the CFR's version of the appropriate policy course for the US government in Southeast Asia scarcely differs from the neo-conservative vision. It is rooted in US economic interests and concerns about encroachment by China, along with ways in which internal instability in countries like Indonesia might destabilize the region and US ambitions for it. Even where political Islam rates discussion in the CFR analysis, it does not rise to the level of these other concerns. Thus, across the relevant policy spectrum in Washington it is evident that relatively consistent and coherent US imperial objectives for Southeast Asia were articulated and in place well before 9/11 offered an opportunity to hasten their implementation.4 The Philippines was the first place to provide that opportunity, and we can thus turn to how US imperial ambitions have become grounded in its former colony.
US Imperialism in the Philippines: Neo-Colonial Residues
Shortly after 9/11, US government officials announced that the ASG-which had been operating a terrorist racket in the southern Philippine island province of Basilan, just southwest of Mindanao-had links to al-Qaeda and would become a focus of US global anti-terrorism operations. Prior to this, ASG had primarily gained media exposure through small-scale violent acts such as the kidnapping for ransom, and occasional execution, of Catholic priests and foreign tourists. With the announcement that ASG was now a target of the global "war on terror," some observers began to speak of Basilan potentially turning into the next Afghanistan (International Peace Mission 2002).
To understand the strains involved in portraying ASG as a threat requiring massive deployment of military force to the region-as well as to understand some of the strange political and military contortions that were to follow this deployment-it is necessary to note briefly the historical geography of social struggles in the southern Philippines. Long the most Islamized region of the Philippines, and also the region with some of the highest levels of poverty (in spite of significant natural resources), the south has also been the region most distant from Manila's rulers (be they Spanish, American, or Filipino) and the region that has been most susceptible to separatist struggles. In this sense, struggles in places like Mindanao have had, and continue to have, a sub-imperial dimension, as successive governments have attempted to deal with the enduring legacies of colonial incorporation and ongoing uneven development.
The most recent phase of the anti-sub-imperial struggles in the south developed at the same time leftist activity against the Marcos dictatorship was rising, with the formation of the MNLF in the early 1970s. A nationalist front, the MNLF has been based in Mindanao and has struggled for greater regional autonomy within a broader framework of struggle against military dictatorship (Noble, 1987, 195-7). While the MNLF is the largest of Mindanao's insurgent groups, and the one with the strongest connections to the Philippine left, the late 1970s saw the emergence of a group somewhat more committed to struggle for an Islamic state, the MILF. MILF members have typically been more religiously orthodox and politically conservative, and some have reportedly received training in al-Qaeda camps in Afghanistan, as well as with Indonesian Islamist groups that received similar training (ICG 2002b; 2003c, 6, 16-7). Yet, like the MNLF, the MILF has an indigenous base of social support in Mindanao and operates independently of these international networks (Rahim 2003,214). Though the MNLF and MILF have not always cooperated, together they have formed the most important regional opposition to leaders in Manila, and with the fall of the Marcos dictatorship, the 1990s regime of President Fidel Ramos had in fact been able to move towards some resolution of regional conflicts by carrying out negotiations with them.
Against the backdrop of these major political maneuvers, the appearance on the scene of ASG in the early 1990s was a barely-noticed event. In a semi-chaotic context where many different criminal and small-scale terrorist organizations operate alongside (and perhaps sometimes in connection with) insurgents, ASG was seen as little more than a group of bandits-in fact, Philippine President Gloria Macagapal-Arroyo characterized ASG as "a money-crazed gang of criminals" prior to 9/11 (International Peace Mission 2002, 10). Indeed, on the Philippine Left, ASG was widely suspected to have been a creation of the CIA and/or Philippine intelligence, formed to further splinter and undermine the Moro insurgency.
Such views, of course, are not easy to fully substantiate, yet interestingly enough, in this case their plausibility is buttressed precisely by the claims emanating from the US government after 9/11. IfASG is indeed a Philippine extension of al-Qaeda, then its "link" with the CIA is straightforward, since it is by now well known that the CIA provided training for al-Qaeda operatives in Afghanistan. Moreover, the possible use or toleration of groups such as ASG by US intelligence cannot be dismissed given what is now official policy in Washington. As Pentagon analyst William Arkin notes, US secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld's Defense Science Board 2002 Study on Special Operations and Joint Forces in Support of Countering Terrorism recommends the creation of a Proactive, Preemptive Operations Group which would, among other activities, launch secret operations aimed at "stimulating reactions" among terrorists, which would then facilitate further US response (Arkin 2002). In short, terrorist activities in areas the US military plans to police are desiridata of US policy. The possibility, then, that ASG operatives have been known to US and Philippine intelligence since their arrival in Basilan and have been at least tacitly allowed to operate cannot be dismissed.
In addition to this, many local activists and community members in Basilan testify to events that imply Philippine military collaboration with ASG leaders and tolerance of ASG operations (International Peace Mission 2002, 15-17; International Solidarity Mission 2002, 24, 27-9). Such accusations were largely the province of the Philippine and international Left until July 2003, when a "mutiny" by Philippine military officers brought to the fore parallel charges from the Right. The mutineers accused senior Philippine military officers of selling weapons to Islamic separatist groups in the south and staging bombings in Davao City so that they could receive more US military assistance in the name of fighting the "war on terrorism" (Klein 2003; Roberts 2003e).
Again, such charges are difficult to completely prove or disprove, but what they highlight is something more important to the present argument. Specifically, the extension of the "war on terrorism" to the southern Philippines has been out of proportion to the actual threat of the insurgent forces in the region and has created a gravy train of military expenditures that encourage corruption at the highest levels of the Philippine government. Indeed, US military