Jungle of Snakes Page 2

THE LESSONS OF Vietnam and the merits of various counterinsurgency approaches elsewhere continue to be debated furiously among those who believe that historical experience can provide signposts for future conduct. Simultaneously, the first decade of the twenty-first century witnesses active counterinsurgency operations on every populated continent except North America and Australia. The battle rages across what American military thinkers call the zone of instability—an arc stretching from northwest Africa across the Middle East and through Central Asia to the Islamic frontiers in Indonesia and the Philippines.

  Today, the American architects of the global war on terrorism—or the “Long War,” as it may become known—describe the fighting as asymmetric conflict. The paradox is stark. An ostensibly superior military power confronts an inferior foe. The superior power has unlimited means but only limited goals. Compared to their superior opponent, the insurgents have limited means and inferior armaments. But the insurgents have a high tolerance for casualties while the stronger power does not. More important, the insurgents know that their enemy’s unwillingness to suffer casualties stems from his uncertain will. The insurgents do not have to defeat their enemy; they merely must outlast him.

  The battle is fought on many fronts but none surpasses the importance of the information front. In the Philippines in 1900 the insurgents crafted their strategy to influence the American presidential election. Poor communications and hardworking U.S. Army censors helped thwart this strategy. When Communist insurgents in Vietnam employed the same strategy in the 1960s, advances in communications technology enabled them to broadcast their messages. Today’s globalized information environment gives insurgents an even more powerful tool. Whether from hideouts on the Pakistan border or from bases deep in the Colombian jungle, insurgent leaders often wield this tool with great skill.

  David Kilcullen, an Australian expert whose advice has influenced General David Petraeus among others, observes that contemporary counterinsurgencies are “fundamentally an information fight. The enemy gets that, and we don’t yet.”4Jungle of Snakes seeks to contribute to that information fight. The author fully understands that any historical example involves a set of influences of which some are unique to a certain place and time. But the reader will see common themes emerge. One inescapable conclusion is that a counterinsurgency is a long fight. Jungle of Snakes provides readers with a historical foundation so that informed citizens can assess how the fight is going.

  PART ONE

  The Philippine Insurrection

  ONE

  An American Victory Yields

  a Guerrilla War

  Finally, it should be the earnest and paramount aim of the military administration to win the confidence, respect, and affection of the inhabitants of the Philippines . . . by proving to them that the mission of the United States is one of benevolent assimilation.

  —President William McKinley, December 21, 18981

  An American Challenge

  THE AMERICANS HAD COME TO FIGHT and now, on the morning of August 13, 1898, they were finally getting their chance. For the veterans among them, the Spanish line of trenches and blockhouses defending Manila appeared formidable. Civil War experience had taught that determined infantry dug in up to their eyebrows behind log and dirt breastworks could hold their position even if outnumbered four or five to one. On this field the sides were roughly equal, with each having about 13,000 men. Furthermore, the attackers would have to make a frontal assault on a narrow strip of land hemmed in on one side by Manila Bay and on the inland side by a flooded swamp.

  The soldiers expected little assistance from their informal allies, a ragtag force of Filipino revolutionaries who followed the banner of twenty-nine-year-old Emilio Aguinaldo. Indeed, the senior American leadership had planned carefully to prevent the Filipinos from participating in the assault. When the Americans claimed they needed the position to establish an artillery battery, the revolutionaries had reluctantly ceded the trenches facing this section of Spanish works back on July 29. Since that time, the Americans had endured a life in the trenches made miserable by either a baking tropical sun or, as was the case on this morning, a pelting rain. Their shoes and uniforms had quickly rotted on their bodies, while Spanish snipers shot at anyone who unwisely revealed himself. Now, finally, with their contemptible allies out of the way and their senior officers prepared to order an assault, they could escape their trenches and come to grips with their foe.

  At 9:35 a.m. Admiral George Dewey’s cruisers and gunboats opened fire against a beachside Spanish strongpoint, Fort San Antonio Abad. The 3.2-inch field guns served by Utah volunteers joined the bombardment. For fifty minutes American shells blasted the Spanish defenses. The guns fell silent and the Americans clambered from their trenches, advanced a short distance, and lay down. This was no wild charge of densely packed troops into the teeth of the enemy’s breastworks in the manner of Virginia in 1864. Instead it was a carefully orchestrated, methodical assault backed by overwhelming firepower. When the soldiers lay down the navy resumed a short bombardment. Then the soldiers moved forward along the beach to within 100 yards of the Spanish position and went to ground again. For a third time the big naval guns spoke. When an eight-inch naval shell penetrated the rear wall of Fort San Antonio Abad, the Spanish garrison fled.

  While one U.S. brigade pursued the Spaniards through the suburbs toward Manila, an adjacent brigade commanded by Civil War veteran Arthur MacArthur charged toward Blockhouse 14, which was barring the road to the capital. Here there was a sharp exchange of fire, costing the Americans five killed and thirty-eight wounded. MacArthur’s men captured the blockhouse and pressed ahead all the way to the old walls protecting Manila. Gazing up through another tropical deluge, they saw the surprising sight of white flags flying from the city’s walls. After offering token re sistance, the Spanish had surrendered. Having captured the Spanish capital of the Philippine islands, the Americans turned to their second objective: keeping Aguinaldo’s aroused revolutionaries from entering Manila.

  THE DISEMBARKATION OF United States soldiers at the port of Cavite in Manila Bay in the summer of 1898 marked the first time in history that American ground forces set foot on Asian soil to fight a war. Their mission was daunting: they had volunteered to oust the Spanish but found themselves having to impose American control over the Philippines, an archipelago numbering more than 7,000 islands spread along a 1,000-mile chain. If the patriotic Westerners who filled the ranks of the volunteer regiments looked at a map they could appreciate that this was a span equivalent to the distance from Seattle to Los Angeles. But the natural obstacles were far more formidable. From mountainous interiors to swampy shorelines, individual islands presented a hostile environment featuring jungles and dense expanses of towering cogon grass pierced by rough trails that connected isolated hamlets. The threat of ambush was everywhere. Worse, heat, humidity, and terrifying tropical diseases reigned.

  The Philippine islands were home to more than 7 million people. To the American soldier their behavior was a mystery. Few Americans spoke Spanish and none spoke any of the seventy-some dialects used by most Filipinos. The insurgents easily blended into the local population or hid in the interior, where they found near-perfect concealment. They were like fish swimming in a friendly sea and the American soldiers knew it.

  Philippine History

  In 1521 Ferdinand Magellan entered an unknown region in the South Seas while searching for a route to the Spice Islands. He came upon a chain of islands that he named the Philippines after King Philip II, of “Invincible Armada” fame. It proved his last discovery. Natives on the island of Cebu killed the great explorer, leaving it up to his second in command to complete history’s first circumnavigation of the globe. The Spanish returned to Cebu in 1565 to begin a period of colonial rule that lasted until 1898.

  During the great European scramble for colonies, the Philippines remained a backwater. Nonetheless, Spanish influence was great. Spain forcibly united the Filipinos into one nation for the
first time in their history. The Spanish introduced Catholicism, thereby creating what to this day remains the only Christian nation in East Asia. Converting the benighted islanders to Christianity provided the cover for colonial exploitation. The great religious orders—Jesuits, Franciscans, Dominicans—owned and developed large estates where the peasants attended mass on Sunday and the rest of the time labored to produce rice, sugarcane, and hemp for the church’s benefit. The Spanish zeal to perfect the natives did not extend to promoting economic development or self-government, and therein lay the seeds of insurrection.

  Outside of the religious orders, few Spaniards came to the islands to live. To administer the archipelago’s economy, Spanish authorities relied on select natives to occupy the lower rungs of the bureaucracy. Over time this local elite took advantage of opportunities in trade and commerce to achieve a dominant position in Filipino society. But the Spanish continued to discriminate against them when it came to appointments to important positions in the church, government, and military. By the dawn of the twentieth century, prominent, educated Filipinos, called the ilustrados (enlightened), had grown tired of their second-class status. As their resentment built, some ilustrados formed the Katipunan (Patriots’ League), a secret society dedicated to overthrowing the Spanish and achieving Philippine self-rule.

  The Katipunan initiated a major rebellion in 1896 in the Tagalog-speaking provinces of Luzon, the most populous island in the Philippines. The rebels quickly gained control of the area south of Manila. Then factional rivalries split the Katipunan command, leading to the execution of the movement’s leader and his replacement with Emilio Aguinaldo. The quarreling allowed the Spanish to recover and counterattack. After a year of conflict, and having learned that rebellion was difficult, dangerous work, Aguinaldo and several other prominent leaders made a shrewd calculation and allowed themselves to be bought out by the Spanish. Aguinaldo went into brief exile in comfortable billets in Hong Kong.

  Hostilities Erupt

  The sinking of the battleship Maine in Havana harbor precipitated the United States’ declaration of war on Spain in April 1898. Admiral George Dewey commanded the U.S. Asiatic Squadron, the spearhead of his country’s Pacific thrust against Spain. Best remembered for his utterly ordinary command “You may fire when ready, Gridley,” Dewey and his fleet annihilated the overmatched Spanish fleet in Manila Bay on May 1, 1898. Because he lacked sufficient ground forces to invade the Philippines, Dewey had to confine his subsequent efforts to a naval blockade of Manila. In order to avoid a total loss of momentum while he waited for the arrival of American troops, two months away, Dewey made the fateful decision to summon Aguinaldo from exile.

  What exactly was said during Aguinaldo’s meeting with Dewey remains controversial. Aguinaldo claimed that an American consul had already pledged that the United States would recognize Filipino in dependence and that Dewey reiterated this promise. Dewey claimed he said no such thing. Dewey’s intention was merely to use Filipino guerrillas to pin the Spanish in Manila until an American ground force arrived to capture the capital. Toward this goal Dewey gave Aguinaldo 100 rifles and the American consul in Hong Kong purchased another 2,000 for the Filipino leader.

  In a country where modern firearms were scarce, these gifts helped Aguinaldo reassert his position as leader of the Filipino independence movement. As the weeks passed, friction between the Filipino insurgents and the Americans developed. Aguinaldo had learned that the McKinley administration was coming to the view that the United States should first evict the Spanish and then retain the Philippines as a prize of war. Aguinaldo sought to preempt this effort by proclaiming himself president of a provisional government of an inde pendent Philippine Republic. He assumed control of the insurgency and directed his forces to occupy as much territory as possible in order to give credence to the assertion that he represented the will of the Filipino people.

  From the beginning, leaders from the ilustrado class dominated the insurgency. They were Tagalogs, racially indistinguishable from other Filipinos but separated by the language they spoke. Their homeland was the central and southern parts of the main island of Luzon. The Tagalogs did not try to mobilize support from the mass of the people. Their goal was to transfer power from the Spanish to themselves. From a peasant’s perspective, this was essentially a continuation of rule by a local elite. In select areas, notably in central Luzon and the provinces south of Manila, the people enthusiastically supported the revolution. Outside of this Tagalog heartland, the peasant response to Aguinaldo’s revolutionary government was tepid. However, as a contemporary American historian observed, “It is fair to presume that a people will help men of their own blood, men who speak the same language, men whose thoughts are their thoughts, rather than foreigners whose declared purposes they do not trust.”2 Despite his lack of military education and experience, Aguinaldo assumed command of the revolutionary army. By the end of June 1898, Filipino insurgents controlled most of Luzon except for Manila itself. As this point Aguinaldo believed that the United States would recognize his government. He was wrong.

  On August 14, 1898, the Spanish formally surrendered to the Americans. The previous day’s combat for control of Manila had been something of a sham. Guidelines over the conduct of the battle had been prearranged between the Americans and the Spanish. The subsequent show of Spanish re sistance was a matter of honor, although the American casualties, 17 killed and 105 wounded, were real enough. The so-called First Battle of Manila was unusual in several respects. The nominal foes, Spain and the United States, shared a strong common interest in barring Aguinaldo’s rebels from the city. The nominal allies ended the battle almost in armed conflict with each other. Hasty negotiations allowed the rebels to remain in the suburbs while the Americans controlled the city. Perhaps the least surprising outcome from the battle was the immediate collapse of army-navy harmony. Dewey told American war correspondents that he had had everything arranged for a bloodless transfer of power and that the army had taken unnecessary losses for glory’s sake alone. The general who commanded the assault columns responded by publishing an account of the army’s storming Manila without any naval assistance.

  Safely ensconced behind the walls of old Manila, the Americans issued a proclamation to inform the Filipino people that the United States had not come to wage war on them. At year’s end President William McKinley reinforced this point by declaring that U.S. policy was to be based on benign assimilation, a paternal policy in which the knowing elder improved the child by providing education and discipline. Of course, to accomplish benign assimilation it was necessary to occupy the islands. Without realizing the difficulty of the task, McKinley charged the U.S. Army with enforcing “lawful rule” throughout the islands. At the same time, he ordered it to protect Filipino lives, property, and civil rights. McKinley thereby set the army a twofold task: one military and one involving civil affairs. The president was convinced that in time the Filipinos would see that American motives for occupying the islands were pure and that this realization would end any re sistance. Like Aguinaldo, McKinley was wrong in his conviction.

  Following the Spanish surrender, a state of high tension persisted for almost half a year. About 14,000 American soldiers established a perimeter defending Manila and worked fitfully to make the city a showcase for the benefits of benign assimilation. Meanwhile, Aguinaldo’s newly named Army of Liberation, with about 30,000 soldiers, maintained a loose cordon around the city while Aguinaldo, who felt betrayed by American conduct, prepared for war. He and his insurrectos, as the Americans labeled them, did not intend to exchange one colonial master for another. Aguinaldo warned that his government was ready to fight if the Americans tried to take forcible possession of insurgent-controlled territory. Operating under McKinley’s assumption that it was only a matter of time until Filipinos came to their senses, the American commander of ground forces, General Elwell Otis, avoided provoking the insurgents. Finally the inevitable occurred on the evening of February 4, 1899, whe
n a shooting incident escalated into war.

  The next day President Aguinaldo issued a proclamation to the Philippine people announcing the outbreak of hostilities. It explained that he had tried to avoid conflict, but “all my efforts have been useless against the measureless pride of the American Government . . . who have treated me as a rebel because I defend the sacred interests of my country.”3

  On the Brink of Victory

  The Philippine-American War had two distinct phases. During the first, conventional phase, from February to November 1899, Aguinaldo’s soldiers operated as a regular army and fought the Americans in stand-up combat. In the absence of a coherent strategy—the revolutionary cause never bred a first-class strategist; Aguinaldo proved himself in deep over his head as a military thinker—Filipino efforts focused on defending the territory they controlled. This defense lacked imagination, amounting to little more then trying to position units between the Americans and their objectives. The U.S. Army easily dominated the conventional war. The army could reliably find the enemy and bring him to battle. Once combat began, the army’s superior firepower dominated. The contest was so one-sided that General Otis reported that he could readily march a 3,000-man column anywhere in the Philippines and the insurgents could do nothing to prevent it. Conventional military history taught that when one side could not oppose the free movement of its enemy across its own territory, the war was all but over. Indeed, military pressure coupled with the army’s commitment to a policy of benevolent assimilation appeared to produce decisive results in the autumn of 1899, as Otis prepared a war-winning offensive scheduled to take advantage of Luzon’s dry season.