Coup d'oeil in waging political war

By Lt. Gen. Antonio Parlade Jr. / The Manila Times

WAR is costly but a protracted insurgency war is even more so. The armed forces and the police are spending billions year in and year out in sustaining a fight that seems to have no end. We have lost more than 13,000 soldiers and policemen in the past 52 years, yet we have been accused of simply "managing the conflict" and not ending it completely in order for us to benefit from the billions that the taxpayers spend for the war kitty.

Let me give it to you straight. If there is anybody who wants to see the end of this insurgency, it is we, your soldiers. We don't want more soldiers to die out there. We don't want to see more orphans from this useless war being waged by Jose Ma Sison and his ilk in the Kamatayan (Makabayan) bloc. We want to go home to our families. We want to go back to our barracks so we can prepare, train and fight instead the bigger wars, which may be launched by non-Filipinos. We are tired of fighting our own countrymen. It is pointless.

But no, we can't. Just as the National Task Force to End Local Communist Armed Conflict (NTF-Elcac) is about to lick this "war of the running dogs" (to use Noel Barber's term), suddenly some smart people are telling us what to do. Go back to the Army and do your fighting there (as if I left, and isn't this charlatanism if not neo-Hegelian thinking?). They would tell me to shut up, stop red-tagging, stop our Barangay Development Program, stop our arrogance, just stop. Or they will take hostage our budget for next year.

Makes you wonder where this hubris is coming from.

And then I realized. Thirty-seven years of fighting this kind of war has helped me develop a kind of strategic intuition. Napoleon Bonaparte was widely known for using it extensively as he conquered half the globe. He kept his boots on the ground, felt the breeze, and smelled the smoke. Then he is able to sense the battlefield. Coup d'oeil. Swivel chair generals, politicians and