Afghanistan, and the Indian subcontinent.  Iraq.  Israel, Gaza, and the West Bank.  The Philippines.The Philippines?  Yes, the Philippines are also a significant theater in the GWOT, and the other place besides Iraq where we and our allies have had noteworthy success against the jihadist movement led by al’Qaeda and its allies.  The conflict there is a very different sort, with a different set of restrictions (many of them political, since we’re operating within the territory of a sovereign ally against its own domestic enemies); but as Max Boot and Richard Bennet point out, it offers us a model for how a “soft and light” approach—”a ‘soft’ counterinsurgency strategy, a light American footprint”—can work against terrorist groups.Perhaps the chief benefit of such an approach, where possible, is illustrated by the fact that you probably didn’t even know we’re fighting in the Philippines.  As Boot and Bennet note,

One of the beauties of this low-intensity approach is that it can be continued indefinitely without much public opposition or even notice. The reason why Operation Enduring Freedom-Philippines gets so much less attention than the operations in Iraq and Afghanistan is not hard to see. In Iraq there are 140,000 troops. In Afghanistan 35,000. In the Philippines 600. The Iraq war costs over $100 billion a year, Afghanistan over $30 billion. The Philippines costs $52 million a year.Even more important is the human cost. While thousands of Americans have been killed or maimed in Afghanistan and Iraq, in the Philippines only one American soldier has died as a result of enemy action—Special Forces Sergeant First Class Mark Jackson, who was killed in 2002 by a bomb in Zamboanga City. Three soldiers have been wounded in action, the most serious injuries being sustained by Captain Mike Hummel in the same bombing. Ten more soldiers died in 2002 in an accident when their MH-47 helicopter crashed. Every death is a tragedy, but with the number of tragedies in the Philippines minuscule, there is scant opposition to the mission either in the Philippines or in the United States. That’s important, because when battling an insurgency the degree of success is often closely correlated to the duration of operations.

As the article goes on to concede, this kind of approach won’t work everywhere, because it “requires having capable partners in the local security forces”; we couldn’t have started off on this footing in Iraq or Afghanistan, and there would be real problems in trying to handle Afghanistan this way (or, just as much to the point, Pakistan) even now, though it seems to me that there would be real benefit to implementing as much of it as we can as part of our operations there.  In Iraq, however, our success in the Philippines offers a worthy roadmap for the way forward. This is ironic, since our conflict in the Philippines at the turn of the last century offered the best model for the initial situation in Iraq; but as the new government in Baghdad and its security forces continue to grow stronger with our assistance, there’s a real opportunity to transition to a model for American involvement along the lines of our work in the Philippines; the surge has won us that opportunity.  Perhaps in another few years our work in Iraq will get as little attention, and be as successful, as our work in Mindanao.  That, it seems to me, is the goal, so that when the House of Sa’ud finally falls, Iraq will be a strong and stable ally in the region as we try to deal with whatever comes next on the Arabian Peninsula.