Before embarking on his four-day state visit to China, President Rodrigo Duterte gave a TV interview where he said he was willing to hold joint military exercises with China and Russia.
If the President goes through with this joint military exercise, what would be the scenario?
In planning for joint military exercises, one must have a fictional enemy. But even if the enemy is imaginary, there must be some basis in fact to make the exercise as realistic as possible. Our military exercises with the US was easy. We try to prevent the invasion of one of our islands. With China and Russia, however, it would be a little difficult to imagine a fictional enemy.
Going to the nitty-gritty of planning, how are we going to blend with the Russians and Chinese who have completely different armaments, doctrines and operational concepts? This was never a problem when we were having exercises with the US.
Has the President considered this problem with his military advisers or simply thought this thing all by his lonesome self and then made the pronouncement, leaving his people to sort out the details? If this happens, it will be the complete opposite of what our military has been so used to over the past 80 or so years.
Another problem with the joint military exercises with China and Russia is that the Filipino people already have a good idea about who the aggressor is—and it is not Japan or the United States. The Filipino people already know which country has taken over part of its exclusive economic zone and banned Filipino fishermen from fishing on an area that is supposed to be ours.
Whether the nation agrees with the President’s desire to move closer to China at the expense of our long-standing relationship with the United States will be a test of his power of persuasion. Right now, the nation has embraced most of the things that he has been doing. The anti-crime and corruption campaign has gained broad support from the public notwithstanding their misgivings on the unabated alleged extrajudicial killings.
But the pivot to China is something that he has not expounded on much during the presidential campaign. He chose to remain quiet on this issue but now seems to be taking center stage. Secretary Perfecto Yasay once quipped that observers should not pay attention to what the President says but what he does. True enough. But these contradictory and confusing statements are not doing the country any good because it is negatively affecting the financial markets and the economy in the long run.
Even Senator Panfilo Lacson, who is not a trained economist, said the peso slide has something to do with the perception that the government is spooking the market because of its rhetoric. But the President is now in China with about 400 businessmen and scores of government officials. Let us all hope that he brings home the bacon.
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What will happen to the police when this anti-drug campaign is finally declared over? In a conversation over the weekend with a fellow police retiree, I speculated on this question. Both he and I believe that the best way to solve and prevent crime is the tried-and-tested practice of good police investigation. Indeed, there is really no substitute to it.
In the war over drugs, we have attracted tremendous international attention especially from human right groups. Now, the government has invited the United Nations rapporteur for Human Rights to come to the country, go anywhere, interview anyone in order to investigate whether there really is a state-sponsored extra judicial killings. If—and this is a big if—it is found to be complicit in extra-judicial killings, what will happen to the reputation of the police as an organization?
Already there are examples of this. The two motorcycle-riding masked men who gunned down an anti-crime crusader turned out to be police officers. It is now estimated that there are more than 4,000 people killed for various reasons in the anti-drug war. Before this thing is over, more will die.
There are those who believe that the Police is taking shortcuts to the law-enforcement process. That it is simply killing the suspects without any due process to save themselves from the hard work of having to investigate and file cases. To these observers, this is poor police work and is certain to affect the psyche of the Police. The public cannot afford a trigger-happy police force.
Is it necessary to detoxify the whole Police and retrain them to be a force that the public can trust again? This is a daunting and scary effect of this anti-drug war. Managing a huge anti-crime campaign such as the drug war is not that easy. This is because our statistics on people who use, sell and manufacture drugs is not always reliable—although we know the problem is out there and is huge.
In order to wage this war, Police leaders will have get to the entire organization to a situation wherein certain objectives will have to be met. Otherwise, local police commanders will be relieved for non-performance. There is therefore pressure from top to bottom, and this is where the shortcuts come in. Hopefully when this is over, the Police as an organization will emerge with its perspective intact. Otherwise, it will take years to retrain, counsel and institute other programs to bring the Police back to what it should be.