If the Devil does exist, and man has therefore created him, he has created him in his own image and likeness

-Fyodor Dostoevsky

Keith Pace, a Sergeant in the Green Berets, was stationed deep in the Philippine bush in a base only accessible after a march through a mangrove swamp and a triple-canopied rainforest. He was keeping something of a busy schedule.

Pace, a medic, and the rest of his Special Forces A-Team had gone to work in the thick mosquito-rich overgrowth rebuilding a mosque and organizing biweekly medical clinics in as many of the local villages as they could, treating everything from trauma wounds to toothaches to malaria to strokes. It was territory Ramzi Yousef and Uncle KSM would’ve felt plenty comfortable in, as it was rife with members of Abu Sayyaf, the fundamentalist militant group with close ties to Osama bin Ladin mentioned earlier when the boondocks were discussed. Those ties are why Sergeant Pace came to be stationed in Basilan, a strategic island thick with Philippine jungle, in the first place.

After the attacks of 9/11 the U.S. military launched Operation Enduring Freedom, which actually had two fronts. Although most Americans were only aware of the more publicized one – removing the Taliban regime in Afghanistan. The second front, disrupting the Abu Sayyaf’s operations in the Philippines and severing its ties with Al Qaeda, was run almost exclusively by the American Special Operations Command. The Special Operations Command is in charge of all American Special Forces, and was the command that had ordered Sergeant Pace into Basilan’s dense and sweaty flora.

Unlike the front being opened against the Taliban, the one being run in the Philippines “would be accomplished less by military actions than by an unusual kind of humanitarian assistance program.”¹ This same sort of unusual humanitarian assistance program was being integrated in with more regular military action in Afghanistan, but since the Abu Sayyaf had nothing of the Taliban’s centralized authority the American command saw no need for wide-scale regular military action, and planned to use only this type of irregular action in the Philippines.

Another, broader name for this sort of irregular action, usually punctuated by unusual humanitarian assistance programs, is a counterinsurgency. And just as the Green Berets actively built rapports with indigenous warlords in Afghanistan in an effort to make them better trained and more effective at fighting the Taliban in their counterinsurgency there, in the Philippines the Green Berets also sought to serve as a “spine doctor” by trying to “put some backbone into the Manila authorities so they would better take care of their own people.”²

Crucial to the irregular humanitarian assistance program was accurate intelligence. To gain this, the Green Berets first conducted a series of population surveys, unique in that they had a “concrete, cut-to-the-chase quality about them that is uncommon in academia.” The only information about the people of Basilan the Green Berets were interested in was that which would help them kill or drive out the Abu Sayyaf. Because the Abu Sayyaf, operating as an insurgent State Shell on the island, was strongest where government services and infrastructure was the weakest, the first missions for the Green Berets were digging wells and building roads, constructing piers, and clearing airstrips. In a sense, beginning to construct their own State Shell to counter the one being developed by the Abu Sayyaf.