As in Vietnam and later Afghanistan, the generals leading the Moro War perennially assured the public that progress was being made, that victory was imminent. All that was needed was yet more time. And in Moroland, as until recently in the never-ending Afghan War, politicians and citizens alike swallowed the optimistic yarns of those generals, in part because the conflicts took place so far beyond the public eye.
Once the larger insurgency in the main Philippine islands fizzled out, most Americans lost interest in a remote theater of war so many thousands of miles away. Returning Moro War veterans (like their war on terror counterparts) were mostly ignored. Many in the U.S. didn't even realize that combat continued in the Philippines.
One vet wrote of his reception at home that, "instead of glad hands, people stare at a khaki-clad man as though he had escaped from the zoo." The relatively low (American) casualties in the war contributed to public apathy. In the years 1909 and 1910, just eight regular Army soldiers were killed, analogous to the mere 32 troopers killed in 2016-2017 in Afghanistan. This was just enough danger to make a tour of duty in Moroland, as in Afghanistan today, terrifying, but not enough to garner serious national attention or widespread war opposition.
In the style recently revealed by Craig Whitlock of the Post when it came to Afghanistan, five future Army chiefs of staff treated their civilian masters and the populace to a combination of outright lies, obfuscations, and rosy depictions of "progress." Adna Chaffee, Leonard Wood, Hugh Scott, Tasker Bliss, and John Pershing -- a virtual who's who in the Army pantheon of that era -- repeatedly assured Americans that the war on the Moros was turning a corner, that victory was within the military's grasp.
It was never so. A hundred and six years after the "end" of America's Moro War, the Post has once again highlighted how successive commanders and U.S. officials in our time have lied to the citizenry about an even longer war's "progress." In that sense, generals David Petraeus, Stanley McChrystal, Mark Milley, and so many others of this era share disturbing commonalities with generals Leonard Wood, Tasker Bliss, and company.
As early as October 1904, Wood wrote that the "Moro question... is pretty well settled." Then, Datu Ali, a rebel leader, became the subject of a two-year manhunt -- not unlike the ones that finally killed al-Qaeda's Osama bin Laden and ISIS's Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. In June 1906, when Ali was finally caught and killed, Colliers magazine featured an article entitled "The End of Datu Ali: The Last Fight of the Moro War."
After Bud Dajo, Tasker Bliss toned down Wood's military operations and oversaw a comparatively quiet tour in Moroland, but even he argued against any troop withdrawals, predicting something akin to "generational war" as necessary to fully pacify the province. In 1906, he wrote that the Moros, as a "savage" and "Mohammedan" people "cannot be changed entirely in a few years and the American people must not expect results... such as other nations operating under similar conditions have taken a century or more to accomplish."
As Pershing lamented in 1913, the 14th year of the war, "The Moros never seemed to learn from experience." And the violence only continued after his departure, even if American troops took an ever more advisory role, while the Filipino army fought the ongoing rebellion.
The Moros, of course, continue to combat Manila-based troops to this very day, a true "generational struggle" for the ages.
Missing the Big Picture, Then and Now
The last major American-led battle on Jolo in 1913 proved a farcical repeat of Bud Dajo. When several hundred intransigent Moros climbed into another crater atop Bud Bagsak, Pershing, who'd criticized Wood's earlier methods and was once again in command, tried to launch a more humane operation. He attempted to negotiate and organized a blockade that thinned the defenders' ranks. Still, in the end, his troops would storm the mountain's crest and kill some 200 to 300 men, women, and children, though generating little of the attention given to the earlier massacre because the vast majority of Pershing's soldiers were Filipinos led by U.S. officers. The same shift toward indigenous soldiers in Afghanistan has lowered both (American) casualties and the U.S. profile in an equally failed war.
Though contemporary Army officers and later military historians claimed that the battle at Bud Bagsak broke the back of Moro resistance, that was hardly the case. What ultimately changed was not the violence itself, but who was doing the fighting. Filipinos now did almost all of the dying and U.S. troops slowly faded from the field.
For example, when total casualties are taken into account, 1913 was actually the bloodiest year of the Moro conflict, just as 2018 was the bloodiest of the Afghan War. Late in 1913, Pershing summed up his own uncertainty about the province's future in his final official report: "It remains for us now to hold all that we have gained and to substitute for a government by force something more in keeping with the changed conditions. Just what form that will take has not been altogether determined." It still hasn't been determined, not in Moroland, not in Afghanistan, and nowhere, in truth, in America's Greater Middle East conflicts of this century.
The Filipino government in Manila continues to wage war on rebellious Moros. To this day, two groups -- the Islamist Abu Sayyaf and the separatist Moro Islamic Liberation Front -- continue to contest central government control there. After the 9/11 attacks, the U.S. Army again intervened in Moroland, sending Special Forces teams to advise and assist Filipino military units. If few of the American Green Berets knew anything of their own country's colonial history, the locals hadn't forgotten.
In 2003, as U.S. forces landed at Jolo's main port, they were greeted by a banner that read: "We Will Not Let History Repeat Itself! Yankee Back Off." Jolo's radio station played traditional ballads and one vocalist sang, "We heard the Americans are coming and we are getting ready. We are sharpening our swords to slaughter them when they come."
More than a century after America's ill-fated Moro campaign, its troops were back where they started, outsiders, once again resented by fiercely independent locals. One of the last survivors of the Moro War, Lieutenant (and later Air Corps General) Benny Foulois published his memoirs in 1968 at the height of the Vietnam insurgency. Perhaps with that conflict in mind, he reflected on the meaning of his own youthful war: "We found that a few hundred natives living off their land and fighting for it could tie down thousands of American troops... and provoke a segment of our population to take the view that what happens in the Far East is none of our business."
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