Roots of armed conflict can never be bombed into submission

Published: 07 September 2025 07 September 2025

Barely a month after Marcos Jr.’s State of the Nation Address, where he declared with pompous certainty that “there are no more guerrilla groups” in the Philippines, a string of armed encounters has shattered his illusion. From Quezon to Northern Samar, Albay to Bukidnon, reports of firefights between the Armed Forces of the Philippines (AFP) and units of the New People’s Army (NPA) show that far from extinguished, the flames of resistance continue to burn across the archipelago.

No less than his own generals, in rolling out new division-level offensives involving thousands of troops, aerial bombardments, and artillery shelling, are openly admitting that guerilla forces remain. Indeed, the AFP’s renewed boast to “end the NPA by year’s end” is the same tired rhetoric recycled for two decades, and it only underscores the fact that successive regimes have failed to crush the armed revolution.

At the heart of these costly military offensives is the fascist logic of suppression through brute force. US-supplied fighter jets and 500-pound bombs have been unleashed on rural communities in Northern Samar, Bukidnon, and Capiz, leaving deep craters, traumatized villagers, and destroyed farms. By targeting areas near civilian populations, the AFP is not only showing its desperation but is also brazenly violating international humanitarian law (IHL). Ironically, Marcos Jr. recently hosted a regional conference on IHL, projecting himself as a statesman championing the rules of war. This is hypocrisy at its most obscene: the primary violator of IHL, particularly in the context of the civil war in the Philippines, masquerading as its proponent.

The roots of the conflict cannot be bombed into submission. The NPA continues to find safe refuge and political support because it serves the masses, especially the peasantry. Red fighters serve as doctors, teachers, and organizers, while the AFP comes to the countryside as an invading force bringing harassment, arrests, and massive displacement. Marcos’ counterrevolutionary campaign does not weaken the people’s will, it hardens it. It is the intensification of land grabbing, mining plunder, forced recruitment into paramilitary units, and the trampling of democratic rights that makes the soil fertile for both armed and unarmed forms of resistance.

Yet Marcos Jr. insists on his narrow definition of “peace.” Like his predecessors, he reduces it to the formula of demobilization, disarmament, and reintegration (DDR). In other words, surrender talks. This was made starkly visible in the government’s handling of the Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF) decommissioning process, which exposed the real intent of Malacañang: not genuine peace negotiations that address root causes of armed conflict, but staged spectacles of capitulation. Such a framework ensures the continuation of armed struggle rather than its resolution, because it refuses to confront poverty, landlessness, tyranny, and foreign domination which are the very issues that gave rise to revolutionary armed movements in the first place.

The involvement of US imperialism in counterinsurgency operations further exposes the bankruptcy of Marcos’ approach. With drones, weapons, and “training exercises,” US and even Australian forces are actively intervening in what is framed as a domestic conflict. The strategic aim is clear: to weaken the Filipino people’s armed resistance so the AFP can be redeployed in support of Washington’s geopolitical objectives in the Asia-Pacific, particularly its confrontation with China.

The Marcos Jr. regime’s militarist path is a dead end. Just as previous regimes (from Ramos to Duterte) prematurely declared “strategic victory” over the revolutionary forces only to be proven wrong, Marcos Jr. is setting himself up for the same humiliation. History and the present reality both prove that so long as the Filipino people are subjected to worsening poverty, hunger, displacement, and foreign domination, they will resist.

A just and lasting peace cannot be built on aerial bombardments, arbitrary arrests, or sham peace processes designed to force surrender. It can only be achieved by addressing the root causes of conflict: land reform, national industrialization, respect for democratic rights, and true national sovereignty. Until then, Marcos’ declarations will remain hollow, his peace rhetoric exposed as hypocrisy, and his militarist offensives remembered as fuel for the flames of the people’s war.