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History News Network February 9, 2010 David Silbey: The Philippine War is Not So Different from Afghanistan -[T]he similarities between the Philippine-American War and the current conflict in Afghanistan should remind us of a time when the U.S. was more or less constantly at war in conflicts that never drew the all-encompassing attention of World War II. We may have returned to that era....American history has been dominated by war; so, too, may the American future be. [David Silbey is the author of "A War of Frontier and Empire: The Philippine-American War, 1899-1902" and associate professor of history at Alvernia University in Reading, Pa.] The war in Afghanistan feels foreign to Americans: a far distant land, a confusing and alien culture, and combat against a shadowy enemy. That feeling is mistaken. America has spent much of its history fighting wars like the one in Afghanistan. So much so, in fact, that Afghanistan would be familiar to an American in 1900, and conventional wars such as World War II would seem strange.... Yet while [the Spanish-American War] is remembered, it was a war that occurred as a result that had longer-lasting repercussions. As part of the peace treaty with Spain, America bought the Philippine Islands in the Pacific for $20 million. We found ourselves embroiled in a war there against the Filipinos themselves, who resented being bought and sold.... The American forces fighting in the Philippines were experienced at the kind of war that they faced. The American Army had spent much of the last part of the 19th century fighting a series of small wars against the Native Americans in the continental west. Those small wars demanded the same kind of counterinsurgency skills that the Philippines did, and so American officers and soldiers found themselves in a familiar situation in the western Pacific. So too for Afghanistan: American forces there have a wealth of knowledge garnered in Iraq. News of the Philippine War reached home almost as rapidly as does news from Afghanistan. It was an age of the telegraph and the mass-market newspaper. Both ensured that Americans were quickly informed of news from the islands. When Company C of the Ninth U.S. Infantry was ambushed and massacred at Balangiga on the island of Samar on Sept. 28, 1901, the news made the New York Times two days later, hardly slower than our same-day reporting on Afghanistan. Both Afghanistan and the Philippines committed America to a new part of the world. Taking the Philippines made the United States a power in Asia for the first time, and shifted the focus of the western United States from the east to the Pacific waters. In Afghanistan's case, it has been a growing and probably long-term presence in Central Asia, mixed in with young nations like Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan and Georgia, created in the aftermath of the Soviet Union's collapse, and jostling for position with such traditional regional powers as Pakistan and India.... ...[T]he similarities between the Philippine-American War and the current conflict in Afghanistan should remind us of a time when the U.S. was more or less constantly at war in conflicts that never drew the all-encompassing attention of World War II. We may have returned to that era, one in which American forces are always involved in small wars around the globe. The trickle of daily deaths- an IED here, a sniper there - will probably not grow to a roaring flood, but also may not really stop, a leaky faucet never quite repaired. American history has been dominated by war; so, too, may the American future be. =========================== Stop NATO http://groups.yahoo.com/group/stopnato Blog site: http://rickrozoff.wordpress.com/ To subscribe, send an e-mail to: rwroz...@yahoo.com or stopnato-subscr...@yahoogroups.com Daily digest option available. ============================== --------------------------- ANTI-NATO INFORMATION LIST --^---------------------------------------------------------------- This email was sent to: arch...@mail-archive.com EASY UNSUBSCRIBE click here: http://topica.com/u/?a84x2u.bNM5nn.YXJjaGl2 Or send an email to: antinato-unsubscr...@topica.com For Topica's complete suite of email marketing solutions visit: http://www.topica.com/?p=TEXFOOTER --^----------------------------------------------------------------
