The attacks of September 11, 2001, pushed President George W. Bush to actively combat terrorist networks around the globe, most visibly in Afghanistan where the fight against the Taliban and Al Qaeda captured the world’s attention. At the same time the American military was searching for Osama bin Laden and hunting Taliban insurgents in their isolated mountain strongholds of Afghanistan, the U.S. military initiated a number of smaller-scale operations in a variety of disparate locations that took a more indirect approach toward defeating terrorist groups.

The Philippines – a recurring counterinsurgency battleground ever since the colonial wars at the turn of the twentieth century and the Magsaysay years of the 1950s – would become one example of America’s post-9/11 attempts to target the world’s murky and lawless areas that nurtured and fueled the spread of global terrorism and insurgency. While the indirect U.S. military effort in the Philippines would receive scant media coverage, it stands as an important but overlooked case of light-footprint counterinsurgency that, in the shadow of the full-scale invasion of Afghanistan, demonstrates the diversity of the American experience with counterinsurgency warfare in the heady moments of the post-9/11 era.