Surrender monkeys don't eat balut

A fascinating shit-storm is brewing between the Philippine Army and the UN Disengagement Observer Force as a result of recent events in the Golan Heights:

The Philippine military said Monday that a U.N. peacekeeping commander in the Golan Heights should be investigated for allegedly asking Filipino troops to surrender to Syrian rebels who had attacked and surrounded their camp.
[...]
When the besieged Filipino troops sought his [Gen. Catapang's] advice after they were ordered to lay down their arms as part of an arrangement with the rebels to secure the Fijians' release, Catapang said he asked them to defy the order.

It seems that in order to facilitate negotiations for the release of 45 Fijian soldiers captured by the (al-Qaeda affiliated) Nusra Front rebels - such capture perhaps due to less-than-stellar planning by UNDOF - the UNDOF commander decided that yielding to the rebels' demands for the Filipino troops to give up their weapons would be just dandy. After all, what could possibly go wrong?

Gen. Catapang is Chief of Staff of the Philippine Armed Forces, so can't really rise any higher in the command structure, and isn't well-known enough to run for high government office, so he's got no real motive to puff up his role in this dispute. I'm inclined to believe the main thrust of his account. Since the army has been in near-continuous counter-insurgency campaigns, with the communist NPA in the central Philippines and the Islamic groups in the south and south west, they've accumulated quite a lot of experience with fanatic groups and have presumably absorbed the lesson that doing what your opponent tells you to seldom works out well.

It'll be interesting to see if the resolution of the dispute is made public:

Catapang said an investigation would allow the UNDOF commander to explain his side and the Philippine military to explain why it advised the Filipino peacekeepers to defy his order.

I doubt the second part will take very long. I'd start with "Because it was bloody stupid" and work up from there. Catapang, as a 4-star general, comfortably out-ranks UNDOF's 2-star leader and so there's no insubordination problem I can see. The first part would be educational though: just what did the UNDOF commander think would happen if the Filipino troops had laid down their arms as ordered? And what involvement did the UNDOF commander have in the Fijians being captured in the first place? The Philippine Army is withdrawing from the UNDOF mission in the Golan, presumably because they have no appetite for being put in the same position again when UNDOF decides that covering its backside is more important than the safety of the troops in its command.

It seems that si vis pacem, para bellum is still true: if you want to keep the peace, you have to be prepared to kick the ass.

Update: Richard Fernandez at the Belmont Club is well worth reading on this topic:

In the past the UN apparatchiks have relied on the faithfulness of their subordinate commanders to take a bullet for the team. "Theirs not to reason why, theirs but to do and die." But Tennyson had never been to the Philippines where the word for blindly following orders is tanga – or sap.