MANILA, Philippines - Deploying more than 600 U.S. troops may help control the Muslim extremist group that has plagued the Philippines for a decade, but the escalating American involvement will test ties between Washington and one of its closest allies in Southeast Asia.
President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo welcomes the U.S. military buildup, saying it could help deliver a fatal blow to the Muslim extremist group Abu Sayyaf, which has been linked to Osama bin Laden's al-Qaida network.
But the military mission could further inflame the country's Muslim minority and alienate some of the president's leftist supporters.
Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said at the Pentagon that up to 250 U.S. troops are in the country and "several hundred more" will follow. A "small number" of the Americans are on the southern island of Basilan, an area where Philippine forces have been battling Abu Sayyaf rebels.
Philippine officials say the six-month joint exercise will total about 660 troops, including 160 U.S. Army special forces, and some will work in the southern Philippines.
It will essentially be a new front in the U.S.-led war on terrorism, but a radically different mission from Afghanistan, shifting to a heavily support-based role helping a friend rather than ousting an adversary, and coping with tropical jungle instead of snow and desert.
The aim is to help eradicate the Abu Sayyaf. But the group, which holds two Americans and a Filipino hostage, has defied successive governments for 10 years in the jungle-covered mountains of the remote southern islands.
Abu Sayyaf has about 800 fighters in a loosely knit federation of gangs that can escape by melting into the jungles or dropping weapons and blending into the local populace.
The guerrillas don't fight head-on, meaning that wiping out Abu Sayyaf, even with U.S. help, would be a lengthy task. Even before the start of the six-month exercise, the Philippine government is saying it may be extended to a year. And that much time in the jungle, making war on a guerrilla force, is a daunting prospect for those who remember Vietnam.
The possibility of U.S. troops firing at a Filipino, even a violent radical, has sparked criticism from the Muslim minority, nationalists, the mainstream political opposition and left-wing groups that are traditionally anti-American.
But that doesn't trouble Arroyo, at least for now.
"I will weather the criticisms because, in the end, if we get the Abu Sayyaf, we would have been victorious," she said Wednesday.
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