This is the bad part:
The president [of the Philippines] has ordered the national police to eliminate the many private armies and get it done by next year. Since the Ampatuan clan militia massacre in 2009, the government was forced to acknowledge the existence of private armed groups, or PAGs. Official attempts to identify and count PAGs quickly found over a hundred of them. The existence of PAGs is embarrassing, because many of these private militias are controlled by local politicians who support the national government, and were allowed to form (often with help from the army and national police) to help in the fight against Moslem (MILF) and communist (NPA) rebels. ... The problem has been the lack of supervision, mainly because the national level politicians did not want to offend their local supporters by questioning how the private armies were used. Often, PAG members were used to intimidate voters during elections, or for purely criminal activities. The identified PAGs had about 4,000 members. About half the PAGs are recognized as participating in illegal activities, the government is under increasing pressure to crack down. These illegal activities have been an open secret for decades, but prosecuting the PAG leaders means taking on powerful local families, who provide political and economic support for national political parties and politicians. But in the last two years about a quarter of the PAGs were disbanded, and half the known PAG members dismissed. The remaining PAGs have resisted disbanding.
The government needed them to fight insurgents. But many are no longer security assets but threats to security. That's the problem. Early on, you may have no choice but to use such militias if you want to avoid losing to insurgents.
Indeed, early in the Iraq War insurgencies I counted the Shia militias as forces on the government side countering the Sunni Arab insurgents and al Qaeda terrorists. And I was right to count them. But in time, the militias went from a necessary evil to prevent something worse to an evil that the Iraqi government turned on in spring 2008 in the Charge of the Knights operation in Baghdad. We had taken them on in Sadr City before that and broke their resistance in that Baghdad suburb. Of course, one of the problems of those "private" forces was that they became tools of Iran.
But for good or bad, private military forces are a growing part of our international system despite the formal structure that only recognizes state-owned assets as legitimate forms of military force. Ignore them for too long and they become answerable only to themselves.
