Implantación del metamodelo en el proyecto piloto

recent meeting of the SEATO Council of Ministers in Washington# the Philippines underscored the need for

the members of that organization to undertake

unflinchingly the task of extricating Southeast Asia from the state of underdevelopment.“ Manila Bulletin, 5 July 1960.

their freedom must be part of a mutual effort.'1 23 He concluded his report with the statement that

the fundamental decision required of the United States...is whether we are to

attempt to meet the challenge of Communist expansion now in Southeast Asia by a major effort in support of the forces of freedom in the area or throw in the towel.^

In order to help the Diem regime resist the 'communist threat', on 11 May President Kennedy secretly ordered 400 Special Forces troops and 100 other American advisers to be sent to South Vietnam. One of the important

1 Ibid., p.129.

2 Ibid., p.130, See also Hilsman, op.cit., p.420.

Kennedy's own views on Johnson's envisaged 'alliance of the free nations of Asia and the Pacific' are unknown. Hilsman writes:

There was one imaginative proposal — a notion put forward l y Chester. Bowies_.to--enlarge the area of

neutrality far beyond both Laos and Vietnam, to include Burma, Thailand, Malaya, in fact the whole of Southeast Asia. So far as I know, President Kennedy did not

make any specific comment on this suggestion, but my sense of his attitude is that he accepted the concept as a farseeing expression of the ultimate goal for Southeast Asia toward which we should work, but that its time had not yet come. I think he would have said that our policy should lead toward the goal of a neutral Southeast Asia and avoid getting United States prestige so thoroughly pinned to 'victory' in Vietnam as to preclude that goal, but that until Communist ambitions had been blunted against the realities of native resistance from within Southeast Asia we could not do much more than continue to support that resistance.

Hilsman, op.cit., pp.423-4. 3 The Pentagon Papers, p.79.

factors in this decision was apparently the belief that the United States had 'stepped back' in Laos# and had to take a firm stand in Vietnam to reassure its Asian

allies.^

Preoccupied as it was with the crises in Laos and Vietnam, it was hardly surprising that the United States government took little apparent interest in the formation of ASA, The available evidence also lends

itself to the interpretation that the U.S. government was not particularly impressed by ASA because of its limited membership. Despite President Garcia's urgings, it did not

include Taiwan, Japan, South Vietnam# or South Korea# and was a poor imitation of the 'alliance of all the free

nations of the Pacific and Asia' envisaged by Vice-President Johnson. If the Malayan government had not opposed the

membership of these countries, it is possible that the United States might have regarded ASA as an important step in the construction of a new SEATO sans Britain and France. ASA had another important deficiency from the point of view of American policy in Southeast Asia; it did not include the most populous and potentially powerful Asian state - Indonesia.

Indonesia and ASA

Despite the slight improvement in Philippine- 2

Indonesian relations after 1958, the kind of anti-communist bloc which the Garcia administration tried to promote had very little appeal to the Indonesian government. As has been indicated, it was the Malayan government which exerted

1 Ibid., p.87.

most effort in trying to secure Indonesian participation in the proposed regional association. Serrano, did, however, make some attempts to persuade the Indonesians

to participate. When the Philippine-Indonesian immigration treaty was ratified in February 1961, Serrano expressed the hope that Indonesia would join the proposed ASAS, but the Indonesian Ambassador was non-committal. A few days later, Suluh Indonesia, the newspaper of Sukarno's P.N.I., stated that any Southeast Asian pact without Indonesian participation would not have much meaning, and that the sponsors of the pact should pay more attention to Afro- Asian solidarity instead of forming a new association.'^ The attitude of the Indonesian government was made

explicit on 14 February when Subandrio stated that his government was anxious to conduct bilateral agreements, and that:

...If we cannot agree to ASAS it is not

because we are afraid or suspicious as if [sic] ASAS will become an alliance against any

ideology or a defence pact. We, in Indonesia, only consider ASAS as being unrealistic

endeavour [sic] as long as bilateral relations between states have not yet been given its

full contents [sic] so that this alliance can easily be used as a forum to discuss political issues.

What we ought to note is that at the present time Indonesia indeed does have a policy which is rather different from those of our

neighbours.... 2

Serrano's attempts to deny that ASAS could be used as a forum of political issues fell on deaf ears in