MANILA, Philippines - Mindanao is the President?s achilles heel. The government only has enough money to attend to programs for the poor, or to fight a war in Mindanao, but not both. Recently I had the chance to talk to some former officials who confirmed my view that the increase in rice prices in Mindanao reflected war jitters?or as the former official preferred to explain it, an added premium on all business activity in Mindanao to reflect uncertainty and risk over both increased NPA activity and peace talks with Muslim rebels losing steam.

From what I?ve been able to gather, the dilemma facing the President, as far as Mindanao is concerned, is a confluence of events, or encroaching realities. They are both foreign and domestic in nature.

The President has to consider the negative impact of foreign peace monitors, who are due to leave soon, leaving the MILF and military to square off; that is, unless progress is made to justify their staying. There is also the embarrassment and lost opportunity from having millions, even billions, in pledged development assistance remaining untapped, while foreign funders become increasingly frustrated.

Domestically, the bombing of the Batasan served as a reminder that if hostilities break out, the front line of the war won?t be Mindanao, but Metro Manila, while she may know or at least sense that the armed forces are so demoralized that they are unable to contain renewed NPA aggression in both the Visayas and Mindanao. The last thing she needs are for tensions to rise and for new variables to enter her finely tuned political and fiscal calculations.

By all accounts, one strength of the President is also one of her main weaknesses: when a problem arises, she focuses on that problem with such utter concentration that she is somehow able to cobble together a solution, regardless if her inattention to everything else causes future problems. Food and fuel, themselves problems that only began to be attended to rather late in the game because she was previously focused on the NBN-ZTE mess, led her to setting aside Mindanao until she noticed that things were headed toward a crisis situation. She then seems to have compensated for her previous inattention by rushing a deal with the MILF in time for her to announce it at her State of the Nation Address.

That deal is scheduled to be formally signed tomorrow, and such is the controversial nature of the deal that draft versions of it have been leaked to the media. While Zamboanga, Iligan and North Cotabato in Mindanao have threatened to go to the Supreme Court to delay the deal, it seems the administration will sign an agreement with the MILF as scheduled.

What happens next is anyone?s guess, but for now, the main points have been identified in media reports. It is these points?the proposed ?Bangsamoro Juridical Entity,? the expansion of the current Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao, the recognition of the historic territories of the old Moro Sultanates as the ancestral domain of Muslim Filipinos, and the possibility, even probability, of a Congress amending the Constitution by means of a Constituent Assembly?that have been the focus of public commentary.

The debate will surely be ferocious, based less on positive hopes for the future and more on ancient animosities based on religion and even tribal rivalries. It will be made even more acrimonious by the public wondering if it wasn?t made possible by oppositionists providing the opportunity for Charter change by means of proposing federalism, while wondering, too, if peace can even be achieved at the cost of going parliamentary and extending the President and her ruling coalition?s hold on power. Even those deeply involved in the peace process will be asking if it was wise for the President to have made such sweeping concessions to the MILF.

As for the MILF itself, it will certainly take what it can, but it may not be accurate to think that the MILF believes for a moment that the President can deliver on the substance of the agreement (for example, in the case of the expansion of the ARMM, is its internal benchmark for success 80 percent of the towns that it wants annexed? You always ask for more than you realistically hope to obtain, precisely because you might be bargained down). Things have moved too quickly for her to be able to say that her commitment to the peace deal represents a consensus among her national and local constituency of subordinate leaders.

Regardless of whether the President surprises by accomplishing the seemingly impossible (dodging the question of the ARMM polls, for example, by means of a convenient declaration of a failure of elections by the Comelec, if Congress fails to pass a law postponing the polls in time), the MILF surely wouldn?t sign something if its internal objectives weren?t satisfied.

So even if the agreement begins to unravel almost immediately upon signing, or even if it moves forward but ends up derailed either at the congressional level or in a plebiscite, we should consider the possibility that the government has already made it possible for the MILF to secure one of its most crucial objectives: legitimization abroad. The MILF will be able to tell the Muslim world that it has what up to now only the much-diminished MNLF could claim to possess: a formal agreement with the Philippine government. The proposed agreement, after all, says the MILF will gain its much-sought-after observer status in the Organization of Islamic Conference; and that, in itself, confers such prestige and access to official Islamic channels as to make the whole agreement, even if it fails, an MILF achievement. The agreement, too, establishes a precedent, requiring all future administrations to meet its provisions as the minimum basis for future peace talks.