Curiously there was a drop in Islamist-inspired attacks in Thailand since the junta took over. Sigh, maybe that is really the only way to deal with them. They did behaved themselves when the Americans were in control of the country.

Many of the originally Muslim areas in the Philippines are just on the part of the island, the rest were populated by animists who moved up to the mountains to avoid conflict with the Muslims (as well as Christian settlers later). We've never stopped negotiating with these groups. Once we're done with one, another offshot comes out of the former and asks for more. We already gave them some autonomy. We POURED money from the more affluent regions but nothing ever came out of it.

At the risk of sounding ethnocentric, the culture is partly to blame. If you think the Catholic Filipino are easily corruptible, you have to look down south. Their politicians are basically their old nobility and act as such. There were even places were politicians run unopposed because everyone in the local government is a member of the clan and they'd just have a family meeting to select who will run for office. We call them clannish for a good reason. Seen it personally for my self. Some woman got into a fight with a Muslim woman and soon she was being mobbed by all the women of the clan. And this is here in the capital, just imagine if it was in their home base.

It also doesn't help that they still have a warrior mentality. These people are armed and some even bring this culture when moving to Christian areas. Entire towns would have to be evacuated just because some families decided to revive an old feud (yup this happens even in Christian areas since Muslims build ghettos around mosques and eventually wall up the place). They say their religion allows them to do this, to hunt after people who killed a family member or "dishonored" their family. As expected, this starts a vicious cycle of vendetta which would scare out even the most intrepid investor.