Sen. Gregorio Honasan warned Friday the Armed Forces of the Philippines (AFP) leadership that publicly stating that it could lick the 40-year-old insurgency problem in three years might backfire.

“We should learn lessons from past chiefs of staff who made us believe that you can set a timetable,’’ Honasan said of the recent pronouncement of Lt. Gen. Ricardo David, new AFP chief of staff, that the military establishment can end the insurgency problem in three years.

Past AFP leaders had promised to lick the communist insurgency before the end of then President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo’s term.

While admitting the insurgency problem remains, the AFP leaders insist the number of armed insurgents has gone down.

Honasan, a former Army colonel, strongly suggested that the Aquino government “put in place the infrastructures for peace and order and the insurgency problem . . . so we have to inventory what we have before we make pronouncements.’’

“Let us not make promises that we cannot keep. So we inventory what we have and we have a reasonably positive inventory considering the positive political development under which President Noynoy assumed power,’’ he said.

This developed as Sen. Ferdinand R. Marcos Jr. expressed “hope for a lasting peace in the South finally (and that) the peace process must not be allowed to stop.’’

The Muslim secessionist movement in the South began to spread in the early seventies.

Marcos said that pre-conditions to peace talks need “to be addressed but there should not be too many pre-conditions because these shoot down the entire effort.’’

The proposed RP-Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF) memorandum of agreement (MOA) on ancestral domain was shot down in 2009 when it was declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court.