26.03.2009
From unviability to disintegration
As US and Nato strategy joins Pakistan to its Afghan neighbour, Jim Moody examines developments
The new administration of Barack Obama is fast losing patience with Pakistan’s government. Even though the current president, Asif Ali Zardari, has been determinedly upbeat about his successes in dealing with the Islamic threat, reality shows that control is slipping through his fingers and Pakistan is fast becoming ungovernable.
It is becoming ever more embroiled in the US-led ‘war on terror’ - and not only because the Taliban uses bases in Pakistani territory. Zardari has felt compelled to enter into negotiations with the local Taliban (however loosely that description applies to disparate organisations) and cede power to them and away from the centre.
As a result, Islamists now control most of Swat (population: 1.25 million) in the north of the country, and have replaced Pakistani national law by sharia law. In fact, as part of a peace deal the Zardari government has returned troops to barracks and restricted police to traffic duties. In their place local Islamist thugs patrol the streets guns in hand, meting out floggings and other summary punishments.
In contrast to Zardari’s official optimism, former president Pervez Musharraf was quite open about the huge difficulties Pakistan faces from insurgent Islamist groups when he spoke in India on March 7: “We face the challenge of terrorism from Al Qa’eda; we face the challenge of terrorism from militant Taliban; we face the challenge of extremism of the Talibanisation of the tribal districts of the Frontier Province; and we face the challenge of extremism in our society” (India Today March 23).
Currently, the US defence department’s Security Development Program aims to train and equip the 10,000-strong Pakistani Frontier Corps for counter-insurgency fighting. So far, $62.5 million has been pumped into this scheme, but there are warnings from defence officials that $167.5 million more is urgently needed in the current budget year that ends in September. Military specialists point to the virtual absence of security along the Pakistan-Afghan border. And this despite US military and economic aid to Pakistan that has in recent years totalled over $12 billion. For the US and Britain, Pakistan must pull its finger out - or else. Foreign secretary David Miliband has said as much.
The March 23 Brussels Nato forum focussed on the alliance’s approach to Afghanistan and its neighbours, crucially Pakistan. This reflects a newly emerging position in Washington. The administration is revamping its strategic thinking, bringing Pakistan into the same rangefinder as Afghanistan. Without doubt, an ‘Af-Pak’ dimension is being forged.
Keynote speaker in Brussels was US special representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan Richard Holbrooke, ex-director of Lehman Brothers and former chairman of the Terrorism Task Force. He was quoted as saying: “A year ago, I visited Peshawar [capital of Pakistan’s North West Frontier Province] and I was asked about starting an Asia Society office there. Last month, people were afraid to go outside after dark and walk their dogs. The change in the situation was stunning. Geopolitically Afghanistan hasn’t changed; Pakistan has” (The Christian Science Monitor March 23).
Barack Obama has confirmed the new US strategy ahead of his first overseas trip as president - he will be attending the April 3-4 Nato summit meetings of heads of state and government in Strasbourg and Kehl after his stop-off in London for the G20 meeting. This summit will deal with Nato’s stalled campaign in Afghanistan and the results of the strategy review undertaken by the new US administration. The two-venue meeting is expected to endorse the new American line of bundling Pakistan and Afghanistan together as a single entity.
Holbrooke has asserted that the heart of the problem for imperialism is in northern Pakistan. This is clearly some kind of a marker for Nato plans. Nevertheless, a kind of hot war has already begun. US drones have rocketed Taliban targets inside Pakistan, incidentally killing many civilians too. Any assurances from Obama about keeping off Pakistani soil can only be temporary.
But Pakistan faces a crisis that runs far deeper than trouble in its mountainous and sparsely inhabited border areas with Afghanistan. It is in danger of disintegration, hence becoming another one of the world’s failed states. This has been more than just symbolised by the crisis that has propelled the country’s judiciary to take to the streets as if they were unruly students.
Musharraf dismissed chief justice Iftikar Chaudhry in November 2007 after he had failed to produce judgements in line with the dictator’s wishes. Musharraf wanted his sham re-election as president confirmed. Chaudhry refused and his sacking led to large demonstrations of lawyers and democrats that greatly contributed to Musharraf’s eventual downfall. Left, nationalist and bourgeois parties formed a popular front, the All Parties Democratic Movement, in support of the lawyers.
It was therefore on the face of it puzzling that the Pakistan People’s Party government failed to reinstate Chaudhry until it too faced renewed demonstrations and the long march on the capital city led by the main opposition leader, Nawaz Sharif, of the Pakistan Muslim League (Nawaz) - a party which has as a result grown significantly in popularity. Zardari and his PPP had, after all, promised, as a core plank of their election campaign a bare six months ago, to give Chaudhry his job back. Doubtless Zardari feared renewed corruption changes. His nickname is ‘Mr Ten Percent’.
The ruling class is abnormally divided in Pakistan to the point where the business of its main factions is getting hold of the state itself in order to further the direct and indirect looting of public and private assets. Pakistan is counted amongst the three most corrupt countries in the world. As a result civilian rule has always been highly problematic. The army held power from 1958 to 1971, but, while bringing a certain stability to begin with, this ended in total disaster, not least with the breakaway of East Pakistan. India intervened militarily on the side of the secessionists.
The PPP was born in the run-up to the 1968-69 popular upsurge against army rule and came to power in 1972. Founded by Zulfikar Ali Bhutto - a member of the Sindh landed aristocracy - the party mixed the rhetoric of state capitalism, anti-imperialism and Pakistani socialism. The PPP thereby served to divert the student radicals, workers and peasants who were taking hold of factories, seizing land and forming soviets.
Nonetheless, this landlord socialism persuaded the Grantites to enter the PPP. The illusory idea was to transform the PPP into an instrument of proletarian revolution. To this day the organisation Struggle, the largest section in the International Marxist Tendency of Alan Woods, remains deeply embedded in the PPP - this despite its evolution into a neoliberal party committed to privatisation and an alliance with the ‘international community’ (read US imperialism).
This turn was epitomised by Benazir Bhutto (daughter of Zulfikar). Nevertheless, she too still relied on populism and the claim that the PPP represented the underprivileged, peasants, women and minorities. Her particuler slogan was ‘Food, clothing and shelter’. Ali Zardari became president after her assassination and, although he is depicted by the western media as fatally weakened, in truth it has simply been his bad luck to preside over what is a disintegrating country - a process that has been exacerbated no end by the ongoing global economic downturn.
Although Musharraf was supposed to have purged the Inter-Services Intelligence of those who were against his opposition to the Taliban and Al Qa’eda following 9/11, it is more than likely that pro-Islamists within the state machine were just keeping their heads down until more propitious times came along. They are now well placed to spread the Islamist rot that has gained hold of Swat. To say the least, the army does not welcome such developments.
Extra US military aid was a quid pro quo for Musharraf’s turn against the Taliban and other shades of internal Islamism. It was also meant to keep the army satisfied. In fact Pakistan spends 25% of its total budget on its bloated armed forces. The country has the seventh largest army in the world and nuclear weapons too. However, the political economy of the armed forces needs to be appreciated. In a certain sense the armed forces are Pakistan. The country has been built around and in many ways exists to serve them - the only enduring source of national pride and stability.
Other institutions, not least the political parties, are deeply fractured along regional, ethnic and linguistic lines. There are six major population groups, the Punjabis being the largest, with 48%. Hence, even so-called national parties are loose coalitions. More to the point, capitalist development is tenuous and shallow and the state substitutes for ‘normal’ market relations and has therefore grown to the point of hypertrophy. Typical of the so-called third world. Hence the periods of military rule and constantly recurring crises of the state.
The Pakistan armed forces are themselves engaged in direct surplus extraction. Serving and retired top brass certainly count amongst the country’s mega-rich. Businesses owned by the armed forces are worth £10 billion, covering banks and industrial conglomerates manufacturing everything from cement to cornflakes. The military has recently grabbed 12 million acres of erstwhile public land. In effect, naked robbery. The insatiable greed of the military engenders all manner of additional conflicts and tensions within the ruling classes.
As a direct concomitant, illiteracy is widespread. Only 2% of government spending goes to education, around half of the country’s children get no formal schooling. Pakistan’s record on health is equally appalling. It accounts for only around 2% of GDP - amongst the lowest in the world. Not surprisingly, there is a huge gulf between rich and poor - nearly 80% of the population have to live on less than $2 a day.
The country is clearly ripe for a social explosion. A huge one too. For the US, dealing with Pakistan, with its population of 175 million, is going to be a lot more difficult than Afghanistan, where Nato commanders forlornly talk about a stalemate. Obama’s promised ‘surge’ of 17,000 additional troops is intended to change the situation on the ground. As many as 8,000 US marines will patrol the border between Afghanistan’s Helmand province and Pakistan’s Federally Administered Tribal Areas, with the aim of stopping weapons getting into Afghanistan via FATA from the neighbouring province of Balochistan.
Holbrooke may have given the game away when he described India as a great power that has a critical role in resolving the crisis in Afghanistan. He let on recently that Washington consults New Delhi closely every step of the way. It is not impossible to imagine that Indian forces might be part of the pressure required to quell the west’s problems in Pakistan. Many bourgeois politicians in India would be glad of the chance, despite the nuclear weapons that Pakistan holds.
Rather than a dose of Greater Indian chauvinism, however, which might be prescribed under certain scenarios by the US and its junior imperialist partners in order to sort out Pakistan, the working class in the subcontinent as a whole needs to take the initiative. Workers in Bangladesh, India, Pakistan and Sri Lanka have every interest in fighting against the growing chaos produced by capitalist decay.
Concretely that can only mean the reunification of the subcontinent under the leadership of the working class.