13.05.2009
Victims of the 'war on terror'
US fears of the Taliban getting its hands on nuclear weapons could lead to another Indo-Pakistani war, warns Jim Moody
Pakistan may not be a failed state, but it is getting there. Not only did its weak central government cave in to Islamists in the north of the country and allow sharia to replace the secular national law, but elements in the military and the intelligence community have been on very good terms with the Islamists for a very long time. Indeed, Islamists have no small contingent within these arms of the state, thanks to the previous military government’s attempt to keep the ring between them and the requirements of Washington and the Pentagon. And duplicity is rife: president Zardari signed the sharia law agreement, but now says in interviews that he did not agree to negotiations with the Islamists.
So it is that in the last week the seventh largest armed forces in the world have moved into action against Taliban fighters in the North West Frontier Province (NWFP). As it has been trained to do, the Pakistan army has gone in hard. Consequently, Operation Rah-e-Haq has produced a stream of around one third of a million civilian refugees from the Swat valley and nearby regions. And that is not counting another half a million who had already fled because of Talibanisation. Mostly they were absorbed by the families of near and distant relatives.
It has been officially confirmed that 125,000 troops, somewhere around half the Pakistani army’s infantry, are fighting in the contiguous areas of Buner, Dir, Malakand and Swat. There are also unconfirmed reports that contingents of the Special Services Group (SSG) have also been sent in; they are similar to the British SAS. These areas of fighting are within the NWFP, just to the north of Pakistan’s populous and prosperous Punjab province, where 44% of the country’s population live. Clearly, the threat presented by the ‘miscreants’, as the peculiarly sensitive Pakistani media and government tend to call their home-grown Taliban, to nearby Peshawar could almost as easily apply to Lahore, the Punjab capital, a mere 436 kilometres away.
The manner of the army’s attack on Swat has been as if against a foreign invader, such as the old foe, India. (Pakistan’s all-guns-blazing approach has been publicly approved by Sri Lanka’s foul leaders in justification for their own disregard of civilians during their push against the Tamil Tigers.) This campaign is a complete turnaround compared to the situation obtaining until only a short time ago, when Pakistan’s generals were adamant that they would be keeping most of their forces on the western border with India, despite the brazen way in which Swat and other areas were being Talibanised. Lack of military enthusiasm for attacking Islamist ‘brothers’ is longstanding.
Swat’s new rulers were, after all, long ago installed and supported by the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), the largest of the country’s intelligence services. There were once good global political reasons for doing so, or so we are led to believe. As Pakistan’s president Asif Ali Zardari frankly admitted in an NBC interview on May 11, the Taliban had been an ISI-CIA joint creation: “We got together, we created this cancer to fight the superpower [Soviet Union] and then ... you [the USA] went away without finding a cure for it. And now we have both come together to find a cure for it and we’re looking for one.”
Shortly following the attacks of 9/11, then president Pervez Musharraf made a great to-do about purging the ISI of those who did not support his new, US-inspired stance of opposition to the Taliban and al-Qa’eda. No doubt he had to been seen to be doing something to justify generous military aid from the USA, which had totalled $10 billion over the preceding 10 years. More realistically, however, many commentators have suggested that all those Taliban-inclined individuals and groupings inside the ISI have been merely keeping their heads down, biding their time.
In the last week, Pakistani newspapers have started to report their part of the rotten deal that was done earlier this month in Washington. As part of Barack Obama’s Af-Pak initiative, Zardari and Afghanistan’s US puppet, president Hamid Karzai, met with US administration representatives, including secretary of state Hillary Clinton and Richard Holbrooke, special representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan. As far as the Zardari government was concerned, it was given a very good incentive to transfer troops massively from the western border to the north-east of the country: US help to ‘sort out’ Kashmir to the benefit of Pakistan. That this was the very positive outcome of the talks, Pakistani newspapers were quite clear: “The United States will help Pakistan resolve the Kashmir issue if it shifts its focus from the border with India to the country’s frontier with Afghanistan and carries out effective military operations against the Taliban and al-Qa’eda militants” (The Nation May 12). So no sooner said than done. Ink had hardly dried on the agreement, when troops started their assault in the NWFP.
There is little doubt that the US administration sees Afghanistan and Pakistan as Obama’s biggest rescue mission. But whether the craven government headed by corrupt ‘Mr 10%’ Zardari can deliver is moot. On previous occasions, military engagement with the Islamists in the north has had to be abandoned due to the surprising inability of the Pakistani army to advance and consolidate. Now government policy, according to Zardari, is “dialogue, deterrence, development”.
Strangely, by this he means that his administration has passed the stage of discussion and negotiation with the Taliban, of trying to mollify; now comes military action. Later, under his scenario, there will apparently be an unfolding bounteous investment in these benighted areas of the country.
What of Pakistan’s 180-million population? A recent US-sponsored poll found 80% support for Islamists of various stripes, which would pretty well say farewell to Zardari hanging onto office beyond the near future. It all depends on their accuracy, though, since such sentiment would appear to give a good reason for the USA or one of its surrogates to intervene militarily to ‘save the country’.
Holbrooke this last week stated that many in Pakistan believe that the US is not a reliable long-term partner and will abandon them after achieving its ‘counterterrorism’ objectives. He reiterates, of course, the sentiments that the Obama administration has recently developed towards both Afghanistan and Pakistan. (See White paper of the Interagency Policy Group’s report on US policy toward Afghanistan and Pakistan March 2009: www.usembassy.org.uk/afghn014.html).
What it boils down to is: win the hearts and minds if you can, but still use the big stick if you must. (Vietnam, anyone?)
In another poll, the opposition Pakistan Muslim League (Nawaz) leader, Nawaz Sharif, has become, for 45% of those polled, the most popular person in the country, followed by the sacked and then reinstated chief justice Iftikhar Chaudhry. Even the Pakistan People’s Party (PPP) prime minister Gilani is way ahead of Zardari in the popularity stakes, the latter considered to be to blame for the state of the country.
Of course, for the US the greatest fear is that Pakistan’s nuclear weapons might get into the hands of the Taliban. This is why US media have started to describe Pakistan as the ‘most dangerous place in the world’. It is certainly very worrying for US intelligence that it does not know where all the nuclear weapons in Pakistan are, according to its spokespersons. This all adds to the pressure exerted by Washington on Zardari to come round to tackling his Taliban properly. The carrot of a much-prized Kashmir must inevitably be accompanied by its unstated concomitant: the threat of boots on the ground that are other than those of the Pakistani army - something that on past experience might well be necessary to sort out the Taliban, as far as the US is concerned.
However, the likelihood of US ground troops in Pakistan seems remote. Who, then, might fill the role? There is always the Indian army, of course. It has battled in Kashmir against the Pakistani army three times, marched into former East Pakistan (now Bangladesh) in 1971 and sent a so-called peacekeeping force that same year to Sri Lanka to keep the island’s armed forces from massacring Tamils. (There have been recent calls in India’s Tamil Nadu state for a repeat of the latter exercise.)
An Indian move against the Taliban might need a Pakistani government invitation. But, then, these things can be arranged among the rulers, just as the government of the Democratic Republic of Afghanistan ‘invited’ in the Soviet Red Army. It is true that Pakistan has nuclear weapons, primarily aimed at Indian cities (as India has for Pakistani cities), but with the possibility that the whole of Kashmir could be Pakistani who knows what deal might be struck?
This kind of scenario brings with it grave dangers of nuclear war, should recalcitrant elements in the Pakistani armed forces refuse to cooperate with Indian ‘liberators’. Whatever the solution fixed up by the bourgeoisie, it cannot benefit the working class and people. Truly, the crisis that is developing in Pakistan can have dire consequences because the working class there is without its own mass political party and currently supports the nationalists of the PPP and other parties. But, as we have stated before, given the history of the region - including its working class history of socialist and communist organisation - there is every reason to look to a subcontinent-wide way out of the disaster that looms. A united working class, organised in a real communist party, would be able to offer the mass of the people, including the peasantry, a focus for their discontents and a means by which they might overcome them. How better, for example, to combat the possibility of a bourgeois Greater India ‘solution’ to Pakistan’s problems?
In India, most ‘communist’ parties, whether mass or minor, parliamentary or Guevarist, hold essentially to a national socialist manifesto which is totally at odds with working class internationalism - quite apart from their abysmal level of internal democracy. The situation, however, remains urgent and communist partisans of the working class in Afghanistan, Bangladesh, India, Pakistan and Sri Lanka need to look to how they might fight for unity of the class on the territory of the whole of the subcontinent. This is the only way they have a chance of standing up to the machinations of their ‘own’ bourgeoisies and those of imperialism.