29.10.2009

AfPak strategy brings new disaster

It has been total war for civilian non-combatants, writes Jim Moody

Among the hills of the South Waziristan agency, close to the border with Afghanistan, nigh on 30,000 Pakistani troops have for the last two weeks been fighting an estimated 10,000 Taliban Movement in Pakistan fighters (Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan) and perhaps 1,000 al Qa’eda militants. But, it seems, they have not been making much headway. Six soldiers were killed at the start of the week when a Pakistani MI-17 helicopter was shot down at Nawapass in Bajaur district.

All combat zones have been declared off limits to journalists and aid workers, so independent reporting on the details of Pakistani operations is next to impossible. Pakistan’s media occasionally trumpets the larger numbers of ‘miscreants’ killed than jawans (soldiers), but as yet no major tactical gains have been claimed. That is, unless taking over the home town - Kotkai - of Taliban leaders Hakimullah Mehsud and Qadri Hussain counts.

Nearly a year ago the late Baitullah Mehsud and other militant leaders agreed to unite and form the Shura Ittehadul Mujahedin (SIM; Council of United Mujahedin). After the agreement had been made, SIM issued a short statement that included a declaration of allegiance to both Mullah Omar and Osama bin Laden. This is the grouping, led by its new amir, Hakimullah Mehsud, that the Pakistani armed forces are fighting.

Talibanisation has been an aspect of Pakistani politics for many years. Many Afghan Taliban received their ideological grounding within Pakistani madrassas and were drawn from among the five million refugees who fled Afghanistan at the time of the Soviet Union’s occupation: several million still live in Pakistan.

At the time of the Soviet intervention 30 years ago, Pakistan’s security forces were to the fore in aiding those who later were to constitute the Afghan Taliban and al Qa’eda. Most if not all of this assistance was carried out as part of a US surrogate programme. Numerous Islamist militant outfits, if not set up by, were nurtured and supplied by Pakistan’s Directorate for Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI). In addition, groups such as Lashkar-e-Taiba (Army of the Good) were initiated by the ISI to act as a guerrilla force against Indian-ruled Kashmir south of the line of control. It was Lashkar-e-Taiba that was widely considered responsible for the Mumbai attacks on November 26 last year.

A large segment of the ISI in particular and the Pakistani security and armed forces in general have long seen today’s miscreant terrorists as ‘our boys’. This is why there have been vacillations at the top of the Pakistani state machine, and why even today many commentators consider that the Pakistani Taliban has continued to receive help from elements of state forces even during the current year, when serious pursuit of them became de rigueur.

But so seriously is the government now taking its attack on the Taliban that all 40 of the country’s F-16s are being deployed in Waziristan. Pakistan airforce planes pounded the Sarar-o-Gha, Badr, Saam and Laddha areas last weekend.

Once the Obama administration decided to bracket Pakistan with Afghanistan in the continuing war on terror, several lines of approach were set. While the US Congress voted last month to grant the Zardari government $1.5 billion over the next year for civilian infrastructure, including roads and schools, this did not please everyone. Pakistan’s military dislikes the fact that the US government is intent on ensuring that this American money is earmarked for designated civilian use. Its continued receipt is contingent on detailed reporting to Congress after six months: this must show effective civilian control over the military.

It is not as if the US has stinted on military assistance in the past, nor is it likely to be reduced in the future. This newly announced civilian aid is in addition to military aid, which has amounted to more than $10 billion since 2001. What has really angered Pakistan’s military top brass, which has wielded tremendous power since the country’s foundation at the partition of India in 1947, is that Obama’s conditions are intended to prevent pilfering of the civilian aid for military purposes. Military skimming from civilian aid budgets is a decades-long worst-kept secret in Pakistan.

A recent Financial Times report quoted an unnamed ‘senior US official’ as commenting: “The Pakistani military controls the day and the jihadis control the night. We are looking at ways of helping them” (October 21). The fact that Pakistan’s military has pulled back important resources from the border with the traditional enemy, India, to pile them into Waziristan instead has obviously impressed the US military that they have been doing the right thing at last. General David Petraeus, head of the US Central Command, is pressing for Pakistan to receive more US military equipment that can be used exclusively for operations against the Taliban.

In addition, secretary of state Hillary Clinton’s three-day official visit to Pakistan from October 28 may presage an increase in the generous civilian aid already on offer - possibly to as much as $2.7 billion in the current year.

As a result of the machinations of US and Pakistani rulers, it has been total war for civilian non-combatants living in Waziristan: already 200,000 - a third of South Waziristan’s estimated population - have fled the fighting to nearby towns and cities, only to have the armed forces prohibit them from using the main roads. This penalty has been exacted as a form of collective punishment because most are from the same tribe, and thus have the same surname, as the leader of the Taliban insurgency, Hakimullah Mehsud. Senator Saleh Shah from South Waziristan was quoted in The Times last week as declaring: “The government is dealing with the refugees like the Israelis’ attitude to the Palestinians” (October 20). When the army pushed the Taliban out of Swat in April it also launched a massive operation to feed and house two million displaced persons. Locals report that nothing is being done for the Mehsuds flooding into the adjacent North West Frontier Province (NWFP).

An Abu Dhabi-based news service quoted one internally displaced person (IDP) called Abdullah, who had made it to relative safety in the city of Dera Ismail Khan, NWFP: “When they realise you’re a Mehsud, they treat you like a suicide bomber who’s wearing an explosive jacket.” The International Crisis Group (ICG) reported that the needs of IDPs from Waziristan were being neglected and that most had not received adequate assistance or any compensation for the destruction of their properties and livelihoods. The ICG accused the military of not allowing camps for Waziristan IDPs on the “unjustifiable grounds that they would offer jihadi groups pools of easy recruits”, forcing Mehsuds to seek accommodation in private homes (news.wateen.com).

As for the Taliban in the rest of Pakistan outside of Waziristan, it has hit back repeatedly and hard across the country. Although the large port of Karachi has so far largely escaped attack, most cities in the northern half of Pakistan have experienced bombings and assassinations in the days since the start of operations against militants in Waziristan. Taliban announcements have stated specifically that these attacks have been made as a direct response to the war in Waziristan. Apart from a spate of suicide bombings in the capital, Islamabad, Lahore, Peshawar, and Rawalpindi, a motorcycle assassin shot dead a brigadier and another soldier in Islamabad in broad daylight last week; another brigadier survived a hail of bullets in a similar attack this week, again in Islamabad. On October 25, motorcycle gunmen in Quetta shot dead the Baluchistan minister of education, Shafiq Ahmed Khan.

Pakistan is a nuclear power, and as such commands special attention from the US, including around the war being fought largely by US and UK forces in Afghanistan. So it was especially sensitive when one of last week’s Taliban attacks occurred just outside the Pakistan Aeronautical Complex at Kamra, where some of the country’s nuclear weapon-capable aircraft are on standby; it is the country’s main airforce maintenance and research hub, building and overhauling fighter jets and radar systems. Just this week there was a diplomatic spat with India over that country’s foreign secretary’s subsequent remarks regarding safety of nuclear assets in Pakistan, rubbing salt into the Pakistani military’s wounded pride.

Pakistan’s founders, including its first president, Muhammad Ali Jinnah, fondly imagined that the country would be a bulwark of the whole subcontinent not only against pressure from the Soviet Union, but also against Islamist movements. Their vision was shared by the author of India’s new constitution, dalit leader BR Ambedkar, although many other voices in the Congress Party of the day warned of destabilisation as a result of partition, with a consequently much reduced India likely to have an international status no higher than that of an Egypt or Burma. Communists at the time were insufficiently ideologically prepared nor organised in sufficient strength to make a difference.

Once again the US and its military allies including the UK have proved that they can only bring death and destruction to the countries they invade and occupy. Most recently the exemplar of this western behemoth’s destructiveness was Iraq. Now Afghanistan has bled its conflict over the border into Pakistan, which has been in a parlous state for some time anyway.

Although Pakistan’s armed forces spring-cleaned the Taliban out of Swat, the latter merely regrouped in Waziristan, which is but a step away from Afghanistan anyway. Political and ethnic lines of communication have pulled fundamentalist militants into Pakistan from Afghanistan with the same aims: getting rid of western armies and their local satraps and imposing anti-human, religiously blessed regimes of degradation.

Class partisans have a lot of work to do in Pakistan, but working class ideology is the only way toward positive resolution. Proletarian internationalism raised as a real, concrete aim of uniting the working class and working peoples of all south Asia, reversing and going beyond the disabling of the subcontinent carried out decades since in the interests of imperialism, provides the only hope for the disastrous state that Pakistan and Afghanistan have been pushed into.

In complete contradistinction to the AfPak plans of the US and its local allies, a working class united in a Communist Party that spans these divided territories bears the promise of eliminating the vicious divisions of religion and class.