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Washington Pushes Pakistan To The Brink

There is no question that Pakistan needs to eliminate the terrorists who
call themselves Pakistani Taliban. But it is also true that Pakistan is
destabilized today because of the pro-American policies of its ruling elite.
This is written by an American. Pakistanis need to read this.

23 October 2009

Under heavy pressure from the Obama administration, Pakistan is now waging
all-out war in South Waziristan. Since last Saturday, 28,000 Pakistani
troops, supported by F-16 fighter aircraft and helicopter gunships, have
mounted a three-pronged offensive in the Pashtun-speaking tribal agency.

Their target is the Tehrik-i-Taliban, an alliance of tribal-based militia
groups opposed to the US occupation of Afghanistan and the pivotal
logistical support that Pakistan's government has provided the occupation,
first under the US-backed dictator General Pervez Musharraf and since March
2008 by the Pakistan People's Party-led coalition government.

The US's guiding role in the Pakistani offensive was underscored by the
sudden descent on Islamabad early this week of Gen. Stanley McChrystal,
Obama's Afghan war chief, and Gen. David Petraeus, the head of the US
Central Command.

Taking its cue from the White House, Capitol Hill and the Pentagon, the US
media has been full of commentary lauding the widening civil war in
Pakistan. Typical was a column by the Washington Post's David Ignatius
titled "Pakistan Fights Back: The Offensive in South Waziristan is the
Latest Sign It's Finally Taking the Taliban Seriously."

No matter that this offensive is being waged by the Pakistani military to
assist the US in pursuing its geopolitical ambitions and with callous
indifference to the lives and livelihoods of ordinary Pakistanis.

As was the case in last spring's offensive in Swat and adjoining districts
of Pakistan's North West Frontier Province, homes and schools are being
flattened by bombs and artillery barrages and tens of thousands have been
forced to flee for their lives.

South Waziristan and the Federally-Administered Tribal Agency (FATA) of
which it is part constitute Pakistan's most socio-economically deprived
region. Sixty percent of the population survives on less than the official
subsistence-level poverty line.

Islamabad has historically treated FATA as a quasi-colonial dependency,
giving it substantially less per capita aid than other regions and until
little more than ten years ago denying the vast majority of its inhabitants
the right to vote. In seeking to quell support for the Afghan insurgency and
enforce the British-imposed Durand Line that divides the Pashtun of
Afghanistan and Pakistan, Pakistani authorities have regularly made use of
regulations inherited from the British Raj sanctioning collective tribal
punishments.

The violence in FATA-including repeated US drone missile strikes-has
displaced more than one million people, or close to a third of its 3.5
million residents.

The enthusiasm in Washington for the bloodletting in South Waziristan
exemplifies the bloody mindset that prevails within the US ruling elite. It
also speaks to their shortsightedness and recklessness.

In pursuit of its twin objectives of securing a commanding US presence in
oil-rich Central Asia-a region from which it was historically barred by the
existence of the Soviet Union-and containing a rising China, US imperialism
is destabilizing the entire region and sowing the seeds of future wars.

Iran, China, Russia, India and Pakistan either border or fall in the
immediate neighbourhood of Afghanistan and all, understandably, maintain
that they have a major stake in the outcome of the ever-expanding Afghan
war.

Moreover, all are acutely aware that under the Bush administration the US
undertook to fundamentally reshape the geopolitics of Asia by aggressively
courting India, including offering it a "global strategic partnership" and
help in becoming a "world power."

Toward that end, the US secured for India a unique exception in the world
nuclear regulatory regime that allows New Delhi to engage in civilian
nuclear trade, although it developed nuclear weapons in defiance of the
Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. As Pakistan has repeatedly protested, the
Indo-US nuclear accord has changed the balance of power in Asia by providing
its arch-rival India with the means to concentrate its indigenous nuclear
program on the development of its nuclear arsenal.

Russia and China have cooperated with the US-NATO intervention in
Afghanistan. Russia is now allowing the transit of war material across its
territory. But Moscow and Beijing share the objective of severely limiting
US influence in Central Asia. That common interest has found expression in
the Shanghai Cooperation Organization as well as in their attempts to
coordinate their response to Washington's campaign to bully and threaten
Iran over its nuclear program.

As in Iraq, Iran has reached a shaky modus vivendi with the US military
forces in Afghanistan. But under conditions where Washington is threatening
Iran with crippling economic sanctions, including an international gasoline
import embargo, and the Obama administration is considering a Pentagon
request to increase the US's Afghan troop strength to 100,000, Teheran
cannot but feel anxious.

Teheran has accused the US, Britain and elements within Pakistan of
complicity in two bombings last weekend in the eastern Iranian province of
Sistan-Baluchistan that killed more than 40 people, including six
high-ranking members of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps.

The Pakistani elite, and especially its military, have for decades enjoyed a
mercenary relationship with US imperialism at the expense of the Pakistani
people. Beginning with Ayub Khan in the mid-1950s and continuing through the
only recently removed Musharraf, Washington has sponsored a succession of
right-wing military dictatorships in Pakistan.

But of the major states in the region, Pakistan is the one whose internal
equilibrium and strategic interests are most immediately threatened by the
US war to subjugate Afghanistan and its attempt to make India a pivot of its
drive to counter China.

So as to choke off support for the insurgency in Afghanistan, Islamabad has
been pressed by Washington, through financial inducements and repeated
violations of its sovereignty, to wage war in much of the country's
northwest. And the US has made clear that it expects that the military
operations will soon be expanded to include the volatile western province of
Baluchistan.

Previous military offenses in South Waziristan ended in failure, not just
because of the tenacity of the resistance, but because many of the Pashtun
troops reportedly balked at killing their brethren. There are reports that
in the current offensive, the Pakistani military is using predominantly
non-Pashtun troops, but in a country riven by ethno-linguistic and communal
frictions, this could well stoke centrifugal tendencies.

Less than two years ago, the Musharraf dictatorship unraveled under the
combined impact of mounting economic crisis, popular opposition to its
support for the US wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and its denial of basic
democratic rights. The PPP-led government that replaced it has only
implicated Pakistan more deeply in the Afghan war, been forced to accept an
IMF readjustment plan, and, so as to secure the military's support, left
Musharraf and his cronies at liberty.

Within Pakistan's political establishment and military there is enormous
apprehension and resentment at the extent to which Islamabad is being forced
to sacrifice what they perceive to be Pakistan's long-term strategic
interests to secure US objectives, and to do this even as Washington showers
favors on India.

The Pakistani elite is outraged that the US has encouraged India to play an
ever greater role in Afghanistan, even as it demands that Islamabad sever
all ties with the Pashtun-based Taliban and associated Islamist militia.

For its part, India, anxious to prevent Islamabad from using the US
predicament in Afghanistan to gain leverage, has taken an increasingly hard
line against Pakistan, demanding that it suppress Kashmir insurgent groups
in Pakistan with the same vigor that it is battling the Pakistani Taliban.

The anxieties of the Pakistani elite over their rapidly deteriorating
geopolitical position found expression this week in statements from Interior
Minister Rehman Malik. First he charged that India is behind unrest in
Baluchistan. Later he amplified the charge, saying that New Delhi is behind
most terrorist attacks in Pakistan.

Said Malik, "We have solid evidence not only in Baluchistan [that] India is
involved in almost every terrorist activity in Pakistan." India, Malik
complained, routinely makes threats against Pakistan. He then added, "We are
a nuclear state and not so weak. We better know how to retaliate."

The US ruling elite's attempt to offset its economic decline through wars of
aggression is destabilizing world geopolitics and throwing fuel on
longstanding conflicts. If imperialism is to be prevented from reprising the
catastrophes of the 20th century, the international working class must be
mobilized against capitalism and the outmoded nation-state system.

Keith Jones

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