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With
the starting of a campaign of attacks across Pakistan, the Taliban and its allies
have in effect extended their guerrilla war to a regional level.
The Islamist militant response to the Pakistani army offensive
against their redoubt in South Waziristan has pointed up another
dimension of the political crisis in Afghanistan.
The
Afghan government has no political credibility and the
Pakistani government scarcely more. Both are notoriously corrupt.
Both are seen by their respective peoples as stooges of U.S. imperialism. Both
are confronted by an insurgency, which although it lacks a
credible political program and conducts atrocities of its own on
innocent civilians, is being waged by dedicated fighters
against corrupt and weakly motivated local military forces.
Moreover,
regardless of the military fortunes of the U.S.-led forces in Afghanistan and its ally in Pakistan, this war will mean
great suffering to the populations of both countries (There are
already more than 100,000 displaced persons from South Waziristan. From the Swat Valley, it was more than a
million).
The
experience of Iraq indicates that the
local people will blame the United States even for the
atrocities committed by the Islamist militants because the U.S. will be seen as
responsible for the strife. The “oral history” of the Taliban published
recently in Newsweek indicates the dynamic. The Taliban
forces in Afghanistan were shattered by U.S. air power. They fled
in disarray into Pakistan tribal areas
also inhabited by the Pushtun people, on
which they were based.
But
the antagonism of the Afghan people to foreign occupation
and resentment against the atrocities resulting from U.S. bombing of civilians
revived support for the Taliban until it regained control of large
sections of Afghanistan and became a serious contender
for power in the country. The account of a New York Times
journalist held captive by the Taliban in Pakistan for seven months, recently
published in his newspaper, indicates that the Taliban also
created a mini-state of their own in the Pakistani tribal areas,
which the Pakistan
government either chose or was forced to tolerate.
The
Pakistani government only started launching major
offensives against the Taliban when the Islamist militants
appeared to be reaching the point of threatening the national
government by occupying the Swat Valley, an economically important
region close to the national capital. Pakistani military was
previously linked to the Taliban, and in fact helped them to gain
power in Afghanistan. It was bound to the Taliban by a common
Islamist ethos and the conception that it was a strategic ally
against Indian influence in the region.
Pakistan by its origins and the
political needs of its rulers is a sectarian Islamic state. Other
than Israel, it is the only nation-state whose existence is
entirely based on religion. Pakistan’s Islamist ideology, in fact, long
made it a favored ally of the U.S., despite its successive repressive
and inept military governments. It was considered a reliable ally
against “Godless Communism,” unlike its larger neutralist
neighbor, India.
Since
Sept. 11, 2001, the U.S. has supplied Pakistan with over $12 billion in
military aid. This year, Washington has sent $500 million in
counter-insurgency equipment, plus 150 “advisors.”
On
its religious ideology, the U.S. based its proxy war against
the Soviet Union in Afghanistan. The most repressive of the
military dictators of Pakistan, Zia
ul-Haq pushed a reactionary version of
Islam as the justification of his regime and built up a network of
religious schools that turned out crop after crop of Islamist
enthusiasts.
The
Taliban was only one of the Islamist militant forces
sponsored by Pakistan. There were other groups
formed in Pakistan’s central province of Punjab to wage guerrilla
war against India in parts of Kashmir claimed by the Islamist
state. It was some of these groups apparently, such as the Lashkar-e-Jhangvi, that have organized
the recent attacks on Pakistani military targets in Punjab in
retaliation for the Pakistani army’s offensives in the Swat Valley
and South Waziristan. The captured
leader of the attack on the Pakistani version of the Pentagon, the
most daring Islamist attack so far, was a long-serving member of
the Pakistani military.
Following
the attack on the central military headquarters, an article in Time
in early October noted: “Nor is it clear if the Pakistan army has severed its
links entirely with the outlawed terrorist group, as its presence
in and around the southern Punjabi city of Bahawalpur grows undisturbed. A
heavy concentration of madrasahs [religious
schools] in the area has become a breeding ground for recruits who
are then taken to South Waziristan and trained as suicide
bombers.”
Within
the Pakistani military and the intelligence service, the
ISI, there are almost certainly still sympathizers with the
Islamists. Such long associations cannot be wiped out overnight, even
if the Pakistani rulers want to, which is by no
means certain. It was only the strong U.S. pressure brought to bear on
the Pakistani dictator, Pervez Musharraf, after 9/11 that forced him to turn
against the Taliban.
Moreover,
there is a process going on in Pakistan similar to the
one that brought the Taliban back in Afghanistan. The U.S. pinpoint bombings of
Islamist leaders have been effective militarily, but they have
increasingly alienated the civilian population, to the point where
hatred of the U.S. is now powerful and
massive.
The
Pakistani authorities collaborate quietly with the U.S. attacks, but the
people cannot be reconciled to seeing their country turned into a
shooting gallery. The mass hatred of the U.S. is
surely undermining the political base and legitimacy of the
parliamentary government that succeeded Musharraf’s
military dictatorship. The pervasive hatred of the U.S. undoubtedly also assures
the Islamist insurgents contacts within the army and the security
forces to facilitate their guerrilla attacks.
That
has also been the case in Iraq, where, despite reverses,
the insurgents were recently able to carry out new large-scale bombings
in downtown Baghdad against government
targets. There has been evidence of insurgent infiltration of the
Iraqi police and army.
A
columnist in the Pakistani English-language paper Dawn has
pointed out that merchants readily sell Pakistani security forces
uniforms that can be used by insurgents in attacks.
The
Kerry-Lugar bill, calling for $7.5 billion in additional aid
to Pakistan for the next five years, includes conditions aimed at
insuring the subordination of the Pakistani military to the
civilian authorities and assuring that the aid to the military
goes to the fight against the Islamists and not for arming against
India, as most of the previous aid to the military did.
In
the context of the widespread anti-Americanism, the military was
able to denounce these conditions as attacks on Pakistani
sovereignty. Newsweek reported: “It [the Pakistani
military] has already started to stoke nationalist fervor
by insinuating that the U.S. is behaving like a neocolonial
power.” (A columnist in Dawn dared the “defenders of
Pakistani sovereignty” to refuse the money).
Nonetheless,
the uproar demonstrated that the U.S. is not going to get any
goodwill for its “largesse,” at least not from the Pakistani
military. An analysis of the situation confronting U.S. Secretary of
State Hilary Clinton on her visit to Pakistan in the Oct. 26 New
York Times argued that the Pakistani rulers and military are
still maintaining a two-faced attitude to the Islamist groups:
“The special envoy for Afghanistan and Pakistan, Richard C. Holbrooke, said Friday that the Obama administration would be trying to find
out whether the army was simply ‘dispersing’ the militants or
‘destroying’ them, as the United States would like.
“From
the number of troops in South Waziristan, it was not clear
that the army wanted to ‘finish the task,’ said a Western military
attaché, who spoke on the condition of anonymity according to
diplomatic protocol. The army would not take over South Waziristan as it had the Swat Valley, where the military is now
an occupying force after conducting a campaign in the spring and
summer that pushed the Taliban out, the officials said.”
The
28,000 troops sent into South Waziristan against an estimated 11,000
Taliban is far less than what military experts consider an effective
ratio in counter-insurgency warfare. The article cited Tariq Fatemi, a former
Pakistani ambassador to the U.S., as saying that the Pakistani
military’s objective was simply to “cut down to size” the
insurgent groups, which had overreached themselves in threatening
important cities and regions of the country. He argued that the
Pakistani officials simply wanted to harness the Islamist groups better
to their goals of combating Indian influence by changing their
leadership.
In
the assault on South Waziristan, the Pakistani military in
fact sought to make a deal with Taliban factions less antagonistic
to the Pakistani government. Associated Press reported Oct. 10: “Pakistan’s army, in the midst
of a major new offensive against Taliban militants, has struck deals to
keep two powerful, anti-U.S. tribal chiefs from joining the battle
against the government, officials said Monday.”
U.S.
Democratic Party leaders Rahm Emanuel and
John Kerry have argued against another major escalation of U.S. military intervention in Afghanistan on the basis that it would
threaten to destabilize Pakistan.
The
foreign ministers of India, China, and Russia issued a statement on Oct.
27 saying that the conflict in Afghanistan is a regional problem that
affects them and that it cannot be dealt with by the United States and Pakistan alone. They did not
indicate what they proposed to do, but their statement was an
indication of the danger of conflict spreading to the entire
region.
Right-wing
voices in the United States are stridently calling
for military escalation, but many of them are the same that
insisted that U.S. troops would be welcomed in
Iraq and that it was an
un-American slander to say that U.S. bombings were killing
civilians and alienating Afghanis. This current is characterized
by a denial of reality. It is probable that the decisive wing of
U.S. capitalism realizes that it can no longer afford such
truculence. That is undoubtedly what is giving Obama
some maneuvering room, as he tries to pursue the U.S. imperialist aims by
more flexible means.
But
as the Iraq situation shows, after
bitter experience, U.S. governments can be caught
up in their own toils. They have created a hornets’ nest in
Afghanistan and Pakistan, in which they are going continue to
be stung no matter what they do. The only way out is complete
withdrawal, but that would mean accepting limitations on American
power, which the U.S. ruling class is obviously unwilling to do.
Only the growth of a powerful and determined antiwar movement in
the U.S. itself could force it do
that.
The
biggest danger is that the “surge” being advocated so aggressively by
the right will lead to a regional war far greater in scale
and implications than the present conflict. In fact, the argument
for a “surge” is based on a false assessment of the effectiveness
of the so-called surge in Iraq. It was not the increase in U.S. forces that isolated the
insurgents but the ruthlessness of al-Qaida,
which alienated the population and local leaders.
To
a certain extent, a similar process has started in Pakistan. It may be accelerated
by the atrocious Oct. 27 bombing of a market place in Peshawar, in
which over 100 people were killed. But it is still far from the point
it reached in Iraq. The resentment against the U.S. has apparently been growing
faster and more powerfully than revulsion against the ruthlessness
of the Taliban and its allies.
In
the April 24 issue of Newsweek, Farid Zakaria pointed that there has already been
more than one “surge” in Afghanistan, and that has not improved
the situation for the U.S. but made it worse: “The real question we
should be asking in Afghanistan is not ‘Do we need a surge?’ but
rather ‘Do we need a third surge?’ The number of U.S. forces in Afghanistan in January 2008 was 26,607.
Over the next six months, the Bush administration raised the total
to 48,250. President Bush described this policy as ‘the quiet
surge,’ and he made the standard arguments about the need for a
counterinsurgency capacity—the troops had to not only fight the
Taliban but protect the Afghan population, strengthen and train
the Afghan Army and police, and assist in development.
“In
January 2009, another 3,000 troops, originally ordered
by President Bush, went to Afghanistan in the first days of the Obama presidency. In February, responding to a
request from the commander in the field, Obama
ordered an additional 17,000 troops into the country. In other words,
over the past 18 months, troop levels in Afghanistan have almost tripled.”
Zakaria argued: “It is not dithering to try to figure out why previous
increases have not worked and why we think additional ones would.”
The
alternative being projected by some U.S. military and
political leaders is giving up trying to control the entire area
of conflict but continuing to stage strikes to keep any important
threat to U.S. interests from
developing—creating a “Chaosistan,” an area
of permanent chaos, would not remove the dangers either. Such
would create a festering sore, like Gaza or Somalia, that would drive more
and more of the local population to desperation and foster deeper
and deeper hated of the United States.
On
a world scale the political costs for the U.S. would steadily increase, as
they have grown for Israel because its
similar policy toward Gaza. The area of conflict in
Afghanistan and western Pakistan is too big and strategic to be
kept in chaos. It is on a scale incomparably greater than Gaza, to say
nothing of remote and forlorn Somalia. The Oct. 27 statement of
the regional powers makes that clear.
Moreover,
the prospects for achieving stable neocolonial regimes in Afghanistan and Pakistan look more and
more remote. In its Oct. 28 issue, The New York Times
revealed the depth of the U.S. involvement with
corruption and gangsterism in Afghanistan, by reporting that Hamid Karzai’s brother
has been on the payroll of the CIA for eight years and that he
runs a Mafia-like operation engaged in the opium trade.
A
large percentage of the Pushtun, on which Karzai depends, will probably not vote again if an
election proceeds. Much of this area is controlled by the Taliban, who
are threatening reprisals against anyone who goes to the polls.
The
farcical nature of the Afghan elections on Aug. 20 forced a reluctant Hamid Karzai to accept a
run-off vote. But on Nov. 1, Karzai’s main
opponent, Abdullah Abdullah, pulled out of
the new election on grounds that Karzai had
refused his demands on changes to the electoral commission to prevent
fraud. The electoral conflict had threatened to divide the country
on civil war lines between the Pushtun and
the peoples of Persian language and/or culture in the north and west
of the country.
Abdullah
appeared to offer no alternative to the present regime other than a
different sectional interest, undoubtedly even more dependent on
the warlords of the old Northern Alliance.
In
the Oct. 27 British Guardian, Nushin Arbabzadah wrote: “Given that only a third of
the population chose to exercise their right to vote in the first
round, there are strong grounds to believe that the disenchanted
represent a majority of the Afghan population.”
In Pakistan, the army offensive in South Waziristan prompted
some questions about whether it was possible to finally integrate
the Federally Administered Tribal Areas into the Pakistani state.
The conclusion was that this was unlikely because it would require a
social revolution, for which the Pakistani government has neither
the will nor the means.
The
structure of the country remains an unwieldy hybrid of
feudalism and gangster capitalism. It will not change without a
real social revolution that sweeps away the bourgeois structures
as well as the feudal ones.
Such
an upheaval would change not only the region but the world. If it
approaches, its footsteps would resound around the globe. It
will obviously be a difficult process. But for the Pakistani
people, as well as for the Afghanis, the only alternative is
deepening chaos and fratricidal civil conflict.
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