Pennsylvania’s governor what could be the third and final warrant for

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ployed Mills to set aside the jury’s death penalty decision. Yohn gave the state of Pennsylvania 180 days to literally retry Mumia but limited the jury’s finding to the penalty only—that is, the guilty verdict could not be set aside. Since then, Pennsylvania officials have effectively stayed Yohn’s order by appealing to the higher federal courts.

In deciding to hear Ohio prosecutors’ arguments in the Spisak case with regard to Mills, the Supreme Court has implied that one of the key issues they will consider centers on the interpretation of the concept of federalism—that is, that the exercise of power in the U.S. is shared in some measure between the federal government and the states.

The political pendulum has swung back and forth on this issue. In past decades, the “states’ rights” interpretation was employed to justify racist state laws that denied Blacks access to public institutions and facilities. With the rise of the Civil Rights movement, federal power was used to compel the elimination of the same racist laws. In capitalist society justice is far from blind. It is applied to the advantage of the working class and the oppressed only to the extent that the relationship of forces, the class struggle, demands it and is prepared to fight for it.

Since Mills was decided in the state of Maryland, the would-be Ohio and Pennsylvania executioners might argue, based on the laws of those states, it cannot be automatically applied to the situation in Ohio where a different set of jury instructions and therefore jury deliberations were be involved. Should this “states’ rights” argument be accepted, and Mills effectively constricted, the Supreme Court could then uphold Spivak’s death sentence and, with a mere citation to Spisak and the new interpretation of Mills, uphold Pennsylvania’s attorney general’s appeal seeking Mumia’s execution.

Almost all legal observers previously considered a Supreme Court Mills re-interpretation a virtual impossibility, thereby clearing the way to execute Mumia. The stage has now been set for such an outcome. The state’s longstanding effort in this regard has been giv.... Taliban gains ground 8 Socialist Action november 2009

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(continued from page 1: “Taliban extends war to wider region despite U.S. troop surge”)

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 ulHaq 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 Englishlanguage 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 alJoe Raedle / Getty Images ready 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, antiU.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.

(Left) U.S. Marines take cover as a 500-lb. bomb is dropped on a Taliban stronghold in Afghanistan, July 3.

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 unAmerican 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 alQaida, 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 (continued on page 11, in “Kinder, gentler capitalism?”)

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W ister Dwight Duncan de- hen Ontario Finance Minclared Oct. 22 that his Liberal provincial government faces a $24.7 billion deficit this year, it headlines the Liberals really don’t want to see.

“So what’s their plan? My guess is, they think that just the threat of layoffs and privatization will force public employees to