Taliban Advance in Pakistan Creates Dilemma for U.S.

by Gerry Foley / May 2009

“The inescapable reality is that another domino has toppled and the Taliban are a step closer to [Pakistan's capital] Islamabad,“ the Pakistan-based News International newspaper warned last month after the week-long takeover of the Buner district, in the country’s northwest, had begun. The paper compared Pakistan to Vietnam in the 1960s—a weak and corrupt state being “nibbled away” by determined insurgents: “The Taliban have the upper hand, and they know it.”

In its April 20 report on the Taliban overrunning the Buner district, the Washington Post touched on the roots of the growing crisis. It pointed out that when the Taliban stormed through this district adjoining the Swat valley that had been handed over to them by the government, it set off alarm bells not only in Islamabad but in Washington. And making things worse, the deaths of civilians in the area due to U.S. missile strikes “have become a powerful recruitment tools for extremist groups in Pakistan as anti-American sentiment builds.”

In a “show of good faith,” the Post article notes, the Pakistani government instituted Sharia law in the region “in an effort to halt violent intimidation by Taliban forces that the army was unable to quell. ... Instead the evidence suggests that the extremist forces have drawn the opposite lesson from their victory in Swat and are gearing up to carry their armed crusade for a punitive, misogynistic form of Islam into new areas.”

The problem is not the ambiguities of the country's rulers toward fundamentalist Islam. That is only a symptom. The basic problem is that this neocolonial state, whose retrogressive structures have long been supported by the United States, has rotted through and through. It is now collapsing under the pressure of the overflowing hatred of the exploited classes for the ruling landlords and brutal bosses.

The New York Times reported April 16: "In Swat, accounts from those who have fled now make clear that the Taliban seized control by pushing out about four dozen landlords who held the most power: To do so, the militants organized peasants into armed gangs that became their shock troops, the residents, government officials and analysts said. The approach allowed the Taliban to offer economic spoils to people frustrated with lax and corrupt government even as the militants imposed a strict form of Islam through terror and intimidation."

Another challenge to the rule of the exploiting classes took place about the same time but was not reported widely in the international press. A report from Farooq Ali of the Pakistan Labor Party described an April 17 gathering at Okara Military Farms of over 20,000 peasants and tenants.

“The demand was simple: ‘Give us the land we are cultivating for the last 100 years.’ There were over 3000 peasant women. Nobody wearing any burqa, hijab or niqab. They were all sitting together and no so-called religious restrictions were accepted by them. Religious harmony was reflected by he fact that Muslim and Christian were attending and organizing the event together."

The report described the development of the movement: “This was the fifth peasant convention in last three months. Over 30,000 peasants participated in these conventions in different parts of Punjab, demanding land ownership. Three peasants were killed during this round of struggle and 27 injured when the gangsters of the military generals and other top officers opened fire on the peasants at Chack 28/RB at Kulyana Military Estate.

“The peasants responded by occupying the land leased to top military officers and distributing it among the families of martyrs and injured ones. The top military officers wanted to crush this uprising. They choose a wrong time and their estimation of the consequences of this brutal attack brought results just the opposite of their expectations. This incident has strengthened the movement and did not weaken it as they were hoping for."

This is another indication that the Pakistani army is losing its ability to maintain control of the country. In the case of the Swat valley, an area highly prized by the Pakistani rich because of its value as a tourist attraction, the army was defeated militarily by the Taliban. This reality was avowed openly in the Pakistani English-language daily Dawn of April 19:

"But it is far from clear that the government has the means to do much of anything in the Swat Valley. It agreed to Islamic law in the region—drawing international condemnation—after trying and failing to defeat the Taliban in fighting marked by brutal beheadings that killed more than 850 people over two years.

'''We lost the war. We negotiated from a position of weakness,’ said Afrasiab Khattak, a leader of the Awami National Party, which governs the province that includes Swat. He said the region's police force is too underpaid, undertrained, and underequipped to take on the militants. Maybe the government is not paying them enough to take risks, or maybe it is just not paying them enough to risk their lives for the landlords."

The Pakistani ruling classes are obviously in a dilemma. If they allow the Taliban to take over the country or even larger sections of it, they risk attacks from the U.S. and India, maybe even large-scale invasions that could threaten the survival of the Pakistani state. On the other hand, if they allow the Taliban to take over, the rule of the Islamists could be a guarantee against fundamental social revolution, as it has been in Iran. They would have to make some concessions to the populism of the Taliban, but they could still save their basic assets, as the Iranian ruling classes have.

From the standpoint of the U.S. and India, any major attempt to intervene in Pakistan could lead to a prolonged and costly war—maybe even the threat of nuclear terrorism. The U.S. and British support for a still-born and decaying regime in Pakistan has created a huge time bomb threatening not only the region but the world. The only forces that can defuse it are the American people, who can compel their government to withdraw from military adventures in the Middle East, and the Pakistani working people, who can avoid being sidetracked by Islamist intoxication and overthrow the entire corrupt system that oppresses and exploits them.

They can raise the banner of unity of the entire region based on the common economic interests of the great bulk of the population, and move toward ending the reactionary partition of the Indian subcontinent that created the dead end of one openly religion-based state, Pakistan, and another one also based on religion, only in a more indirect way, India.